Reflection on The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

               This is a very interesting book about new tax ideas that would raise public income and try to fight inequality that has emerged in the economy of the United States since the 1970s. I really liked it but I’m not too motivated to write long posts lately. I am fighting through over a thousand pages of the last Winston Churchill book and it’s tough. I’m just gonna put some interesting facts below. One interesting thing though that I learned about is “economic substance doctrine,” which is a legal concept that makes “illegal any transaction that has no other purpose than a reduction of tax liability.” I think that is a really important and good idea that should be forcefully applied.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• 20% of shares of US corporations are owned by foreigners.
• Every income group in the USA funnels between 25 and 30 percent of their income into tax coffers except for the ultra-wealthy, who pay 20%.
• Massachusetts implemented a property tax in 1640.
• Apparently economists used to believe that the shares of national income that came from capital and labor were a constant 25 and 75 percent. However, from 1980 to 2018, they have changed to 30 and 70 percent.
• Today about 60% pf profits made by US multinational companies are booked in low-tax countries like Ireland and Bermuda.

Reflection on History of the Jews Volume Five by Heinrich Graetz

               This book, published in 1891, is the oldest book I think I’ve read in a long time (besides the Tanakh). It was a good history though a little heavy at points going into specific persecutions. I would have liked a more holistic history and more information on the development of Reform Judaism. Graetz hates Kabbalah and mysticism and loves rationality. He is definitely very biased in that aspect, but his biases are clear since he makes no effort to hide them.

He has a really great and dramatic type of writing, like when he talks about Mendelssohn rescuing Ashkenazi Jews from the ignorance that they held. I think that his interpretations of what the religion was about were really interesting. He writes that, “Judaism recognizes the freedom of religious convictions. Original, pure Judaism, therefore, contains no binding articles of belief, no symbolical books, by which the faithful were compelled to swear and affirm their incumbent duty. Judaism prescribes not faith, but knowledge, and it urges that its doctrines be taken to heart. In this despised religion everyone may think, opine, and err as he pleases, without incurring the guilt of heresy. Its right of inflicting punishment begins only when evil thoughts become acts. Why? Because Judaism is not revealed religion, but revealed legislation. Its first precept is not, ‘thou shalt believe or not believe,’ but, ‘thou shalt do or abstain from doing.’” Another great passage is the following: “a nation actually did arise from the darkness of the tomb, the only example chronicled in the annals of man. This resuscitated people, the Jewish race, endeavored at its resurrection to collect its thoughts and memories, and recall a vision of its glorious past; feeling itself to be at once old and young, rich in memories and lacking in experience, chained to the hoary antiquity by a perfect sequence of events, yet seeming as if of yesterday. I think that the best thing about the book is how Graetz’s love of Judaism and the Jewish people shines through his writing.

I noticed a few really interesting things that I want to point out. One is that after their conquest by Napoleon, many German states reacted against the Jews, blaming them for the German defeat. This is very similar to the “stabbed in the back” theory that gained popularity among anti-Semitic Germans after World War One. Another is that Polish Judaism had become totally about the Talmud. Young Jewish scholars knew nothing of the Jewish writings or khetuvim, and only really knew the Talmud. It is so bizarre to think that the Talmud was studied more than the Tanakh but that’s the way it was. I was also shocked at how long discrimination of Jews went on for. Jews were not considered citizens of the countries they lived in until the French Revolution, after which we were slowly emancipated in Europe, ending with Romania in 1922. Even in Great Britain, Baron Lionel de Rothschild couldn’t enter the House of Commons because he was Jewish when he attempted from 1847 to 1851.

Reflection on Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? By Graham Allison

               This excellent book has got to be one of the best I’ve read in a while. It is an extremely detailed and thorough look at the likelihood of war between China and the United States and its analysis of possible conflict between the two countries is very clear. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Churchill biographies, but modern China keeps reminding me of Germany in the 1930’s. There are the feats of engineering. China produced and used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the United States did in the entire 20^th century. China built the equivalent of all the housing in Europe in just 15 years. The list goes on and on. There is also the repression of minority groups, as China attempts to wipe Muslim Uyghurs off the map. One criticism of the book and the Thucydides’s Trap project is that it is very Eurocentric. I think that the fundamental idea of a rising power and an established power fighting does not just have to be applied to the most powerful of states but could also be applied to any number of conflicts. They chose to only cover the last 500 years, which is a choice that will favor Europe. I am also not sure that the list is so comprehensive since it doesn’t explain the decline of some powers. For example, Spain and Portugal have the first conflict of their “big 16,” and they come to an understanding, yet there is no explanation of Spain’s later decline.

               Allison has lots of good lessons for policymakers. For example, he writes that, “when states repeatedly fail to act in what appears to be their true national interest, it is often because their policies reflect necessary compromises among parties within their government rather than a single coherent vision.” This reflects the fundamental truth that a state is a body of people who often disagree. The overwhelming interest of 90% of the people can definitely be stopped by a powerful or motivated 10%. This happens often in domestic policy as the wealthy, special interest groups, and lobbying organizations exert outsized policymaking. In the international sphere it can threaten the very existence of the state.

