The $3-Trillion War

By James Harris | truthdig, posted on Apr 16, 2008

Listen to this interview.

Transcript:

James Harris: This is Truthdig. James Harris here with Linda Bilmes. She is the co-author of the new book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War.” She’s also a Harvard economist, and she did serve in the Department of Commerce during the Clinton administration. As we watch the sensational news coverage of the governor of New York’s resignation, “The Three Trillion Dollar War” reminds us that nearly 4,000 American soldiers and more than half a million Iraqis have been killed in this war. And that spending will total more than $3 trillion. Linda, why is it important that we take this war, and our spending, more seriously?

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Alfred Kazin: A Biography

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

Reviewed by Michael Dirda

For more than 50 years Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) was one of the best known critics in America. In 1934, at the age of 19, he started reviewing for the New Republic (under the literary editorship of Malcolm Cowley). In 1942, at only 27, Kazin published a masterly study of American literature, On Native Grounds. During the 1940s and '50s he contributed to Partisan Review, Commentary and the Reporter, as well as a host of other magazines. Just as important, throughout these years he steadily debated politics and literature with Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, Lionel Abel, Newton Arvin, Cleanth Brooks, R.P. Blackmur, Leslie Fiedler, Mark Van Doren, Harold Rosenberg, Allen Tate, Dwight Macdonald and Lionel Trilling. By the early 1960s he was, arguably, after Edmund Wilson, the country's leading man of letters.

And yet. Look at the names in that paragraph. How many do you recognize? If you are under 50, perhaps a couple. How many have you actually read? Probably just one: Edmund Wilson. It is a sad truth that almost any poet or novelist has a shot at immortality, but a critic lives only as long as he keeps writing, keeps in the thick of the action. A decade after his (or her) death, a loyal publisher may bring out a "selected essays" that will prompt a few reminiscences and reconsiderations. After another decade, nothing.

Kazin, however, is luckier than most. While he scratched out a living by writing book reviews, teaching at various colleges and universities, and snagging grants (four Guggenheims, numerous other fellowships and regular visits to the artist's retreat Yaddo), he also produced three wonderful works of autobiography, classics of the modern American experience:

A Walker in the City (1951) describes his childhood and education in New York's impoverished Brownsville neighborhood; it remains one of the great documents of Jewish-American immigrant life.

Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) recalls the ideological and literary battles of a decade racked by the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Hitler and the darkening shadow of Stalinism. Yet grim as they were, the 1930s were also as exhilarating as the 1960s, full of intellectual intensity and passion: Socialism would surely change the world.

New York Jew (1978) strikes a more elegiac tone, as Kazin offers pen portraits of many of the leading figures of the postwar cultural scene. But now the young rebels and hotshots have grown old, become the mainstays of the establishment, even turned to the right.

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Soros Says the Pain Has only just Begun

Louise Story | International Herald Tribune | Friday, April 11, 2008

George Soros will not go quietly.

At the age of 77, Soros, one the world's most successful investors and richest men, leapt out of retirement last summer to safeguard his fortune and legacy. Alarmed by the unfolding crisis in the financial markets, he once again began trading for his giant hedge fund and won big while so many others lost.

Soros has always been a controversial figure. But he is becoming more so with a new, dire forecast for the world economy. Last week he rushed out a book, his 10th, warning that the financial pain has only just begun.

"I consider this the biggest financial crisis of my lifetime," Soros said during an interview Monday in his office overlooking Central Park. A "superbubble" that has been swelling for a quarter of a century is finally bursting, he said.

Soros, whose daring, controversial trades came to symbolize global capitalism in the 1990s, is now busy promoting his book, "The New Paradigm for Financial Markets," which goes on sale next month.

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Alfred Kazin Book Carousel

The Solitary New York Jew

Geoffrey Wheatcroft | The Spectator | 8th April, 2008

Alfred Kazin by Richard M. Cook
Richard M. Cook
Yale, 452pp, £25,







In a recent review of They Knew They Were Right, Jacob Heilbrunn’s book about the neo-conservatives, Mark Lilla began by asking:

How many of you are sick to death of hearing about City College in the 1930s, Alcove One and Alcove Two, the prima donnas at Partisan Review, who stopped speaking to whom at which cocktail party . . .

and a good deal more besides? Well, the answer is that some of us can’t get enough of the extraordinary story of the ‘New York intellectuals’, from Starting Out in the Thirties, the title of one of the books by that New York Jew — the title of another — Alfred Kazin. He was not only an excellent writer, as critic and memoirist; his life illustrates a number of salient themes in mid-20th-century American social as well as literary history.

