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Title: Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America by Arianna Huffington ISBN: 1-4000-4771-4 Publisher: Crown Publishing Group Pub. Date: 14 January, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.72 (50 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: If The Good Lord Thought Money was Important,
Comment: I can remember Bret Maverick observing that "My old pappy always said that 'if the Good Lord thought money was important, He would a given it to a whole better class of people.'" Well, the class of people that Arianna talks about in her book is not very good; as a matter of fact, by calling them porkers, she gives them too much credit. I believe a pig will actually stop short of eating itself to death. These jaspers evidently cannot. So maybe pigs ought to feel offended by the comparison.
This book made me feel a whole lot better about being poor. I now feel smugly superior to Kenny Boy Ley, Bernie Ebbers, Dennis Kozlowski, Jeff Skilling, Gary Winnick, John Rigas and the rest of the troughateers that have helped harm our country (why aren't your carcasses all rotting in prison?).
I can envision Arianna, a beautiful dance hall girl, on the arm of Bret Maverick, listening to his stories attentively then transforming into a modern woman and writing down these tales. Only they are stories from today. But they bespeak a greed that is older than Bret Maverick, even Bret's old pappy.
They are stories about the crooked dealers and card sharks that rig the game so as to take the money of honest citizens and cowboys who lack the sophistication to spot their cons. Today the crooked dealer is a research analyst like Jack Grubman who tells the little guy, "yeah the game is honest and you ought buy as many chips as you can." Or it is accounting firms like Arthur Anderson who restate earnings the way a slick cheat shuffles a deck of cards, deftly inserting an ace. Often the stakes are alot more than a cowboy's pay. Often they are the pensions and life savings of honest folk who helped build this country.
Always the card cheats were abetted by the sheriff, the mayor and the good people of the community who did nothing. And the cowboy's only recourse was to go for his gun. If he was lucky, he was thrown out of the saloon by the cheats minions; if he wasn't so lucky, he took a slug from a Colt and lay dead in a pool of his own blood.
What we need is a good sheriff, and somebody to extoll his virtue and to make us mad at the troughateers. Arianna introduces a good sheriff, Eliot Spitzer (Guys named Eliot are good at this sort of thing. Eliot Ness did it to Al Capone but that was on another early 1960's ABC series, and I don't want to mix my metaphors). Anyway, Spitzer can't be bought, and "so far" he can't be shot. He is dong a pretty good job. He has got the card cheat Grubman, and we, the citizens, are aware the casino/saloon is crooked, or at least some of its dealers are crooked. Meanwhile, the Anderson gang has been busted up, and the troughateers run out of town (I still wish they were all in jail).
But Arianna warns, and we know, that there are alot more troughateers out there. Theirs is a venality too oft replicated in the gene pool to be removed. As long as we have people, and things are run by people, it will exist. Next week there will be another episode of Maverick and perhaps Arianna or some other dance hall girl will absorb the wisdom of Bret's (or Bart's, I liked Jack Kelly too) next little soliloquy on the nature of human weakness. They will write it down, and we will be closer by an asymptote to curing this human condition.
Rating: 1
Summary: An empty populist polemic
Comment: Arianna Huffington proves in this book that anyone can write a book today if they are outrageous enough in their attack, regardless whether they have anything new to say. Her book is a compendium of facts and figures well-known to anyone who regularly reads Business Week, Fortune, and other business press --- sadly, her work lacks even one original piece of research or one new fact that she herself dug up. This is clearly a book written entirely from Lexis, Nexis, and Google searches.
Aside from the lack of original research, Ms. Huffington's style grates on one's nerves. Her writing attempts to be overly cute, but comes across with all the clever cynicism of a high school sophomore. She excells at moronic, cliched name-calling (beginning with the title itself), as if her sticks and stones will somehow solve the much deeper problems in corporate governance and auditing about which she clearly knows little except the most superficial of information. Her so-called quizzes embedded throughout the book were equally immature. Far better that she should leave her pitiful attempts at humor of that sort to people like Al Franken, Molly Ivins, Dennis Miller, or Michael Moore who actually are funny and have the intellectual breadth and cultural repertoire to actually pull off real satire.
I suffered my way through the entire book mostly out of disbelief that a woman whom the press consistently dubs as intelligent could write such a shallow, childish, ineffectual work about a truly serious set of problems in our modern capitalist system. Having read this book, I see that her depth of knowledge and her persistent literary grandstanding through empty name-calling made her at least as good a candidate for governor in California as Arnold. They make the perfect pair for a state in which shallow superficiality reigns supreme.
This book is the perfect purchase for readers with high school educations who have never seen a copy of Business Week or read the business section of the New York Times. For everyone else, I suggest you spend your money elsewhere (spend it on a serious book like The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, or Paul Krugman'sThe Great Unraveling).
Rating: 5
Summary: No-nonsense truth from a no-nonsense woman
Comment: Arianna Huffington is a rare treasure...a political pundit who states the truth without sugar coating it. She is brilliant,insightful, and she has a great sense of humor. Her writing adds some exciting life and laughter to very serious issues.
This book is a must read for capitalist pigs and those that hate them.
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Title: How to Overthrow the Government by Arianna Huffington ISBN: 0060988312 Publisher: Regan Books Pub. Date: 03 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Truth About Corporate Cons, Globalization and High-Finance Fraudsters by Greg Palast ISBN: 0452283914 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: 25 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken ISBN: 0525947647 Publisher: E P Dutton Pub. Date: 29 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News by Eric Alterman ISBN: 0465001769 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 04 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! by Michael Moore ISBN: 0060392452 Publisher: Regan Books Pub. Date: 19 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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