Reflection on Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds by Joel L. Kraemer

               Honestly, I don’t feel like writing a big reflection. I read the book and got some info from it but it was written in a very boring way. I’m not gonna bother with this one.

Reflection on The Last Lion Volume 2: Alone 1932-1940 by William Manchester

               Another great entry in the Last Lion trilogy, this book confirmed for me that William Manchester is a great author and I will need to find more of his books. This book covers 1932 to 1940, essentially Churchill’s time in the political wilderness, which corresponds pretty neatly with the rise of Hitler and the beginning of World War Two through the invasion of France. It is pretty good timing that just as France is defeated and England is at its most vulnerable, the nation turns to Churchill, the only prominent politician of whom it can be said had always seen Hitler for what he was and who never doubted that England must defeat him.

               The writing in this book is spectacular and I think that Manchester’s skill in imagery and metaphor is as good as it gets in a biographer. I’ll quote him a few times, so you get the picture.

• “All who were close to him agree that [Churchill] was weakly sexed, even in youth, and in his sixties his volcano was virtually extinct. In Parliament a fellow MP whispered to him that his trousers were unfastened. ‘It makes no difference,’ Winston replied wryly. ‘The dead bird doesn’t leave the nest.’”
• “Here [Neville Chamberlain] made a cardinal error. Afterward he happily wrote his sister that the Astors’ son William, recently returned from a trip to Berlin, had the impression that ‘Hitler definitely liked me & thought he could do business with me.’ This was true in the sense that an armed robber thinks he can do business with a bank teller.”
• “The German generals, who had been sweating blood, could scarcely believe their good luck.”
• “It was 5:10 P.M. when the Speaker recognized Churchill, and as Winston rose the mood of the House resembled that of Spaniards when the bull lunges into the arena.”

This book explores Winston a lot as a person rather than a politician since he held no government post in the cabinet until 1939. He was just a backbencher “though a very important one.” To relax, Winston painted, and professional painters were known to comment that his works were “of real merit” and that he was skilled in painting. He painted like he thought, focusing on one object above all others and using his concentration to bring that object to the fore. Winston also dedicated significant time in this period to laying bricks for his retirement home and fixing up the mansion that he would later give to his son when he and his wife Clementine moved into the smaller house. The mansion was Chartwell and Winston loved it tremendously, adopting animals to populate its grounds and building ponds for fish and swimming. He spent his free time painting, laying bricks, and engaging in major works of construction to keep himself busy.

               Churchill bore a very different relationship to power than other politicians that I’ve read about. He had very little political skill and in this sense differed a lot from Lyndon Johnson. Churchill was really a man with an idea who in normal circumstances would probably not have risen to the heights he did. He knew nothing of bringing votes together in Parliament. He rose to power for the sole reason that he was consistent and consistently right in his admonition of Hitler. His best “political” moves were the manners in which he obtained facts and information while out of power. Because he was so trusted, he was able to get civil service employees to send him information that he wanted that he was not really supposed to have. Because he was so prominent, people from outside the government who had information about German armaments came to him because they trusted him more than the appeasing Prime Ministers MacDonald, Baldwin, and Chamberlain. Finally, he was able to get official government figures because MacDonald authorized him almost a decade before the war and everybody forgot that he had that access. Manchester writes, “Reading the transcriptions of those parliamentary debates today, one can only imagine the ministers’ astonishment as Churchill rose to face them and reel off facts and figures that seemed to have come from nowhere — but were always confirmed afterward. Had Simon, say, or Hoare done his homework, they would have realized that Churchill had access to documents stamped ‘Most Secret.’”

