Capitalism (Good & Bad) – Page 24 – Public Intelligence Blog

2009/09/192009/09/19

Review: Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

5 Star, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Budget Process & Politics, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Education (Universities), Electoral Reform USA, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

Potential Straw to Break the Camel's Back

September 19, 2009

Chris Hedges

I disagree with those who dismiss this book, however erudite their claims. The author first impressed me with American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.

Reading this book on the heels of Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny and Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, on top of my own cry of the heart in the preface “Paradigms of Failure” in 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), I have to say in the strongest possible terms that this is a capstone book of great service to both those who know it all and those who know little at all.

My flyleaf notes:

Continue reading “Review: Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle”

2009/09/082009/09/08

Review: An Enemy of the State–The Life of Murray N. Rothbard

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Biography & Memoirs, Budget Process & Politics, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Democracy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Gfited Author Summarizes Gifted Libertarian Mind

Justin Raimondo

September 8, 2009

I was so impressed by the AUTHOR of this book and the manner in which he so ably presented in summary form the very complex economic, philosophical, and consequently political reflections of Murray Rothbard that I immediately looked for “About the Author” and did not find it. So let me start with the author rather than the subject.

Justin Raimondo an American author and the editorial director of the website Antiwar.com. He describes himself as a “conservative-paleo-libertarian.” In addition to his thrice-weekly column for antiwar.com, he is a regular contributor to The American Conservative and Chronicles magazine. Raimondo also writes two columns a month for Taki's Top Drawer. He has published three other books, the last one only available from Google Books:
Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (Background: Essential Texts for the Conservative Mind)
The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection
Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (AFPAC, 1996) via Google Free Online

As someone who appreciates complexity in all its forms, I found the author's intellectual endeavor in this book to be stunningly formidable. Of the over 24 books by Murray Rothbard, the author presented a coherent account of the high points, and particularly of these that merit further study:
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market – Scholars Edition
Economic Depressions
An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (2 Vol. Set)
The Case Against the Fed
Wall Street Banks and American Foreign Policy

From my nine-pages of notes, respecting the 1,000 word limitation on reviews:

Continue reading “Review: An Enemy of the State–The Life of Murray N. Rothbard”

2009/09/062009/09/06

Review: The New Rulers of the World

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Crime (Government), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform)

Integrity Takes This to a Full Five–Part of a Review Trilogy

September 6, 2009

John Pilger

John Pilger was brought to my attention recently. I have known a few really great investigative journalists such as Robert Young Pelton, David Kaplan, and John Fialka, but John Pilger was new to me, and I am *very* glad to have been pointed in his direction. I found in all three books a combination of integrity, insight, and optimism that is heartening and bodes well for the “average” person getting a grip on their out of control governments and corporations who are as criminal in their own way as transnational crime networks.

I bought this book along with:
2005 Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism That Changed the World
2007 Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire

Published in 2002, it gripped me from beginning to end. Although I studied Multinational Corporations (MNC) in the 1970's and more recently, and am a fan of such books as Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations; The Manufacture Of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System, and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, what was new for me in this book and in other readings I have undertaken this past decade is the collusion between governments and corporations, both profiteering at the expense of the individual taxpayer.

The author is compelling in labeling politicians as criminal tyrants, and here in the USA I am happy to see the beginning of the end of the two-party tyranny in such books as Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny.

Continue reading “Review: The New Rulers of the World”

2009/09/042009/09/05

Review: Conscious Globalism: What’s Wrong with the World and How to Fix It

4 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad)

Righteous, Not as Deep As Some, Great Overview

September 3, 2009

David Schwerin

This book is a logical follow-on to the author's earlier book, Conscious Capitalism: Principles for Prosperity, a book that is doing very very well in Chinese translations. Early on he points out that we need to achieve a global change in consciousness, and I am reminded of Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Conscious Evolution: Awakening Our Social Potential as well as Steve MacIntosh's Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution. Everything I am reading is converging, and it is not because of what I am choosing as much as it is about what there is to choose from–this is a tsunami.

