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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.

A Matter of Opinion

The Book of the Week is “A Matter of Opinion” by Victor S. Navasky, published in 2005. This tome details the decades the author has spent working at the more than 150-year old, politically left-wing weekly opinion journal, The Nation.

Typical for a publication of its nature, The Nation, as of the book’s writing, had turned a profit for only three fiscal years of its existence. It is supposed to have for-profit status. During their histories, all such journals that derive most of their revenue from subscribers and a little from advertising, consider becoming a non-profit organization. The major traits of non-profits include: the ability to accept tax-deductible contributions, lower postage costs, and the fact that they are prohibited from endorsing political candidates and are restricted in their lobbying of lawmakers.

The Nation has been a party to various lawsuits in connection with defamation, intellectual property and free speech issues. One of its goals is to expose the truth about the activities of the American government. Navasky wrote, “… claims of national security are all too often a cloak for government lies, cover-ups, and bureaucratic disinformation.” Started in 1979, one suit brought by Harper & Row dragged on for years over The Nation’s releasing a story on President Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon prior to the release of Ford’s new book; Harper & Row spent an estimated $250,000, but it was seeking damages of $12,500.

In 1989, the tiny, financially struggling Nation wrote a satirical letter to Time, Inc., the target of hostile corporate takeover offers by Gulf + Western and Paramount with an offer of its own. It said, “… we can do better than Paramount’s $175 per share offer… our plan is to pledge the assets of Time, Inc. as collateral on the loan we take out to buy you so cash will be no problem for us.”

Read the book to learn of Navasky’s stories on all the issues involving the running of an opinion journal in the Twentieth Century, into the early years of the Twenty-First Century.

My Mistake

The Book of the Week is “My Mistake” by Daniel Menaker, published in 2013. This is the autobiography of a well-educated Northeastern American male typical for his generation who, born in the 1940’s, entered the publishing profession. However, his mother was exceptional for her generation in that she was an editor at Fortune magazine.

At the then-academically rigorous Swarthmore College, during spring of his senior year, Menaker was “… taking Honors exams– eight three-hour written exams and eight oral exams, all administered by professors from other colleges.” He spent most of his career at The New Yorker, and then switched to Random House about a year after Tina Brown took over the magazine in 1992. He wrote that she halved the quantity of fictional stories appearing in the publication, and employees of both the fiction and nonfiction sections competed with each other in kissing up to her to get their pieces published.

Read the book to learn the details of Menaker’s work, of a traumatic event involving his older brother, and his bout with cancer.

Blood Will Out – Bonus Post

This blogger skimmed the book “Blood Will Out” by Walter Kirn, published in 2014. It is a personal account of the author’s relationship with the scammer, Clark Rockefeller, aka Christian Gerhartsreiter. Kirn, a novelist and journalist, befriended him in the late 1990’s.

Growing up, Gerhartsreiter had had permissive parents, who “… excused and coddled their naughty son.” This might have led to his thinking he could get away with bad behavior, including murder, as an adult. He was, to the dismay of his ex-wife, initially caught for a different crime– trying to abscond with his young daughter. This was in 2008, a year fraught with stories of dishonest dealings on a large scale– Lehman Brothers, Bernie Madoff, subprime lenders, etc.

Read the book to learn how and why Kirn was suckered into a lopsided friendship with a swindling phony.

Louis Renault, A Biography

The Book of the Week is “Louis Renault, A Biography” by Anthony Rhodes, published in 1969.

Renault, an automobile entrepreneur, was born in February 1877. When he began his career, there were only two classes of any real importance in France– the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Renault sold vehicles initially for commercial purposes like taxis, public buses and milk delivery trucks.

By 1905, there were 22 intensely competing European automakers. The year 1908 saw six-cylinder engines made by eight French, ten American, three Belgian and one German manufacturer. In 1909, Renault sold his cars in New York. The goal was to sell 1,200 to 1,500 of them.

In the 1920’s, Citroen, Renault’s chief rival, employed many women in his factories. He conducted an ongoing direct-marketing campaign, mailing letters to potential first-time and new car buyers who had visited the local showroom and expressed interest in a purchase. He also made toy models of his cars for kids. Renault and Citroen competed in starting bus lines between cities in France. Citroen was taken over by Michelin after going bankrupt in 1935.

Read the book to learn of Renault’s accumulation of wealth, his company’s corporate culture and labor troubles, what transpired among automakers during the World Wars and through the decades, and how history dealt Renault a serious blow toward the end of his life.