               It is astonishing how unready and unwilling Britain and France were to face the Nazi threat in hindsight. The psychological phenomenon is fascinating. Having won the last war, neither could bear to imagine another war, having seen a generation of their best men slaughtered. During the German buildup, popular opinion in Britain supported appeasement and the men who led the charge saw themselves as the protectors of peace. By avoiding antagonizing Germany, they thought that they did the world a service. They fundamentally did not understand who Hitler was. Churchill could understand him better, I think, because they were somewhat similar people. Both saw the world in terms of good and evil with their respective nations as the great good. Both also saw themselves as tremendously important and shapers of the world. It was easier for Churchill to understand where Hitler was headed and why letting him have the Rhineland or the Saarland or all of Czechoslovakia would not sate his appetite but only increase his hunger. Churchill saw things others could not. For example, when Britain decided to allow Germany to build up its fleet, Churchill saw the threat this would pose. Although Britain only allowed a buildup to a fraction of its own power, Germany had no overseas possessions. While the entire English fleet, if together, would easily defeat Germany, that could never happen since they had to protect possessions as disparate as the Falklands and India. It was only with the seizure of Prague that British public opinion started to turn against Hitler, and it would be longer among the Parliamentary leaders of the appeasement movement. In France, politicians would beg their generals to invade the weakly defended German border when Hitler invaded Poland but were rebuffed.

               When Germany did invade, they were using tactics that were totally innovative. For example, in Poland, Nazis who knew Polish simulated Polish news programs telling Poles to flee down the very roads that the Polish army needed for their maneuvers. They attached sirens to dive bombers to stoke maximum fear amongst the populace. The French and British, on the other hand, were convinced that air power would not play a major part in war and the French also limited their tanks, not giving them radios so that they couldn’t coordinate attacks and counterattacks. The French R-35 was better than any German model according to Manchester, yet France sold 235 of the last 500 produced to other countries and had only 90 on the front when the Germans struck. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Poland and France had 130 divisions to Germany’s 98 (of which 36 were totally untrained, so really 62). There was no challenge at all to the French and they could have probably defeated Nazi Germany right then and there. The political situation in France was even worse than in Britain: their chief general resigned just hours before the Nazis invaded and France was without a government.

               The book made me think a lot about modern parallels with China. Will we see in our lifetimes a repetition of these themes as China grows in power and Americans try to keep the peace? How far will China go to assert its power? As I write this, the Communist Party of China is committing atrocities in Xinjiang and crushing the liberty of Hong Kong. For most Americans it is shocking how Chin can even crush the criticisms of an NBA GM who tweeted about Hong Kong. I don’t think that this is the conflict that will cause a war, but I do think that we might be at the beginning of a cold war. I hope that we have a Churchill somewhere who can guide us through it.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Churchill was a Zionist and opposed the Chamberlain government’s policy of restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine, which occurred nine weeks after Nazis stormed into Prague.
• This is not really a fact, but I think it’s interesting how FDR is to Churchill as Reagan is to Margaret Thatcher. The two most powerful British Prime Ministers of the 20^th century both had the support of an American counterpart.
• When he was reinstated as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1939, Churchill carried around a pistol and a suicide pill in his pen.
•                 

Reflection on The Last Lion: Visions of Glory 1874-1912 (Winston Spencer Churchill Volume 1) by William Manchester

               I’m not going to bother recounting the specific events of this book like I usually do. In the second volume, Manchester conveniently summarizes the first volume, so I’ll just put that summary below. Instead, I’ll comment on the writing of the book and the most interesting things about Churchill himself. The summary is underneath the stuff I wrote. I like how the book is divided. There are no chapters, just parts. They are Part One: Headwaters, 1874-1895; Part Two: Stream, 1895-1901; Part Three: River, 1901-1914; Part Four: cataract 1914-1918; Part Five: Oxbow, 1918-1932. The author writes very well and injects a bit of personality into the book sometimes, like when he says “it’s extraordinary how many crises caught him bathing” in a funny little exasperated tone. I think that Manchester really has top-notch skills and I would put him in the same league (though not quite the same level) as Robert Caro. That said, I have only read one book of his and so the rest might be even better.

