Tomgram

Pass go, collect $2 billion

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The time of withdrawal, instantly updated:

A recent modest report on the inside pages of the New York Times, recounting the efforts of Representative John M. Spratt Jr., the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, to get ballpark cost estimates on the American occupation of Iraq, was revealing indeed on how the parameters of “withdrawal” are still being viewed in Washington. Spratt went to the Congressional Budget Office with four different future troop levels and the Office’s analysts then factored in “Pentagon data” on the subject (Richard A. Oppel Jr., Congressional Unit Analyzes Military Costs in Iraq):

“In the most expensive hypothesis examined by the budget office, troop strength declines to 102,000 by 2005 and drops to 50,000 by 2008, remaining there until 2013. Total spending would come to about $200 billion, including about $22 billion in 2005. Spending would then fall to about $14 billion in 2008, and rise from there in line with inflation through 2013.

“The least costly plan, at about $85 billion, calls for troop levels to decline to 76,000 by 2005 and for all troops to be withdrawn by 2008. That version predicts spending $16 billion in 2005.”

The Congressman was assumedly interested in the cost projections. What strikes me more are the years of our prospective departure. These scenarios, with “Pentagon data” figured in, assume a military occupation ending sometime between 2008-2013. That’s the last year of junior high and high school on the low end versus junior high, high school and college on the high end, for those of you with children. Think about that time-scape. That’s evidently what “toughing it out” really means.

In the most recent Nation magazine, Jonathan Schell writes the following on our indefinite occupation of Iraq (Tautology in Action):

“Great powers hate to lose at anything. Once embarked on a course of action–even if it is a tragic mistake–they feel a compulsion to succeed that is not felt by smaller powers. Great powers’ ambitions are far-flung, and if they fail in one place, they are more likely to be defied in another. They are as concerned for the reputation of their power as for its substance; indeed, the reputation is a good part of the substance. In the nineteenth century, the name for that reputation was “prestige.” In the nuclear age, it became “credibility.” The United States, for example, embarked upon the Vietnam War for many reasons. But the reason it refused to give up for more than a decade was to preserve the credibility of American power. Long after policy-makers had concluded that no local stake was worth the continued cost, they still dared not lose the war for reasons of credibility. We cannot afford to lose, they said, as they now do today.

“The least costly plan, at about $85 billion, calls for troop levels to decline to 76,000 by 2005 and for all troops to be withdrawn by 2008. That version predicts spending $16 billion in 2005.”

The Congressman was assumedly interested in the cost projections. What strikes me more are the years of our prospective departure. These scenarios, with “Pentagon data” figured in, assume a military occupation ending sometime between 2008-2013. That’s the last year of junior high and high school on the low end versus junior high, high school and college on the high end, for those of you with children. Think about that time-scape. That’s evidently what “toughing it out” really means.

In the most recent Nation magazine, Jonathan Schell writes the following on our indefinite occupation of Iraq (Tautology in Action):

“Great powers hate to lose at anything. Once embarked on a course of action–even if it is a tragic mistake–they feel a compulsion to succeed that is not felt by smaller powers. Great powers’ ambitions are far-flung, and if they fail in one place, they are more likely to be defied in another. They are as concerned for the reputation of their power as for its substance; indeed, the reputation is a good part of the substance. In the nineteenth century, the name for that reputation was “prestige.” In the nuclear age, it became “credibility.” The United States, for example, embarked upon the Vietnam War for many reasons. But the reason it refused to give up for more than a decade was to preserve the credibility of American power. Long after policy-makers had concluded that no local stake was worth the continued cost, they still dared not lose the war for reasons of credibility. We cannot afford to lose, they said, as they now do today.

“But the United States could lose and did lose. Costly as losing was, ‘winning’–indefinite occupation of the country–was discovered to be more costly still. Now once again, the logic of credibility threatens to introduce a fatal rigidity into policy. Policy becomes a tautology in action. We are there because we are there. We have to win because we cannot lose. Strategic retreat is ruled out. Yet nothing in this inflationary, self-reinforcing logic can change a jot of the situation on the ground, on which success or failure will ultimately depend. A policy that forsakes local reality for considerations of credibility is to geopolitics what a bubble is to economics. The bigger the bubble–superpowers beware!–the bigger the crash.”

