4 Star – Page 29 – Public Intelligence Blog

Superb, Needed by the 90% of Leaders Who Don't Read, August 26, 2008

Yves Doz

Minus one star for publisher being lazy about using Amazon tools to help readers see the table of contents and otherwise “look inside the book,” and for lack of deeper reference to externalities that deeply impact on emerging business models, including natural capitalism, moral capitalism, and transcendent capitalism.

I found the content engrossing, while on every page I realized that with every word, the authors are describing precisely what 90% of the “successful” leaders refuse to do–and especially those in the secret intelligence community that I know so well.

The authors blend deep strategic experience with Nokia and at INSEAD among many other qualifications, and I recommend this book be read together with two others that I recently reviewed:

The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks
Execution Premium

Book's bottom line: leaders must create and nurture counterintuitive blending–sustained constant blending, of the following:
+ Strategic sensitivity
+ Collective commitment
+ Resource fluidity
+ Management depoliticization

They summarize the challenge early on: “interdependent opportunities in the world of convergence and fuzzy enterprise boundaries and of rapid emergent systemic change in environment.”

Before summarizing the really compelling points made by the authors, I want to skip ahead to their appendices and list the thirteen toxicities that define most successful businesses today, as well as government agencies and most especially secret government agencies that are, in the words of one Defense Intelligence Senior Leader (DISL) cited in Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon: “institutionalized lunacy.”

The thirteen toxicities (buy the book for these pages alone):
– Tunnel vision
– Tyranny of core business
– Strategic myopia
– Dominance mindset
– Snap judgment and intellectual laziness
– Imprisoned resources
– Business system rigidity
– Ties that bind
– Management mediocrity and competence gaps
– Management divergence
– Heady charm of fame and power (or in secret world, lack of accountability for failing to deliver anything truly valuable)
– Expert management (making operational decisions instead of strategic)
– Emotional apathy

In the book in you are looking at it in a bookstore, pages 124-126 are a priceless inventory of the drivers, consequences, and toxicities that undermine strategic sensibility, collective commitment, and resource flexibility. Any CEO or Board of Directors can use these three pages alone to fail just about any company, right now, across the board.

Now here are the gems I pulled from this worthy offering:

STRATEGIC SENSITIVITY
+ Casting a wide net (as I suggested to AGSI in 1994)
+ Multiple levels of analysis (see image–threat and opportunity change depending on the level of analysis)
+ Including understanding of one's creeping and binding “lock ins”

COLLECTIVE COMMITMENT
+ Keep the top level meetings focused on strategy
+ Create culture of holistic accountability instead of silos
+ Make time for full information sharing and interaction
+ Treat personal objectives and concerns as critical inputs
+ Have a FAIR process that allows for needed UNEQUAL resource allocation

RESOURCE FLUIDITY
+ Some resources are more fluid (money, brand) than others (key people, fixed inputs, special relationships with clients)
+ Challenge is cognitive and political rather than procedural or financial
+ Generative growth (on the edges) is key–one reason I hate tethered devices like the X-Box or the iPhone
+ Must MAXIMIZE knowledge SHARING with OUTSIDE parties
+ Experiment

MANAGEMENT DEPOLITICIZATION
+ “Most top teams are, for natural reasons, collections of independent individuals with strong opinions rather than inspiring and innovative teams.” Page 79 citing Teams At the Top. In my own experience and that of Ben Gilad, author of Business Blindspots (order from UK Infonortics), the INFORMATION reaching most managers is biased, late, incomplete, filtered, and poorly focused–thus making opinions even more dangerous.
+ Authors feel strongly that teams need to be organized for mutual interdependencies, with incentives to match.
+ “Cognitive diversity is a key precondition to high-quality internal dialogs.”
+ Use young rising leaders as a shadow management team focused on the future
+ Have an OPEN strategy process
+ Leaders must learn to ASK and ADAPT rather than to DECIDE and TELL.

Other key points that grabbed me and are memorable:
+ Strategy now is continuous
+ Strategy now is less about foresight (still important), more about insight across every domain
+ Agility is the key ingredient, means being able to think and act differently (so much for most leadership teams)
+ Emotions matter–people not products innovate, learn to use this

I put the book down (at the beach, in Rohoboth) with three ideas bringing this encounter to a close:

1) Mature *successful* businesses die of strategic paralysis and the thirteen toxins

2) Three core values the authors use to conclude are

+ Dedication to EVERY client

+ Innovation that matters to both the company and the world

+ Trust and personal responsibility in ALL relationships.

