POLITICAL BOOK NOTES
political book notes Public affairs books to be published in December. Antitrust Action and Market Structure. Don E. Waldman. Lexington, $18. The well-publicized delays and snafus in...
...Rollo...
...So, just threatening to break up GM may not be such a great idea-at some point you’ve actually got to do it...
...There’s not much here that Nat Hentol‘for Tom Wicker haven’t said before--and better...
...The corporate activists’ successes, whether through proxy, boycott, or p u b l i c i t y , are l i m i t e d . H o n e y w e l l continues in the anti-personnel arms business, and Gulf Oil couldn’t be budged out of Angola...
...The Duke would then have to hear the case and render a verdict by judging it “according to the law of God and good conscience...
...is being heard increasingly from citizen a c t i v i s t s , challenging U.S...
...Ariibrose The Day the Bomb Fell on America: True Stories of the Nuclear Age...
...This happened, Waldman says, whether the government won the suit or lost-since the threat of a suit often encouraged dominant firms to let their competitors into markets that previously had been locked up...
...George F. Bishop, Robert G. Meadow, Marilyn Jackson-Beeck, eds...
...Randall J. Miller...
...It relies entirely on information published elsewhere-particularly the Church committee’s fin a I rep o rt --a n d thus contains little that is new...
...Vogel’s sometimes pedantic book is not, thank goodness, a primer on corporate activism...
...Raymond William Baker...
...The threat of suit seems only to have encouraged our most efficient automaker to pull its competitive punches-keeping inefficient, poorlymanaged companies like American Motors afloat...
...The result is a book full of white hats and black hats, and no one’s hat is whiter than Dan Wolfs, afounder, and for nearly 20 years, the editor of the Village Voice, America’s first and foremost alternative newspaper...
...Political Values and the Educated Class in Africa...
...Walter ’ L. Kantrowitz, Howard Eisenberg...
...Although Theoharis ought to be able to give us the perspective of an insider, inasmuch as he did some of the original investigating of this material for the Church committee, his book doesn’t reilect that...
...Monthly Review Press, $5.95...
...the loyalty and security programs and all the rest...
...Dodd...
...David Oshinsky...
...If you’re looking for an answer about where the movement may be going from here, search a little further...
...His best example is the DuPont company, which went so far as to build a plant for its competitors while it was being sued for monopolizing the cellophane market...
...John W. Hevener...
...Kevin McAuliffe...
...You bet he is...
...But breaking up GM has been the trust-busters’ holy grail for much of this century...
...And guess who the bad guys are...
...Scribner’s, $14.95...
...Owen M. Fiss...
...It’s a trip down memory lane-with excursions to the Huston Plan...
...in this country...
...Basic, $14.95...
...businesses...
...Clyde Burleson...
...Joseph Nocera Children’s Rights: Contemporary Perspectives...
...Mead, $19.95...
...Robert M. Kaus Breakdown of Democratic Regimes...
...Patricia A. Vardin, Ilene N. Brody, eds...
...And then all those delays and snafus that result from conducting antitrust policy by lawsuit become a lot more troubling than Waldman’s sanguine view admits...
...Today’s protests against U.S...
...The well-publicized delays and snafus in recent government antitrust suits have given those efforts a bad name, so it’s worth noting this dull, but informative study...
...Morton Schwartz...
...About Jack Newfield, the paper’s renowned investigative reporter, for example, McAuliffe writes that he refused to sign the entry form for the Pulitzer Prize for which the paper wanted to nominate him for his stories about Bernard Bergman’s nursing homes...
...Don’t you want a Pulitzer...
...Vogel didn’t...
...But David Vogel writes here that the new corporate gadfly is still leaving it up to the Duke...
...Praeger, $25...
...Well, there may be some truth to all of that, but the voice behind so much of this book, behind so many of its anecdotes, and descriptions (and outright character assassinations in some cases) is so obviously Wolf‘s, that it is hard to put much stock in McAuliffe’s one-sided version of the history of the Voice...
...Teachers College Press, $6.95...
...But if you’re not a Voice groupie, you’ll find this book overly long, horribly overwritten, and cluttered with cheap shots (for the bad guys) and virtual canonization (for the good guys...
...The author is clearly more interested in being comprehensive and he is--to a point...