Of Spies and Spokesmen

The Book of the Week is “Of Spies and Spokesmen” by Nicholas Daniloff, published in 2008. This long memoir covers the author’s journalism career, which started in the late 1950’s at the London bureau of the newly formed wire service, United Press International.

Daniloff’s father was of Russian descent, and it was suggested to him that Russian expertise might be in demand in the future. He switched to the Moscow bureau, where he covered the Cold War. This blogger was a bit annoyed by the redundancy of two historical incidents recounted in this book: the U-2 Incident and Soviet leader Khrushchev’s ouster.

Daniloff wrote about various ethical issues of his profession and problems he encountered due to the stark cultural differences between the then-Soviet Union and the United States. The former’s media were entirely controlled by the government. In the early 1960’s, the two major press organizations were Izvestia and Pravda, meaning “news” and “truth.” This blogger has read elsewhere that the joke was that the News contained no truth, and the Truth contained no news. The author found this to be largely correct, as he witnessed a myriad of controversial incidents involving other journalists who had to be let go by their employers– the Soviet authorities accused them of injudicious language in their writings or relationships with certain Russians who were their news sources, or of being spies. “In those Cold War days, Soviet national newspapers seemed to delight in attacking Western correspondents and portraying them as hopeless drunks who behaved in boorish fashion.”

In the late 1960’s, the author became a White House correspondent. He then returned to the Soviet Union. Read the book to learn of: the oppressive environment under which citizens and expatriates suffered in the former Soviet Union, the ways the KGB tried to bait the author and the ordeal he underwent due to that environment, how Soviet-American relations changed through the decades of the latter half of the Twentieth Century, and the policies of the American government concerning source disclosure and specificity of new stories when officials supply information to journalists.

Dirty Daddy

The Book of the Week is “Dirty Daddy” by Bob Saget. This is a tell-all autobiography. Some people are shocked to learn of Saget’s stand-up comedy persona–all toilet and sex jokes– because they knew him only as the goody-goody father of three young daughters on the 1980’s American sitcom “Full House.”

Saget writes that the development of his dirty image was influenced by his father, a butcher, who had a lively, shameless sense of humor. He rambles on a little too long about relationships– his own, and in general. Nevertheless, one should read this book to learn about the people and experiences that shaped his life through his gratuitous name-dropping and lighthearted anecdotes, if one can stomach occasionally repulsive scenes.

In the Name of Profit – Bonus Post

This blogger skimmed the ebook, “In the Name of Profit” by multiple co-authors, originally published in 1972. This depressing set of anecdotes on corporate greed simply reminds the reader that there is nothing new under the sun.

One theme is that through the 1950’s and 1960’s, big manufacturers such as Goodrich and General Motors had constructive knowledge that the products they sold were defective. Purchasers had bad experiences, and were seriously injured or were killed by those products. The companies’ attorneys and their employees rationalized that “‘planned obsolescence” meant progress. “But the meaning is clear: ‘Go cheapen the product so we can make more money.” In the case of drug company Richardson-Merrell, the product wasn’t cheapened, but rather, serious side effects were downplayed or hushed up and the results of FDA pre-approval testing were fabricated. Unsurprisingly, the company and its subsidiaries hired top-dollar attorneys skilled at helping businesses weasel out of legal trouble.

Another topic covered was Napalm, whose evolution began at Guadalcanal during WWII. “The Napalm fire bomb was deliberately designed as an indiscriminate terror weapon for mass destruction and death among civilians.” When people in Vietnam were harmed, Dow Chemical’s legal defense was bolstered by the fact that it had received orders by the U.S. Government to make the controversial product.

This ebook also discussed stock manipulation and corporate takeover. SEC laws were shown to be very lax in the 1950’s and 1960’s, as one particular perpetrator did jail time for various securities violations, but after his release, went right back to his old tricks. One Herbert Korholz repeatedly gamed the system with acquisitions. President of the Susquehanna corporation, he was able to bribe directors and officers in taking over another company with a secret tender offer of a share price higher than what was to be offered to the general share-owning public. “Profit-making firms can cut their taxes magnificently by merging with big losers…” One Maurice Schy, an attorney, attempted to make the government aware of Korholz’s unethical, unlawful and disgusting behavior, by filing lawsuits through the years, to no avail. Government officials were mired in conflicts of interest (favorable to Korholz’s interest) and ruled against Schy every time except one; a ruling was pending as this book was being released in 1972. Schy had finally gotten a possible break only because there was another case brought by another party against Korholz’s companies’ illegal activities.

In sum, we human beings are a mixed bag of evolutionary traits; altruism and greed among them. On many occasions, greed wins out, and we never seem to learn from those past occasions.