A startling window into the bribery that shapes the world in which we live, including the major corporate players and...
Following the money to discover how corporate payoffs and billions of dollars in bribes have shaped current events.
In his debut book, investigative journalist Montero, a former Christian Science Monitor correspondent and Frontline producer, peels back layers of corruption to uncover the secret network of bribery and intimidation that exists among many of the world's largest corporations and the public officials who profit from their misconduct. Culled from a mix of court records, leaked confidential documents, and personal interviews, the book details how corporate payoffs contributed to the regime of Saddam Hussein, the economic collapse of Greece, and other instances of national governments selling out their constituents to the highest bidder. “Corporate bribes involve a remarkable amount of money,” writes the author. “The World Bank has estimated $1 trillion a year, though this may represent the high end; others have placed the amount at 10 percent of the $4 trillion spent annually on global public procurement.” Providing a closer look at how these massive transactions are orchestrated, Montero profiles the middlemen who specialize in rubbing elbows with world leaders and heads of industry while ensuring that any illegal financial transactions remain below the radar of federal investigators. The incredible wealth and unapologetic public personas of the many co-conspirators are both fascinating and deplorable. The author is at his most compelling when connecting these sordid backroom dealers with some of the world's most recognizable brand names and the international conflicts that they helped foster. Although Montero’s tendency to hurry through the complicated chain of events involved in such high-level payoffs makes them sometimes difficult to follow, many of his revelations are worth studying. While often treated casually among those directly involved, these payoffs have consistently significant, wide-reaching effects on world events. After all, writes the author, “corporate bribery is not a rogue act.”
A startling window into the bribery that shapes the world in which we live, including the major corporate players and government parties involved in the corruption.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-670-01647-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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