In the meantime, if recent reports are to be believed, the occupation is taking another decidedly bad turn — and not just because a Chinook helicopter was shot down by a hand-held missile today with at least fifteen dead, twenty-one wounded, and two more American private contractors killed by a side-of-the-road bomb. Symbolically enough, according to the Associated Press, our military recently arrested a whole village (Hamza Hendawi, U.S. Raid Nets Whole Iraqi Village):

“American troops in helicopters swooped down on this remote sheepherding village in the desert and detained nearly all the men, one as old as 81, one as young as 13. A month after the raid, apparently aimed at preventing terrorists from slipping across the border from Saudi Arabia, only two of the 79 captives have been freed.”

These are the tactics of madness and lead only to further resistance. In fact, the Independent’s fine reporter Patrick Cockburn comments more generally (Iraqis are Naming Their Babies ‘Saddam’): “There is a self-defeating crudity about the occupation’s methods. US troops routinely tie up those they detain, force them to lie on the ground and put bags over their heads.”

Unsurprisingly, the isolation of the Americans in Baghdad itself, he reports, only grows as they pull back inside a modern version of classic frontier forts:

“The changes in the physical appearance of central Baghdad since mid- summer leave no doubt where power lies. Ever more elaborate fortifications are being built to defend Saddam Hussein’s old Republican Palace where Bremer and the CPA live and work, inside a sort of Forbidden City. It is now surrounded by grey prefabricated concrete walls, with red painted warnings forbidding drivers to stop next to them. The few entrances are protected by tanks and rolls of razor wire. New notices have gone up saying it is not permitted to swim in the Tigris [River] outside the palace, presumably for fear of underwater saboteurs. The British Embassy, abandoning its spacious enclave, has fled inside the Rashid Hotel, its entrance guarded by Nepalese soldiers. In future, it will work from a villa inside the Republican Palace.”

This isolation is further emphasized by the withdrawal of the rest of the foreign UN staff, NGOs like Doctors without Borders (an organization which stayed on even in Talibanized Afghanistan), and the stand-down of the Red Cross. These are, after all, among the groups that have actually helped keep Iraqi society afloat through terrible times.

“Riverbend” of the Baghdad Burning blog despairingly points out just what the loss of the Red Cross will mean:

“The Red Cross have started pulling out their personnel. A friend of mine who works with the Red Crescent said that they were going to try to pull out most of their personnel, while trying to continue with what they’re doing — humanitarian assistance. When I heard Nada Domani, the head of the ICRC in Iraq, say that they’d begin pulling out their personnel on Tuesday, I wished I could yell out, ‘Don’t abandon us Nada!’ But I realize that their first priority is to ensure the safety of their employees.

“The Red Cross is especially important at this point because they are the ‘link’ that is connecting the families of the detainees and the [American] military. When someone suddenly disappears, people go to the Red Cross and after a few grueling days, the missing person can often be tracked down at one of the prison camps or prisons.”

Eric Margolis in his latest column in the Toronto Sun (included below) found that the “storm of car bombs, rockets, and gunfire” in central Iraq brought back for him memories of the Tet Offensive and the “ill-fated Vietnamization” program that followed in the Nixon years. He sums up quite well the growing disjuncture – a familiar one from those years – between sunny visions of “progress” in Washington and events in Iraq and concludes, “The light that optimistic George Bush sees at the end of the Iraq tunnel is probably an onrushing truck, loaded with explosives.”

(On the subject of the Tet analogy, a reader recently wrote in: “Seems to me the more appropriate parallel than Tet is with an earlier bombing by the Vietnamese Resistance of the Rex Hotel in present day Ho Chi Mihn City. The Rex, like the Rashid, was used as a resident for US military and civilian personnel.”)

Perhaps the combination of increasing isolation and the autocratic power to change the face of Iraq at the sweep of a pen is bringing it on, but doesn’t L. Paul Bremer, our man in Baghdad, seem to be growing more grandiose by the second?

