©Hazel Henderson 2021
Unsurprisingly, all these womens’ paradigm-shifting books are on steering our US economies toward fairness and recognition of the unpaid sectors. I also discuss these issues in “Valuing Love Economies: Revealed as Driving Positive Human Evolution!”, June 4, 2021.
~Hazel Henderson, Editor”
“ANTITRUST:
Taking on Monopoly Power from the
Gilded Age to the Digital Age,”
Amy Klobuchar
Alfred A. Knopf, Penguin Random House (2021)
If you only read one policy book this crucial year, make it this wonderfully readable, richly-illustrated account of how generations of US capitalists continually merged into ever-greater concentrations of power, monopolizing industry after industry, until courageous civic leaders, workers and activists finally passed legislation to curb these monopolies. Senator Klobuchar tells the personal story of her immigrant family who came from the mines of Eastern Europe to become miners in northern Minnesota. Few if any sitting US Senators work more diligently and systematically and embrace our current situation in the USA so holistically. This book also manages to be humorous, including not only amazing cartoons illustrating how reformers challenged these monopolists, as seen in newspapers through two centuries. Klobuchar, also adds her 25 reform proposals, as well as over 240 pages of meticulously documented footnotes! This book belongs in all our public libraries and on the shelves of politicians, policy wonks, unions consumer groups and all citizens!
“ENGINE OF INEQUALITY:
The Fed and the Future of WEALTH in AMERICA
Karen Petrou
John Wiley & Sons, (2021)
This book is the most honest, courageous and penetrating look at the Federal Reserve system so far, its history of missed opportunities. Mistaken policies and timidity precluded fully using its mandate for balancing the USA economy and financial system for greater equity and inclusion. Amazingly, Karen Petrou is also an acclaimed monetary expert, co-founder and Managing Partner of Federal Financial Analytics, who has testified before many US government agencies and known for her precise impartiality and expertise. Petrou points to the many reforms the Fed could undertake to reverse the “trickle-down“ economics and the over-aggregated statistics that miss too much detail on the ground. These include GDP and macroeconomic indicators, that I have also critiqued over the past 40 years, summarized in my “Time to Dethrone Economics“, (2021) and “Mapping the Global Transition To the Solar Age: From Economism to Earth Systems Science”, (2014). Petrou proposes pragmatic actions the Fed can take and should take immediately to reverse its adverse influence on economic inequality use its power to move the money into a force for shared prosperity. Read this book now!
“THE WHITENESS OF WEALTH:
How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans and How We Can Fix It”,
Dorothy A. Brown
Crown/Penguin House, (2021)
Law Professor Dorothy Brown, as a Black girl growing up in the South Bronx, saw how race limited the lives of her family and neighbors. So she became a celebrated tax lawyer as Asa Griggs Candler Professor at Emory University after graduating from Fordham University, Georgetown Law and New York University. Prof. Brown looks into the ways that many tax rules, often inadvertently, harm Black married joint filers, as well as many single women. With over 50 pages of key footnotes, Prof. Brown outlines how these tax rules exacerbated inequality in the GI Bill, housing, mortgages, red-lined communities, colleges, student loans, even how the Homestead Act of 1872 offering “40 acres and a mule” to settlers going West, largely excluded African-Americans. Brown spells out a key set of reforms to the IRS and our tax rules to level the playing field and give tax rebates where clearly justified. I have also quoted many of these reforms in my “Evolving Finance, Money & Markets“, (2021). We hope President Biden is listening as Prof. Brown is interviewed, recently on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, and reads her articles in FORBES, New York Times and Washington Post. A must read for both policy wonks and taxpayers!
“THE DEFICIT MYTH: Modern Monetary Theory and the
Birth of the People’s Economy“
Stephanie Kelton
PublicAffairs, (2020)
Professor Stephanie Kelton at Stony Brook University, N.Y. is former chief economist on the US Senate Budget Committee and the most readable proponent of the economics school of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), developed at Bard College Levy Institute www.levy.edu. Kelton tells all from her experience at the US Senate Budget Committee, on how libertarian economics is promoted by wealthy donors whose family fortunes were based on fossil energy and mining natural resources. These ideologies contribute to regressive policies, based on constant fear of inflation, debt burdening our childrens‘ future, austerity, cutting social budgets while passing huge military expenditures and tax cuts for corporations and the top 1 percent. I have cited Kelton’s book in many recent columns and how she acknowledges all the valuable government investments created: from the Hoover Dam (without which Los Angeles would still be a village) to Eisenhower’s interstate highway system and Kennedy’s moon mission in the 1960’s which spurred our current economy and created NASA. Yet these assets are still missing, only recorded in debt-to-GDP ratios-which could be cut by up to 50% with a few keystrokes! This book is now a New York Times best-seller and must reading!