Manchester does this really cool thing in the book where he talks about where are the leaders were at a certain time. For example, “Could any other nation in 1901 offer its young politicians the chance for greatness which was now his? Not the insular United States of nineteen-year-old Franklin Roosevelt, then an immature, unpromising Harvard freshman in a country of fewer than 76 million—less than a fifth of the Empire’s 412 million—which largely ignored the rest of civilization. Not the vast China of thirteen-year-old Chiang Kai-shek; its few pretensions to a national identity had been shattered with the crushing of the Boxer uprising the previous summer. Certainly not the locked medieval oriental kingdom of sixteen-year-old Hideki Tojo’s Japan. The domain of the Turk—the home of nineteen-year-old Mustapha Kemal—was an empire in name only. Czarist Russia seethed with anarchy, terror, despotism, nihilism, and intrigue, and was constantly menaced by uprisings in the Ukraine, the Baltic states, Finland, Poland, and Georgia, where Joseph Stalin, then Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aged twenty-one, had just been fired from the only nonpolitical job he ever held, a clerkship in the Tiflis observatory. In Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, the Hapsburg emperor presided over an equally unstable polyglot of Serbs, Croats, Poles, Magyars, Czechs, Yugoslavs, and Austrians, including, in the Austrian town of Linz, a sullen eleven-year-old schoolboy named Adolf Hitler.” The book is has two of these moments where it discusses several other leaders and it has a few more moments where it discusses what Hitler was doing at the time.

Something I want to just point out as maybe one of the most interesting things in the book is how terribly Winston’s parents treated him as a child. His father was outright mean to him and his mother was neglectful and had no interest in him. He would send her so many letters from boarding school (where he was sent at 7 years old) and hardly received any in return. He never breastfed and was raised entirely by his nanny. In those first years at boarding school he was beaten savagely and changed schools. On that occasion Manchester interjects to point out that Winston’s father likely did not even know of the incident, as he did not even know how old Winston was. This is apparently the stuff that makes great men.

Winston Churchill is an incredibly unusual person. He lives in a world that is very Victorian and based on the highest ideals of honor. All of his policies and thought flow from these ideals of British supremacy and magnanimity. He loves the hierarchy of the aristocracy. He would see any visitor in his bedroom except for the king and had the common aristocratic disdain for the working class. That said, he would later support social welfare legislation in that European-style noblesse oblige sort of way. His life is honestly fascinating as it’s filled with interesting people, war, prison breaks, and excitement. Churchill seems to have been at the center of so many major events, like when he found himself in New York on Black Tuesday. His life is incredibly fascinating and I had to pick up volume two right away.

Summary

THE GRANDSON of a duke, Winston Churchill was born in splendrous Blenheim Palace during the autumn of 1874, when the British Empire was the world’s mightiest power. Almost immediately the infant was entrusted to his plump nanny, “Woom,” who became his only source of childhood happiness. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a brilliant if erratic member of Parliament — he was, briefly, chancellor of the Exchequer — actually loathed Winston. The boy’s breathtakingly beautiful American mother, Jennie, devoted most of her time to sexual intrigue, slipping between the sheets with handsome, powerful men in Britain, in the United States, and on the Continent. Her husband was in no position to object. He was an incurable syphilitic.

Winston rebelled against school authority, first becoming a disciplinary problem and then, at Harrow, the lowest-ranked scholar in the lower form. His dismal academic record ruled out Oxford or Cambridge, so he went to Sandhurst, England’s West Point. On February 20, 1895, less than a month after his father’s death from paresis, young Churchill was commissioned a second lieutenant and gazetted to the Fourth Hussars, preparing to embark for India. In Bangalore Churchill succeeded where his schoolmasters failed. During the long, sweltering siestas, he educated himself, reading Plato, Aristotle, Gibbon, Macaulay, Schopenhauer, and poring over thousands of pages of parliamentary debates. Developing a flair for the language, he found he could earn money writing newspaper and magazine articles and books. At the same time he felt strong stirrings of ambition. He would, he decided, seek a seat in Parliament. But first he must become famous. Ruthlessly manipulating his mother’s lovers (who included the Prince of Wales), he managed to appear wherever the fighting was fiercest. By 1899 lie was in South Africa. Taken prisoner in the Boer War by the Boers, he managed a sensational escape from a POW stockade, making his way across three hundred miles of enemy territory to freedom. His breakout made him a national figure. Returning home, he was elected to Parliament while Victoria still reigned.

In the House of Commons his rise was meteoric. At thirty-three he was a cabinet minister. Appointed president of the Board of Trade, he joined with David Lloyd George, the new chancellor of the Exchequer, in the move to abolish sweated labor despite die-hard peers in the House of Lords. In 1908, working in tandem, they conceived and then guided through the Commons an unprecedented program of liberal legislation: unemployment compensation, health insurance, and pensions for the aged, all of them to be financed by taxes on the rich and the landed gentry. Winston denounced the aristocracy in savage speeches, and titled relatives stopped speaking to him. But he had a new, exciting supporter: Clementine Hozier, who became Mrs. Winston Churchill in 1908. Long afterward the groom said that they had “lived happily ever afterwards.” In fact, they remained deeply in love until his death nearly sixty years later.

