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Red Notice

The Book of the Week is “Red Notice, A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man’s Fight For Justice” by Bill Browder, published in 2015. This suspenseful, emotional saga should be made into a motion picture, as it is not only entertaining and engaging, but is a comprehensive picture of the extremes of human nature.

Rebelling against his left wing intellectual family, Browder became a capitalist. During his career, he worked under two big bosses who died under mysterious, suspicious circumstances– Bob Maxwell and Edmond Safra. As a young whippersnapper, he longed to do investment consulting in Eastern Europe, but had to settle for London. Browder got in on the ground floor when the Russian securities industry was in its infancy in the early 1990’s.

In early 2000, the power of Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin, was actually held by “… oligarchs, regional governors, and organized-crime groups.” Browder started a hedge fund called Hermitage. What with complex economic and political goings-on, his hedge fund became the victim of the Russian mentality. In 2006, Hermitage had to “… sell billions of dollars worth of Russian securities without anyone knowing.” That was just one of many traumatic episodes in Browder’s career.

The author had the brains and skills to become not only a successful financial consultant and investor, but a muckraker; however, this made him a “Darwin Award” candidate. He became involved in a true thriller with intrigue, greed, power hunger, human rights abuses and karma. Russia struck at his attorney, Sergei Magnitsky. Numerous Russians in positions of authority– in the government, prisons, the police– all lied to the world about what happened to Magnitsky. Under Putin’s rule, Russia had reverted to the Stalinism of the 1920’s, with thousands of dissidents tortured and killed.

The few people whose eyes were open, who were raising the alarm– were risking their own lives. The rest of the world didn’t want to get involved because they were of the mentality that the violence was confined to Russia, and it wouldn’t spread to them. And they might end up like those dissidents if they rocked the boat. Besides, in the 2000’s, people have become desensitized to human rights abuses due to the widespread, propagandized publicizing of them (like video clips arousing viewers’ morbid curiosity, of the alleged beheadings of journalists by Middle Easterners on YouTube).

(Please excuse the legalese in this paragraph- but it is the briefest way of explanation) Some people would say that Browder had “unclean hands” and there was “contributory negligence” on his part, so his story should not have deserved the special attention it got. Admittedly, he was out for revenge, not because he truly wanted to stem uncivil behavior in the world. He made his living in an industry full of greedy people whose scruples are less than stellar– securities. He made a ton of money by engaging in “self-dealing” and insider trading, which would be considered violations of American securities laws. He was from America, the country that gave rise to the corrupt economic system in Russia in the first place. It might be recalled that Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs gave bad advice to Boris Yeltsin (to put it generously), convincing him to adopt “shock capitalism” — a ruinous financial plan. Lastly, Browder had “constructive knowledge” that doing business in Russia was especially risky (not just financially), compared to other countries. Arguably, he was trying to apply American morals and laws to get justice in a situation in which he had profited from Russian morals and lawlessness. Some people would say, “Pox on everyone’s house.”

Browder wrote, “There was something almost biblical about Sergei’s story, and even though I am not a religious man, as I sat there watching history unfold, I couldn’t help but feel that God had intervened in this case.” This blogger thinks that, but for Browder’s powerful professional and political contacts who intervened in this case, it would be just another infuriating, depressing, suppressed, and eventually forgotten human rights abuse story.

Read the book to learn the details of the story, including the actions taken against the morally bankrupt, brazen Russian criminals, and learn whether justice was done.

The Crusader

The Book of the Week is “The Crusader, The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan” by Timothy Stanley, published in 2012.

Born in 1938, Buchanan, a journalist, commentator, conservative-Republican political aide and presidential candidate with sometimes unexpectedly radical, contrarian views, was the third oldest in an eight-child family of Irish descent. They lived in the Catholic Georgetown section of Washington, D.C.

In the 1950’s, the American economy was so good that a man could support a ten-person household, and afford to hire a maid. Buchanan and his brothers would crash keg parties. “The Buchanan boys respected the cops who busted up their parties and chased them into the trees, and the next morning the gang lined up outside the confessional to lay it all before God.” Joe McCarthy was Buchanan’s hero.

Buchanan attended Columbia University School of Journalism in the late 1960’s when there was cultural snobbery– the school didn’t deign to teach TV journalism. He thought the civil rights movement was a Commie front. In 1972, he was horrified when Nixon had the U.S. reopen diplomatic relations with China to contain Soviet expansion, and signed an agreement with Mao Tse Tung saying China included the territory of Taiwan.

