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A diet book by a neurologist. The neurological angle is, your nervous system is centered not just in your head: there's an almost equal network of ner
A diet book by a neurologist. The neurological angle is, your nervous system is centered not just in your head: there's an almost equal network of nerves in your gut. The gut neurons flood the brain with messages. These gut neurons in turn get signals from your gut microbes. Which tell the brain to eat more of the stuff they want: sugar! starch! fat! There are different kinds of microbes in your gut: the more you feed the ones who want the addictive foods, the more they scream for more. The doctor's prescription is to fight down the population of problem microbes in your gut with a course of increasingly potent Indian spices and herbs--along with meditation, and with paying attention to the cravings you have, and whether what you actually need might not be food at all. She does not proscribe any foods--though she herself eats mostly vegetables, whole grains, a little fruit, and occasional bone broth--all of it, except presumably the fruit, with curry spices, which she says have many benefits for both the digestion and the nerves. One suggestion of hers is to avoid eating late at night; eat the biggest meal at noon. All together, a very good, helpful, illuminating book. It's written not by the author alone, but with a co-writer who has brought a number of such topics to a popular audience. Part of what this seems to mean is that the doctor has not thought through her subject sufficiently clearly to herself write with perfect clarity. There are a couple glaring self-contradictions in her prescriptions*. Also, the idea of prescribing a remedy without knowing just what each reader's state of health is now, is rather contrary to the idea of medicine. Still, a valuable book. I doubt I'll do everything she suggests--I know I won't. But I'm considering how I can increase my consumption of curry spices. And I've reduced my late-night eating, my meat, my coffee, my sugar. This kind of book is an encouragement to better habits. And this one in particular, with its revelation about gut microbes having a large effect on how we feel and what choices we make--and that we can alter the population of those microbes by altering what we feed them--is well worth a read. * When she talks about eating cardamom pods, she contrasts this recommendation with "the cardamom in the tea." There is no cardamom in the tea. * Where she gives you a quiz to find out what "type" of body you are, she has two questions about what temperatures you prefer--and these two point to /different/ body types. ...more |
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it was amazing
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Fictionalized stories of (1) Tahitians who colonized Hawaii circa 800 CE; (2) Missionaries who came in 1822, and their descendants; (3) Chinese from C
Fictionalized stories of (1) Tahitians who colonized Hawaii circa 800 CE; (2) Missionaries who came in 1822, and their descendants; (3) Chinese from Canton province, imported to work sugar cane; (4) Japanese from Hiroshima province, imported to work sugar cane and pineapple after Chinese began leaving the fields to open shops. Michener writes with deep understanding and true affection of each of his many characters.
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| Apr 06, 2010
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The main appeal is to a fascination with the gutter: it's a story of people having bad lives; it's not a fun read. Important messages include: It's fr The main appeal is to a fascination with the gutter: it's a story of people having bad lives; it's not a fun read. Important messages include: It's friendships and giving and receiving acts of kindness that make life livable—whatever our situation. Tobacco and alcohol each destroy far more lives than all illegal drugs put together. The author is bemused by this disconnect between destruction and criminality—yet she doesn’t recognize her own “legitimate” work advertising and marketing for some of the most rapacious corporations as at least as immoral as her criminal transport of heroin and drug money. Only since 1980 has the prison population exploded to 2.3 million locked up, 7 million either behind bars or on probation or parole. Much of this is due to mandatory minimum sentencing of low-level violators of drug laws, signed into law by Bill Clinton. The U.S. now has 5 times the world average fraction of its population behind bars—up from average in 1980. This orgy of imprisonment has not made us safer. Arrests, prosecutions, convictions, and sentences correlate strongly to skin color and poverty. Indeed, the author did far less time, in far easier circumstances, after a far longer delay, than many poorer, darker-skinned convicts of similar or lesser crimes. There is nothing correctional about prison. It's purely punitive warehousing. Prisoners are infantilized throughout their term, and dumped out with no assistance readjusting to the world after what is often a very long time. Prisoners who are allowed to work are paid 14 cents an hour. In the U.S. Prisoners have to buy their own soap, pay for phone calls; anything they're allowed to buy is at a much higher price than it would be outside. The author's experience in a minimum-security women's prison is far less dire than a "real" prison. None of the worst horrors happened to her. Her experience was merely degrading, maddening, and mind-numbing, a waste of that part of her life. At a minimum-security women’s prison, she enjoyed certain freedoms many of us lack on the outside, such as to go alone to a running track before dawn. The few such places that would be open to the public in the average city would all be off limits at night. Indeed for many of us, to travel on foot at night is to invite harassment by inebriated adolescent motorists, or by police, or worse. The author’s worst time came during months she was locked up in the federal jail in Chicago, waiting—while the trial was repeatedly postponed—to testify against another member of her gang. The author was imprisoned for an offense ten years in the past, revealed when the drug gang she once carried money for was finally caught. All the names, and some of the personal characteristics, of the people mentioned in the book have been fictionalized. The author doesn’t say whether her own name is a pseudonym—but if she’s trying to provide privacy to her friends and family, then their names and personal details, and hers, are probably false. That’s kind of weird in a memoir—you expect an author of romance novels or mysteries to use a pseudonym, but in an autobiography, falsifying names and details is odd. The author never explains the meaning of the chapter title, “Diesel Therapy.” Wikipedia knows it to mean cruelly excessive transport time—as indeed the author did suffer in waiting to testify. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_... ...more |
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Details ways in which various countries governments are actually kleptocracies, existing to siphon wealth into the hands of government officials for t
Details ways in which various countries governments are actually kleptocracies, existing to siphon wealth into the hands of government officials for their private benefit. These include Afghanistan (the U.S.-created Karzai regime, where the corruption is funded by the U.S. CIA), Egypt, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, and Nigeria. Then at the end, we hear the fall of the other shoe: the worst of the bunch is the U.S. itself. Here the kleptocracy exists to use the machinery of government to enrich Wall Street banks and corporations--often illegally. The author cites four other books for further reading on U.S. corruption: Simon Johnson and James Kwak, /13 Bankers/, 2010 Charles Ferguson, /Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America/, 2012 Neil Barofsky, /Bailout/, 2012 Laurence Lessig, /Republic Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress/, 2011 and the documentary film /Inside Job/, 2010, whose author, Charles Ferguson, details the "deliberate concealment of financial transactions that aided terrorism, nuclear weapons proliferation, and large-scale tax evasion; assisting in major financial frauds and concealment of criminal assets . . . ." ...more |
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| 4.25
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it was amazing
| Chapters 2, 3, 19, 34, 41, 44, 46, and 60 are particularly illuminating. The chapter on Israeli Jews (chapter 19) is saddening. Their G
Chapters 2, 3, 19, 34, 41, 44, 46, and 60 are particularly illuminating. The chapter on Israeli Jews (chapter 19) is saddening. Their Gush Eminem faction, that cares only about occupying land, can and does destroy any possibility of peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They illegally occupy Palestinian land, and the Jewish state "has to" spend massive money and manpower protecting them and their homes from attacks by the Palestinians they displaced. Moreover the Israeli government spends vastly more money building highways bypassing Palestinian cities to these illegal Gush Eminem settlements. This carves up Palestine, making a Palestinian homeland impossible. Of course, the U.S. government massively subsidizes the Israeli state. The Israeli Jews are split into factions. The multiple factions of religious Jewish communities act like competing crime families, "smugglers, tax evaders, operate unregulated banking operations used by the PLO to launder money" (p. 191). Israelis from Europe look down on and marginalize Jews from North Africa and the Middle East. The latter are a growing bloc: the former fear that the dominance of African and Asian Jews will transform Israel into "occupied territory, imposing an alien religious law!" (p. 194.) This without irony. The original leaders of the Israeli state were not religious Jews at all, but secular. They saw their Jewishness as membership in a tribal group. Chapter 46, Islamic Communities in South Asia, gives a lovely summary of teachings of Sufi master Nizam al-Din Awliya (1244-1325): (1) Service to the needy is better than ritual worship. There are innumerable ways leading to God; the surest is bringing happiness to others. (2) The presence of God is found among the destitute and needy. (3) Egoistic chauvinism is real idolatry, to be combated by loving compassion, open-hearted acceptance of others, and religious tolerance. The path is to (1) serve a spiritual master; (2) embrace voluntary poverty, and (3) revive the life of the heart by listening to devotional music. Chapter 44, Shi'a Islamic Societies, surprisingly says there is "no serious difference in articles of faith between" Shi'a and Sunni Islam. Surprising, as Sunnis have destroyed Shi'ite shrines; news accounts of which suggested differences in interpretation of Islam played a role. p. 449, The chapter on U.S. protestantism (chapter 32) strangely defines the “old-line, established" churches as Episcopal, Presbyterian, and, of all denominations, United Church of Christ—and the “more moderate” denominations as Disciples, Methodist, and, of all denominations, Lutheran. What I've heard is that while Lutheran churches were expelling openly gay clergy, Episcopal and Presbyterian churches welcomed them. And the UCC is so liberal it's been accused of standing for "Unitarians Considering Christ." Mark Juergensmeyer has written the charming, perceptive, and unique Religion as Social Vision : the Movement against Untouchability in 20th Century Punjab, the brave translation of ancient Indian poetry in Songs of the Saints of India, and a number of other interesting books on Indian religion, religious violence, and conflict resolution. More books by Mark Juergensmeyer and related works:
