Since just before Easter, when
this year of the Covid
virus set in, a year of more reading began.
I did not muster the energy to do a
thorough summary of all the interesting
books I stumbled into, but I have given
a full account of some. This
article is
a catch-all for some other books read during
the year so far. I explain how I
was attracted to the book and then write a
few paragraphs about each to give
its flavour. Back in Fall 2018 I described a
visit to China. And China
had become an interest so I was drawn to a
book by a former Canadian Ambassador
to China, David Mulroney, Middle Power,
Middle Kingdom: What Canadians Need
to Know about China in the 21st Century, Penguin
Random House Canada, 2015.
China was a complicated mix of things to
me as a tourist. How do you put
together lifting millions of rural peasants
into a modern urban state,
torturing dissidents and putting Uighurs
into “educational” camps? Happily my
visit was before Canada set about
extradition proceedings for a powerful
Chinese business woman whose flight touched
down in Canada. Two former Canadian
diplomats were seized and jailed in China.
Moreover, since then China has
imposed more direct control on Hong Kong.
Despite that deterioration in relations
between China and Canada since 2018, David
Mulroney’s book
remains useful
and valid. Basically China is what it is. It
is a mix of good, bad and
dangerous agencies, people and places – but
also a new major power that should
not be ignored. When I decided to learn Mandarin
as a retirement project it was
because I too figured that such a big,
ancient yet modern and increasingly
powerful country deserved some attention. I
needed to know more about it than
the occasional Canadian newspaper piece. And
teaching Canadians something more
about China is what Mulroney aims to do. His
ability in the language evidently
helped his work. His insights into the good
and bad are helpful. I found it
interesting, readable and informative. Not
at all blind to the problems and challenges,
he nonetheless wants Canadians to go to
China and to learn Mandarin. He wants
us to see the various parts of the country.
He wants us to become familiar with
the history, with the problems, with the
successes and with the problems from
Chinese politics. He wants us to communicate
and to trade. The stories and
insights make good reading. I did not know that China had
grown into Canada’s second largest
economic trading partner. It is still far
from as big as the US as a partner,
but when Mulroney wrote it was far bigger in
trade than other countries Canada
trades with. Chinese tourists and students
found Canada attractive and came in
droves. More than that, it seems many
Chinese have bought homes in Canada - he
thinks in search of a new life or simply
looking for a safe place to hold their
money. Early in the book he tells a story of
hearing Mandarin at check out in a
store on Bay Street in Toronto. Mulroney
thinks China’s growing power is
becoming more of a challenge in the Pacific.
It is also true that China is
giving “aid” and doing joint development
projects in places around the world.
(I noticed China was building new roads in
the heights of Lesotho near the Sani
Pass during a birding trip to South Africa
in 2014.) Mulroney warns China has
also been finding ways to reach across
borders, including Canada’s, to steal
technologies. Recently we have seen
Mulroney’s bolder China that is not afraid
to confront challenges to its ideology or
its policies. As a bonus, a reader of
this book will learn something about how
Canada’s Foreign Affairs department
works along the way. Of course 2020 has continuously
featured the Trump-as-President
reality show. A well-written article by
Sarah Kenzior, an opinion piece writer
for the Globe and Mail, led me to a book of
hers about Trump – Hidden in
Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump
and the Erosion of America, Flatiron
Press, April 2020. It turned out to be very
well annotated and reported the
background actors and history leading up to
Trump as president. The author’s
clear and gripping story-telling writing
style runs throughout the book.
Interestingly, the author had studied the
post-soviet dictatorships for her PhD
in anthropology and she uses her
understanding of their stories as a lens to
write
about Trump, the autocratic class in the US,
interference by foreign powers and
the weaknesses of US democracy. Her chosen home city, St Louis,
used to be America’s 3rd city. It is
in Missouri, which used to be a “bellwether”
state. Now, lost in the decaying
central states of the US called the
“mid-West,” losing good jobs and companies
for several decades, hurting deeply from the
2008 financial collapse and
misunderstood in media that is now largely
located in distant coastal states,
Missouri has shifted Republican with the
help of “dark money” from undisclosed
sources. There is a fascinating chapter in
which we are given insights into
Trump’s close association with “shameless”
lawyer Cohn, the lawyer associated
with McCarthy, Nixon and 5 New York City
crime families. Cohn developed a
relationship with the City’s gossip
columnists leaking material to smear and
humiliate adversaries. He threatened law
suits to any who moved from his
desires. Cohn introduced Trump to Roger
Stone, a Nixon acolyte, and to Paul
Manafort, a GOP operative and lawyer whose
company served the world’s most
brutal dictators and guerrilla groups.
