The System Must Be Overhauled

 My landlady offered to allow me to read her copy of  The System by Robert B. Reich.  I've never read a book by him, but I'd seen what he's had to say on various issues online.  I also liked the back cover summary.  I thought Reich was likely to be insightful.

                                  

Reich says that the income of most people is either stagnant or has declined.  I can certainly confirm that this is true in my own case.  My income has declined since the beginning of the 21st century.

I liked Reich's rather pointed observation that the U.S. has a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, but no Domestic Corrupt Practices Act.  Perhaps the text of a Domestic Corrupt Practices Act would be too long, requiring too many specifications in order to be effective.  I think it would also continually be amended by Congress because new technologies would cause the evolution of new corrupt practices involving those technologies. 

As I read Reich's description of the irresponsible behavior of corporations, it occurred to me that they were like unruly children.    If a community is aware that a company had moved precipitously after considerable investments were made for them at their previous location, they should definitely refuse to make any similar agreement with that company.  If the company then decides to leave, I would say "Good riddance to bad rubbish."

He shows parallels between The Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century and our current era.  I felt particularly enlightened by the reasons why Senator John Sherman introduced what became known as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890.

I also learned about the Glass-Steagall Act, which Elizabeth Warren was continually mentioning during her Presidential campaign.  It separated commercial banking from investment banking.  This meant that commercial banks couldn't make risky investments with their depositors' money.  The Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999. Robert Reich warned against it.  

In the final chapter, Reich addresses Jamie Dimon of Chase.  He tells him about the policies Dimon needs to support including "treat the environment as your largest stakeholder and fight like hell to preserve it."  The reason he gives for it is that even his biggest shareholders won't survive if the planet becomes uninhabitable.  I pointed out in my notes that the technology that science fiction novels develop for humans to survive on other planets that were otherwise uninhabitable, could be used on an uninhabitable Earth.  It's not a good idea, but unfortunately it does seem likely.  It's more likely than the idea that our irresponsible corporations will follow extensive environmental regulations to keep Earth habitable.  So in the future we'll all be wearing spacesuits when we go outdoors on our own planet, and living in sealed artificial environments because Earth is too toxic. In fact, I've seen science fiction novels like that. 

We can't rely on Jamie Dimon and others of his ilk to become environmentalists.  If we want to avoid the future I've described, we'll have to create an even more extensive body of environmental laws, and break up those powerful corporations who would prevent those laws from existing.

 

                              

                             

 

                                     

                                     

Drawdown: Possibilities For Remedying Climate Change

 I decided to read Drawdown edited by Paul Hawken because I needed to read a book while I was updating to Windows 11, and this one dealing with energy alternatives seemed to be the most worthwhile of the current crop of library books.  I expected the Windows 11 update to take six hours, and it turned out to be an eight and half hour process. So I finished Drawdown and made a start on another book during that time period.  Afterward, I decided Drawdown deserved a review.

                         

                              

                                 

                                   

The forward to Drawdown was by  Tom Steyer.  I knew little about this billionaire before he became an advocate for the impeachment of Donald Trump.  At the time, I considered him high profile evidence that other billionaires despised Trump.  Later Steyer became known as a strong supporter for environmentalism.   I knew nothing of his investment in polluting companies at the time.  In fact, I just read his Wikipedia article, and found out about his business background.  When he decided to run against Trump,  it certainly seemed as if he'd repented of his support for earth ruining enterprises.  He sold those polluting investments in 2012.  Yet I suspect the American people weren't inclined to trust billionaires at that time.  His forward to Drawdown did seem sincere.

I appreciated the fact that Drawdown  avoids jargon and has fewer acronyms so that general readers can understand it.  Paul Hawken also wanted to avoid military terms.  "Climate change is a natural process, not an enemy," Hawken tells us.  I thought that Hawken's attitude was constructive.  Seeing climate change as an enemy to be fought takes focus away from the positive changes that will make our planet more livable for all of  Earth's inhabitants.

