In his introduction, he warns that if the Bush administration's economic ideology, heavily influenced by right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, continues to its logical conclusion, America will lose all the New Deal and Great Society programs that have helped average citizens since the Great Depression. He goes on to say that "the people now in charge really don't like America as it is. If you combine their apparent agendas, the goal would seem to be something like this: a country that basically has no safety net at home, which relies mainly on military force to enforce its will abroad, in which schools don't teach evolution, but do teach religion and-possibly-in which elections are only a formality."

This past month, the Online Review managed to intercept the busy Princeton economics professor and discuss his book with him. We also talked about related political and economic issues currently in the news.

OR: In your book you discuss how the radical right wants to abolish all taxes on capital and only have taxes on labor. Does this mean that they would like to see a pre-New Deal America, like the Gilded Age where workers are routinely exploited and there is a huge disparity between the rich and poor?

PK: Well, they would reject that idea of what the Gilded Age was like. But if you ask the question, does the Heritage Foundation or Grover Norquist want to take us back to a period before the New Deal existed, the answer is yes. They are quite clear about that. In fact, when Norquist was asked about whether he wants to take us back to before the New Deal, he said, no, that he wanted to take us back to before the Progressive Era. Now, the Bush administration would deny that it wants anything like that, but people in his administration have advocated those views before they became members of the administration, and the people backing them are pretty clear that that is their goal.

OR: Speaking of Grover Norquist, in your book you also talk about how many members of the House of Representatives are "true believers in the miraculous powers of the free market-they are in effect members of a sect that believes that markets will work even when the businessmen actually involved say they won't." I suppose individuals like Grover Norquist would fall into this category as well.

PK: Yes, that's right.

OR: But here's what I don't understand. A lot of these zealots on the far right who espouse this type of philosophy, like Tom DeLay, for example, did not come from privileged backgrounds, yet they seem to look back to the late 1800s and early 1900s and think it was a great time for the average person in America. Don't they know their history? Don't they know how bad working conditions for most average Americans were in that era? Didn't they ever read books like The Jungle?

PK: They believe that is all left-wing propaganda. Of course they will say that the country was poorer then and that the average standard of living was lower, but they believe there was also good stuff happening during that era, like people taking more responsibility for their lives. In addition, they believe that anything good that evolved from that time was a result of the free market.

OR: What about individuals like Bush or Cheney? Are they really true believers, or are they just scam artists who use this right-wing free market philosophy to promote their own self-interests?

PK: I don't think they're really big believers in the free market; in fact, I know they're not. For example, when push comes to shove, and there's a question of subsidies for energy companies, or for other groups that they support, they're all for government intervention. So I don't think they're really free marketers. Actually, I'm not sure what is in the mind of somebody like Dick Cheney, but I do think he believes that people with the right connections should run things.

OR: In other words, he's an elitist.

PK: I would call him an oligarch. read more

Hypocrisy Is Not Heroic
In an age where image is reality, and Corporate America protects the 'free market' at all costs, the meaning of the term 'hero' needs to be seriously re-examined.

By J.F. Miglio

In a plutocracy, the natural hero is the man who robs a bank.
--William Carlos Williams

There was a time when Americans knew what it meant to be a hero. But thanks to the last few decades of corporate mind control, mass media distortion, and political double speak, the term has lost its meaning. As a result, Americans too often compromise their principles, give in to the "bad guys," and condemn anyone who questions their motives or points out the flaws in the system. Not a very heroic way to live, yet shouldn't everyone be a hero in his (or her) own life? In order to answer this question, we need to re-examine what the word itself means. For the definition, I'll defer to Joseph Campbell, the world's foremost authority on mythology and author of the classic book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

According to Campbell, who died in 1987, a hero is an individual who has gone beyond the normal range of human experience to perform an extraordinary act or deed; in addition, he is an individual who is willing to risk or sacrifice his life for a cause greater than himself or other than himself. Historically, the hero has embodied these qualities: honesty, bravery, unselfishness, compassion, inviolate personal ethics, and a commitment to never give up, to fight until the end. Campbell also divides the hero into two subcategories: action heroes, who achieve their objectives through violent or militaristic means, and spiritual heroes, who achieve their objectives through non-violent or passive resistance.

One of the great action heroes of ancient times was King Leonides of Sparta who defended the pass of Thermopylae in northern Greece with only three hundred troops against Xerxes, the Persian King, who had thousands of troops. According to the historical account, Leonides knew he and his men had no chance of victory, but their goal was simply to delay Xerxes and his army in order to give Athens and Sparta more time to prepare their armies for war. "Stand and die" was the battle cry among the three hundred Spartans, and for three days they held off Xerxes' troops until eventually they were overwhelmed, and each Spartan warrior was killed, including King Leonides. Their noble fight to the finish, however, gave Greece the time to prepare for battle and ultimately win the war against Persia. This act of heroism, which highlights patriotism, bravery, and self-sacrifice, set the standard for military battles for centuries to come.

In contrast, the spiritual hero uses moral rectitude and nonviolence as his tools of the trade, but like the action hero, he is prepared to sacrifice his life if necessary. Socrates and Christ, for example, were two great spiritual heroes who died for their beliefs, as were Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Joan of Arc was a spiritual hero, but a unique one because she was also an action hero (and a woman) who led her troops into battle at a time and in a culture that did not sanction female warriors. Unfortunately, she ultimately sacrificed her own life and became a martyr (dead hero), the fate of many heroes, or as F. Scott Fitzgerald noted, "Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy."

