Average customer rating:
|
Subjoyride: Selected Poems (Green Integer)
Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven
Manufacturer: Green Integer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Women Writers & Feminist Theory
| Books & Reading
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Poetry
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Lesbian
| Fiction
| Literature & Fiction
| Gay & Lesbian
| Subjects
| Books
Lesbian
| Poetry
| Literature & Fiction
| Gay & Lesbian
| Subjects
| Books
Women Writers
| Women's Studies
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 1933382775 |
Book Description
The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, born Else Hildegard Ploetz, worked first as a model, posing for artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and others. She also produced her own Dadaist art, using found materials and her own body and dress, sauntering through Greenwich Village in outrageous attire and partial nudity. Her poetry was deemed "mad" by readers of
The Little Review. This is the first major selection of her work.
Average customer rating:
|
How to Succeed As a Male Model
Eric Perkins
Manufacturer: Nautilus Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
| Automotive
| Books on CD
| Books on Cassette
| Crime & Criminals
| Current Events
| Economics
| Education
| Foreign Language Nonfiction
| Government
| Holidays
| Law
| Philosophy
| Politics
| Social Sciences
| Transportation
| True Accounts
| Urban Planning & Development
| Women's Studies
General
| Job Hunting & Careers
| Business & Investing
| Subjects
| Books
Textile Arts
| Crafts & Hobbies
| Home & Garden
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Fashion
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0935055401 |
Book Description
The game is still afoot, as Master Zhuge finally comes face-to-face with the man pulling the strings for the 13 masked killers. But how could it be "him?" Also, the four major kung fu houses make their move, but is it for good or ill?
Book Description
Water is Rising in the Classroom: True Terror Dreams of Teachers is an illustrated collection of actual teacher's nightmares. Teachers in classrooms K-12 were interviewed in seventeen schools in three states to form the content of the book. The stress brought on by teaching is evident in the dreams. Teachers are afraid they will lose control, be humiliated, have no preparation, or be put in charge of students who could not be handled by anyone. Teachers in all schools surveyed admitted to having the dreams, there being no apparent difference in the content of dreams experienced by men and women, teachers in wealthy versus less wealthy schools, or public versus independent schools. The book is interesting and humorous, and reveals the pressures teachers experience.
Customer Reviews:
Great Teacher Gift!.......2006-12-07
This is a great book! Looking for a great gift for that special teacher? This will keep them laughing and praying that those terror dreams never really come true!
Average customer rating:
- A sad but triumphant memoir
- Excellent Book, Excellent People, Excellent Location
- Hesper Anderson is a Gifted Writer
- I loved this book
- Amazing memoir
|
South Mountain Road: A Daughter's Journey of Discovery
Hesper Anderson
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Authors
| Arts & Literature
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Women
| Specific Groups
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0743242467 |
Amazon.com
Hesper Anderson's poignant memoir opens with her mother's suicide in March 1953 and closes late the following year, when reading the contents of Mab Anderson's strongbox revealed to 20-year-old Hesper that her parents were never married. This disclosure makes some sense out of turbulent interactions between her mother and father (the noted playwright Maxwell Anderson) that had baffled Hesper for years before their bitter separation. The author intersperses her narration of the period following her mother's death with memories of her childhood home on South Mountain Road in Rockland County, New York, where the Andersons lived in close communion with a group of fellow artists including Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, and cartoonist Milt Caniff. Visitors included humorist Marion Hargrove, the object of Hesper's adoration from the time she was 7, and the book's most shocking moment comes when Hargrove sleeps with the still-grieving girl months after her mother's suicide, then callously informs her he's getting married. Hesper Anderson skillfully conveys the comfortable yet bohemian atmosphere on South Mountain Road and its impact on her. Vivid character sketches include the warm, down-to-earth Lenya and the author's loving but judgmental father, but the strongest portrait is of Hesper herself, groping toward maturity in difficult circumstances. --Wendy Smith
Book Description
"My mother killed herself on the first day of spring." So begins South Mountain Road, Hesper Anderson's elegant, wrenching memoir of death and deception, family secrets and memories, and of a young girl's trauma of self-discovery.
When Hesper Anderson, the daughter of famed Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Maxwell Anderson (What Price Glory?, Winterset, Key Largo, The Bad Seed), got the phone call informing her that her mother, the beautiful, enigmatic Mab, had committed suicide, she knew that her world would be forever changed. A woman of baffling remoteness and alienating beauty, Mab Anderson had been the dominant figure in her daughter's life. What Hesper did not realize, however, was that beyond the inevitable devastation of loss lay a whole chain of discoveries that would link her irrevocably both to her mother's past and to secrets that would turn her world upside down.
