A wounded right-wing yelp against companies that make moral as well as commercial decisions.
Hobby Lobby good, Patagonia bad: a plaintive denunciation of the movement toward socially responsible corporations.
That Ramaswamy considers Rand Paul to be “one of the greatest advocates for social liberties of Americans” tells you all you need to know about what side of the fence his political shadow falls on, and every word in this book should be read against that knowledge. The author is angry that the Milton Friedman school of predatory corporatism—capitalism in which the only duty of the firm is to maximize shareholder return—has turned into “stakeholder capitalism,” in which corporations advance causes for the social good. By Ramaswamy’s account, it’s wrong that Delta Airlines, headquartered in Atlanta, should denounce Georgia’s recent attempts at voter suppression while “failing to explain why Americans should care whether a voting law matches the values of an airline company.” The author scores a point or two: He’s right that there’s a disconnect between people’s decrying the corporate personhood enshrined in Citizens United while demanding that corporations take a role in socially progressive causes. He’s also right to note that corporate leaders love to take companies public in order to dilute the power of governing boards, since “the more people you are accountable to, the more powerful you become.” In the face of all this, Ramaswamy wrings his hands about what will happen to, say, the Trump supporters inside Google and demands that conservatives be accorded protected-class status under the terms of civil rights law, since he holds that the “Church of Diversity” is a civil religion whose tenets are to be questioned only at one’s peril. Here he waxes hyperbolic: “According to corporate America it’s anti-semitic to compare liberals to Nazis, but praiseworthy to compare conservatives to them.”
A wounded right-wing yelp against companies that make moral as well as commercial decisions.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5460-9078-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2021
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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