The logic of horror

The time is ripe for a complete overhaul of the historical contextualisation of the Holocaust. By Götz Aly

Lafargue, in a statement that surely made the earnest defender of the working masses spin in his grave, stated that in the age of industrialization “all individual and social misery is born of the passion of work.” He proposed a change in legislation by which workers shouldn’t have to work more than three hours a day. Machines, he argued, would soon replace the workers.

The Book of (Historical) Virtues

A conservative pundit writing America's history finds little good to say about conservatives of days gone by.

Reviewed by Alan Wolfe

Sunday, June 11, 2006; Page BW03

AMERICA

The Last Best Hope

Far more focused and successful is Robert E. Wright and David J. Cowen's Financial Founding Fathers: The Men Who Made America Rich (Univ. of Chicago, $25).

Charles Mann’s book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus proves that the opposite is true.

Rarely do we get a glimpse of the Dante envisioned by the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam: "If the halls of the Hermitage were suddenly to go mad, if all the paintings of all the schools and the great masters were suddenly to break loose from their hooks, and merge with one another, intermingle and fill the rooms with a Futurist roar and an agitated frenzy of colour, we would then have something resembling Dante's Commedia."

Cabeza de Vaca's story is not known to most Americans, and it deserves to be. It's a hair-raising account of the slow death of an army and the abandonment of civilized behavior in order to stay alive

"All democracies need the same elixir," the authors tell us, "economic prosperity. The more resources that a nation's economy can produce, the fewer and more muted will be the discontents and the less venal the government will become." Readers would have been better served with more about what the financial founders believed than with promoting notions that the authors hold or believe their Wall Street readers hold.

Twenty years after the Historikerstreit, more than 16 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the time is ripe for a comprehensive new understanding of the age of violent nationalism, of the twentieth century's politics of ethnic segregation, expropriation and extermination. But contrary to Nolte's obsession, such attempts should not begin with the October Revolution in Russia, because that only leads to the historically optimistic illusion that the repugnant aspects of the twentieth century can be reduced to the major totalitarian dictatorships and that they can be cleanly distinguished from all that we now view as progress and success.

Brutal Journey

The Epic Story of the First Crossing of North America

By Paul Schneider

Andrew Jackson's vicious campaign of Indian removal);

Masonic connotations: "Providence," "the Deity" and "the Grand Architect." Holmes concludes that Washington was a deist primarily concerned with morality and order, one who favored religion because of the useful role it played in society.

Jonathan Yardley

How a family in the New England slave trade came to grips with the moral issues.

By Jonathan Yardley

Sunday, June 11, 2006; Page BW02

SONS OF PROVIDENCE

The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revoluti

Jacob Burckhardt's "The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy", which is also among those rare works of history that effortlessly survived the period of its original publication. Unlike Hilberg, Burckhardt lifted his gaze from detail to the larger context in order to analyze the rupture between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. But he theorized his material without losing sight of the empirical base. He deftly used the example of the Italian as "the first-born among the sons of modern Europe" to explain the present. He showed, and he still shows today, how Europe freed itself from the tightly woven veil of "faith, illusion and childish prepossession."

Or it may be that there is something in our political climate that suggests we can find answers for our times by appealing to our origins.

Leisure Scoop

by Sabine Heinlein

consider the journey of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca

The question of historical contexts cannot be answered with philosophical conjectures about some kind of historical nexus, but only with approaches grounded in fact. After 1945, it took historians six decades just to secure the facts – which points not to the incapability of the researchers, but to the gravity of the crime, that could only be processed slowly, layer by layer.

Michael and Jana Novak, in Washington's God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country (Basic, $26), vigorously disagree.

By William J. Bennett

The Founding Fathers

Solving modern problems, building wealth and finding God.

By David Liss

For John, the pleasure was not in the spoils but in the hunt, and in the stature that came with material wealth."

Tom Lutz’s Doing Nothing chronicles “A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America.”

The man who goes to Hell

Ciaran Carson hears the ghost of Dante at the gate in Barabara Reynolds's biography

Saturday June 10, 2006
The Guardian

Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man
by Barbara Reynolds

Just as interesting, however, are the stories of Hamilton's contemporaries, such as Tench Coxe, a Hamilton assistant who later betrayed the Federalist cause and supported Jefferson; Swiss-born frontiersman Albert Gallatin, who helped preserve Hamilton's legacy under Republican rule; and William Duer, the shifty speculator whose inability to repay his colossal debts almost single-handedly brought down the nation's finances in 1792.