               Allison is extremely clear in his discussion of Chinese goals and motivations. I found his explanation of Xi Jinping’s views on Gorbachev even more clear than Kerry Brown’s or Francois Bougon’s. Allison boils down Xi’s thoughts to this: “Gorbachev made three fatal errors. He relaxed political control of society before he had reformed his country’s economy. He and his predecessors allowed the Communist Party to become corrupt, and ultimately hollow. And he ‘nationalized’ the Soviet military, requiring commanders to swear allegiance to the nation, not the Party and its leader.” In terms of maintaining control over the country, I think that these three errors would just about sum it up.

               In a conflict between the two countries, China will not have the naval strength to strike at the United States’ mainland. Even hitting Hawaii would be very difficult. It will be almost as difficult for the Americans to hit China. Allison writes that, “Today, China’s arsenal of more than one thousand antiship missiles based on the mainland and its coastal fleet make it impossible for any US warship to operate safely within a thousand miles of China’s coast. Sixty-two submarines patrol adjacent waters armed with torpedoes and missiles that can attack surface ships. An array of antisatellite weapons gives China the capacity to jam or even destroy US intelligence, surveillance, and communication satellites over this area.” He says that the US would have to keep carriers behind the first major East Asian island chain and, according to the Pentagon doctrine of “Air-Sea Battle,” would send long-range bombers to destroy Chinese anti-ship missiles based on the mainland to allow carriers to safely move closer.

               One of the most shocking things about the book is how closely two predictions of potential war causes mirror real-life events in 2019, two years after Allison wrote the book. One is the situation in Hong Kong. Allison posits that severe repression in Hong Kong could trigger a movement for international recognition of Taiwan’s independence. The United States is obligated to defend Hong Kong and that defense could cause war, as almost happened in 1996. Another is the escalation of a trade war into a shooting war; a trade war has of course begun under the Trump administration.

               One of the most important ideas of the book is that “There is no ‘solution’ for the dramatic resurgence of a 5,000-year-old civilization with 1.4 billion people. It is a condition, a chronic condition that must be managed over a generation. Constructing a strategy proportionate to this challenge will require a multiyear, multiminded effort.” There are many paths to take, and US policymakers must balance the fact that Chinese supremacy in Asia will cause harm to the United States, yet most Americans are probably not willing to sacrifice their family members’ lives for naval supremacy in the western Pacific. Unless the US pays the blood price for it, that region will have to pass out of US hegemony. My thoughts as I finished the book are that the USA should avoid war with China. We have to acknowledge that we are entering a bipolar century and bide our time. We have to have faith that our system of liberty and democracy is better than Communism and tyranny. Ideally, US policymakers will bide their time and slowly withdraw from East Asia, especially on land. However, in the cyber and economic arenas, the United States will continue to undermine the CCP and try to develop fissures to crack China. The US must keep Taiwan separate and try to get the Chinese out of Xinjiang and Tibet. However, the real prize is the division of the Chinese heartland itself. The United States cannot remain a world power when a single country has over four times the USA’s population. While the British failed to protect the CSA in the American Civil War and divide the nation that would eventually displace them, the USA should not fail to miss this opportunity, as it will not likely come more than once if it comes at all. Until then, the United States should focus on its own prosperity. In sports and in war the best victories are not planned perfectly in advance but go to the side that can capitalize on its rival’s errors. We should not seek to positively go on the offensive against China; instead we should convert on all the turnovers they give us and keep control of the air and seas. On any map it is clear that the United States has the advantage and that China, with land powers on three sides and Japan and the United States at sea, is at a long-term disadvantage.

Miscellaneous Stuff:

• Each chapter starts with a quote from Thucydides and then a quote or two by other people. One chapter starts with two quotes. Churchill said in 1914 that, “They build navies so as to play a part in the world’s affairs. It is sport to them. It is life and death to us.” He must not have realized that German Admiral Alfred Tirpitz said to Kaiser Wilhelm II that, “Since Germany is particularly backward in sea power, it is a life-and-death question for her, as a World Power and great cultural state, to make up the lost ground.”

Reflection on Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping by Francois Bougon

               Now here’s a great book for understanding the basics of modern China. It is very similar to CEO China by Kerry Brown. While CEO is a more historically-minded book, Inside is more about the present and future. One of the fundamental facts about Xi that both books agree on is that he is authoritarian. He is most opposed to “ideological confusion,” which is a funny way of saying freedom of thought. He sees the end of the Soviet Union as the result of the relaxing of central controls and will fight to avoid anything like that in China. He also points out that army control is critical—that the army is not the tool of the state or the people but rather the tool of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Despite himself having suffered under Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Xi does not want to de-Maoize China as Russia was se-Stalinized. Xi wants to centralize his and the Party’s power by preventing the emergence of an independent judiciary and rehabilitating the image of Mao. His vision is of the continued growth of China into a worldwide superpower in 2049, the 100^th anniversary of the successful communist revolution. This national rejuvenation will be dependent on the party, though many scholars now think that as  result of this greater centralization and party control that China’s institutions will get much weaker.

