Book Reviews

Andreas Grein of Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, City University of New York reviews “Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas,” by Marc Levinson. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores the development of globalization in the early twenty-first century, focusing on the role of transportation, communication, and information technology in enabling firms to organize their businesses around long-distance value chains.”

The Practitioner’s Bookshelf: New Books on Undocumented Storytellers in the United States and on the Crime of Aggression in International Law

In this instalment of ‘The Practitioner’s Bookshelf’—a new feature of the JHRP Review section containing brief reviews of recent publications of particular interest to human rights practitioners—Rubia R. Valente (Baruch College, City University of New York) discusses an analysis of narratives from the immigrant rights movement in the USA and Brian Phillips (Reviews Editor, JHRP) assesses a study of the crime of aggression in international law.

Review – New Media Caucus Showcase A perspective on consciousness within digital practices

Presentations by the following NMC members: Sophia Brueckner, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan Martin Calvino, Artist-in-residence at Rutgers University Zach Duer, Assistant Professor, Creative Technologies, Virginia Tech Carter Eggleston, MFA candidate in Creative Technologies, Virginia Tech Elizabeth Flyntz, Artist, Writer, and curator Jeffrey Gangwisch, strikeWare co-founder and Adjunct Professor, Anne Arundel Community College Chelsea Heikes, candidate at European Graduate School Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Ph.D. candidate, University of Colorado Boulder George Legrady, Distinguished Professor of Interactive Media and director of Experimental Visualization Lab, UC Santa Barbara Maya Livio, Ph.D Candidate, University of Colorado Boulder, Curator of Media Archaeology Lab, Curator of MediaLive at BMoCA Eric Souther, Associate Professor of New Media, Indiana University South Bend Deirtra Thompson, Independent artist, practitioner, and researcher Masha Vlasova, Lecturer and Lead Faculty, University of North Texas Michelle Hernandez, MFA alumna, Hunter College, CUNY Dominika Ksel, Adjunct Assistant Professor of New Media, Baruch College, CUNY.

SEC chief accountant shines spotlight on audit committees

Purpose To explain and analyze remarks concerning the importance and responsibility of corporate audit committees made by US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chief Accountant Wesley Bricker before the Baruch College Financial Reporting Conference on May 3, 2018. Design/methodology/approach Discusses Mr Bricker’s remarks in three principal areas: the role of audit committees in clearly understanding non-GAAP measures presented to the public, the attentiveness of audit committees to disclosures regarding changes in market risks, and the importance of independent, diverse thinking on corporate boards, and particularly, audit committee, brought by independent directors as an element of strong corporate governance. Findings The coming months may offer a better indication whether Mr Bricker’s speech is simply a specific point of emphasis from the Office of the Chief Accountant or is perhaps intended to foreshadow a contemplated or ongoing enforcement initiative. Originality/value Expert guidance from experienced lawyer with specialties in SEC investigative and enforcement actions, securities litigation, accountants’ defense, white collar criminal defense and corporate investigations

Fayned News

When my students ask me, “What will be the next big thing in historical studies?,” I tell them to watch out for the history of public relations. The University of Bournemouth in the UK has a fairly new center devoted to the subject, Baruch College in Manhattan has just set up a Museum of Public Relations, and I think that’s just the beginning. Yes, plenty of work has been done on the history of advertising and propaganda, but PR is different: Dan Draper and Joseph Goebbels were perfectly upfront about what they were doing, but PR is a medium that commonly and deliberately disguises its own authorship. Let me state at the outset that everyone today uses publicists, and much of their work is entirely ethical. For publishers, they write up promotional material, send out review copies, arrange author interviews, and extract blurbs from reviews of their books—this one, for instance. But the main focus of this chapter is the kind of PR that surreptitiously plants stories in various media. It works only insofar as readers don’t recognize it, and therefore distrust of the media is in large measure a function of reader recognition of PR. The standard narrative holds that public relations was invented by Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays in the early twentieth century, but the basic concept of publicity can be traced back as far as Socrates’s Phaedrus, who observed that “an orator does not need to know what is really just, but what would seem just to the multitude who are to pass judgment, and not what is really good or noble, but what will seem to be so; for they say that persuasion comes from what seems to be true, not from the truth” (260a). One of the most brilliant PR agents of the pre-newspaper era was working before Shakespeare staged his first play.