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| 3.80
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Arabs and Israel for Beginners Very readable account. Zionists are the bad guys. The state of Israel has no right to exist. Every bit of land was taken Arabs and Israel for Beginners Very readable account. Zionists are the bad guys. The state of Israel has no right to exist. Every bit of land was taken by murder and theft from the Palestinians who had been there for thousands of years. U.S. foreign policy has been captured by AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The New York Times, CBS, all the major media, are controlled by Zionists, present a false, one-sided story. Zionist Jews in the United States during WWII persuaded the U.S. government to refuse to accept refugees of the holocaust! They wanted to force Jews to move to Palestine, and force Palestine to accept them. The book recounts from ancient history up to 1993. It was published in 2001, but presents the 1993 peace treaty as if there was a possibility that the Israelis intended to honor their part of it. (They have continued the ethnic cleansing, appropriation of land, subjugation of the indigenous population that they've done since WWII.) The author appears to know only what he's read in popular accounts. He gets many names wrong, gratuitously states that "normal" people think Iran is an Arab country, and misidentifies Croesus as Athenian (he was Lydian, from western Turkey). He also writes as if he thinks "Abraham's journey from Ur" really happened. The author admits that until a few years before he wrote the book, he was so gullible he swallowed all the lies the Israelis and their stooges told. Yet for all its marks of amateurishness, this book stands as an important account on a critical subject. For insight on the composition and internal behavior of Jewish communities within Israel, see the chapter on Israeli Jews in the Oxford Handbook of Global Religions, ISBN 9780195137989, Mark Juergensmeyer, ed.. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... It will open your eyes. Religious Israeli Jews behave as competing crime families: laundering money, evading taxes, shirking responsibilities of citizenship, denying the legitimacy of the secular state that supports, protects, and benefits them. The Zionists that persuaded the international community to create Israel in 1947 were not religious at all, but secular: they saw their Jewishness as tribal membership. The Ashkenazi East Europeans look down on and marginalize the many Jews from the Arab world who were forced out of their home countries after Israel was created. For current, informed analysis, here's Noam Chomsky: https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/qa-n... ...more |
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| 0520255151
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| 3.90
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| Jan 01, 2009
| Jun 18, 2009
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The U.S. government is complicit in the abuse of workers, bringing them into the country on A-3, G-5, B-1, and J-1 visas, that tie workers to individu
The U.S. government is complicit in the abuse of workers, bringing them into the country on A-3, G-5, B-1, and J-1 visas, that tie workers to individual employers, and give the workers few rights and fewer protections. Agriculture, domestic work, any low wage occupation traps thousands of people in slavery.
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| 9780385535595
| 0385535597
| 4.30
| 25,520
| Jan 19, 2016
| Jan 19, 2016
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Dark Money, Jane Mayer, 2016, 449pp. ISBN 9780385535595 Energy-corporation owners' wealth controls U.S. universities, media, politicians, public opinio Dark Money, Jane Mayer, 2016, 449pp. ISBN 9780385535595 Energy-corporation owners' wealth controls U.S. universities, media, politicians, public opinion, and public policy. We increasingly live in not just an aristocracy of wealth, but in a monarchy of wealth. A Charles Koch (1935- ) or a Richard Mellon Scaife (1932-2014) or a John M. Olin (1892-1982) can and does set policy for the U.S. government, and sets the bounds of the conversation for the media, academia, and politics. And no, the monarch's influence does /not/ die with him. His hundreds of (tax-exempt) everything-for-the-rich think tanks, institutes within universities, and media organizations are still spewing their toxic message. That message is, the private interest of one man is one valid side of the debate (we'll call it, "conservative"). The public interest--environmental protection, economic fairness (decent pay, fair prices, constraints on monopolies), public services, public schools, human rights beyond the right to own property, civil rights--all that is the enemy side. We'll call it, "liberal." "Liberal" is illegitimate. Of course the king may do anything. "Conservative" is the only legitimate position. These few billionaires have changed the debate. In the 1970s there was a consensus that the public interest is a valid goal. That consensus was considered /non-partisan/. The New York Times editorial page and the Ford Foundation proudly supported the public interest. They believed they were non-partisan. Enter hundreds of think tanks, academic institutes, front groups, astroturf organizations, right-wing news media, all funded by a few billionaires. These hyperpartisan (and mostly tax-exempt) thought leaders accused media and foundations that supported the public interest, of /partisanship/. And the New York Times and the Ford Foundation, and everyone else who'd supported the public interest, /started giving voice and support to the all-for-the-billionaire worldview/! Billionaires created these all-my-way-nothing-for-anybody-else message mills partly as a tax dodge! There's a tax law: a billionaire can leave his entire estate to his heirs, pay /no/ estate tax, /if/ for 20 years the /interest/ on the estate is given to charity. That charity can be the billionaire's own foundation. Its educational, social, cultural charitable work can be funding attack-dog think tanks slavering to destroy the common good and bring back feudalism. The festeringly-rich are anti-government as long as government helps anyone /else/. Government contracts to Koch companies, regulations prohibiting /competition/ against the Kochs--all OK. The Kochs got so rich in part thanks to environmental regulations preventing any /new/ refinery of tar-sands muck--after Koch bought the one by Minneapolis, letting him buy all the very cheap crude and sell full-price gasoline. (p. 71) 75 clergy Democracy, or concentrated wealth. Choose. Louis Brandeis 2 Charles Koch (w/ brother David (1940-2019) owner of 2d largest private corp in U.S.) 6th & 7th richest men in world. Each $14B 2009. 3 1980 Wm. F. Buckley: Kochs "Anarcho-Totalitarianism" 3 1978 Charles Koch: "Our movement must destroy the prevalent statist paradigm." 4 Richard Mellon Scaife, banking & oil heir Harry & Lynde Bradley, defense contract tycoons John M. Olin, chemical & munitions Coors family DeVos family, Amway 5 Charles Lewis, Center for Public Integrity: "Kochs lawbreaking, manipulation, obfuscation." 5 Kochs & cronies huge sway over U.S. regulatory & tax law in Bush II years. 7 Kochs sponsored meetings of rich political "investors" 2x/year since 2003. free-market pressure group. 2003 15 people. Koch corporate project. Fight environmental action. 8 Koch political conferences by 2009: speakers Scalia &Thomas 8 1972 W. Clement Stone $2M to Nixon campaign ($11M in 2016 $) led to laws limiting gifts. 2016 Kochs & friends $889M political war chest. 8-9 Koch secrecy. 9 2009 18 billionaires in Koch anti-regulation, antitax club, 2009-2015. Tot. $214B wealth of 18 billionaires. 10 2007 1% owns 35% of U.S. private assets, takes 25% of all earnings. 10 Oligarchy. Jeffrey Winters, Joseph Stiglitz. 11 Dollars game U.S. policy. Mike Lofgren. Rich just extract loot. Winner-take-all. Jacob Hacker 12 Koch summit full guest list June 2010. Plurality of financiers. Hedge fund. Insider traders. $10.3B Steven A. Cohen. Vulture Paul Singer, buys distressed debt of poor countries, pressures U.S. govt to squeeze poor to pay Singer a profit. 13 carried-interest loophole 14 Home Depot founder Ken Langone 14 tax avoidance 15 Richard DeVos co-founder of Amway guilty of customs fraud. Son Dick & his wife Betsy fined $5.2M violating Ohio campaign-finance law. 16 Corbin Robertson Jr. owned 21 billion tons of coal reserves. largest private hoard in U.S. Fights EPA. 16 coal mine unsafety. Frackers. 17 invisible rich: privately-held companies 17 Many Koch donors have legal trouble. Bribery. Corruption. Illegal sales to Iran. Stock-backdating. Safety violations. 18 Many govt. contractors among antiregulation antitax "investors." Steven Bechtel Jr. 6th-lgest private company in U.S. Built Hoover dam. $39.2B govt contracts 2000-2009. Cost overruns. Shoddy work. Superrich believe "I can do any fucking thing I want!" 19 Nonpartisan /National Journal/: John Cornyn (2009 Koch summit speaker) 2d-most-conservative Republican senator. Big tent: get more votes. Sen. Jim Demint, S. Carolina: compromise is surrender. 20 Demint: war on regulations & spending. (except, of course, regulations and spending that benefit /us/!) Better 30 Republicans that believe in something than a majority that believe in nothing. Massive resistance & obstruction vs. Obama. (Though Obama not liberal at all.) 21 Koch's Americans For Prosperity reversed position on 2008 bank bailouts when market fell, threatened Koch portfolio. "But if Kochs' personal interest trumped free-mkt. principles, no mention to libertarians, whose $ they wanted to fight Obama." 22 Charles & David Koch together have largest fortune in world. Obama no clue what up against. Post-partisan! Meaning Republican in all but name! 25 Part 1: Weaponizing Philanthropy: war of ideas, 1970-2008 27 Chapter 1 Koch history. 28 buy judge. rules are for chumps. 29-30 Fred C. Koch fueled Nazi war machine. Built refinery in Hamburg in 1935. Father of Charles & David. 