Books this year: a book diary

I borrowed this book from a friend in the Peace Corps. It’s a really good book. I had previously read The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home, but this book is definitely better and the one I would recommend. While The Night is Dark is more personal and searching, Savage Inequalities is very direct and policy oriented.

The book is about class and racial inequality and points out that often schools within a few miles of each other will differ in annual per capita student expenditure by $5000 to $10000. This leads to conditions such as unsanitary facilities that are falling apart, lack of textbooks, and unattended (by teachers) classes. Reading the accounts of when Kozol visited these schools, I was stricken by the eerie resemblance that poor schools in America have to schools I see everyday in the third world here in Africa.

This book was a real history lesson for me. I recall having learned about major Supreme Court decisions such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education. The first guaranteed schools separate but equal education. The second mandated mixed education. When these decisions are presented in classrooms like the one I attended, everyone seems to think that we’ve triumphed over the problems of the past and that the Civil Rights Movement has been victorious. However, we fail to even consider that the reality of the situation today — as Kozol demonstrates — is that education today is still separate and still unequal. The education that an inner city black child is likely to receive is vastly inferior to the education that a suburban white child will receive.

Kozol points to various moves that have been made to keep money in the rich school districts. One change introduced was to guarantee that funds for school are taken out of local property taxes. The Constitutional justification for this system is that schools should have local self-determination. However, decisions such as this one (solidified in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez), and other Supreme Court rulings such as Milliken v. Bradley, have effectively overturned both Plessy and Brown, making education lawfully separate and unequal once again.

In San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the Supreme Court actually said that education is not a fundamental right, and that therefore, it is not subject to the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This is interesting to me, given that politicians often claim education is a fundamental right and the Universal Declaration seems to say so as well. This case also makes an interesting point. The residents of the Edgewood District, which is a poor area in West San Antonio (where I actually applied once), pay a much higher rate of tax than residents of richer San Antonio districts like Alamo Heights. This tends to be the rule rather than the exception. People like to argue that the residents of the richer districts simply value education more highly than those of the poorer districts. However, this is clearly not the case given the financial hardship in the form of bonds and other indebtedness parents in poor districts consistently vote for.

It’s a really quick read and it blew my mind. When I told Ken I was reading this book, he said something like, “Kozol’s not going to make you into some sort of a Statist is he?” Rest assured, I’m still an Anarchist. While Kozol argues for reform, I realize that the state is inherently bad. However, reform would be better than nothing. Also, as long as the state is coercing people to go to school, it might as well try to be fair about it. Of course this probably isn’t the state’s goal.

I bought this book just before leaving for Africa. I realized that I should probably understand a little bit more about the place so I bought one of the standard one volume surveys of its history.

It is a pretty comprehensive history, but devotes only about 50 pages or so to more recent post-independence Africa. It’s very broad and multi-disciplinary which I like, though Reader spends the first 200 or 300 pages on geology and stuff like that which was pretty boring. There were some interesting things in that first part. I learned anthropology and ecology stuff like that a large chewing surface means that you eat a lot of inedible material and that’s why the kids in my home pound our grains. The pounding is like a pre-chew so that your jaw doesn’t get tired.

I liked the book and it definitely made up for some of my inadequacies. For example, I had never even heard of the Rinderpest of the 1890s, which killed 80 or 90 percent of the cows in all of Southern Africa. In addition to the destruction of pure wealth, many people used cattle as a medium of exchange, so this really messed things up pretty bad.

I’m much happier to have found The State of Africa by Martin Meredith however, as it is a book which covers the last 60 years of post-independence. That really fills in a lot of gaps. Caleb, my friend and neighbor in the Peace Corps introduced me to it. It’s a real gem and you should read it. If anyone has read a good engaging book on South African history, let me know because I haven’t found one yet.

I first heard about this book when I was teaching at Katherine Anne Porter School in Wimberley, TX. I think it was selected for assigned reading in some of the economics classes. I then heard about it again on a documentary, and it was then that I decided to get the book.