Hesper was a shy young girl, insecure and -- to her mind -- inadequate. As a result, she spent much of her childhood adrift, rendered all but invisible by the alienating shadow of her mother, surrounded (but not impressed) by the brilliance and celebrity of her parents' friends and neighbors -- people such as the composer Alan Jay Lerner, cartoonists Bill Mauldin and Milton Caniff, playwright/composer Kurt Weill and Weill's wife, actress Lotte Lenya (who was also Mab's best friend) -- all of whom lived on or near South Mountain Road, in a rural community outside New York City.
It was to be expected, then, that when a handsome young author, himself an outsider, brought into the charmed world of South Mountain Road by Maxwell Anderson, showed Hesper special attention, she developed a schoolgirl crush on him. It was an attachment that endured for years and continued to haunt the impressionable young girl to the brink of womanhood and beyond, leading, perhaps inevitably, to an emotional crisis almost as devastating as her mother's death.
Hesper was away from South Mountain Road, off at college, when she got the call that her mother was dead. When that call came, Hesper began what was in effect a journey of discovery -- an immersion in the past that revealed unexpected facts about herself, about the world she had grown up in, and most especially about the two people who were her parents. What she discovered in the end was a series of shocking secrets, some terrible truths, and her own broken heart.
South Mountain Road is a startlingly personal and beautifully conceived and written story of a young girl's coming of age through the suicide of her mother. Featuring a virtual Who's who of literary celebrities of its time (the late 1930s and 1940s) and place (New York and its environs), it is a remarkably novelistic and delicately wrought memoir of immediacy and grace.
Customer Reviews:
A sad but triumphant memoir.......2001-12-17
Hesper Anderson, youngest child of playwright Maxwell Anderson, has written an honest, straightforward and very readable memoir. Ms. Anderson grew up in a community of successful and influential artists, authors, musicians and intellectuals. The title of the work is the name of the road in rural New York where she and her famous parents and neighbors lived. Ms. Anderson tells the story of her parents' troubled relationship and its lasting effects upon her.
Ms. Anderson has a beautiful, sensitive nature. She reveals her emotional life with heartbreaking candor. She clearly loves both of her parents, but nonetheless has seen right through some facades. Her famous father comes across as mysterious, remote and controlling. Ms. Anderson pointedly blames the cancer death of the first Mrs. Anderson and the suicide of her mother upon Maxwell Anderson. She reveals some shocking family secrets which she did not discover until after her mother's death. The discovery of those secrets helped bring some closure and understanding for Ms. Anderson. She also works through some painful secrets of her own, including her childhood fascination with an older famous neighbor. This neighbor takes advantage of this fascination with particular cruelty. He has an affair with her during a time of extreme emotional vulnerability, announces that he's getting married (to someone else) and walks out of her life. The final chapters of the book bring with them a sense of reconcilation and forgiveness.
This is not just a memoir of the daughter of a famous family -- by the time you reach the book's end, you've completely forgotten that the people are rich and famous. It is the story of a young girl's emotional journey.
Excellent Book, Excellent People, Excellent Location.......2000-12-06
This is an amazing story of love, loss, and discovery. The characters are amazing and memorable and Hesper is a great character caught in the sudden and terrible memory of a troubled childhood. This book takes place in the same community that my mother grew up in and where I have a summer home. My summer home is on a street adjacent to South Mountain Road. Rockland County, more specifically Pomona, NY and Ramapo, is the most wonderful setting for a story of such depth, since South Mountain Road and all of it's neighboring places hold such history and depth. Ms. Anderson makes a few mistakes in here references, she mispelled the name Concklin farmstand and referred to Route 45 as Route 202, but very minor mistakes. The scenery and location speaks as well as the story line and really explains who Hesper and her surrounding enviornments are. When I read I am transported back to South Mountain Road, the tree at the top of the road, and the smells and sounds of this wonderful place. Ms. Anderson has created a masterpiece that you cannot possible read and not fall in love with.
Hesper Anderson is a Gifted Writer.......2000-04-04
The book holds my attention from the very first line and I just can't put it down. I love the way Hesper retells her life, flasbacks to flasbacks. It is like getting into her mind. Her description of the bohemian world is very convincing and real. This book is a must-read.
