On Sep 24, 2007, at 3:55 PM, Jim Devine wrote:
isn't her thesis about _changes_ in the degree of cronyism rather than the current level of it? further, isn't her comparison with the less-cronyish 1960s or 1930s rather than with the early 1900s? to dismiss the current cronyish trend _tout court_ would be like saying that the current trend toward globalization is irrelevant since the economy has always been globalized.
Yeah it would be kind of like that, because it's true. Or, more exactly, the desire to identify a historical break often effaces historical continuities. Using a word like "globalization" and pretending it started in the 1980s or 1990s effaces the importance of imperialism to the development of capitalism, and oversentimentalizes the 1950s and 1960s. Klein exhibits a lot of nostalgia for the Keynesianism and import substitution of the Golden Age, and also describes the Pinochet years as a turn against the leftist movements of that same Golden Age. If that age was so golden, why were there leftists, armed and unarmed, fighting for the abolition of capitalism? As for the 1960s, didn't LBJ have something to do with Brown & Root? Oh yeah <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellogg,_Brown_and_Root>:
One of its first large-scale projects, according to the book Cadillac Desert, was to build a dam on the Texas Colorado River near Austin during the Depression years. For assistance in federal payments, the company turned to the local Congressman, Lyndon B. Johnson. Brown and Root was the principal source of campaign funds for Johnson's initial run for Congress in 1937 in return for persuading the Bureau of Reclamation to change its rules against paying for a dam on land the federal government did not own, a decision that had to go all the way to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, according to Robert A. Caro's book The Path to Power. After other very profitable construction projects for the federal government, such as building the Corpus Christi Naval Station, Brown and Root gave massive sums of cash for Johnson's first run for the U.S. Senate in 1941. Brown and Root violated IRS rules over campaign contributions, largely in charging off its donations as deductible company expenses.[citation needed] A subsequent IRS investigation threatened to bring criminal charges against Brown and Root as well as Johnson and others. It was not quashed until Roosevelt himself told the IRS to back off and allowed Brown and Root to settle for pennies on the dollar. During World War II, Brown & Root built the Naval Air Station Corpus Christi and its subsidiary Brown Shipbuilding produced a series of warships for the U.S. Government.
Oh, so maybe there was some cronyism in the 1930s too! Doug
