I stumbled on this book by accident, and it has astonished me. With all the books I have read, this is the one book I might recommend to anyone — in school or beyond school — including those who (like myself) have multiple graduate degrees and/or read continuously.
This book so impressed me that I was contemplating making it a Six Star and Beyond (10% of the books I read make it into that category, see the rest of them at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog under Reviews / 6 Stars. All my reviews lead back here to Amazon. What the book is missing, and I certainly recommend it to the publisher for what I hope will be another printing, is an index of all names, and a consolidated bibliography. The endnotes are superb — this is a solidly researched and very nicely presented over-view of all of the negative forces seeking to destroy the possibility of a world that works for all.
Although the author takes care to cover the usual suspects — the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, etcetera, he is the first author I have found who truly “gets” that every organization is a “front” and that no organization has a New World Order agenda — that is the preserve of the top 200-300 families who regard the Earth as their personal farm. They operate under what is called “deep secrecy” (no paper trail, no audio trail). The organizational leaders — including the President of the United States — are puppets who are fed a mix of information and money to keep them on “on course.”
4.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent FIrst Effort, Misses a Lot of the Crime and Complexity,March 21, 2012
I agreed to review this book, which was a gift. Normally I do not do non-fiction, but the topic of this book — the abject total corruption of our entire political system (from the two-party tyranny to the bloated corrupt government) is important to me, so I agreed.
As a first effort, it is a fine book, and certainly valuable as a “lite” telling of the American story of legalized crime and conspiracy. Unfortunately, it does not go nearly far enough, once again proving that non-fiction is much scarier than fiction. It's hard to get too excited about a fictional version when you have all lived through the real thing.
To the author's great credit, I learned things from this book–always my objective–and it is therefore more than fiction, it is a window into reality. The book ends with six questions for book clubs and overall is very well presented. I would have been more impressed if the author had listed some of the books below as sources–I get the feeling going through the book that the author drew more on Internet and media sources than on actual books. There are important observations throughout the book, not least of which is the fact that Obama gets away with things that a Republican white president would never get away with. He is the perfect house servant for the criminals that consider the USA to be their personal looting preserve.
Here are non-fiction books (you can just read my summary reviews, and also explore at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, among the 98 categories in which I read, many of them focused on the deep corruption that characterizes all organizations we rely on:
5.0 out of 5 stars Ably Researched and Presented Inspection of One Side of America — the Part Without a Soul,March 20, 201
First off, this is not a “sneering” book, this is a solidly researched and ably presented inspection of Ayn Rand, key people in the Ayn Rand “movement” of Objectivism, and on balance the author is both sympathetic and critical — it takes intelligence and integrity to carry this off, those that lack either or both of these qualities should not buy the book. For the rest of us, it is a small piece of the puzzle, a small but most cogent explanation of why the 1% really do look down on the rest of us, and have neither God nor guilt about greed. HOWEVER, I must emphasize that one of the author's findings is that it is not just the 1% that buy into this whole market laissez faire posture, but a good number of the “little people” who have no idea what a philosophy can or should be.
George Soros nailed it with his essay on “My Philanthropy” subsequently a major portion of the book, The Philanthropy of George Soros: Building Open Societies. Blasting what he calls “the Enlightenment fallacy” he points out that all men are not rational, not necessarily good to one another, and not at all equipped to address the public interest in isolation.
Having seen the negative reviews, I was very pleasantly surprised right off by the author's introduction of his own book. I read a great deal — in 98 categories best understood by accessing all my Amazon reviews via category at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog. I was immediately put at ease — serious author, serious approach to the topic, a good plan, and an undeniable commitment to the public interest.
I have to point out that one reason I was interested in this book was because Ayn Rand is reputed to be a favorite among Tea Partiers who want less or no government, and despite the long standing conflicts between Objectivists (code for anything goes, survival of the fittest, altruism is for wimps) and libertarians (themselves so focused on Liberty they cannot get a grip on the rest of the Preamble to the Constitution of the USA, i.e. little things like general welfare, domestic tranquility, and justice. Which is to day, both the Ayn Rand People and the Libertarians — Ron Paul, I am talking to you and still waiting for a courteous answer to my two letters in January — fail on three out of four Constitutional fundamentals. So does Barack Obama! What I have learned from all of my reading and observation is that the two-party tyranny is godless and amoral, all posturing aside. Ayn Rand fits right in.
