Al Jazeera’s Inside Story takes an in-depth look at the global financial crisis.

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Distinguished geographer David Harvey joins host Harry Kreisler for a discussion of how the analytic tools of geography and Marxism can contribute to our understanding of the new imperialism.

This talk forms part of the UC Berkeley Series: “Conversations with History”.

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The Authors@Google program welcomed Howard Zinn to Google’s Cambirdge office on November 11, 2008.

Here in their own words are Frederick Douglass, George Jackson, Chief Joseph, Martin Luther King Jr., Plough Jogger, Sacco and Vanzetti, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Mark Twain, and Malcolm X, to name just a few of the hundreds appearing in Voices of a People’s History of the United States, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. Paralleling the 24 chapters of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Voices of a People’s History is the long-awaited companion volume to the national bestseller.

Historian and activist Howard Zinn is the author of the best-selling A People’s History of the United States and many other books, including The Zinn Reader (Seven Stories Press 2000), Artists in the Time of War (Seven Stories Press, 2003) and Terrorism and War (Seven Stories Press 2002).

The above lecture runs 52 minutes. The abridged version below runs eight minutes.

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From Big Think, a conversation amongst George Soros, Lawrence Summers, Robert Merton and Peter Thiel on the world economy and getting beyond the current financial crisis. George Soros is Chairman of Soros Fund Management, Lawrence Summers is the former Treasury Secretary under President Clinton and the former President of Harvard University, Robert Merton is a Professor at Harvard Business School and a Nobel Laureate in Economics and Peter Thiel is President of Clarium Capital Management, a venture capital group.

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Here are a few articles to ponder President-elect Obama’s “leftist” credentials, if any.

Why America Will Not Turn to the Left
By Paul Harris in the UK Guardian.

Sometimes the most telling moments of a campaign come in the forgotten details. Back in January Obama met editors from a Nevada newspaper, the Reno Gazette-Journal. Obama surprised them by praising former President Ronald Reagan, not for his policies but for his ability to change America. ‘He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it,’ Obama said. The comments caused a brief kerfuffle. Hillary Clinton attacked Obama as praising Reagan’s right-wing legacy. Then it faded from view.

Until now. In the wake of his election win last week, those remarks can be seen in a new light. Many Democrats are hoping that Obama can be a left-wing version of Reagan. He can change America for a generation. Reaganism, after all, dominated American political life from 1980 to last week. Every politician after him, including Bill Clinton, had to run on the pro-business, tax-cutting, hawkish, anti-government playing field that Reagan created. Now many liberals say Obama has the mandate to do the same thing. But in reverse. ‘There is a lot of talk in Washington about the end of the Reagan era,’ said John Fortier, a research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Obama has built a huge and viable coalition of support. It is made up of college-educated whites, blacks and Hispanics and of young voters. It has propelled the party to pick up swing states such as Ohio, Iowa and Florida. It has turned once red states such as Indiana, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Virginia and North Carolina into blue states. It has seen big gains in both houses of Congress, giving Obama control over government. ‘Clearly he has a mandate. The power is there. The question now is when he talks about bringing change, what does he mean?’ said David Frum, a leading Republican and former aide to President George W Bush.

Obama: Radical Moderate
By Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times.

The first order of business for Mr Obama is to figure out why he did so much better among this centre-right electorate than his predecessors did. He won among Catholics, who had begun giving Republican candidates majorities in the early 1990s. His 11-point victory in Pennsylvania was built around wooing moderate Republicans in metropolitan Philadelphia. He won several states in the south because white people liked him better than John Kerry or Al Gore.

But we should not exaggerate. Mr Obama’s appeal is not universal. Only 10 per cent of Democrats voted for Mr McCain and only 9 per cent of Republicans voted for Mr Obama. Mr Obama won this election in the centre and without centrist voters his great mandate will collapse like a house of cards. His position is structurally similar to the one Ronald Reagan faced in 1980. Reagan’s political challenge was to separate sympathisers outside his party (such as trade unionists, who were to be protected and wooed) from irreconcilables (such as public-service unionists, who were to be confronted and, if necessary, destroyed). Reagan built his presidency on Reagan Democrats, not on rural anti-abortion activists. His invocations of Franklin Roosevelt as a model were almost constant.

Mr Obama’s tribute to Abraham Lincoln at his victory speech in Chicago should be understood as a similar invitation: “Let’s remember,” Mr Obama said, “that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican party to the White House, a party founded on the values of self-reliance and individual liberty and national unity.”

75 Years Later, a Nation Hopes for Another F.D.R.
By Joe Nocera in the New York Times.

“We are facing the greatest economic challenge of our lifetime, and we’re going to have to act swiftly to resolve it.”