3) Strike three for the US Intelligence Community and the US Government.

Here are some other books I consider to be, as with this one and the ones cited above, worthy of top minds seriously interested in doing the right thing for country, company, and customers:
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace Battle for the Soul of Capitalism]]
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

I had something to do with the last two and hope I can be forgiven for including them–it is not possible to perform as a smart company in the context of a dumb nation, nor is it possible to co-create value without recognizing that the gold standard now consists of meeting individual needs without social or environmental costs being externalized.

Excellent book. Buy it–this review is a taste, not the meal.

2008/08/282009/12/04

Review: The Necessary Revolution–How individuals and organizations are working together to create a sustainable world.

4 Star, Change & Innovation, Environment (Solutions), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design

Value Priced, Superb Overview, Isolated from Other Literatures,August 28, 2008

Peter M. Senge et al

At the end of this review following the links to other recommended books, I specify why this book receives four stars instead of five. Shortly I will load several images that will augment my written review, a couple of them recreated from this book, a couple my own original work.

I found this book absorbing, and while I recognized many many areas where the authors could have identified and respected the work of others more explicitly, I also found this to be the single best book for a manager of any business, any non-profit, any educational institution, any citizen advocacy group, with respect to the changing paradigm of business from industrial era obsess on profit and waste wantonly, to the information era of integrated full life cycle with total transparency of all costs (social, environmental, and financial) and ZERO footprint on Earth and society. There is ample original work from the authors, and this book is priced just right as a vehicle for energizing groups of any kind.

Following from my extensive notes:

+ A handful of top global businesses “get it” and have been pioneering footprint free zero waste business model: BP, GE, Coca-Cola, Dupont, even Nike.

+ Non-governmental organizations (NGO) know more about local needs and the emerging marketplace (four billion of the five billion poor, I am very disconcerted to see the business world “writing off” the one billion extreme poor) than any market “intelligence” firm.

+ With credit to Jared Diamond, I read for the first time about the unreal financial reality “bubble,” and the “real real” world bubble that is catching up with it. See John Bogle's book below for a deeper explanation of how the financial mandarins have stolen one fifth of the value and misdirected the Main Street economy while doing so.

+ Although I have read Stewart Hart's work, this book helped me appreciate in detail his Sustainability Value Matrix.

+ Other “big ideas” by others that are integrated into this book include that of civil society stakeholders; ethical consumerism, stabilization wedges (Palala and Socolow),ladder of inference (an anthropological practice), peacekeeping circles, requisite organization, and law of limited competition (Daniel Quinn)

PROBLEM STATEMENT:

1. Industrial Waste (USA wastes 100 billion tons a year, 90% of inputs)

2. Consumer/Commercial Waste & Toxicity (of 8B/year, 5B not absorbable)

3. Non-Renewable Resources in Sharp Decline

4. Renewable Resources down 30-70% and in some cases close to extinction tipping point (fresh water, topsoil, fisheries, forests)

THREE GUIDING IDEAS:

1. No viable path neglects future generations

2. Institutions matter

3. Real change must be grounded in new ways of thinking (see Durant below, capstone lessons from their ten volume history of civilization was that the only real revolution is in the mind of man, and that morality has a strategic value of incalculable proportions).

THREE AREAS OF BUSINESS CONCERN:

1. Energy & Transportation

2. Food & Water

3. Material Waste & Toxicity

THREE PRE-REQUISITES FOR NEW THINKING:

1. Seeing Systems Within Systems (Full Cycle Closed Earth)

2. Collaborating Across Boundaries (No one has it all)

3. Creating & adjusting instead of problem solving in isolation

SIX BASIC IDEAS:

1. Natural system encloses social and economic systems

2. Industrial system must operate in that context

3. Regenerable resources have harvest limits

4. Non-renewable resources are finite.

5. Waste is a cancer on the Earth

6. Socio-cultural community is the vessel for change

THREE SKILLS FOR CREATING THE SUSTAINABLE FUTURE:

1. Convening diversity of viewpoints

2. Listening to all, avoiding advocacy

3. Nurturing relationships over time and above money

EXPLICIT INCENTIVES FOR GOING GREEN:

1. Save dollars internally

2. Make dollars externally

3. Provide customers with competitive value

4. Sustainability as point of differentiation

5. Shape the future of your industry, win market share

6. Become a preferred supplier for giants like Home Depot

7. Change image and brand for better (70%+ of market value)

The book is full of examples of successful change implementation, and includes a number of “toolbox” pages that could be made into a protable booklet or distributed broadly across corporate networks.