31 F.C. Koch pro-fascist. June 1944, Allies finally destroy Koch Hamburg gasoline refinery. Kill 42,000 civilians doing it. 32 Freddie b. '33, Charles b.. '35, twins David & William b. '40. 34 boy Charles' favorite game King of Hill. Hasn't changed. 38 1958 Fred C. Koch 1 of 11 original John Birch Society members. 40 Birch Society modeled self on Communist Party. Stealth, subterfuge. Secret membership. Fight dirty. Deceit, dishonesty. 41 F.C. Koch donates big to Goldwater 1964. Charles M.S. nuclear & chemical engineering. 42 F.C. Koch set up trust to hand his wealth tax-free to his heirs. Philanthropy as tax avoidance. Special law benefits Kochs: give interest to charity 20 years, permanently keep all principal, tax-free. 44 Charles dean of antigovernment Freedom School. Taught: robber barons were heroes. Tax is theft. Govt is socialism. Slavery is OK. "no govt, no cops, no fire dept, no public school, no health or zoning law, no army. Anarchy. Reduce Bill of Rights to one: right to own property." 45 Charles loves Ludwig von Mises & Friedrich Hayek's laissez faire. 1944 Readers Digest of Road to Serfdom includes only pure laissez faire, omits Hayek's call for minimum standard of living for poor, environment & safety regulations, monopoly price controls. 46 Hayek calls free market key to all human freedom. Glorified capitalists, vilified govt. See Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands. 46 Charles lifelong, tax-deductible sponsorship of antigovernment. 48 F.C. Koch richest man in Kansas when died, 1967. 49 Charles Koch book Science of Success, 2007, lauds his own virtue, quiet on his inheritance. 49 David Koch: "My father gave me an apple. I sold it for $5. I kept buying & selling apples 'til he died and left me $300 million." 49 Koch Industries refinery near Minneapolis bought muck crude from Canada, cheap. Sold gasoline same price as other refineries. Environmental regulations prohibited others from doing the same. Koch grandfathered in, protected from competition by govt. By 2015, Koch Minneapolis plant processes 350,000 barrels Canadian crude/day. 1/4 of U.S. Canadian tar sands imports to this one plant. Koch largest exporter of oil from Canada. 52 Koch Industries gains "beyond phenomenal. In a 50-50 deal, Charles takes the hyphen." 53 "They live in a world with people like them, or who want to be. Know no poor people. Don't feel obliged to get to know the help." 53 Kochs main underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics. Tear govt out at the root. Control everything himself. 54 "Our movement must destroy the prevalent statist paradigm." --Charles. Wanted to be the Lenin of the antigovernment revolution. Not just the Marx. Disdain public. Need subterfuge. Don't say "anarchy." Though that's what they want. 55 Cato Institute is Charles Koch's. Taxfree. Secrecy. Invite antigovernment media to summits. Glenn Beck. 56 Washington Examiner, Weekly Standard, Daily Caller. Koch-funded Institute for Humane Studies. Fund institutes within universities. Donors control hiring, hide donors' goals. Use ambiguous & misleading names, obscure true agenda, hide control. 1976 Charles wrote Libertatian Party energy policy: no govt control. 57 1980 David runs as Libertarian U.S. vicepresidential candidate--so can spend unlimited $ attacking Reagan from the right. Platform: no campaign finance laws, no Federal Election Commission, no medicaid, no medicare, no social security, no income tax, no corporate tax, no capital gains tax, no prosecution of tax evaders, no Securities & Exchange Commission, no Environmental Protection Agency, 58 no FBI, no CIA, no minimum wage, no prohibition of child labor, no public schools, no compulsory education, no Food & Drug Administration, no Occupational Safety & Health Administration, no welfare. Repeal the last several centuries. Govt protect only property rights. No war. Legalize drugs & prostitution. 1980 1% of vote. "politicians are actors playing out a script." Kochs decide to write the scripts. Fund academia & think tanks. 1980-2010 Kochs $100M to dozens of seemingly independent radical organizations. Demonize govt. Accumulation of vast private wealth is America's purpose. Collectively: the Kochtopus. 59 Philanthropy anonymous taxfree route to control. Fight moderation. Return to feudalism. 60 Chapter 2: Hidden Hand: Richard Mellon Scaife. Banking, Alcoa, oil heir. spent $620M to influence U.S. politics. Died 2014. 61 Ancient Carthage fell after its rich elite failed to back General Hannibal. Scaife League to Save Carthage formed 1964. Goldwater lost to LBJ. 62 Field Marshall Scaife, hero of 1950-2000. 63 "The normal condition of man is hard work, self-denial, acquisition and accumulation; as soon as his descendants are freed from the necessity of exertion they begin to degenerate sooner or later in body and mind." --Thomas Mellon, 1885 63 Great-grandson Richard b. 1932. "Dickie" alcoholic, as were mother & sister. 64 Family preoccupied w/ preserving its wealth. Andrew Mellon, Treasury Secretary under Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, fought against income tax, enacted 1913. See /Rich People's Movements/, Isaac William Martin. 65 Andrew Mellon: inequality is just reward for virtue. 65 1921 capital gains taxes cut, stocks boom. 1926 Andrew gets tax law passed to cut taxes on rich more deeply than any other tax law in history. Andrew had to pay back taxes he had evaded. 66 tax-exempt Sarah Scaife Foundation formed Dec. 1941. Pro-war, but avoid paying their share. 67 Richard Mellon Scaife feels entitled. "I put dollars to work in the battle of ideas." 68 Richard Mellon Scaife taxfree inheritance. 20yr interest to charity; principal forever free. "Isn't it grand how tax law gets written?" 69 tax law thus spurred funding antigovernment movement: Kochs & Mellons. Donate to their own philanthropic foundations. Few restrictions. Give 5% of assets per yr to nonprofit organizations. 70 donors pay much lower income taxes. 70 Teddy Roosevelt: "charitable spending can't make up for misconduct in acquisition" opposing John D Rockefeller's 1909 first private foundation. "repugnant to democratic society." "menace." private foundations "represent by definition plutocratic voices. antidemocratic, undermine political equality, affect public policies, exist forever." 71 2013 over 100,000 private foundations, assets .8 Trillion. Opaque, unaccountable, publicly subsidized by tax breaks, huge sway over public policy. "irresponsible. why not a scandal?" 1917, donors got unlimited charitable deductions. 73 1971 Lewis Powell memo: tycoons, fight back! 74 environmental and consumer laws! oh my! OSHA! oh no! antiwar! what next? respect for business plummeting. anti-tobacco! Lewis Powell a director of Philip Morris 'til Nixon put him on Supreme Court. 75 Lewis Powell wanted Federal Communications Commission to grant tobacco companies equal time to tout benefits of smoking. "our 1st amendment rights are being infringed! We need pro-business courts!" see /Corporations Are Not People/, Jeffrey Clements. 75 income in mid-1970s less unequally distributed than before WWII or during or after Reagan years. "we're under attack"--Powell memo 1971. Enemies are "respectable elements of society!" colleges, clergy. media. politicians. TAKE THEM OVER! Guerrilla war! Capture public opinion! Take over the judiciary! Control textbooks! TV! professorships! politics! long-range planning, massive financing. 76 Also Irving Kristol, Wall Street Journal editorial page columnist: downplay self-interest. Talk family & faith. Weaponize philanthropic giving. Scaife gave $990,000 to Nixon 1972 in $3000 checks to 330 front groups. Nixon forced out 1974. Now focus on think tanks: the artillery in war of ideas. 77 Scaife helped bankroll 133 of antigovernment movement's 300 most important institutions. 1975-1998 Scaife charitable trust gave $23 million to Heritage Foundation: lion's share of its funding. Scaife had been biggest donor to American Enterprise Institute. But AEI feared loss of nonprofit status, didn't lobby. Heritage Fdn. did. Coors donated. 78 Unions, civil rights, federal social programs, counterculture threaten hereditary aristocrats' way of life. 78 Coors gives 6-packs; Scaife gives cases. 79 Earlier think tanks were public-interest. See /The Paradox of American Democracy/, John Judis. Brookings Institution, 1916, "free from political or monied interest." Likewise other fdns, colleges, elite news organizations: nonpartisan facts. Didn't see selves as liberal but impartial truth-seek ...more |
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This is a personal letter to his son, by a young African-American man, about what it means to be an African-American man. 152 pages. It means you're a This is a personal letter to his son, by a young African-American man, about what it means to be an African-American man. 152 pages. It means you're a target of police violence. It means you can be killed by a cop anytime, anywhere, on no pretext, and the cop will be back on the street. That's, unfortunately, not because there are a few bad cops. Or a few bad police departments. It's because society as a whole has determined to fear young Black men. And because society as a whole has determined to tolerate a regime wherein justice is incidental to law and order. In other words, it doesn't matter whether the person killed was innocent: the goal is to create an atmosphere of fear, so that undesirables will stay out of comfortable neighborhoods. The majority of American society has created this regime. Deliberately. Some of Coates' insights: P. 7: "race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming "the people" has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy." p. 24: (speaking to his young son) "when I was about your age, each day, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not--all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body." (Violence comes from other Black denizens of the bad part of the city, as well as from cops.) p. 26: "I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance." p. 27: "Fully 60 percent of young Black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not . . . ." Schools offer no explanation. "Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them." "Unfit for the schools, and in good measure wanting to be unfit for them, and lacking the savvy I needed to master the streets, I felt there could be no escape for me, or, honestly, anyone else." "The ground we walked was trip-wired. The air we breathed was toxic. The water stunted our growth. We could not get out." Here is a brilliant move by Coates' mother: p. 29: "When I was in trouble at school (which was quite often) [my mother] would make me write about it. The writing had to answer a series of questions: Why did I feel the need to talk at the same time as my teacher? Why did I not believe that my teacher was entitled to respect? How would I want someone to behave While I was talking? What would I do the next time I felt the urge to talk to my friends during a lesson. I have given you [my son] these same assignments. I gave them to you not because I thought they would curb your behavior--they certainly did not curb mine--but because these were the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness. Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing--myself." p. 30: "Dad had been a local captain in the Black Panther party. I read through all of Dad's books about the Panthers and his stash of old Party newspapers. I was attracted to their guns, because the guns seemed honest. The guns seemed to address this country, which invented the streets and secured them with despotic police, in its primary language--violence. And I compared the Panthers to the heroes given to me by the schools, men and women who struck me as ridiculous and contrary to everything I knew. p. 33: I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body. And I began to see these two arms in relation--those who failed in the schools justified their destruction in the streets. The society could say, 'He should have stayed in school,' and then wash its hands of him." p. 36: Malcolm [X] . . . was the first honest man I'd ever heard. . . . 'If you're black, you were born in jail,' Malcolm said. And I felt the truth of this in the blocks I had to avoid, in the times of day when I must not be caught walking home from school . . . ." p. 42: "'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining) [the practice of mortgage lenders of drawing red lines around portions of a map to indicate areas or neighborhoods in which they do not want to make loans. Redlining on a racial basis has been held by the courts to be an illegal practice.] But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, "white people" would cease to exist for want of reasons." p. 48: "The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free." p. 50: "I was only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger--I didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble." pp. 52-53: "just outside of Washington, D.C., there was a great enclave of black people who seemed, as much as anyone, to have seized control of their bodies. This enclave was Prince George's County [Maryland]--'PG County' to the locals--and it was, to my eyes, very rich. Its residents had the same homes, with the same backyards, with the same bathrooms, I'd seen in those televised dispatches. They were black people who elected their own politicians, but these politicians, I learned, superintended a police force as vicious as any in America. . . . PG County police were not police at all but privateers, gangsters, gunmen, plunderers operating under the color of law." p. 56: [In response to a racist question, "where is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?"] "'Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,' wrote [Ralph] Wiley. 'Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.' . . . In fact, [racist Saul] Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga." p. 60: "Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe..." p. 61: "love was an act of heroism." p. 62: "[newspaper] editors . . . were the first white people I'd ever really known on any personal level." p. 65: "She [Coates' wife] had never known her father, which put her in the company of the greater number of everyone I'd known." "the bodies of women are set out for pillage in ways I could never truly know." pp. 78-79: "The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of the country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies--the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects--are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs." p. 82: "a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket." p. 84: "I called politicians and questioned them [regarding the murder by cop of Prince Jones]. I was told that the citizens were more likely to ask for police support than to complain about brutality. I was told that the black citizens of PG County were comfortable and had 'a certain impatience' with crime. . . . I knew that these were theories, even in the mouths of black people, that justified the jails springing up around me, that argued for ghettos and projects, that viewed the destruction of the black body as incidental to the preservation of order. According to this theory 'safety' was a higher value than justice, perhaps the highest value. I understood. What I would not have given, back in Baltimore, for a line of officers, agents of my country and my community, patrolling my route to school! There were no such officers, and whenever I saw police it meant that something had already gone wrong. All along I knew that there were some, those who lived in the Dream, for whom the conversation was different. Their 'safety' was in schools, portfolios, and skyscrapers. Ours was in men with guns who could only view us with the same contempt as the society that sent them." pp. 90-91: "All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls to 'be twice as good,' which is to say, 'accept half as much.'" p. 96: "It only takes one person to make a change," you are often told. This is also a myth. Perhaps one person can make a change, but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countrymen. "The fact of history is that black people have not--perhaps no people have ever--liberated themselves strictly through their own efforts." p. 97: "There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally." p. 98: "Solzhenitsyn. 'To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.' This is the foundation of the Dream--its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works." p. 101: "At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of the American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined" p. 102: "[Confederate] soldiers charging through history, in wild pursuit of their strange birthright--the right to beat, rape, rob, and pillage the black body." pp. 104-105: "South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. 'And all the [whites], the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.' And there it is--the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below. [Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage]" p. 129: "summer that the killer of Trayvon Martin was acquitted, the summer I realized that I accepted that there is no velocity of escape." p. 131: "the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong. p. 143: "the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans." pp. 150-151: ". . . Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. . . . The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all." p. 152: "the mark of these ghettos--the abundance of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and crumbling housing" Other insights I've added as trivia questions: https://www.goodreads.com/trivia/work... ...more |
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I wish I'd had this book before I took college chemistry. Whereas a chemistry text presents the subject as one the student must understand thoroughly
I wish I'd had this book before I took college chemistry. Whereas a chemistry text presents the subject as one the student must understand thoroughly before beginning study, Gray shows some of the simplicity. Where university chemistry presents Organic Chemistry as this vast, incomprehensible field, with millions of compounds, Gray shows us how carbon atoms combine with each other and with hydrogen, in simple, predictable ways. Pages 19-20, and page 228, are particularly illuminating. Pages 19-20 show all the 50 ways 1, 2, 3, or 4 carbon atoms can form molecules with just each other and hydrogen. 1 Carbon atom can form just one such molecule: CH4, methane. 2 Carbons can form three distinct molecules: C2H2 acetylene, C2H4 ethylene (ethene), C2H6 ethane. 3 carbons can form nine distinct molecules: C3 (no hydrogen), cyclopropatriene. C3H2 two ways C3H4 three ways C3H6 two ways C3H8 one way, 2-methylpropene 4 carbons can form 37 distinct molecules: C4 (no hydrogen), 3 ways C4H2, 7 ways C4H4, 11 ways C4H6, 9 ways C4H8, 5 ways C4H10, 2 ways Gray shows us pictures of all of these: in every case each carbon has 4 bonds to other carbon or hydrogen atoms; each hydrogen has one bond. Page 228 shows DNA's code. A DNA molecule is a library of books called chromosomes, composed of sentences called genes. Each gene codes for one protein. Genes are written in a language that has 22 words in its dictionary. The words are called codons: each codon specifies a particular amino acid (building blocks of proteins), or a "STOP: end of gene: end of sentence. end of protein." The codons are all three-letter words. The letters are the bases adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine: A, G, C, T. Gray shows us which amino acid (21 in all) is coded for by each of the possible 64 codons, each a three-letter word of AGCTs. It's a picture book. Gray bemoans how many of the pictures are of white powders, which many organic compounds are. Gray explains how the structure of the molecule gives rise to the physical and chemical properties of the compound. Molecules is a kind of a sequel to Gray's book, The Elements. However, comparing the two books makes clear that it is in combining that chemical elements become interesting. The Elements seems to be largely just a set of photos of Gray's odd collection of items fashioned from pure or nearly pure chemical elements. The Molecules book demystifies some of the basics of chemistry--and points out how very few chemical elements--indeed, just two, carbon and hydrogen--it takes to make a great many of the most useful and ubiquitous compounds. Gray's other books, on Mad Science, feature him doing impressive and dangerous demonstrations, such as salting popcorn in the smoke formed by bubbling pure chlorine through molten sodium. Gray is a true egghead: one of the authors of Mathematica software, which does seemingly impossible computation. He's a lifelong amateur chemist, and very good at explaining how things work. https://www.wolfram.com/books/search.... Some of Gray's insights I've put into Goodreads trivia question form: https://www.goodreads.com/trivia/auth... ...more |