When the Central Powers, led by Germany and Austria-Hungary, plunged all Europe into the Great War of 1914-1918, Churchill had anticipated it. Since 1911 he had been first lord of the Admiralty. The fleet was ready. But on the western front the great armies were locked in a bloody, hopeless stalemate. It would be years before either side could hope for victory in the west. Churchill saw a way to break the deadlock. He proposed that the Allied navies open a new front in the eastern Mediterranean, exploiting the weakness of the Central Powers’ unstable ally, Turkey. If the Dardanelles strait were forced by battleships, Constantinople would fall within hours. The French and British could then join hands with their Russian ally and sweep up the Danube into Hungary, Austria, Bavaria, and Wurttemberg, ripping open the Second Reich’s undefended southern flank.

Today military historians agree that the Dardanelles strategy could have ended the war in 1916 with a German defeat. But a timid British admiral, who had been sweeping all before him, turned tail at the first sign of resistance — even as the Turks, believing themselves beaten, abandoned their forts on the strait and began the evacuation of their capital. Then equally incompetent British generals botched the landings on Gallipoli Peninsula, which flanked the Dardanelles. The British public demanded a scapegoat, and Churchill, as the stratagem’s most flamboyant advocate, was dismissed from the Admiralty. He joined the army, crossed to Flanders, and, as a lieutenant colonel, commanded a battalion in the trenches.

After the Versailles peace conference, in which he played no part, he became secretary for war and air, and established the Royal Air Force. Then, as colonial secretary, he was responsible for Britain’s postwar diplomacy in the Middle East. He planned the Jewish state, created the nations of Iraq and Jordan, and picked their rulers. It was typical of Churchill, whatever the question, that he would open with a ferocious stance. Negotiations would lead to compromise and solution. Thus he responded to postwar IRA terrorism by creating a force of Black and Tans — former British soldiers who became terrorists themselves. Yet in the end it was he who befriended Michael Collins, the IRA guerrilla leader, and who piloted the Irish Free State treaty through Parliament.

In 1922 Lloyd George’s coalition government fell and was succeeded by Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives. As a Liberal, and then as a Liberal Free Trader, Churchill ran for Parliament in three elections and was defeated each time. Changing parties, he won as a Tory in 1924 and was appointed chancellor of the Exchequer — traditionally, a step away from the prime ministry — by Baldwin. His appointment was in fact unwise. Rejecting the counsel of John Maynard Keynes and accepting instead the advice of the Bank of England, he returned Britain to the gold standard. Markets abroad couldn’t afford British exports. A coal miners’ strike led to a crippling general strike. Winston founded a strike-breaking newspaper; then, after the strike had failed, he took up the coal miners’ cause and fought the mine owners, including a close Churchill relative, for higher pay and safer pits.

After Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour party won the election of 1929, Winston held the Exchequer post in the Tory shadow cabinet, which would return to power when Labour’s slim majority disappeared. But before that could hap pen, he fell again. The issue was a grant of dominion status for India, putting her on a level with Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. He, like Disraeli, regarded the British Raj as the brightest jewel in England’s imperial crown. He told Parliament that India was “a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.” Facing a stone wall of hostile Tories, Churchill resigned from the shadow government on January 27, 1931. Less than seven months later a new government was formed, and in November what might have been Churchill’s place at the Exchequer was filled by Neville Chamberlain. Thrice fallen from grace — the Dardanelles, the lost elections, and now India Churchill had become a political pariah, out of joint with the times.

In the early 1920s, a small legacy and £20,000 in royalties from sales of his six-volume history of the Great War had permitted him to buy Chartwell Manor, a country home near the small Kent town of Westerham, where he did most of his writing. John Kenneth Galbraith has pointed out that administrations suspicious of intellectuals unwittingly make substantial contributions to scholarship and writing. “It comes about,” he wrote, “from not employing the scholars or scribes.” During Churchill’s long spell as a backbencher he wrote and published a million words.

