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Slaves to the game
By Isaac Zaur
Once the violent world of video games seeped into our friendships, there was no going back
(12/18/98)

Acadamentia
An Internet inquisition?
(12/18/98)

God save the president?
By Jackie Stevens
An anti-impeachment gathering of New York's intellectual hotshots may not do much for the country, but at least it made them feel good about themselves
(12/16/98)

Ask Camille
By Camille Paglia
Wise words for an inner city teacher: Toss out the tutorials on self-esteem and send your students on an adventure to the distant past
(12/16/98)

Harassment backlash
By Matthew Dallek
When Angelo Armenti embarked on a witch hunt for professors accused of indiscretions, he became a case in point for why sexual harassment policies just don't work
(12/14/98)

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THE MARXIST WALL STREET COULDN'T IGNORE | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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Henwood came to be the renegade conscience of the bull market by a rather unusual route. Growing up with the baby boom in a quiet New Jersey suburb, he became infatuated with conservatism his senior year in high school. "Bill Buckley and Milton Freedman were my heroes," he recalls. "When I got to Yale in 1971, I joined the Party of the Right, which at the time seemed very exciting." But after a year of intense conservatism and what Henwood calls "caveman sexual politics," he grew disenchanted with the right wing. "Basically I fell in with a gang of corrupt hedonists and became an English major."

Despite his predilection for American literature, Henwood couldn't seem to stray far from the politics of the marketplace. "After college, I got a job at a crappy little brokerage firm on Wall Street, formed by a Bell Labs physicist who wanted to apply mathematical models to the stock market. He and his gang of reject brokers were running this place, which eventually went under." In the introduction to "Wall Street'," Henwood describes how his experience at this firm formed his first impression of Wall Street as a place run not by the rules of freedom, but by force. "One morning riding the elevator up to work, I noticed a cop standing next to me, a gun on his hip," Henwood writes. "I realized in an instant that all the sophisticated machinations that went on upstairs and around the whole Wall Street neighborhood rested ultimately on force. Financial power, too, grows out of the barrel of a gun."

But Henwood did not begin to record his thoughts on the coercive power of money until he dropped out of a Ph.D. program in English, where he had been tackling a dissertation project about narcissism in American literature. Fascinated by psychoanalysis, and intrigued by the idea that modernist poet Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive, Henwood kept trying to draw parallels between the worlds of aesthetics and speculative finance.

Finally, after working for several years in New York writing indexes for medical textbooks, Henwood was struck by an idea. "I was reading Rock 'n Roll Confidential, an eight-page newsletter, and I thought, "I could do one of these!" While I had been doing my dissertation, I read the business press a lot, along with Marxian economics, so I had spent quite a few years immersing myself in financial matters. I thought I had developed enough expertise to tell the world." A friend designed a logo for the Left Business Observer (whose masthead reads "accumulation and its discontents"), and Henwood sent out the first 200 copies for free -- "some to famous people," he grins.

Although he is a self-taught economist, Henwood immediately gained attention for his outspoken, educated perspective on topics so murky that even high-paid investors find them difficult to articulate. "Within two days I got a call from Victor Navasky [publisher of the Nation], who wanted me to come down and meet him," Henwood recalls. Later, with favorable reviews from progressive journalist Christopher Hitchens and a plug from Alan Abelson of Barron's, the Left Business Observer hit its stride. Henwood became the media pundit to call when markets were collapsing. "If the TV producers start calling me," he laughs, "it's time to buy."

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Rejecting conventional wisdom of left and right