Those conclusions are that big money controls the country. Corporate Canada's acolytes are the politicians who make the laws, the media moguls who support its policies or fail to attack corporate shortcomings, and the rest of us whose votes are bought by smart media campaigns, even though the working and middle classes are the ones who pay, pay, pay, because Corporate Canada doesn't.

McQuaig's book is well researched, she's a fan of the 1966 Report of the Royal Commission on Taxation (the Carter Commission), and says Canada's choice is whether to Make the Rich Pay, or continue to Make the Rest Pay.

Linda McQuaig's The Cult of Impotence explains the theory of NAIRU, what it means (how many people must be kept unemployed to ensure that inflation doesn't happen), who started it (economist Milton Friedman), how it has affected national and international finances (adversely), and how it is destroying democracy and social programs along with it. NAIRU is nonsense, she says, and proves it.

The joy of McQuaig is that you don't have to be an economist to understand her book. She looks at unemployment through the eyes of the unemployed as well as those of professional economists, speckles her research with notes that show that high financiers are merely human -- just guys, who can be wrong.

With examples and numbers she demonstrates that more employment does not increase inflation, that full employment is attainable and useful, that because of our social programs average Canadians are better off financially than average Americans (and a lot less likely to land in jail).

The belief that full employment will result in inflation has persuaded our leaders, and us, that the market is omnipotent, that we cannot affect our future. McQuaig says that's wrong, and she invokes John Maynard Keynes, FDR's New Deal, John Kenneth Galbraith and his son James, and others in support of her argument.

The Western world could reduce problems in international finance through adopting the Tobin Tax, a proposed tax on international transfers of capital to discourage aberrant speculation, which in turn would make national economies less volatile, giving elected governments more control, giving voters more power.

Far from adopting such measures, proposals such as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, and changes respecting the International Monetary Fund are afoot, where "...the impotence of democratic governments will not only be a reality but one enshrined in law."

McQuaig is good, and must reading for democrats.

Comments by Edna Toth

Malcolm X and Angelou provide different but related responses.

The Malcolm X book records a black lad growing up in Klan country; a classic condemnation of how poverty and its administrators destroy families and hope. Inevitably, Malcolm goes to prison. By sheer chance, the jail has an in-depth library, and his metamophosis from loser to leader begins.

In the 1960s, Malcolm X becomes a leader in the so-called Black Muslim organization of Mr. Elijah Muhammad, and preaches that "all whites are devils." His group is frowned on by black activists like Martin Luther King, Jr., who advocate a more gradual route to emancipation.

Travels to Mecca and visits with black heads of state in Africa broaden Malcolm's view of Islam and affect his philosophy. He grows to believe that not all whites are devils, after all.

In a decade which saw the assassination of black leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Medger Evers, white president John F. Kennedy, and his brother and potential president Robert Kennedy, it is no surprise that Malcolm X was killed. It was, perhaps still is, the tone of the times.

Maya Angelou's continuing autobiography also involves black activism. She worked with Martin Luther King as a fundraiser and organizer, gives her impressions of Malcolm X (all positive) based on two short encounters.

This is a personal narrative of her own loves and losses, her strength of mind, her independence, not so very different from any single mother, but against a backdrop of being black.

She embraces Africa for the sake of her son. He is enrolled in university in Ghana where he can "weigh his intelligence and test his skills without being influenced by racial discrimination." She reports on their arrival in Accra, where they encounter black pilots, black customs workers, black cabbies. To her surprise, "A knot in my stomach remembered all my adult life, had unfurled. I realized I hadn't seen a white face for over an hour."

That's a white person's burden few whites know anything about. Generations of oppression have made us scary, just because we're white.

Comments by Edna Toth

Investigative Interviewing is a sensible and readable book. It's aimed at police officers, but few people won't gain from it. It tells how to conduct an interview to find out the facts. Nothing fancy -- just the facts. And MacKinnon, himself a police officer and police trainer, has found from experience the one question that gets it all out in the open: A simple, open-ended asking of "What happened?"

Forget about the "nice guy, nasty guy" police twosome that suckers everything you say out of context and into incrimination. That's gone the way of the fedora, says MacKinnon. Just asking "What happened?" will get the facts flowing.

If it doesn't, sympathy can ease the passage, and with a few imaginative suggestions which may have defence lawyers and civil rights workers gnawing their knuckles, MacKinnon proposes ways of drawing an admission from a guilty person.

