THE PREDATOR STATE by James Galbraith

AS LIFE as we know it seemed to be ending—bailouts pushing $1 trillion on Wall Street, the stock market plunging, credit markets seized up around the world, with banks even refusing to lend to each other, never mind lending to their customers—James Galbraith and I talked. In his recent book, The Predator State, James Galbraith does what his famous father, John Kenneth Galbraith, never did: he makes a moral case. He argues that our country has been hijacked by the neoconservatives of the Bush administration. The "ideals" extolled by those neoconservatives—free trade, monetarism, balanced budgets, deregulation, privatization—are nothing more than a bunch of bull, says Galbraith. Moreover, he says, their true agenda was always greed. Taken together, these "ideals" came to represent a worldview whose basic principle was largely unchallenged by liberals. And what was that basic principle? Socialism—socialism for the rich.

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