Public-finance

One of the authors doesn't understand the issue and constantly confuses disclosure rules and conflict of interests.

Also since one of the authors has used false statements to support his own conclusions about the state of ethics and conflict laws -- that hardly makes for a believeable source.

This book is merely the reflection of people whose own ethics and understanding of civic corruption is in the toilet.

And if you ever wondered why there seems to be no accountability, READ THIS BOOK!

As Milton Friedman has pointed out, when government attempts to solve a problem, the solution is often worse than the problem itself. As "The Appearance of Impropriety" shows, when government was tasked with restoring integrity in government, the solution turned out to be an elaborate code of rules which, in effect, destroy integrity in order to save it!

As an attorney and a self-educated Watergate buff, I read all the whodunit books, explored countless "Deep Throat" theories, and read most of the standard Watergate tomes. Typically the period is portrayed as one in which America learned "hard lessons" in morality, then entered a "new era." During my college years I watched the morality play on television.

Eventually I realized the whole thing had been a triumph of hypocrisy masquerading as a triumph of morality, and I finally concluded that Watergate was a triumph of investigative journalism run amok. I was more cynical than most people even before I read this book, because I sensed that the "new", "more ethical" era was worse in a moral sense than the old era of corrupt backroom deals and cynical political skullduggery.

Authors Peter Morgan and Glenn Reynolds not only provided me with proof of my suspicions, but they demonstrate how the system the reformers created has come to rival the corruption of the past.

As they show, today's corruption is governed by an elaborate, appearance-based regulatory system in which compliance with the rules, by eliminating any real need for personal integrity, places honesty and integrity about on the level of compliance with such things as IRS codes or affirmative action quotas. Thus, the truly corrupt are enabled, and those with genuine integrity are burdened with humiliating and stultifying regulations which would keep many people away from public service. (As the authors note, Dwight Eisenhower was such a notorious rule breaker that it is doubtful that he could survive today's appearance-based scrutiny.)

Actual example of an ethics rule cited by the authors: "...[A] federal worker can legally accept pay for a "comic monologue" -- unless, that is, the government decides that the talk was actually an "amusing speech," in which case the federal worker could be fined $10,000 and drummed out of the service."

All of this and more can be traced to the post-Watergate explosion in ethics reform (a period the authors call "the Big Bang"). This has ended up deepening the entire country's cynicism, not by restoring integrity, but by creating a monstrous system of appearance-based regulations which encourage moralistic posing while actually undermining genuine integrity. Oddly enough, by exposing the appearance racket for what it is, this book offers hope to people (like me) who long since gave up. Integrity can still be made to matter, despite the cult of appearances enshrined since the Watergate Big Bang.

I am not out to rehabilitate Nixon, but were the fine insights of these authors juxtaposed alongside certain long-suppressed details of Watergate, additional light might be shed on why those who were out to get Nixon at all costs created a system of appearance-based "reforms" which ended up perpetuating the very thing they claimed to be ending. Those who "got" Nixon in my view ultimately had even more to hide than he did. They created a code for their times -- a code of appearances.

In the old days, an impropriety was an impropriety. Appearances were used to conceal improprieties, but with no real guarantee that anyone would be fooled. What was once a disguise has now become official certification that no impropriety exists.

When morality is defined as compliance with rules, true morality ceases.

Why didn't the government ever think of that?

When one reads this book, which presents a plethora of alternatively humorous, irritating and discouraging (sometimes, all at once) examples of what's defective with "appearance politics" in law, science, government and society, one comes away with a much better idea of why American political life is as inane and depressing as it has become in the '90s: it's just the logical development of a long line of struggles in which the vacuum of appearance has triumphed over the meatier and graver substance of reality. This book demands to be read by a wide audience, as it provides an entirely new perspective on some of the more troubling incidents in our recent political and societal history and how we have gotten there. There's probably a post-Clinton Administration sequel awaiting this for Messrs. Morgan and Reynolds to report, or at least, a updated second printing.

Brink Lindsey (Director of the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies) and Daniel J. Ikenson (Policy Analyst with the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies) effectively collaborate in Antidumping Exposed: The Devilish Details Of Unfair Trade Law to reveal how the American antidumping law actually works. A popular law that sounds appealing with such concepts as "fairness" and "level playing fields" is convoluted, technically complex, and doesn't actually deliver as promised. Here revealed in comprehensive detail, is a step-by-step guide to how dumping is both defined and implemented under current rules. The authors describe the many methodological quirks and biases which result in the stigmatization of healthy competition as "unfair" and penalized. Antidumping Exposed ought to be required reading for every national politician, agency policy maker, economist, and corporate executive concerned with international trade issues in general, and the anti-dumping laws in particular.

This collection of 19 articles is divided into three parts, on Capital, exploitation and conflict, Global capitalism, and Crisis and the supercession of capitalism. The contributors, from across the world, reflect the increasingly widespread understanding that capitalism doesn't work. They analyse the exploitation intrinsic to capitalism and recognise that in countries like Britain there are just the two classes, a tiny minority of exploiters and the vast majority who depend on selling their labour power to make a living.

The struggle against capitalism is rooted in the workplace, where we must fight for democracy, as Saad-Filho says in his Introduction. We need to be in work, in our union, and fighting the employer. Adding together any number of pressure groups, even infusing those groups with anti-capitalist ideology will not do what is needed to end capitalism - transform the ideology of the working class.

Ben Fine accuses our trade unions of pursuing sectional interests both nationally and sectorally, when the problem is that our unions are hardly fighting for our industries and services at all. He also sees defence workers as depending on war, and energy and car workers as depending on pollution: so to end war and pollution, all we have to do is destroy what remains of our manufacturing industry!

Targeting the IMF or McDonald's is to attack symptoms, not the root of the problem, as Ellen Meiksins Wood shows. It is not a matter of building a bigger demo next time. It would really terrify the ruling classes of the world if all the anti-globalisation protestors turned to focus on working in their workplaces and trade unions to weaken and destroy capitalism.

We need workers' nationalism, that is, workers deciding their own future, in their own lands and for their own interests. As Marx wrote in the Manifesto, each working class must first of all settle accounts with its own bourgeoisie. We also need workers' internationalism, to save the future of the world and defeat the vested interest of the multinationals and the proponents of reaction and fundamentalism.

This book extracts meaning from the chaos of tens of thousands of activists networking, planning, and uniting in Porto Alegre. Anyone who attended the World Social Forum or wishes she had attended will learn from this book why the Forum is so significant and why the Forum keeps growing and regenerating itself. The clearly presented themes help make sense of the Forum'what was said in Porto Alegre, why it matters to the world, and where we (social movements) may be heading.

I particularly liked the paper written by the World March of Women, in the subsection on Violence. The authors challenge the reader to see the culture of violence enforcing corporate globalization as a systemic extension of the 'original form of violence': violence against women. Violence is experienced by women in all parts of the world: 'Paradoxically, whatever the circumstances or forms of violence we women have suffered, we feel ashamed and guilty' this is true in every part of the world ' South and North, East and West' (p. 225). The authors remind the reader that the alternative, anti-capitalist globalization movement is nothing if it does not include women's needs. The same, of course, could be said about the needs and visions of peasants, people of color, lesbian/gay/transgender, or any other marginalized peoples; if our collective movement does not include these needs, the movement means nothing. The challenge presented in this book is how do we create an effective, collective movement with these diverse strands of experiences?

This book is unique because it draws on documents from not just prominent activist individuals, but also from movements, networks, coalitions, and organizations. People and groups such as National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, India, the World March of Women, Oxfam UK, and the Economic Solidarity Group of Quebec present their collective documents alongside movement intellectuals like Vandana Shiva and
Walden Bello. The book is clearly post-capitalist, pro-movement and valuable reading for activists and academics alike.