His chief concern was that Britain might be vanquished by a tacit conspiracy between Prussian aggression and English pacifism. Typically in the House of Commons, he would contemplate his colleagues, then lower his head like a bull confronting a matador and slowly shake it. After a pitifully weak MP revolt against government policy, Aneurin Bevan encountered him in the smoking room and asked: “What have you been up to? We haven’t seen much of you in the fight lately.” “Fight?” growled Winston, sweeping the room with a challenging glance. “I can’t see any fight. All I can see in this Parliament is a lot of people leaning against each other.”

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In the old days of Victorian England, those travelling to India by ship would go “Port Out, Starboard Home,” which became the acronym and later the normal word, POSH.
• In the 1870’s, dry cleaning did not yet exist and “suits had to be picked apart at the seams, washed, and sewn back together. Patricians wore new clothes or had tailors who could resew the garments they had made in the first place.”
• Aristocrats were far more “sexually wayward” than one would think in the Victorian era. The prudishness that we think of was more about the middle classes and the aristocracy were having a lot of adulterous sex. In titled families they wouldn’t worry about the fatherhood of children after the first and Churchill’s mom, Jenny, slept with all of the most important Englishmen at the time.
• Churchill is descended from Sir Francis Drake.
• Churchill’s father, Randolph contracted syphilis from a prostitute when his friends drugged him as a young man. The disease drove him insane and killed him. Very bad prank.
• Something that I thought about was how the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 may have been an important required condition of World War One. Through her, most of the great monarchies of Europe were related and with her dead, they must have lost some affinity for one another. Her funeral was attended by five kings and forty members of Europe’s royal families.
• Winston tried and failed to woo Ethel Barrymore, Drew Barrymore’s great-aunt.
• If Britain had come closer to Constantinople in World War One, the Young Turks were ready to destroy the Hagia Sophia and other priceless buildings with dynamite.
• In one World War One offensive, the German general Ludendorff covered the sounds of his guns being moved into position by wrapping horses’ hooves in rags and masking the sounds of creaking gun carriages with cages of croaking frogs.
• At the turn of the century, England had a policy of spending twice as much on its navy as any other country. At the end of World War One, they allowed themselves to live with a ratio of 5 (Great Britain), 5 (USA), 3 (Japan), 1.75 (France), and 1.75 (Italy).

Reflection on Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

               Ronan Farrow wrote a really good book about his efforts as an NBC reporter to investigate the sexual predation of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and the attempts to stop his reporting. The book is honestly very disturbing and contains graphic depictions of sexual assaults and rapes. Harvey Weinstein is a truly disgusting person. However, it’s not just him. Tons of other men are implicated as well not just for coving up Weinstein’s crimes but for their own horrible acts. One interesting thing is that NBC tried to stop the Weinstein reporting because Weinstein blackmailed them using information the National Enquirer had on Matt Lauer.

               The big point that Farrow makes in the book is that there are not just a few individuals acting badly in Hollywood, but that there is a whole network of people covering it all up. Actresses who have are raped are often told that no one will believe them if they have already done a sex scene. There were also major political connections, as Harvey Weinstein was connected with Bill and Hilary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Jeffery Epstein. Farrow touches on them, but I would love to read a whole book about those four. I was disappointed to learn that former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak connected Harvey Weinstein to Black Cube, a surveillance service run by Israeli ex-Mossad agents. That organization would do Weinstein’s dirty work and investigate Farrow. There are some heroes in the book, like Rich McHugh, an NBC producer who worked with Ronan Farrow and was eventually forced out of NBC due to his push to expose the truth. Anthony Bourdain was also very supportive of his own girlfriend’s allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Farrow also mentions his boyfriend Jon Lovett a lot, who I knew from the Pod Save America podcast.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Apparently Donald Trump and Melania sleep in separate bedrooms.