So said Barack Obama on Friday in his first postelection news conference, a pretty good sign that the president-elect had been brushing up on his presidential history. Seventy-five years ago, the last time the country was this close to economic abyss, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his famous inaugural, the one where he uttered those immortal words, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

But as a Newsweek columnist, Jonathan Alter, who wrote “The Defining Moment,” a book about Roosevelt’s first election and early presidency, pointed out to me the other day, that great line was buried in most news stories about the speech. Stories focused instead on another phrase F.D.R. used: “action, and action now.” In 1933, after three years of incompetence from the administration of Herbert Hoover, that is what Americans most yearned to hear. And on Friday, when Mr. Obama vowed, within the first five minutes of his remarks, to “act swiftly,” he too was offering the same message to a country every bit as receptive.

I’m thinking we got Grover Cleveland really. Granted that does beat Benjamin Harrison. Still, I’d take Chester Arthur in a heartbeat. Not quite sure if there is a modern-day Chester Arthur though. I’d compare Bush to Buchanan, Grant, Hayes or Harding but I don’t like to disparage the deceased. Still, it’s fair to say we are living through another not-so golden Gilded Age if measures of income inequality are any indication. If President Obama reverses this even if slightly, I will sing his praises. If he utters the phrase “poverty is a moral imperative,” I will listen and cheer. He did perk my ears with his “spread the wealth” comments. More of that and I’ll be clapping regularly.

Obama, Be Progressive!
By David Sirota writing for Salon.

These are heady times for the party of Jefferson, Roosevelt and Obama. Only a few years ago, Democrats were almost relegated to permanent minority status by a Mission Accomplished sign and a flight suit. But since President Bush’s 2004 reelection, they gained at least 50 House seats, 12 Senate seats, seven state legislatures and seven governorships. As Republicans used “socialism” attacks to make the election a referendum on conservatism, Democrats also registered their biggest presidential triumph since 1964.

So, while the president-elect talks of forming a bipartisan Cabinet, his victory wasn’t the public’s cry for milquetoast government by blue-ribbon commission. As Deepak Bhargava of the Center for Community Change says, Obama’s win was an ideological mandate presenting “an opening for transformational, progressive change.”

A six point win, while broader than the previous two cycles, is not a landslide. Is it a mandate? Perhaps but to suggest that it is a mandate for a progressive agenda is foolhardy. Not from a candidate who moved away from universal health care or who sided with the GOP on FISA. Let us not deceive ourselves. Obama is an improvement on the current occupant but is he the sum of all our progressive dreams? I don’t think so. Nor do I think that we as progressives have made the case for a progressive America clear to the American people. We need to do better in marketing our ideas.

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In the early 1990s, Sweden faced a banking crisis not unlike the one we currently face. Their problem as ours was a deflationary asset spiral in the real estate sector that then left banks holding assets on the balance sheet that were over-inflated in value. Here are a few articles looking at the Swedish Banking Crisis and how Swedish policy makers tackled the problem. One key difference is that the Swedish crisis was just a Swedish crisis (and there was a smaller concurrent banking crisis in Norway), not a global crisis . And no doubt, the sum of our rescue will be a far larger amount but the Swedish banking rescue amounted to a sum equal 12% of Swedish GDP in 1990.

The Swedish Banking Crisis — A Model for Future Response?
From Credit Write Downs.

Step by step the Swedish economy became increasingly vulnerable to shocks. During 1990 matters came to a head. Competitiveness had been eroded by the relatively high inflation in the late 1980s, resulting in an overvalued currency. This caused exports to weaken and meant that the fixed exchange rate policy began to be questioned, leading to periods with relatively high nominal interest rates. Moreover, the tax system was reformed in order to reduce its harmful economic effects but this also contributed to higher post-tax interest rates. Asset prices began to fall and economic activity turned downwards. Between the summers of 1990 and 1993 GDP dropped by a total of 6 per cent. Aggregate unemployment shot up from 3 to 12 per cent of the labour force and the public sector deficit worsened to as much as 12 per cent of GDP. A tidal wave of bankruptcies was a heavy blow to the banking sector, which in this period had to make provisions for loan losses totalling the equivalent of 12 per cent of annual GDP.

Sweden’s Bank Crisis May Provide Guidance for U.S.
By Tom Walsh in the Detroit Free Press.

Sweden’s bank rescue in the early 1990s, like the current crisis in the United States, was triggered by the bursting of a real estate bubble and a wave of bankruptcies.

The Swedish government took control of its wobbly banks in return for emergency aid, meaning that taxpayers were on the hook for the bailout bill. The citizens also became the banks’ owners who stood to profit — and did — years later when the industry recovered.

US Learns Lessons from Swedish Banking Crisis
From The Local.

Several years of hysterical property and commodity speculation in the 1980s plunged Sweden into its worst financial crisis since the 1930s.

“There are significant similarities between the current American financial crisis and our own financial crisis at the beginning of the 1990s. It concerns a finance and property bubble that has lead to large losses in the the banking sector.”

