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[anarchy1999]

The Village Voice

The Bush Beat by Ward Harkavy

wednesday, august 18th

Rock the Cash BoxThe Halliburton(s): They not only sing, but they talk economics as good as they rock

You may be going tone-deaf from listening to Bush's band of neocons. Time, then, for the Halliburton(s), protest rockers in Dallas who recently returned from a Lick Bush '04 tour of Ireland, where they played with the likes of White Cholera and Christy Moore. (See the poster for a June 25 Bush Comes to Shove gig in Dublin here.)
This summer, they've also been eagerly plugging it in right outside the offices of Dick Cheney's Halliburton in Texas, and are trying to line up gigs in New York for next week's Bush-league coronation.
This band, promoting what frontman Nat Berg calls "town-hall resistance-rock democracy," has some special numbers: Berg is a 31-year-old economics professor at the University of Texas–Dallas, and he's a prof with chops: He was a jazz-bass prodigy who got rave reviews in New York City when he was a teen playing with Maynard Ferguson, and later turned to Zappa-inspired rock. Along the way, he got a Ph.D. in economics. (Berg is the Cecil and Ida Green Assistant Professor of Economics and Political Economy in UT-Dallas's School of Social Sciences.) As a result, his bullshit detector has a built-in number cruncher.
"The reason I think it’s nice to have economists around," Berg tells me, "is to check that assertions about public policy issues—like taxes, health insurance, and the need for war—hang together." And many of those assertions, of course, don't.

snip to the end:

"Michael Moore is cool for what he is. But in the pundit class, there are so few with both fangs and facts. There are de-fanged, fact-equipped critics who ramble, and there are fun but rather fact-light rabble-rousers who, at best, enliven the left. Who can do it and pack a punch? That’s why I’m an economist. And that’s why I’m a protest rocker."
posted: august 18th at 5:02 pm

http://www.villagevoice.com/thebushbeat/