Reflection on Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy by Matt Stoller

               In Goliath, author Matt Stoller argues that American policymakers have stopped fighting monopolies since the 1970’s, which has led to a new age of robber barons that corrupt our politics. Stoller sees the Democratic Party of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the good actors against monopolies. He claims that the modern Democratic Party of the Clintons is more like Teddy Roosevelt, seeking to co-opt monopolies rather than destroy them. The book is very good and important, though I thought it would go into more detail in the pre-FDR era. One aspect I really liked was Stoller’s chapter on Andrew Mellon, who was Secretary of the Treasury from 1921-1933. Mellon was incredibly corrupt and Stoller goes over his crimes, writing that, “Mellon had, as treasury secretary and thus boss of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, given his own companies tax refunds. He held bank stocks while serving as chair of the Federal Reserve. He also owned a massive distillery while enforcing Prohibition, and illegally traded with the Soviet Union. Patman even noted that Mellon had had the Treasury Department launch a magazine dedicated to the use of aluminum in architecture, while controlling the Alcoa aluminum monopoly. The basic accusation was self-dealing; Mellon had been transacting his own business at the Treasury Department, and had retained control, if not formal ownership, in over three hundred corporations engaged in global commerce.”

               Something that I had not realized is that FDR was the biggest trustbuster president. It makes sense with the New Deal and all, but I had always associated that sort of thing with Teddy Roosevelt and Taft. The FDR DoJ brought charges against Mellon’s Gulf Oil, seventeen major oil companies, forty-six individuals, and three trade publications just for fixing gasoline prices. The whole middle of the book is basically dedicated to legislation that acted as a collective shield against monopoly and big business power, all passed from in the New Deal Era up until 1970:

• The Revenue Act of 1937 passed, which closed loopholes that allowed the wealthy to avoid taxes.
• The Banking Act of 1935, according to the author, “moved power from privately owned Fed branches to the presidentially appointed board in Washington, D.C. It transformed the Federal Reserve into a public entity, ensconcing power over the economy in the hands of a publicly run central bank.”
• The Robinson-Patman Act, also known as the “anti-A&P Act” barred the use of discriminatory pricing to gain monopoly power. A&P Supermarket was famous for doing this to destroy its competitors. The law also outlawed the kickback system that A&P used to get special bulk discounts through advertising allowances from producers.
• The Celler-Kefauver Act of 1950 banned anticompetitive mergers.
• The Bank Holding Company Act Amendments of 1970 is, according to Stoller, “one of the most important antimonopoly laws of the twentieth century. It stopped the banking industry from buying major insurance companies through holding companies, preserving the traditional barrier between commerce and banking that Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan would break in 1998.

               Everything changed in the 1970s. It seemed like the New Deal had transformed itself in the 1960s to lower taxes without lowering spending, which caused huge inflation. Then, when the oil shocks of the 1970s came, instead the government couldn’t increase spending without increasing inflation. Republicans and Jimmy Carter were strongly against inflation and Carter famously made Paul Volcker, a very right-wing dude, his Fed chairman. Instead of raising taxes and spending to fight both inflation and unemployment, Volcker raised interest rates to astronomical levels to kill inflation through the creation of unemployment. This was paired with the fact that the Fed became too worried to ever let bankers fail, so it would bail out the bankers in any crunch. As banking monopolies grew “too big to fail,” it would create some very bad incentives for them when they knew that the government would always save them no matter what.

               The 1970s brought political change as well. Committee chairs in Congress would now be decided by a vote of their entire party, rather than just selecting the most senior member of the committee. This led to the defeat of many older chairs, including Wright Patman, who Stoller makes the hero of the book. The Watergate Babies, Democrats who were elected in 1974 and 76, were not concerned about economic issue and monopoly power, primarily concerning themselves with social issues and Vietnam. This led to pro-banking interests leading major committees, most notably the Banking Committee, of which Patman, a strongly anti-bank warrior, had been chair. The shield against big business’ power was slowly dismantled. Stoller writes of the Consumer Goods Pricing Act of 1975, which invalidated state-level fair trade laws, the kind that stopped chain stores from predatory pricing. Stoller calls it the “single biggest step toward the destruction of the independent business enterprise—and the small producer and small retailer—in the history of America.” Due to the 1975 legislation, small businesses became very vulnerable to powerful chain stores and producers could not longer say what middlemen would do with their products. It would create an age of powerful middlemen.