Reflection on Bossypants by Tina Fey

               This was a pretty cool book that I think is good for a fan of 30 Rock though it’s not spectacular. Tina Fey is definitely funny though it feels a little bit like she was trying too hard in this book. I liked it but didn’t love it. It’s kind of like a memoir about her experiences in comedy, though I would’ve liked for about 30 Rock.

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.

Reflection on The Enigma of Clarence Thomas by Corey Robin

               In this book, Corey Robin investigates Clarence Thomas’ jurisprudence through three lenses: race, capitalism, and the Constitution. Robin is a liberal, and he offers a critical look at Thomas’ opinions, though I think he also does a good job of explaining them in a fair way. I finished the book with a greater understanding of and more respect for the Supreme Court justice. You learn a lot about Thomas the judge and Thomas the person because his upbringing, according to Robin, had a big effect on his philosophy.

               Thomas was born in Pin Point, Georgia and lived in that community until he was about seven years old, when his family moved to Savannah. He lived the rest of his childhood and teenage years there before moving to Massachusetts to study at and desegregate Holy Cross College. Robin writes that, “In college, Thomas wore a Panthers-style leather jacket and beret. He sported Black Power buttons, including one that said, “No Vietnamese ever called me Nigger” (attributed, wrongly, to Muhammad Ali). He signed his letters “Power to the People.” He championed the cause of Black Panther leaders and of Communist Party member Angela Davis, in flight from the government after being charged in connection with a politically fraught kidnapping and murder.” He was truly a radical on the left wing of the Democratic Party. But during college, he became disillusioned with liberal ideas for race relations. He decided that racism would always exist and that he preferred the racism of the South, which was obvious and apparent, to the racism of the North, which was hidden. He preferred that cruel honesty.

               Thomas is not a big believer in integration if he believes in it at all. For example, he dissented in one case in which the Court ruled against racial segregation in California prisons. Thomas argued in his dissent that it is reasonable to respond to the social reality of racism by segregating prisoners, which he thinks keeps them safe. Thomas sees separation as necessary to black success. He points out that under Jim Crow, blacks could become successful and develop their own capitalist middle class. Under integration, they ended up buying most products from white people. He would perhaps support optional integration, rather than the legally enforced integration of Brown v Board. Thomas is quoted when speaking of his own youth that, “the problem with segregation was not that we didn’t have white people in our class. The problem was that we didn’t have equal facilities. We didn’t have heating, we didn’t have books, and we had rickety chairs.… All my classmates and I wanted was the choice to attend a mostly black or a mostly white school, and to have the same resources in whatever school we chose.” The author Corey Robin writes, partially quoting Thomas that, “Thomas believes that the very fact of race mixing can be a harm to black people. When white liberals trumpet the benefits of diversity—thinking mostly of the white students who will go on to lead a diverse society, or of abject black students in desperate need of exposure to the mind and manners of whites—they overlook the fact that ‘racial (and other sorts of) heterogeneity actually impairs learning among black students.’” I understand Thomas’ perspective as trying to get out from under the system to create a parallel, rather than rising up within the system. It makes me think of Jews and Native Americans, who tend to be pushed out, rather than just down in white society.

               There’s a really strong theme in the book of the powerful and defiant black patriarch, which Robin sources to Thomas’ maternal grandfather, Myles Anderson. He respected that his grandfather created his own business and succeeded under Jim Crow and developed a preference for a free market, entrepreneurial economy, because black businesses offer ways to achieve autonomy and control. Thomas recalls his grandfather telling him that, “Once you accept [aid from the government] they can ask you whatever they want to. They can tell you whatever they want to. They can come into your home whenever they want to. They can tell you who can come and who can go, and I’d prefer to starve to death first,” and that “I never took a penny from the government because it takes your manhood away.” Robin says that Thomas’ goal is to persuade black people and especially black men to give up the idea that politics can improve their situation since they are such a small part of the population and to focus their effort on the economy, which offers African Americans more opportunities. This is where I really couldn’t understand Thomas, since the economy and politics are so closely tied together. Power in one is inherently tied to power in the other. I do, however, understand the basic idea of manhood and why taking government money can diminish that. That idea of the “defiant black patriarch” as Robin calls it comes into Thomas’ analysis of the Second Amendment. Robin writes that, “When white conservatives think of the right to bear arms, they imagine sturdy white colonials firing their muskets at redcoats and then mustering in militias, or modern-day whites guarding their doorways against government tyranny and black criminals. Thomas sees black slaves arming themselves against their masters; black freedmen defending their rights against white terrorists; and black men protecting their families from a residual and regnant white supremacy.”

               This is a highly recommendable book to anyone interested in Thomas or constitutional law. Thomas has very unique opinions on the law and is at least interesting to probe what they are for someone like me who doesn’t really agree. He seems to be an impressive thinker, though the book still leaves me with doubts. For example, if Thomas doesn’t believe in a government role in helping black people, why is he so accepting in a government role in punishing and harming them? I suppose he views the government, even in racist actions, as improving people by punishing them, but it feels inconsistent to me. This is a great book that is very clearly written. I really liked Robin’s style and he made case law come to life.