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Interesting moreso than fun. Roseanna Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö 1965 in Swedish, 1967 in English ISBN 9780307390462 Spoiler alert! A different kind of murde Interesting moreso than fun. Roseanna Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö 1965 in Swedish, 1967 in English ISBN 9780307390462 Spoiler alert! A different kind of murder mystery. The murder isn’t just there to provide a body, and the hero doesn’t solve the case by deductive brilliance. The crime is solved, if it ever is, by persistence, collaboration, procedure, effort, time, waiting, chance, observation, interviewing, intuition, sacrifice of personal relationships and personal health, persistence, persistence, luck, risk, danger. Or may be not solved at all. It seems very much like a true story. Per Wahlöö was a reporter, as well as a playwright and novelist. The detectives make a great commitment to solving the case. In this story, the name and history of the victim is a mystery, and of course of the killer too. The detectives try to understand who the victim was, what she did, what she thought, how she lived, where she went. The police express compassion for the victim, and even for the man who killed her. It’s a story of murder and violent sexual brutality. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö paint a picture of society at the time, Sweden 1964. Geography, bureaucracy, drabness, frugality, cold, illness, overwork. None of the characters seem to have very satisfying personal lives. Roseanna is #1 of ten Martin Beck mysteries, Martin Beck being the main detective among several. 1. Roseanna 2. The Man Who Went up in Smoke 3. The Man on the Balcony 4. The Laughing Policeman 5. The Fire Engine that Disappeared 6. Murder at the Savoy 7. The Abominable Man 8. The Locked Room 9. Cop Killer 10. The Terrorists This review is also at https://www.worldcat.org/profiles/Tom... ...more |
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The book is a work of journalism, but Goldberg is on board with the decriminalize-abortion attitude expressed by Norway's prime minister: “Morality bThe book is a work of journalism, but Goldberg is on board with the decriminalize-abortion attitude expressed by Norway's prime minister: “Morality becomes hypocrisy if it means accepting mothers' suffering or dying in connection with unwanted pregnancies and illegal abortions, and unwanted children living in misery.” [Norwegian Prime Minister, speech at 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development, Cairo. Quoted in The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, Michelle Goldberg 2009, pp. 103-104] Goldberg shows us some of the horrors of banning all abortion: botched illegal abortions, doctors forced to wait 'til fallopian tube bursts when embryo grows there, 9-year-old raped by stepfather forced to bear child. Goldberg gives us some of the scope of the problem: 42 million abortions per year worldwide, 20 million of them unsafe. [p. 3] The Western embrace of birth control is largely to limit population. Seven billion now, adding a billion every 12 years, have already caused extinction of half the plant and animal species that existed less than a lifetime ago. Human-caused biosphere warming gives storms, floods, droughts, ocean acidification and dieoffs. goodreads.com/book/show/17910054-the-... Official alarm at high and rising population, and especially fear of revolting peasants, led to a focus on birth control at the expense of concern for peoples' well-being and wishes. India in the 1980s forced many poor men to have vasectomies. China's one-child policy led to widespread female infanticide. And the United Nations Population Fund gave the Indian and Chinese leaders /awards/ for this! [pp. 82-83, 100] People have come to understand that even if all you care about is reducing births, especially of /those/ people, the way is to empower women, not take away their option of motherhood but provide opportunity for a meaningful life in other ways too. The United Nations is mostly on board with the women's-rights-are-human-rights idea goodreads.com/book/show/26173970-wome... thanks to activism by women in recent decades. Abortion bans are largely relics of colonialism: part of the colonizers' patriarchal control of women at home, a mindset exported to the colonies. [p. 41] The book is available mainly just at university libraries. worldcat.org/title/means-of-reproduct... Library of Congress call number: HQ 766.5 D44 G65 2009 234 pages plus end matter. Quiz question: goodreads.com/trivia/work/6172179-the... ...more |
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Has little to do with the test. The best way to find out what such a test is like is to take it; then take it again at the next opportunity. This book p Has little to do with the test. The best way to find out what such a test is like is to take it; then take it again at the next opportunity. This book presents many of the type of question that could occur on such a test, and perhaps questions from previous tests in previous years. The 955 test now contains only two sections: The section on patterns, such as match the perspective drawing with the top, side, and front views, and find which whole shape could be made from the slices shown. The subject-area section contains astonishingly few questions on each subject area. If you're weak on a given subject area, such as refrigeration or electronics, you're probably better off with a book on that area. Still, as nonspecific as this book is to the test it purports to prepare for, it will give the reader some sense of the type of thing that might be on such a test. Sadly, USPS careers are quickly evaporating. As of January 6, 2015, first-class mail delivery standards are a thing of the past. Mail that once would have been delivered the next day, such as anything in the local area, now can take the better part of a week. USPS has destroyed its processing and distribution network: once some 500 processing and distribution plants, soon to be 135. The remaining plants no longer make an effort to sort and send out all first-class mail the same night. Meanwhile, private processing centers, paying poverty wages, are everywhere, absorbing deep "work-sharing" discounts given to private companies which do the work USPS once did. The Internet could have been the biggest boon to post since paper: if USPS were to say, "if you want to mail a document, e-mail it to us; we'll print it at and deliver it from the destination post office," it would be a very popular and profitable service: the impact of paper at nearly the speed of e-mail. USPS has not offered the service--purely because FedEx wouldn't like it. It's because only the big mailers, the big suppliers, and the big competitors have a seat at the postal decision-making table, that USPS service has gone away. The American people have not hired a lobbyist to fight for their interests, and have no seat at the table. More at http://worleydervish.blogspot.com/sea... and http://www.savethepostoffice.com/ ...more |
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An important and eye-opening book. We learn: Slavery was brutal. People were tortured to force them to pick cotton superhumanly fast and efficiently. Sl An important and eye-opening book. We learn: Slavery was brutal. People were tortured to force them to pick cotton superhumanly fast and efficiently. Slavery was far more efficient and effective than free labor. Cotton was *the* commodity of the Industrial Revolution. The American economy, South and North, and that of Britain and Europe, rested on cheap cotton produced by enslaved people. It was slavery that lifted nonenslaved people out of the Malthusian trap. War truly was necessary to end slavery. It would not have ended on its own. Powerful people never give up power voluntarily. Southern enslavers controlled U.S. government policy from colonial times until the 1850s. The minute they saw they weren't going to get all their demands met, they seceded: *before* Lincoln was inaugurated. Brilliantly well-written. And, slavery in all but name is still the foundation of the world economy, and is getting worse, in the U.S. and elsewhere. Only during 4 decades after WWII in the U.S. did government enforce rules allowing a middle-class society to exist. Since the late 1970s, we've been galloping back to the early middle ages: a few superpowerful superrich, the rest workers in destitution. note: p. 160: "Here is something that is no accident: the most popular and creative genres of music in the history of the modern world emerged from the corners of the United States where enslavers' power battered enslaved African Americans over and over again." p. 163: "being a voice recognized by one's peers gave one a reason to live." p. 166: "Oh Suzanna" is "the story of an enslaved man trying to find his true love, who'd been taken to New Orleans" p. 195: David Walker, An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, Sept. 1829 p. 236: Bryan Edwards, Jamaican planter, history of the West Indies, 1790s. p. 371: Joshua Giddings and Salmon Chase, "Appeal of the Independent Democrats," 1854: "labor cannot be respected when any class of laborers is held in bondage." Amen! (An injury to Juan is an injury to Al!) ...more |
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Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II, William Blum, updated edition 2014, 471 pages, Dewey 327.1273 B625k 2014, ISBN 9
Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II, William Blum, updated edition 2014, 471 pages, Dewey 327.1273 B625k 2014, ISBN 9781783601776 1945-1994 (with a few updates to 2014): Comprehensive, concise, matter-of-fact reports of each case, some with newly declassified or uncovered information. Fifty-six grim chapters. Three appendices: clandestine financing, U.S. military attacks 1798-1945, U.S. Government assassination plots. The U.S. has sabotaged /every/ socialist experiment everywhere in the world. p. 20. For all of this information that has made its way into popular consciousness, or into school texts, encyclopedias, or other standard reference works, there might as well exist strict censorship in the United States. p. 15. Our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anticommunism already has. --Michael Parenti. p. 7 In 1918, barons of American capital waged war against communism for its threat to their wealth. p. 10. By 1945, Americans had absorbed 25 years of anticommunist venom. Anticommunism lived, independent of its capitalist father. "Good Americans vs. communist evil" had graduated from cynical propaganda to U.S. foreign policy. p. 11. Saint George and the dragon needs a dragon. U.S. claims of a Soviet threat were all lies. p. 19. The U.S. knew the Soviets would not attack. But the U.S. continued its military build-up and cold-war propaganda. p. 119. CIA officers behaved as if they were British colonial governors, and all the world was India. p. 149. The Reagan administration transferred vast wealth from the poor to the rich, partly by huge increases in the military budget. p. 283. This is the best book on the topic, according to Noam Chomsky. Imperialism abroad leads to despotism at home. p. 383. The U.S. massacred Filipinos after the two countries together defeated Spain. In WWII, the U.S. crushed the Filipino anti-Japanese resistance army, occupied the country, supported a corrupt government, and forced lucrative trading concessions to U.S. interests. pp. 39-44. The U.S.-puppet government killed 100,000 South Koreans on /suspicion/ of opposing the government. pp. 51-52. The U.S. destroyed Korea, bombing and napalming. Why? Because there was a communist side to the civil war. p. 55. Western recruitment of East German professionals and skilled workers led to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. p. 63. The U.S. targeted 200 leading West German Social Democrats to be killed, for being willing to coexist with the Soviet bloc. p. 64. The CIA persuaded Iranian military officers to overthrow their government in 1953, installing the Shah. He permitted the U.S. to build military bases; permitted profiteering Western oil companies; instituted a secret police force that imprisoned and killed thousands of dissenters. The U.S. lavished military aid on the Shah, used against the civilian population. pp. 64-72. Guatemala, 1953-1954. 