With the current war on terrorism underway here is a book that gives a venue to voices that are often silenced and ignored. Each year in Porto Alegre, Brazil, thousands of activists meet at the World Social Forum to exchange information, discuss challenges and plan social action to combat the neoliberal excrescences of globalisation (globo-colonisation). The book is essentially a compilation of the documents that emerged from the Forum in 2002 and as Fisher and Ponniah contend, it offers both a 'snapshot' of the left's perception of world affairs in 2002 and a deeper dialogue that lends a practical face to the desired alternatives to globalisation.

A key theme throughout is the collective call for 'the reinvention of democracy,' something that Fisher and Ponniah see as,
The reinvention of society such that the mode of economic production, the structures of political governance, the dissemination of scientific innovation, the organization of the media, social relations and the relationships between society and nature, are subjected to a radical, participatory and living democratic process (p 13).
This reinvention manifests itself in grassroots, bottom-up participation on an international scale both North and South and across lines of gender, sexual orientation, culture, and so on.

There is an impressive number of contributors and while they possess a shared general rejection of neoliberal economic policies they are also diverse in their responses towards combating the aggressive nature of globalisation. From radicalists to reformers, there are those who would abolish the multilateral lending institutions and there are those who would instead push for strong reforms within the existing international system. The diverse backgrounds of the contributors result in some documents offering vague or general ideas while others offer detailed assessments and specific proposals. The central thesis is that neoliberal globalisation only serves to perpetuate and strengthen inequalities.

The book's four parts demonstrate the panorama of interests as held by the tens of thousands of World Social Forum participants. The general thrust of the book is apparent from the beginning with the declaration that "the market needs to be regulated and guided by the democratic control of the public" (p. 28). And this control is to be achieved by pursuing 'new forms of participatory democracy,' 'a new internationalism,' 'a reconstitution the left,' and 'the struggle against war.' From there, the book concentrates on ways and means of pursuing this desire, and in an interesting way it exposes the diversity in opinion within the left.

Such diversity is especially obvious when discussing issues of debt, trade, financial capital, transnational corporations, labour and solidarity economy. Some contributors call for a coordinated economic policy, functioning at the global level and with a central bank. Moreover, it is suggested that the US, Europe and Japan could perform this function as their responsibility to undertake this task results from their having "pressured the world into a system of brutal competition" (p. 89). Others support the idea of anti or deglobalisation, replacing imports with local production.

The second part disputes the capitalist held position that globalisation, with its 'free' and 'open' markets, is the natural alternative to communist regimes. Presented here are compelling arguments concerning the incompatibility between neoliberal policies and nature's renewability and non-sustainability and bankruptcy of the ruling world order. Not surprisingly, there is harsh criticism of the World Trade Organisation's Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), with Oxfam UK drawing attention to the irony that, "all these rules will affect the lives of billions of people, yet until recently they have been introduced with minimal public debate" (p. 137). The documents in this part not only stress the impact and problems of TRIPs but also give detailed campaign strategies for combating negative affects.

Later parts expose issues such as the challenge of ensuring 'the right to information' when confronted by the reality of international media monopolies, this in addition to covering a range of fascinating topics from the 'hidden apartheid' of discrimination, migratory issues, expanding international sex industry, absence of global legal infrastructure for human rights, and the idea of a World Parliament. Near the end of the book James Petras gives a military definition of the current situation, underlining the thinking of many of the book's contributors. "In reality we are facing a situation of permanent warfare...We on the left have the capacity to intervene in the economic crisis if we make clear proposals" (pp. 299-300).

In summary, the book demonstrates the overarching shared ideologies of the contributors. This does not diminish the book's richness or utility, rather it brings together an invaluable collection of the left's perceptions and thinking with respect to offering alternatives to neoliberal globalisation. There is important reading for all those concerned with constructing economic models that serve society rather than vice versa. An editorial conclusion would make a welcome addition to future editions of this book. This edited volume provides a useful reference for those interested in the movement for global justice and solidarity.

Alexander I Gray, PhD
Marie Curie Researcher
Universidad de Deusto, Spain