A former diplomat’s report on how corruption has permeated the United Nations and what can be done about it.
The United Nations’ Oil for Food Program with Iraq was so riddled with fraud that Saddam Hussein was able to graft more than $1 billion from the humanitarian operation. Former UN diplomat Pierce believes the scandal is the tip of the iceberg and that “massive corruption [at the UN] has been allowed to occur worldwide with impunity for decades.” This collection of “investigative essays” is an attempt to document that corruption and suggest reforms that will clean up the UN’s bureaucracies. If corruption is not addressed, Pierce warns, there could be civil unrest, armed conflicts and even international wars, and the UN could become a base of operations for organized crime and terrorist groups. Reform is “of utmost importance for us all,” Pierce says. Unfortunately, rather than discuss specific instances of corruption, Pierce laboriously dissects the internal procedures of the UN and the author presents no evidence to support the idea that terrorists might infiltrate UN organizations. Adding to the frustration, Pierce’s writing is often dense and difficult to absorb. The author also reveals little about his or her experiences at the UN, saying only that he/she spent 25 years as a diplomat for a small member nation. The author indicates his/her interest in exposing corruption at the UN was related to staff reductions. “[W]e had all been rained on by destructive arbitrary management in several organizations of the UN system,” Pierce says, going on to argue that the corruption emanates from abusive management of staff and can “only work successfully, and therefore with impunity, by also defrauding Staff Members of their legal and labor rights and, in many cases, of their human rights.” The book’s proposed institutional reforms focus on increasing the transparency of UN bureaucracies and the job security of staff members. “[P]ersonal history will find no place in this collection of essays,” Pierce says; but a more personal approach might have prevented the book from becoming the dry, disjointed dissertation that it is. An impassioned “wakeup call” for reform of the bureaucracies of the United Nations that would have benefited from clearer writing and structure and a more personal view of life as a UN diplomat.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-1439201398
Page Count: 588
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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