Lundgren argues, like the US president George Bush, that governments have a major part to play in such exceptional situations, adding that there is a good chance of reclaiming the money.

The Swedish Experience
From Sverige Riksbank.

The economic problems in Sweden in the early 1990s should be seen in their historical context. For several reasons, economic growth in Sweden has been relatively weak ever since about 1970. Following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system the creation of a stable macroeconomic environment turned out to be difficult. Wage formation functioned badly, fiscal policy was unduly weak and this was gradually compounded by structural problems.

Credit market deregulation in 1985, necessary in itself, meant that the monetary conditions became more expansionary. This coincided, moreover, with rising activity, relatively high inflation expectations, a tax system that favoured borrowing, and remaining exchange controls that restrained investment in foreign assets. In the absence of a more restrictive economic policy to parry all this, the freer credit market led to a rapidly growing stock of debt. In the course of only five years the GDP ratio for private sector debt moved up from 85 to 135 per cent. The credit boom coincided with rising share and real estate prices. During the second half of the 1980s real aggregate asset prices increased by a total of over 125 per cent. A speculative bubble had been generated.

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In the clips above, Jon Meacham of Newsweek discusses Presidential courage with historian Michael Beschloss and his most recent book, Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989. In the clip below, Michael Beschloss discusses the challenges President Lincoln faced over the question of slavery.

Beschloss has written books on several U.S. Presidents, including The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963, which won the Ambassador Book Prize and was called the “definitive” history of John F. Kennedy and the Cold War. The Conquerors, Beschloss’ book about Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and the destruction of Hitler’s Germany, was a national bestseller and praised by The New York Times Book Review as “vigorously written” and without “a dull page.”

Beschloss contributed a revealing essay on George Herbert Walker Bush in a recent book concerning Presidential leadership. A compelling critic and keen political observer, he appears regularly on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and Meet the Press.

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“… My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived. And as I can do neither good nor evil, I must be borne away by others, and meet the common fate. ” — John Adams, while serving as the Vice President

In the history of the United States eight men have ascended to the Presidency via the death in office of the President. In order, they are John Tyler in 1841 on the death of William Henry Harrison, Millard Fillmore in 1850 on the death of Zachary Taylor, Andrew Johnson in 1865 after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Chester Arthur in 1881 after the assassination of James Garfield, Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley, Calvin Coolidge in 1923 after the death of Warren Harding, Harry Truman in 1945 after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1963 after the assassination of John Kennedy.

Here is some background on these ‘accidental’ Presidents.

John Tyler
Dubbed “His Accidency” by his detractors, John Tyler was the first Vice President to be elevated to the office of President by the death of his predecessor. Born in Virginia in 1790, he was raised believing that the Constitution must be strictly construed. He never wavered from this conviction. He attended the College of William and Mary and studied law. More at The White House — John Tyler.

Daniel Webster declined the nomination as Zachary Taylor’s running mate, saying, “I do not choose to be buried until I am really dead.”

Millard Fillmore
Fillmore presided over the Senate during the months of nerve-wracking debates over the Compromise of 1850. He made no public comment on the merits of the compromise proposals, but a few days before President Taylor’s death, he intimated to him that if there should be a tie vote on Henry Clay’s bill, he would vote in favor of it.

Thus the sudden accession of Fillmore to the Presidency in July 1850 brought an abrupt political shift in the administration. Taylor’s Cabinet resigned and President Fillmore at once appointed Daniel Webster to be Secretary of State, thus proclaiming his alliance with the moderate Whigs who favored the Compromise. More at The White House — Millard Fillmore.

“I neither expected it or desired it,” Hamlin wrote to his wife, Ellen. “But it has been made and as a faithful man to the cause, it leaves me no alternative but to accept it.” — Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s Vice President. They actually had never met until after the election. And Hamlin left Washington DC soon after his inauguration and spent the balance of the Civil War at his home in Bangor, Maine.

Andrew Johnson
With the Assassination of Lincoln, the Presidency fell upon an old-fashioned southern Jacksonian Democrat of pronounced states’ rights views. Although an honest and honorable man, Andrew Johnson was one of the most unfortunate of Presidents. Arrayed against him were the Radical Republicans in Congress, brilliantly led and ruthless in their tactics. Johnson was no match for them. More at The White House — Andrew Johnson.

Chester Arthur
Dignified, tall, and handsome, with clean-shaven chin and side-whiskers, Chester A. Arthur “looked like a President.” He is one of my favourite Presidents, certainly in my top five. During his brief tenure as Vice President, Arthur stood firmly beside Conkling in his patronage struggle against President Garfield. But when Arthur succeeded to the Presidency, he was eager to prove himself above machine politics.

