Doug Henwood

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Doug Henwood (born December 7, 1952) is an American journalist who writes frequently about economic affairs. He publishes a newsletter, Left Business Observer, which aspires to monthliness but rarely makes it, that analyzes economics and politics from a left-wing perspective. Henwood's writing also appears in The Nation, to which he is a contributing editor. He hosts a weekly radio program on WBAI, New York City's listener-sponsored station. He is married to the journalist Liza Featherstone. They live in New York with their son Ivan, born New Year's Day 2006.

1 Early years
2 Writing
3 Contemporaries
4 Quotes
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Early years

Henwood was born in Teaneck, New Jersey, and grew up in Westwood, New Jersey. He received a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1975. At Yale, he was briefly a conservative and a member of the Party of the Right, which maneuvered his election as secretary of the Political Union, but he subsequently became disillusioned and became increasingly attracted to left-wing politics.

From 1976 to 1979, Henwood did graduate work in English at the University of Virginia, concentrating on British and American poetry and critical theory but left before obtaining his doctorate. He later worked for two years as a copywriter and assistant to a medical publisher in New York.

[edit] Writing

In 1986, convinced that the 1980s experiment with free-market economics was a financial and social disaster and that much left writing on economics was usually dry and dated, Henwood launched Left Business Observer. Topics to which he has devoted coverage include:

income distribution and poverty in the U.S. and elsewhere in the First World
the globalization of finance and production
the worldwide attack on pensions
Third World debt and development
the IMF and World Bank
the media business
the influence of foundations on politics and culture
what it means to be a leftist in a world that seems to have forgotten what that means

Every issue includes a report on the world's financial markets and central banks.

Henwood has also written several books. His first was The State of the USA (1994), a social atlas of the U.S. in the Pluto atlas series. This was followed in 1997 by Wall Street, in which Henwood tried to demystify the workings of high finance. Henwood's most recent work is After the New Economy (2003), his analysis of the 1990s boom and bust, with an afterword on the dismal economy of the Bush years.

His writing has also appeared in Grand Street, Village Voice, Newsday, Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian (UK).

[edit] Contemporaries

[edit] Quotes

Whatever the faults of the Soviet Union, at least it was an embodiment of the idea that you could do things differently. The loss of that alternative model is very cheering to capitalists around the world, who use that collapse to discredit any kind of state regulation of the economy or any remotely redistributive policies. (2001)
I try to demystify the dismal science and put it into popular accessible language, and even make a few jokes along the way. (2004)
In some ways, the US looks like Mexico in 1994 and Thailand in 1997 — a country that has chronic imbalances and is cruisin' for a bruisin'. But the United States is not a little country like Thailand or Mexico. It is not likely to have to have the IMF to come in and restructure its economy. (2004)