Reflection on Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck

               In Walkable City, Jeff Speck, an urban planning consultant, lays out lots of different techniques cities can use to improve their walkability and why that is a worthwhile effort. For example, in a city without walking, the social scene is only accessible by invitation. There are no chance encounters on the street when you’re in a car. Many people want ow live in walkable downtowns but cannot afford to. Speck cites on study that finds that 47% of people would prefer to live in a city or in a city or a suburban neighborhood with a mix of houses, shops, and businesses and only one in ten say they would want to live in a neighborhood with houses only. Clearly, walkable spaces are very desirable. Speck quotes the former mayor of Bogota, Enrique Peñalosa, who says, “God made us walking animals—pedestrians. As a fish needs to swim, a bird to fly, a deer to run, we need to walk, not in order to survive, but to be happy.

               Speck lays out “The Ten Steps of Walkability” and spends over half the book explaining them. They are organized as The Useful Walk (Rules 1-4), The Safe Walk (5-6), The Comfortable Walk (7-8), and The Interesting Walk (9-10):

• Put Cars in their Place
• Car ownership means a lot of fixed costs. Just getting the car is the most expansive part and even with high gas prices, $4.00 a gallon will just never feel as much as the $18,000 you just spent on the car. The cost of an individual trip will not really keep a driver home since they already are paying up front, so a city that wants to be walkable just needs to make certain areas off-limits from drivers and/or stop trying to fight congestion. The more you fight congestion the more people drive.
• Mix the Uses
• There needs to be a balance in cities of housing to shopping to working so that people can reach the gym, the park, their kids’ school, and their job within maybe a half an hour walking or using public transit.
• Get the Parking Right
• Speck quotes one of his friends who says that, “parking is destiny.” If a city builds lots of parking, people will drive. If it doesn’t, they won’t. It takes up a lot of land and kills walkability since no one likes walking across a big parking lot.
• Let Transit Work
• Without good transit you can only have a few good walkable neighborhoods. A walkable city needs to invest in its transit to get people out of cars and around the city on foot. Something kind of disappointing is that better transit doesn’t reduce traffic. The only way to reduce traffic is to reduce the size of roads, making it worse and getting people off the road.
• Protect the Pedestrian
• It is very obvious, but protecting pedestrians means shortening the size of blocks, cutting down the width of car lanes, changing the geometry of roads when possible, and putting barriers between drivers and walkers like cement bollards, trees, or a row of parallel-parked cars.
• Welcome Bikes
• Bikeability makes driving less necessary and goes hand in hand with walkability.
• Shape the Spaces
• There needs to be balance in public spaces. People want to be able to see a long way but to also fee enclosed. Think of Central Park- in a park that big, it’s nice to have tall buildings around it. In a smaller park, those buildings would feel like a cage, but not so in a bigger park.
• Plant Trees
• Trees have huge value as barriers that protect pedestrian, actors against the urban heat island effect, and just look beautiful in a city.
• Make Friendly and Unique Faces
• The enemies of lively streetscapes, says Speck, are parking lots, drugstores, and star architects, all of whom favor blank walls. Beautiful and detailed facades invite more walking.
• Pick Your Winners
• Cities should be realistic about which streets and neighborhoods to make walkable. No city is 100% walkable and there are always uninviting neighborhoods. Cities should not try to make everywhere walkable but rather focus on the few places with the most potential.

In sum, this is a great book with really amazing facts and interesting ideas for changing cities for the better. For example, Washington, D.C. gives pedestrians five second head start on lights so that they can claim the crosswalk. Some cities are paring down roads with two driving, one left turn, and one right turning lanes down to three because it is actually no more efficient to have the second driving lane. This opens up more space on the sides. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in cities, transit, and psychology.

Reflection on Margaret Thatcher (The Authorized Biography): Volume One: Not for Turning by Charles Moore

               This is the second multi-volume biography that I have begun since picking up the Lyndon Johnson series by Robert Caro. Charles Moore is similarly meticulous and detailed in his writing and I found his first volume to be illuminating with respect to the United Kingdom of the 1950s-80s, the economic difficulties confronting the country in the late 70s and early 80s, and the Falklands War. This book begins with Thatcher’s girlhood and takes the reader through her rise in the first half through school and politics. In the second half, I would say that Moore covers three distinct but related climaxes in Thatcher’s life. The first is the 1979 Parliamentary election. The second is the economic crisis that Thatcher and her team weathered. But these two are really just the buildup for the true culmination of the book’s action: the Falklands War, which takes up the last two chapters and about 150 pages of the book. While it had its boring parts, I really enjoyed the book. It is sympathetic to Thatcher but not sycophantic. I would say that it seems like as fair a portrayal of various actors as you can get in a book written essentially from Thatcher’s view. That is to say that the author explains all of Thatcher’s thoughts, actions, and reasoning without going too deeply into the lives of others.

