"The Great Reporters" by David Randall

Without good journalists we have no real chance of knowing what is happening in the world.

We rely on good journalists to visit places we cannot,
and tell us what they find.
To look where we cannot,
and tell us what they see.
To listen where we cannot,
and tell us what they hear.

In particular, the only way we can know what our government is doing, what policies it is pursuing, what the effects of those policies are, which officials are doing good jobs, and which officials are doing bad jobs, is by relying on good journalists. Because how else CAN we know?

This exciting book is about some of the greatest journalists of all time.

It starts with the pioneering British war correspondent William Howard Russell (1820-1907) who wrote for The Times of London.

He became famous describing what he saw and heard - and what he thought and felt - during the Crimean War between Great Britain and Russia (1853-1856). He told his readers about the courage of the soldiers, but also about their pain and suffering during the war. He told his readers about government incompetence, especially in dealing with the wounded and the sick, which led, on the positive side, to reforms, and, on the negative side, to greater military censorship over reporters!

In later years Russell wrote with brutal honesty about British cruelty and atrocities in India during The Mutiny and during a trip to the United States he wrote about the terrible Union loss at the Battle of Bull Run. His unvarnished account of this debacle angered Northern readers so much that he received death threats for months from people who did not want to believe what he wrote, and eventually he decided he could only be safe by returning to England.

Russell retired in the 1880's but he left behind an inspiring example of telling the truth even when it makes people angry, even when it puts the teller in danger. He left behind an example of why we need journalists like him.

As this book's chapter on Russell concludes he "... now seems like a figure from a very distant age, but, as a teller of uncomfortable truths, and a challenger of cherished prejudices, he has had few equals. His reports from the Crimea, India and the US are a reminder that the reporting that really matters is an act not only of research, precision and coolness, but, above all, of moral courage."

There are 12 more journalistic giants to enjoy and learn from in this book. These are some of the greatest practitioners of a noble profession. If you like reading about heroes, these are heroes!

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The Great Reporters
David Randall

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Copyright © 2020 by Joseph Wayne Gadway

Isaiah Berlin and the Quest for Freedom

Sunday Morning. May 12, 2019.

This morning I was studying the great political philosopher and historian of ideas Sir Isaiah Berlin.

He believed that societies always struggle with competing values where there are no absolute "right" answers about what we should do.

He developed concepts of "negative liberty" and "positive liberty." Negative liberty means the government leaves you alone to do what you want, like start a business, or speak your mind. Positive liberty means you have the ABILITY to do what you want, like go to college, or get medical care.

These are both good things but we will usually find that we can only increase one of them at the expense of the other. And there are no tablets of stone to tell us how to find the ideal balance.

My own example of this is the tension between individual freedom and democracy. If individual freedom means individuals get to decide and democracy means groups get to decide that means we can only get more freedom by restricting democracy, and we can only get more democracy by restricting freedom. We need BOTH. But there are no tablets of stone to tell us where the perfect balance is.

Isaiah Berlin himself believed that the closest the world has ever come to a perfect balance was in the United States of America, during the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt. Could be....

As I studied Isaiah Berlin this morning I started feeling envious. He spent his whole life studying philosophy and history.

And then I remembered... so have I. ;-)

Sunday Morning

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[If you want to understand politics, REALLY understand it, you have to read Isaiah Berlin.]

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Copyright © 2019 by Joseph Wayne Gadway

The Vision of John McCain

Today is the funeral of a great American statesman, John McCain.

In the political environment of 2018 he had an unusually unifying and moral vision of America. He left us glimpses of that vision in his last book, "The Restless Wave."

He wrote:

"This wondrous land shared its treasures and ideals and shed its blood to help make another, better world. And as we did we made our own civilization more just, freer, more accomplished and prosperous...."

I don't know the details of McCain's foreign policy views but from this statement I believe he knew that business is important, but that everything in the world is not business. Human beings and friends and neighbors and allies are not businesses, and the relationships between friends and neighbors and allies are not business relationships.

Helping other countries doesn't mean we are losing, it means we are investing in a better future for all of us. When a friend or an ally needs help you don't try to calculate how much profit you are going to make, you calculate how much you can afford to give, and then you give it, trusting that everyone will be better off when you do the right thing.

He wrote:

"To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than to solve problems is unpatriotic."

Here McCain encourages us to stay involved in the world, to work together with other people, to spend less time looking for people to blame and more time looking for solutions and ways to make our country and our world better for everyone.