There is nothing new under the sun. In the presidential campaign of 1972, “The [media] made a genuine attempt in open democracy look like a freak show.” By the late 1970’s, Buchanan co-hosted political talk radio and TV shows. He specialized in ad-libs and putdowns — the kind where he loudly and obnoxiously interrupted callers and guests if he didn’t like what they were saying, or if he was losing an argument.

In early 1990, Buchanan was a panelist at a forum of The National Interest magazine, which consisted of neoconservatives– people who felt that all countries of the world should adopt the American way– politically, economically, culturally and socially, etc. Buchanan disagreed with doing this, opining that democracy was right for the United States, but not for all nations of the world.

Buchanan wanted to help form a political group to protest the First Gulf War. It was theorized that three different groups conspired to push for war in the Middle East: the military industrial complex, neoconservatives, and the religious right.

When Buchanan ran for president in 1996, he had changed his stand on certain issues. “Buchanan once saw public enemy number one as the socialists in Washington. Now, it was the corporations on Wall Street.” He asserted that America faced moral, social, economic and spiritual problems, and not only an income tax issue, as 1996 presidential candidate Steve Forbes contended. In Louisiana, Buchanan assumed an anti-vice stance, denouncing gambling, prostitution, drugs and the corruption they caused. He also wanted to blur the lines of separation of Church and State, and was pro-NRA. He was accused of palling around with racists. His communications method to achieve maximum voter reach was doing interviews on radio shows. Candidate Bob Dole went to shopping malls.

In late 1999, Buchanan switched to the Reform Party and traded fighting words with Donald Trump. The former appealed to the far left and the far right who agreed on “… war, trade, the slow decline of American capitalism into a kind of Walmart communism– materialist, greedy, heartless.” The Reform party attracted voters who were neo-hippies, people who believed in meditation, aliens and religious fundamentalism (took the Christian Bible literally) and gun enthusiasts. Buchanan “shot himself in the foot” by choosing a black female running mate.

In 2003, Buchanan opposed the war against Iraq and said the 9/11 attack on America was due to the nation’s meddling in the Middle East.

Read the book to learn more details of Buchanan’s decades-long political consulting, publishing and commentating activities, and their historical backdrop.

Chasing the Devil

The Book of the Week is “Chasing the Devil” by Tim Butcher, published in 2010. This volume’s author, a loyal fan of the British author Graham Greene, wanted to retrace the steps of Greene, who made treks on foot in Sierra Leone and Liberia in 1935. Greene went with his cousin to observe whether the countries were still practicing slavery. Butcher, accompanied by his friend’s son, insisted on having similarly primitive conditions on his trip in 2009. Both of the aforementioned countries have suffered bloody civil wars in recent decades.

Great Britain colonized Sierra Leone in 1807. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, many poor farmers abandoned their subsistence labor for a chance to get rich mining diamonds. Extreme greed prompted diamond smuggling. Although the nation achieved independence in 1961, it fell into disarray in the early 1970’s, as “… order collapsed and the pillars of society that I [Butcher] take for granted in a functioning state, such as the availability of fair-minded police or economic stability or unbiased journalism, crumbled away.”

The violence among white officials, black settlers and native Africans continued through 2002. Around then, a bloodless coup occurred, which represented progress. At the time of his visit, the author reported that Sierra Leone was fraught with corruption, and was suffering “brain drain” and “capital flight.” However, China became interested in building infrastructure and investing there due to untapped iron ore deposits. Modernization has been occurring, but not without growing pains. One part of that has been the advent of cars on the yet-to-be-constructed roads, causing extremely bad traffic jams.

Liberia became independent in 1847. In years prior, the United States launched a public relations initiative to assist freed slaves in returning to their homeland, just as the British did in Sierra Leone. However, the Americans did not colonize Liberia. This meant that the nation had black leadership much sooner than did Sierra Leone. Even so, in the early going, white men ran the campaign with hypocrisy and greed.

Read the book to learn more about Butcher’s trip and the histories of Sierra Leone and Liberia in the time of Graham Greene, and in the last twenty years.