He gave quite a remarkable Ramadan talk (with a translated Arabic voice-over) to the Iraqi people on a TV station set up, evidently quite disastrously, by a private contractor and run by the Americans. In comments introducing a reprint of Bremer’s address, the Washington Post suggested somewhat sardonically:

“Some analysts found it notable that a U.S. official was speaking in a religious cadence, while several Arabic-speaking experts focused on the difference between the English and Arabic versions posted on the authority’s Web site. ‘The Arabic is an awkward literal translation of the English,’ said Mamoun Fandy, a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute for Peace. ‘The sentence structure is off and there are phrases that sound odd to an Arabic speaker.’ [B]y translating the text in this way rather than revising it, Fandy said, the rhythm of the rhetoric is gone and the message is obscured.”

Here’s just a taste (and I swear to you that this is in the original English, not a translation back from the Arabic):

“You must not lose hope because you have seen the evil one [Saddam, of course] go.

“You, the Iraqi people, whom the evil one was bound to protect, he instead tortured, he instead murdered.

“You, the Iraqi people, whom the evil one was bound to feed, he instead starved.

“You, the Iraqi people whom the evil one was bound to lead in peace, he instead led into foolish wars, wars which poured your blood into the sand.

“When the people of the world asked the evil one to stop he sneered.

“You will live in the quiet enjoyment of family, of friends, and of a decent income honestly earned.

“You will live in an Iraq governed by and for Iraqis.

“These things will come to pass.”

They will “come to pass”? Do I sense that L. Paul is starting to think of himself as a Biblical prophet, if not Yahweh?

Pass go, collect $2 billion:

Quote of the day: “‘If you go to the Four Seasons [restaurant] and shout out “Who’s working on a deal in Iraq?” everybody there will raise their hand,’ said Ed Rogers, one of the GOP’s top lobbyists in Washington, according to The Hill.” (From Roger Triling, Bush’s Golden Vision, the Village Voice)

Okay, here’s an image for you. Imagine a typical Midwestern small town of the 1930s (at least as we’ve all seen them in the movies). Let’s call it Midvale. A black Packard pulls up to the curb on Main Street – think Bonnie and Clyde here — right in front of the Midvale Savings Bank where the citizens of the town have cached all their savings – $1 million. Out of the car leap four bank robbers, who rush in, guns drawn, and loot the bank of the $850,000 they find on hand. By now, despite the danger of the guns, the whole town has gathered on Main Street to catch the spectacle. As the robbers emerge from the bank, sacks in hand, one of them opens the smallest sack and begins to pass out crisp new $100 bills, one for each of Midvale’s citizens. An extra $500 each goes to the town’s two policemen and $1,000 to the police chief. $50,000 in all. The robbers then leap in their car and speed out of town never to be seen again. The townspeople are ecstatic. They rush to the stores on Main Street and splurge: groceries, farm equipment, new clothes. It’s a bonanza for the local economy. Everyone is thrilled. Times look better. What’s the problem here?

The problem is that the robbers have just crossed the Mexican border heading for Baja where they plan to lead lives of luxury with the remaining $800,000 dollars – and of course, for the town’s citizens, however bright the moment, the economic future has just ceased to exist.

Consider this my way of catching our own domestic and global moment of Bushonomics. In a long piece in the New York Review of Books, “Strictly Business” (see below), Paul Krugman points out that “income inequality in the United States has returned to Gilded Age levels” and reminds us that the Gilded Age was a time when “robber barons openly bought and sold government officials and their policies.” He proceeds to explore our age of knavery, thievery, and lies, while wondering why the outrage isn’t greater. He comments:

“The most striking feature of these stories [of Bush administration machinations] is the rawness of it all. Never mind all that stuff you’ve read in the past about how political contributions buy ‘access,’ which allows interest groups to influence policy. The companies now riding high don’t just contribute to Republican campaigns, they contribute directly to the personal wealth of future (and in some cases current) public officials. And they don’t influence policy: they write it, directly.”

Economist James K. Galbraith in “Why Bush Likes a Bad Economy” in the October Progressive magazine (see below), while predicting a “false dawn” thanks to “new tax cuts and more military spending,” weeks before the recent 7.2% jump in gross domestic product, suggests that:

“Administration policymakers are making no concessions in their war on labor rights. Why not? It may be that economic stagnation is to their taste. They don’t want a new recession, obviously, and they look set to avoid that. But do they really want full employment and strong labor unions and rising wages? Probably not. The oil, mining, defense, media, and pharmaceutical firms who form the core of their constituency rely on monopoly power, patents, and the control of public resources for their profits. They do not depend, very much, on strong consumer demand.”