I loved this book.......2000-03-26
Hesper Anderson vividly reconstructs her childhood memories for the reader with clarity and exquisite detail. Her story is one of a remarkable, sensitive girl as she traverses her precarious journey of childhood. The daughter of playwright Maxwell Anderson, Hesper was surrounded by the rich and famous. Her anecdotes of Rex Harrison, Ingrid Bergman, Marlin Brando and many others are skillfully woven into her story, giving the reader a sense of the uniqueness of growing up on South Mountain Road. Personally, I was touched by the generosity with which the author shares intimate details of her life. Her struggle to understand herself within the context of her famous family is rich with the irony of life in a fishbowl. Her book is a thoughtful, well-written reflection on life, relationships, and what really matters. I loved this book.
Amazing memoir.......2000-03-17
This is a wonderful book! I didn't want to put it down and looked forward to reentering a very special world every time I picked it up. A quite amazing memoir that reads like a novel.
Average customer rating:
|
Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture.: An article from: Notes
Jerry McBride
Manufacturer: Music Library Association, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
| Humor
| Movies
| Music
| Performing Arts
| Pop Culture
| Puzzles & Games
| Radio
| Sheet Music & Scores
| Television
Online Books
| Books & Reading
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Science
| Subjects
| Books
Science & Technology
| Subjects
| e-Docs
| Formats
| Books
Entertainment
| HTML
| Formats
| e-Docs
| Formats
| Books
Science
| HTML
| Formats
| e-Docs
| Formats
| Books
ASIN: B000987P88
Release Date: 2005-07-28 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Notes, published by Music Library Association, Inc. on June 1, 1998. The length of the article is 1748 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture.
Author: Jerry McBride
Publication:
Notes (Refereed)
Date: June 1, 1998
Publisher: Music Library Association, Inc.
Volume: v54
Issue: n4
Page: p925(3)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Average customer rating:
- doesn't fulfill the promise of the title...
|
Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Schoenberg, Arnold
| Composers
| Classical
| Musical Genres
| Music
| Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Classical
| Musical Genres
| Music
| Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Music
| Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
History & Criticism
| Music
| Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Composers & Musicians
| Arts & Literature
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Culture
| Sociology
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0520203143 |
Book Description
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is a pivotal figure of musical modernism. The "father of serialism" has influenced nearly every major composer of this century, and the idea of Schoenberg, now wild-eyed radical, now embattled moralist, now lonely prophet, is woven into the mythos of modern art. What is more, the sites of his professional activity--fin de siècle Vienna, the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, and his "exile to paradise" in Los Angeles--bring home the representative quality of his life and works, which bear witness to some of the defining experiences of our time.
This collection by leading Schoenberg scholars is an interdisciplinary examination of the historical, aesthetic, and intellectual issues that formed Schoenberg's creative persona and continue to influence our response to the modernist legacy of the first half of this century. The book's first section, "Contexts," investigates Schoenberg's sense of ethnic, religious, and cultural identity. The second section, "Creations," focuses on specific works and the interplay between creative impulse and aesthetic articulation. The final section, "Connections," addresses the relationship of Schoenberg's legacy to present-day thought and practice.
Customer Reviews:
doesn't fulfill the promise of the title..........2001-11-06
This is a collection of academic papers from a conference held at the University of Southern California in 1991. Unfortunately they are mainly of no interest beyond specialists, and the book certainly does not live up to its ambitious and intriguing subtitle. It might more accurately have been called "Schoenberg and the Transformations of Musicological Hermeneutics."
The papers are divided into three sections -- Contexts, which looks at how Schoenberg was affected by his social context, Creations, which examines specific aspects of Schoenberg's music, and Connections, which looks at what effect Schoenberg had on the world. The third section is where "Transformations of 20th Century Culture" might be identified -- how Schoenberg's atonality and serialism, revolutionary or purist or neoclassicist ideas affected modern culture -- but this is totally absent. Instead we have insular examinations of Schoenberg from a postmodern standpoint. Disappointing and dull.
The one excellent essay, by Leon Botstein, founding director of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, is a fascinating look at Schoenberg's position in avant-garde intellectual circles in Vienna. Botstein describes two rival factions, one centered on Gustav Klimt, and one centered on Karl Kraus. Schoenberg was active in the Kraus circle, which "believed in art as a profound instrument of ethical and moral transformation," saw that "modernism needed to be a critique of culture," and advocated "truth-telling" as opposed to what it saw as the other faction's "facile bohemianism."