The pessimism of the Federalists in an increasingly democratic society,

Moses' change of heart, though, was complete. He believed that "given the opportunity, blacks could assimilate into white society," and, "unlike many fellow abolitionists, Moses saw blacks not just as pitiable objects for philanthropy but as equal to whites in every human capacity." He was, for his day and time, a genuine radical, and his views greatly complicated his relationship with his brother John, who had "built his fortune as a smuggler and a privateer" and, during the war with England, "managed to turn the war into a personal bonanza," through profiteering that made him "the richest man in Rhode Island."

For example, it was in fact Republican France that invented the selection criteria later used as the basis for the so-called "Deutsche Volksliste" (German ethnic list) in the areas of Poland annexed by Germany. In 1919, the population of the reclaimed Alsace region were sorted into four groups: full, three-quarter and half French, and Germans. On this basis, Alsatians were accorded full, limited or zero civil rights. In the case of those belonging to Group IV (the Germans), the French authorities ordered expulsion over the Rhine bridge.

The Founders had an 18th-century anxiety about standing armies. They had little or no anxiety about armed robberies, gangs, carjackings and school shootings.

Ciaran Carson's version of Dante's Inferno is published by Granta

1491: The Truth About the Americas Before Columbus

Written by Benjamin Dangl

David L. Holmes's The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (Oxford Univ., $20) provides a survey of religion in the American colonies, a history of deism, an analysis of the religious beliefs of six of the major Founders, a look at the beliefs of less prominent Founders who were devout Christians,

When Columbus landed, there were an estimated 25 million people living in Mexico. At the time, there were only 10 million people in Spain and Portugal. Central Mexico was more densely populated than China or India when Columbus arrived. An estimated 90-112 million lived in the Americas, which was a larger population than that of Europe. Mann also pointed out that the Incas ruled the biggest empire on earth ever. In their prime, the kingdom’s span equaled the distance between St. Petersburg and Cairo.

Blair’s House of Cards: Clare Short with Hirsh Sawhney

by Hirsh Sawhney

Clare Short: The New Labour around Blair has just taken on the whole rhetoric of the Neo-Cons. He’s about to go to America, where he’s going to make a big speech justifying everything—saying how they’ve really done Iraq for the benefits of humanity. He’s just swallowed the whole thing and takes on [the Neo-Cons’] analysis and way of talking. And Blair does this “triangulation” thing that Clinton started.

Short: Well, it’s a positioning system. You look at where the right wing is and where the left wing is, and you choose someplace in the middle that sounds reasonable.

Blair would say, “There are the peaceniks and there are the hard-line aggressive warmongers. But I will present myself as a caring human being reluctantly willing to use force when it’s necessary to advance the condition of some of the neediest people on the planet.” And it’s a lie. It muddles political debate. No policy is fully considered or properly consulted upon or scrutinized. Triangulation and that whole new way in which politics is done through bouncing misleading accounts of ill-thought out policies through the media and driving policy in that kind of way—it’s badly motivated, and it’s incompetent.

The [military industrial complex] can distort American foreign policy. I think in the case of the so-called War on Terror, the military industrial complex was terribly threatened by the end of the Cold War and the slashing of defense spending.

It’s government by media management, and the media collude in this and cross the line from being people who scrutinize the executive to being almost part of the executive machine.

The Road Map to the establishment of a Palestinian State should have taken place by the end of 2005 on the basis of international law… And then in the case of Iraq we could have gone through the UN and got the inspectors back in, indict[ed] Saddam Hussein for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and help[ed] the Iraqi people get into the international court like we did with Milosevic. And if you did both these things, you’d take the fundamental anger out of the Middle East. Then you could have an era of spreading democracy. The third component—which is supposed to be American and British policy—is that all WMD should be out of the region. Israel has massive nuclear capacity.

If anyone had told me before that the US President and the Prime Minister of Britain would lie through their teeth to this degree, I would’ve said, “impossible.” It would mean a corruption of all our political systems.

And if Blair had said, “We’ll be with you in resolving the situation in Iraq, sanctions are awful, Saddam Hussein is abusing his people. But there are ways through this. Let’s make progress on Israel-Palestine, let’s do this in a proper cooperative international way,” the whole world could be better off and America could’ve avoided this horrendous error. But I think he felt it makes him big to be the only guy in the world who can pick up the phone to President of the United States.

America’s building four massive permanent bases. What they want to do is withdraw into those bases and have a pro-American Iraqi government that will keep law and order for them. And I don’t think it can work. The resistance is so strong and so powerful.