Reforesting the oceans is a solution that I'd never previously seen discussed.  These are kelp forests which grow so much more quickly than land vegetation.  Kelp also has a very positive impact.  It produces half of Earth's oxygen.  I had no idea that kelp is that significant.

Most of the content didn't impress me as much.  So I gave this book a B grade.

 

                             

The First Emancipator: In Order To Form A More Perfect Union

Few of my readers will have heard of founding father Robert Carter. Neither had I before finding The First Emancipator by Andrew Levy in my library system's catalog. Carter wanted to be forgotten.  He did such a good job of it that now he is practically unknown.  One thing that sets Robert Carter apart from our famous founding fathers is that Carter emancipated his slaves during his lifetime. 

                            

 To 18th century Virginian Robert Carter, Thomas Jefferson was someone he knew.   Jefferson wasn't a historical personage then, as he is today. Carter had been a deist like Thomas Jefferson, but he went through a process of spiritual transformation.  He then became a convert to the Baptist denomination which goes back to the 17th century English separatists according to Wikipedia.  Being a Baptist then could be dangerous.  I read in The First Emancipator about Baptist services being attacked by armed mobs during the American revolutionary period.  Yikes!

The Anglican Church, which later became known as Episcopalian, was the established religion of early America.  The Baptists were among the Protestant sects that Anglicans called "dissenters".  Ministers from dissenting denominations could be imprisoned for up to a year for trying to convert slaves according to a law passed by the Virginia House of Burgesses.

Currently, the U.S. is having a political crisis of legitimacy.  Many wonder who has the right to speak for all Americans. I discovered in The First Emancipator that the founding fathers also wondered about that.  Patrick Henry asked  in 1787 how the members of the Constitutional Convention could take it upon themselves to say "We the People".  

 From quoting the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, I'm moving on to more topical concerns.  In The First Emancipator, we learn that Carter's son died after an assault by a law enforcement officer.  This tragic incident is a very unfortunate reminder of protests against police violence I've been seeing on television lately.

 Author Andrew Levy tells us that Carter wrote "tarred and feathered" three times across the tops of pages in his journal.  It seems to me that writing this phrase three times is very emphatic.   It was unclear to Levy who had been tarred and feathered. Yet I'm pretty certain it must have been Carter who was the victim of this barbaric colonial practice.  He left his family estate in Virginia very abruptly due to local animosity.  I think Carter became so unpopular because he allowed former slaves to live on his property.   White Virginians of that era would have been outraged.  Tarring and feathering could conceivably have been their reaction to such a sin against their ethos.

Robert Carter, the wealthy 18th-19th century Virginian who freed all his slaves during his lifetime, was quite a discovery.  It is too bad that other wealthy American slaveholders didn't follow his example.

                                     

 

 

                  

The Gods of Tango: A Female Tango Musician in 1913 Argentina

 The Gods of Tango marries two favorite reasons for me to read novels.   The protagonist is a woman pretending to be a man, and it deals centrally with music.  In this historical/geographical context, the first reason is a necessary condition for the second.  In 1913 Argentina, Leda couldn't become a professional musician without disguising herself as a man. 

                                        

 It's not that there weren't any women at all in Tango music in 1913, but Tango was and still is very male dominated in the areas of composition and performance.  

I discovered that the first well known woman composer of  Tango music was Eloísa D'Herbil.  She was born in Spain, and originally studied classical music with Franz Liszt who called her "Chopin in skirts". See her Wikipedia article here. 

In The Gods of Tango, there was an exchange about the origins of Tango.  One character said that Tango is African, but another insisted that Tango began with the drums and was therefore "the sound of the gods".  I've heard drums in the background in Tango music, but no dominant drum beat.  My guess is that I've only heard the White people's version of Tango. 

I loved the protagonist's long term lesbian relationship with a singer who performed at the venue where she played.  I also loved the music aspect.  Its rare that I find so much content that I love in a novel.   I'm sure that this will be one of my favorite novels of 2021, if not my top fiction read of the year.