We are deep into an era in which the American economy is quite literally being looted. In Le Monde Diplomatique (US: The World’s Deepest Debtor), Philip S. Golub points to the foreign version of this — “one of the curious features of U.S. hegemony,” its dependence on “the apparently limitless willingness of US allies – and even of some future competitors, such as China – to finance the apparently limitless budget and trade deficits of the U.S. Over the past twenty years the US has become the world’s leading debtor This means that the US has mobilised an ever-greater share of world savings to finance US consumption, economic growth, living standards and military expansion.”

He sees some global “signs of change,” and so, in the longer term, the end of the American binge. He quotes Stephen Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, who argues,

“that empires are not built on debt and that the explosion of the US asset bubble in the late 1990s revealed the unsustainability of the US position: “This saga is not about the bubble. It is about the unwinding of a more profound asymmetry in the global economy, the rebalancing of a US-centric world . . . History tells us that such asymmetries are not sustainable.

“Can a savings-short US economy continue to finance an ever-widening expansion of its military superiority? My answer is a resounding no. The confluence of history, geopolitics, and economics leaves me more convinced than ever that a US-centric world is on an unsustainable path.”

It’s in Iraq, however, where the Busheviks have a “free hand” to create the marketplace of their choice — at least, for now — that one can see what the new Gilded Age looks like when there is no force (other, of course, than arms) to hold them back and no body with the faintest power to check them.

Everything is private:

Quote of the day (2): “Contractors’ deaths aren’t counted among the tally of more than 350 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. No one is sure how many private workers have been killed, or, indeed, even how many are toiling in Iraq for the U.S. government. Estimates range from under 10,000 to more than 20,000 – which could make private contractors the largest U.S. coalition partner ahead of Britain’s 11,000 troops.” (Jim Krane, A Private Army Grows, Associated Press)

Imagine that — our number two coalition partner turns out to be an army of private corporate contractors now swarming over Iraq. Who says we have no eager allies? As Roger Triling of the Village Voice has written in “Bush’s Golden Vision”:

“Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives have long justified regime change in Iraq as the first step in a larger, longer, vastly more ambitious regional transformation. And while some critics have focused on the military dimension-Syria next, then Iran-right now it’s about money. More soldiers may be a possibility, but contractors are inevitable.

“So is a certain amount of campaign cash, cycled back from those who profit in the reconstruction. Against the backdrop of a treasury-draining scheme to remake the world, a few million dollars in corporate contributions to a sitting president may seem insignificant, but one can be sure they matter to Bush-and to his political opponents. For Democrats, the spectacle of a Republican administration larding out contracts to close allies is a political disaster [It’s enough in fact] to consolidate the existing distribution of power in Washington.”

Before the invasion of Iraq, critics joked that, because the Bush administration was offering so much money to garner allies, it was creating not a “coalition of the willing” but “of the billing.” Now we can see what the real Coalition of the Billing looks like. Los Angeles Times reporter David Streitfeld vividly describes, for instance, the lives of Bechtel workers in the Little America of the new Iraq (U.S. Engineers Working Under the Gun in Iraq):

“Bechtel’s Baghdad compound is deep inside the Green Zone, a vast swath of land along the Tigris River where Hussein built palaces, gardens and monuments. The civilian coalition forces have made the area their headquarters, tightly restricting access. Bechtel’s camp, set in what used to be a garden, is protected by a fence, which recently was deemed to be inadequate security. The company has hired a team of elite Gurkha guards from Nepal.

“Resembling over-wide house trailers, the prefabricated units are roomy and nicely cool. Their wood paneling evokes suburban family ‘rec’ rooms from the early 1970s. There’s a special trailer with a pool table and exercise machines, and an admonition taped to the wall: ‘Drinking will occur only at the end of the work day.'”

But he also describes the daily dangers — as a Bechtel engineer he’s with responds to gunshots: “[Tom] Rodenfels’ hired guards, two British ex-soldiers sporting MP-5 machine guns, take up positions at the edge of the construction site. But the Bechtel Group engineer barely notices. ‘Just another day at the office,’ he says.”

