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Book reviews this month are:
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Saturday, 29 May 2010 19:18 |
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Mike Phipps reviews Erasing Iraq: The Human Costs of Carnage, by Michael Otterman, Richard Hill and Paul Wilson, published by Pluto, price £14.99 pbk.
Seven years after the invasion, Iraq is still occupied by nearly 100,000 US troops and 150,000 military contractors. It receives only four hours of electricity a day. There are 2.2 million internally displaced citizens and 2.7 million Iraqi refugees. Unemployment fluctuates between 25% and 70% and there are two dozen car bombs a month.
Today’s Iraq is a police state where one cannot move for more than five minutes without hitting a checkpoint. Begging women and children wander between cars at every intersection. Ten-foot high concrete walls surround many neighbourhoods.
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Friday, 28 May 2010 19:42 |
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Mike Phipps reviews The Enigma of Capital by David Harvey, published by Profile, price £14.99 hbk.
David Harvey’s online courses on Marx’s Capital are very popular and here he uses the current crisis to explain how the system works. The sub-prime mortgage crisis had been brewing for some time before 2007, he argues here.
Between 1998 and 2006, African Americans in the US were estimated to have lost up to $98 billion in asset values through engaging with sub-prime loans on their housing. “But nothing was done. Once again, as happened during the HIV/AIDS pandemic that surged during the Reagan Administration, the ultimate human and financial cost to society of not heeding clear warning signs because of collective lack of concern for, and prejudice against, those first in the firing line was to be incalculable.” Only when the crisis hit the white middle class did the Government and media take notice.
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Reviews