He wrote:

"We don't build walls to freedom and opportunity, we tear them down."

This line probably has more than one meaning but surely one of them must be referring to the issue of undocumented immigration to the United States.

I think McCain is suggesting here that we should treat people coming to our borders, and the undocumented immigrants who already live here, with honor and respect. They are, after all, just like us, our brothers and our sisters who are seeking freedom and safety and prosperity for themselves and our children just as we do.

Maybe it is impossible to take all these people in, but even if that is so, there is no reason to hate them, or to be angry with them, or to fear them. Even if we have to turn them away there is nothing to prevent us from wishing them well, and treating them well.

And maybe the image of tearing down walls to freedom and opportunity means that we need to start working with countries like Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador to find mutually beneficial ways to help them become more prosperous and safe so the good people who live there don't need to leave their homes to find hope.

Maybe I am wrong about my interpretations here. John McCain was a Republican and I am a Democrat so I am sure we would have disagreed on many issues. But I feel certain that one part of McCain's vision was that the United States should always be a country where people respect each other enough to talk and to argue, to fight for what they believe in but to still find ways to compromise so that everyone in the country can all move forward together.

John McCain is gone. Let's hope his vision will never die.

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[This was Senator McCain's last book. A good chance to get to know a fallen hero. If you read it before I do please send me a review I can publish here.]

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Copyright © 2018 by Joseph Wayne Gadway

Collusion!

Our free press is good at giving us pieces of the puzzle.

Books like "Collusion" by Luke Harding help us put the pieces together.

Christopher Steele worked for MI6 as a Russia expert for 22 years before he went into business for himself. (One of his private jobs led to uncovering the famous bribery scandals involving FIFA, the world soccer organization, and to the indictments of 14 people.) When he gathered the information that went into the famous Trump dossier he took it very seriously and brought it to an FBI contact he knew in June 2016.

Steele also shared the Dossier with Sir Andrew Wood, the UK ambassador to Russia from 1995 to 2000. Wood also took the information seriously and shared it with Republican Senator John McCain. McCain sent a former Bush administration assistant secretary of state named David Kramer to talk to Steele about the information he had gathered. Kramer took the dossier seriously and reported back to McCain.

By then McCain took the dossier seriously and delivered a copy to the head of the FBI who was named James Comey.

NONE of these people believe the dossier is 100% true. It is raw intelligence. The information was collected from several different informants. Parts of it will turn out to be true and parts of it will turn out to be false. But all of these people believed the dossier, and the issues it raised, needed to be investigated, and I agree.

Let's look forward to Mueller's final report so we can see what he has learned.

In the meantime this great book helps us to see what was going on behind the scenes in the 2016 election.

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[This excellent book pulls together the story of what happened between Russia and Trump campaign during the 2016 election. A book that should be read by every American.]

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Copyright © 2018 by Joseph Wayne Gadway

How to Create a Prosperous Society

"Through Nasar's ambitious storytelling, we see Western society evolve from one in which most people live in poverty to one in which government tries to grapple with unemployment and inflation and raise the standard of living for all."
Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times Book Review

This book promises to show us how economic understanding has led to increased prosperity for much of the world over the last 150 years. I started reading it about four years ago and stopped because it seemed like it was not going to keep that promise. Then I started reading it again about two years ago and gave up again.

Finally I started reading it once more a few months ago and read it all the way through and now I think it is one of the best and most important books I have ever read about creating a better society for all.

This book tells the life stories and great ideas of the greatest economists who have taught society how to succeed at producing and distributing greater wealth then older societies ever imagined possible. Syliva Nasar keeps the story very interesting while still teaching us a good deal about economics.

We learn about Beatrice Potter who had a stormy relationship with a powerful British Cabinet Minister who wanted a subservient woman so she married Sidney Webb instead and spent her life promoting the importance of government aid to the poor. We learn about Hayek who taught that governments should leave the economy alone but, in my opinion, went too far in that direction. We learn about Joan Robinson who was a brilliant economist but who fell for communist propaganda and went much too far in the direction opposite to Hayek, as she defended ruthless dictatorships. We learn about Keynes who taught governments how to manage recessions and we meet Amartya Sen who studies "third world" poverty today.

I think the most important thing we learn from this book is that we have to be both smart and moderate in our economic policies. Governments need to promote free and competitive markets while also providing vital infrastructure like stable currencies, roads, schools, electrical power, communications, public health services, law enforcement, court systems, etc.