The author has done his homework–more than his homework. With due credit to biographers of Ayn Rand (this book is not a biography, it is a tour of Ayn Rand Nation as the title says) he resurrects people who were “buried” or shunned, exiled, reviled, or with great fanfare “ignored” by Ayn Rand.
I learn things I did not know in this book — her opposition to World War II (“let the Germans and the Russians kill each other off”); her favoritism toward Israel (in sharp distinction to the Libertarian ire and refusal to bow to Israeli influence) — her prediction of the 2008-2012 (and soon the 2013-2014) huge financial crash. She nailed it. Government debt in any form that is cumulative and passed off to the future will eventually destroy the nation. The author points out that no one from the Ann Rand Institute realizes she said this, and they have consequently failed to promulgate this one bit of getting it right decades in advance.
Of course Michael Lewis said the same thing in Liar's Poker, and both John Bogle and William Greider have spoken to the issue in their respective books The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism and The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, and while it may be that the author goes a bridge too far in laying all of our failures of character and culture at the feet of Ayn Rand, she does seem to fill a very large hole in people's heads and souls — empty spaces without her.
What really jumps out at me as I pass the midway mark is how unethical and ignorant top figures in the upper reaches of US finance are — Henry Paulson, Tim Geithner, Ben Pernanke, John Mack, the Wells Fargo guy, etcetera. They lack intelligence and they lack integrity and they survive on being part of the club, of being reliable to the few at the expense of the many. It makes me sick to contemplate the depravity of the collective US public mind, that it cannot see these people for the charlAtans and postuRers and cheats that they actually are.
It also merits observation that the 1% are so far removed from the Ayn Rand circles as to make her a peasant on a stump, spouting ideas into the ether and completely irrelevant to what some call “deep secrecy” and the manner in which a few banking families (including those in China and Indonesia and India) manage all. This is a side show, not the main event. The named individual in US finance–as greedy and treasonous as they might be, are bit players in a much larger drama.
Throughout the book Barack Obama and his Administration are present as the anti-thesis of Objectivism, and I remind myself over and over again that it is truly a shame that what we have right now in our government is a combination of irresponsible entitlement socialism and irresponsible economic and military fascism. Only in America. Hence, absent a deep understanding of the fact that CORRUPTION is the common ingredient for the two-party system that excludes all other nationally accredited parties from the ballot, and that legalizes crime as a matter of routine (Matt Taibbi is still the best on this, see my summary review of Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History), it is safe to say that both Objectivism and the mix of socialism and fascism now represented by Barack Obama (as the puppet in chief) are identical: amoral, atheist, and absent any coherent strategic analytic model that can actually connect to reality or project future outcomes.
As someone who has spent the past decade reflecting on the urgency of demanding BOTH intelligence AND integrity from all eight tribes at all levels (academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental/non-profit) I am charmed by the author's skewering of Alan Greenspan, in a chapter centered on Greenspan, Greenspan's notions of integrity (not), and how much damage Greenspan did to the US with his ignorance and lack of integrity in the holistic sense. I myself fell prey to the Greenspan myth, and while I do not go back and rewrite my reviews, there are several back a few years that I now realize were written from a less than fully informed perspective. I continue to learn, and this book is one I strongly recommend — it is about Ayn Rand Nation, but in passing, it is about what the USA is or is not. For the complete opposite, see my summary of the phenomenal book by Kevin O'Keefe, The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen.
QUOTE (235): Greenspan could seek to escape reality, but his words and his actions could not be so neatly erased. The fact was that Rand had failed. Her ideas had collided with the real world, a world in which monomaniacal selfishness is not beneficial but harmful, in which businessmen are driven by the scent of money to ast recklessly, and in which capitalism requires government oversight lest capitalist excesses hurt the financial system and society as a whole.”
