Sublime

the Marshall Plan, announced by Secretary of State George Marshall in June 1947. The focus was on Europe’s recovery; the aid ($150 billion in today’s dollars) was extensive but transitional, with the goal of getting Europe to the point where its economic growth would be self-sustaining.

government’s most important function: to help people “caught in the tentacles of circumstance,” to help them fight forces too big for them to fight alone.

Yes, Libya is Clinton’s baby and she would tout it as a success story. Her success story. But it would soon become one of the most monumental foreign policy disasters of the decade. Obama and Clinton had no effective plan for post-Qaddafi Libya. In the ensuing vacuum, ISIS was born and Libya became a failed state. A breeding ground for Islamic extr

“The tragic irony of Lyndon Johnson is that the lowering of the presidency, not the Great Society of which he dreamed, is his most obvious legacy.”

This is not an exhaustive list, but you can see the pattern: An elitist, pro-Western, anti-Islamic leader, propped up by the US, initially succeeded in modernizing the economy, but hit some roadblocks and didn’t act decisively, letting the opposition take over.

What we are trying to achieve with this book is a neural alternative that is open to important truths: the central role of the Public in American life, the overwhelming power of corporations in our public life, the predatory nature of privatization, the disastrous reality of humanly caused global warming, and the powerfully negative effect of extre