Ehrenfeld, a research scholar at NYU Law School and author of Narcoterrorism (1990), ineffectively details several major cases involving money laundering and governmental corruption. In 1981, Ehrenfeld says, Los Angeles banks reported a $341 million cash surplus. In 1991, after L.A. became a money-laundering center, this increased to $5 billion—and Miami and Atlanta banks experienced similar cash booms. Here, the author maps the connection between cash and corruption, outlining three extended case histories, and several shorter ones, that show how this availability of cash has corrupted bank officials—and even whole governments, as with Lyndon Pindling's regime in the Bahamas. Colombia has become a ``narcocracy,'' contends Ehrenfeld, who offers examples of former American officials involved in money laundering. She also examines the case of Elizabeth Kopp, a former Swiss minister of justice forced to resign because she warned her husband that his company was under investigation for money laundering. Ehrenfeld is apparently an expert on this sort of exposÇ, but her expertise rarely shines through the mass of rather diffuse detail. The chapters are of highly irregular quality: that on Pindling seems secondhand, and, in the Swiss section, Ehrenfeld puts herself in the narrative, often giving her personal opinion on matters that should be dealt with more substantively. She seems to disdain any but the most perfunctory characterization and has an unerring eye for the banal detail: A salmon served by the Kopps ``tasted as good as it looked.'' Ehrenfeld seems more interested, and readers will be too, when she outlines links between BCCI, oil money, the Abu Nidal organization, and South American narcoterrorists or guerrilla groups such as Peru's Shining Path. Lifeless and uneven, padded with platitudes (``drug- trafficking is an evil acknowledged by all nations'') and minutia.
Pub Date: July 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-88730-560-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1992
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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