wealth

Love, Honor, and Betray

brittany — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Before I started to read it, this book held lots of promise; the cover tells of the author’s previous books being on the New York Times bestseller list. Unfortunately, I had not had the pleasure of reading any other of Kimberla Lawson Roby’s books. Since reading Love, Honor, and Betray, I have come to realize that one of its characters, the Reverend Curtis Black, was at the centre of a series of an eight books by the same author. This series forms a sort of soap opera narrative around this character and his family that has apparently had quite a bit of success. Lawson Roby is certainly a very prolific writer, having published fifteen books since 1997 and been the recipient of many prizes at the African American Literary Awards Show. Her books have a cult following.

Since reading the book, I have realized that I am perhaps not the best person to critique it. My feminist bent is too strong to not be offended by much of what the novel contains. The easy good versus evil dichotomy is maintained throughout the novel, with the main character, Charlotte, painted as a despicable woman and completely vilified by the author to suit the narrative that centers on the “good” Reverend. For example, when the Reverend’s ex-fling passes away, he wants to take in his baby daughter, Curtina, and raise her in his family. However, his wife Charlotte openly hates this child and spends the entire book treating her badly, until the end when she realizes she may lose her husband. While multiple women chase after the handsome Reverend, he stays faithful to his wife while she cheats on him with not just one stranger picked up in a bar, but with a former lover whom she reconnects with on Facebook.

The action in the novel never stops. There are naughty photos of Charlotte sent by cell phone to blackmail her into a subservient sexual relationship. There is a crazed paedophile holding teenagers hostage in a high school. There is a spectacular car crash that almost costs the Reverend his life.

All the characters are attractive one-dimensional mannequins who live an opulent way of life. This lifestyle is probably eons away from any of Lawson Roby’s readers. Charlotte gets back at her husband by maxing out his credit cards ($25,000) at the shopping centre, her son with the Reverend, Matthew drives a brand new luxury car at the age of seventeen, and they have a fulltime housekeeper. The ultimate cliché was the Obama-style fist bump the Reverend and Matthew give each other often in the novel.

Perhaps if I had read the previous novels, this would be a more interesting story; I have been known to follow soap operas in the past. But, the only thing that kept me turning the pages was the fact that I couldn’t believe that it could be any worse. Towards the end of the book, I was able to conceive of a redemptive factor through the fact that Lawson Roby’s publisher had included discussion questions for reading groups. Perhaps the purpose of the book is to discuss its transparent dichotomy and its one-dimensional characters?

Written by: Sophie M. Lavoie, March 15th 2011

Somewhere

mandy — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Directed by Sofia Coppola

Focus Features

It’s hard to give a shit about the rich. The beautiful and the damned don’t stir much sympathy. All the angst of moneyed loneliness seems… slight, when compared to poor and ugly people who feel lonely. Pity should be reserved for people the world shuts out, not those who shun the world’s embrace. Sofia Coppola’s new movie, Somewhere, is about the sadness of having everything. Luckily, it’s not as bad as you might think.

At the Chateau Marmont—an opulent hotel with an edgy reputation—we meet a famous actor (Stephen Dorff) who is feeling isolated. He spends his days by the pool, or watching pole dancers perform for him in his hotel room. He receives anonymous text messages telling him he’s an asshole. He drives his fast car, in circles, on a deserted race track. And he tries, fitfully, to be father, though there’s a sense in which he thinks his daughter is too good for him. She, fortunately, loves her dad. And together, they are charming.

As the dissolute dad, Dorff looks like a men’s fragrance advertisement. He’s got so many stomach muscles. His tattoos are winningly rebellious. His looks devil-may-care when he smokes. Even though he’s a scarcely-articulate douchebag with the intellectual life of a palm tree, you still want to hang out with him.

Elle Fanning has been in showbiz since an agent cut her umbilical cord (she had her first major screen credit at age two), so it really is a stretch for her to play a non-actor. She’s innocent as a lily in Somewhere, and she easily presents the strongest argument as to why anyone should care about Dorff's character. Her role is to be authentic; a real person in a morass of phonies. Thankfully, she isn’t given the kind of precocious wisdom children are often endowed with in this kind of movie. Instead, Fanning gets to play a girl who seems entirely normal, who doesn’t see her uncertain future or how painful adolescence is going to be.

The photographer Helmut Newton died, age eighty-three, when the Cadillac he was driving crashed into a wall outside the Chateau Marmont. After a lifetime celebrating excess, even his death seemed glamorous. Not many octogenarians die in this way. The fact that Somewhere is set in the cloistered walls of a celebrity retreat, and not in a mall in Boise, Idaho, is because Coppola knows depression is easier to look at when it’s dressed in pearls. Her movie is elegant and perceptive. But poor people have it worse.

Read the full review at Movie Waffle

Written by: James Tatham, January 11th 2011

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future

gwen — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Robert B. Reich

Alfred A. Knopf

Many people shy away from trying to understand economics. They assume that because they don’t know much about tax or trade policies, or because they don’t understand what a derivative on Wall Street is and does, that economics is too complicated, and they leave the fate of the economy in the hands of the “experts”. The trouble with this is that the experts often have a vested interest in keeping everyone else in the dark in order to make a profit.

Enter Robert Reich. In his newest book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, the former US Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and currently professor at the University of California, Berkeley, manages to make a complicated topic digestible. He presents a thorough, yet easily accessible analysis of patterns in America’s economy since the Great Depression.