Any American with pride should say, “Let’s come back into the fold of nations; let’s behave according to international law; let’s get a just settlement in the Middle East. Let’s restore our constitutional arrangements, abide by the rule of law and close down Guantanamo.” Because as well as in the Middle East, we need international agreements to deal with the crisis of global warming. And if we shatter all our international institutions, our ability to get the people of the world to cooperate to deal with this real crisis for the future of humanity is going to get worse and worse.

America is the key.

OPINION: A Bush-league response?

Jun. 11, 2006. 01:57 AM

PETERSCOWEN

"Their alleged target was Canada, Canadian institutions, the Canadian economy, the Canadian people. We are a target because of who we are and how we live, our society, our diversity and our values — values such as freedom, democracy and the rule of law."

— Stephen Harper, June 3

Rudolph Giuliani, the heroic mayor of New York, made the same point in a speech on Oct. 1, 2001 — and added a warning to anyone who didn't agree:

"The era of moral relativism between those who practise or condone terrorism, and those who stand up against it, must end. Moral relativism does not have a place in this discussion and this debate."

The message was hard to miss: The attacks were not to be construed as a response to U.S. foreign policy. "Moral relativism" was the sin committed by anyone who disobeyed this edict.

The American who was most courageous in her post-9/11 writings was the late critic Susan Sontag. She was repelled by her government's reaction to the attacks and said so in a piece in The New Yorker.

This is the guts of what Sontag wrote in the magazine's issue of Sept. 25, 2001:

"A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counterintelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defence. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy."

We cannot, as a mature democracy, allow terrorism or its threat to dictate government policy — no one is saying that.

But we also cannot allow the threat of terror to shut down our ability to think.

And what we really don't need is a prime minister using a discredited U.S. political strategy to scare off serious, mature debate about Canada's military presence in Afghanistan and its alliances with the United States.

Business
US Outflanked in Eurasia Energy Politics
By F William Engdahl, Asia Times 12/6/06
Jun 12, 2006, 05:41

Curiously, Washington has repeatedly accused China of "not playing by the rules", in terms of its oil politics, declaring that China is guilty of "seeking to control energy at the source", as though that had not been US energy policy for the past century.

Whither Washington? It's little wonder that some Washington hawks are getting alarmed. Suddenly, the world of potential "enemies" is no longer restricted to the Islam-centered "war on terror". Leading neo-conservative ideologue Robert Kagan wrote a prominent opinion article recently in the Washington Post. Kagan is privy to pretty high-level thinking in Washington, presumably. His wife, Victoria Nuland, worked as Vice President Richard

Cheney's deputy national security adviser until being named US ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Kagan declared, in reference to Russia and China, "Until now the liberal West's strategy has been to try to integrate these two powers into the international liberal order, to tame them and make them safe for liberalism. If, instead, China and Russia are going to be sturdy pillars of autocracy over the coming decades, enduring and perhaps even prospering, then they cannot be expected to embrace the West's vision of humanity's inexorable evolution toward democracy and the end of autocratic rule."

Kagan charged that China and Russia have emerged as the protectors of "an informal league of dictators" that, according to Kagan, currently includes the leaders of Belarus, Uzbekistan, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Venezuela, Iran and Angola, among others around the world, who, like the leaders of Russia and China themselves, resist any efforts by the West to interfere in their domestic affairs, either through

Adviser Has President's Ear as She Keeps Eyes on Iraq

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By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: June 12, 2006

WASHINGTON, June

Ms. O'Sullivan is undaunted. "I'm able to focus on the fact that we're building a relationship with Iraq," she said, "that will have benefits to Iraq and America over the long term."

TRB FROM WASHINGTON Good Old Boy by Peter Beinart Post date 06.10.06 | Issue date 06.19.06
"Clinton's third way failed miserably. It ... delivered nothing." So wrote Markos Moulitsas, the most influential online activist in the Democratic Party, in the May 7 Washington Post.

The charge ignores two small things: the 1970s and the 1980s. In reality, the Democratic Party didn't lose the confidence of its convictions when Clinton became president; it lost them when he was in graduate school. From Harry Truman through Lyndon Johnson, Democrats stood for three basic things: enlightened anti-communism, an expanding welfare state, and racial integration. Between 1968 and 1972, under pressure from Vietnam and racial conflict, two of those three collapsed. By 1972, George McGovern was urging the virtual abandonment of anticommunism and advocating racial quotas. Then, in 1976, Democrats nominated a relative economic conservative, Jimmy Carter, who showed little interest in extending Johnson's Great Society largesse. And, poof--there went principle number three. 