Glittery press profiles and gleaming
buildings built by Trump then appeared in
the media, hiding a darker side. Trump Tower became a dorm for
Russian mafia. It laundered money,
sheltered and hid assets at a time when
Russian criminals took over from former
Italian Mafia families. Indeed, the FBI
warned that regional criminal families
had been replaced by a global network of new
criminals that were capitalists and
entrepreneurs as well as master criminals.
They can infiltrate businesses,
provide support to foreign powers and try to
influence the highest levels of
government. Trump and Trump Tower are linked
to this FBI danger! Strangely the
FBI did not pursue the matter after Mueller
was replaced by Comey as its head
in 2013. Media said much in earlier years
about Trump and crime. However,
things changed: “And there is the media
morass of 2015 and 2016, when
investigative journalists from Trump’s past
were censored, threatened, or
generally kept out of the news—while
journalists of Trump’s present ignored
blatant crimes in favor of an obsessive
focus on Hillary Clinton’s emails - a
misalignment of priorities that was stoked
by the FBI itself.” And this chapter
goes on: the media prefers scandal to real
crime and there was media
manipulation for scandal around so that
Trump has never been taken to trial.
And as the book goes on, Trump’s history of
association with criminals and sex
traffickers like Epstein extends, as the
book title says, “hidden in plain
sight.” Meanwhile, in Canada during the
summer of this pandemic year, the
minority Liberal government had another
scandal. This time it was around its
attempt to pass large sums of money to WE
Foundation corporations to provide
summer activity for youth. The upshot was
the resignation of the Minister of
Finance who had not disclosed a trip payed
for by WE for his family. A further
upshot – parliament was prorogued and
subsequently Chrystia Freeland was named
the new Finance Minister. Very recently
there was a narrowly avoided possibility
of a forced election to avoid further
revelations about Liberal spending and
WE. However, the significance of all this
was that I felt I should read
Chrystia Freeland’s book Plutocrats: The
Rise of the New Global Super-Rich
and the Fall of Everyone Else, Anchor
Canada, 2014. Before her election to
parliament in 2015, Freeland was a
journalist in business affairs. Her book is an interesting
well-written chatty read about colourful
people. The reader gets a bit of history –
from Carnegie and the early 20th
century US super rich through the 2008
financial collapse and the global super
rich. Then there’s the culture of the
Plutocrats – with the surprising note
that the super-rich are for the most part
working rich – CEOs – and that their
proportion of capital income other than
capital gains has been falling. Their lifestyle is what one might
expect. They are living an
international life of travel, mostly limited
to a few short years at the very
top, divisible into groups like the “alpha
geeks” of silicon valley, and they
are trying to show they are making the world
a better place as well as
extracting money. These sorts of themes are
explored - all with named
individuals whom the book places sitting at
a bar chatting with the author or
at a conference with the author. I found her section about
rent-seeking and setting government
regulation to one’s company’s advantage
informative. However, for most of the
book I found myself feeling uncomfortable.
Freeland is obviously familiar and
friendly with these people and with their
lifestyle and their wealth. I was
more interested in the part of her title
that read “and the fall of everyone
else.” That is mentioned only a little along
the way. The Plutocrats are super-rich
people in educated environments who excel
and discover new business
opportunities and are free to make wealth
around the world. It seems too rosy. In the last chapter, the
conclusion, Freeland raises some dangers.
Using the history of Venice, she suggests
there has to be a way of allowing new
Plutocrats to keep emerging. She relates
this to the Marxian analysis that
suggested capitalism is doomed because the
capital must gather to a single
point. Freeland finds it remarkable that
this didn’t happen for her Plutocrats.
Rather, she says, corporations submitted to
creative destruction and to
competition from new entrants. Yet
surprisingly anti-trust legislation is not
mentioned or analyzed here. Freeland says in
passing that one could question
Microsoft using its market dominance to cut
out competition but she neither
applauds nor condemns and says nothing more.