I was struck throughout the book with the value of this work in identifying specific personalities and specific companies who could be drawn into the broader holistic work of emerging meta-strategic networks such as Reuniting America, the Transpartisan Institute, and Earth Intelligence Network. Two women in particular jumped out as future global leaders on the order of Lee Kuan Yew and Nelson Mandela:

1. Vivienne Cox of BP

2. Lorraine Bolsinger of GE

I put the book down deeply impressed with its concluding sections, and thinking to myself: China, CHINA, CHINA! That is the center of gravity for getting right on a massive scale in the near term.

Other important books NOT mentioned by this book:
The Story of Civilization by Will Durant with The Lessons of History (Complete in 10 Vols. plus The Lessons of History which was written by Durant to accompany the 10-volume set)
Organizational Intelligence (Knowledge and Policy in Government and Industry)
The Knowledge Executive
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

I resolved to rate this book as a four for the following reasons, in relative order of annoyance:
1) Crummy index for what could have been a brilliant REFERENCE book, not just an orientation book for leaders that do not read a lot. This index is SO BAD it fails to list all the individuals mentioned, and completely blows off numerous key phrases (e.g. sustainability wedges) that would be in any properly created professional index.
2) No literature search and total isolation from the major literatures of Collective Intelligence, Wealth of Networks, Organizational Intelligence, Integral Consciousness, Closed Systems Engineering, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, and so on.
3) Understandable use of the iconic name of the lead author, but in all probability actually written by the other four authors.
4) Really marginal reference section and no bibliography (even more valuable would have been an annotated bibliography).
5) Absolutely clueless on the means of visualizing and using world-class visualization to create compelling multi-dimensional mental images (this is not to say I am any better, just that they missed a chance to be “the” reference work for the next seven years).

Bottom line on the deficiency: I read very broadly, and am increasingly distressed at the continuing isolation of authors from one another's work. It's time every work of this importance do a proper job of connecting to other works.

2008/08/252009/12/04

Review: Execution Premium

4 Star, Best Practices in Management

One Side of Wisdom, Needs to be Read with Prahalad Et Al, August 25, 2008

Robert S. Kaplan

I strongly recommend this book for any executive with ambitions to both rise and to help grow a sustainable and increasingly profitable (or effective) organization, i.e. this applies to non-profits and government and academia as much as to commercial enterprises.

The book MUST be read in partnership with The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks, both emphasize strategy and business processes, and they are each unique in how they approach the urgency of getting an executive grip on both strategy and business processes or the blood and guts of operations.

Where I am increasingly disappointed (only one star worth) with the business literature is with its relative isolation from all the other literatures. Business is one of eight “intelligence tribes” (learn more at Earth Intelligence Network and OSS.Net,): the others are government at all levels, Military and National Guard or Gendarme, Law Enforcement, Academia, Media including bloggers and new media, Non-Profits, and Civil Society including lasbor unions and religions.

Where the Innovation book adds to this book by Kaplan and Norton is in its focus of co-creating value with all indiviudals–cutomsters, suppliers, employees, regulators. Both, however, lack the sense that can be found in, for example:

The exemplar: The exemplary performer in the age of productivity
The Knowledge Executive
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (Helix Books)

I also find both completely lacking in their appreciation for the green to gold, cradle to cradle sustainable design ENVIRONMENT of business, as well as the toxic immoral environment that most businesses accept rather than challenge. See for instance:

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism

Finally, while strategy as well as information and intelligence (one in inputs, the other outputs) are buzz words in the business world, this book does well at demanding an Office of Strategy but does not reflect the best knowledge of strategic thinking such as represented by Colin Gray in Modern Strategy and other recent publications; and neither really appreciates external unstructured ANALOG or human information, although the innovation book tries with a second hand appreciation of humans.

A huge paradigm shift is coming, and the value of morality as a basis for trust (Nobel Prize awarded for the guy that gamed that trust lowers the cost of doing business) is upon us. We are now ready to create the Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth that Buckminster Fuller envisioned. See Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace for a sense of what 55 others are saying on this vital FOUNDATION for business enterprise.

2008/08/252009/12/04

Review: VOICE OF THE PEOPLE–The Transpartisan Imperative in American Life

4 Star, Communications, Democracy

Conversational Book, Valuable, August 25, 2008

A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

My substantive review, which is very favorable, follows the Table of Contents that I am entering here because the publisher failed to do so using the tools that Amazon provides.