Carter ran on character--as a decent, capable man who embodied the small-town virtues forsaken by Richard Nixon. And it worked--until economic recession and the hostage crisis stripped him of his reputation for competence and left him ideologically naked. 

In 1988, Michael Dukakis barely even tried. "This election is not about ideology," he declared. "It's about competence." And, when Lee Atwater shrewdly invoked cultural issues like crime and the Pledge of Allegiance, which required not merely technocratic solutions, but statements of belief, he crumbled. 

In 1984, the Democrats nominated Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale, who looked like a prisoner of the party's fractious, multicultural factions. While serving numerous parochial interests, his campaign never defined any broader national one. As one Mondale speechwriter admitted, "We had a hell of a time putting down on paper what this campaign was going to be all about." 

His adviser Bill Galston called it the "politics of reciprocal responsibility." Government would provide opportunity, but it would demand responsibility in return; it would not give something for nothing. This idea--manifested in Clinton's pledge to "end welfare as we know it"

And, by using market mechanisms to achieve traditional liberal goals, he found ways to fight poverty in an environment where large new programs were politically impossible. 

By 2000, black and Latino poverty were at their lowest levels ever recorded. 

Saving the planet and ourselves: the way to global security
John Sloboda

The four threats are:

• climate change
• competition over resources
• marginalisation of the "majority world"
• global militarisation.

David Attenborough, BBC television's respected documentarist of the natural world – who resembles every young person's ideal grandfather – is the latest in a growing roll-call of public figures asserting that climate change is the major challenge facing the world. His motivation is clear: "One of the things I don't want to do is to look at my grandchildren and hear them say, 'Grandfather, you knew it was happening – and you did nothing'."

Preserving the planet for our children and grandchildren speaks to our deepest aspirations, no matter what culture, religion, or ideology we belong to or espouse. The entire global political system has been fruitlessly distracted for nearly half a decade by 9/11 and its consequences. It is not just that the United States-led "war on terror" fails to address the real threats facing humanity; the very conduct of that "war" is exacerbating these very threats, and bringing closer the likelihood of their devastating impacts on human and environmental security.

This is the stark conclusion of a report from the Oxford Research Group (ORG), Global Responses to Global Threats: Sustainable Security for the 21st Century, published on 12 June 2006. The report – co-written by the ORG's research officer Chris Abbott, author of the ORG's international security monthly briefing (and openDemocracy columnist) Paul Rogers, and myself – identifies four main threats to security in the next century and outlines a plan of action. The four threats are:

• climate change
• competition over resources
• marginalisation of the "majority world"
• global militarisation.

If these growing threats are not halted within the next few years, the world could pass a tipping-point which would catapult it into a period of intense and unprecedented conflict.

	John Sloboda is executive director of the Oxford Research Group The ORG's report Global Responses to Global Threats: Sustainable Security for the 21st Century – co-written by Chris Abbott, Paul Rogers, and John Sloboda – is published on 12 June 2006 Also by John Sloboda (with Chris Abbott) in openDemocracy: "The 'Blair doctrine' and after: five years of humanitarian intervention" (22 April 2004)

A brief look at each of the threats is enough to suggest the scale of peril they present.

First, climate change will cause rising ocean levels, placing migratory pressures on millions of the world's most vulnerable people living on coastal and river delta areas. It will also alter rainfall patterns, particularly over the tropics, creating drought and food shortages. Hurricane Katrina gave a small foretaste of much worse to come.

Second, the world's oil reserves are depleting, and there are severe water shortages in many parts of the world. Yet the major powers act as if these resources are unlimited: aggressively competing for their control and expanding their consumption, rather than seeking alternatives. Nuclear power is promoted as a magic wand, rather than a growing source of deadly materials for those states and terrorist groups wishing to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Third, disparities of wealth and power are growing deeper, both within countries and between different regions of the world. This fuels the discontent and marginalisation which feeds political violence. Yet current trade and aid arrangements do little to address global economic inequities.

Fourth, far from "keeping the peace" the unceasing growth in global military expenditure is stoking fresh conflicts. New weapons, such as "mini-nukes", are destabilising current arms-control regimes such as the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), and place more deadly capabilities within the reach of terrorists. The civilian deaths caused by the United States and the United Kingdom in Afghanistan and Iraq have been a propaganda gift to al-Qaida.