Dating back to the ancient Greeks, the hero was a primary archetype of Western culture and was celebrated in stories and song. During the twentieth century in America, however, the archetype began to change as our society evolved culturally, and by the 1960s, the heroic archetype came under attack. Black Americans, for example, objected to the fact that the mainstream media almost always portrayed a white American in the role of the hero. Women also objected to the fact that most often the hero was a male rather than a female. In addition, the Vietnam War changed the perception of war itself and the role of a hero.

During this era, another archetype evolved: the antihero. The antihero, or alternative hero, as I prefer to call him, embodied many of the same qualities of the traditional hero, but unlike the traditional hero, he was decidedly anti-establishment. The alternative hero, of course, was not a totally new phenomenon; in fact, one could make a case that some of the ancient Greek heroes, Odysseus, for example, could be interpreted as more alternative hero than traditional hero. In more recent times, Dashiell Hammett's detective character Sam Spade was a classic alternative hero, and Humphrey Bogart, the actor who portrayed him in The Maltese Falcon, the movie version of the book by the same name, became famous for playing alternative heroes in the movies.

The concept of the alternative hero reached its apotheosis during the cultural revolution of the late1960s and early 1970s. During this period, the traditional, clean-cut, God-fearing hero of post World War II America had become corny, passé, and at odds with the prevailing political zeitgeist. He was a relic from another era who represented the "plastic" values of the 1950s establishment. On screen he was embodied by John Wayne, but even "The Duke," the quintessential western film hero of the World War II generation, was being outgunned and replaced by Clint Eastwood's gritty new alternative western hero whom he portrayed in "spaghetti westerns" like A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The new archetype portrayed by Eastwood was a perfect fit for the Baby Boom generation of the sixties; he was unkempt and iconoclastic, a bounty hunter, not a soldier or a lawman, and he didn't like taking orders. He was an existentialist who created his own code of ethics, the same way that rebels or gangsters did, and he foreshadowed a changing world where the line between the good guys and the bad guys was becoming progressively more blurred.

But just as the alternative hero replaced the traditional hero, a new archetype, what I call the "corporate hero," replaced the alternative hero in the 1980s. The new corporate hero was a product of the Reagan era. He was a stalwart proponent of free market capitalism and Ayn Rand objectivism, a staunch anti-communist and disciple of ultra-conservatives like Milton Freedom and William F. Buckley Jr. Where the alternative hero of the sixties was an anti-establishment rebel, the corporate hero of the eighties was a super-establishment businessman. But he was not like Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, the old-fashioned conformist businessman who goes to church on Sundays, gripes about unions and high taxes, and occasionally feels guilty about his affluent lifestyle. No, he was more like Gordon Gecko, the ruthless, greed-driven character Michael Douglass portrays in the movie Wall Street. The Gecko character was patterned after real life cutthroat capitalists like Michael Milkin and Ivan Boesky, both of whom went to jail for their financial misdeeds. Boesky, of course, was credited with coining the term, "Greed is good," and he spoke for a whole generation of corporate heroes and all-around swell guys like "Chainsaw" Al Dunlop, "Neutron" Jack Welch, and "Kenny Boy" Lay.

Predictably, the mainstream media, forever obeisant to their corporate masters, were quick to lionize these heroes of cutthroat capitalism and couldn't wait to put them on the front covers of magazines and do flattering interviews with them on television. Even college professors lauded these immoral, ruthless creeps as "smart cookies" worthy of admiration. In fact, I personally know of a case where a professor at a prominent business school actually showed the movie Wall Street to his students not as a cautionary tale of good verses evil, but as a primer on how to be a consummate businessman!

In the old days, this type of corporate hero, who represented greed, ruthlessness, selfishness, and lack of ethics and morals, would have been considered evil and identified as a "villain," an archetype as old as the hero himself. Charles Dickens, for example, was noted for writing classic villains who fit into this category, and more often than not, his villains were businessmen, like Ebenezer Scrooge, the prototype of the miser who values money above all else. Twentieth century Hollywood continued in the Dickens' tradition and often depicted the villain as a tightfisted, read more

The Online Review recently caught up with the prolific writer and discussed his new book with him. We also talked about the agenda of the mainstream news media and the questions surrounding 9/11.

OR: In your latest book you make the case that history is written from an elitist point of view because all the writers of the time came from the privileged class. Would you say all history has been written this way?

MP: Yes, as a matter of fact, I wrote another book called History Is Mystery with that very same theme. That is, the victors in history are the ones who write it, and the victors are usually the ones who are the dominant socio-economic interests of the society. They themselves may not write it, but their faithful scribes do, people in their employ.

OR: Which goes along with another theme in your book. Although you discuss Julius Caesar's flaws and foibles, basically you see him as a social reformer who wanted to give more opportunity to average citizens. As a result, he made many enemies in the Roman Senate who wanted to get rid of him.

MP: Yes, Caesar was a much more democratic leader than Brutus or Cassius or any of the individuals who killed him. For example, he started rhetoric schools for ordinary people. These schools usually were the province only for the very rich, and he initiated a number of democratic reforms, strengthened the tribal assemblies, and took powers away from the oligarchic aristocracy in the Senate. When the Romans took over Athens during the first civil war, he re-instituted a democratic constitution for Athens. He also called for the public posting and publishing of the proceedings of the Roman Senate to expose what the Senators were saying and doing in order to make them more accountable. read more