Joseph Stiglitz's book "The Roaring Nineties" was one of last year's nudges that convinced me to get out of the business world. What shocked me was how he exposed the hypocrisy that many corporate leaders and other businesspeople exercise every day in thinking about and fighting for the issues that are important to them. It was that and also that I recognized my own role in the grand lies that big business told in the 1990s.

I recently looked up an entry on How the World Works about "free-trade hypocrisy", where Andrew Leonard, whom I have mentioned here before, considers again his opinions that although globalization is good, the set of policies we call "free trade" are "in effect a rigged system that locks in the advantages of those already at the top of the heap, at the expense, not only of the developing world, but of blue-collar and middle-class workers in the developed world."

He examines this in relation to a book by Robert Wade, in which Wade quotes Friedrich List, a 19th century German economist, who slams free-trade propagandists in the following illuminating way:

"It is a very clever common device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him ... Any nation which by means of protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throw away these ladders of her greatness, to preach to other nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tones that she has hitherto wandered in the paths of error, and has now for the first time succeeded in discovering the truth."

Salon.com has a War Room blog entry that takes the mickey out of CNN senior national correspondent John Roberts, and then Wolf Blitzer. It is about how sanctions didn't stop Iraq from having weapons of mass destruction.

Wait a minute, what did I say?