5.0 out of 5 stars Was Going to Ignore, Then Could Not Put It Down
December 17, 2007
This book arrived in the mail with no letter. I normally do not read or review unsolicited books, but as I was deep into The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism instead of ignoring it I picked it up and it grabbed me.
This is a fine book, a tale well told with deep detail where there needs to be detail. My only thought as I put it down was, Wow! followed by another thought: what would it take to make Wall Street traders a force for good as John Bogle calls for in his own book?
If you want to be a trader in today's market where you buy on dips and sell on spikes, this book is as good as any.
Amazon ate my earlier review, probably because they did not like all the links I included to make the point that while Patrick Buchanan is dead on target as an individual minds, there is a *huge* convergence of public opinion from left to right that boils down to this: government is broken, from war criminals in the White House to doormats in Congress abdicating their Article 1 responsibility to balance the power of the Executive.
I regret the loss of my detailed review, here are just a few of the notes from the flyleaf:
+ Insufficient focus on Cheney, but does correctly evaluate Wolfowitz as a madman.
+ Tars Bush's ideology as a “false God”as “modernity's Golden Calf.”
+ Respect Gore Vidal in citing “perpectual war for perpetual peace.”
+ Opens book with excellent discussion of the cost of lost wars and the mismantling of artificial nations (there are 177 failed states today,up from 148 in 2006 and 75 is 2005.
+ This may be the most credible and thoughtful author on the subject of treason in modern times. He explicitly accuses corporate chiefs who favor globalization and “transnationalism” with being traitors to the Republic.
+ He states that Islamic militarism is not a threat to America. I agree.
+ Pages 153-154 provide a brilliant articulation of seven reasons why China is not a threat to the US.
+ I note: “This is the epitaph for the village idiot.”
This book is a work of genius and integrity, with the potential to catalyze Wall Street into fulfilling the promise of moral capitalism and community ownership.
Here are some highlights from my flyleaf notes:
+ America is no longer an ownership society–financial intermediaries “own” everyting and the individual owners are passive
+ We can find the wisdom and will to restore moral capitalism
+ Earnings have been manipulated and misrepresented.
+ Executive compensation plus lax accounting and the fiction of quarterly earnings versus actual cash flow have hollowed industry out.
+ Profound conflict of interest exist across all fronts
+ Fund managers have siphoned off one fifth of the gross value of the funds.
+ Our business world chose the wrong bottom line, and ignored the importance of sustaining human, social, and community capital
+ Stock options aqre out of control.
Seven specific Conference Board suggestions:
1) Corporate citizenship
2) Separate ownership from management
3) Fix the stock option mess
4) Pay on performance not peers
5) Return to long-term focus
6) Let sunlight shine on accounting
7) New mindset for Board (aggresive stewardship)
Page 103: “Investment America went wrong, then, because in the contagious enthusiasm of the day, financial engineering and manufactured earnings became the coin of the valuation realm, accepted by corporate managers and investment managers alike. What is more, the emphasis on short-term price came to overwhelm the reality of long-term value, as investors failed to honor the distinction between investment and speculation drawn by John Maynard Keynes six decades earlier.”
I am personally committed to the non-violent legal ethical overthrow of the existing pathologically inept federal government and its politcal leaders in both Congress and the Executive who lack morality, intelligence, integrity, or conscience. Dick Cheney, not George Bush (a village idiot) is their poster child. I find it truly gratifying that a man of such financial stature as John Bogle now articulates and inspires the remorse that Wall Street must feel for running the Earth into the ground.
Below are other books I recommend as a reading list toward November, five about the bad, five about the promise:
I continue to believe this is one of the best in class original references. Winn, Peter Black (RIP) and I were among the first to warn of electronic Pearl Harbors, with Winn being the most knowledeable and the only one invited to brief Congress, where it went in one ear and out the others.
Winn Schwartau was one of the first, along with Peter Black (RIP), to warn Congress and the business world that digital systems would be extremely vulnerable. No one listened.
This book is still in my library. It is the non-fiction “first book” in this area.
For the fictional version that will stun with its surprise ending: Terminal Compromise
5.0 out of 5 starsValued Early Bird over Spies and Secrecy, November 30, 2007
I read biographies of key officials as a means of trying to understand how they make decisions, and on what basis of fact or fancy they make decisions.