Born in 1915 the son of semi-literate Yiddish-speaking immigrants, Kazin grew up in Brownsville, a quarter of Brooklyn then as Jewish as the Polish or Russian shtetls from which its inhabitants had fled. He went to City College, geographically not many blocks from Columbia on the Upper West Side of Manhattan but a world apart. Some of its alumni who would become famous, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe and Bernard Malamud, remembered ‘CCNY’ with affection, but Kazin hated it. He was never as politicised as many of his contemporaries, and the radical atmosphere at the college, with those famous competitive Stalinist and Trotskyist alcoves in the cafeteria, seemed to him odiously ‘fanatical’, for him the harshest term of abuse.

On the other hand, he followed so many other children of the immigration when he chose English as his academic subject. The implications of this were obvious, in terms of the urge to assimilate: Kazin said that he fell in love with American literature because ‘this literature was mine — I felt a part of it and at home with it’. He made his name with On Native Grounds, his study of American writing from the late 19th century to the 1930s, published while he was still in his twenties, and he was unmistakably claiming a place for himself and those like him on those native grounds.

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Steve Wasserman on Fidel Castro

By Steve Wasserman | Truthdig | Posted on Apr 10, 2008

Fifty years ago, Herbert Matthews of The New York Times interviewed a rebel-with-a-cause most people thought was dead. Matthews’ scoop in the tangled jungle of Cuba’s Sierra Maestra proved the man was alive. His name (which in its entirety was but four syllables) would soon come to be known the world over. To his followers, the first two syllables would suffice: “Fi-del.” Castro’s quest to topple Cuba’s strongman, Fulgencio Batista, captured the imagination of millions. Victory, secured after only two years of urban insurrection and guerrilla warfare, catapulted the 32-year-old former lawyer and son of a wealthy landowner into the ranks of revolutionary stardom. After the catastrophes and crimes that had befallen the 1917 Bolshevik project, Castro seemed at first to herald something new. His was the first socialist revolution, after all, to have been made without the central participation of the Communist Party (and even, it appeared, against the party). (Six years before, in the aftermath of Castro’s failed attack on the military barracks of Moncada in Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953, its apparatchiks had denounced him as a “putschist” and an “adventurist.") All previous socialist revolutionaries had seemed grimly puritanical; by contrast, Castro’s barbudos appeared almost to be bohemians with guns. Democracy and radical reform were poised to replace dictatorship and social misery.

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“Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics”

(updated below)

My new book -- Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics -- is available for online ordering now. It will be available in book stores beginning April 15. Ordering now can help increase visibility for the book and its arguments.

Writing a book enables a much different type of analysis and discussion than the type one is able to pursue in a daily column or blog. The day-to-day focus here is typically on a discrete event -- the latest act of government lawlessness, Congressional complicity, media deceit or pundit propaganda. A book is a more deliberative process. It therefore allows one to take several steps back and think about the underlying causes of those events, identify what they have in common, and consider ways they can be changed.

From the time I began blogging in October, 2005, I've written about many different topics, but almost all have a similar undercurrent: the Limbaugh/Kristol/Fox-News right-wing faction that controls the Republican Party and has dominated our political life for the last 15 years, and the multiple ways that our political institutions -- and particularly the Drudgified establishment press -- enable them. Marketing packages aside, this book is about them; how they function; the weakness-driven bloodthirstiness, dishonesty and sleaze which defines them; the indispensable eagerness of the establishment media to be used by them; and what can be done by those opposed to them to change all of that.

All of the radical and reprehensible events of the last eight years -- the commencement and endless prosecution of an indescribably disastrous war, the accelerated dismantling of our Constitutional framework, the creation of a lawless Surveillance State and a virtually omnipotent President, the legitimization of truly grotesque torture and detention regimes, the complete corruption of our political discourse -- have individuals and a political movement behind them, causing all of that to happen. They have cultivated the ability to manipulate media behavior, largely as a result of a media eager to help. But what they do not have is popular support for virtually anything they are doing. And yet they continue to win elections.

How and why that happens -- the deceitful electoral tactics and manipulative personality-based myths the Right has perfected and continuously deploys to win elections, and the ways in which our slothful, vapid and complicit establishment press propagates those myths -- is the principal subject of this book. And understanding and exposing that right-wing/media partnership is a necessary precondition for weakening it.