Part I: The Crisis in Our Politics: Partisan Fatigue
Chapter 1: What Divide? Our Phantom Political Conflicts
* The Divided America Myth
* The Transpartisan Majority: A Different America
* Language: Partly a Problem of Words
Chapter 2: Some Casualties of Partisan Politics: Prisons, Schools, Hospitals, and National Security
* Prisons and the Penal System
* Public Schools: A `Rising Tide of Mediocrity'
* The Healthcare System
* National Security
* Bringing Citizens into Public Spaces
*
Part II: The Old Politics: Squeezing the Life Out of Society
Chapter 3: Transpartisan Capitalism I
* Private interest and Public good
* Ownership in Public Spaces
Chapter 4: National Security and “The Long War”
* Improved Law Enforcement and the Recruitment of Citizens
* Spending for Security
Chapter 5: Challenges of an Unconnected Society: Race, Sexual Preference, and Religion
* Rethinking the Relationships
* Race
* Gender and Sexual Preference
* Religion/Spirituality

Part III: The Transpartisan Imperative
Chapter 6: A Call to Action: The Transpartisan Opportunity
* Addressing the Nature of Life: Nasty, Brutish, and Short
* The Founding
* Forming a More Perfect Union
* The Structure: Congress Shall Make No Law
* The Transpartisan Context: We are all Republicans We are all Federalists
* Transpartisan Discourse

Part IV: Transpartisan Politics: Bring Life Back to Society and Society Back to Life
Chapter 7: Transpartisan Capitalism II
* Public Schools and the Challenge of Bureaucracy
* Notes on a Political Strategy
* The Energy/Environment Challenge
* What is Politically Feasible
* Who will Decide What to Do on Climate Change?
Chapter 8: Recruiting Citizens as Partners for National Security and Foreign Policy
* Focusing on Social Trust
* A Foreign Policy Model
* Spending for Security
Chapter 9: Re-engaging Society: Race, Gays, Religion, and Spirituality
* Race
* Gender and Sexual Preference
* Religion and Spirituality

Part V: Leadership for a New American Politics
Chapter 10: Transpartisan: Past, Present, and Future
* Transpartisan Integration: Engaging Left and Right
* Expand the Analysis
* Transforming Taxes: A Transpartisan Discussion
* Expanding the Business/Commercial Context
* Synergizing Religion
* Empowering the American Transpartisan Imperative
Chapter ii: An Awakened America
* The Changing Role of Leadership: Repairing the Structure of Partisan Politics
* The Paradox of Political Change
* Active Citizenship Organizing Transpartisan Political Campaigns

Conclusion: Leadership for a New Politics
* Starting a Conversation

MY REVIEW

Jim Turner, the liberal co-author, shares with Don Beck, author of
Spiral Dynamics : Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change (Developmental Management), the conceptualization of the word “transpartisanship,” a word that is a direct contradiction of the word “bi-partisan,” the latter being code for “keep the two-party spoils system immune from public challenge.” See Peter Peterson's Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It.

A. Lawrence Chickering, the conservative co-author, wrote Beyond Left and Right: Breaking the Political Stalemate, a concept that has gained great popularity, in part because of Paul Ray's superb work on “The New Political Compass” (not yet a book, free online).

Both authors credit Dee Hock with his pioneer role in One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization.

I rate this superb book at four stars and a “must read.” The authors and the publisher lose one star for failing to offer the book in a scalable manner, and for presenting a mish-mash of policy assertions with little reference to either the actual threats to our society or to the actual budget (e.g. 950 billion for the military and 30 billion for diplomacy, in 2007).

This is a hugely important book and a must read. It is not available free online, which is a pity because the book *should* be read by millions before Election Day 2008.

I went through my copy today (I traded Jim Turner a copy of Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace) and here are the critical points that grabbed me:

+ “Old (partisan) politics squeezes the public out of politics.

+ Transpartisan capitalism (not to be confused with Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution) creates a valuable new concept that melds private interests and public good.

+ National security is broken, in part because the US “system” is optimized for state to state relations, for “hard power” from the military, at a time when we need to distinguish between–and deal differently with–strong versus weak states, and weak states versus their societies (often fragmented ethnically, tribally, and by religion).

+ Restoring local ownership is a key principal in energizing change. I personally support “home rule” and the reasonable demand that corporations forego their illicit use of “personality” to avoid liability.

+ The authors present the need for an informal network for deciding upon and then delivering foreign assistance that is separated from US “policy” and not necessarily funded by the taxpayer.

+ The authors quietly present the alternative to individual income taxes, crediting economic professor Edgar Feige with the idea of an automatic banking transaction tax.

