Good fuel for the fire for those who decry the rise of corporate power, a rise unlikely to be altered by the current...
Fierce indictment of a parallel-universe judicial system that punishes the poor but increasingly lets the rich walk away from the wreckage of their crimes.
In the early 2000s, writes Pulitzer Prize–winning ProPublica senior reporter Eisinger, the dot-com bubble burst “revealed a corporate book-cooking pandemic” that sent numerous corporate officers from Qwest, Enron, Adelphia, and other corporations straight to prison. Later in the decade, the crash that brought the world economy close to the brink of depression saw no prison terms for the top bankers who speculated their ways into disaster—even though Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke quietly observed that it would have sent a useful message to the financial community. Eisinger’s account picks up speed with the Enron investigation, which went after individuals as much as corporations themselves. The government’s prosecutorial strategy has since changed, rarely concentrating on single players and instead preferring not prosecution but settlement, a strategy that, writes the author, “corrodes the rule of law” and encourages criminal behavior. Eisinger identifies a few figures who have balked at going along to get along, such as a New York circuit judge who “broke with zombified judicial tradition…[and] refused to sign off on a settlement that he regarded as a sham,” a radicalization produced by the very financial crisis that other courts were trying to sweep under the rug. A few other players come in for damnation with faint praise, such as recently fired U.S. attorney Preet Bharara, who “might castigate corporate culture in a speech, but…was busting insider traders at hedge funds, a different beast altogether.” Eisinger’s overarching message is that a toothless regulatory and judicial regime cannot but produce—well, chickenshit results, such as the sentencing of a West Virginia mining CEO to a single year in prison for negligence that resulted in the deaths of 29 miners.
Good fuel for the fire for those who decry the rise of corporate power, a rise unlikely to be altered by the current administration.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2136-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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