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Information overload
Armed Madhouse
By Greg Palast
Penguin (Allen Lane), 2006, £14-99
Reviewed by
Sarah Sachs-Eldridge
THIS BOOK does what it says on the tin. "You want
something heart warming? Buy a puppy. But if you want just the facts,
Ma’am – facts rarely cuddly or cute – here’s your book", shouts the back
cover of Armed Madhouse. And the book certainly keeps its promise, both
of facts-aplenty and of sustaining this particular style of writing,
highly energetic and in-your-face informality.
Greg Palast bombards us with all the dirt on Bush
and his neo-con pals, covering major events such as the methods involved
in winning the elections in 2000 and 2004, the motivations behind the
Iraq war, and the policies designed for the destruction of manufacturing
and welfare in the US, with plenty of other tasty titbits thrown in.
No one could read this book and not be conscious of
the hard graft put in to establish those aforementioned facts. Documents
aplenty, sources, gotten and ill-gotten, and a variety of tables and
graphs leave us convinced that he’s done his homework. But, although it
is incredibly informative, it left me feeling somewhat breathless, with
a sense of being buried under a massive heap of facts. Palast is clearly
very passionate about the task he set himself – to make sure everyone is
armed with the info to back up what most people have already decided
they believe: that Bush and the neo-cons are the last people we would
want in the stewardship of our planet.
What I really liked about Palast is his absolute
aversion to the unturned stone. Everything must be questioned and
investigated. The first chapter includes an examination of Osama bin
Laden’s motivations and background in construction, to the dealings of
ChoicePoint which, according to the Transportation Security
Administration, keeps more than 17 billion records of individuals and
businesses, which it sells to more than half of America’s top 1,000
companies. It also has contracts with over 7,500 state and local
government agencies, including law enforcement. That kind of carry-on
seems to really whet Greg’s appetite.
Later, in a chapter entitled The Network, he gives
evidence of the impact of the collapse of Stalinism on Russia and
Eastern Europe. The number of billionaires has gone from zero to 36 in
Russia. Palast explains how this has been paid for by cutting spending
on medicine and hospital care by two-thirds. This chapter outlines the
development of the neo-liberal model but the writing style here
particularly inhibits the clarity of analysis. It seems that he is
fumbling a little through the weight of evidence he had amassed for an
analysis and solution.
In later chapters a magnifying glass is put on the
theory of ‘peak oil’. Palast refers back to the initial research for
Shell, by the geologist M King Hubbert, and makes the case that the
claim is made on an economic and political basis rather than on solid
fact. His point is that peak oil signifies the end of easily retrievable
oil, whether that be due to the political or the geological
circumstances.
It is difficult to get a clear idea of what Palast
is for. It’s obvious what he’s against. The book is peppered with
fleeting mentions of times past, where the New Deal in the 1930s, for
example, is compared favourably to the neo-conservatism of Bush and his
predecessors, Reagan and ‘Poppy Bush’. There is a chapter entitled Class
War which comes towards the end and I was hoping that, having outlined
all the shenanigans and goings on of Washington and the administration’s
big-business pals, this would provide some hope and balance that there
is an alternative, at least some opposition. But no. The chapter
outlines the extremes of education privatisation, the scams pulled off
by the energy companies and how useless Bush’s response was to Hurricane
Katrina. Last year the US was rocked by the massive protests of
immigrant workers, saw the foundation of the Soldiers of Solidarity by
trade unionists in the car industry, and the growth of the anti-war
movement. Of course, a political alternative is still absent, but the
idea that there is a growing audience for Palast’s own writings was not
clear from the book.
Facts are raw material, and the book is undoubtedly
useful, but without an analytical framework or a clear idea of what an
alternative would look like it’s hard not to be frustrated. It is an
impressive book in that it covers a lot of ground at a rapid pace. But
in that mad sprint it seems to leap over and ignore the gaping hole made
by the absence of an answer to the implicit question: what do we do
about all of this? After the final chapter there is a section entitled
Insurgency USA – Join Today! Out of 370-odd pages this section comprises
of four lines recommending that you sign up to the author’s website for
more news.
I was left impressed but with a sense of being a
little bamboozled afterwards. The sheer amount of facts and figures and
the investigative lengths gone to are remarkable and yet unsatisfying.
What do we do with all of this information? Are we in a better situation
to know that Bush is really, really, really bad than when we knew that
he was really bad? There must be a saturation point for all of this
information. Young people and workers on demonstrations are looking for
more than affirmations of what they already know to be true.
This year hundreds of thousands of school students
took to the streets of Chile and occupied their schools. In the US, car
workers, transport workers and hundreds of thousands of immigrant
workers in all sectors took action to try to stem the tide of
privatisation and cuts and the massive subsidies the poor are forced to
contribute to the already overflowing coffers of America’s wealthy.
Would it have helped them to read this book?
It could, of course, be argued that Palast never set
out to answer any programmatic questions or to propose an alternative.
After all, he promised the facts and that’s what we got, nothing more,
nothing less. The question is whether we need more of this type of book,
or that now, especially in the wake of the mid-term elections, these
journalists and leftish writers can be pushed to comment on what is
needed, and whether they will get their hands dirty in the battles that
are to come.
Palast and others are in danger of being left behind
by workers and young people who are involved in the day-to-day struggles
for their rights and their future. Palast does not put forward a
socialist alternative. Socialists are sometimes accused of rubbishing
anything that fails to do so but, as the resistance to capitalism and
all its heinous crimes develops, there will be more and more
dissatisfaction with hand-wringing, no matter how thoroughly researched
its basis. I have to say, I cannot give my full quota of gold stars and
recommend this for your Christmas gift list, but it was an interesting
read.
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