October 2014 – education and deconstruction.com

Keeping Hope Alive

The Book of the Week is “Keeping Hope Alive” by Dr. Hawa Abdi, with Sarah J. Robbins, published in 2013. This ebook is the personal account of a driven, fiercely independent Somalian doctor.

Around 1970, Abdi did seven years of medical training in the former Soviet Union. She then returned to her homeland of Somalia to practice obstetrics and gynecology. Through the years, she married, had two daughters and a son, and in August 1983, built a clinic.

By mid-1992, Abdi had made available a farm and campus on which poor people and war refugees could reside, and receive medical treatment. In addition, she was a law school graduate. She also took in her sister’s large family when they were destitute. She risked her life many times during hostilities between and among Ethiopians and Somalian clans ruled by warlords and sheikhs.

Abdi gathered quite a following because she was so generous to her community. Her dream was that the Somalian people would unite as one country, instead of killing each other in tribal infighting. “People who are fighting will never be able to build.” By the early 2000’s, “… after fifteen years of civil war, the women and youth ran everything, while most of the grown men had either been killed or were away– out fighting or somewhere abroad, trying to make business deals.”

Read the book to learn the details of: Abdi’s trials and tribulations in protecting her property and family, how she was betrayed by her husband; how in some ways, she refused to comply with Somalian/Islamic culture; the cities to which she evacuated her children, and of her interactions with relief organizations, soldiers and journalists.

The Law of the Jungle – Bonus Post

This blogger skimmed the ebook, “The Law of the Jungle” by Paul M. Barrett, published in 2014. This is the story of a decades-long court case involving oil contamination in the Amazonian rain forest of northeastern Ecuador, to which a number of cliches apply:

Pox on the houses of both the plaintiff and the defendant;

A man is known by the company he keeps; and

When you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.

Starting in 1993, the plaintiff, represented by a greedy, egotistical, loudmouthed, yet shrewd attorney– Steven Donziger– claimed that defendant, Texaco, and then successor Chevron oil company, had caused illness, deaths, and damage to the quality of life of thousands of farmers and tribesmen in Ecuador. The Amazonians were allegedly poisoned by the oil-contaminated streams where they fished, bathed and gathered drinking water. The oil company had established a presence in their villages since 1964, when it forged an agreement with the Ecuadorian government to drill on 3.5 million and later, 4 million acres in the Oriente region.

The author tells a suspenseful, controversial story that reveals valid arguments on both sides. There was evidence of serious disruption of villagers’ lives. This included cancer clusters and other health issues that plagued the Ecuadorians, pollution of the place where they lived, the unintended consequence of violent fighting for jobs and over income inequality between Indians and homesteaders, etc. directly attributable to the activities of, and inept cleanup of, oil that allowed spreading of toxic chemicals by, the petroleum companies. On the other hand, over the years, the economy of the country of Ecuador made great strides due to the companies’ building of, and heavy investment in, transportation infrastructure and the side effects of job creation and good political relations that would not have occurred but for the corporate presence in Ecuador.

According to the author, the plaintiff’s attorney went after “big oil” rather than “… a struggling national government responsible for letting down its people” because big oil had more sex appeal. It could also be that big oil had deeper pockets.

In sum, “The oil pollution suit was not unique. Ecuador’s judiciary had a well-earned reputation for corruption and chaos.”

Read the book to learn of the various sleazy tactics employed by both sides in the dispute, and to get a concise, eloquent summary of the whole story– read the “Conclusions” section of this ebook.

The Zeroes

The Book of the Week is “The Zeroes” by Randall Lane, published in 2010. This is the author’s personal account of his adventures in the magazine publishing business in the single-digit 2000’s.

Lane describes in detail, his mostly bad experiences with some of the world’s wealthiest people. They were the subjects of articles and ranked in lists in the magazines published by his company, Doubledown. They were mostly greedy Wall Street traders. He was obligated to throw lavish parties for them (paid for by his company) to sell advertising and subscriptions. He was pressured to write nice things about them, or have them pull their ads.

The author and his business partner also got caught up in the spirit of the times, which valued material possessions and growth financed through a staggering debt burden. He started a wine-tasting club, and a wristwatch club. He writes, “Character, focus, patience– all get sacrificed when you’re starved for 100% growth.” He organized events to raise money for non-profits. When an event’s promotional materials stated, “… a portion of the proceeds will go to charity” that usually meant 1 or 2%.

