Drain the Swamp

In this age of Amazon where you can order any book ever written there is still a place for library visits and browsing selected Dewey Decimal classes (in this case 320.973) for books that some library director  (in this case Scotch Plains) thought worthwhile. I found this one on Sunday and just finished reading it. Excerpts follow:

Breaking Through Power

Ralph Nader’s new book is dedicated

to all citizens who wish to better the world and are seriously willing to dedicate some of their time, talent and resources to advance important causes.

Though a little heavy on the bashing of large corporation (who, even if they do not pay much in taxes directly, do employ people who through both income and payroll taxes do pay quite a bit) there were some interesting excerpts to note:

Media Watchdogs?

The New York Times headline seemed interesting:

In New Jersey, Only a Few Media Watchdogs Are Left

But then it turned out NOT to be about why there is supposedly less oversight over journalists but rather implied a nonsensical link between having fewer people working on newspapers and somehow there being less coverage of important government actions.

Three points:

Nails Over Trump

The Kenilworth library presented a choice of Labor day weekend reading between learning about the life of a dissolute egomaniac responsible for a string of bankruptcies or Lenny Dykstra.

I went with the one likely to provide more useful and/or believable information:

Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide

An aging pundit with Parkinson’s disease reflects on life, politics, journalism, and public pensions.

Excerpts follow:

Who Gives Up What

Kenneth R. Feinberg in 2012 wrote Who Gets What which is something of an autobiography with a focus on five cases he was involved in where a pot of money generated to ease the impact of a tragedy was allocated without recourse to standard legal procedures.

• Agent Orange
• 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund
• Virginia Tech shooting Memorial Fund
• Paying Wall Street Executives
• Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

These days Mr. Feinberg is engaged in overseeing the fund for victims of the Orlando shooting while also involved in a polar opposite case where he is charged with deciding how and how much participants in six (and counting) multiemployer pension plans will have taken away from them.

After reading these excerpts:

Update to The Hedge Fund Mirage

One of the chapters in Simon Lack’s Wall Street Potholes is on the dangers of investing the way the New Jersey retirement system is doing it.

Excerpts from that chapter follow: