Jon Carroll's column today has some interesting thoughts on Cindy Sheehan
being in over her heard: <URL:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/03/DDGU9GJ4TS1.DTL
.
I am also reading _Confessions of an Economic Hit Man_ by John Perkins. I
highly recommend it, and will probably write a review at some point.
Perkins is a soft leftist, it appears, but he has first-hand knowledge of
how unfree the global "free market" really is. He worked with the
goverments of the Shah, Suharto, the Saudis, and pre-Noriega Panama,
deliberately inflating economic projections in order to tie the nations
down with debt. Names that come up frequently are McNamara, Cheney,
Shultz, Weinberger, and of course Bush, and he describes Iraq as a failure
of the economic hit men, necessitating military action.
Of course, he didn't write this book until after 11 September 2001, and I
believe that he will propose, by the end of the book, a less free economy
as the solution to these problems. Nonetheless, it is a very revealing
look at international governmental control of the economy (and yes, Phil,
he takes a swipe at Bretton Woods), and good ammunition for libertarians
when arguing that the depradations of the current system are not the
result of free-market capitalism.
~Chris