2016 books: 38-41

[the_siobhan]

    

Confesssions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins I could have sworn I got this from BC but she says no. Maybe Sabz? Somebody loaned it to me. Perkins has written an autobiography focusing on his years of working for a company that secured development deals in countries all over the world. Countries targeted for "development" would receive loans which hired American corporations to build dams, air fields and other major projects. The loans were designed to be unsustainable, and once the mega-corps had made their fortunes the defaulted payments were used as leverage to force concessions to the US government.

I got very tired of hearing about how becoming fabulously wealthy and successful at the expense of other people gave him the sads, but other than that it's a very accessible book and the mechanisms of power and control are clearly laid out. If you ever wanted to know how exactly it happened that 80 people own half of the entire fucking world, this is the book for you.


    

Bitter Fruit: The Story of the U.S. Coup in Guatemala by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer I got into a conversation at work one day with a guy about the parallels between Guatemala and Haiti. He loaned me this book and unfortunately left the company immediately after and I never got to give it back to him. I think after all this time it's probably safe to give it away. Pretty much what it says on the tin. The US government overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala in the 1950s in order to protect the economic interests of the United Fruit Company. (Now called Chiquita.) The book is a detailed documentation of how that went down.

    

A World of Ideas : Conversations With Thoughtful Men and Women About American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future by Bill Moyers I have no idea where this came from. It's basically the collected transcripts from a show of the same name that aired in the late 80s. He would interview well-known people from various fields talking about their ideas about current events. My first impression is that he put a lot of effort into getting people from diverse fields - he invited scientists, artists, historians and educators. My second thought was that reading it really reminded me just how long ago the 80s were. Mostly it's worth checking out only if you are interested in any of the specific people he interviews - Isaac Asimov is in there, as well as Noam Chomsky and a few other names I recognized.

    

Day One: Before Hiroshima and After by Peter Wyden Apparently I bought this back in '85. It's a factual account of the events and people that led to the development of the atomic bombs that were dropped in Japan at the close of WWII. Wyden put a lot of time into researching the characters and history of the people in the bomb program. It started as a defensive effort because allied scientists were afraid that Germany was developing their own atomic program, but once started it became kind of a runaway train. They poured so much money and manpower into to the damn thing that pleas to not actually use it on people fell on deaf ears. Axel and I once visited Wendover Field in Utah where the pilots trained, and there is still no acknowledgement in the museum there that maybe atomic bombs might have a down side.

One thing that I hadn't known before reading this is how much responsibility Churchill bears for the arms race. Several of the scientists involved in the project predicted Russia developing their own bombs within a few years and they lobbied to take advantage of the fact that they were allies during the war to create some kind of international oversight that would allow them to share the science. They got agreement from FDR, but Churchill hated the Russians so much he vetoed the idea and Truman also rejected it. The result was 50 years of nuclear stockpiling.