On A Personal Level

               Thatcher was from a middle-class and proper family in Grantham, England. While she could never truly fit in with the aristocracy that led the Conservative Party, she always aspired to be one of them. She probably had some sort of a superiority complex as a girl, being remembered by her contemporaries as someone who had grades at the top of the class but was not above rubbing it in. For all her intelligence, she had little self-knowledge. The author reflects on how strange it is for him to analyze Thatcher so deeply when it appears as if she never or only rarely did so herself. She consciously avoided introspection and tried to keep busy with clear tasks and solid goals.

               Margaret Thatcher was always very religious. Moore writes that, “And to the end of her life she retained the words of scores of the classic English hymns in her mind. At Denis’s [her husband] funeral in July 2003, when her anguish and mental confusion were such that she was not sure whether it was her husband’s or her father’s coffin in front of her, she was seen to sing all the hymns, word-perfect, without looking at the service sheet.” The author himself was a witness to this.

               It seems like her relationship with her husband, Denis Thatcher, was not particularly passionate. She had also been seeing another man while she saw him but picked Denis because he was younger (though still older than her) and was serious about marriage. Denis remembered later that when he proposed, “She didn’t leap at it.” She concealed her engagement during the 1951 election, as engagement was considered the end of a woman’s career at the time. Despite having twins in 1953, the young Margaret Thatcher (28 when she gave birth to Mark and Carol) had no intentions of ending her political career. Both Margaret and Denis Thatcher expressed regrets later in life that they had not given more attention to the twins when they were children. With Margaret’s political career and Denis’ business travels, the children were mostly raised by a nanny.

               Her relationship with her parents was explored pretty deeply in the first third of the book. Her mother died in 1960 and it seems like Margaret did not grieve much for her. The author says that Margaret had probably consciously tried not to be like her mother, who was very much a stereotypical housewife. Moore writes, “This context, perhaps, helps to explain her remarkably frank comment to Winn about the mother who had died only a few months earlier: ‘I loved my mother dearly but after I was 15 we had nothing more to say to each other. It wasn’t her fault. She was weighed down by the home, always being in the home.’ There can be no doubt of her desire to escape some of her background, particularly that part which, had she stayed in Grantham, would have circumscribed her because of her sex. To her father, even as she forgot to send him a birthday present, she paid tribute. ‘He made me read widely,’ she told Winn, ‘and for that I owe him everything.’” She also did not have much patience for her mourning father, who was staying at her and her sister’s houses. It seems like she just didn’t have a lot of time for personal and familial relationships.

Her Rise to Power

               Thatcher first got on the Conservative list in 1949 for eligibility in the 1950 election. In the British system, the parties interview and choose all their own candidates, so it is critical to be chosen and to be selected for a friendly constituency. Margaret was lucky enough to meet and make a good impression on John Grant, who was an influential Conservative in the constituency of Dartford. She was just 23 years old when they met. Unfortunately for her, it was a strong Labour constituency, and despite doing far better than expected and shaving 6,000 votes off the Labour incumbent’s lead, she lost by a significant margin. There was another election in 1951 in which Thatcher (then Roberts), concealing her engagement to fiancé Denis, lost again, though shaving the Labour lead by another 1,300 votes.

               With her new last name under which she would become widely known, Margaret Thatcher (nee Roberts) studied and practiced law, being called to the Bar in February 1954. After some years practicing law, Thatcher got onto the Conservative list for the Finchley constituency and won. Always a strong speaker and a good candidate, she increased the Conservative majority in the constituency and won handily. By 1961, she was a minister, serving as the parliamentary under-secretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, perhaps because it was seen as a “womanlier” post. In 1964, the Conservatives went into the opposition, which must have stung for Thatcher as she lost her job. Despite that setback, she continued to perform well and gain recognition for her youth, ambition, and effectiveness. In October 1967, party leader Edmund Heath made her shadow minister for fuel and power. In 1970, thanks to a Conservative victory, Thatcher entered  the true cabinet for the first time, not just the shadow cabinet. She was to be Education Secretary from 1970-74.

               Thatcher got in trouble when she tried to cut free milk in British schools to save money, which did not end up happening due to popular resistance, and afterwards she was nicknamed “milksnatcher.” She looked even worse when she toured a school on TV and talked to students about silver breakfast spoons as if they were normal to have in the home. She was looking bad. That said, her perception inside of the Conservative party was getting quite good. The Heath government from 1970-74 was not a very right-wing government, and many backbenchers grew frustrated at the fact that they weren’t cutting the size of the state. When the Conservatives lost in 1973 and Labour took over in 1974, a movement began to push the party to the right. Thatcher, then the new Environment Shadow Secretary, was not involved, but may have been secretly harboring ambitions, as she certainly sympathized with the right wing of the party.