The author concludes along these lines, but here I believe he misses a very important point. I continue to rate the book five stars because there are too many negative reviews that have no foundation in fact. This is a worthy book for anyone with both intelligence and integrity. It's not about capitalism and it's not about government. It's about education. Since Carnegie and Rockefeller were allowed to standardize what John Gato calls Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling the USA has become an idiot nation, beating the creativity out of kids, still offering today rote instruction that is a hundred years out of date. My youngest is about to “test” out of high school after the 10th grade and spend two years working and traveling–Fairfax County has a good reputation within the nation of inattentive idiots [I certainly include myself in that group], but between its neo-Nazi zero tolerance for youthful indiscretions and its inbred mediocrity of programming, I cannot in good conscience force my son to waste his next two years in the wasteland called “high school.” We lost sight of what it means to be a citizen — a responsible citizen with an obligation to apply their intelligence at all times with integrity, irrespective of which tribe they work for…. my long-term ambition remains to that of integrating education, intelligence, and research, creating a Smart Nation, in which all the bureaucracies are euthenized, and we allow our natural creativity and deeper instincts of community to come forward.
For a complete overview of books by others exploring both the negative and positive of our situation, search for these two lists or find them at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog under books; each review leads back to its Amazon page:
4.0 out of 5 stars Lacks Visualization and Genealogy, A Good Start,March 3, 2012
I eagerly anticipated receipt of this book, but when it arrived I had two immediate reactions:
01) A serious work that offers new information about American corporations betraying the public interest; and
02) Totally lacking in visualizations and “trees” showing both the family trees of those like the Bushes that started out and stayed Nazi sympathizers; and those who entered the USA under CIA sponsorship after the war, and spawned multiple generations of neo-Nazi mind-sets with assets able to influence public policy.
Then I noticed Howard Zinn's jacket blurb (“A valuable history…shocking and sobering…deserves to be widely read”) and I mention that to make the point that my four star grade is one of disappointment at what could have been, NOT disappointment at what is. This is a very useful serious book, it needs to be redone.
I totally agree with another reviewer who expresses a desire for footnotes rather than endnotes. For works of this kind that are both controversial and revelatory, the notes needs to be as close to the text as possible.
This entire book strongly reinforces my long-standing view that every nation needs to have a very strong counterintelligence cadre to guard against both religious and corporate treason. The US was clearly infected with Nazi ideology, sympathy, and corruption, and this has clearly carried over into today's corporate immunity from government regulation, and the achievement of the virtual corporate state in the USA — in a word, neo-fascism.
The book is an excellent mix of material I was not familiar with, and material I have have encountered before. The latter tracks with what I have read from others, thus in my lay view authenticating the mew material.
For myself, the most interesting materials covers corporate treason in refusing to provide materials or allocate man-hours and machine-hours as requested for the war effort — this is another side of the corporate face, complementing the side that gains great profit from war.
What is missing from this book that would have fascinated me — apart from the visualizations and timelines — is the deeper story of how US corporate nazi sympathies and international banking zionist sympathies eventually converged into the 1% against the 99%.
The CIA is a constant in this book, but having worked for the CIA myself, I have to remind the reader that there are at least five CIAs: the White House CIA, the Wall Street CIA, the “nice” CIA that really does try to do good intelligence, the covert operations CIA (paramilitary, influence operations) and the rendition and torture CIA. A future President might well wish to break up the CIA and start over — I absolutely consider 90% of the CIA to be earnest and honest. A proper counterintelligence agency (what the FBI is supposed to be but is not) would be nailing down government, corporate, and religious traitors.
Allen Dulles is made out to be a traitor in this book. For me this is a useful teaching point. If one takes every major leader across the public and private sector, and examines their actual decisions, what are the criteria for establishing the degree to which they are loyal to the Constitution, what are the sources one must develop to make that determination, why are those sources not in use? To this one must add the deeper question of how education, intelligence / counter-intelligence, and research should be managed to achieve the highest possible ethics and avoid “contamination” by authoritarian and genocidal mind-sets.