John Perkins was a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1960s in Ecuador when the Peace Corps was first getting started. When he finished his service, he was called upon to work for a company called Main. He alleges that he was actually recruited to work for Main by the NSA, but does not really provide substantial proof of this. During his time at Main, he came to believe that his work was part of a conspiracy – one that was at least partially overt – to enslave poor countries in the world with debt. He says that people in his field who trained him would actually refer to themselves as EHMs, or Economic Hit Men.

His job was to produce reports which would state that, in order for a country to reach its development goals, it was necessary for them to spend vast amounts of money on power lines and things like that. He claims he was encouraged to exaggerate the amount of infrastructure required so as to increase the profits of his employer when they moved in to do the work. He also was required to get the political leaders of the country in bed with him.

He was deeply torn throughout his career, in part because of his genuine love of the diversity of cultures in the world. He resented the displacement of indigenous groups and the deliberate process by which countries would be unable to pay back the massive debt accrued and would therefore have to bend to the will of corporate interest in America in the future. However, he stayed on with Main because of the massive amount of money they were willing to pay him. Later, when he decided to write this book, he was threatened and bribed.

John Perkins believes that the government, controlled by corporations, engages overtly in a 3 step process aimed at making poor countries around the world subservient to the interests of large corporations. The first step is to send in specialist Economic Hit Men like himself who attempt to engineer a political climate amenable to the interests of development companies. Since many leaders smell a rat when the EHMs come and are not willing to put the sovereignty of their country up for sale, the second step is to utilize American intelligence agencies such as the CIA to further engineer the situation using methods such as riots. Failing this, the procedure is for the intelligence community to oust the leader, either through coup or assassination. The third step, which John Perkins believes is the actual cause of what our country has been calling “activities other than war”, is to send in the military. This is done if the CIA fails with the assassination.

Many case studies from actual history are presented. I myself personally believe it is demonstrable that something very much like what is described above has happened in the past. Whether or not it is still happening today is difficult to establish, because if it were, it would be covered up very well. However, given that countries only seem to pursue the interest of their constituencies, I would guess it probably is. Governments clearly seem to be unmotivated by purely humanitarian concerns. One only has to consider the inaction and ridiculous propping up of horrible regimes in places like Somalia and Rwanda in the very recent past to see this.

The other thing I became convinced of while reading this book is that a country can be lifted from the third world to the first extraordinarily rapidly if the developed world chooses to do it. Many point to the problems foreign aid has caused in Africa as proof positive that throwing money at a country doesn’t make it developed. However, if America had the will, it could dramatically and rapidly alter any poor country on earth. This would require more than simply giving money to heads of state for them to waste, however.

Some interesting things: The Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos sounds like an amazing guy and I want to read Graham Greene‘s book Getting to Know the General. John Perkins claims that one of his workers is actually the one who popularized the use of Markhov models in economic development theory, where they used it because they couldn’t find any other way of justifying their numbers. This is the kind of stuff I do, and I’ve never heard anything like this when reading about the history of Markhov models.

Anyways, it was a good book. If what John Perkins says is true, it establishes that the evil machinations of the machine are not self-propelling, but rather that business leaders and politicians are sitting behind the wheel.

This book was loaned to me by my good friend Kiki who was once a Peace Corps volunteer in Namibia. I read it during my first few days at site, when most everyone was still on vacation from the school break and there was nothing to do. It was just one of those relaxing, easy reads. I guess it’s what they call leisure reading.

So, Liz Gilbert decides, for reasons even she can’t really pin down that she doesn’t want to be married to her husband anymore. She resists divorcing him for a long time, then has a spiritual conversion of sorts where she starts talking to herself or God, she’s not sure which. She gives herself (or God gives her) permission to divorce her husband. He hates her for it, she gets a new boyfriend who introduces her to an Indian Guru, and then the meat of the book, which is her year-long voyage to Italy, India, and Indonesia begins.

In Italy, she focuses on food and learning Italian. In India, she focuses on meditation in an Ashram. In Indonesia, she focuses on learning another form of meditation from this traditional healer guy. Of course a lot other stuff happens throughout and a big part of the book is her trying to figure out her spirituality.

Overall, it was an interesting read. It’s just one lady’s account of trying to figure out what the hell life on this planet means. I don’t know that she figures all that much out, but most of us don’t.