In an extraordinary piece of Freedom of Information Act sleuthing, the Center for Public Integrity has given us the fullest picture yet of what the new Gilded Age of Iraq Contractors looks like — and it looks like there’s an unbelievable amount of money sloshing around Washington and Baghdad, some of which is unaccounted for, and a percentage of which is going into Republican and Bush reelection coffers. Maybe Rumsfeld’s “long, hard slog” was a slip of the pen for “long, hard slosh.” For further reporting on “missing” moneys, read Emad Mekay’s More mystery over missing Iraqi millions in the Asia Times. Otherwise check out the Center’s website, where you can find lists of Iraq contracts (to the extent that they are known), portraits of corporate contractors and a fine overall view of the situation, Winning Contractors, which shows that the old revolving door from government to Bechtel or KRB or Dyncorp or the other corporations at the Iraqi trough is now fully automated:

“More than 70 American companies and individuals have won up to $8 billion in contracts for work in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan over the last two years, according to a new study by the Center for Public Integrity. Those companies donated more money to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush-a little over $500,000-than to any other politician over the last dozen years, the Center found.

“Kellogg, Brown & Root, the subsidiary of Halliburton-which Vice President Dick Cheney led prior to being chosen as Bush’s running mate in August 2000-was the top recipient of federal contracts for the two countries, with more than $2.3 billion awarded to the company. Bechtel Group, a major government contractor with similarly high-ranking ties, was second at around $1.03 billion. There are even contractors to evaluate the contractors.

” nearly every one of the 10 largest contracts awarded for Iraq and Afghanistan went to companies employing former high-ranking government officials or individuals with close ties to [the Pentagon, the State Department, the Agency for International Development] or Congress. In addition, those top 10 contractors were established political donors, contributing nearly $11 million to national political parties, candidates and political action committees since 1990, according to an analysis of campaign finance records.”

Jim Krane of the Associated Press adds the following vision of a future Washington: “The connection between companies and politicians in Washington raises the specter of executives lobbying for a hawkish U.S. foreign policy since they profit from war.”

And for every corporation in Iraq, there are many more awaiting the right moment to hit Baghdad International Airport without being knocked off by a missile. The Bangor News reports, in a piece aptly titled Gold Rush, that the latest of a series of meetings to auction off Iraq is about to happen in Maine:

“Some of the world’s largest corporations will meet in Maine this month to talk about how to take advantage of the growing economic opportunities in post-war Iraq. Although hesitant to make a move while car bombs continue exploding in the streets of Baghdad, many of the largest U.S. companies reportedly are lining up for membership in the U.S.-Iraq Business Alliance, a group backed by the Bush administration that hopes to get American companies into Iraq before the best business opportunities are gone”

Many of these prefer to remain anonymous. “When asked why alliance members were so reluctant to be identified, [Alliance founder Dennis] Sokol offered a quick answer: ‘This war effort is not popular you know.'”

Iraq itself is a guinea pig for whatever experiment crosses any neocon brain in Washington or Baghdad, anything that can’t yet, but might someday be tried out at home, once a few more barriers have come tumbling down. You want to get rid of unions and can’t quite do it in the U.S., well, why not Iraq? You want a flat tax and Americans won’t listen, well, sure. (“The flat tax, long a dream of economic conservatives, is finally getting its day — not in the United States, but in Iraq. It took L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Baghdad, no more than a stroke of the pen Sept. 15 to accomplish what eluded the likes of publisher Steve Forbes, Reps. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) and Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.), and Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) over the course of a decade and two presidential campaigns.” Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus, the Washington Post.) You want to privatize everything in a few giant hands and create a system of no-competitive-bidding crony capitalism, welcome to Iraq. As Tim Shorrock wrote recently in the Nation (Big Bucks in Iraq):

“Many observers, including even US businessmen and Iraqis who favored ‘regime change’ in Iraq, agree. They say the shock therapy being applied in Iraq will concentrate wealth in the hands of large US and Iraqi corporations, particularly the family-owned businesses that have won the majority of subcontracts from Bechtel and Halliburton. ‘I like the analogy of Wal-Mart coming into a town,’ says Timothy Mills, an attorney in the Washington law firm Patton Boggs who represents several US and foreign corporations that have contracted with the US government and are doing business in Iraq. ‘The downtown dies, Wal-Mart grows and the owners of local businesses are displaced. The effect of Iraq’s new foreign investment law for the medium and small-sized Iraqi business could be very detrimental and could result in even more concentration of capital in Iraq.’ With the US Export-Import Bank providing $500 million to insure US investors, he added, ‘If I was an Iraqi and I was political, I’d say this was a ploy to favor US companies and let them steal the riches of Iraq.'”

