Rating: WORTHY!
The cronyism and good old boy networking that arose under the Bush administration when it cavalierly kicked-off the two longest-running wars in US history – and significantly privatized them – was a shocking disgrace. The problem is that when such things are let loose, it becomes a lot harder to eradicate them than it would have been to prevent them in the first place.
That the US military is ridiculously profligate in how it spends your tax dollars is so well-known that it has become a cliché, but this does nothing to alleviate how much the mind boggles at the discovery by the GAO (Government Accountability Office) when it looked into 95 defense projects last year that there was $295 billion in wasteful spending!
This amazing book starts by covering Middle East war, specifically Afghanistan and the contingent and subsequent profiteering. Chapter two looks at the state of Greece, which is dire, and their human rights abuses even more so. Chapter three moves on to post-earthquake Haiti which is even more dire than is Greece, having been a pawn in the capitalist-communist cold war, and which therefore had two brutal dictators in a row, using US-supplied arms and money to simultaneously shore-up their power base and beat down the locals.
The fourth chapter covers Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the copper and gold mining at the Paguna mine in Bougainville. The fifth takes a look at the US prison population which is the highest in the world despite the USA being one of the most fundamentally religious nations on Earth. I guess organized religion does nothing to keep people honest, huh?!
The sixth chapter is hardly better - it covers private company G4S (formerly Group 4 Securicor, the largest security corporation in the world measured by revenue) in Britain in maintaining (supposedly) housing for asylum seekers in Britain. It covers other such corporations too. The author mentioned Sheffield which I have visited, although not the area he discusses.
People there are living in appalling conditions with no idea of when their case will be reviewed (or even if it is being reviewed). This is in a nation where the top five richest families control more wealth than the poorest twenty percent of the British population - in a world where the wealthiest one percent of people are richer than the other 99 percent.
There were many writing issues with the advance review copy which really never ought to have made it that far in this age of ebooks and spell-checkers. Errors that running a spell-checker would catch included: Portau-Prince, and twentiethcentury. I found many examples of words run together, such as “warlordcontrolled” where it should be “warlord controlled”. There were also instances where an apostrophe ‘s’ after a word was separated from the word by a space, such as in “state ‘s” instead of “state’s”. I don’t know if these were in the original text or if they were simply created as part of the process of moving that text into Kindle format. Hopefully they will be eradicated before this actually gets published.
There were other instances which did not arise as a result of any transformative process, such as where I read, “myriad of ways” which should have simply been “myriad ways”. There were three other instances where this was written in the same way. Myriad can be used as a noun or an adjective, but I’ve never seen a case where trailing it with “of” has made sense. In this same vein, I noted an inappropriate use of 'entitled': "released a report in 2012 entitled The Shadow State". I see this a lot - entitled used where it should be simply 'titled'. I think this word is going the same way as inflammable and irregardless! Sad but true.
One more complaint: the text has references in-line, but the references are not clickable, and unless they’re offered in that format, it’s a lot harder to skim screens back and forth and look up a reference in an ebook, than it is in a regular print book to turn a few pages to the end of a chapter or to the reference section at the end of the book. It's worth a thought!
At one point the author describes a certain political mentality as "Debtocracies, not democracies," which strikes me as a writing issue. How do we use made-up words? Strictly speaking, since we’re dealing with Greek roots here, it ought to have been something like ofeilí̱ocracy, but since no one would know what that meant, and since 'debtocracy' isn't actually a word (I guess it is now! LOL!), it should have been written as 'debt-ocracy' in my opinion. But you pays your drachmas and you takes your choice, I guess. And let's not get started on 'thugocracy'...!
All that aside, I recommend this book as a worthy read because it's as awesome as it is depressing. For example, at one point the author says "The average age of Papua New Guineans was twenty-one, and 30 percent of the population was under thirty". Now math is far from my strong point, and this seemed weird to me, but when I looked into it, it turned out to be true. How disturbing is that? There's a massive population in PNG of kids aged below fifteen years, and it's disturbing given what big business wants to do there.
The US prison population scandal is as upsetting as anything else. The author quotes from a book, The New Jim Crow (which I haven't read) by Michelle Alexander who tells us that the US imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than did South Africa under apartheid, believe it or not. She also tells us that three out of four Washington DC young black males will serve some time in jail, and The number of incarcerated drug offenders has increased twelve-fold since 1980.
And how angering is this:
CCA sent letters to forty-eight states in 2012 offering to buy their prisons— on the condition that the states guaranteed 90 percent occupancy and a twenty-year management contract. Some states did deals with the GEO Group to ensure contractually that 100 percent of prison beds would be filled every night.Talking of doing well out of it, the author clues us in: "In 2013 CAA’s revenue reached nearly $ 1.7 billion, with a profit of $ 300 million. All of this money had come from government contracts." And this while there are ten times as many mentally disturbed people in jail as there are in psychiatric institutions. Is this the definition of insanity?!
I was more than willing to overlook the technical issues I encountered in view of the wealth of information which even to someone who is aware of what can go on and go wrong with these things, is still staggering. It becomes quite horrifying when we realize that we have to do something about this once we get over our paralysis from the sheer magnitude of these issues and of how shameless and brazen government and big business are. I recommend this book completely.