Note the word "guilty". MacKinnon encourages a personal quality control check by the interviewing officer: "Ask yourself, am I saying or doing anything that would cause an innocent person to confess?" he suggests. The answer must be no, or you are doing something wrong.

He's also in favour of video-taping interviews, one reason that he advocates meeting witnesses (who may become suspects) at the police station, on the officer's home turf. The other reasons include one-upmanship, at which lawyers and civil rights people may look askance.

Whatever your interest, if you've got crime in mind, this book is worth a read.

Comments by Edna Toth

• Order from:
  • Old Village Press
  • 60-8 Bristol Road East #437
  • Mississauga, Ontario. L4Z 3K8
• Price: (including taxes and shipping) $36.05 Canadian.
• Ouch! You could ask your local library to buy it.

So here we have it. If you don't have money, you don't have liberty. If you don't have liberty (and it's 1776 in the 13 Colonies, or 1789 in Paris, France) you organize a revolution.

The revolution that Galbraith suggests doesn't involve a rush to the barricades.

He reassesses the forces at work in society -- no longer labour vs. capital, but the well off who don't care about the poor vs. those among the well off who do care. It's a political rule of thumb that poor people don't vote. "There is democracy, but ... it is a democracy of the fortunate," says Galbraith.

The answer he supplies is "a coalition of the concerned and the compassionate and those now outside the political system." A more inclusive democracy would make his Good Society inevitable. How to bring about this coalition? Galbraith doesn't say. That's our job.

Equally, failing to work for an all-inclusive community will bring down all of us -- including the rich.

Through a good 90-minute read, Galbraith shows that the poor must rely on government for their daily bread, while the rich require government services only when their banks go broke, or for government to buy their particular products.

Economic expansion is necessary; spending to create jobs during recession is essential, as is reduced spending in boom times; full employment will lead to inflation, but the advantages outweigh that particular cost.

Internationally, the "have" nations must assist the have-not, including Western help for the various nations of the former Soviet Union.

He comments on deficits, education, immigrants, the environment, NAFTA, the independent military power that has grown in the United States.

A typical Galbraith one-liner on socialism vs. privatization: "Both are irrelevant. In both cases the primary service of the doctrine is in providing escape from thought."

Galbraith is an economist who sees poverty not just through compassionate but through pragmatic eyes -- opportunity for all, even if it costs short-run money, won't discomfit the comfortable and will make the future more secure for all of us.

Comments by Edna Toth

John Kenneth Galbraith's A Journey Through Economic Time, a firsthand view is written by a one-time Canadian who has spent 60 years involved in North American economics and politics. Previous books include The Affluent Society, The New Industrial State, and The Culture of Contentment.

This most recent book is notable for its evocation of John Maynard Keynes, the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, and its condemnation of Reaganomics.

Always stimulating, Galbraith reports in passing that intelligent economics (sensible government investment) had the 1930s Depression solved in Germany and in Sweden by 1936, long before an end was in sight for North America. And that massive government investment to produce materiel for the war effort from 1940 on, coupled with price controls, bond buying and taxation, led to a burgeoning of wealth at war-end.

In 1946, Galbraith reports, an act entitled originally the Full Employment Act emerged from the U.S. Congress with clauses requiring an annual program of expenditure, taxation, and other policies "to ensure full employment". The full employment ideas, which he finds attainable, were dumped, he says, by conservatives.

Best quote of the book (about Germany's military decisions in World War II), Galbraith notes "the primal role of stupidity in shaping the course of history".

Comments by Edna Toth

Or that's what David Orchard's own book says the RCMP says.

Good for him. Many Canadians equally qualified don't make it to the Horsemen's baddy file, perhaps because the causes they espouse are also scheming and self-centred.

That can't be said about Orchard. His cause is the survival of Canada, which he puts forward in The Fight for Canada -- Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism.

It's a selective look at history, from Jacques Cartier taking advantage of the native peoples in 1535 to Orchard exhorting the public to write to their MP in 1993.

In between, Orchard revisits various bits of history, from the fruitless incursions of the United States to later events like Joey Smallwood's hustings battle to bring Newfoundland into confederation, Hal Banks and the destruction of the Canadian Seamen's Union, the squelching of the Avro Arrow, Canada's role in Cuba, the nuclear arms debate.

