“An America where people . . . lived in fear of terrorists and the government would no longer be the same country,”...
Big Brother may have been dozing on 9/11, but you can bet he’s watching you now.
The line between liberty and security is thin, writes former Wall Street Journal correspondent Brzezinski (Casino Moscow, 2001). It’s getting thinner, and liberty is losing as America’s intelligence services struggle to catch up with events. It’s not that they didn’t have a head start: Brzezinski opens this bracing narrative with an anecdote set in the Philippines in January 1995, when al Qaeda operatives were caught plotting to destroy a dozen American airliners simultaneously. “We told the Americans about the plans to turn planes into flying bombs as far back as 1995.” Brzezinski quotes a Filipino police officer. “Why didn’t they pay attention?” Now, armed with a battery of constitutionally questionable laws, those services are scrambling to secure a daunting inventory of potential targets; as Brzezinski notes, for instance, most of America’s nuclear power plants are easily accessible to outsiders, and “the United States has 600,000 bridges to protect and 14,000 small airports from which terrorists can wreak havoc.” Given our failure to curb the drug trade, the utter lack of screening of airborne cargo, and the fact that just about anyone can walk into the White House, it seems reasonable to assume that terrorists will find a tempting target—and that they’ll succeed. Brzezinski offers examples of security operations that get it right, many of them to be found, not surprisingly, in Israel, where, one agent tells him, “Even the lowest beat cop . . . knows things that would be considered top secret in the States.” In other words, security need not mean secrecy, pace John Ashcroft and gang.
“An America where people . . . lived in fear of terrorists and the government would no longer be the same country,” Brzezinski cautions. That world may be upon us. An alarming, wholly provocative work.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-553-80366-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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