The author observes that the Internet is both a people unifier, allowing for information sharing across all traditional barriers and boundaries, and it is also a source of competitive information, something I take to mean that smaller players are now competitive with larger players because of their increased access to information.

The author points out that “the rules” were made of, by, and for those with wealth, and that our challenge today is to find investment capital with a conscience. I think that is happening as Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution and Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World combine with Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things and The Philosophy of Sustainable Design thinking. Further on he talks about how respecting the environment encourages innovation and reduces waste, but I am struck by the absence of references to any of the greats in this entire line of reflection.

The author follows the spiritual principles adopted by Phi Beta Iota, the Honour Society for Public Intelligence, and focuses constantly on moving us all, one individual at a time, from “Me” to “Us.”

Continue reading “Review: Conscious Globalism: What's Wrong with the World and How to Fix It”

2009/07/102011/10/22

Review: Catastrophe

America (Founders, Current Situation), Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Democracy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public)

Dick Morris is part of the circus–Wall Street owns it and him,

July 14, 2009

Dick Morris

Neophytes argue about facts, journeymen argue about models, and masters discuss the assumptions underlying the models.

This book assumes the President has power, which most of us who are students of America, from Buckminster Fuller on, have recognized is not the case. We've gone from a village idiot to a major domo, and the only constants are three:

1) Wall Street and Goldman Sachs specifically continues to run and manipulate the US Treasury against the public interest.

2) Congress continues to abdicate its responsibility to its constituencies and the Constitution

3) The bulk of the American people remain uninformed sheep.

The ten books below are intended for those of you that want to move beyond Dick Morris as the classic comic book version of the truth, and into the deeper truth that should inspire Constitutionally-valid actions to restore the sovereignty of We the People of the United STATES of America. You cannot fix what you do not understand. Obama is a tool, not the problem. If Obama were willing to break free of Wall Street and embrace the 70% of America that did not vote for him, he could actually become the George Washington of this century if not this millenium.

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed by restoring the Constitution and the sovereignty of We the People. The Electoral Reform Act of 2009, blowing open the crooked two-party system to Independents, Greens, Reforms, and Libertarians, and all others, is the ONLY thing we need to understand and demand. Below I offer five books on each side of the future:

Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Obama: The Postmodern Coup – Making of a Manchurian Candidate
Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street

The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents (Hardcover))
The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen
Constitutional History of Secession

The latter book makes it crystal clear–and the same is true in Canada for Quebec and others–that secession is a legal, non-violent, absolute right of each of the United STATES of America. Wall Street is literally creating a “fire sale” in the USA while moving all of its assets into foreign currencies. Just how stupid do We the People have to be?

Dick Morris is a good man, but he is a clown in this circus, and if all do not focus right now on the misbehavior of the government at large, violating the Constitution every day, not acting in the public interest as We the People would define it, then the USA will break up as the Soviet Union did, within the decade.

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on Cover Above to Buy or Read Other Reviews,

I Respond to Comments Here or There

2009/07/042013/05/01

Review: Nobodies–Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Crime (Organized, Transnational), Culture, DVD - Light

Riveting, Gifted Reporting, Deeply Depressing, Call to Arms, May 18, 2008

John Bowe

This is a spectacular piece of work with many gifted turns of phrase. The author has done his homework, and melds economic facts and philosophical reflections in a worthy manner. The author opens with a challenge: how should a free people respond to slavery, i.e. should they knowingly buy products and services that are rooted in slavery?

I ordered this book on the strength of the author's appearance on CSPAN BookTV, and this is one of those instances where I think that listening to him talk about the book first is hugely beneficial to appreciating the book. The author, in person (on CSPAN), is funny, intelligent, informative, a really excellent presenter of facts in a coherent manner.

Supreme Court Justice Brandeis is cited in this book: “You can have great concentration of wealth in the hands of a few or you can have democracy. You can't have both.” While the author documents slavery, at least 27 million world-wide (not counting the prison-slave population) with 800 million not enslaved but utterly poor going hungry each day, 33 million of them in the USA, his book is a socio-economic ideo-cultural treatise on “whither globalization.” His bottom line is clear: if we allow slave labor and sweatshop conditions to undercut each of our homeland industries, we are toast.