Given Adorno's advocacy of Schoenberg, and given the retreat of much postmodernism into moral relativism and facile bohemianism, a book that truly addressed the effect of Schoenberg and the Second Vienna School on 20th century culture would be well worth reading!
Book Description
Advanced Craps is just what it sounds like. this book is my favorite because of the power of the Money Management and discipline Theories. there are 131 chapters alone on Money Management. It takes the time honored idea of playing craps and offers a comprehensive and logical way of utilizing the Place Bets as a more potentially profitable way to play craps. this book has everything a player need to compete at the tables and a wide variety of off shooots to each suggested method of play. In short.....it is a MUST read.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent book!.......2001-12-11
things u didnt know about the game within the game of craps....this book will really help u win!
So You Wanna Be A Gambler: Advanced Craps.......2001-11-02
This book has many,many strategies to play craps, a down to earth book for people who are not greedy,he shows mostly conservative way to play.
Hands down the best book on craps!.......2001-03-13
This is by far the best book ever written on craps. Patrick's style of writing is easy to read and very often entertaining. He gives detailed examples of different systems to use at the table. He not only describes the proper moves to make but also explains the reasoning behind each bet. Patrick briefly talks about the different bets available to a craps players and then jumps right into an analysis of the game. His style involves careful money management and a powerful regression move. By reducing your bet after a win, you lock up a profit and guarantee yourself a winner. Using Patrick's techniques for both right and wrong betting, you'll become a better player. Will you win all the time? Of course not, no system can guarantee you a winner everytime. But at those times when you do lose, Patrick's money management helps you keep the losses down. If you're looking for the big score, this book isn't for you. Advanced Craps is for the conservative player, looking to grind out small consistent wins. If you wanna win more money, bet more! Patrick's book has tought me the three most important words in craps -- Take Me Down. I highly recommend this book.
The best book about craps, ever!.......2000-12-22
This terrific book is really 600 pages of good, solid advice - everything you always wanted to know about craps! You'll learn over 50 different super systems and John Patrick REALLY drills them into you in his "unique" style (he kind of yells at you a little). But at least you'll remember stuff like I did. Don't be put off by his style - he does it for a reason - he's really trying to help. READ THIS BOOK it may take a while but it's the best book you'll ever read on the game of craps!
The BEST book of 6 that I've read on craps.......2000-10-04
I bought 6 books to better improve my craps game. This was the best book purchased. It's around 500 pages, and offers the most insight into all aspects of playing craps. This is an Advanced book though and if you're new to craps, get a more basic book to start. Be warned that Patrick uses sarcastic anecdotes, but the wit is meant to drive home his key points. Also recommended, "Craps: The Real Deal" by Vogel and Edell's "How to Make Your Living Playing Craps."
Book Description
For over forty years in more than sixty countries, Raymond Baker has witnessed the free-market system operating illicitly and corruptly, with devastating consequences. In Capitalism’s Achilles Heel, Baker takes readers on a fascinating journey through the global free-market system and reveals how dirty money, poverty, and inequality are inextricably intertwined. Readers will discover how small illicit transactions lead to massive illegalities and how staggering global income disparities are worsened by the illegalities that permeate international capitalism. Drawing on his experiences, Baker shows how Western banks and businesses use secret transactions and ignore laws while handling some $1 trillion in illicit proceeds each year. He also illustrates how businesspeople, criminals, and kleptocrats perfect the same techniques to shift funds and how these tactics negatively affect individuals, institutions, and countries.
Download Description
PRAISE FOR CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL ""The corrosive effects of bribery, money laundering, tax evasion, and fraudulent transfer pricing need to be analyzed and explained. Raymond Baker, a pioneer in this research, shows how illicit funds move through world financial systems and lead to increased corruption, poor distribution of resources, and damage to the rule of law. I hope his passion for the subject will inspire others to delve into the legal, economic, and social consequences of dirty money and what must be done to stop it."" -Senator Carl Levin, (D-Michigan), Ranking Member, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations ""In today's world, expanded trade relationships and rapid advances in communication technology foster opportunities for greater political freedom, economic growth, and higher living standards around the world. These developments also create new vulnerabilities for the international financial system. This book takes a look at these challenges head on and makes an important contribution to the public debate."" -Senator Charles Grassley, (R-Iowa), Chairman, Senate Finance Committee ""This groundbreaking book will open your eyes to two things: how illegal money is shifted out of poor countries into rich countries and how these illegal flows add to poverty, misery, and inequality in poor countries themselves. Can this be stopped when those in power think they are benefiting? Public pressure, as was focused on slavery two centuries ago, is the first step toward change."" -Branko Milanovic, Economist, World Bank and author of Worlds Apart
Customer Reviews:
required reading.......2007-01-13
Working in the financial sector in emerging markets, this was a fascinating shot across the bows. It should be required reading for anyone potentially involved in the effects of flight capital. This relates not to illegal movements but also to the legal (but immoral?) movement of money from poor countries to rich country priavte bank accounts.
