A solid, useful exploration of a system that “needs substantial, systemic change.”
A tale of greed and corruption involving “corporate landlords” who “drove a generational transfer of wealth from hundreds of thousands of individual homeowners to a handful of well-heeled bankers and titans of private equity.”
Many previous books have painted searing portraits of massive financial fraud in the mortgage and investment banking world, including David Dayen’s Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud (2016). While Dayen told his tale mostly from the ground up, Glantz (The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans, 2009, etc.), a Peabody Award–winning investigative reporter, relates the saga mostly from the top down. The author spotlights a variety of contemporary robber barons, including Donald Trump before he was president; Trump’s father, Fred; Wilbur L. Ross Jr. before he was the Secretary of Commerce; and Steven T. Mnuchin before he became Secretary of the Treasury. Glantz’s impressive research leads him to portray each of the tycoons as morally bankrupt and utterly without compassion for homeowners who lost their property. Occasionally, the author shifts the narrative to Sandy Jolley, a cheated homeowner who gathered copious amounts of information, found a lawyer willing to present her damning case to the federal government, and stood to gain substantial damages from the bankers under a law meant to reward whistleblowers. As Glantz relentlessly builds the indictment against the bankers, he wonders why law enforcement agencies failed to take any meaningful action. “It’s hard to imagine [deals] so perfectly designed to lazily allow the government to undercut working-class Americans on behalf of a small group of billionaires,” he writes, “but that is exactly what happened again and again.” In addition to the Trumps, Ross, and Mnuchin, Glantz also levels warranted attacks against John Paulson, Jamie Dimon, Jared Kushner, and Sean Hannity. The similarities of the moguls’ many predations may tire some readers, but the insertion of Jolley into the narrative bolsters the storyline.
A solid, useful exploration of a system that “needs substantial, systemic change.”Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-286953-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
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