So I suppose my bottom line on this book is that it is an eye-opener, but it does not go far enough in “processing” and in “visualizing” the information to help us lay people understand with greater precision the degree to which our public and private sectors are corrupted by the Nazi orientation – to which one must add today the Zionist orientation, the “new world order” orientation, the neo-Nazi eugenics/Forced Population Reducation orientation, and so on. Who actually represents “We the People” appears to be unclear and dangerously distant from the public interest.
5.0 out of 5 stars Work of genius, superb detail, ignore the critics,February 24, 2012
This is a fast read, but it is truly scary, for anyone who has actually paid attention and read such strong non-fiction books as The Bush Tragedy. Not only does this book provide searing, gripping “reality” but as we fast-forward to understanding how a nothing like “W” could get to the White House and unleash Dick Cheney (see for instance Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency), it helps to put the well-intentioned village-idiot president in context.
The author has a claim to credibility in writing this book. Others may not like it, but it reeks of the truth and in my view is a useful depiction of the reality that is now known as “W.”
It makes me sick to my stomach to be reminded of how decrepit our political process has become. This is an educational down-to-earth book, and as much as it pained me to read it, it also strengthens my commitment to helping reform our process. There isn't a citizen out there who could not have been a better president solely armed with integrity — “W” was possible because we have all lost our integrity and let the while collar upper class crime families rock on. IMHO.
4.0 out of 5 stars Beyond Six on Detail, Loses Credibility on Mistakes,February 20, 2012
I have never been one to seek out conspiracy books. Reading in 98 categories, it was not until the combination of 9/11 and the multiple legalized crime bubbles that exploded in 2008-2010 that I finally realized I had been oblivious to the obvious that books such as this have been addressing for years, with more mainstream books finally starting to come into play.
This book has mind-boggling detail, most of it credible. It loses considerable credibility in making truly outrageous claims such as Executive Order 12333 being the order that authorized the framing and then incarceration of Lyndon LaRouche, an individual who cannot be stereo-typed. Indeed, this is a man that is so complex, stepping back and forth over the line — the very thin line — that separates sheer genius from errant lunacy — that I strongly recommend a reading of his Wikipedia page before reading the book. LaRouche is a convicted criminal — I see that — but I respectfully submit that every partner in Goldman Sachs, Morgan, Citi-Bank and others is an unindicted unconvicted criminal solely because the US Government lacks the intelligence and integrity to go after them.
5.0 out of 5 stars Rings of Truth Against Rings of Lies, February 20, 2012
I cannot improve on Betsy's review, “Instruments of the State: Propaganda or Just the Facts, May 20, 2011” and recommend that review. Here I just make a comment and link to some other books. Normally I do not do fiction, but this book came to me and I have a very high interest in the truth at any cost, it lowers all other costs. Unfortunately, all forms of human organization, from governments to religions and certainly including corporations and non-profits, all seems to believe that any lie good for them is an “acceptable cost.”
It is not. Lies are like sand in the gears of an extraordinarily complex and delicate machine. Lies kill and lies cost. The last fifty years have seen a web of lies and a web of deliberative destruction of humanity and the planet such as has never before been orchestrated. Deep secrecy and deep technologies have allowed the 1% to impoverish the 99% while concentrating wealth and looting public treasuries in a manner scarcely imaginable.
By all means read the book, but especially so if you do not have the time or the money for all of the non-fiction that backs up this book's story line. I list my allowed ten books below. Many more can be accessed at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, where my 1700 plus reviews are sorted in the 98 categories within which I read, all leading back to Amazon.
My own books are free online as well as for sale here at Amazon. My next book, coming out in June, is the antidote to all of the lies, it is entitled THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, and Trust. It will NOT be free online, as it is being distributed by Random House and published by North Atlantic Books.
The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — that, in my view, should be the battle cry of the 99%.
Quiet Extraordinary — With an Index & Bibliography Would Be a SIX,March 21, 2012
