August 2014 – education and deconstruction.com

The Courage of Strangers

The Book of the Week is “The Courage of Strangers” by Jeri Laber, published in 2002. This autobiography describes the making of a passionate human rights activist.

The author grew up in privileged surroundings in New York City, in the Sunnyside section of Queens, and Jamaica Estates when the wealthy suburban enclave was in its infancy. This was because her Russian father was a multi-skilled home builder with his own business. On the family’s newly-constructed home: “Back in 1936, it was a technological wonder, with central air-conditioning, a built-in room-to-room intercom system, garage doors that opened automatically, and, buried under the steep cobblestone driveway, wires that heated up to melt the snow.”

In the early 1950’s, Laber wanted to study Russian in graduate school, but her father objected partly because it was the McCarthy Era, and because he felt over-education would hurt her chances for marriage. She defied him. In 1954, she got the opportunity to visit Moscow with three other students. Their tour guides tightly restricted their activities, allowing them to visit only tourist sites, and Moscow State University. She recorded her impressions of the people she met, including, “They have replaced God with Lenin and Stalin…These people are healthy and happy, as long as they conform.”

Excuse the cliche, but “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” At that time, there was the “Military-Industrial Complex.” Now there is the “Military-Corporate Complex.” However, world annihilation via nuclear war was the biggest fear in the 1950’s. The continuing increase in global oppression via telecommunications and other underhanded means is the biggest fear in the early 2000’s.

The author was an eyewitness to the different speeds at which different countries threw off their communist yoke, as she visited various countries behind the Iron Curtain in turn. She writes that people in the former Soviet Union had lived under communism for decades longer than their Eastern bloc counterparts. The older ones residing in the latter had known a better quality of life prior to Soviet takeover. “They looked around them and saw corrupt, repressive governments, failing economies, contaminated water, polluted air, alcoholism, and apathy.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Read the book to learn of Laber’s career adventures in Eastern Europe, her checkered love life, the difference she made at meetings with top Soviet leaders and others by speaking out against injustice, and Eastern Europe’s radical political and social changes in the 1990’s.

Jeffrey Sachs

The Book of the Week is “Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr. Shock and Mr. Aid” by Japhy Wilson, published in 2014. This ebook emphatically argues that the highly influential Ivy League economist Jeffrey Sachs has wreaked havoc on at least three nations’ economies in the last thirty years with his non-stop publishing, lecturing and implementation on and of, (in the author’s opinion) delusional, elitist, anti-communist, anti-union schemes; he is, arguably, an economics criminal, so to speak (the counterpart to a war criminal) in that the implementation of his policies caused deaths. As an aside, this blogger disagrees with the author’s spelling of “publically” rather than “publicly.”

Sachs has refused to acknowledge that his “shock therapy” method employed in Bolivia, Russia and Poland was a dismal failure. It was supposed to help them make the transition to capitalism through conferring responsibility for previously government-led distribution of goods and services, to private citizens without warning them of extreme measures to be imposed in accomplishing this. The countries were forced to adopt a model at the far opposite end of the spectrum of the welfare state.

Sachs’ first victim, Bolivia, was experiencing 60,000% inflation and 20% unemployment in the summer of 1985. By 1987, pursuant to Sachs’ plan, a free market had been created, but the costs included a 50% higher unemployment rate and a 40% lower real-wage level. Over the next five years, the mining and industry sectors lost jobs by the tens of thousands.

In Russia, a few powerful wealth owners were already experienced in “managing” assets, so their receiving additional private property– with no laws requiring them to treat their workers in a humane manner– made them even more exploitative. In the early 1990’s, leader Boris Yeltsin became a convert of Sachs. The result was mass corruption. On the other hand, this has helped the United States and other nations with already evolved capitalist systems to maintain their economic dominance in the world. This blogger is not saying such a goal is right or wrong, but merely suggesting that this might have been Sachs’ goal.

Sachs also helped the rich get richer in Uganda, by providing specially chosen farming families with certain resources, such as fertilizer and seeds, in a few villages. The goal was to have those politically connected farmers “… magically combine entrepreneurial self-interest with community spirit, based on a patronizing representation of the deserving poor.” This smacks of a similar kind of mentality in the New York City schools under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the early 2000’s, based on the mistaken notion that all students were bound for college. Sachs’ program started charging money for conferring some of its resources, “… which inevitably privileges those with the ability to pay.” Bloomberg imposed various policies (still in effect as of this writing), that inevitably privilege those students who have the ability to pay for private school, and testing and tutoring services. That is just the tip of the iceberg in both cases.