The Media Relations Department

The Book of the Week is “The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You A Happy Birthday” by Neil MacFarquhar, published in 2009. This is a foreign correspondent’s take on various Middle Eastern countries– countries he has covered for the New York Times and the AP in the 1980’s and later. The dictatorial leaders and secret service of Middle Eastern countries together create an oppressive combination.

Born in 1959, the American author discusses his Libyan childhood, and what happened when Qaddafi came to power in a coup. Libya had no parliament, military institutions, political parties, unions, NGOs and very few ministries. “Popular Committees” (similar to neighborhood associations in Asia– common people acting on a very local level) were supposed to govern the country.

The financial aid that the United States provided to Lebanon around 2002 appeared generous but had strings attached and seemed basically designed to recycle the money back to American businesses. For example, Lebanese farmers had prospered growing hashish and opium poppies but when those crops were outlawed, they received cows instead, only because U.S. dairy farmers wanted to sell surplus cows. So American aid engenders just as much resentment as goodwill.

According to MacFarquhar, the United States launched its war against Iraq because Iraq was seen as the strongest military threat to Israel and an alternative oil source to Saudi Arabia. Arabs opined that the war was launched to “…reestablish the Western colonial dominance of their lands.” America’s ostensible goal in invading Iraq was to cause a domino effect in the region. However, the action of the dominoes turned the opposite of the way intended. Common people living in the affected nations were made worse off, and “… they feared the possible bloody consequences of experimenting with pluralism.”

The author writes extensively on Muslim extremists who believe in killing all non-Muslims. Saudi Arabia might well be the nation that debates jihad more than all of the others because many of its citizens subscribe to the Wahhabi ideology. “Three of the four main branches of Sunni Islam reject the idea of an offensive jihad, of Muslims initiating hostilities.”

Bahrain is clearly a recipient of monetary assistance from the U.S., as the latter has a naval base there. The Khalifa government depends on such support, and could not subject a blogger critical of the ruling regime in Bahrain, to prolonged torture or imprisonment. The blogger started a forum where Web users around the world, including Bahrainis could freely express their views.

Read the book to learn additional information on the politics and cultures of the above and other nations, such as Egypt, Jordan and Syria (up until 2009) through Western eyes.

From Exile to Washington

The Book of the Week is “From Exile to Washington” by W. Michael Blumenthal, published in 2013. This tome describes the historical times of the author, with some autobiographical bragging thrown in.

Blumenthal, born in 1926 in Germany, happened to have a Jewish last name when Hitler came to power. He endured the hardships of living in Shanghai as a refugee when his family fled Germany on the eve of WWII. After the war, as a Displaced Person, he waited years for permission to live in the United States. When the Jews in Shanghai learned of the atrocities that had been committed against their fellow religionists, they considered the terms “Germany” and “Germans” anathema. No one wanted to go back to Europe. The most sought after destinations were Palestine, America, Australia or South America.

The author became Americanized but his life experiences gave him a unique perspective on his homeland and China that not many people had. In 1960, he, like many other Americans, was inspired by President Kennedy’s language of idealism and sacrifice to volunteer to help his country through government service.

Read the book to learn about the lofty corporate and government positions held by the author, and the historical backdrop of his life.

The Black Nile

The Book of the Week is “The Black Nile” by Dan Morrison, published in 2010. The American author traveled along the Nile River for more than sixth months, “roughing it” just for fun. He spent time in Sudan, South Sudan, Egypt and Uganda.

Morrison spoke with people of all walks of life, including government officials. He visited farms, oilfields and night clubs. He was forced to deal with numerous delays of vehicles on water and land while traveling to his next destination. He wrote briefly of the recent history of tribal infighting, and the cultural, political and economic background of the region.

The economies of some villages, fueled by black markets, with high-priced accommodations, like Juba in Sudan, were frequented by aid workers and diplomats. In South Sudan alone, there are more than ninety different tribes and factions. The author visited just prior to the partitioning of Sudan. Most of the oil was in the south. The militias and corrupt local officials were forcing villagers to evacuate their land for the purpose of oil exploration. The oil companies used private security services and hired northerners. China, Malaysia and India were the major investors in the oil.

“Northern Sudan was almost entirely untouched by the civil war and, despite the combined effects of mismanagement and international sanctions, its main roads were paved, electricity reached the major towns and there was always a hotel to be found.”

