Buzzflash

If the number of dog-eared pages thickening the upper corner of a book on my bookshelves is any indication of how important that book was to me (and it is), then "The Impact of Inequality" is one of the top ten books in my library (and it is).

Back on Iyyar 2, 5769 (that's April 26th of this year to most Americans) the most left of Israel's major newspapers, Haaretz, published an article by Amer Oren titled, "Why Lawrence of Arabia is still relevant, from Gaza to Kabul." I resolved to watch the movie, and ordered it from a popular online seller. Last week I caught enough time (it runs over 3 hours) to watch it. Oren was right.

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. (This is the book that Hugo Chavez gave to President Barack Obama at the Summit of the Americas and that Obama said that he would read.)

What if the Japanese never really did “surrender” to us, inasmuch as we think they “adopted” our culture and values after World War II, but instead have been playing us for suckers, angry about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ever since? What if they’re collaborating with the Chinese in creating an Asian sphere of influence – decidedly un-democratic – to rule the world over the next century?

There’s no shortage of excellent histories of the progressive movement, from the beginning of this nation to today. One of the very best of the early Progressive/Revolutionary Era is Harvey Kaye’s “Thomas Paine and the Promise of America,” an earlier one of my BuzzFlash Book of the Month reviews. Others are large and fairly substantial tomes, rich with information, such as several of the writings of Chomsky and Zinn, or Charles and Mary Beard's brilliant (and encyclopedic) 1928 "History of America."

The Republican Great Depression of 1929-1939 has been an unending source of mystery, fascination, and disinformation for the past four generations. As you’re reading these words, there’s a huge push on by conservative think-tanks and wealthy political activists to reinvent the history, suggesting that Roosevelt prolonged the Depression or that New Deal programs were ineffective. At the same time, folks like David Sirota are valiantly pushing back with actual facts and statistics, showing that Roosevelt’s New Deal was startlingly effective, particularly when compared with the Republican policies of 1920-1929 that formed the bubble that crashed in 1929, and the Republican failures to deal with its consequences during the last three years of the Herbert Hoover administration (1929-1933).

Bill Ayers is doing interviews with Chris Matthews, John McCain based his campaign on his Vietnam War service, and Barack Obama is constantly compared with JFK or RFK. As much as time has passed, the Sixties are still with us.

I read two books yesterday. The first was Joseph Tainter’s “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” a dense, profound, and insightful academic/archeological discussion of why civilizations have a stubborn habit of crashing. Following that, I read Dmitry Orlov’s “Reinventing Collapse,” about how the USSR collapsed and how the US is on the verge of doing the same – for many of the same reasons – any day now. What Tainter did for academics and archeology wonks (I confess I’m one), Orlov did for you, me, and Joe The Plumber.

If you want to understand what’s really behind the current goings-on in the former Soviet state of Georgia, immediately buy Michael Klare’s DVD, produced by the Media Education Foundation, “Blood and Oil.”

Given this point in the election cycle, the title of this book, Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency, is easily misunderstood as having to do with the challenges Barack Obama faces in becoming president. That’s not its topic, however.