She suggests that the real key to
social upward mobility and continuing
renewal of Plutocrats is a degree from an
elite university. Freeland has obviously lived and
worked comfortably with plutocrats
around her. But there is not much
development of issues in her account of the
lifestyle of the Plutocrats that matter to
the rest of us. Is there fair
taxation? Is there use of offshore tax
havens? I found myself wondering whether
the new finance minister had any interest in
ensuring that the wealth generated
by the initiatives of the plutocrats is
shared with the societies that enabled
them and that launched them into their
internationally orbiting world. In the conclusion, while lauding
inclusion and mobility among the
Plutocrats, Freeland also uses “inclusion”
to mean more of society benefitting.
She says that in the early 20th century
Henry Ford needed a middle class to buy
his cars. But she then adds that
globalization may be reducing this need for
a
domestic middle class because, she says,
Western countries can import demand
for products from emerging markets. So in a
world where books, including those
described in my articles, have ascribed the
rise of Brexit and Trump to the
vanishing middle class from former
industrial zones of developed countries, I’m
hoping for some policy learning by Finance
Minister Freeland about what to do
about that danger and her intriguing
Plutocrats! This has also been a year of
protests about deaths of Black people
at the hands of the police – protests led
internationally by the Black Lives
Matter movement. Early this month I came
across Richard Rothstein’s The
Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How
Our Government Segregated America,
Liveright, 2018. It was a mind-blowing
lesson that shows in chapter after
chapter how throughout the 20th century
various levels and agencies of US
government supported and created segregated
living and employment despite
constitutional obligations to the contrary.
Black veterans were denied the
housing built for veterans after WWII, then
they were denied government backed
mortgages for new suburban developments. The
book makes clear ghettos were made
and Blacks were forced to be in them. Rothstein shows how the US
Constitution and fifth, fourteenth and
thirteenth amendments apply. The denial of
housing subsidies to blacks that
were available to whites was clearly unfair.
But segregated housing is too, by
the thirteenth amendment. In 1866 Congress
enforced the abolition of slavery by
passing the Civil Rights Act prohibiting
actions that perpetuated the
characteristics of slavery – things that
made African Americans second class
citizens – things like racial discrimination
in housing. In 1883 the Supreme
Court did not agree that exclusion from
housing markets could be a badge of
slavery. It was not until 1968 that the
Supreme Court reversed itself on that.
The Color of Law exposes consistent
government policy that enforced racial
segregation in housing in the mid twentieth
century, even though those many
actions that prevented Whites and Blacks
living amongst one another were
unconstitutional. I carry a kaleidoscope of
unexpected findings from this book. The,
negative role of unions that had power to
designate people for jobs, denying Blacks
jobs. Blacks were even denied the higher
level blue collar jobs when there was
a shortage of people for them. Educated
middle class blacks with good jobs
were howled out of white neighbourhoods by
mobs of less educated whites. Their
houses were even torched or blown up. The
police stood by. In the freeway building era,
federal freeways were routed to
separate white areas from black areas – or
were routed so as to destroy black
areas. Whites got government backed loans
for housing in newly developing areas
and got equity from day 1. Blacks were not
given government backed loans. If
they were in a position to buy, banks gave
no equity on loans provided until
the full cost and interest was paid off.
Before the 2008 housing crash, the
Black community was targeted by banks with
misleading information to encourage
house purchases that were designed to fall
through. Each chapter examines a different
policy at a different level of
government in a different part of the US
that forced segregation when there was
none, creating new segregated communities or
perpetuating segregation. We learn
how schools become segregated and good
schools become hard for Blacks to get to
and how buses don’t happen to run from Black
ghettos to white areas with good schools.
The residential segregation translates to
segregation in schools and
segregation in access to good schools. Then
industries were allowed to locate
in Black areas and they can give rise to
health issues that can add to
performance difficulties for Black children
in schools. The last chapter of the book
looks at what can be done. And it finds
some places in the US with useful practices
that could be encouraged, developed
and followed more widely. There are simple
things like telling it like it is: school
textbooks do not presently reflect the
things Rothstein uncovered. They
should.
Segregation was not by chance,
it was “de jure.” It was by law. After an
epilogue there are questions and
answers. Asked about reparations that
Ta-Nehisi Coates made a case for, Rothstein
says he prefers to talk about remedies – but
basically, yes, there should be remedies. As I write this article it is not
clear whether, on their November
voting day, Americans will take the first
step in remedies and get rid of the white
supremacist president. Indeed all the issues
I’ve touched on above would be
advanced by that same big first step
forward: dump Trump. Non-US citizens, who
get irritation without representation, can
only hope US voters elect someone
with credentials for the job. May it be so.