The machanisms by which poor countries remain poor, while benefitting banks in rich countries makes for worriesome reading. Highly recommended.
a naive look at the "shadow economy".......2006-11-13
After graduating from Harvard's Business School in the 60s, Raymond Baker spent some time in Africa, and is clearly unhappy with the continent's progress, or perhaps more accurately lack of progress, since then.
If you would believe Baker, the reason for much of this poverty is the corruption and shadow economy that plague much of Africa and South America, and he does indeed describe some of the manifestations of this plague, such as the Abachas. All the same, I was disappointed by this book, because I feel that it only superficially addresses these problems. South Korea was once a rather backward country with a rather opaque business world, and yet it has made leaps and strides towards becoming an industrialized country, while other countries in the same position went backwards. Ireland went from being a somewhat backward country most known for its exports of emigrants to a booming country whose economy is growing at 6% per annum without organizing UN conferences on tax evasion. Unfortunately, Baker doesn't touch on possible explanations for the fact that some countries could overcome their "Achilles Heel" while others stagnated.
Similarly, he insists that the rampant tax avoidance and tendency to stash money overseas and the like cause the corruption in Africa; could it not be that the corruption, arbitrary taxation and confiscation of goods account for the habit of avoiding exorbitant taxes and keeping one's savings overseas? If Italy is any guide, Baker is confusing cause and effect of the problems he describes. How did Dubai, once much poorer than Africa, and endowed with little oil become such a prosperous emirate? Not by whining about corruption and the like, but by establishing a pro-business business environment and letting the market work its magic. Unfortunately Baker neglects this Cinderella story that doesn't support the thesis of his book. Singapore too, with its similar history, goes unmentioned. This isn't to say that Baker doesn't identify some very real problems, but rather that the cures he has to offer may actually be worse than the disease. I feel that this book ought to be read with much caution.
Round Up the Usual Suspects.......2006-04-04
This book distorts the corruption problem in developing countries by lumping it in with tax evasion. Little is said about government officials helping themselves to the public treasury in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The book only touches that issue to blame Western banks for accepting their deposits. Yet U.S. banks are subject to harsh penalties for accepting ill-gotten funds. Criminal as well as civil penalties are imposed on bankers who don't get the point, which means imprisonment and/or fines from personal assets. I hoped this book would propose practical solutions for improving this enforcement. Instead, it effuses on fear and greed, pointing the finger only where the market for anti-capitalism literature can bear. (I have no affiliation with banks, just grasping for solutions.)
For example, the author equates transfer pricing with tax evasion. Since every product is made in more than one country these days, there is always room for discussion about where income was earned and thus where income tax is owed. Developing countries often have tax rates in excess of 70%. Their officials frequently do not expect these rates to be paid-they use them to extort bribes with impunity. In countries where prices are negotiable, people are not shocked when government fees and regulations are negotiable. While this impoverishes the public treasury, local managers adapt (albeit stifled). U.S. managers cannot play this game because they are scrutinized under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. They cannot circumvent 70% tax rates by paying bribes, so they use transfer pricing to create some sort of system integrity in an environment of overwhelming litigation risk.
Valuable and well-written sections of the book relate to traditional forms of "dirty money"-criminal and terrorist proceeds. The author has a very worthwhile goal--to staunch the flow of dirty money by unifying efforts to fight all its various forms. My only disappointment was the pursuit of this goal by "rounding up the usual suspects."
Baker shows how we have lost our way.......2006-03-03
Baker shows us how "maximizing profit" is a failed philosophy. Only by including Justice in our dealings with one another can we expect to create a decent, life-giving society. The one we have, he points out, is not working.
The day after finishing "Capitalism's Achilles Heel" I noticed a news item regarding the new cancer drug, "Avastin". The drug maker plans to charge $100,000 per year; citing the "inherent value of life-sustaining therapies". They said further that the health economics hold up "and therefore we don't see any reason for touching them".
A perfect example of Baker's revelation that "maximizing profit" is the operative principle in today's business dealings.