               Originally, Margaret Thatcher wanted a mentor of hers, Keith Joseph, to replace Edmund Heath, but Joseph was soon out of the running due to a poor speech. With Joseph out, she decided to go for it, urged on by the right wingers. She had Airey Neaves, another MP, run her campaign to become Leader of the Opposition. The guy was good. One typical trick that the author puts down is this: Neaves says to an MP, “Margaret assumed you must have turned down a job offer from Ted [Heath].” The MP asks, “Why?” And Neaves tells him, “Oh, because you so obviously should have one if you want it.” Thatcher won on the second ballot, and in 1975 became the leader of the Conservative Party, shocking the world who knew the Conservatives to be stuffy, sexist, and elitist. It was very surprising to see a middle-class-born woman, then, leading the party. It was really a huge deal to have a major party led by a woman in 1975, especially the Conservatives, and Moore does a really good job of analyzing the role that her gender played in Thatcher’s leadership.

               Thatcher brought in a lot of old enemies within the party into her cabinet. I think that this makes a lot more sense in the UK system since the “government” is a much more united group that rises and falls together. A new PM will not find it very hard to get the loyalty of their own cabinet versus a President of the United States would with the leaders of the legislative branch. It was also useful to Thatcher to keep people in place since she didn’t have many followers from earlier. She didn’t really have anyone to bring in. She also didn’t reshape the civil service, choosing to let it remain as it was. Moore writes that she met with difficulties in leadership due to a “cultural gulf” between her and more aristocratic members, her gender, and her high need for privacy. All of these things cut her off from fellow party members and leaders. That said, she had at least one great strength: “She had a burning sense of mission.” She was ideological and her clear philosophy served as a guide for her and for the Conservative Party for the next 15 years. As a leader, her overwhelming hunger for ideas led to a huge movement toward the right in the Conservative party. It was simple. “Thatcher was the most clamorous customer in the ideological marketplace.” Young policy wonks did not find the left of the Conservatives or the Labour party looking for new research and ideas, but they did find Mrs. Thatcher. When it came time to do research or get a job at a think tank, they went right-wing.

               The Conservatives benefitted from the breakdown occurring in the late 70s between public sector unions and the Labour Party. The fundamental promise of Labour government was that its connections to unions and workers meant no labor strikes, yet these happened regularly in the late 70s. Industry was in uproar over pay increases not keeping up with inflation and it was an awkward situation as Labour found itself in management. In 1979, the Conservatives delivered defeat to Labour, winning 339 seats against Labour’s 269.

Economic Difficulties and the Budget of 1981

               Britain had been struggling economically for years and went into recession in the early 1980s. The Conservatives focused on trying to defeat inflation and allowed unemployment to reach 3 million, its highest level since the 1930s. They managed to get inflation down from 18% to 8% in 1982. They passed through difficult times though and in December 1980, Thatcher’s approval rating dropped to its lowest at 23%. Compared to Reagan, Thatcher was more serious about deficits and less-so about tax cuts. While the Americans ran huge deficits to pay for tax cuts, Thatcher was much more serious on deficits and seriously worried about Reagans high spending habits.

               1981 was a bad year. In July there were riots in major cities and budget cuts during the recession were very unpopular. Despite that, she and her Chancellor of the Exchequer were united and stood firm on the budget. At this difficult time, the Prime Minister received a document from her research group titled, “Your Political Survival.” Moore writes, “The ‘blockbuster’ was quite possibly the bluntest official document ever seen in Downing Street. Although it recognized that ‘your Government has achieved the beginnings of a near-revolution in the private sector and especially in Industry,’ and ‘things in the economy are better than people realise,’ the note warned that ‘it is exactly at this moment that colleagues’ nerves begin to crack and internal revolt (now clearly recognised in all the newspapers), threatens your own position.’ Hoskyns told her that ‘Your own credibility and prestige are draining away very fast.’ The most likely outcome was ‘you as another failed Tory prime minister sitting with Heath’, but it was a serious possibility that she would be simply thrown out before the next election. He then listed her faults. ‘You lack management competence’ was the headline of one paragraph. ‘Your own leadership style is wrong’ was another. He warmed to his theme: ‘You break every rule of good man-management. You bully your weaker colleagues. You criticise colleagues in front of each other and in front of their officials. They can’t answer back without appearing disrespectful, in front of others, to a woman and to a Prime Minister. You abuse that situation. You give little praise or credit, and you are too ready to blame others when things go wrong.’ ‘The result’, the next paragraph was headed, ‘is an unhappy ship’: ‘This demoralisation is hidden only from you. People are beginning to feel that everything is a waste of time, another Government is on its way to footnotes of history. And people are starting to speculate as to who might reunite the Party, as Macmillan did after Suez, if you go. But no-one tells you what is happening, just as no-one told Ted.’ To survive, ‘you have an absolute duty to change the way you operate.’” Thatcher reshuffled her cabinet and stayed afloat. By 1983 the economy was improving but she was politically saved before then by a foolish Argentinean dictator.

The Falklands Invasion

               Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands came with little warning for Britain. While there had been some disputes for many years where Britain seemed to signal willingness to transfer the islands to Argentina, it had not happened, frustrating Argentina. The Islands had been British since 1833 and were settled by 1,800 English-speaking people. Most leaders wanted to use diplomacy to resolve the invasion but Thatcher, in her gut, did not want to do that at all. She was helped by the fact that Argentina’s junta was a fascist regime, so the Labour Party, led by Michael Foot, had nothing good to say about them. It put the United States in an awkward situation as an ally of both countries.