The author does something quite special with this book. I am deeply impressed. Since the 1970's I have understood the conflict between multinational corporations and governments, the trade-offs between profits and social value, but it is only recently that my reading has brought forth the sharp battle that will define the 21st Century: the battle between Collective Intelligence (one for all, all for one) and Corruption at all levels of government and business.

The meme “true cost” is the ideological battle line. Also known as the triple bottom line (economic, social, and environmental), it is my view that the ability of my generation to promulgate True Cost information in the next ten years is going to determine what kind of future our children have. The author provides numbers, and I am gripped by the 40 cents paid to the slave laborer for a bucket of tomatos, versus the $12.00 plus paid to the farmer or “organizer/enforcer.” The author is eloquent in describing how slave wages have not risen in thirty years, while all else has….

This book is deep, richly textured, a tremendously informative and socially-valuable offering.

Here are a few highlights that stayed with me:

1) US Census statistics are so “delusional and deceptive” that Wall Street investors no longer use them–they commission their own studies.

2) The conditions of slavery and poverty and abuse are so deeply entrenched, and imposed on individual held in isolation from society and the rule of law–when the law is willing to be enforced–that they might as well be on another planet, a slave planet.

3) FBI Special Agents get very high marks for being able to master law enforcement in an illegal immigration environment, but the author speaks of “institutional malfeasance” in how often the FBI transfers people. I have long felt that we need to turn government inside out–we need to mass Latin American specialists across government, military, law enforcement, etc, and we need to start putting people into 10 year tours.

4) It is clear we need a “white hat” side of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), I envision something in which all information they might collect in investigating human rights and other labor violations is firewalled from illigal immigrant status.

5) 911 operators are virtually helpless in responding to foreign langugage calls. I have been saying for years that we need to have an international implementation using Telelanguage.com.

6) The author surprises me with his optimism, his expectation that we can achieve a profound change in attitude across our population, completely boycotting all products and services whose “true cost” include slave labor.

I want to end this laudatory review by pointing readers toward the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility, the Interra Project, the World Cafe, and the Earth Intelligence Network.

Below I list a few other books that support this one. The first book documented the commoditization of human labor as the beginning of commercialized evil. The rest are increasingly positive about all of us coming together to overcome power and information asymmetries. “Put enough eyes on it, no bug is invisible. That's us: intelligence officers to the poor and the disenfranchised, who in being lifted from slavery, will create infinite revolutionary wealth. We can do this.

The Manufacture Of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America
The Case Against Wal-Mart
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

2009/07/042009/12/04

Review: The Gridlock Economy–How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives

4 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation

Have Ordered Book to Do It Justice, Initial Reaction is Pooh, July 12, 2008

Michael Heller

EDIT of 11 August 2008: Not going back to the book. Glad I gave it four stars to begin with, brilliant on one idea in narrow context, but disappointing in relation to immoral capitalism, breaches of political trust, true costs, cradle to cradle, the power of we, and so many other bigger ideas, just not going to do this a third time.

EDIT of 19 July 2008: After a second pass, I see one idea that I did not recognize at first: that unlike MEGA-ownership (e.g. destruction of all family farms), it is MICRO-ownership that the author addresses. HOWEVER, this is largely a specious distinction for two reasons: first, all the patents tend to be owned by MEGA organizations (including one recently created to do just that–buy patents as a basis for litigation); and second, micro-ownership by micro-people is easily resolved with money. I continue to see a lack of strategic perspective on how to restore the Commonwealth of the Republic by firing Congress, having a second Constitutional Convention, creating an amendment that restricts personality protection to individuals born in the USA of at least one citizen-parent, and so on. In the middle of a Hackers on Planet Earth conference, so the detailed dissection will have to wait a week.