His underlying premise is that the American economy swings back and forth like a pendulum between times of economic contraction (to varying degrees) and times of economic growth and prosperity. He argues that in this pattern lies another pattern that provides the key to understanding why things went so horribly wrong in 2008 and have not gotten much better since: the concentration of income at the top and a flat growth of income for everyone else. Reich steps beyond the now common analyses that see the root of the economic crash in 2008 in the mortgage crisis or in the scrupulous behavior on Wall Street. He points out that while it is true that Wall Street’s strategy of betting against the American economy and making profits off of people losing their homes contributed to an accelerated downward spiral into the Great Recession, the real issue that led to the economic collapse has been the ongoing erosion of income for the vast majority of Americans.

Reich notes that in the year leading up to the crash in 2008, the top one percent of the American population earned twenty-three percent of the nation’s income. The last time income was so concentrated at the top in the US was in 1928, just before the Great Depression. He explains that the time of economic prosperity that the US experienced after 1945 was a result of macroeconomic policies that ensured a fairer distribution if income and wealth. The Social Security system, Medicare and Medicaid, regulation of the housing and loan market, increased power of labor unions to negotiate higher wages, and programs designed to create jobs were legacies of the New Deal that between 1947 and 1975 created a time where ordinary Americans earned enough money to consume the products they were producing. However, the pendulum swung back starting in the late 1970s. Reich points out that when it became increasingly difficult for American workers to be able to afford to consume, they turned to, and ultimately exhausted, three key coping mechanisms: women entering the workforce, working longer hours, and when that failed to generate enough income, borrowing against your house.

Reich puts the current Great Recession in political and historical perspective. He points out that the path toward the crash really started in the 1980s, when the emphasis on free-market economics and the linking of Wall Street and key decision-making position in politics made the pendulum swing away from a basic bargain that meant that average Americans could afford to live a decent life. He points out that the only way to really get out of the Great Recession is to reverse that trend and ensure that income is distributed more fairly to allow Americans to consume, which would trigger production of goods through increased demand, which in turn would trigger job growth.

Reich ends his book with a series of suggestions for how to achieve this: a reverse income tax, where those earning less than $20,000-$30,000 annually receive wage subsidies rather than paying income tax, higher marginal tax rates for the wealthy, a carbon tax, school vouchers that are based on family income, college loans linked to subsequent income, Medicare for all, and a delinking of money/corporate interests and politics. While this plan sounds utopian, especially given the current trend toward electing politicians who run on an even more drastic deregulation and anti-government platform, Reich makes it very clear that unless we make the pendulum swing toward fair distribution of income again, which can only be done through government action, the Great Recession is here to stay and might, ultimately, undermine the social and political peace in America.

We can’t afford to not understand this. We can’t afford to not understand economics.

Written by: Annette Przygoda, November 12th 2010

The Life You Can Save: Acting Now To End World Poverty

admin — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:45:00 +0000

By Peter Singer

Random House

For his writings against speciesism, most notably Animal Liberation, some people think of Peter Singer as the father of the animal rights movement. Singer is also an accomplished philosopher, ethicist, writer, and bioethics professor. But with academic notoriety comes controversy; Singer has long balanced criticism for his utilitarian ethics perspectives while acting as an advocate for the rights of animals and poverty-stricken people. In his new book, Singer expands his ethical arguments in favor of eradicating poverty and lays a theoretical foundation for ending extreme poverty and the powerlessness that it both causes and reinforces.

Drawing on the general facts relating to poverty, Singer breaks down ethical arguments about how to give and why. Every chapter begins with an exercise in "practical ethics." The reader is forced to examine contradictions in generosity and weigh the moral imperatives of saving a single life versus many lives. Singer offers a variety of tips for creating a culture of giving; for example, joining forces with like-minded philanthropists to rally enthusiasm, or doing away with anonymous donations to encourage more conversation about giving money away. Repeatedly, Singer asserts that as privileged people in the developed world who are universally better off than those battling poverty in the developing world, it is our moral obligation to equalize the masses.

The problem with The Life You Can Save is that poverty is not a one-dimensional issue that can be addressed with only large-scale measures. Singer writes about poverty in broad, sometimes offensively simplistic terms, relegating the cultural, socioeconomic, and regional specifics of poverty and its causes to appendix notes. While explaining what poverty is, Singer seems to forget the root causes and how so many of the supposed solutions of today (such as creating assets through investing and relying on large organizations) are built on models that brought us to our current global dilemmas (capitalism and corrupt governments). It is clear that Singer hopes to galvanize people to believe they can be part of the big-picture solution, but there is also something to be said for small scale alternatives that address the unique needs of specific continents, countries, cities, cultures, and people. To criticize residents of developed countries instead of oppressive oligarchies seems humorously shortsighted.

Singer does the predictable chastising of the spectrum; from "Don’t Be Evil" Google co-founders who use private planes to everyday people who needlessly buy overpriced bottled water and name brand coffee, Singer finds fault with every measure of wasteful spending. At the same time, he uncritically celebrates investment capital and the philanthropy of upper class white Americans like Bill and Melinda Gates and minister Rick Warren. Should a technology monopoly and homophobia at home be ignored when guilt-ridden white people send loads of money, vaccines, and church folk to Africa? Why are the majority of Singer’s examples white American men? Forgive me if I’m unconvinced and uncomfortable with the idea that one homogeneous group of leaders has all the answers.

In line with modern publicity, you can visit The Life You Can Save website to find the book in many languages and to learn about anti-poverty organizations that you can donate to. Then again, if you’re savvier than Singer assumes, you can also use the power of the Internet to find other ways to redirect your cash to the people in need.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, April 6th 2009