               On the diplomacy front, the UK was able to pass Security Council Resolution 502, which called for the “immediate withdrawal” of Argentine forces and urged both sides to come to a peaceful and diplomatic resolution. Meanwhile, Britain prepared for war. They met with initial failure, as helicopters crashed on a glacier in South Georgia, though none died. Initially thinking that as many as 17 men were dead, Thatcher wept. Upon hearing the better news, she was relieved, but disturbed that the crash could be an omen of further failure. British submarines started to attack Argentine destroyers armed with Exocet missiles and managed to clear a way for an amphibious landing. Throughout the operations, Britain systematically offered terms to Argentinean dictator Galtieri, and when he refused them, they published the documents, embarrassing Argentina. British ships were sunk, but after the landing, British soldiers won back the islands, taking 11,000 Argentine troops captive. 255 British servicemen died along with 649 Argentines, and three Falkland Islanders. Argentina never abandoned its claim to sovereignty but didn’t cause any more problems until the 21^st century, when oil was discovered.  As a result of the debacle, Galtieri’s government fell.

               Moore writes that the Falklands crisis brought out the Prime Minister’s best qualities: her courage, conviction, and resolution are well known, but also in evidence were her careful judgment and restriction of her own passion for fighting, her modest approach in which she listened to others, and her lack of vanity. While on other occasions she could be long-winded, she started no digressions during this crisis. Thatcher would later judge individuals based on where they were during the crisis. Ronald Reagan, French President Mitterand, Chilean dictator Pinochet, New Zealand Prime Minister Muldoon, and King Hussein of Jordan were all foreign leaders who gained her respect. Moore writes that, “The British Antarctic Survey, who had advised her on the terrain, became such favourites that not only did she ensure they received more government money, she also listened to them when, years later, they warned of the damage to the ozone layer caused by pollution.” The PM also gained “a soft spot” for Leader of the Opposition Michael Foot, who she thought had been patriotic. By projecting force 8,000 miles across the sea, she forced the USSR to recognize the will and capacity of the West.

Her Relationship with Ronald Reagan

               Ronald Reagan, in preparation for his 1976 presidential run, went to a few foreign countries to improve his foreign policy credentials. In the UK, he was sure to visit Thatcher on April 9^th, 1975. Denis Thatcher had seen Reagan speak in 1969 and gave him high praise. They had only planned to meet for 45 minutes but stayed to talk for an hour and a half. Thatcher recalled being won over by his charm and Reagan recalled that it was immediately evident that they “were soul mates when it came to reducing government and expanding freedom.”

               When she won the premiership in 1979, Reagan was the first foreign politician to call her. Since he wasn’t too important at the time, the switchboard didn’t even put him through, though they managed to talk a few days later. Always close, it seems like Thatcher was the dominant partner in the relationship. Everything I read about Reagan, this book included, seems to suggest a general lack of respect from others regarding his knowledge of the issues. A great leader and communicator, he was out of his element when discussing specific policy issues and Thatcher exploited this to get her way.

Conclusion

               This meticulously researched book is very well-written and an engaging portrait of the early years of the future Prime Minister and her early challenges in the important role. I really enjoyed the book and look forward to reading the rest of the series.

Miscellaneous Facts

• The first time Thatcher was called the “Iron Lady” was in Red Star, the newspaper of the Russian Red Army. They were trying to insult her by comparing her with Bismarck, known as “The Iron Chancellor,” but she liked the nickname and took it as her own.
• Politicians in Britain bring some of their own staff, but most are staffed by the civil service and the party.
• In 1982, Mark Thatcher, the PM’s son went missing when on a race through the deserts of Algeria. He was thought missing but found after a few days in his broken-down car.

Reflection on Astroball: The New Way to Win It All by Ben Reiter

               Astroball is a business-data-baseball book that is directly inspired by Moneyball, which detailed the first efforts by a major league team to integrate data science into its process. Astroball is sort of a follow up from 10-15 years later as the Astros integrate the Moneyball analytics sweeping the league with the gut intelligence of their scouts and other immeasurable factors to rise from the ashes to become a championship team. Reiter says that Astros GM Jeff Luhnow did not see scouts and analytics as an either/or competition, despite the fact that conflict emerged. He saw each as a way to complement the other.

               A crucial intangible that may be the next frontier in data measurements is the effect of certain personalities in the clubhouse. For the Astros, a major key to their World Series Championship season in 2017 was 40-year-old veteran Carlos Beltran. Beltran was not at the peak of his career anymore, but he used his baseball knowledge to make other players better. He spent hours watching tape of pitchers and analyzing all their movements to see if they had a tell that would “tip” what pitches they were going to throw. He would share his discoveries with teammates, an improvement not often reflected in any statistic. As a bilingual player, he was especially helpful. He would advise Spanish-speaking teammates on how to handle post-game interviews and serve as a bridge between players. A player who not only speaks two languages but wants to serve as a friendly connection between those two worlds is a huge asset to a team beyond their batting average.

