The Bezzle

Author: Cory Doctorow • Published: 2024

This was my second Doctorow work. I immediatly ordered two more from the library after finishing this one.

The first, For the Win (2010), was a lesson in labor rights and exploitation in the digital age. It sat upon fiction about “gold farmers”—low-wage workers from developing countries, who were hired to play online games to earn currency for wealthier players.

This one followed a similar format. The underlying non-fiction piece here is on profit-prisons and frauds. The fiction is a noir, following a tough accountant going up against a capitalist system that continues to more cleverly extract money from the rest of us.

Because there was so much to chew on, I thought I’d share a list of things I looking up while reading:

Scams

• Ponzi scheme: use new investors’ money to pay returns to earlier ones.
• Pyramid scheme: rely on recruiting new members, with payouts depending on expanding levels of recruits.
  • Downline: People below you in the recruitment or sales chain. So, if you recruit three people into the program, those three are part of your downline.
  • Upline: People above you who recruited you into the system. Your sales contribute to the earnings of everyone higher up.

Finance stuff

• Junk fees: hidden or unexpected charges added often without clear explanation.

• The bezzle: The period of the con when it has started and the future seems bright and prosperous to those who have invested. The jig isn’t up yet.

• Private equity: a form of investment where funds are directly invested into private companies, or where investors buy out public companies to take them private. They can fix companies, but can also hurt them if they focus only on making money quickly (which, of course money is a major focus.)

  • Venture Capital: a type of private equity in early-stage investments in startups with high growth potential.

  • Private–equity–funded “roll up.” An example is private equity firms buying up multiple nursing homes, “rolling them up” into a larger organization, and then flipping them for profit. A famous case happened in 2007, when this book took place. HCR ManorCare declined in care quality for a decade and went bankrupt, while the firm Carlyle Group made bank.

    A grab bag of companies”, “a rat king made of jealous, bickering companies, all vine to dominate each other and the public at the same time."

• PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records): is how the public accesses U.S. federal court documents and case information. It launched as a free service, but is now paywalled.

  • RECAP (REtrieve the CAPtured documents): is an open-source project designed to open up these documents that are leagally within the public domain.

Cali’s private prisons

• 80s: overcrowding begins due to tough-on-crime policies
• 90s: private prisons introduced to make more space for inmates. Even harsher crime policy cranks up the numbers more
• 2000s: Prisons at 200% capacity. Lawsuits filed about inhumane conditions and inadequate healthcare for inmates.
• 2010s: Supreme Court orders Cali to reduce, but their citizens aren’t warm to the idea of roaming ex-inmates, so the state does little.
• 2023: They’re down to only 126% capacity.

America will never make life better for the millions of souls it has imprisoned. Never. It is not in our character. To be an American is to live with the festering background knowledge that you are in a land that imprisons more of its people than any country in the history of the world–a land with more prisoners than Stalin’s USSR or Hu Jintao’s China or P. W. Botha’s Apartheid South Africa.

• Guard vs financier psychology: Financiers, and those within that world, end up being more cruel to the inmates than the prison guards. Why?
  • Distance, making dehumanization easier.
  • Different incentives. Financiers are rewarded for squeezing maximum value out of every transaction, even if it harms the public.

Drugs

• Science suppresion: thousands of studies on over 40k patients showed extremenly promising results on LSD improvong mental health conditions like addiction, depression, PTSD, and anxiety. The rise of its use into counterculture movements lead to criminalization and heightened drug propaganda.
• Free drugs: Once you’re connected to the right people, especially around older hippie enthusiasts, sometimes the drugs are free.

while the whole sound drug distribution networks were controlled by dangerous, organized criminals, the actual production side was often just some semiretired hobbiest engineer with a lab in their garage, who produced so much quantity so cheaply, that selling to anyone, except those wholesalers made no sense. The cartels paid cash. Pals got freebies…”

Cali

• LAPD neo-Nazi police gangs: are a thing, and their “998” tattoos which indicate an officer has shot someone
• Catalina Island: small island 22 miles from LA
  • William Wrigley Jr., the chewing gum magnate, bought it in 1919
    • His money came the typical way; shrewdness, which lead him to buy up 95% of the world’s chicle tree forests. Anyone would now need to go through him to make gum.
    • He bought the Chicago Cubs and they went there for spring training
  • DDT filled: One of the deepest channels off any coast. Sits there is tens of thousands of barrels of the toxic pesticide. Someday they will all leak and kill all life around it. Sweet exposé.

Critique

My only critique is that somse of the main characters came off as a little flat. I cannot comprehend how our main guy Marty displayed no remorse for being solely responsible for putting his friend in prison for 25 years. At no point did he offer an apology or even narrate to the reader that he was indeed to blame.