2.2% of landowners owned 70% of the land. Annual per-capita income of agricultural workers was $87. Before the revolution of 1944, which overthrew the Ubico dictatorship, the army roped laborers together for delivery to lowland farms, to be kept in debt slavery by the landowners. p. 74. President Árbenz offered United Fruit (now Chiquita), $525,000, its own assessed valuation for tax purposes, for some of its unused land; the company wanted $16 million. United Fruit owned Guatemala's rail, telephone, and telegraph facilities, administered its only important Atlantic harbor, monopolized banana exports. Top men in Eisenhower's administration had financial interests in United Fruit. p. 75. A U.S. disinformation campaign persuaded Guatemalan military officers to force President Árbenz to resign. p. 80. The U.S. demanded that many Guatemalan leaders be killed, "because they're communists." When Guatemala's new president refused, the CIA bombed Guatemala. Eisenhower's team installed Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas as president. He arrested thousands on suspicion of communist activity, tortured and killed many. He gave United Fruit its land back. Labor-union leaders were murdered. Castillo Armas disenfranchised 3/4 of Guatemala's voters, outlawed political parties, labor unions, and peasant organizations, closed opposition newspapers. p. 81. The U.S. overthrow of Guatemala convinced Che Guevara that armed struggle was the only path to justice. p. 82. The "anticommunist" terror would continue in Guatemala for over 40 years. p. 83. [The U.S. spent far more money destroying Guatemala and Guatemalans than United Fruit claimed Árbenz took from them.] Books on Guatemala: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list... Indonesia 1957-1958. President Sukarno organized a conference of underdeveloped-world countries in 1955 at Bandung, Indonesia, proclaiming neutrality. The CIA tried to overthrow him, killing hundreds of Indonesians. Sukarno was finally overthrown in 1965. pp. 99-103. Vietnam, 1950-1973. To Truman, a communist government was intolerable. p. 122. Ho Chi Minh would've been elected president of a united Vietnam. So with Eisenhower's OK, South Vietnamese president Diem cancelled the election. p. 126. The U.S. stopped fighting Vietnam in 1973, but embargoed all trade and assistance until 1994. Tens of millions of gallons of herbicides, including dioxin, the most toxic man-made substance, continue to poison the Vietnamese. pp. 132-133. Cambodia, 1955-1973. Prince Sihanouk refused to join SEATO, the U.S. anticommunist military alliance. He was no communist, but had no quarrel with his neighbors. The CIA finally succeeded in overthrowing Sihanouk in 1970. The overthrow started a 5-year war, the U.S. and its Cambodian vassal against the Khmer Rouge. p. 137. The U.S. bombed Cambodia to dust after the end of the Vietnam war, destroying the country, leaving 2 million Cambodians homeless. After the Khmer Rouge won the war in 1975, the U.S. supported them. p. 139. The U.S. dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on the people of Laos, 1965-1973. p. 144. Because the Pathet Lao were led by people the State Department categorized as "communist." p. 140. Congo's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, wanted Congo to be independent. Top Eisenhower men had financial interests in Congo minerals. p. 157. CIA director Allen Dulles ordered Lumumba's assassination, probably on Eisenhower's orders. p. 158. After Lumumba's murder, the U.S. military and CIA supported opposite sides in Congo's civil war. p. 159. Mobutu became dictator, brutalized and impoverished his people, and cooperated with the CIA and Western mining interests. p. 162. The U.S. overthrew the Brazilian government in 1964, beginning a 20-year dictatorship that aided U.S. efforts to overthrow the governments of the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, and Chile. p. 170. The U.S. funded Brazil's torture and death squads. p. 171. The CIA and U.S. military armed, trained, and led Peru's military to crush insurgencies aimed at land reform. Peasants averaged 500 calories a day. 1960-1965. pp. 172-174. The CIA and U.S. military occupied the Dominican Republic, 1960-1966, eventually scaring the Domicans into submitting to a U.S.-business-friendly government. pp. 175-184. Cuba, 1959-1980s. The CIA spent $50 million/yr. in the 1960s sending Cuban exiles back to Cuba to sabotage and murder, to try to damage and discredit the socialist experiment. The total U.S. trade and credit embargo against Cuba continues to this day. p. 187. [Noam Chomsky explains the embargo in Rogue States, 2000: https://chomsky.info/roguestates03/ ] Cuba became what the U.S. feared: a good example. Land reform, education, medical care, no death squads. p. 191. Indonesia 1965. U.S. diplomats listed thousands of suspected communists, for the Indonesian army to kill. p. 194. Ghana 1966. President Kwame Nkrumah published a book, /Neo-Colonialism--The Last Stage of Imperialism/. The CIA then overthrew him. p. 198. Uruguay 1964-1970. The CIA trained Uruguayan police in torture and assassination, and supplied explosives for their death squads. p. 201. From 1972 to 1983, Uruguay's dictatorship had the most political prisoners per capita in the world, all tortured. p. 203. Chile 1964-1973. The CIA spent vast sums influencing the 1964 Chilean election, preventing Salvador Allende from winning the presidency that year. pp. 206-208. Allende's program would've included income redistribution (the top 2% got 46% of the income), to nationalize copper mining, and agrarian reform. p. 208. Allende won in 1970, despite heavy CIA propaganda and the murder of the Chilean military commander-in-chief. p. 210. The U.S. then prevented imports and bank loans from reaching Chile, funded and trained the Chilean military, hoping for a coup, and bankrolled labor strikers so strikes could be prolonged. p. 211. The CIA- and U.S.-military-sponsored Chilean military coup brought down Allende in 1973, succeeded by a murderous, authoritarian regime. p. 214. Greece 1964-1974. A CIA agent became prime minister of Greece in 1967. p. 218. Thousands of Greeks were tortured under the new regime. Bolivia 1964-1975. With U.S. help, a military coup installed a brutal right-wing government. p. 228. Guatemala 1962-1980s (postscripts to 1995). A few hundred families possess almost all arable land. Three-quarters of the people are malnourished. Almost half the children die before age 5. The U.S. lavished arms, training, and assistance to a succession of brutal dictators, who unleashed a bloodbath to keep it that way. pp. 229-239. Australia 1973-1975. Australia's Labour government objected to the CIA's use of Australia and Australians to commit genocide in East Timor and Southeast Asia, overthrow governments in Greece and Chile, and surveil the world, including Australia and Australians, without the knowledge or consent of the Australian government. The British queen's appointed governor general--who was CIA's man--dismissed the Australian government. pp. 244-249. Angola 1975-1980s. The CIA fomented, fought in, and prevented the end of a civil war in Angola, to no purpose. Kissinger and the CIA lied to Congress and the media, and to the Angolan client tribe, about everything. The Soviet-supported tribe won the war. The world did not end. American oil companies continued to profit there. Reagan, though, restarted CIA and military attempts to destroy the Angolan government. pp. 249-257. The CIA located Nelson Mandela for the South African government in 1962, which then imprisoned him for 28 years. p. 253. Zaire 1975-1978. Purposeless U.S. intervention in civil war. pp. 257-263. Jamaica 1976-1980. The Jamaican government taxed bauxite extraction. The CIA responded with violence, mass murder of Jamaicans by poisoning rice and flour, fomenting labor unrest, economic destabilization, and assassination attempts. pp. 263-267. Seychelles 1979-1981. pp. 267-269. The CIA tried to overthrow the Seychelles government, out of concern that Seychelles might not renew the U.S. lease of a military base. Grenada 1979-1984. pp. 269-277. A socialist government presented the danger of a good example. The U.S. unleashed indiscriminate death and destruction on the tiny island, occupied it indefinitely, and ensured an authoritarian government. Morocco 1983. pp. 278-279. CIA client state Morocco assassinated one of its generals for advocating closer relations with France, which made the CIA unhappy. Suriname, 1982-1984. pp. 279-280. Reagan's CIA tried to overthrow the Suriname government, on unsubstantiated claims of Cuban influence there. Libya, 1981-1989. pp. 280-289. The Reagan administration bombed Libya, shot down Libyan jets, destroyed Libyan ships. The Reagan administration told outrageous lies about alleged Libyan crimes. Qaddafi's crime in Reagan's eyes was, he supported the /wrong/ terrorist groups. (The one terrorist group both men supported was the Afghanistani Moujahedeen.) But even when Qaddafi stopped supporting terrorist groups, and adopted business-friendly policies, the U.S. maintained its crusade against him. He had value as an enemy. pp. 283. Nicaragua 1978-1990. pp. 290-305. In 1979, the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza kleptocracy, installed by the U.S. military in 1933. In 1979, two-thirds of the population earned less than $300 per year. Jimmy Carter authorized the CIA to give money and other support to the Sandinistas' opponents. The Reagan administration stopped international bank loans to Nicaragua, slashed sugar imports by 90%, destroyed fuel depots and pipelines, destroyed ports and ships coming to and from Nicaragua, destroyed agricultural infrastructure and produce, destroyed roads, bridges, trucks, houses. The U.S. provided the formerly small-time "contra" thugs with military planes, landing strips, docks, radar stations, training, reconnaissance, surveillance. The contras destroyed schools, health centers, agricultural cooperatives, community centers. The contras killed 9,000 Nicaraguans, 1981-1984, as the CIA taught them to. The Reagan administration blocked all attempts to make peace between the contras and the Nicaraguan government. Panama, 1969-1991. Noriega had been /our/ thug. When he started getting independent, the G.H.W. Bush regime invaded Panama, killed a lot of people, installed a puppet government, left the economy in shambles, drug-traffickers and money-launderers freer than ever. pp. 305-314. Bulgaria 1990/Albania 1991. pp. 314-320. The socialist government won the Bulgarian elections. So the U.S. poured money into the