Dear reader, you need this book !
Useful account of crime and capital.......2006-03-01
This is a fascinating and deeply researched book by a businessman with experience across the world. Baker sums up, "Dirty money causes disaster for millions and deprivation for billions. No other economic condition generates so much harm for so many people. A system that continues to support such massive illegal flows, sustaining poverty, and contributing to historically high levels of global inequality, requires fundamental rethinking."
Multinational firms steal an estimated $500 billion a year from the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This can only happen with the connivance of the West's banks, which process the illicit gains.
Baker writes, "Intracompany trade across borders represents about 50 to 60 percent of all cross-border trade. I have never known a multinational, multibillion-dollar, multiproduct corporation that did not use fictitious transfer pricing in some part of its business to shift money between some of its entities."
Half of all international trade and investment passes through the world's 63 tax havens, including the Isle of Man, the Channel Isles, the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Cyprus, Malta, Gibraltar, Singapore and Hong Kong. Nearly half are members of the Commonwealth. They host about three million dummy corporations (500,000 in the Caribbean alone), holding possibly $11 trillion.
Foreign aid to Asia, Africa and Latin America is $50 billion a year, just a tenth of the amount plundered. These countries owe $1.5 trillion: the World Bank/IMF's Heavily Indebted Poor Countries' Initiative forgives only $50 billion of this, 3%.
How does the system `support such massive illegal flows'? For centuries the British ruling class, then the US ruling class too, have used the law to maximise capital's freedom. Lord Chief Justice Mansfield said in 1775, "No country ever takes notice of the revenue laws of another." So no capitalist state enforces the tax rules of another, opening the way to tax evasion.
Later, in 1929, the ruling in the case Egyptian Delta Land and Investment Co., Ltd. v Todd established the principle - for the entire British Empire - that companies could incorporate in Britain but avoid paying British tax. This allowed tax havens to sprout across the Commonwealth. Britain itself became a tax haven. As a French parliamentary committee reported in 2001, "Great Britain does not cooperate with European countries and offers a totally unacceptable haven for criminal funds."
Baker shows how the US state used English law as precedent: "Holes [were] intentionally left in anti-money laundering laws." These laws allow US banks to trade in the money generated by most kinds of crimes committed in other countries - prostitution, people smuggling and slave trading, for example.
Even after 9/11, the American Bankers' Association lobbied against tighter controls on bank accounts to curb terrorists' funds. So it is no surprise that 99.9% of anti-laundering efforts fail.
Liberal structures - the free movements of capital, goods and labour - suit capital best. By the same process, they aid crime and corruption. The freer capital is, the more lawless the host society will be. Free movement of capital also destroys national sovereignty and democratic accountability.
Baker shows how all capitalism's leading institutions are complicit in crime, but what does he say we should do about it? He urges us to press capitalism to put justice before profit. He writes, "There is no suggestion here that businesses should not be maximizing profits, operating efficiently, and competing. The point is much simpler: Capitalism should not place these aims ahead of justice in its institutions and transactions. Justice must be a prior condition."
Where is the evidence that capitalism could do this? It is idealist nonsense, sheer wishful thinking. As Lenin pointed out long ago, if capitalism could put justice before profit, it would not be capitalism.
Illegal money flows are not an unfortunate off-shoot of capitalism: they are integral to capitalism. Baker gives us enough evidence to convict capitalism as an unreformable, exploitative system, inevitably breeding crime and corruption.
Books:
- SuperVisions: Stereo Optical Illusions (Supervisions)
- Tales of the Old North Shore: Paintings and Companion Stories
- Technicians of Ecstasy: Shamanism and the Modern Artist
- The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980-1420
- The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne Vol. 1: Paintings and Sculpture 1961-1963
- The Anime Movie Guide: Movie-by-Movie Guide to Japanese Animation since 1983
- The Art of Kabuki: Five Famous Plays (Second Revised Edition)
- The Artist's Craft: A History of Tools, Techniques, and Materials
- The Avant-Garde in Russia 1910-1930: New Perspectives
- The Best Of Herman
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915
- Between a Rock and a Hard Place
- Beyond the Reef
- Bright Messengers: A New Novel Set in the Rama Universe
- Beyond World's End
- Criminalistics: An Introduction to Forensic Science
- Attacks: ROMMEL
- Anchor Hocking Catalogs, 1940-present
- Australia's Most Dangerous: Spiders, Snakes and Marine Creatures
- A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs: Of Eastern and Central North America