+ The authors call for changing the debate from left-right to a four quarters matrix (see Paul Ray's work for a more sophisticated depiction) and for creating new means (not further defined) for engaging all of us in participatory democracy. [The most obvious need is for all budgets to be online and open to the public prior to being voted on by Congress or other bodies, and for the elimination of all secret earmarks.]

The book ends with a disappointingly out of date list of founding members of Reuniting America, 110 million strong, and a handful of organizations including 25 representing the “radical center.”

See also my own political book, free online as well as for sale as a high end full color version, Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography). There is no connection between the two books or the authors of that book and my own personal “shout out” against the corruption that is so evidently on display in Washington regardless of which party controls the Congress or the White House. “Bi-partisan” is code for betraying We the People and giving trillions of our hard-earned credit to Wall Street speculators that bribed Congress to look the other way as they destroyed the American economy.

2008/08/152011/10/22

Review: Obama–The Postmodern Coup – Making of a Manchurian Candidate

4 Star, Corruption, Democracy, Politics

Polemical, Provocative, Frightening, & Credible, April 15, 2008

Webster Griffin Tarpley

Edit of 18 Oct 2008: New book by this same author with much more detail including extensive notes, Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography. Tell others. We have a problem and it is not Obama, it's the people around and behind him.

Edit of 9 May 2008: “House Negro.” That's what a Reverend of color called Senator Obama, and I agree. The Democratic “system” is trying desperately to field a “front” that can win, and Obama has rolled over for them. Just as Colin Powell betrayed all moderate Republicans by confusing loyalty with integrity (instead of quitting and calling for Dick Cheney's impeachment and then running for President in 2008), Obama is, as this book suggests, a Manchurian candidate–a House Negro.

Edit of 7 May 2008: I lost all respect for Obama when he finally disowned Reverend Wright. His original instincts were correct, his late renunciation is further proof that he is bought and paid for by the system. Reverend Wright, despite his inflamatory language, was right on target in seeking to arouse passion about misdeeds done in our name. This can still be a great Republic, but it needs integrity, transparency, and dignity for all. I respect Reverent Wright more than I respect Senator Obama at this point.

Edit of 5 May 2008: Please ignore the individuals whose hysterical reviews demonstrate they are reacting to mine, they have not actually bought nor read the book. I deal with reality, nothing else. This book is a wake-up call, just as the 935 lies and the 25 impeachable offenses of Dick Cheney are a wake-up call. I have confidence in our Collective Intelligence. I have no confidence in the think tanks, the candidates, or the political system of a two party organized crime spoils system.

Edit of 1 May 2008: In the author's own words:

This is not an academic study. It is a vigorous political polemic. It is meant to sound an alarm against a looming catastrophe. All of that is sincere, and none of it is hidden. Now that the phase of adulation and cultism is dissipating, I urge you to take a fresh look.

In the context of all that I know and have read, this book shocked me into realizing that the author may well be correct, and that Senator Obama and his wife, as intelligent and well-intentioned as they may be, are nothing more than puppets to a Trilateral Commission/Federal Reserve mafia.

I say this as someone who believed in the potential of this candidate, but who subsequently found that his campaign staff, his senior political advisor, and even Oprah Winfrey, are so enthralled with the prospects of an easy engineered win (money talks), that they are refusing to engage with or listen to Libertarians, Greens, Reforms, Naderites, or Independents. They refuse to mention the word “transpartisan” that outs the lie of bipartisanship (“keep the two-party spoils system alive, continue to exclude Independents and others from all debates”), they refuse to address the need for Electoral Reform and the naming of a transpartisan cabinet in advance of the election, and they refuse to create much less publish any semblance of a balanced budget, without which all of their promises are empty (as well as often mis-guided). So for all of these reasons, as polemical as the author's book it, I find it credible and compelling. This book also explains why Mike Bloomberg has gone silent–others with more money than he appear to have persuaded him he could, like Bear Sterns, be punished by being bankrupted.

MOST INTRIGUING is the manner in which the author dissects and evaluates Senator Obama in the context of who his advisors are.

I now realize that the refusal of all three candidates to outline any kind of strategy for eradicating the ten high-level threats to mankind by harmonizing the twelve policies is deliberate–they don't HAVE a strategy, they have an agenda, and it does not include our well-being.

Let me set the stage with two quotes from pages 178 and 179:

“Obama is best understood as a multi-contractor puppet with hardware from the Ford Foundation and software from the Rockefeller-Trilateral-Brzezinski circles.”