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Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation

Product Description

In Founding Mothers, Cokie Roberts paid homage to the heroic women whose patriotism and sacrifice helped create a new nation. Now the number one New York Times bestselling author and renowned political commentator—praised in USA Today as a "custodian of time-honored values"—continues the story of early America's influential women with Ladies of Liberty. In her "delightfully intimate and confiding" style (Publishers Weekly), Roberts presents a colorful blend of biographical portraits and behind-the-scenes vignettes chronicling women's public roles and private responsibilities.

Recounted with the insight and humor of an expert storyteller and drawing on personal correspondence, private journals, and other primary sources—many of them previously unpublished—Roberts brings to life the extraordinary accomplishments of women who laid the groundwork for a better society. Almost every quotation here is written by a woman, to a woman, or about a woman. From first ladies to freethinkers, educators to explorers, this exceptional group includes Abigail Adams, Margaret Bayard Smith, Martha Jefferson, Dolley Madison, Elizabeth Monroe, Louisa Catherine Adams, Eliza Hamilton, Theodosia Burr, Rebecca Gratz, Louisa Livingston, Rosalie Calvert, Sacajawea, and others. In a much-needed addition to the shelves of Founding Father literature, Roberts sheds new light on the generation of heroines, reformers, and visionaries who helped shape our nation, giving these ladies of liberty the recognition they so greatly deserve.


About the Author

Cokie Roberts is a political commentator for ABC News and a senior news analyst for National Public Radio. From 1996 to 2002, she and Sam Donaldson coanchored the weekly ABC interview program, This Week.

In addition to broadcasting, Roberts, along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, writes a weekly column syndicated in newspapers around the country by United Media. Both are also contributing editors to USA Weekend, and together they wrote From This Day Forward, an account of their now more than forty-year marriage and other marriages in American history. The book immediately went onto the New York Times bestseller list, following a six-month run on the list by Roberts's first book on women in American history, We Are Our Mothers' Daughters. Roberts is also the author of the bestselling Founding Mothers, the companion volume to Ladies of Liberty. A mother of two and grandmother of six, she lives with her husband in Bethesda, Maryland.

McCain caught in expletive-laden spat with wife

John McCain's temper is well documented. He's called opponents and colleagues "shitheads," "assholes" and in at least one case "a fucking jerk."

But a new book on the presumptive Republican nominee will air perhaps the most shocking angry exchange to date.

The Real McCain by Cliff Schecter, which will arrive in bookstores next month, reports an angry exchange between McCain and his wife that happened in full view of aides and reporters during a 1992 campaign stop. An advance copy of the book was obtained by RAW STORY.

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain’s intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain’s hair and said, “You’re getting a little thin up there.” McCain’s face reddened, and he responded, “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” McCain’s excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

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Martin Luther King: When Silence is Betrayal

US marks 40 years since Martin Luther King killing

The United States is today marking the 40th anniversary of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King. The 39-year-old was shot dead as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine motel in Memphis on April 4th, 1968.

Today, I wish to remember Dr. Martin King in a number of ways, firstly, by looking at his words on the war in Vietnam which, if applied to the situation in Iraq today, are as topical now as they were when he first addressed the American people on this issue in 1967.

“Beyond Vietnam”
Address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church, 4 April, 1967, New York City

Text from AmericanRhetoric.com

“A time comes when silence is betrayal.” And that time has come for us… . Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. …and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government. …What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? …Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. …we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. …The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. …“This way of settling differences is not just.” …A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. …Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. …I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

Complete text

Martin Luther King Jr.: “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”

Sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967

I preach to you today on the war in Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. …Now, I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.

…Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love.

…It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home, America. …I call on Washington today. I call on every man and woman of good will all over America today. I call on the young men of America who must make a choice today to take a stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be too late. The book may close. And don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, “You’re too arrogant! And if you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I’ll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still and know that I’m God.”