The leaders of the two states, George W Bush and Tony Blair, may have made a reluctant admission of tactical errors in Iraq, but there is no fundamental review of the effectiveness of their current military strategy. Nor are there serious efforts to curb or decrease military expenditure by any major power; the record of Chinese arms sales in stoking conflicts in Sudan, Burma, and Nepal is but one example of how the opposite has been happening.

These four trends, individually and when reinforcing each other in combination, put the world on course for catastrophe.

It's up to us

There is, however, one big hope. That hope lies in the people of the world who are waking up to this impending disaster, and the pressure that only they can place on governments. The spread of education coupled with increasing global communication means that more and more people see, with greater clarity, the dire consequences of our actions and the need for alternatives. This new global awareness has thrown up three powerful social movements, which have united people across the world:

• the environmental movement
• the global justice movement
• the peace movement.

We cannot achieve disarmament without climate control. We cannot have clean water for everyone without trade justice. We cannot eliminate terrorism without developing alternatives to oil. All of these linkages are components of a "sustainable security" approach to the world's problems.

Woe, woe is all of us

TERRORISM | A kamikaze cultural critic challenges our powerlessnessIn a post-9/11 era, no easy answers

---

Beyond the Spectacle

of Terrorism:

Global Uncertainty

and the Challenge

of the New Media

by Henry Giroux

Mesmerized by fear, many will surrender to any governing power that promises to defend the "homeland" in the most draconian way.

But where are the Democrats? According to Herbert, "trembling on the analyst's couch" in a massive identity crisis that leaves them attempting a poor imitation of the hardliners who have so disastrously ruined the country's economy, foreign policy and international image. So afraid are they of an independent vision for a better American future that rightward-sliding Hilary Clinton is being mooted as a presidential candidate by default.

Giroux has no patience with weak-kneed liberals, to whom he administers a good kicking. Their failure to stand and deliver a new agenda to Americans hungry for an alternative to the past five years of unreality-based government has thrown the country into prolonged despair.

Giroux's prescription for a democratic future is to take back the pirated public space — the public forum that once existed for debate, before multi-million-dollar media campaigns and slash-and-burn talk shows turned voters into passive audiences.

Above all, he says, education must also be rescued from technocracy that turns out narrowly focused careerists who embrace the social Darwinism of the new global economy. Critical thinking is the key to the kind of self-definition, social responsibility and collective struggle necessary to create real, rather than virtual, democracy.

The War of the World by Niall Ferguson

Learned armies clash by night

By A C Grayling

His aim is to explain the century's shocking violence, and he does so by depicting it as the mutual destruction of empires.

He dates the effective beginning of the long global war to Japan's defeat of Russia in 1904,

Leave aside the over-arching thesis about the war of the world as a bonfire of decaying empires, for this is certainly one plausible way among others of reconfiguring events.

The first concerns the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. In Ferguson's view they came as a shock to the world. This controverts the orthodoxy that Europe had for years been sliding ineluctably towards war as its peoples watched, half in dread and half in exhilaration, as if bored by decades of peace and prosperity. The

not even the Rothschilds expected the conflagration, despite having one of the biggest and best-connected banking networks in Europe.

had for just as many years been convinced that the longer peace continued, the better their rivals would be armed - and that the sooner a war started, the better for themselves.

Dominic Sandbrook reviews The War of the World by Niall Ferguson.

Freud was having none of it.

Man, he said, had an urge "to destroy and kill", an "impulse to destruction" that stemmed from the "death instinct" of every living being. "There is no likelihood," he explained, "of our being able to suppress humanity's aggressive tendencies… Why do we, you and I and many others, protest so vehemently against war, instead of just accepting it as another of life's odious importunities? For it seems a natural enough thing, biologically sound and practically unavoidable."

Put simply, Ferguson believes that the bloodshed of the 20th century was attributable to a lethal combination of economic uncertainity, imperial breakdown and ethnic tension. Instead of looking to class, like so many historians trailing in Marx's wake, he concentrates on ethnicity as the central, explosive factor in 20th-century conflicts from the Balkans to East Asia. This doesn't mean that he downplays economics: the book is stuffed full of tables and statistics of all kinds. But time after time, he argues, unsettling economic changes - which include growth and urbanisation as well as recession or depression - have acted as "the trigger for the politicisation of ethnic difference".

In his final pages, Ferguson even hints that our new century could be the bloodiest yet, thanks to the rise of China, the sensational demographic growth of the developing world and the persistence of ethnic rivalries. We may fantasise about the "end of history", about a new age of globalisation and democracy, but there will always be another war.