“The Obama campaign has thus far been shown to represent: the Ford Foundation, the Trilateral Commission, the New York Council on Foreign Relations, the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberger Group, Skull and Bones, the RAND Corporation, the Soros Foundation, the Rockefeller family, and the Friedmanite Chicago School of economic genocide. Obama is the Manchurian candidate groomed and indoctrinated by those financier-controlled groups. As president, Obama would impose a regime of crushing economic austerity and a new set of foreign wars far worse than what has been seen under Bush.”

I am going to highlight a few points here, and reserve the option of modifying this review after I talk to the author tonight. I want to get this down while it is fresh in my mind.

The real kicker, the “truth-teller” that persuades me this author is on to a very important potential nightmare scenario for the USA, is the role of Zbigniew Brzezinski as the top foreign policy advisor and indeed the “maker” of both Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

I have always respected Brzezinski's talents, but as I have grown older and wiser I have come to see him as nothing more than a war criminal, no better or worse than Henry Kissinger, both of them convinced that a) they know better, b) their grand strategic design demands the subversion of all who stand in their way, and c) never mind a little genocide here and there (and especially in Africa), eugenics is code for depopulating the areas we have not finished looting.

What I see in the two political parties, both Running On Empty, is a propensity to promote sycophants and then let them do great evil “in our name” and without retribution.

The book on Kissinger has been written: The Trial of Henry Kissinger. The book on Brzezinski remains to be written. For a taste, see Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025.

I share the author's view of Brzezinski as a loose cannon with a rabid anti-Russian sentiment, and I for one will not vote for any candidate that allows Brzezinski to play with our loose nukes, or to antagonize Russia with missile defense in Poland.

The author is quite persuasive when he discusses the manner in which Brzezinski obtained both political asylum and a lucrative complete funding package for the Chechnyan terrorist leader now granted asylum and living in splendor here in the DC area (at taxpayer expense).

He makes it a point to observe that Brzezinski is an opponent of Third World development, wanting no more miracles such as have been achieved in Asia.

I believe the author when he describes Senator Obama as Brzezinski's last chance, at 80, to create destabilization along the Russian western border, and to goad China into invading Siberia to the point there is a Russian-Chinese war. Thus does Brzezinski go up in flames, taking the rest of us with him.

Other Obama advisors (less Joe Nye, who can be reasonable) are also frightening, buy and read the book for details.

The author has several major pet rocks that get tossed around, and I summarize them here:

1) The Clintons are the lesser evil because they have no single owner and Senator Clinton, for all her flaws and tribulations, appears to be genuinely in favor of New Deal arrangements for the working class and the vanishing middle class..

2) The young trouble this author. He considers them ignorant, gullible, and too subject to manipulation,

3) Fascism lurks, and one price Senator Obama may have to pay is that of his life–being assassinated early on (shortly after inauguration ostensibly by a foreign agent)so the Vice President can take over and fulfill the fascist/corporate control dream. I shake my head as I write this–if I had not lived the life I have, been part of the CIA, read all the books I have, all of this would be disreputable ranting. The book is an indictment, not a conviction, and merits attention.

In other provocative notes the author considers Mark Penn to have been a mole into the Clinton campaign all along, and to have provided a strategy intended to fail, bolstered by fake polling that misled Senator Clinton.

The author laments the splintering of the 9/11 Truth Movement between Kucinich and Ron Paul, and suggests that Kucinich was in grave error when he threw his delegates to Senator Obama.

The author explores how John Edwards dominates the two major issues of the day, poverty and labor rights, and these were essentially stolen from him with “big money” we do not see behind the “little money.”

The author draws to a close warning the reader that like Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama was selected and promoted by the Trilateral Commission, and that like Jimmy Carter, he will preside over a melt-down of the US. Indeed, he draws a line from “malaise” to Mrs. Obama's discussion of “broken souls.”

The author believes that Senator Obama is being set up for a fall with the national infrastructure fund, which will be speculative and lead to a major economic setback (for the little people, the funds will do fine).

The author believes that the mental health of the candidates for President is something that must be examined in public very carefully. He has grave doubts about both Senator Obama and Senator McCain, and while I have grave doubts about Senator Clinton's ability to listen to anyone other than her cronies, I do NOT have a single doubt at all about her sanity and seriousness of purpose.

His draft emergency economic recovery plan covers a stop of foreclosures, raising minimum wage, Tobin Tax implementation, single-payer health care, tax relief for families, nationalization of the Federal reserve and re-regulation of banking and finance, funding infrastructure to eliminate daily auto commutes, protection of the family farm, attention to global depression, and restoration of FDR's “freedom from want.”

