Politics & Controversy

Marektplace comentator James Galbraith explains in Tuesday’s show how this will be a longer and deeper recession than previously thought and many economic indicators may have been manipulated to hide the recession’s true nature prior to November 5. Galbraith reminds us that things were rather similar 20 years ago, when unemployment rose over 10% and Democrats took control of congress from a far-right conservative president. History did not repeat itself, yet.

Take a moment to listen to the RealPlayer stream here.

<a href=“http://www.cera.com/commandingheights/" title="Commanding Heights“>Commanding Heights authors Daniel Yergen and Joseph Stanislaw tell us that workers in communist Russia were not motivated to work simply because the government controlled economy offered no rewards for innovation. This they use as the basis for their argument that communism/government controlled economies were bad and capitalism was good.

And what’s truly amazing is that in this obvious comparison between the USA and communist Russia, they find the most significant difference to be economic. In one brilliant stroke they appear to toss aside the fact that the USSR was a totalitarian, insular society. Or, and this is an interpretation that might only come paranoid thinkers like Noam Chomsky or Michael Parenti, maybe Yergen and Stanislaw found that the average American and Russian had equivalent freedoms (albeit controlled by different means).

The worst forms of tyranny are those so subtle, so deeply ingrained, so thoroughly controlling as not even to be consciously experienced. So there are Americans who are afraid to entertain contrary notions for fear of jeopardizing their jobs, but who still think they are “free.”

     –Michael Parenti’s Democracy for the Few.

This may be old news (it was published on May 20th, 2002) but, David R. Henderson’s essay on how the drug war effects the war against terrorism is a must read for everybody. Conservatives tell truth about drug war.

Why do I say the Hoover Institution is a pack of conservatives? Because Eric Alterman says so.

A feature story by Jesse Walker in Reason Magazine’s July 2002 issue confirms something I’ve been worried about for a while: Doonesbury isn’t what it used to be.

Walker gives us examples detailing Trudeau’s mild conservitive shift, and his more unfortunate shift toward irrelevence. I’m too young to know the strip from its beginnings in the early 70s (or earlier), but we can all compare old and new cartoons online in the Doonsebury retrospective.

Walker hasn’t entirely given up on Trudeau, though. And I still get a chuckle now and then. In the meantime, Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks has displaced old Doonesbury on the political left of syndicated comic strips.