opposition, which staged strikes and demonstrations, until the socialist prime minister resigned. The U.S. won banker-friendly policies in Bulgaria: freely-rising prices, shortages of everything, IMF and World Bank demands for ever-tighter belts. Living conditions are bad: communism was "the good old days:" people had housing, employment, and enough to eat. The U.S. made sure socialism would have no chance to succeed, though capitalism fails. Same story in Albania. Iraq 1990-1991. pp. 320-338. Iraq seems to have been goaded into attacking Kuwait, so the U.S. would have reason to attack Iraq. pp. 323-324. U.S. senators immediately called for more military spending, despite the end of the cold war. pp. 325-326. The U.S. curtailed aid to Yemen for voting in the U.N. to disapprove of the coming U.S. attack on Iraq. p. 327. The U.S. put more than 500,000 troops in the Gulf area--100,000 more than in Europe at any time in the Cold War. p. 328. The U.S. Army insisted on a ground war; this prolonged the war; the bombing was already decisive. p. 328. The U.S. had armed both Iraq and Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, so they would inflict maximum damage on each other. p. 332. The U.S. targeted many nonmilitary facilities, and slaughtered refugees trying to leave Iraq. p. 336. Bomb damage and the U.S. embargo dropped electricity to 3 to 4% of prewar level, water to 5%, oil production negligible, food distribution devastated, sewage system collapsed, flooding houses with raw sewage, gastroenteritis and extreme malnutrition prevalent. Water-borne disease and malnutrition killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis after the war. p. 335. Afghanistan 1979-1992. pp. 338-352. The Carter administration began supporting Afghan Islamic fundamentalists--despite their penchant for kidnapping U.S. embassy personnel and exploding airliners--to try to destroy the fledgling socialist Afghan government. pp. 338-345. The Afghan government then invited the Soviet Army's help--first time since WWII the Soviets fought outside the USSR. p. 344. The U.S. was eager to fight to the last Afghan to give the Soviets a Vietnam-style defeat. pp. 345-346. The Soviets did suffer a bleeding in Afghanistan, leaving in 1989. But the U.S. kept arming Islamist terrorists. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the CIA's anti-aircraft guns, missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47 automatic rifles, ammunition and mines were stolen by Pakistani Army officers or sold to Iranians or to criminals. pp. 348-350. As little as 20% of the arms reached the intended Islamist terrorists. The Iranian military then used U.S. missiles against U.S. aircraft. The CIA helped Islamist terrorists transport heroin: Afghanistan supplied 75% of Western Europe's heroin, and 1/3 to 1/2 of heroin to the U.S. p. 351. The war killed more than a million Afghanis, disabled 3 million, made 5 million refugees: in total about half the population. Destroyed the government, destroyed the country. p. 351. Veteran Moujahedeen terrorists exploded a bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, that only just failed to demolish the building. p. 352. The Islamists won. Afghanistan had an Islamist government for the first time since it became independent in the mid-1700s. And this was an anti-modernity perversion of Islam. pp. 351-352. Out of the Moujahedeen came Al Qaeda. p. 388. El Salvador 1980-1994. pp. 352-369. El Salvador since 1932 has suffered a succession of U.S.-approved dictatorships, serving 14 ruling families, while people starve. p. 353. The CIA aids death squads. p. 354. The government, with U.S. help, began land reform: troops told workers the land was theirs, elect leaders. Troops then killed the leaders. Carter, Reagan, and G.H.W. Bush kept the murderous government armed, supplied, and trained. pp. 356-358. Reagan lied to Congress to keep the funding coming. p. 366. Haiti 1986-1994. pp. 370-382. Most U.S. military aid to the Duvalier dictatorships was covertly routed through Israel. p. 370. The Duvaliers' yet-more-murderous successors enjoy U.S. Government approval. A popular priest, President Aristide, was deposed by the military with U.S. complicity. As a "leftist," he antagonized U.S. power centers. p. 375. The U.S. and international financial institutions ensure that Haiti is ruled so as to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor. p. 382. The U.S. killed a 1992 agreement among Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs for a unified state. p. 389. Your tax dollars at work! More: Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, William Blum, chapter 17. The System: An Insider's Life in Soviet Politics, Georgi Arbatov, 1992: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... https://search.library.wisc.edu/searc..." Books on neocolonialism: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list... Prensa Latina (Cuba): https://www.prensa-latina.cu ...more |
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Everything the CIA writes is done with an agenda in mind. It's spin: its goal is to convince the reader that the U.S. must be ever ready to intervene
Everything the CIA writes is done with an agenda in mind. It's spin: its goal is to convince the reader that the U.S. must be ever ready to intervene all over the world, and that the U.S. (and CIA) have done no wrong. If you want accurate history of the countries of the world where the CIA and U.S. military have intervened (nearly everywhere), you won't find it here. A tip of the truth starts to emerge in books such as: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, Tim Weiner Back on the CIA factbook itself, don't rely on what you read. For instance, the CIA gives navigable waterways' total length per country, showing Vietnam with more than the U.S., and the sum of all countries' totals less than a quarter of their world total. They seem to be lying about the U.S. total at least. cia.gov/library/publications/resource... [or search for navigable waterways] In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story, John R. Stockwell JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, James W. Douglass Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope, Beatriz Manz Joel Andreas' Addicted to War: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... General Smedley Butler's War is a Racket: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Sara Miles' La Verdadera Guerra (links to two of her English-language articles after clicking "war" at:) https://www.goodreads.com/trivia/deta... Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, Eduardo Galeano ...more |
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Joseph Stiglitz The Price of Inequality I have to start by saying The Price of Inequality is $27.95 hardcover. Sorry. Had to be done. Stiglitz, rare amo Joseph Stiglitz The Price of Inequality I have to start by saying The Price of Inequality is $27.95 hardcover. Sorry. Had to be done. Stiglitz, rare among economists, does recognize that inequality has many other, higher, prices. Still he is an economist, and has drunk more of the Kool-Aid of his profession than he realizes. For example, Stiglitz tells us: “The virtue of the market is supposed to be its efficiency.” He goes on to worry about how it can be made more efficient. Yet the market’s efficiency is largely in transferring wealth from the many who have too little to the few who have more than they could spend in many lifetimes. p. xi “we . . . need . . . to promote development.” Yet development in practice often means destroying the natural world primarily for the benefit of the wealthy, while worsening the lives of the general population. p. xii “We have vast underutilized resources—workers and machines that are idle or are not producing up to their potential.” Stiglitz would have us maximize production. Which usually has vast environmental costs, and makes the focus of life on putting in long hours to feed the machine and on consuming more and more of what we don’t need. p. xii Stiglitz is expressing his profession’s attitude that our goals should be to maximize measurable quantities, preferably expressible in dollars. To the contrary. The most important things can’t be measured, certainly not in dollars. An intact forest is priceless. No amount of money can replace it. To her kids, a full-time mother is priceless. Taking her away from them to add to the measurable dollar economy comes at incalculable cost to them. The goals of the economics profession are simply the wrong goals. Its worldview is wrong. Economics exists to tell the lie about the invisible hand: “If everyone pursues his own self-interest, everyone is better off.” The reality is the all-too-visible boot of the market dominator on the neck of everyone else. The above is a little of what Stiglitz reveals about where he’s coming from, in his preface to the 2012 English-language edition—and a bit of my rant in reply. The takeaway from the book is: We are so screwed. No politician will ever stand up to any monied interest. The uber-rich have rigged the system through control of politicians and regulators, monopolies, nugatory taxes on inheritance, capital gains, and corporate profit, no taxes on wealth, union-busting, freeing trade as a race to the bottom in wages, working conditions, rights, and environmental protections, and every other way imaginable. Despite the short final chapter on "what must be done to fix it," it's depressing. Stiglitz makes his case for just how bad everything is and how much worse and how fast it's getting worse, with great authority. It's important stuff to know. The Spanish-language 2012 version begins with a prologue on the depression in Spain, and how Eurozone bankers created and amplified it by demanding that financial decisions be made strictly and solely in the interest of bankers' profits, to the cost of everyone else. isbn 9786071121301 The message is a hard one to take in, in any language. ...more |
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Miles gives a unique perspective on Christianity: she is someone whose parents protected her from the dour religion their parents had inflicted on the
Miles gives a unique perspective on Christianity: she is someone whose parents protected her from the dour religion their parents had inflicted on them. Therefore at age 46 she was completely a blank slate walking into a church. The one she walked into was St. Gregory's of Nyssa (Episcopal, in the Anglican communion) in San Francisco. It is unique in the effort its founding priests put into making relevant liturgy. Miles' reaction was unique in wanting and expecting the church to live its words. Miles lived the words, "Feed my sheep," starting a food pantry at St. Gregory's, which led to starting many other food pantries around San Francisco. Miles is a good writer with an interesting life story. She was a reporter in the dirty wars of Central America and the Philippines, in the Reagan-Bush years. She had learned and practiced the craft of cooking in busy New York City restaurants. Many of Miles' perspectives on Christianity I've copied in the form of "trivia questions," link here: https://www.goodreads.com/trivia/work... ...more |