The author summed up various American viewpoints, including: a) “No one in the United States cared about a months-old spell of terror and death in South Sudan. They barely cared about Darfur, and Darfur was the rage.” and b) Americans’ impression of the Middle East is one of veiled women and angry men.

Read the book to learn more about the author’s adventures.

Simon Says

The Book of the Week is “Simon Says” by Kathryn Eastburn, published in 2007. This is the true story of a triple murder that occurred in the small town of Guffey in Colorado in early 2001.

The mastermind behind the criminal act was a teenager, Simon Sue, who convinced others that he was part of an anti-governmental group in Guyana. He and his father collected guns for their investment value. They had a humongous collection. The younger Sue believed that theft of firearms from other households in the neighborhood was acceptable if their owners were racist or dealt illegal drugs.

Sue ran a terrorist training camp of sorts for three other high schoolers he had befriended. Read the book to learn the details of the heinous atrocities committed by them, how they got caught, and their fates.

Why Do Only White People…

The Book of the Week is ” ‘Why Do Only White People Get Abducted By Aliens?’ ” by Ilana Garon, published in 2013. This is the personal account of a New York City high school English teacher who began her career during the early years of the Bloomberg mayoral administration. Fresh out of college, but passionate and focused, she became a Teaching Fellow in a rigorous training summer-school program in the Bronx in 2003.

The author, like many, many other teachers before and since, suffered psychologically draining experiences at an overcrowded, inner-city school in her first year teaching. Garon’s day had fourteen periods, ending at 5:55pm. She became privy to numerous bad home situations, and was involved in her share of in-school incidents. Her school had a heavy police presence and metal detectors that were used to screen all the students every time they entered the campus. She wrote, “… am continuing to teach at a school where all I do is discipline….”

There were ethnic tensions among light-skinned, darker-skinned, and Spanish-speaking kids. When students engaged in fighting in the hallway, “…it sounds like a bomb… Everyone starts screaming, the crowd of about one hundred kids…” There were also gang fights. It wasn’t just the boys, either. “Rather than the boys, who would throw punches, the girls would hold each other in death grips, trying to slam each other into floors or walls and pull each other’s hair out.”

Someone asked the author why she didn’t assign a particular novel about African Americans to her class. She tried to explain that the reason she didn’t, wasn’t that the book would be too hard for them– it had nothing to do with the stereotype that people of their ethnicity can’t read as well as others; it was that the book would be too hard for most of the students, given their poor reading, writing and verbal skills, regardless of their ethnicity.

Despite many of the students’ abysmal literacy, Garon was under pressure by higher-ups to give the students a passing grade, whether or not they completed their coursework, or demonstrated that they learned anything. Unsurprisingly, by the spring of her first year, she had also been subjected to sexual harassment from faculty members, and the mentoring system had failed her. Her mentor, who doubled as the baseball coach, absented himself from mentoring her in the spring.

In her second year, the author was assigned to “team-teach” one of her classes– a Special Education inclusion class of 33 boys; in other words, a boatload of behavior problems. The other teacher on her team was a Filipino who spoke only Tagalog (no English), while the students spoke only English and Spanish.

Garon was threatened by a student for confiscating a note he was passing to another student in her classroom. She couldn’t let that go. She had to assert her authority over the students or else they’d walk all over her ever after. However, reporting the student was a legal can of worms. The bureaucracy required a court hearing by the Board of Education. She had to get on the stand and testify. The student had a lawyer present. It took five hours. It happened to be scheduled on the same day as parent-teacher conferences. So she missed most of them.

Garon discussed the case of a cute, smart African American boy in her class who was a year younger than his classmates. His situation had looked so promising when she first met him. His parents and teachers were encouraging and cared about his education. He was attending a good school. Garon thought his academic performance suffered between ninth and tenth grades due to peer pressure– the other kids would socially ostracize him for being “white” and nerdy if he got good grades.

The author teaches the kinds of kids she does, because she wants to make a difference in these deprived youngsters, compensate those who “… had been slighted in more ways than I could enumerate, while my peers and I had been given ever more incalculable advantages over them.” She feels that poverty is the main obstacle to their getting an education. This means home environment– their homes lack the same resources that other kids have; for starters– they lack parents who care about their education, who teach them behavior patterns that lead to success.

Read the book to learn of the slew of other issues Garon faces on a daily basis.