Avoiding old political friends, he became a man of fashion in his garb and associates, and often was seen with the elite of Washington, New York, and Newport. To the indignation of the Stalwart Republicans, the onetime Collector of the Port of New York became, as President, a champion of civil service reform. Public pressure, heightened by the assassination of Garfield, forced an unwieldy Congress to heed the President. Publisher Alexander K. McClure recalled, “No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted, and no one ever retired … more generally respected.” More at The White House — Chester Arthur. I have also blogged previously on Chester A. Arthur.

Theodore Roosevelt
With the assassination of President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, not quite 43, became the youngest President in the Nation’s history. He brought new excitement and power to the Presidency, as he vigorously led Congress and the American public toward progressive reforms and a strong foreign policy.

He took the view that the President as a “steward of the people” should take whatever action necessary for the public good unless expressly forbidden by law or the Constitution.” I did not usurp power,” he wrote, “but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power.” More at The White House — Theodore Roosevelt.

Calvin Coolidge
At 2:30 on the morning of August 3, 1923, while visiting in Vermont, Calvin Coolidge received word that he was President. By the light of a kerosene lamp, his father, who was a notary public, administered the oath of office as Coolidge placed his hand on the family Bible.

Coolidge was “distinguished for character more than for heroic achievement,” wrote a Democratic admirer, Alfred E. Smith. “His great task was to restore the dignity and prestige of the Presidency when it had reached the lowest ebb in our history … in a time of extravagance and waste….” More at The White House — Calvin Coolidge.

Harry S. Truman
During his few weeks as Vice President, Harry S Truman scarcely saw President Roosevelt, and received no briefing on the development of the atomic bomb or the unfolding difficulties with Soviet Russia. Suddenly these and a host of other wartime problems became Truman’s to solve when, on April 12, 1945, he became President. He told reporters, “I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.” More at The White House — Harry Truman.

Lyndon Baines Johnson
“A Great Society” for the American people and their fellow men elsewhere was the vision of Lyndon B. Johnson. In his first years of office he obtained passage of one of the most extensive legislative programs in the Nation’s history. Maintaining collective security, he carried on the rapidly growing struggle to restrain Communist encroachment in Viet Nam.
In the 1960 campaign, Johnson, as John F. Kennedy’s running mate, was elected Vice President. On November 22, 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson was sworn in as President.

First he obtained enactment of the measures President Kennedy had been urging at the time of his death–a new civil rights bill and a tax cut. Next he urged the Nation “to build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” In 1964, Johnson won the Presidency with 61 percent of the vote and had the widest popular margin in American history–more than 15,000,000 votes.

The Great Society program became Johnson’s agenda for Congress in January 1965: aid to education, attack on disease, Medicare, urban renewal, beautification, conservation, development of depressed regions, a wide-scale fight against poverty, control and prevention of crime and delinquency, removal of obstacles to the right to vote. Congress, at times augmenting or amending, rapidly enacted Johnson’s recommendations. Millions of elderly people found succor through the 1965 Medicare amendment to the Social Security Act. More at The White House — LBJ.

When asked to name an idea Vice President Richard Nixon had contributed to his administration, President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”

Then there is the unique case of Gerald R. Ford who ascended to the Presidency upon the resignation of Richard Nixon.

Gerald Ford
When Gerald R. Ford took the oath of office on August 9, 1974, he declared, “I assume the Presidency under extraordinary circumstances…. This is an hour of history that troubles our minds and hurts our hearts.”

It was indeed an unprecedented time. He had been the first Vice President chosen under the terms of the Twenty-fifth Amendment and, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, was succeeding the first President ever to resign. More from The White House — Gerald Ford.

There have been 46 Vice Presidents in the nation’s history. Here are their profiles. In 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush became the first sitting Vice President to be elected President since Martin Van Buren in 1836. In between only former Vice President managed to get elected President. Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, eight years after serving as Eisenhower’s Vice President. The two others who became President after serving as Vice Presidents are John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. More former Governors have won the White House than former Vice Presidents.

Finally test your knowledge of Vice Presidential Trivia Quiz One and Vice Presidential Trivia Quiz Two.

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The By Fault Weekend Reader this week looks at what some leading global voices are saying on capitalism. In addition, I want to highlight a new strategic partner of By The Fault, the website Big Think that features leading thinkers from around the world. They offer provocative global thought. They have been added to the blogroll under the Blogs of Special Interest section. The videos below are from their website. By The Fault will be featuring their articles and videos. For the record, each of these videos is under two minutes in length.

Political Communications Strategist Lisa Witter on the Downside of Free Markets

Paul Krugman: Is American-style Capitalism Inherently Wasteful?

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus on Capitalism’s Successes & Failures

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This week Al Jazeera’s Inside USA travels to Mexico to look at the the drug war going on there, and to examine how the United States is involved. The bodies are piling up – over 1800 killings so far this year alone.

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