...There are, for example, on file at the FBI, thousands of pages of internal documents on the Security Index-a subject to which Theoharis devotes an entire chapter...
...He examines in some detail how these often monolithic corporations control every step of the production process, from extraction of t h e raw materials to marketing of the finished product, leaving the host country’s role that of, well, a host-supplying the goods and the labor and getting left with the mess in the end...
...University of Illinois, $10...
...Schocken, $15.50...
...Alexander Cockburn and other writers who didn’t see things Wolfs way during the traumatic times, and so on...
...Julia Rose National Party Platforms...
...Lexington, $17.95...
...Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Chile...
...Ali A. Mazrui...
...This title is a little misleading-Rose and Peters know that governments, no matter what their financial straits, can’t go bankrupt in the same sense a corporation can-but their message is a grim one nevertheless...
...Juan J. Linz, Alfred Stepan, eds...
...because it’s that kind of information that would lead to the right kind of reform of the intelligence agencies pages of speculation (all based on published sources...
...he was asked...
...And for most stockholders, the issue is still not corporate responsibility, but the bottom line of the balance sheet...
...Thanks, most of all,” writes author McAuliffe, “to Dan Wolf, who broke two decades of circumspection and finally chose to let someone inside his head, and who made that someone me...
...Athan Theoharis...
...Corporate Imperialism: Conflict and Expropriation...
...Thomas C. Bartsh, Francis M. Boddy, Benjamin F. King, Peter N. Thompson...
...Nah,” he said, “they ‘re fixed...
...In this socialist account of third world rip-offs by multinational corporations, Girvan walks us through the economic intricacies of just how multinationals conspire to deprive mineral-rich developing countries of the profits-and resulting benefits-of their own wealth...
...Can Government Go Bankrupt...
...And since it’s the threat of a suit, and not the actual victory, that counts, there’s no need to delay while working out the legal details...
...University of California, $12.50...
...The old days, of course, are the good days...
...Alfred A. Lilienthal...
...The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace...
...His rtasons for the excesses itre predictable: liberals didn’t have the nerve to stand up to McCarthyism...
...The Regional Impact of Monetary Policy in the United States...
...Temple, $15...
...Norman Girvan...
...David Vogel...
...Spying on Americans: Political Surveillance from Hoover to the Huston Plan...
...Any old lawsuit will do, as long as it promises to do something really nasty, like splitting GM into smaller companies...
...His finding: “Contrary to popular belief, antitrust often works...
...He spends his days being the alternative version of William Shawn, coaxing work from writers that even /he,il didn’t think they had in them...
...The cry of “Ha...
...Wolf is busy discovering great talent and putting out his lively, i f ragged p a p e r a m i d s t an atmosphere of ferment and excitement...
...The Law of Value and Histortcal Materialism...
...School Desegregation Policy: Compliance, Avoidance, and the Metropolitan Remedy...
...Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931-39...
...business are not the direct hits of the Judy Holliday proxy fight (you remember that, don’t you-the 1950s movie “Solid Gold Cadillac”) that toppled corrupt management...
...And after 22X pages of data, data, data...
...The Presidential Debates: Media, Electoral and Policy Perspectives...
...According to the old Norman legend, an aggrieved person could bring a complaint against his neighbor, feudal officialdom, or a Duke with the cry of “Ha...
...Their a t t a c k s are directed at “the judgement of management, not its power...
...The Great American Newspaper: The Story of the Village Voice...
...The Civil Rights Injunction...
...Free Press, $12.95...
...Johns Hopkins, $3.95...
...One of the things that has always troubled me about the Chruch committee and the other investigations into the excesses of American intelligence is their failure to relate any of the illegal acts committed by the intelligence community to the lives of the people they affected...
...That’s a shame...
...The distinctive feature of a politically bankrupt regime is that citizens are indifferent to it,” they write, adding, “Citizens are not prepared to f i n a n c e a d d i t i o n a l government programs by accepting a cut in the absolute value of their take-home pay...
...Lobb.i,ing the Corporation runs through some solid examples of both citizen groups’ tactics and business responses...
...Prentice-Hall, $9.95...
...How to Be Your Own Lawyer (Sometimes...
