tom mertes

Unfortunately, I don't think our benighted Press Secretary watches HNN nor does he read professor Harvey's work.

The simple answer to this question is everyone is paying for it. Mason's book is an excellent narrative of the events that led to the financial meltdown but this crisis started well before the fall of 2008. For example, stagnant real incomes in much of the developed world, to say nothing, of wages in the rest of the world were putting households in trouble long before the banks began ramping up debt assembly lines. For a much fuller and statistically compelling on the long term causes see Robert Brenner's The Economics of Global Turbulence (Verso 2006). Unfortunately, deleveraging from this debacle and the failure to restructure the world economy on a just and sustainable path will be paid for by future generations.

"Frozenology" is consistent with Tony Wood's craft. He effectively deploys solid historical and geographic research with on-the-ground reportage. His focus lands on vital and enduring problems with no easy solutions that few authors are willing to tackle. His Chechnya: The Case for Independence (Verso 2007) demonstrated his tough-mindedness. Unfortunately his analysis has gone unheeded. In Chechnya he argued that "Across the years of slaughter and destruction visited on the Chechens, the fundamental question they posed in 1995 - 'What can be obtained by a military victory and the appointment of an occupation puppet regime?' - has been drowned out by bombs, gunfire, kidnapping, torture. Every new casualty raises the question once more; every new casualty is itself the answer." Events less than a month ago (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/world/europe/30chechnya.html) sadly confirmed his conclusions. Let us hope his "Frozenology" predictions make a bigger impact on policy-makers (IPCC reports notwithstanding) . The consequences of not addressing climate change, especially by the industrialized and post-industrialized nations, are dire.

J. M. Ledgard, an Economist correspondent, reviewed The Elephant's Journey in yesterday's http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Ledgard-t.html. The reviewer overcame his ideological proclivities and gave the novel a thumbs up:

"The Portuguese writer José Saramago died in June at the age of 87. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, having peaked as a writer later in life. His prose is impish and subtle enough to bear comparison with Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, even if he lacked their scope. Saramago was a Communist. He believed there was a new totalitarianism of multinational companies. “To be a Portuguese Stalinist” well into the 21st century “means you’re simply not living in the real world,” the critic Harold Bloom has said. True enough. Yet when Saramago picked up his pen, a richer world was made."

The rest is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Ledgard-t.html

I agree Jane Dark. The price mechanism is important to capitalism and it is surely being challenged by current struggles in currencies markets but it is not history. More to the point, social property relations have yet to undergo any seismic shift. Capital still exploits labor for profit and nothing has replaced capitalism on a systemic level.

If you are interested in Pakistan you should also check out Tariq Ali's comments on the latest wreckage visited upon Pakistan by climate change in the London Review of Books, Vol. 32 No. 18 · 23 September 2010. It is entitled, ‘What does one do?’ Here is the opening quote: “As if everyday life in Pakistan weren’t dispiriting enough, last month the swift and turbulent Indus burst its banks and swathes of the country disappeared under water. Divine punishment, the poor said, but they were the ones who suffered. Allah rarely targets the rich. As the floods came and the country panicked, its president fled the bunker and went on a tour of inspection to France and Britain.” Unfortunately, you have to be a subscriber to read the whole text but it is definitely a stirring and informative piece.

Shainin was an excellent editor and attracted more than just talented writers from more than just New York. Closer to home, the Chicago Tribune has been having its own problems. Some of them are cultural but these shifts are more pronounced because of the economic situation that Schiffrin has been documenting. Here is a story in today's New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/business/media/06tribune.html

Steve Early is correct that the original Tea-Party direct actions were aimed at the king. However, more to the point they were aimed against a potential corporate monster who was in league with the monarch. As “A Citizen” noted at the time, “Whether the duty of tea is taken off or not, the East India Company’s scheme has too dangerous aspect, for us to permit an experiment to be made of it among us; whether we consider it as it may create a monopoly; or, as it may introduce a monster, too powerful for us to control, or contend with, and too rapacious and destructive, to be trusted, or even seen without horror, that may be able to devour every branch of our commerce, drain us of all our property and substance, and wantonly leave us to perish by thousands, for want of the necessaries of life, as they did the poor unsuspecting Indians . . .” New York Journal 4 November 1773. Rank and File activists were doing the same as most of the authors in this excellent collection make quite clear. Unfortunately for us the monsters have gained much more power since the long revolt of the 1960-70s.

It is a very good list though I would have suggested David Harvey's Spaces of Global Capitalism rather than his Brief History of Neoliberalism.