My Amazon Review of Martin Baron's "Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post"

 Democracy Dies in Darkness

 

I met Marty Baron in the early 1980’s when I was working as an economist at the UCLA Business Forecasting Project, and he was a reporter/editor at the Los Angeles Times. Who knew he would go on to lead the Miami Herald, the Boston Globe and then become the executive editor of the storied Washington Post. Although he was just starting out, he was a great journalist then and he became greater as the years passed.

 

In this book Baron puts us inside the Washington Post newsroom as it was hemorrhaging cash when he started there in 2013 and was then rescued by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos who infused the cash needed to restore the paper back to its greatness. Just to note I have always been a fan of the Washington Post and much preferred it to the hoity toity New York Times. Through Baron’s eyes we se how the Post put together the stories involving the Snowden documents, the Steele Dossier, and its ongoing struggles with the Trump administration. Baron was clear from the start when he stated “We are not at war with the administration. We are at work.”

 

This is important because Baron had to face off with coteries of self-centered young journalists who thought that they were the story and that their opinions should be spayed across the news pages. To me if anything, Baron made a mistake in hiring most of them and the Post as well as other news organizations should look for viewpoint diversity as opposed to racial, gender and sexual orientation diversity. My advice would be to stay away from the Ivy’s; Baron is a case and point; he went to Lehigh.

 

Bezos comes across as a real mensch. Aside from putting up the big bucks needed to grow the newsroom, Bezos became personally involved in the freeing of journalist Jason Rezaian and his wife Yeganeh from Iranian prisons. So much so that when Rezaian arrived in Switzerland Bezos was there with his private plane to ferry them back to the United States. Similarly, Bezos was at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul to protest the murdering of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Throughout it all, Bezos, for the most part, backed Baron and stayed away from making editorial judgements.

 

As someone who in his misspent youth was involved in editing and publishing an underground newspaper, I found Baron’s book fascinating. The reader gets the smell of the Washington Post’s newsroom, a place I visited many years ago before the move to its new digs.

For the full amazon URL see: Democracy Dies in Darkness (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Jay Newman's "Undermoney: A Novel"

 

Rogue Traders

 

Retired hedge fund impresario Jay Newman has written his first novel about a rogue military-backed operation to elect a U.S. Senator as president. Newman is famous for his being the point person for the giant Elliot Management hedge fund’s successful effort to reap billions of dollars profits on Argentina’s defaulted debt. His background in hedge fund operations and international finance allows him to tell a story of corruption in the highest places of finance and politics domestically and internationally.

 

His story evolves a group of special forces operatives in Afghanistan who make a pact to save America from its incompetent leadership. One of their members has become a sitting senator and he becomes their vehicle to become president. Of course, that needs money, and we find them stealing two billion dollars in currency that was air dropped into the Syrian desert to support America’s allies in the region.

 

However, that money had to be laundered and the vehicles they chose was a hedge fund in New York that they plotted to seize control of and a corrupt central banker in Latvia who also happens to launder Russian money as well. The hedge fund is run by the sociopathic Elias Vicker who makes his money by investing in low probability – high impact events based on inside information.

 

Newman’s plot takes us to the Russian-backed Parsifal Group whose business is to create events that would have a huge market impact. As a result, the hedge fund has advanced knowledge of an explosion here, an air disaster there, and a 9/11 styled event. Parsifal profits from its investment in the hedge fund.

 

Along the way we meet the New York hedge fund glitterati, nymphomaniac Russian ballerinas with many of the leading characters found in compromising positions. As an aside Newman mentions how Saudi Arabia’s MBS obtained compromising pictures of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and how Russian intelligence operatives have infiltrated the highest reaches of American politics, journalism, and finance. How much of this it true along with the Latvian Central Bank acting as a laundromat for the Russian oligarchy, I do not know.

 

At times I found Newman’s plot choppy, but this book represents a very strong first effort.

Fpr the full Amazon URL see: Rogue Traders (amazon.com)