Stringer – BONUS POST

This blogger read “Stringer” by Anjan Sundaram, published in 2014. The author studied mathematics at university but entered the field of journalism instead. He went to the Congo with the hope of getting paid for reporting news. Someone helped him become a freelance writer for the Associated Press.

However, this book is unclear about when any of his experiences occurred, as no dates– not even approximate ones– are provided. Not even during his description of Kabila’s historic election “victory” over Bemba. This appears to be a case of laziness and cheapness on the part of the author and his publisher. If dates were provided, then this book would need to have notes, references and possibly an index– entailing additional work, time and expense. Also, by omitting a timeline and confining the writing to the author’s personal experience, this work appears less credible and less literate than otherwise. Journalists are supposed to be recorders of history. History is all about when events occurred– so that there is context. This blogger has observed the lack of dates in other recent books written by foreign correspondents, too. It is a disturbing trend that bespeaks of the decrease in quality of personal accounts of “Darwin Award” candidates in war-torn countries.

Anyway, Sundaram stayed in Victoire, a section of Kinshasa with a reputation for “…gangs and disorder, and expatriate and embassy workers were banned even from visits.” As he was a stringer, he was paying his own expenses to collect news stories of the civil war. Competition in the region for getting stories published was fierce, as the AP bureau in Dakar covered 22 countries. “There was constant news of rape, child soldiers and violence.”

Congo was influenced by missionaries. When a child was misbehaving, and the family suffered a misfortune, it was thought that the devil was influencing the child, so a pastor would compel the child to confess.

“Congo’s minuscule 25 miles of coast was rich with oil.” Sundaram met an Indian whose land was allegedly seized illegally by the Congolese government and the Americans, because some natural resource was found in it. Sundaram avoided covering the story, as the situation was sure to be rife with corruption. The business community was comprised of Indians, Lebanese, Israelis, Belgians and politicians. These foreigners shamelessly engaged in conspicuous consumption; hence the common Congolese people rioted in wealthy neighborhoods.

Sundaram was present when the Congolese people were led to believe there might occur a historic political change in their nation, as they could vote for a presidential candidate. “From across the country came stories of villagers who had walked for days, supplies on their heads, families in tow, to reach a polling station… turnout was higher than 80 percent in many districts worst hit by the war.” However, as usual, their corrupt government took advantage of their lack of education and naivete.

Read the book to learn how Congo has historically been manipulated by foreign powers. But don’t expect to learn when.

Crescent & Star – Turkey Between Two Worlds

The Book of the Week is “Crescent & Star – Turkey Between Two Worlds” by Stephen Kinzer, published in 2001. This repetitive volume recounts the recent history of Turkey. Of course the country has changed significantly since the publishing of this writing, which was prior to 9/11.

The individual was considered less important than the collective– family, village or clan, not the nation. The media were censored on topics such as the Kurds, Islam, the Armenian genocide of 1915, relations with Greece and Cyprus, etc., etc. Three major controversies in Turkish society included: the tribal conflict between Turks and Kurds, the religious conflict between Sunni Muslims and Alevis, and the hotly debated question of whether religion should be practiced in public life (such as female students’ wearing of veils at university). “The Turks are still gripped by two ancient Middle Eastern taboos. One is the taboo against change, which they equate with admitting failure. The other is the taboo against dialogue, compromise and negotiation.”

In the mid 1980’s, the Kurds formed an anti-government military organization called the PKK to try to subvert the government through violence. Excessive blood was shed with the government’s response against these separatists.

The August 1999 earthquake was a particularly trying time for the nation. There was plenty of unnecessary death and destruction. The disaster was a cluster screw-up. In years prior, unschooled, capital-poor Turks started unscrupulous home-building businesses that constructed flimsy apartment buildings. After the quake, arrogant and indifferent top officials of the government relief agency, Kizilay, who had been playing fast and loose with the organization’s checkbook, responded slowly to aiding the victims. Nevertheless, tens of countries around the world, including Greece, aided Turkey in its time of need. The disaster served as an excuse, a tipping point for the nation’s resuming diplomatic relations with Greece. Besides, the events surrounding the earthquake served as an additional impetus for younger Turks to agitate for political and cultural change.

Read the book to learn about additional factors that were affecting the people’s push for change, such as worship of Kemal Ataturk, the 1996 Susurluk scandal and the military’s role in governing the country.