Colin Powell is a great man, and I hope he returns as Secretary of State under a transpartisan team. He was destroyed by Dick Cheney and his own confusion of loyalty versus integrity.
Here is the sentence, on page 293, that made my day:
when he was Military Assistant to then Sectary of Defense Casper Weinberger, he preferred the Early Bird with its compendium of newspaper stories to the “cream of overnight intelligence” which was delivered to the Secretary of Defense by a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) courier each morning.
This book is more of a scholarly work and has eye-glazing detail. However, as best I can tell, this is the single best and most carefully documented book, with the stellar advantage of having as a co-author the Honorable Bill Hendon, who is not only a former Representative (R-NC) but was on the POW/MIA beat while there.
I am very very very angry. Our politicians, both Republican and Democratic, have betrayed us all, and this brings me to tears, betrayed the honorable warriors who became POWs or were MIA in Viet-Nam.
There are several points that grab me:
Over 1,500 POWs still known to be in Viet-Nam and probably alive.
Viet-Nam had a clear strategy for capturing AND KEEPING ALIVE our personel in order to charge the US for reparations after the war was inevitably won by the Vietnamese
The authors explicitly suggest that Senator John McCain has been fully witting of the reality of how many have been left behind, and complicit in our federal government's deliberate decision to abandon them rather than pay Viet-Nam the compensation they appear to fully merit given our violation of the Geneva Convention and our intrusion into the civil war between North and South.
I hold the authors of this book, and the excrutiating detail that they have assembled, in the greatest regard.
It is now clear to me that the Federal Government as it is now constituted, cannot be trusted. We need Electoral Reform, open books, and an end to secrecy.
To the right is the current mass paperback cover that is available.Ā Below is the cover of the original hard-copy, and a guest review (Amazon is deleting top reviewer's old reviews to make room for new reviewers, we missed this one when creating this web site to counter that “lost history”).
Amazon Page
5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning Expose Of Government DesertionOf Its Vietnam Vets!
May 20, 2002
William Stevenson, Monika Jenson-Stevenson
Review by Barron Laycock “Labradorman”
This is a book that should make ordinary American citizens exceedingly sad and angry. Although some may argue that its message is old news, and certainly very dated information, the horror and outrage it should occasion is neither old nor dated. For what the authors contend, and go on to impressively prove, is that our national government deliberately and maliciously betrayed its own soldiers trapped as Prisoners Of War (POWs) in Vietnam, abandoning them in favor of a quick and otherwise painless exit from the war in Southeast Asia. This, as the authors argue, is a truly devastating indictment of the Nixon administration, and one for which they cannot be forgiven.
However, it is more than that. It is also a bizarre story of men left behind for the sake of political expedience and due to a number of highly classified clandestine operations, which were purposely kept from the American people. The story line begins with the sad saga of a young ex-marine who escaped from Vietnam on the late 1970s and claimed to have seen a large number of fellow American servicemen still being held by the Vietnamese. However, he was quickly charged with desertion and collaboration with the enemy, in what seemed to be a desperate effort on the part of governmental officials to bury both him and his story of American prisoners as deeply as possible from public view. From here the plot takes a number of bizzare twists and turns.
As the authors began to investigate the young marine's story, layers of deception, half-truths, and active censorship began to emerge. What they finally uncovered was an amazing tale of official deception from the highest levels in government, and also a very well organized and relentless abuse of official governmental power. This book reveals convincing evidence of American soldiers and sailors deliberately abandoned for political expedience, and of families torn apart by these acts. It also raises quite provocative questions concerning the very nature of democracy, and the corruptibility of ordinary men given such power. Similarly, they show how the use of claims of national security were used to derail efforts to learn the truth, and of an active conspiracy to keep the public from discovering the truth.
There are many of us who have long believed that Nixon and Kissinger made a pact with the devil himself in order to to extricate the United States fro the ongoing horror of Vietnam. What is truly mind-boggling is to discover just how right we were to suspect that they, and many others in the government since that time, would take such drastic action as they have to conceal these facts and to evade the truth. This is a worthwhile book, and one that demands to be read. I hope you can approach it with an open mind. Its arguments and the evidence associated with it are, in my opinion, very convincing. Enjoy!
Nobel Prize Material–Final Review
