Here's a look back at 2008.
- ▼ 2008 (28)
- ▼ December 2008 (3)
- ▼ April 2008 (4)
- ▼ March 2008 (3)
- ▼ February 2008 (5)
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Year in Review/A Look Ahead
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
The Stonecutters Song
Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do!
Who leaves Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
We do! We do!
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Gutenberg a star?
We do! We do!
Who robs cavefish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscar night?
We do! We do!
After I read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, I was charged with positive feeling for humanity. The example of Monsiegneur Bienvenu filled me with the desire to do good. Some years later I read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. What a bunch of idiots I’m surrounded by, I thought. How could I have let Hugo manipulate me so? Young Milton Friedman, among a coterie of
Roll call of nations:
The current American mortgage and stock market crash happened after the book came out but we can see the antecedents in this book. One chilling passage refers to the bailout of the business associates of the
The remainder of the national debt was mostly spent on payments, as well as shady bailouts for private firms. In 1982, just before Argentina’s dictatorship collapsed, the junta did one last favor for the corporate sector…the state would absorb the debts of large multinational and domestic firms that had, like Chile’s pirhana’s, borrowed themselves to the verge of bankruptcy…[T]hese companies continued to own their assets and profits, but the public had to pay off between $15 and $20 billion of their debts; among the companies…were Ford Motor Argentina, Chase Manhattan, Citibank, IBM, and Mercedes-Benz.
Any of those names ring a bell?
***
For years I’ve been complaining about Timesman Thomas Friedman and his clever “don’t blame me” columns and Klein quotes him, “We are not doing nation-building in
Physical torture in Argentina and Abu Ghraib, the near-complete privatization of New Orleans’ public school system, the lawless reign of Blackwater security forces and the profiteering of Cheney’s Halliburton in Iraq are not the result of natural forces or an invisible hand that will make things right, Klein posits, but part of a plan to exploit chaos. Why? Simple greed and power.
The real shock is that most of the reporting in the book is not from secret sources but from the public record—major dailies, weeklies, wire services, websites. The power grab after 9/11 and government incompetence happened in plain sight, promulgated by Republicans and abetted by Democrats. Either her book is true or this is the greatest conspiracy of the century, aiming to smear patriots like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush et al. who put Country First ahead of money and power. Read and decide.
POSTSCRIPT
America 2009 reminds me of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror. In the 15 c., there were rich and poor. The middle class hadn’t been invented yet. No subject blamed the French king for his disastrous wars against
Friday, December 26, 2008
Merry Christmas from Mel Tormé
This is from my private stock and you probably won't find it on YouTube...
Let's view a clip from a Mel Tormé PBS Christmas show from the '90s. The song is the title tune from a Sonja Heine picture, IT HAPPENED IN SUN VALLEY. It's one of my favorites and after you hear this shamelessly romantic tune, this old gem might end up as one of yours too. Merry Christmas!
Ten awesome points if you can guess who the spangled band leader is before Mel mentions him by name. There was a time when every weeknight on TV, he played the greatest music ever written (which we only heard in 10 second intros and outros).
Clip from The Christmas Songs (1992), copyright WMVS/WMVT and Milwaukee Symphony.
Let's view a clip from a Mel Tormé PBS Christmas show from the '90s. The song is the title tune from a Sonja Heine picture, IT HAPPENED IN SUN VALLEY. It's one of my favorites and after you hear this shamelessly romantic tune, this old gem might end up as one of yours too. Merry Christmas!
Ten awesome points if you can guess who the spangled band leader is before Mel mentions him by name. There was a time when every weeknight on TV, he played the greatest music ever written (which we only heard in 10 second intros and outros).
Clip from The Christmas Songs (1992), copyright WMVS/WMVT and Milwaukee Symphony.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
44 and 43
DREAMS FROM MY FATHER
I’m a little late to the party but have you read President-Elect Obama's first book? (Stay tuned for the review.) After hearing his Superman gag at the Al Smith dinner. It got me thinking:
Little Barry Obama loved comic books.
He was raised by a kindly old couple from
After high school he lived in Gotham, where he worked as a writer and then moved to
In his early years he kept his background secret, afraid that his real identity would alienate people.
The woman he loves has two Ls in her name, like
His first act as president will be to restore the American way.
You'll never guess what the title of the first part of the book is:
Origins (a conceit from comic books).
Yup, he’s Superman.
Dreams from My Father is a memoir that reads like a bildungsroman, the colorful peregrinations of a young man in search of his identity. I recommend it highly. Ignore the nut jobs who claim that Bill Ayres wrote the first draft on the back of Obama’s Indonesian birth certificate.
W.
Last week I paid 75 cents for the new format Post, circular size, and 12 bucks to see W. Great movie. Stacy Keach knocks it out of the park with an unironic turn as the reverend who brings W to the Lord. Laura Bush will be flattered as even in the later scenes she's portrayed by Elizabeth Banks with no wrinkles and still very sexy, like Pat Nixon (Joan Allen) in Oliver Stone's Nixon.
Josh Brolin is dangerously close to an impression but never crosses the line. That little actor who looks like Truman Capote is an amazing Karl Rove. Richard Dreyfuss is back as a movie star--his stock had been so low in
Stone takes verbatim quotes we might know from watching Letterman’s “Great Moments in Presidential Speeches” series and puts them in different places, which is ok because I know the difference between a doc and fiction.
Why didn't this movie do better? Because people are tired of the subject. A surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a screwup on whom tough love failed but Jesus and will power succeeded.
I predict the real W the will become a popular TV evangelist as that’s where his heart lies. He won’t be making much money giving speeches but preaching something he knows he believes rather than something he thinks he believes in because smart people told him it’s so, might loosen his mangled tongue.
Next post: The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Wolf. This is a Naomi-explains-it-all, positing that the Chicago School and guru Milton Friedman are responsible for most of the worldwide political brutality and the intensely related economic shock and awe of the last 50 years. This replaces my father's Irishman's thesis: pick a point on the globe where there's trouble, any point, and you'll find the English were or are behind it. I almost dropped the book when she listed the overspending and bad-investing bums who first sponsored and finally took bailouts from the departing Argentine junta of the '80s: Citibank, Ford Motor Company, ... The usual suspects.
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