The second part of his book is devoted to debunking the Free Trade Agreement, showing how Canada has given away control of its water, natural resources, agriculture, and therefore its ability to make its own decisions about almost everything.

Back when he wrote the book (published in 1993) Orchard thought that if the NDP and the Liberals would oppose the Tories jointly instead of splitting the vote, Canada would get a non-Tory government with a mandate to revoke the Free Trade Agreement.

But the Liberals are now the government, no thanks to the NDP, and the FTA remains in place.

Maybe the NDP knew something about the Liberals that Orchard didn't.

Orchard sought to become leader of the dastardly Tories, the very Party that duped Canada into free trade in the first place. He was beaten to the leadership by Joe Clark, a former prime minister, who, like Orchard, doesn't have a seat in the House of Commons.

Meanwhile, back in the House, the New Democratic Party takes every opportunity to oppose that son of free trade known as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. Orchard opposes it too, but he would rather back the Tories than support the NDP, the one voice in the House that speaks against MAI.

Maybe the Mounties had it right.

Comments by Edna Toth

Ideas along the way include revealing corporatist groups as top-heavy with management who reward themselves with ever greater salaries and share bonuses for no productive work whatever; though there is ample "money" for speculation, which may also produce nothing useful, there is no cash for essential social services that help human beings.

The corporate move to privatize public enterprises hasn't worked in the U-K, and won't work here, as the managements reward themselves (as above).

Among his suggestions for improvement in our society:
As agreements can be made between nations to trade together, agreements can also be made to maintain and raise social conditions;
people live on average 25 years longer than a century ago, so time can be budgeted for everybody to take part in democratic discourse, to broaden and lengthen postsecondary education to include more of the humanities, to enable people to take part in providing public service before they leap into the corporate whatever-it-is.

In fact, Saul says the universities should dump the corporate, and work on their humanist image.

Saul is asking for a different ethic to guide our future. It will require breaking away from the tight specialities of the universities and other "experts", to take a more informed and thoughtful view of society, a new dynamic that cares about people.

Is it a package deal to create a book from a series of lectures? Lecturers have a less than studious approach, in that they must not only challenge, but entertain.

Stimulating though it is, Unconscious Civilization is not Saul's best book.

Comments by Edna Toth

Adams' personal experiences, growing up in poverty as a Catholic in Protestant Northern Ireland are preludes leading inevitably to political activism, which in the context of the times also meant violence, spells in jail, and non-stop work for the IRA and Sinn Fein.

• Evocative descriptions of street battles and occupation of neighbourhoods by British government troops and the Royal Ulster Constabulary are must reading for political people weighing training and deployment of troops and/or police in civilian disturbances.

Writing before the Good Friday Accord of 1998, Adams notes that the IRA concentrated its activities on bringing about a united Ireland by terror tactics, and that it had no plan or room for negotiation.

When its terrorism ceased, as it did during the truce of 1972, the IRA also essentially ceased because it had no political solution to propose, Adams says. And (pre-1998) he comments: "A British withdrawal can be secured more quickly and in more favourable conditions if it is achieved not only because of the IRA military threat, but also because resistance to British rule has been channelled and built into an alternative political movement."

Gerry Adams and others in Northern Ireland used rent strikes to draw attention to their plight. Then they marched for civil rights. Adams points out that the majority of those involved in the protests understood what they wanted to accomplish and why, so that had the British government at Westminster used negotiation instead of repression, the IRA would have gained little support and more peaceable politics would have gathered recruits. In fact, Sinn Fein/IRA only became party political when other parties drew support away from them.

Now that the struggle for Northern Ireland is heading for talk across the table rather than guns across the street, one of Adams' comments is especially appropriate: "In Ireland, the physical force tradition is very strong and those who are part of it, especially on the republican side, have a huge responsibility to bring it to an end, to embrace other forms of struggle."

Meanwhile, the table talk is about persuading various groups to surrender arms caches.

Comments by Edna Toth

Around the world, achromatopes -- people unable to distinguish colours -- are one in 30,000 of the population.

In Pingelap, three coral islets only 10 feet above sea level, 57, or one in 12 of the 700 residents, are colourblind.

Settled about 800 years ago, in 1775 Pingelap had a population of 1,000. A typhoon and subsequent starvation cut that number to 20. By the fourth generation after 1775, one in 20 were colourblind. In 200 years, the population is at 700 with one in 12 colourblind, and 33% carrying the recessive gene for achromatopsia.

