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UNCHECKED CAPITALISM IS KILLING US!

HOW UNFETTERED CORPORATE GREED AND CORRUPTION HAVE MADE US POORER, FATTER, SICKER, LESS TOLERANT OF OTHERS AND MORE DANGEROUSLY EXPOSED TO THE CORONAVIRUS

A well-researched argument against America’s largest corporations and the politicians who enable them.

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A debut work offers a rallying cry for economic and political reform.

Though his book is a searing indictment against 21st-century global capitalism, Rynerson insists in his opening line “I am not a socialist….I am an American.” Indeed, the former Kentucky farm boy has a lifetime of service to his country, having spent two decades in the Air Force and as president of the board of San Francisco’s Big Brothers/Big Sisters. As have many Americans of both major political parties, the author—who at different points has been a Republican and a Democrat and is now an independent—has become increasingly concerned with the growth of unchecked corporate influence in the United States. In this exposé, he tackles over a dozen industries, clearly delineating their negative impacts on contemporary society. The book convincingly makes the case that underregulated corporations are directly to blame for nearly every major issue that decreases America’s standard of living, including inequitable access to health care, wage stagnation, obesity, the opioid epidemic, and even the ideological polarization stoked by social media and partisan news outlets. While many politicians, from Republican Ted Cruz to independent Bernie Sanders, rhetorically lament the unwieldy growth of corporate power, the two major parties are both implicated in Rynerson’s account. According to the author, President Ronald Reagan’s systematic deregulation of industries began the process, but President Bill Clinton’s endorsement of policies favored by his home state’s largest corporation, Wal-Mart, is also to blame for creating today’s milieu of offshore accounts and outsourcing. Not bound by party positions, Rynerson is just as skeptical of globalization, a bogeyman of today’s right, as he is of Wall Street, the left’s go-to villain. His chapter blaming obesity on the food industry for deliberately obscuring ingredient lists and targeting children is particularly compelling. There is even a chapter on the role of corporate greed in inhibiting America’s response to Covid-19. Despite its evenhanded, if hard-hitting, approach, the book is at times redundant in its relentless emphasis on corporate greed.

A well-researched argument against America’s largest corporations and the politicians who enable them.

Pub Date: July 4, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-73484-990-5

Page Count: 436

Publisher: Bonneau Publishing

Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2020

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ELON MUSK

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

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A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.

To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023

ISBN: 9781982181284

Page Count: 688

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

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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