...These raw files tell a story that Theoharis hasn’t-about the people in Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Los Angeles who lost their jobs after the FBI had tipped off their employers that they were “security risks” who would be detained in the event of a nat io na I emergency . This...
...Donald Bruce Johnson, ed...
...Egypt’s Uncertain Revolution Under Nasser and Sadat...
...A Class-Action Suit That Worked: The Consumer Refund in the Antibiotic Antitrust Litigation...
...Waldman has taken a look at 12 of the biggest antitrust cases since World War 11 to see if they did any good...
...of course), about whether Truman knew or didn’t know what kind of illegal activities were going on about him...
...Harvard, $16...
...Indiana University, $10.95...
...on spying, Theoharis has tacked on a 16-page “conclusion” that is as disappointing as the rest of this book...
...Theoharis, a former consultant to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (the so-called Church committee), has written an exhaustive book-a massive and detailed compilation of all the ways our government has spied on us...
...They are thus forced to import the unavailable capital goods...
...Truman and Eisenhower were manipulated by devious aides: there was inadequate executive ovcrsight of the intelligence bureaucracy...
...The tip-off comes early-in the last paragraph of the foreward...
...Monthly Review Press, $6.50...
...Senator Joe McCarthy...
...In most of the cases, the result was more competition, lower prices, and a more efficient use of resources...
...Since the suits he examined had these beneficial effects, Waldman concludes the government should bring more of themparticularly against firms that dominate major industries...
...GM, he suggests, is one obvious target...
...I am in his debt, permanently, and glad to be...
...Girvan points out one frequently missed contradiction: often the multinationals set up capital intensive factories in nations whose prime resources are raw materials and people...
...firms have adopted the compromises of separate-butequal employment opportunities and coiiditions in their subsidiaries in that country...
...University of California, $18.50...
...For people who have read the Voice for years, who know all the players and remember all the literary feuds that were carried on in its pages, there is a lot of enjoyable stuff here-an6Edotal bits on practically everyone who ever wrote for the paper, and a great deal of excerpting from its pages...
...Science in a Free S o c i e t y . Paul Feyerabend...
...Soviet Perceptions of the United States...
...Richard Rose, Guy Peters...
...Dar...
...Although he makes it clear from the beginning where his sympathies lie-he claims to be an alumnus of the picket lines in front of Woolworth’s lunch counter in the civil r i g h t s days-Vogel goes overboard in his effort to be even-handed to both sides...
...the illegal wiretapping, break-ins, and mail openings...
...Samir Amin...
...University of Illinois, $30...
...Instead Theoharis b’‘lv es us --J...
...N. Which Side Are You On...
...They argue that Western governments that continue to spend more than they take in -and that’s just about all of them-face the prospect of “political bankruptcy,” a political end of the line, sometime down the road...
...And he notes angrily (and predictably), the times have changed, the clamor for reforming the intelligence agencies seems to have died...
...What we have here is a classic case of a reporter being a prisoner of his source...
...Everett F. Cataldo, Michael W. Giles, Douglas S. Gatlin...
...That’s not hard--Clay Felker, who bought the paper late in 1974...
...however, isn’t information that has been mined by a political scientist or put into book form by a journalist, so it sits there, unread and unused...
...For every case of broader corporate-board representation, and companies that have given a l m o s t t r a d e - u n i o n s t a t u s to negotiations with stockholders on public oriented shareholder resolutions, there are j u s t as many instances of numerous corporations holding annual stockholder meetings on the same day...
...He concludes that corporate activists are making strides, but not hitting pay dirt...
...Arturo Valenzuela...
...Johns Hopkins, $35...
...Whew...
...How could you do that...
...Basic, $12.50...
...In the process, they often make no effort to affect the growth of a viable support economy in the host country...
...Lexington, $25...
...Rollo...
...Lexington, $ I I .95...
...Their thesis rests on the assumption that at the point at which government spending for public programs begins to cut into citizens’take-home pay in very visible ways (through higher taxes as opposed to, say, inflation), citizens will simply turn their backs on government...
...N. Lobbying the Corporation: CitiTen Challenges to Business Authority...
...But Polaroid stopped sales in South Africa and many U.S...
...Carter Burden, the principle stockholder who sold Wolf down the river...
...Putnam, $12.95...
Vol. 10 • December 1978 • No. 9