A World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in 2000 was discontinued because “… Suddenly, this orderly world of billionaire philanthropy and elite policymaking was overturned by massive street protests involving unions, NGOs, and activist groups, demanding an end to the global neoliberal agenda of free trade, privatization, and corporate power.”

Read the book to learn of additional outrages associated with Jeffrey Sachs.

The Last Resort

The Book of the Week is “The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe” by Douglas Rogers, published in 2010. The author of this extremely suspenseful ebook describes how his landowner-parents fared in the years after the spring of 2000, when Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe ordered that land owned by light-skinned people be taken over by dark-skinned. The author’s family was light-skinned.

This is a lurid story of how the use of three major instruments of power– lawyers, guns and money– did not necessarily play as important a role in his parents’ fate as their history, the relationships they formed and actions they took.

Rogers was a travel writer who had moved out of the country long before. His parents had stayed to defend their property in Mutare, (about 180 miles from Harare) on which, because it was land unsuitable for farming, in 1992 they had built a resort that originally hosted young backpackers in its chalets.

Read the book to learn about:

a) the irreverent goings-on and clientele at the resort through the years,

b) how his father fared in attempting to deal with the lawless, bureaucratic Zimbabwean government, and

c) whether the author’s parents’ dealings with various people– pro-Mugabe (officials, thugs who perpetrated violence against whites, and those who had the government’s permission to move onto the property of the light-skinned) and anti-Mugabe (activists and fighters)– allowed them to survive.

The Snowden Files

The Book of the Week is “The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man” by Luke Harding, published in 2014. This ebook eloquently describes how Edward Snowden became a whistleblower, and the immediate consequences of his actions.

President Barack Obama vowed to curtail intrusive collection of personal data from and on the American people during 2008. A set of policies passed after 9/11, the Patriot Act, originally allowed certain kinds of spying. The goal was to root out terrorists. Instead of curbing the program, Obama authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States government to become an all-out global spying operation. By 2009, it was collecting metadata from millions of American and English citizens, as well as numerous global government officials, through phone records and email. It teamed up with GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s governmental branch that handles intelligence, and later, elicited customer data from the major U.S. tech companies Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. The NSA and GCHQ “…secretly attached intercepts to the undersea fibre-optic cables that ringed the world.”

However admirable the intentions of government officials might be– thinking they are seeking out evil and preventing incidents of terrorism, their actions are misguided. They might contend that there have been no terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11, so therefore, the program is working. This erroneous reasoning is like the stupid joke: A man is sitting outside on a city street waving around an odd contraption. Someone walks by and asks him what it is. The man tells them it’s an elephant repellent. He is asked how he knows it’s working. He says, “It must be working. Do you see any elephants around here?”

This blogger believes that the privacy violations– arguably unconstitutional– are a secondary reason why the nature of the NSA’s actions are so dangerous. One major aspect that makes the spying so dangerous is that comprehensive searches can be done on electronic-records literally at the speed of light.

Excuse the cliche, but “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Abuse of power is inevitable. For instance, there have been incidents involving the TSA. Throughout history, only bad publicity generated by whistleblowers who have made serious sacrifices– their livelihoods and/or their lives– has stemmed the tide of the evildoing. The same is true with this NSA/GCHQ situation. This ebook likened the spying to the East German Stasi prior to the fall of Communism. This blogger thinks eventually, absent a whistleblower, there would have emerged an individual with the mentality of Stalin or the late U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy. Fortunately, Snowden found a way to act on the conviction of his beliefs in a mature, if illegal, way. He communicated with the right individuals at The Guardian, “… the third largest newspaper website in the world.”

A minor side effect of the collection of massive amounts of data, even if only a fraction of it is looked at– is that mistakes of honest ineptitude will be made. Lives have been greatly inconvenienced at best, due to the erroneous data in credit records, and those whose names have been mistakenly placed on a “no-fly” list, among various other cluster screw-ups of record-keeping entities.

Read the book to learn of the different media cultures in the U.S. and U.K., and the details of this suspenseful saga.