Pohnpei, another island in Micronesia, in 1996 had an enclave of 2000 Pingelapians and schools reported one in 10 youngsters colourblind.

This is what it means to have achromatopsia: at two to three months of age, the eyes cannot tolerate bright light. Children squint and blink a lot, just to function visually. Nystagmus -- jerking of the eyes -- gradually decreases as children learn to use their vision better. Toddlers cannot distinguish fine detail or small objects at a distance and from the age of four to five, it is apparent the children (boys and girls are affected in equal numbers) cannot distinguish colours.

Achromats have only night vision.

In normal eyes, cones fill the fovea, a sensitive area of the retina, specialized in fine detail as well as colour. Totally colorblind people have no functional cones so rely for visual cues on rods, which fill the retina. Achromats therefore see everything with rod vision only. As rods are light-sensitive and don't distinguish colour, achromats detail vision is not good and objects bleach out as lighting increases.

In the dark, achromatopes can usefully distinguish shades and textures not visible to normally sighted people and can produce intricately woven fabrics. (p. 44)

Sacks deals with various aspects of his trip to Micronesia, from the effects of Spam on the native population, to scary landings on short airstrips, to meeting a missionary intent on bringing Christianity to the islands, and some more possibly population-related differences to the world-wide norm.

It's readable stuff.

This book is a pitiless recount of her life in Cree society, within white society, in Butte, Montana, in Alberta and within what we call a justice system.

Johnson is a great-great-granddaughter of Big Bear, subject of a two-part TV presentation. Big Bear also served time in jail. His essential crime? Trying to negotiate better terms for native peoples in Western Canada. Big Bear was convinced that treaty conditions would bring perpetual poverty upon the Cree and destroy their way of life.

How right he was.

Stolen Life is a harrowing depiction of one woman in that post-Big Bear society.

Johnson's family, as depicted in the book, is into boozing, incest, rape, child abuse, family head games, and finally murder.

It tells of Johnson's life from babyhood, through the surgery required for a cleft palate, through all the dysfunctions that the family inflicted upon itself and had flung at it by a racist society.

A brother dies in jail in circumstances suspicious at the time and even more so following Rudy Wiebe's more recent research into Butte police activities. Another brother is in and out of jail.

The women are drunks, gossips, and/or driven by their own experiences. Johnson for a time succeeds in being sober to take care of her three children. Yet they are now in foster care while she and their father are in jail for the killing.

At the women's prison in Kingston, Ontario, Johnson was in sweat lodge ceremonies, was named Medicine Bear Woman. Now she is in the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge, in Saskatchewan, a minimum security facility. She is re-making herself.

Wiebe says that Johnson reads widely and deeply and writes a lot. Among her lines: "Help me to share my shame and pain, so that others will do the same." That's why she has told her story.

Stolen Life is not an easy read, for Rudy Wiebe runs reality, not witticism, through all his books.

But it is essential reading for those interested in prisons and changing them, in policing, in law. Essential reading, too, for native people and those whites who care. And also for the Kingston prison guard the book names as Joe, who gets his jollies taking photos of women prisoners undressing. He's also said to rape women in the jail.

We might ask what are men doing in a women's jail anyway?

What's the point, she asks, in forcing our way into a workforce of unfree men. "Freedom in an unfree world is merely licence to exploit." And on women's greater numbers in the workforce: "Women always did the shit work. Now that the only work there is is shitwork, men are unemployed."

As for progress, in the days of The Female Eunuch, "our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves." No?

The Whole Woman is full of flashing phrases to inspire more essays, articles, and books.

There's "the hunt for the perfect orgasm"; "failure to enter into debt slavery equals social delinquency"; "Women have historically been committed to caring; if they are now condemned to be uncaring, can this be liberation?".

Greer looks at the dangers and social commentary inherent in breast implants; in the torturous "screening" for breast cancer (Check this out on p.51. The vaunted programs are in doubt.); ditto cervical cancer screening, p. 109).

She has chapters on love, on power, on men, on aging. Her whole woman is "...a woman who did not exist to embody male sexual fantasies or rely upon a man to endow her with identity and social status, a woman who did not have to be beautiful, who could be clever, who would grow in authority as she aged..."

Her main question: "Is it equality women want, or freedom?"

It's a marvellous read.

Comments by Edna Toth