So there you have it. I am impressed.

See also Someone Would Have Talked: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy to Mislead History and also An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, New and Updated Edition and of course all the books on the lies told to We the People regarding Viet-Nam and more recently, 9-11, Katrina, and Iraq.

There are others. Bottom line: Government lies (both left and right) and We the People need to flush all these knaves down the toilet and start over.

For competing visions that do not tolerate Manchurian machinations, see, among many others:

The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

2008/08/112009/10/30

Review: War and Decision–Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism

4 Star, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), War & Face of Battle

Articulate Vindictive Oblivious but Ultimately Necessary Reading, April 11, 2008

Douglas J. Feith

This book is essential reading for historians and those concerned with national security reform. It is not recommended for normal people, including those that have strong political views one way or the other. You will get much better value simply by reading reviews of a 100 related books starting with the ten below, and buying the book Fixing Failed States and checking out the reviews of the books I recommend there.

I read the Index after the Table of Contents and before I actually read the book. It became immediately evident to me that:

1) The index stinks in not including place names like Jalabad, Tora Bora, Kandahar, etcetera.

2) The author has written a personal account that opens with a concise (even impressive) summary of the high points of “alleged” criticisms and conspiracy claims, but with the exception of Bob Woodward, I could not find a single other reputable author in the index (see my list of ten books below, a token of the 100+ books that generally refute most of what this author has to say at the external level). I have no doubt this author is honest and credible on the details he knows, but as with the Viet-Nam rejoinder, “so what”, I really question whether the author–good man that he is–is at all in touch with reality. Baer, Bamford, Clarke, Ritter, etc. do NOT appear in this book's index or footnotes that I could find.

Getting into the book, I am immediately impressed by the existence of a supporting website (waranddecision.com just add the www) and I am generally very impressed with the level of detail, the sequencing of information, the able reference to those he talked with by name. There is no question in my mind about the authenticity of this book. The author speaks from his mind and his heart, he is not dumb, just self-centered.

As the book progresses, I am astonished by several factors:

1) Dick Cheney appears only 28 times in this book, and not before page 53. The Cheney-Rumsfeld relationship is one that was evidently not shared by the author. He consequently is oblivious to the reality that Dick Cheney orchestrated 935 distinct documented lies in the rush to war; and committed 25 distinct impeachable offenses, not least of which was leveraging the nine advance warnings of the plans to attack the World Trade Center to allow a Pearl Harbor.

2) I had to go forward to read Chapter 6 (“Why Iraq”) because of the prominence of the author's claim of the many “proven” instances in which Iraq trained, supported, or financed terrorism, but I quickly note that the author makes no reference at all the many proven open sources, including the former President of Czechoslovakia, who totally trashed this assertion.

3) The author is actively deceptive on more than one occasion. He cites the New York Times as “evidence” while casually neglecting to mention that he is citing the notorious Judith Miller, a fellow traveler at least, if not an active agent of influence for Israel.

4) The author is critical of the CIA throughout the book, including Milt Bearden whom I happen to respect greatly, and while I myself think CIA needs to be burned to the ground, I do not respect the manner in which the author manages to completely disrespect by omission of three major facts:

+ CIA got it right on WMD. Between the son in law that defected and the 30+ legal travelers that Charlie Allen orchestrated, CIA established without a shadow of a doubt that they kept the cookbooks, poured the stocks into the river (something that will have downstream impacts for decades), and were bluffing for regional sake. Since Rumsfeld and Cheney delivered the original WMD supplies and the joke is they kept the receipts, what I see here is an elegant concealment of the reality that the Pentagon was not about to listen to the CIA no matter what. The fact is that the professional CIA got it right, George Tenet sacrificed his integrity, and the White House was able to ignore secret intelligence because both the CIA professionals and the Pentagon's flag officers drank the koolaid and confused loyalty with integrity to their Constitutional oaths of office. ALL of our checks and balances failed us.

+ The author infuriates me with the manner in which he blatantly misleads the reader about how he and Rumsfeld triumphed in pushing for both early precision targetting inside Afghanistan, and the push to Kabul prior to the winter. He is maliciously evil in failing to credit the CIA teams that are described in “First In” and “Jawbreaker” and he can be excused for not being told that Putin told Bush he could take Kabul before the winter. Obviously the author does not read widely, and one can understand how immersed he might be in the reality of his own creation.

+ He misleads the reader in parroting Ahmed Chalabi's accusations against the CIA, while failing to point out that CIA fired Chalabi for stealing and lying; that Chalabi was convicted in Jordan for embezzlement; and that Chalabi is almost certainly a very well paid agent of influence for Iran, one reason most in Iraq's leadership circles want nothing to do with him.