Governments also have to referee between various economic actors. They have to find the delicate balance that will allow them to promote the well-being of business without hurting the poor while they simultaneously promote the well-being of workers without making it impossible for business to succeed.

To have good and successful lives in a good and prosperous society it is all about being smart and not going to any extreme, either on the left or the right. This book can help us find the path.

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[Read this great book on economics and how to create prosperous societies.]

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Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Wayne Gadway

If We All Want Something Good... How Come We Can't Agree?

Years ago I tried to think of the most important value pursued by each of the major political worldviews in the United States. Of course these values have to be GOOD things because everyone believes their side IS good and right. I came up with these:

• Principles - for the Conservatives
• Brotherhood - for the Progressives (I called them Liberals when I did this)
• Freedom, for the Libertarians.

The author of "The Three Languages of Politics" did a similar analysis and came up with three axes:

• Conservatives support civilization and oppose barbarism
• Progressives support the oppressed and oppose oppressors
• Libertarians support liberty and oppose coercion.

Each of the three axes moves from good to evil. Civilization is good while barbarism is evil; the oppressed are good (or at least we have no reason to think otherwise given the mere fact that they are oppressed) while oppressors are evil; liberty is good while coercion is evil.

This analysis is very important for at least two reasons: First: it can help us to understand what people believe and why. Second: it might help us to communicate more effectively and reach more productive compromises by trying to give each side something that it wants.

Think about police shootings of minorities, for example. According to this book conservatives support the police because the police defend civilization; Progressives support the victims because they are oppressed; Libertarians oppose the multitude of unnecessary coercive laws that "create" too many criminals and too many police-civilian interactions.

Everybody wants something good: defending civilization is good, defending the oppressed is good; opposing unnecessary laws is good, and yet, we still disagree and seem incapable of reaching an agreement or even a compromise.

But maybe, understanding better what each group wants could help us put together a successful compromise position. As an overly simplified example maybe we could:

• Punish more harshly criminals who assault cops (for the Conservatives),
• Punish more harshly cops who violate the law (for the Progressives),
• Reduce the number of unnecessary laws (for Libertarians.)

Would that work? Could we get all sides to agree? Would a similar approach work for other issues?

Might be worth a try!

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[This great book can help us understand how our political opponents think, which could help us finally to really communicate and even compromise.]

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Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Wayne Gadway

Review of Matt Taibbi's "Insane Clown President"

I just finished reading Insane Clown President and I am planning to write a substantial review of it but it is important enough that I wanted to get a short review out right away. This book is not always easy to read as it channels some of Hunter S. Thompson's maniacal style from his 1973 Fear and Loathing book about Nixon. The channeling makes sense because Matt Taibbi is Thompson's journalistic descendant as political reporter for Rolling Stone.

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Sometimes this book is hard to understand. The rhetorical flourishes get very elaborate and the obscure references can be very obscure. The book is made up of pieces written during the 2016 campaign so we see the author trying to make sense of a rapidly moving train wreck as it happens. This leads to some confusion and contradictory points of view as the campaign unravels. This is a kind of stream-of-consciousness accounting of the most bizarre and maybe dangerous presidential election in United States history.

But in spite of the difficulties in unraveling the meanings in this book it richly rewards every effort at understanding. It did the most important thing a book is supposed to do (contrary to the views of the ignorant who think books are supposed to spoon feed ""facts" into their passive brains), it forced me to think HARD about what the author was trying to say, which means I was also thinking hard about WHAT happened in 2016 and WHY it happened.

It helped me understand how and why the Democrats let down the working class and how those people took their revenge by doing something FAR worse in electing Trump. It also helped me to understand a little more about the "post-fact" world we seem to be lurching into, where presidents still lie, as they always have, but now they do it openly and shamelessly, because their followers don't seem to care anymore.

And that makes this a very good book indeed.

Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Wayne Gadway

Good Cops and Bad Cops: The NYPD Tapes, "They Came and Got Me"

[This was originally posted on another blog on 30 June 2015. And now it's here.]

What if you knew that senior police officials were breaking the law? What if you gathered evidence against them by recording their conversations? What if they found out what you were doing, then showed up at your apartment, arrested you, and had you locked up in a mental hospital?

That's what happened to New York City Police Officer Adrian Schoolcraft in 2009. And that's the story told in Graham A. Rayman's book: The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage.