The Municipal Reference and Research Center is Born: New York’s Municipal Library in the late 1960s

Recently the news site Democracy Now! featured a story titled “NYPD Surveillance Unveiled: City Claims to Lose Docs on 1960s Radicals, Then Finds 1 Million Records.”1 The segment describes Baruch College professor Johanna Fernández’s efforts to access records of New York Police Department (NYPD) surveillance of radical organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. In the early 2000s, Fernández began her search for this material but encountered a major obstacle when the city of New York claimed it had lost them. Sixteen years later, the city contacted Fernández to inform her that these documents were in fact not lost and had been found with more than 520 boxes of related materials in a warehouse in Queens.

An Update On The Possible Incorporation Of IFRS Into The U.S. Financial Reporting System

The SEC issued the “Commission Statement in Support of Convergence and Global Accounting Standards” in February 2010 to reaffirm its position that IFRS was best positioned to serve as the single set of high-quality globally accepted accounting standards and indicated that it would not incorporate IFRS into the financial reporting system for U.S. issuers unless such a change is in the best interest of U.S. investors and capital markets and that a determination was expected to be made in 2011 as to whether, when, and how to incorporate IFRS into the financial reporting system for U.S. issuers. It is now 2015 and the SEC still has not yet made a decision. Nonetheless, based on the statements given by the SEC Chief Accountant James Schnurr at the Baruch College Financial Reporting Conference in May 2015, it appears that the SEC might make a decision really soon. The wait for the SEC’s decision might finally be over. This paper provides an update on the possible incorporation of IFRS into the U.S. financial reporting system.

The Coup

In his most recent work, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of ModernU. S.-Iranian Relations, Ervand Abrahamian (Distinguished Professor of Iranianand Middle Eastern History, Baruch College of the City University, NewYork) recounts a definitive moment of modern Iranian history that overshadowsIranian-American relations to this day. Drawing on a remarkable varietyof sources – accessible Iranian official documents, the Foreign Office andState Department files, memoirs and biographies, newspaper articles publishedduring the crisis, recent Persian-language books published in Iran, aCIA report leaked in 2000 known as “the Wilber document,” and two contemporaryoral history projects (the Iranian Oral History Project at HarvardUniversity and the Iranian Left history project in Berlin) – the author providesa detailed and thorough account of the 1953 coup.Challenging the dominant consensus among academicians and politicalanalysts that the coup transpired because of the Cold War rivalries betweenthe West and the Soviet Union, he locates it within the paradigms of the clashbetween an old imperialism and a burgeoning nationalism. He then traces itsorigins to Iran’s struggle to nationalize its oil industry and the Anglo-Americanalliance against this effort.The book is divided into four chapters. The first chapter, “Oil Nationalization,”narrates the history of Iran’s oil industry and various encounters betweenthe Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and the Iranians. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), an English company founded in 1908 followingthe discovery of a large oil field in Masjed Soleiman in southern Iran, wasrenamed AIOC in 1935. AIOC gradually turned into a vital British asset andprovided its treasury with more than £24 million a year in taxes and £92 millionin foreign exchange in the first decades of the twentieth century ...

Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran

Ervand Abrahamian, the author of this well-written book and a member of Iran’s ethnic Armenian minority, is Distinguished Professor of History at Baruch College and Graduate Center of City University of New York. His previous publications, among them The Iranian Mojahedin (1989), Khomeinism (1993) and Tortured Confessions (1999), feature more or less the left-wing political perspective of their author - especially in terms of socio-political and socio-economic analysis.