EDIT of 15 July 2008: I have spent an hour with this book. It is a strange mix of interesting detail, facile assumption, grotesque naivete (or disingeneousness), along with some robust ignorance, topped off with extraordinarily detailed property law discussions to the exclusion of all else. The INDEX does not list the words Corruption, Crime, Culture, Ethics, Politics, Public Interest, or White House. Congress has five (I am *not* making this up) references. There is no bibliography, something I find especially annoying. The author is oblivious to key references (for example, in his discussion of spectrum, he makes no mention of the single most important reference in recent time, David Weinberger on “Open Spectrum.”)

Case in point: the author goes on about how 25 more runways would solve all our air traffic congestion problems. He evidently has no clue, or does not wish to dilute his point, about the alternatives to “hub” airline travel, among which NASA and (now DayJet) include point to point aviation; and of course high-speed trains,as well as a restoration of home rule, eat local, and so on.

At first serious glance (one hour), this book fails to factor in white collar crime, organized crime, political crime, or public ignorance. To his credit the author states, in a rather low-key fashion, that the extension of copyright may not be in the best interests, but the reader must struggle to find harsh detailed references about how Disney and the music and film industries have orchestrated billion dollar corruption and mass deception campaigns to steal from the public.

Bottom line: when I finish reading this and dissecting it, I am sure it will be a weak four. My original pre-evaluation remains valid. Should it be weakened by a full reading of this book, I will be the first to say so.

SIDE NOTE: The rapid posting of several rather shallow reviews is not unusual, what *is* unusual is the equally rapid number of positive votes for reviews that generally lack specificity or any evidence of familiarity with broader literatures and larger contexts. Could the publisher be stacking the deck? Am interested in a co-reviewer willing to dialog as we dissect this book together. My email is bear/oss.net.

—original pre-assessment below—

This book is getting enough traction, but strikes me as very out of touch with a broad range of libertarian, collective intelligence, and citizen home rule, to the point that I expect my own review will be negative.

Let's start with corporate personality. The limited liability of corporate officials who have looted one fifth of the financial value, funded two dysfunctional parties, and the limited accountability of public officials who have sold public land and public spectrum to corporations below market value, while refusing to invest in local education and welfare, are all part of a massive decline of the Republic.

Of course too much private ownership is bad for the economy. Duh.

Here are a few books that I recommend alongside this one:
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Case Against Wal-Mart
War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier

Here are a couple of DVDs
The Corporation
Why We Fight

I read a lot, so my angst and my presumed annoyance with this book and its putative naivete about how we can free innovation may be more aggressive than many might think the author deserves. Who does he think sold off bandwith rather than supporting open spectrum, and how much were they bribed to betray the public interest?

I won't mention the books I have written, edited, or published, but I will say that I stand in shock and outrage as America (the portion that reads–NASCAR folks do not, see my review of Hunting with Jesus) is tillated by this “cool idea.” Cool? It was cool in the 1970's when Limits to Growth, Global Reach, Silent Spring, and all the other classics came out. The problem is that We the People allowed money to talk while abdicating our role as armed and informed, to keep government honest.

I'll go with Lawrence Lessig on eliminating corruption, Yochai Benkler on the wealth of networks, Mark Tovey on collective intelligence, Jim Rough on Society's Breakthrough, and on and on and on (true cost, natural capitalism, triple bottom line, buy-cott).

A full review by next week-end. For now, based on multiple reviews and what the publists have shared, this book merely annoys.

Home rule. Eat local. Take back our open spectrum (see comment for my “Open Everything” keytone to Gnomedex 2008. I am scheduled to appear at the last meeting of Hackers on Planet Earth 18-20 July, in New York City.

We do not lack for good ideas. We lack for outraged citizens (Lou Dobbs does not count unless he learns the ten high-level threats and twelve core policies that he must address), honest politicians, and accountable corporations. And all of those live or die on how inert we are in both our thinking and our buying habits. We are a dumb nation led by a crooked government with war criminals in charge of the Executive. Bah humbug.