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Schoolcraft started his police career in 2002 and did pretty well until Steven Mauriello took over the 81^st Precinct in October 2006. Mauriello used a "...hands-on, numbers- and productivity-focused approach that was favored by ambitious commanders in the era of CompStat." CompStat was the NYPD's computerized system for tracking the crime rate in every precinct, and the "activity" of every police officer, in the city.

Naturally, if Precinct Commanders are judged by CompStat, they are going to do everything possible to keep police "activity" up and crime down – or at least give the appearance this is happening. Schoolcraft's ratings started to suffer as he resisted the pressure to increase "activity" by arresting innocent people and "reduce" crime by falsifying reports.

One technique used to increase "activity" in the 81^st Precinct was called a "Mauriello Special" – find people loitering on street corners and arrest them all. Even if no crime had been committed these arrestees would be held for a few hours and then released. This counted for police "activity" in CompStat and would look good on Mauriello's job reviews.

To keep crime down cops were pressured to deliberately falsify reports. When a man named Timothy Covel was attacked and robbed the police wrote it up as "lost property." This same type of corruption was happening not just in Schoolcraft's 81^st Precinct but also all over the city. Rayman provides numerous examples from other precincts.

One of the most horrifying cases was exposed by a retired Detective First Grade Harold Hernandez who arrested a sexual predator named Daryl Thomas in 2002. Hernandez discovered that many of Thomas's earlier crimes had been falsely reported as misdemeanors. This hid the pattern of what was really going on, delayed Thomas's arrest, and caused more women to suffer attacks – all to keep the "official" crime rate down in CompStat so Precinct Commanders would look good.

It was in this corrupt environment that Adrian Schoolcraft collected 1000 hours of recorded conversations documenting the crimes being committed against the people of New York by the very police department sworn to protect them. When the department finally became aware what Schoolcraft was up to they tried various means to pressure or discredit him. Most frighteningly, on 31 October 2009, they arrested him in his apartment and then had him held in a mental hospital for six days against his will.

One morning while he was there a doctor asked Schoolcraft, "Do you feel they are coming after you?" and he answered, "Well, they did. They came and got me."

This book could have been better edited; there are occasional errors that should have been caught and corrected before publication. The story is dramatic enough however, and important enough, to over-ride these small problems. This is a very important book about how a large police department can become corrupt and turn into the enemy of the people it was meant to serve. This is a book that should be read by every citizen of the United States.

Copyright © 2016 by Joseph Wayne Gadway

65

Hillary Rodham Clinton by Karen Blumenthal

Good biography of Hillary. I recommend this book. It seems balanced to me. It doesn't make her out to be a saint or a criminal, just the most successful woman ever in the difficult and dangerous world of U.S. politics.

In the introduction the author gives quotes from Hillary's concession speech in 2008, when she realized Obama would be the Democratic candidate rather than her.

Based on everything I have learned about Hillary over the last few months, these words ring true:

"...I have an old-fashioned conviction that public service is about helping people solve their problems and live their dreams."

"Life is too short, time is too precious, and the stakes are too high to dwell on what might have been."

"Always aim high, work hard, and care deeply about what you believe in. And when you stumble, keep faith. And when you're knocked down, get right back up, and never listen to anyone who says you can't or shouldn't go on."

After a bruising loss - after a huge disappointment - at what might have been the end of her political career, Hillary didn't make excuses, she didn't blame anyone else, she didn't accuse the other side of cheating, and she didn't resort to vulgar insults. She just tried to inspire others by saying GET UP and GO ON!

That's the kind of President I want. I hope that's the kind of President America will get in November.

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Please read this excellent biography of Hillary and share it with others.

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Blinded by the Right #1

This is a fascinating story of one man's career as a right wing "hit man." This is how bare knuckles politics works behind the scenes. Both parties do it so don't feel superior!

My top rule of political conflict is "never lie." Make the best case you can FOR your side and make the best case you can AGAINST the other side, but NEVER LIE!

People who lie are dishonest - morally corrupt. People who lie in intellectual debate are out of ideas - unworthy of respect. People who lie in political debate are interfering with the ability of citizens to make good choices, undermining Democracy itself - traitors to fundamental American beliefs.

There is nothing wrong with making your case and making it HARD but don't cross the line into flat-out lying! Present FACTS and LINK to supporting evidence.

Anyway, here is how Brock starts: "This is a terrible book. It is about lies told and reputations ruined. It is about what the conservative movement did, and what I did, as we plotted in the shadows, disregarded the law, and abused power to win even greater power."

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[Check out Brock's great book on how politics really gets done.

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Copyright © 2016 by Joseph Wayne Gadway