A specific tale of governance at the local level that should appeal to labor activists and scholars of urban studies.
In Richmond, California, overlooking scenic San Francisco Bay, is a company town bankrolled by Chevron. A resident reports, in some detail, on his town’s fraught governance.
Labor activist and journalist Early (Save Our Unions, 2013, etc.) moved to Richmond in 2012 and soon became intrigued with the largely nonwhite community’s municipal life. Naturally, Chevron took a large part in the electoral process. Yet there was an active left-of-center cadre in opposition to the influence of the refinery and other powerful interests. For example, the Richmond Progressive Alliance, in a fight with big soda, endeavored to tax soft drinks to promote good health, and the creation of casinos in the town was halted. To prevent the foreclosure of homes financially underwater after the Great Recession, the Alliance proposed the use of governmental eminent domain. Fair housing was often the topic of town council battles. It seemed, according to Early’s account, a Manichaean fight. The forces of good were led by an admirable mayor, the Green Party’s Gayle McLaughlin. On behalf of her town, she engaged in foreign relations with Ecuador. (McLaughlin is writing a book of her own.) The author also admired the effective and efficient police chief, Chris Magnus. Early suspensefully chronicles the town’s 2014 political campaign. Spoiler alert: the good guys won, but the Frank Capra–like script took a turn, and the new mayor proved disappointing to his former friends. Early’s ongoing study of community action is, assuredly, not objective, and his earnest text is marred somewhat by an excess of acronyms—e.g., “but all of them—the CSB, DOT, EPA, Cal-OSHA and BAAQMD—proceed at a snail’s pace.” Otherwise quite accessible, the story remains focused on one municipality, as wide-ranging lessons are scanted while the text progresses.
A specific tale of governance at the local level that should appeal to labor activists and scholars of urban studies.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8070-9426-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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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