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Online at piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/AtkinsonPike... 584 pp. Several income and estate graphs for France, UK, and US for 20th century of interest to the g Online at piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/AtkinsonPike... 584 pp. Several income and estate graphs for France, UK, and US for 20th century of interest to the general reader. A particularly illuminating one is on page 149 (167 of 584 of the pdf): Only from 1943 to 1986 did the highest-income .01% take no more than 100 times the average income in the United States. By 2000 the highest-income .01% were back up to 300 times the average income--a level last seen in 1928. It was just about a 40-year flirtation with progressive taxation, labor law, and antitrust law that allowed a middle class to thrive in the United States. A brief, shining moment. It's long over now. The bad old lords-and-serfs world is coming back. That graph is repeated on page 234 (252 of 584 of the pdf) comparing to Canada, which has same pattern but less extreme. The text is largely of interest only to specialists. The authors go into detail on methods of massaging the data. Graphs are available on Piketty's World Wealth & Income database, http://wid.world The book for the general reader is Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. ...more |
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goodreads.com/trivia/author/795282.Th... is where I've listed some of Piketty's insights. Piketty has assembled vast data on wealth and income distribu goodreads.com/trivia/author/795282.Th... is where I've listed some of Piketty's insights. Piketty has assembled vast data on wealth and income distributions over the last 2 to 3 centuries for many countries. He explains clearly how wealth inequality is a self-amplifying system. He correctly identifies that only a global tax on wealth itself--not just a tax on income, but a tax on wealth--not a tax in just some jurisdictions, that can be avoided by moving the money--together with global financial transparency--can save us from plunging back into the dark ages. One criticism: he falls into the trap common to academics, of thinking we can all educate ourselves out of low-wage work. To the contrary, getting everyone a postdoc in economics before we go to work doing all the jobs that have to be done, most of which don't need extensive education, will only be a jobs program for economics professors: it will be a massive opportunity cost, to no benefit. Muhammad Yunus has it right that in most cases people don't need more training--they just need loans for tools and materials to go into business doing what they already know. Piketty mines literature, including novels, for historical information on wealth and income disparity. Piketty has researched the history of income and wealth inequality from the 1600s to the present. He presents important insights. See also Top Incomes Over the Twentieth Century: A Contrast Betweem Continental European and English-Speaking Countries by Anthony B. Atkinson and others including Thomas Piketty, for some wealth and income graphs for the twentieth century. My review of that book: goodreads.com/review/show/915833593 My notes on his World Top Incomes Database: http://wid.world *For only forty years, from 1942 through 1981, has the top 0.01% income share – including capital gains – been less than 1.65% (the average of the top .01% less than 165 times the average family income). These were the years when the federal government effectively wielded political power – through labor law, antitrust law, and progressive taxation – to create a level playing field. Every year on record before and after that, the .01% share of income has been higher: These are the years when federal troops and federal courts have weakened labor rights, antitrust provisions weakened, progressive taxes lessened. The wage controls during world war II acted to lift the working class into the middle class. The collapse of top tax rates, union-busting, and deregulation, under Reagan, released the hunting dogs to eat all of the carcass they can swallow. *select “united states” “from 1917 to 2009” “bottom 90% average income including capital gains” *“Bottom 90% average income – including capital gains” has been in the low $30,000s per year per “tax unit” (family) from 1967 through 2009, in real 2010 dollars. However, the composition of the family (tax unit) has changed from 1967 to 2009. The average family is smaller now (tax unit). So the per capita income has gone up. How much? Data not shown. However, the typical family now has more than one earner—while the real earnings haven’t increased. Yet the P90 income threshold—the top of the bottom 90%--has steadily increased, from $77k to $110k, while the average of the bottom 90% has stayed flat. So some of us in the bottom 90% are losing income, while the top of the range gains. *The graph for canada, 1972 to 2000, shows canadian Bottom 90% average income – including capital gains, at around $16,000, in real 2000 canadian dollars—but, is this an average by tax unit (family), as the U.S. number is, or, does the canadian average per capita? The graph doesn’t say. *For australia, 1941 to 2008, bottom 90% avg. income (doesn’t say whether capital gains are or are not included) was in the high 20,000s from 1973 to 2003, then jumped to the mid to high 30,000s from 2004 to 2008, in real 2010 australian dollars. Exchange rates, aren’t shown. *UK, 1918 to 2009, shows bottom 90% avg. income – tax units at 15447 in 1989 (the peak and last year for that datum), then bottom 90% avg. income – adults at 12965 in 2009 (the peak and last year for that datum), in real 2010 pounds. *Comparison across countries means little or nothing without the definition of the tax unit, the definition of income, and the exchange rate. http://topincomes.parisschoolofeconom... world top incomes database Warnings The top income share series are constructed, in most of the cases presented in this database, using tax statistics. The use of tax data is often regarded by economists with considerable disbelief. These doubts are well justified for at least two reasons. The first is that tax data are collected as part of an administrative process, which is not tailored to the scientists' needs, so that the definition of income, income unit, etc., are not necessarily those that we would have chosen. This causes particular difficulties for comparisons across countries, but also for time-series analysis where there have been substantial changes in the tax system, such as the moves to and from the joint taxation of couples. Secondly, it is obvious that those paying tax have a financial incentive to present their affairs in a way that reduces tax liabilities. There is tax avoidance and tax evasion. The rich, in particular, have a strong incentive to understate their taxable incomes. Those with wealth take steps to ensure that the return comes in the form of asset appreciation, typically taxed at lower rates or not at all. Those with high salaries seek to ensure that part of their remuneration comes in forms, such as fringe benefits or stock-options which receive favorable tax treatment. Both groups may make use of tax havens that allow income to be moved beyond the reach of the national tax net. These shortcomings limit what can be said from tax data, but this does not mean that the data are worthless. Like all economic data, they measure with error the 'true' variable in which we are interested. The data series presented here are fairly homogenous across countries, annual, long-run, and broken down by income source for several cases. Users should be aware also about their limitations. Firstly, the series measure only top income shares and hence are silent on how inequality evolves elsewhere in the distribution. Secondly, the series are largely concerned with gross incomes before tax. Thirdly, the definition of income and the unit of observation (the individual vs. the family) vary across countries making comparability of levels across countries more difficult. Even within a country, there are breaks in comparability that arise because of changes in tax legislation affecting the definition of income, although most studies try to correct for such changes to create homogenous series. Finally and perhaps most important, the series might be biased because of tax avoidance and tax evasion. For the details, we refer users to the original papers (see also Atkinson, Piketty and Saez, 2011). How to cite the database? Information taken from this site should be cited as Alvaredo, Facundo, Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, The World Top Incomes Database, http://g-mond.parisschoolofeconomics...., dd/mm/yyyy. We advise making explicit reference to the date when the database was consulted, as statistics are subject to revisions. The specific country chapters and papers should also be cited. References Atkinson, Anthony B. and Thomas Piketty (2007). Top Incomes over the Twentieth Century: A Contrast between Continental European and English-Speaking Countries (Volume 1). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 585 pp. Atkinson, Anthony B. and Thomas Piketty (2010). Top Incomes over the Twentieth Century: A Global Perspective (Volume 2). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 776 pp. Atkinson, Anthony B., Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez (2011). Top Incomes in the Long Run of History, Journal of Economic Literature, 49(1), pp. 3-71. Kuznets, Simon (1953). Shares of Upper Income Groups in Income and Savings. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 707 pp. Piketty, Thomas (2001). Les Hauts Revenus en France au 20ème siècle. Paris: Grasset, 807 pp. Piketty, Thomas (2003). Income Inequality in France, 1901-1998, Journal of Political Economy, 111(5), pp. 1004-42. ...more |
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|
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15
|
| 4.45
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Nov 15, 2015
|
|||||
91
|
| 3.78
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Nov 09, 2015
|
|||||
57
|
| 4.03
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Mar 21, 2015
|
|||||
12
|
| 3.33
|
it was ok
|
Jan 08, 2015
|
Jan 10, 2015
|
|||||
7
|
| 4.46
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 31, 2014
|
Oct 31, 2014
|
|||||
132
|
| 4.24
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Jul 19, 2014
|
|||||
87
|
| 3.96
|
did not like it
|
not set
|
Jun 23, 2014
|
|||||
17
|
| 4.02
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
May 22, 2014
|
|||||
25
|
| 4.00
|
really liked it
|
Jan 2014
|
Apr 27, 2014
|
|||||
74
|
| 4.50
|
liked it
|
not set
|
Apr 20, 2014
|
|||||
4
|
| 4.06
|
it was amazing
|
not set
|
Apr 20, 2014
|
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