Global organized crime has grown exponentially the past few decades primarily due to globalization and the collapse of Communism. When states fail or weaken, it provides a huge opening for organized crime to flourish. Among other things, they like wars. Chaos provides cover, the troops want prostitutes, and smuggling abounds.
Over and over again McMafia shows [...]
Posts under ‘Book reviews’
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, by Misha Glenny
The Long Emergency. Climate change
Global warming coincides quite exactly neatly with the use of petroleum-based products on a large scale, something which is hardly coincidence. Industrialization and globalization were literally fueled by oil, and an unexpected consequence of that is climate change. Melting ice caps, the spread of disease in now-warmer climates, and severe drought in some areas are [...]
A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Risks of Financial Innovation
Author Richard Bookstaber, a hedge fund “rocket scientist”, presents a scary scenario in Demon of Our Own Design. Today’s financial markets are so complex and tightly coupled that a tremor in one area can have massive, unexpected fallout in another. The current subprime crisis which has triggered hedge fund implosions and cratered the housing [...]
Why Religious Militants Kill. Terror In The Name of God
The author of Why Religious Militants Kill, Jessica Stern, is no armchair analyst. She’s “the foremost U.S. expert on terrorist” and to research the book she traveled worldwide, and met with terrorists. She, a Jewish woman traveling alone, met with jihadi and mujahideen in Pakistan — something most would say is seriously dangerous.
Stern defines terrorism [...]
Review: Deer Hunting With Jesus
Joe Bageant grew up redneck in Winchester Virginia, escaped to the city, became a “godless commie,” moved back thirty years later, and wrote this book about it.
It’s subtitled “Dispatches from America’s Class War.” He looks at the people that he grew up with, and most are in debt way beyond their means, have serious health [...]
Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror
Blackwater is the best known of the private military contractors (PMC) in Iraq. There are a number of books out now about PMCs and mercenaries — I chose Pelton’s Licensed To Kill because of his reputation and his previous books. He *likes* going to incredibly dangerous places like war zones, finding the local warlord, talking [...]
Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization
What if warfare was reinvented and nobody bothered to tell the Pentagon?
That is the thesis to John Robb’s Brave New War. Globalization, the Internet, cellphones, etc. have created a world in which information spreads very fast, can not be contained, and is available to all. This allows small, highly mobile groups working in loose networks [...]
Buda’s Wagon. A Brief History of the Car Bomb
The car bomb was invented in the US and was used to devastating effect by Mario Buda, an anarchist who exploded his horse-drawn wagon on Wall Street in 1920, thus prompting the title to Buda’s Wagon, a new book by often controversial and politically radical Mike Davis. Buda was the first car bomber, his progeny [...]