               Some of what is suggested about the future is a little strange. For example, two professors who worked with the Astros and now work with NASA on the effects of various personalities on a team want to install cameras in the clubhouse to analyze every interaction and conversation. They would even like to use biometric devices to record stress levels and heart rates to better study the interactions. While I’m sure that interesting data could be gained, it doesn’t look good for the future of people’s privacy. Despite that, the book ends by telling us that “there would always be a role for gut feels.” I would say that this is true but remember that gut feels aren’t based on nothing. Our intuition is based on connecting what we already know, so collecting data only makes our gut decisions better. At the edge of quantitative data, there must always be an interpreter.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Not even ten percent of the baseball players drafted will ever step onto a major league field for a single inning.

Reflection on Do What You Are (Fifth Edition): Discover the Perfect Career for You Through the Secrets of Personality Type by Paul D. Tieger, Barbara Barron, and Kelly Tieger

               This was a book all about how to pick a career through the Myers-Briggs Test. I got ENTJ and learned a bit about the personality type. I feel like these types have interesting results, but that it ends up like astrology where you can basically justify whatever answer you get. That said, I identified with my type and found it interesting. The book advises me to “Slow down, focus on the details, and tune into others’ needs.” I think I do the third well, but I could work on the first two. It says that I will be happiest in independent or leadership positions where I can do analysis.

Reflection on Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United by Zephyr Teachout

               Zephyr Teachout’s Corruption in America asserts that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States have been marked by the return of corruption that had been strongly legislated against by the founders. Teachout argues that modern definitions of corruption require far too high a threshold for proof of bribery and other crimes. I am obviously given to agree with her. In an age when Hilary Clinton gave speeches for hundreds of thousands of dollars and Donald Trump hosts his the G7 at his own hotel, the United States’ political scene is dominated by open corruption.

               One important source of corruption is the job of an American ambassador. From early times, ambassadors have accepted gifts from the heads of state where they lived. In the early USA, this was considered corrupt and banned, since while accepting a gift from a foreign head of state does not prove corruption, it certainly gets into dangerous territory. It is a crucial part of Teachout’s argument that the founders therefore understood corruption as something that can occur without any quid pro quo agreement that explicitly states what will be given and received. However, even today ambassador appointments are given politically so that only major donors can get the best ones. Teachout points out that while Justice Antonin Scalia has stated that there has always been a quid pro quo requirement to prove corruption or bribery, the phrase was not mentioned in relation to corruption until the 1970s, with the Buckley v Valeo case.

               One major problem of corruption is that under common law, bribery is something considered to taint the judiciary branch, but not the legislative. While common law developed protections against payment to a judge, it was long considered that Parliament would deal with its own people, something that transitioned over into the American system. The result is that few laws have existed to monitor the legislative branch, showing that legislators in America have not exactly been eager to regulate themselves.

               In the 19^th century, there were many cases that upheld the right of the government to restrict and even ban lobbying, as Georgia did in 1877. While the laws were never directly struck down, they were slowly chipped away into meaninglessness. First, state courts started to call lobbying contracts professional contracts instead of selling personal influence. Second, judges stopped ruling on the moral content of contracts and acted more as impersonal arbitrators, taking the default approach that lobbying contracts were legitimate. Third, the general view of the first amendment began to change to allow spending to count as speech.

               The 1976 Supreme Court case Buckley v Valeo was critical in changing the laws to allow for greater spending by non-persons in politics. It ruled that spending money on elections is a First Amendment right, that campaign contributions are presumptively valid, and that campaign expenditure limits are presumptively invalid. While it acknowledged that in the name of stopping corruption it may be important to infringe somewhat on these new “rights,” that has not happened much since. Things got really bad in 1999 when the court ruled that over $5,000 gifts given by the company Sun Diamond to the Secretary of Agriculture could not be proven to be bribery since they could not be conclusively connected to favor that the secretary gave to the company during his tenure. So even though the acts may happen on both ends, the law now required an explicit statement of the trade. Teachout writes that, “Sun Diamond makes it nearly impossible to prove a violation of the gratuities statute for any gift given before an official action.”

               With the Citizens United case, which gained a lot of infamy, the Court ruled that the First Amendment protects speech regardless of the identity of the speaker. It also found that “no sufficiently important countervailing governmental or constitutional goal was served by limiting corporate political advertising.” Teachout writes that nowadays, “corruption does not include undue influence and cannot flow from donors trying to influence policy through campaign contributions, unless these donors are utterly crass.” Basically, the court has accepted that all citizens will be very selfish and that the richest may have the privilege of purchasing policies that benefit them. This is hugely harmful to our democracy as it defeats the idea that all people should have an equal hand in the political process.

               Teachout defines corruption as any instance where public funds are used for private gain. She argues that SCOTUS, which used to have many more members who had been in elective offices, no longer appreciates the corrupting influence that campaign donations have on a politician. They accept the corruption as something inevitable when it is not. Teachout advocates public financing of all elections and trustbusting against monopolies as ways to cut corruption out of public life.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The Tillman Act of 1907 banned corporations from contributing to political campaigns