And lest you think no one’s profiting from all this, the vaunted “peace dividend” of the post-Soviet-collapse years may never have come about, but the “war dividend” turns out to be all to real. Check out, for example, Halliburton, a company not doing all that well before Iraq came along (David Teather, Oil firm linked to Cheney gets Iraq boost, the Guardian):

“Halliburton, the oil services company formerly run by US vice president Dick Cheney, yesterday reported soaring revenues from its contracts to help rebuild Iraq. The company said sales in the third quarter were 39% higher at $4.1bn. Iraq-related work transformed the prospects of its Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary. The division’s total revenues increased by 80% to $2.3bn, of which $900m came from Iraq and profits grew fourfold to $49m, of which $34m was Iraq business.”

Let me leave the last word to University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole, who comments that land reform in Japan, India and elsewhere has always preceded successful democratization:

“So far the CPA plan for Iraq appears to be to just let businessmen and wealthy landlords run wild, with all the risks of repeating the disastrous errors made in post-Soviet Russia.

“I’d add that it is widely recognized that the trade unions played key roles in Japanese and German reconstruction and prosperity after WW II, whereas Bremer has been dissolving all such associations. It is not clear that the Iraqi workers will even retain the right to organize or strike

“I’d say that one could forgive the Iraqis if they conclude that the American system in Iraq is a form of state socialism, with Bremer playing the Politburo, giving orders and exercising a veto even though no one elected him to office, and Halliburton and Bechtel playing state-supported industries. Perhaps it looks more like Cuba so far than like capitalist democracy.”

Tom

No light at the end of this tunnel, George
By Eric Margolis, contributing Foreign Editor
The Toronto Sun
November 2, 2003

Watching the recent storm of car bombs, rockets, and gunfire in central Iraq gave me nasty memories of the January, 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam.

At that time, many soldiers in my U.S. Army unit were departing for Special Forces camps in Vietnam’s highlands. We stood in mute horror as TV reported these very camps being overrun by North Vietnamese troops, and their garrisons killed to the last man.
We immediately understood the bloody Tet offensive was a huge political and psychological victory for North Vietnam. Tet blew away for good Washington’s claims of a light at the end of the Vietnam tunnel.

Reacting to last week’s Ramadan offensive in Iraq, President George Bush actually claimed it proved things were improving, though attacks on U.S. forces have surged from 20 to 30 daily.

To read more Margolis click here

Strictly Business
By Paul Krugman
The New York Review of Books
November 20, 2003

On a recent Friday afternoon, the Interior Department announced a change in rules for US mining companies. (They always announce the outrages on Friday afternoon, because few people read the Saturday papers or watch the Saturday TV news.) Reversing a Clinton-era decision, Interior now says that companies mining precious metals can appropriate as much federal land as they want to dump the waste from their operations-and modern mining techniques generate a great deal of waste. Environmentalists were appalled, not just because of the direct effect on the landscape, but because chemicals can leach out of the exposed waste, polluting a much wider area.

To read more Krugman click here

Why Bush Likes a Bad Economy
By James K. Galbraith
The Progressive
October 2003

Almost nine million people are unemployed. Many millions more are underemployed, and most of all, under-paid. Millions more lack health insurance. States are cutting basic public services everywhere, while the taxes (property and sales, mainly) to pay for those that remain are rising. And the gates of opportunity–for instance, to attend college–are closing on millions more.

George Bush did not entirely create this problem. The bubble and the bust of high technology, the obsession with a strong dollar, the debt build-up of American households–these existed before we got George Bush. The late 1990s were a moment of prosperity and that rarest of economic achievements–full employment. But the boom was based on dreams, illusions, and mortgages. These set the stage for a slump that began in late 2000, from which we have not recovered and will not recover soon.

To read more Galbraith click here