Word: barnetly
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...very apolitical during my days at Harvard," said Barnet, a History and Literature major. "Students couldn't have been more conservative then." He remained unconcerned with public affairs until the day when the Luces, who lived down the corridor from him in the Law School, were arrested and tried as Communist agents for delivering The Daily Worker under students' doors during their undergraduate years at Cornell. The Luce affair "convinced me of the irrationality of McCarthyism and the Communist scare," he recalled. While working the next year at Harvard's Russian Research Center on his first book, Who Wants Disarmament...
...BARNET'S EARLY disenchantment with the U.S. government followed his disillusionment with the legal profession. He describes himself at that time as a "hungry lawyer," who published his first book "out of love of learning and financial need." But, he adds, Harvard came through later, helping him to fund the Institute for Policy Studies, which he founded in 1962. Barnet started the Institute, he explains, because he perceived a need for an advisory body outside the government which could objectively study public policy. "One of the worst problems I became aware of in Kennedy's administration was the pandering...
...Lean Years, Barnet writes that the same situation led to Carter's down-the-wire support of the deadweight Shah of Iran in 1978. In the midst of Tehran riots, the director of the National Foreign Estimate of the CIA, Robert Bowie, appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to give an optimistic report...
...Lean Years, subtitled Politics in the Age of Scarcity, sketches the powerful hierarchies supporting the production and distribution of five world resources: oil, energy, minerals, food, and water. Barnet finds that "the illusion of scarcity creates power," and that "the market operates almost totally on illusion. It was folk wisdom that the crisis was exaggerated, that the doubling of gasoline prices was making the companies rich, that the companies were in league with the sheiks against the consumer--and it was all true." But--he stresses--there is still a real oil crisis that Americans will not face, which...
American consumption of fully a third of the oil currently produced in the world had forced her to construct foreign policy around oil interests. Barnet asserts that the oil priority is not new and cites the Marshall plan as an early marriage of American business and political concerns. The decision to convert Europe from a coal-based energy system to an oil-consumptive one, after the decimation of World War II, is unavoidably tied to oil lobbying. The world's consumption of oil, inextricably linked with its consumption of minerals, water, food and energy, is managed by a handful...