Flat Earth Watch

Check out this review of a new book by economist Ha-Joon Chang debunking Thomas Friedman's flat earth theory.  It's not as radical as it could be (not, for example, exposing the entire system of free trade as an exploitative sham), but it does explain how free trade policies are about powerful countries, who themselves became rich by protecting their own markets, forcing poor countries to open their markets in the name of development.

If you want you can also read my comment,which is the 6th one down, entitled "We were never good samaritans." It was 4:10 in the morning so my use of pronouns is a little ambiguous, but I was trying to explain how from 1947-73, which the book argues was the golden age of U.S. Good Samaritanism, the United States actually set the stage for neoliberalism by deposing democratically elected leaders all over the world and installing dictators who would capitulate to our economic interests. 

And while we're on the subject, I also want to say that those of us on the left should be very afraid of the Democratic candidates lionizing misogynist racist warmongers like JFK and LBJ, both of whom  sold out the civil rights movement in favor of military adventurism (see JFK giving a speech about the "southern half of the globe" as "the great battleground for the expansion of freedom today" on the very day in May 1961 that the first Freedom Riders were imprisoned in a show trial; LBJ drowning out, then selling out Fannie Lou Hamer and the MFDP at the 1964 Democratic Convention in favor of the segregationist delegation; LBJ defunding Head Start to pay for the war on Vietnam, explaining later, in that fun folksy way of his,  how "that bitch of a war killed the lady [he] really loved--the Great Society").  I suppose this is all of a piece with our backlash-fueled misremembering of the sixties generally, but the fact that Hillary and Barack are extolling the virtues of men whose main achievements were leading us into a horrible, vicious, immoral war is something we should be figuring out and watching closely. Protest at the DNC anyone?