Complete text

Safire's Political Dictionary

Amazon.com
Legendary language guru, author of more than twenty-five books, and Pulitzer-prize winning political columnist, William Safire is perhaps best known for his weekly "On Language" column for the New York Times. From slang to spin, Safire has for nearly four decades, shown us how the English language is a living, breathing and ever-evolving organism, that should never, ever be taken at face value. This is particularly true of the political jargon cast out by politicians, pundits, and the press. When Safire catches these colorful and slippery specimens of "polingo" in his lexicographer's net, his probing reveals them to be as curious and revealing of our historical past as our present. Want to know what the politicians are really saying, or trying to say? Then check out the newly revised edition of Safire's Political Dictionary--a magnum opus of U.S. political terminology. In it, Safire shares with readers his expert dissection of politico-speak to uncover its deeper meanings and broader significance. This fully updated reference volume is essential and highly entertaining reading for voters of all persuasions and just about anyone interested in American political culture. --Lauren Nemroff

William Safire Book Carousel

Former Governor Jesse Ventura: WTC Collapse A Controlled Demolition

Navy veteran and movie star savages official story, says media covering up truth about attacks

Paul Joseph Watson - Wednesday, April 2, 2008

(Video in 3 parts.)



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Jesse Ventura Discusses Politics

(Video in 6 parts)

Part 1: Jesse discusses the political landscape.



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Sen Chuck Hagel, Olbermann and Reality on the Ground in Iraq

Senator Hagel speaks to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show

The Senator breaks from his party's ranks to denounce the Iraq War and apologizes to the American people for not asking the tough questions.

Book Review: America: Our Next Chapter: Tough Questions, Straight Answers

Senator Chuck Hagel has long been admired by his colleagues on both sides of the Senate floor for his honesty, integrity, and common-sense approach to the challenges of our times. The Los Angeles Times has praised his "bold positions on foreign policy and national security" and wondered, "What's not to like?" In America: Our Next Chapter, Nebraska-born Hagel offers a hard-hitting examination of the current state of our nation and provides substantial, meaningful proposals that can guide America back onto the right path.

In America: Our Next Chapter, Hagel speaks the truth as he sees it—in a direct and refreshingly unvarnished manner. Basing his suggestions on thorough research and careful thought, as well as on personal insight from his years as a political insider, successful businessman, and decorated war hero, he discusses domestic issues—including the health care crisis, immigration, and Social Security and Medicare reform—and global climate change. He confronts foreign policy problems that the current administration has bungled or ignored, including China's growing economy; control of U.S. debt; India's and Pakistan's nuclear capabilities; and Iran's aggressive political, ideological, and nuclear stances. He decries the pervasive disease of third world poverty, arguing convincingly that this is where the real fight against terrorism must begin. Always true to the beliefs instilled in his childhood on the prairie, he speaks passionately about service—to one's country and to one's fellow citizens—as the path toward a renewed America. And, of course, he gives a candid examination of the debacle that is the Iraq War.

A staunch Republican yet a "hero to liberals" (Time), Hagel asks the tough questions and delivers straight answers to America's most pressing problems. America: Our Next Chapter is a serious, honest, and, ultimately, optimistic look at our nation's future, from an American original.

About the Author

Chuck Hagel, Nebraska's senior senator, is serving his second term in the U.S. Senate. His duties include membership on four senate committees: Foreign Relations; Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; Intelligence; and Rules. Hagel and his brother Tom served side by side in Vietnam in 1968 as infantry squad leaders with the U.S. Army's 9th Infantry Division. He earned many military decorations and honors, including two Purple Hearts. A fourth-generation Nebraskan, Senator Hagel is a graduate of the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Hagel and his wife, Lilibet, have two children.

Hagel: Bush Iraq speech like 'Alice in Wonderland'

Nick Langewis and David Edwards | Raw Story | Published: Thursday March 27, 2008

Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) suggests to CNN's Wolf Blitzer that there is no cause for optimism towards the situation in Iraq, propagated by arrogance, with an ever-growing cost in lives and money, despite a recent speech by President Bush.

"I think this is another episode of 'Alice in Wonderland,'" the Senator says. "What's up is down, and what's down is up. What do you mean, 'stability and security?' Baghdad, for example, has been over the last year essentially ethnically divided."

"And," Hagel adds, "when you look at the casualties the United States has taken since since the so-called 'military surge,' over 900 deaths; you look at almost 30,000 wounded, and the money we've put in there.

And then, the other point of this is, too: If, in fact, the 'surge' has calmed things to a point where the President and others are saying 'Well, they've done a great service, and they've achieved some terrific things,' why, then, is the administration talking about keeping more American troops in Iraq for the remainder of this year than we had before the 'surge'?"

"This," the Senator continues, "is still a very unstable, serious, dangerous situation in Iraq."