Robinson's prose is often breathless, urgent—even hyperbolic—but if only a modest moiety of his claims are accurate, the...
A prolific novelist and nonfiction author (The Hotel, 1997, etc.) explains the threat of international organized crime.
Robinson traces "the birth of modern transnational crime" to a 1990 Easter weekend summit near Vienna among representatives of criminal factions in Italy, Russia, Poland, and Colombia. Examining how criminals thrive by cooperating in a global economy that has become nearly impossible to police, he concludes that sovereignty is the problem: "The good guys have borders and no money, the bad guys have no borders and piles of money." Robinson pulls few punches in this alarming, sordid saga of greed, violence, and corruption. Ciudad del Este, a criminal hangout in Paraguay, is "the anus of the earth"; Russia has become "a full-fledged mafiocracy"; Miami is now "the capital of South America"; the British Commonwealth is a "money-laundering cesspool"; and the Internet has grown into "the most powerful force on the planet since Christ." Validating this alarmist language are numerous accounts of complicated multinational crimes that range from credit-card scams to counterfeiting Canadian currency to cocaine trafficking to selling stolen components from nuclear weapons to offshore banking fraud to the corruption in the gambling casinos operated by the St. Regis Mohawks to the ultimate coal-to-Newcastle operation, a venture "to ship toxic waste from the States to Chernobyl." Robinson believes that transnational crime is the "defining issue for the twenty-first century" and that the only plausible remedies are international cooperation among law-enforcement agencies and the political will to dam the swollen rivers of illicit cash that flow unimpeded across borders. Although he includes a formidable bibliography, there are no footnotes or endnotes, so readers cannot easily determine the sources of some of his more lurid allegations.
Robinson's prose is often breathless, urgent—even hyperbolic—but if only a modest moiety of his claims are accurate, the threats to the world's financial security are indeed ominous.Pub Date: July 25, 2000
ISBN: 1-58567-030-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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