Some great reading from the weekend’s papers.
By: Hank Kalet
Some good reading in this weekend’s New York Times.
On Saturday in the Arts & Ideas section, Daphne Eviatar offers a look at the criticisms of the World Bank primarily the bank’s willingness to deal with corrupt and dangerous regimes looking to exploit their natural resources. The story focuses on critics’ contentions that loans made to such regimes such as those made to Chad for oil exploration and refining do not result in higher standards of living for the citizens of those countries and instead tend to fund more repression.
Frank Rich (as always) is worth reading. His essay in the Times’ Sunday Arts& Liesure section on a new documentary, "Capturing the Friedmans," that focuses on one family with a somewhat sordid past. The essay does more than talk about the film, however, and branches into our current cultural obsession with supposed reality television and the mania many of us seem to have for it, both as viewers and as potential actors/participants.
From Fashion & Style comes this decent report on rocker Liz Phair, whose new disc (the eponymous "Liz Phair") is due June 24. For Ms. Phair, who recorded one of the best discs (1993’s "Exile in Guyville") of the early 1990s, a time when so-called alternative rock was busting through to mainstream radio, it is her 1998’s "whitechocolatespaceegg." "whitechocolatespaceegg" and the 1996 effort, "Whip-Smart," while not as good as "Guyville," and are worth a listen, too.
From the Los Angeles Times comes this Sunday piece from cultural critic Neal Gabler on the ways in which the Bush White House’s apparent desire to destroy the Democratic Party is driving its decisions on policy.
"It has been said of Bush that he intends to finish the Reagan revolution by embedding conservatism so deeply into the governmental fabric that it will take generations to undo it," he writes. "What he is really finishing, though, is not the Reagan revolution but the Clinton wars, which had far less to do with ideology than with politics. As Rove has engineered it, this is about power, pure and simple. It is about guaranteeing electoral results."
Christopher Brauchli, writing in The Boulder Daily Camera, offers this almost Swiftian take on the Bush budget. (I was alerted to the column by The Common Dreams News Center, an invaluable resource for progressive and liberal viewpoint on the Web.)