               In the 1980s the deregulation got even worse. In 1982, Reagan allowed banks to pay whatever they wanted on deposits and eliminated rules that restricted savings and loan banks to their core business of helping people finance homes. This allowed them to start speculating in riskier investments like financial derivatives and commodities. Reagan’s administration, essentially run by big business interests, had no interest in busting trusts. While Nixon and Carter had seriously slowed DOJ suits against companies, the Reagan administration filed just four (next to nothing) and cut the anti-trust division’s staff almost in half. Economists were elevated in the DOJ to be necessary in any case and they tended to be economists who favored monopolies. New guidelines made it much harder to challenge mergers. They required complex cost/benefit analyses that were used to shut down any attempts at stopping a merger. With no way to stop mergers, the economy grew increasingly concentrated, and competition decreased. Corporate raiders entered the scene. These financiers would look for companies that “generated cash, had little debt, and owned assets.” These conservatively managed companies were perfect victims on whom they would pile their debts after a hostile takeover, in which the raider would surreptitiously buy out a majority of the company. It would end up costing next to nothing since a raider put all of his debt on the company once he had it, essentially paying himself back.

               Stoller saves what is honestly the angriest portion of his book for the last chapter. He discusses the Clinton administration and the ways in which Democrats, the same party who created the shield to protect democracy against big business, were cutting off parts of it to achieve the economic gains of the few. In 1999, Clinton worked with a Republican Congress to pass the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act, which fully repealed Glass-Steagall, the Depression-Era law that famously split commercial and venture capital banks. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 eliminated public rules that limited the use of derivatives by enormous banks. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 started to allow telecom companies to re-merge together, and AT&T, the old monopoly, started to re-form through buying back its old constituent parts. The number of mergers that occurred under Clinton is astounding. In the twelve years of Reagan and Bush, there were 85,064 mergers valued at $3.5 trillion, but under just seven years of Clinton there were 166,310 deals valued at $9.8 trillion. Stoller writes that the DOJ even approved the Exxon and Mobil merger, unifying two parts of the old Rockefeller empire of U.S. Oil.

               Stoller is really upset that Democrats have betrayed their old anti-monopoly creed. I think that he is angrier at them than Republicans because he had always expected this behavior from Republicans but not from the Democrats who had saved the country in the 1930s and 40s. For example, Obama promised Congresswoman Donna Edwards that as part of the $700 billion TARP deal, he would attach protections for homeowners that would allow bankruptcy to cover mortgage debts, but he did not. Today, the outlook is dark, especially in the technology sector. Google and Facebook took 60% of all online ad revenue in 2018. Google has 90% of the search ad market, “can track users across 80 percent of websites, and its ad subsidiary AdMob has 83 percent of the market for Androis apps and 78 percent of iOS apps. Facebook has 77 percent of mobile social networking trafficking, and roughly two thirds of Americans get news on social media.” This is in the context in which local news is dying. “Roughly 1,800 local newspapers in America have disappeared since 2004, and over 2,000 of the 3,143 counties in America now have no daily newspaper. Pittsburgh has become the first midsized regional city without a daily newspaper. Specialty newspapers are dying as well; from 1999 to 2009 the number of black newspapers was cut in half. From 2005 to 2015, roughly 26 percent of newspaper journalists—including digital outlets—were laid off. There have also been massive declines in the workforce of related industries, like radio, book publishing, magazines, and music.” With no alternate sources of news, Facebook will become more or less the only place people get news anymore. “Meanwhile, Amazon captures nearly one of every two dollars Americans spend online, and it is the leading seller of books, toys, apparel, and consumer electronics in the nation. Its cloud computing subsidiary has over one million enterprise customers, it is a major movie producer and defense contractor, and it has 100 million U.S. customers that are members of its Prime bundling service. It is the number one threat to independent retailers.” At the very end Stoller breaks into first person to openly advocate for resistance against this and for the creation of new protections against monopolies. I think that the book was extremely convincing and hopefully important people are listening.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Due to a wave of mergers, 40% of hospital stays happen in markets where one entity controls all of the hospitals.
• Teddy Roosevelt reached a deal with JP Morgan to bring anti-trust suits against large corporations but not against those owned by Morgan.
• In the early 1920s, 90% of money-producing patents and 90% of all dividends and interest payments were held in the North. Of the top 200 corporations, 9 were in the South, 11 in the West, and 180 in the North.
• FDR tried to veto the Bonus Bill of 1935 that offered earlier benefits to veterans of World War One, but he was overridden by Congress.