In passing, there is no mention in this book of our love fest with 42 of 44 dictators; there is active (virulent) hatred for Colin Powell and Rich Armitage (I would follow either over any hill), nor is there any mention, as the book draws to a close, that ignorant treasonous rendition and torture aside, the score for nailing terrorists right now is CIA 40+, DoD zero (I may not know of one or two).

I bought and labored through this book because James Schlesinger recommended it and because it may be the only book among the 100 or so I have read circling the sordid regime from 2000-2008, that comes from one of the avowed “insiders.” I give the author high marks for his homework, his documentation, and his writing.

Doug Feith is what you get when you agree to elect one man who picks a few cronies that pick other cronies who in turn orchestrate their kind of crony in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. In Singapore, I am told, one must have a Master of Business Administration before being qualified to run for Parliament. We don't need to go that far. I believe that in the General Election, we must demand that Presidential candidates appoint a Cabinet in advance of election, at least three of whom must participate in the debate process (State, Defense, Attorney General), *and* they must produce a balanced budget proposal for public scrutiny at least 90 days before Election Day. It's time to put Citizen Wisdom back into the Republic.

2008/08/042009/12/04

Review: An Atlas of Poverty in America–One Nation, Pulling Apart, 1960-2003

4 Star, Atlases & State of the World, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

Superb, Could Have Been Better, August 4, 2008

Amy Glasmeier

This volume is as good as it gets for depicting poverty in America, but it could have been significantly better.

1) The colors chosen to depict degrees of severity of poverty are in the blue-purple range and do not “compute.” I do not know if this was a foolish decision by the publisher to save on more expensive yellow, orange, red, but the bottom line is that the colors stink and do not communicate as well as they should.

2) There is a lack of attention to the connection between health and poverty, education and poverty, labor category and poverty. I would also have liked to see a specific focus on poverty in each of the Nine Nations of North America (see Joel Garreau's still relevant The Nine Nations of North America.

Poverty has been declared the Number ONE High-Level Threat to Humanity by a distinguished group including as the US representative LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft, USAF (Ret), available both free online in PDF form, and at Amazon in very nice hard-copy, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change That makes this book–and an exztention of this book to the rest of the world–absolutely essential. Also needed is a web site that shows interactive time-space series, and some means of seeing “impacts” of differing policies and spending (it's not policy until it is in the budget and the budget obligated). There are twelve core policies that impact on poverty:

Agriculture
Diplomacy
Economy
Education
Energy
Family
Health
Immigration
Justice
Security
Society
Water

Learn more at Earth Intelligence Network (public intelligence in the public interest). I am increasingly of the view that we need to gather up all the brilliant authors and contributors of the varied atlases (I have reviewed only a fraction of those in my collection) and ask them to create slices for the EarthGame(TM) that has been designed by Medard Gabel, who created the World Game (analog) with Buckminster Fuller.

Here is the table of contents that is not otherwise available to the Amazon viewer:

List of Tables, Maps, and Photographs
History of the Atlas Project
How to Read This Atlas
Basics of Poverty
Introduction: The Paradox of Poverty in America
Lived Experiences
= Children: Poverty in America Starts with Children
= Women: Often Poor, Vulnerable, and Lacking Access to Basic Needs
= Black Families at Risk
= Black Male Incarceration: Impacts on the Family
= Hard Work and Low Pay Define the Lives of Hispanic Americans
= Elderly: Social Programs Keep Many Out of Poverty
= Working but Poor
= The Lived Experience of the Wealthy in America

History of Poverty
= Poverty in the 1960's
= Poverty in 1970
= Poverty in 1980
= Poverty in 1990
= Poverty in 2000

Distressed Regions
= Appalachia: A Land Apart in a Wealthy Nation
= The Mississippi Delta: Plantation Legacy of Slow Growth, Racism, and Severe Inequality
= First Nation Poverty: Lost Lands, Lost Prosperity
= The Border Region: Where the Global and the Local Meet
= Rural Poverty in America
= Segregation: A Nation Spatially Divided

History of Poverty Policy (Text)
= American Poverty Policy from the 1930's to 2004
= Sources
= Graphical Sources
= Index

All told, a fine effort gone awry with a poor choice of colors. Still, the best available and strongly recommended for that reason.

DVD connecting desired poverty with desired enlistment in military:
Why We Fight

Category: 4 Star

Review: Fast Strategy–How strategic agility will help you stay ahead of the game