Read this suspenseful, eloquently written book to learn how the author and his company fared when the financial services sector got its comeuppance in 2008. Here’s a hint: “In all, 1,471 hedge funds closed their doors in 2008, with dozens more failing in 2009.”

Drama

The Book of the Week is “Drama: An Actor’s Education” by John Lithgow, published in 2011. This ebook is Lithgow’s autobiography.

The author has had a very successful acting career in theater, TV and movies. He learned from his father– a super role model and passionate producer of Shakespeare festivals. His father’s career necessitated the family’s relocating every few years, from Ohio to Massachusetts to New Jersey and elsewhere; a disruptive force in his social life. Nevertheless, Lithgow earned a full scholarship to Harvard, where he continued to hone his acting skills.

Read the book to learn how the author escaped the Vietnam draft, about his 1970’s theater experiences in twelve Broadway shows, his explanation of why actors have trouble staying faithful in their love lives, and his professional and personal trials and tribulations.

The Truth with Jokes – Bonus Post

With the U.S. midterm elections approaching, this blogger paged through Al Franken’s book, “The Truth with jokes” (but it isn’t funny), published in 2005. It is mostly about: election, military and economic issues in connection with George W. Bush’s first term.

One controversial issue (still a relevant question years later) that Franken covers is that “…seven months into the [Iraq] war, Donald Rumsfeld wrote a memo asking whether we were creating more terrorists than we were eliminating. ‘We lack the metrics to know,’ he lamented at the time.” A few years later, the government admitted it had the metrics– statistics on terrorist attacks– and the answer was yes.

In 2000-2001, when Bush was first “elected,” Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan was excited that “After eight years of Clinton-style fiscal discipline and economic growth, the era of big deficits was over, and we were running surpluses…” As is known now, Greenspan’s assessment of America’s financial shape turned out to be a bit off the mark. By 2005, the U.S. government had to borrow $2 trillion.

Therefore, the Bush administration might have been wrong in predicting that Social Security would run out of money by 2042. There were then murmurs about privatizing it. Al Franken and his political ilk squelched Bush’s attempt.

Nevertheless, Franken has done extensive economics research, as is shown in this video:

This blogger thinks it is well worth watching in its entirety.

Idea Man

The Book of the Week is “Idea Man” by Paul Allen, published in 2011. This autobiographical ebook’s author is best known as the co-founder of Microsoft, and one of the world’s wealthiest people.

This is not exactly a career memoir, because he gives only an overview of his eight years with the company– from which he withdrew as an employee– and the rest of the book is devoted to his other life experiences. It appears that the amount of information he chose to provide on his short tenure with the software company is insufficient to fill an entire book, so he supplements with his: investments in sports teams, stadiums and communications and aerospace companies; his medical problems; travels; musical encounters; and philanthropic endeavors.

Allen, a ten-grader in 1968, describes eighth-grader Bill Gates’ physical appearance: “…pullover sweater, tan slacks, enormous saddle shoes… blond hair all over the place…”

The two youths took full advantage of the opportunity of a lifetime to learn the craft of programming in the computer room of a private school in Seattle. They had endless capacity for the extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive brainwork required. When he had yet to turn twenty years old, Allen’s experience spanned “…ten computers, ten high-level languages, nine machine-level languages, and three operating systems.” Pretty good for a college dropout.

In the late 1970’s, affordability was a major requirement for selling personal computers, an industry in its infancy. “Today’s laptop is thirty thousand times faster than the machine [the PDP-10] I was lusting after, with ten thousand times more memory.” At that time, memory was expensive and lack of it made machines glacially slow. Today’s base iPhone has four million times the memory contained in BASIC– the programming language that ran on Altair, one of the first computers sold to businesses and consumers in the late 1970’s.

Allen said Gates was a thrill seeker, enjoyed driving fast. In the early 1980’s, “Bill got so many speeding tickets that he had to hire the best traffic attorney in the state to defend him.”

The author discussed how a technology company must always be on the qui vive for the Next Big Thing, and introduce it before its competitors in the right way with the right people, or perhaps suffer significant financial losses. In 1982, DEC came late to the party by selling the high-quality Rainbow 100. Unfortunately, the minicomputer was behind the times– running on the old 8-bit CP/M system, while a 16-bit system was already on the market.

Suffice to say on most of his investments, Allen was a Warren Buffett wannabe. He deserves credit for freely admitting to his epic losses. Nevertheless, it was just another case of redistribution of wealth among the wealthy.

Read the book to learn the details of this billionaire’s life stories.