Books Briefly
BOOKS BRIEFLY Bombs Away NUCLEAR EMPIRE by Robert C. Aldridge New Star, 2504 York Avenue, Vancouver, BC V6K 1E3. 160pp. $19.95, cloth. $9.95 paper. In 1973, Robert C. Aldridge gave up his job as...
...The second half of this book discusses the post-FDR period and the fraying of the New Deal consensus...
...20.00 Photographer Eugene Richards spent several months traveling across the United States in 1986 with his camera and tape recorder, interviewing poor Americans and taking pictures—stark, vivid, powerul—of the faces and landscapes of our impoverished society...
...There for a while, I just felt like I failed...
...Or Joyce Grandy, in East Orange, New Jersey: "Where I live now, it's a boardinghouse...
...93 pp...
...But Third World nations share part of the blame, Bello contends, for they missed an opportunity "to alter the power equation with the North...
...the increasing leverage of multinational corporations...
...They ultimately prevailed on Franklin Roosevelt, says Ferguson...
...Several authors discuss the labor movement's missed opportunities, in which bureaucratization, anticommun-ism, strategic errors, and the wartime and post-wartime boom all played a part...
...6.00...
...Calling on some of the leading writers in political economy—including Thomas Ferguson, Alan Brinkley, Ira Katznelson, and Thomas Byrne Edsall— the editors present a detailed look at how the New Deal was formed and where it lost its social-democratic potential...
...only a few nations in Asia have sustained growth, but its benefits have not spread among wide sectors of the population...
...I'll tell you what, I've made my mistakes...
...Ferguson, for instance, discards traditional analyses of the New Deal and locates the prime mover in a new historical bloc: "capital-intensive industries, investment banks, and internationally oriented commercial banks...
...In this slender but enormously useful report, Walden Bello unflinchingly examines the economic collapse and provides a sketch for a more hopeful future...
...When Katrina got eighteen, I had to go to the city welfare instead of the welfare for the child support...
...It will be the only way for Third World countries to survive as viable national economic entities in the next few years...
...Aldridge warns against allowing the easing of U.S.-Soviet tensions to lull us into a sense that the threat of nuclear war has abated...
...None...
...The scenarios for using nuclear weapons in what the military deems an approved manner envision a reaction much quicker than can be accommodated by any attempted civilian control...
...Bello is one of the most astute, radical, and accessible commentators on Third World economic issues...
...There's nine that lives here and some of the people don't have no sense, no sense at all...
...Otherwise, we just do without...
...This is an arresting, deeply disturbing, deeply humane look at America's forgotten poor...
...Each of the twenty-one stories Richard conveys runs several pages...
...Africa faces economic collapse and widespread starvation...
...It is not a standard, mainstream accounting...
...But I ain't really failed...
...The New Deal Order is dead," the editors of this book write, offering their collection of provocative essays as "a historical autopsy...
...They just don't give you enough...
...nuclear forces around the world as well as the latest official war-fighting doctrines...
...the replacement of raw commodities grown in the Third World (sugar, for instance) with synthetics made in Western laboratories (aspartame), and increasingly protectionist policies of the United States and other industrial countries...
...Poverty's Toll BELOW THE LINE: Living Poor in America by Eugene Richards Consumer Reports Books, 110 East 42 Street, New York, NY 10017...
...This book contains many wide-ranging and stimulating pieces of revisionist history at its best...
...Beyond Debt BRAVE NEW THIRD WORLD...
...He points out that nations in the Third World have seen not only a dramatic fall in living standards but an erosion of economic sovereignty as well...
...They failed, by and large, to use their shared commodity-producing status to impose more equitable terms of trade...
...Hissed Opportunities THE RISE AND FALL OF THE NEW DEAL ORDER edited by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstie Princeton University Press...
...To overcome their marginali-zation, Third World nations must establish economic ties among themselves, Bello argues, and he provides a blueprint for how this can be accomplished...
...At nighttimes I would hardly get to sleep because I owed so much money to different people...
...Just the food stamps for Connie and me and our youngest daughter, Dawn, and some fuel assistance...
...And Edsall points out in the concluding chapter how a new ruling clique has come to power: "a small, often interlocking network of campaign specialists, fundraisers, and lobbyists...
...But this is by no means a voyeuristic account...
...It's not wholesome...
...The only successful cartel, OPEC, refused to play a leadership role beyond oil and blindly ignored the disastrous impact rising oil prices had on other Third World nations...
...Nuclear Empire provides excellent background for activists committed to that agenda...
...He traces this decline to the debt crisis and the punitive "cures" imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank...
...In 1973, Robert C. Aldridge gave up his job as a weapons engineer designing nuclear missiles for Lockheed...
...218 pp...
...1983...
...South-South cooperation is no longer just an option for development," he writes...
...nuclear strategy have appeared in The Progressive and other publications and in two previous books, The Counterforce Syndrome (1978) and First Strike...
...Here, for instance, is Ralph Tim-merman, an indebted farmer in Gann Valley, South Dakota: "Nowadays, we live on just about nothing...
...the individual gets plenty of space to relate the personal toll that poverty takes...
...These segments of the business community, Ferguson argues, needed a global free-trade system and could accommodate labor and social concessions...
...When we come right down to the line," he writes, "there is no fail-safe way to insure that nuclear weapons won't be used accidentally or without proper authority...
...All in all, most of the poorest nations and the poorest peoples have been watching a horror movie lately: Revenge of the First World...
...311 pp...
...Strategies for Survival in the Global Economy by Walden Bello Institute for Food & Development Policy, 145 Ninth Street, San Francisco, CA 94103...
...Since then, Aldridge has been a tireless crusader against the arms race...
...Mother reminds me of that...
...The only way to prevent nuclear war, Aldridge insists, is to halt testing and deployment of new weapons while stepping up negotiations to eliminate the weapons already in place...
...The system's failed me...
...Chapters on the new radicalism of the 1960s and the subsequent reaction of the "Silent Majority" chart the ideological unraveling of the New Deal...
...labor-saving technologies...
...It was this latter group, Brinkley explains, that won out...
...Latin America sinks under its debt...
...He had concluded that he was working not for the "defense" of the United States but for the capability to launch an aggressive war...
...Nuclear Empire brings those studies up to date, detailing the current deployment of U.S...
...This clique has instituted a policy realignment that has reversed the New Deal priorities...
...Finally, the debtor nations, despite some overheated rhetoric, never pooled their dependency to exert leverage so they could repudiate their foreign debts...
...There's no money coming in...
...The major beneficiaries of this policy realignment are the affluent," Edsall writes, "while those in the bottom half of the income distribution, particuarly those whose lives are the most economically marginal, have reaped the fewest rewards or have experienced declines in their standard of living...
...Richards took the time to get to know his subjects, and he lets them tell their own stories in their own words...
...His informed analyses of U.S...
...The 1980s have not been kind to the Third World...
...Brinkley cites two divergent schools within the Executive Branch during FDR's Administration: the regulators, who wanted to tame capitalists and invigorate state institutions in the marketplace, and the fiscal tinkerers, whose vision was of "an essentially compensatory government, which would redress weaknesses and imblances in the private economy without directly confronting the internal workings of capitalism...
...I think that's when things started getting tough for me...
...Katznelson examines Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and traces its limitations to the compromises that were struck during the New Deal's formative stages...
Vol. 53 • June 1989 • No. 6