Noel Malcolm reviews The War of the World by Niall Ferguson.

Instead, Ferguson homes in on three essential things: economic volatility, the decline of empires, and ethnic conflict. The first of these does have more than a whiff of economic causation about it. Economic factors, it suggests, cause the conditions in which politicians are more likely to choose violent and belligerent policies (such as destroying Jewish businesses, or demanding 'Lebensraum'), and more able to persuade the public to support them.

The second factor (declining empires) seems more like a consequence of conflict than a cause; the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires were in decline because many people violently wanted to leave them. Indeed, as Ferguson notes, it was the two world wars that undermined or terminated the old European empires (while, meanwhile, helping Stalin to build a new one).

but to get them to engage in mass-murder you needed two extra things: ideologies, to enable them to justify the murders, and politicians, both to instil the ideologies and to organise the killing.

Throughout this book, it is the politicians that really make the difference. From Ferguson's own account it is clear that there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution if Lenin's 'sealed train' had been shunted into a siding, no Third Reich if Hitler and Goebbels had been knifed early on in a dark alley, no Bosnian war if Milosevic had not chosen to have one.

Ferguson is right to resist single-cause explanations of history; whole lists are needed, but the list here should surely give more prominence to politicians, ideology, and the apparatus of the modern state. This is a big, bold and brilliantly belligerent book, which will stimulate readers especially when they disagree with it. Here, as often happens in warfare, neutrality is not an option.

by John Renehan

 

On Lawrence Summers, Cornel West, and West’s greater sin – not his scholarship, but his teaching

This course considers, in an American setting, the contemporary meaning of the democratic ideal, the relation of popular self-government to the market economy as well as to class, racial and gender divisions, and the contrasting institutional futures of democracy. . . .  The course explores alternative, more democratic ways to organize government, politics, and the economy as well as the school and the family. . . .  The attempt throughout is to exemplify the work of a programmatic imagination that, informed by an understanding of social realities, frees itself from a superstitious attachment to established institutions...

Redford To Democrats: Show Backbone

Sundance Kid Says Party Should Show More Courage, Avoid Compromises

With God on both sides

ANDREW WHEATCROFT

Sea of Faith:

Islam and Christianity in

the Medieval Mediterranean World

O'Shea, a Toronto-born, U.S.-based journalist and writer (Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I and The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Spectacular Death of the Medieval Cathars),

Berle's scholarly works include numerous law texts, legal, social, and economic commentaries, and treatises on the United States corporate economy. By far the best-known and most frequently cited of these works are The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932, coauthored with Gardiner Means), The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution (1954), and Power without Property (1959).

In The Modern Corporation, Berle and Means presented an analysis of the structure of the American economy, showing that the means of production were highly concentrated in the hands of the largest 200 corporations, that this concentration was increasing, and that within the large corporations which so dominated the economy there was a clear divorcement of ownership from control. Since the American private-property legal system had been based on the assumption that those who owned property possessed the rights and power to use it for their own benefit, the Berle and Means thesis called into serious question the operability of the legal system on which the private-enterprise economy had been built.

In the two later volumes Berle advanced the companion thesis that management of large corporate enterprise, in addition to having become liberated from the control of corporate owners (stockholders), had acquired sufficient power to have become liberated from the market forces of competition as well. He concluded, therefore, that much of the economic theory pertaining to the functioning of the marketplace, which served as a rationale for the free-enterprise market economy, had been rendered obsolete by the accumulation of immense power in the hands of corporate management. This provocative thesis generated much debate among economists and legal scholars, a debate that still continues.

In almost surreal rhetoric, Bush said Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs must be curtailed. He said this after the Iraqi vice president and the head of the biggest bloc in parliament both went off to Tehran and praised Iran's stabilizing role. If Bush thinks that Shiite Iranians are the problem in fanatically Sunni Ramadi and Adhamiyah, we're in even bigger trouble than I thought.

Soros sees American prestige in the world as badly damaged -- and somewhat restorable with a new effort at alliance restoration and a new discourse on what serious challenges nations need to collectively concern themselves with -- but he thinks it will be hard for America to get back to a position of its previous prestige and moral status in the world.

Soros too comes off to me as someone of moderate Republican sensibilities who believes that for a healthy political marketplace of personalities and ideas to be restored in America, the Democratic Party -- which he believes is in distressing disarray -- needs to be brought back to power, both in at least the House of Representatives in 2006 and the presidency in 2008.