Gary Reback, author of FREE THE MARKET, featured in the San Francisco Chronicle

Author favors stronger antitrust enforcement

By Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
March 8, 2009; San Francisco Chronicle

Antitrust attorney Gary Reback stirred up Silicon Valley in the 1990s when he asked the Justice Department to protect Netscape and its Web browser from the machinations of mighty Microsoft Corp.
Netscape has since disappeared and the browser wars have been forgotten. But Reback has returned with a book, "Free the Market," in which he argues that government must do more to protect innovation and fair play.

"The hardest thing to get across to my libertarian and conservative friends in the tech industry is that we owe a lot of what we've got to the government," said Reback, 59.

"In earlier decades when government was more vigilant about antitrust, it created the openings that allowed Silicon Valley to exist," he said, citing one anecdote from his book.
Reback writes that, long before its breakup, AT&T settled one in a series of government antitrust cases with a deal that included licensing its transistor technology. One licensee was scientist William Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor. Shockley opened a chipmaking laboratory in Mountain View. It failed, but several of his employees later founded famous Silicon Valley firms, including Intel Corp.

"And that's why we're sitting here today," Reback said.

In "Free the Market," Reback quickly sketches the activist period of antitrust law from the 1911 break-up of Standard Oil to the 1984 break up of AT&T.

"The rules were populist, they were set up to aid small businesses," he said.

Since the 1980s, however, he says antitrust policy has taken the hands-off, free market approach identified with Ronald Reagan.

Reback says former federal judge Robert Bork laid the intellectual groundwork for weaker antitrust enforcement. Bork is best remembered because his 1987 appointment to the Supreme Court was rejected in a controversy involving his views on abortion.

Bork's 1978 book, "The Antitrust Paradox," said big companies could be efficient in ways that benefited consumers and that market forces protected competition better than government regulators.

"For 20 years starting in the late 1970s, the Supreme Court took one chapter after another of Bork's book and made it into law," said Jonathan Baker, a law professor and antitrust expert at American University.

For the full article, click here.

Martha Sandweiss' PASSING STRANGE reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle

By Roger K. Miller
Tuesday, February 24, 2009; San Francisco Chronicle

Passing Strange
A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
By Martha A. Sandweiss
(The Penguin Press; 370 pages; $27.95)

For a book on a serious subject, Martha A. Sandweiss could hardly have chosen a more appropriately clever title than the slightly archaic phrase "Passing Strange." Its story of a white man strangely choosing, in our race-riven society, to pass as a black man is passing - that is, exceedingly - strange from beginning to end.

Clarence King, born in Newport, R.I., in 1842, was a Western explorer, a geologist of wide renown, a tremendous wit and an accomplished writer who moved in the highest societies of his day. Secretary of State John Hay and historian Henry Adams were among his closest friends; Hay called King "the best and brightest man of his generation."

But King, a bachelor, lived a secret double life as the husband of a black woman. His wife, Ada, was probably born into slavery, most likely in 1860, somewhere near West Point, Ga. Her last name, if she had one, might have been Copeland. Somehow she migrated to New York City, possibly in 1884, where she might have gotten work as a domestic.

As the previous paragraph indicates, much about their lives remains unknown and unknowable, mostly because of King's herculean efforts at secrecy, but in part due to Ada's humble origins. No stories or records of her early years survive. What her life might have been like can only be guessed at from research into others in similar situations.

The author's effort is well done and well worth it, and not simply because the story is compelling in itself. King, though no longer a high-profile historical figure, nevertheless has been the subject of several biographies, and all of them have ignored or given short shrift to this central aspect of his life. Sandweiss, a professor of history at Amherst College and author of other histories, has brought a lot to light through diligent digging.

For the full review, click here.

Philip and Alice Shabecoff's POISONED PROFITS in the San Francisco Chronicle

'Body Toxic' and 'Poisoned Profits'
Steve Heilig
San Francisco Chronicle, October 12, 2008

In "Poisoned Profits: The Toxic Assault on Our Children," veteran journalists Philip and Alice Shabecoff focus on a particularly troubling biological fact: that the younger we are, the more vulnerable we can be to chemical impacts. "Developmental" exposures of fetuses and young children can influence their health for a lifetime. "As we looked around, we found that a surprisingly large number of children were suffering from chronic illnesses," they begin, and then proceed to marshal moving examples of tragic impacts and to summarize the vast scientific evidence that chemicals are contributing to many illnesses. Although thorough and detailed in their writing, the Shabecoffs don't mince words about how they feel about their story: Chemically affected kids "are victims of a crime."...

Most helpful to the average concerned reader might be the appendices here, which include practical tips on reducing children's exposures and extensive resources for learning more about this complex arena. Regarding broader preventive efforts, they also explore the emerging field of "green chemistry" and the concept of other preventive approaches. Their exploration of the missing but emerging voice of religion in environmental protection is also very welcome.

To read the full article, click here.