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The One Book That Can Save Capitalism & The Planet,

December 12, 2006

Paul Hawken

Edit of 19 Jan 08 to add links.

This book is pro-business, pro-market, and pro-life. It outlines how profits can be made by going green and getting in touch with the actual cost of goods and services. It demonstrates how efficiencies can produce a 71% per year after tax Return on Investment (ROI).

On page 261, the following quote summarizes the intellectual victory that this book represents over economic fundamentalism: “That theology treats living things as dead, nature as a nuisance, several billion years' design experience as casually discard able, and the future as worthless.”

The three authors are “originals” whose genius dates back to the 1980's, and I am finding that the books written in the 1970's and 1980's were a quarter-century before their time of acceptance, and now pressing urgent and relevant.

They advocate a shift from a production economy that disregards the actual costs of goods, toward a service economy in which durability, ease of repair, and the elimination of waste transforms commerce so that we have sustainable profit, not short-term destructive profit.

The basic premise of the book is that in the next 100 years the population will double while available natural resources will drop by one half to three quarters.

The authors are damningly trenchant when they point out that we have taken just 300 years to consume 3.8 billion years of natural capital by turning scarce resources into permanent waste.

I am at one with these authors when they suggest that labor is now abundant–I for one believe that national leaders must demand full employment and cease substituting technology, which requires natural capital, for human capital. We need to reverse the process and restore full employment, community-based resource allocation.

In the course of two days with this book, I pulled 21 key ideas that I list here in tribute to these authors and their work:

1) Cars can generate electricity during the 90% of the time they are parked, and this will allow the replacement of ALL coal and nuclear plants

2) We waste 1 million pounds per person per year in the USA

3) Authors are saving business, not fighting business

4) Two trillion out of nine trillion in the total economy per year is waste of no value, including time spent in automobile gridlock

5) Real-time feedback is the number one resource saver

6) Biological processes create Kevlar strength silk (spiders) and walls (oysters)–we should emulate them instead of continuing our toxic ways.

7) Green buildings increase human productivity while reducing waste

8) Continuous education of designers and engineers is the single best investment for continually updating our ability to eliminate waste

9) Point to point air travel in smaller more numerous aircraft is a much more efficient alterative to the hub systems

10) We must end our perverse subsidies of wasteful agricultural, energy, forestry, fishery and other harmful practices by publicizing the foolish budget allocations

11) We should tax pollution and waste rather than income

12) Agricultural residues can be used to make paper, which can be recycled and substituted (e.g. electronic). We must end junk mail and unneeded packaging that outlasts its contents.

13) Restore localized agriculture, deep sustainable farming that does not deplete topsoil, get smart on water and fuel consumption.

14) Get a national water policy and water education, recover all rain (which can meet all of Africa's needs), use gray water; get a grip on toilets to include separate capture of urine and feces.

15) Protect the climate

16) Conserving energy is cheaper, faster, better than trying to produce more

17) Canceling or updating antiquated laws long overdue (for example, giving away billions of gold based on 1800 laws, for pennies)

18) Adjust prices to reflect external costs

19) Implement no fault insurance purchased at the pump

20) Create information feedback loops at all levels

21) Need systemic approach (what I call the ten threats, twelve policies, eight challengers) to avoid unintended spill-over consequences

22) The market cannot do it all. We need government.

Above all intelligence and information can make this happen. Simply labeling switches allows localized awareness and individual actions to save energy. The lack of accurate and up to date information is the largest correctible deficiency

I put this book down hoping that I might one day be able to take the secret intelligence budget of $60 billion a year, cut it by two thirds, and apply one third of that budget to implementing this book's ideas, and one third to creating a new form of global education that is continuous, free, online, in every language, and equally balanced between structured human teaching, interactive social networking, and self-paced online learning through serious games.

There is plenty of money and plenty of brainpower to save our planet and our quality of life while elevating the five billion poor, what we lack is inspired political transpartisan leadership, and a model, perhaps a model to be created in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon.

I want to be part of this “big push” and am in awe of these authors and the big ideas they represent.

My top ten green to gold books:
The Limits to Growth
Seven Tomorrows
Silent Spring
Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
The Future of Life
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition
Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

I would also point with enormous respect to books on green chemistry, beneficial bacteria, sustainable design, and what I think of as the “home rule” literature: an end to corporate personality, localized agriculture, localized credit (e.g. Interra Project), and an end to absentee landlords and mega farms that produce indigestible corn for cattle whose waste gets into our spinach, and for fuel (one tank of ethanol consumes enough corn to feed an individual for an entire year).

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2006/11/162009/12/04

Review: War on the Middle Class–How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Crime (Corporate), Democracy, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Justice (Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

Single Best Handbook for We the People Seeking to Take Back the Power,

November 16, 2006

Lou Dobbs

I read a lot, and my highest praise for this book is that it is easily a single coherent substitute for at least 50 others books including Barbara Ehrenrich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America; David Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible in America; Jeff Faux, The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back; Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and many many others including books I have reviewed on the broken government, immoral capitalism, the failure of education and health care, and so on. He covers it all, including how Wal-Mart is trying to use the World Trade Organization to force US states to back down on laws protecting them from this predatory organization (see my reviews of the book and DVD about Wal-Mart).

Although the author draws most heavily on his own broadcast remarks, and does not provide an annotated bibliography for further study, Amazon reviews by many others could serve to this end–just search for the topic and read the reviews of the book for a broader study.

Lou Dobbs may well have swung the 2006 election with his series on Broken Government and Jack Cafferty's robust commentaries, and thank God he did.

The book ends with key documents–the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitutional Amendments.

Summing it all up: take back the power by voting and demanding that Washington represent the people instead of corporations; fair trade not free trade; end illegal immigration (and I would add, demand English as a common language); self-insure as a Nation with respect to health care.

This topic is so important, I bought a second book with a more aggressive title, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class – And What We Can Do about It (BK Currents) by Thom Hartmann, also published in 2006, and I am pleased to report that these two books complement one another perfectly.

Lou Dobbs would have my vote if he ever ran for President. Now if we can just get him to add a 15 minute “national intelligence review” to the CNN line-up or web site….all the topics he deals with are right on target, but missing is the larger picture: America faces ten high-level global threats, America has no strategy and no coherent policies across twelve policy areas from Agriculture and Debt to Security and Water, and America has no plan for helping the eight challengers (Brazil through Venezuela) avoid our enormous mistakes, mistakes the planet cannot afford (we consume one third of the energy and create one third of the waste if not more).

Of all the books I have read, this is the one that I hope everyone buys, reads, and discusses before the 2008 primaries and general election.

There is also hope. Jim Turner, #2 Naderite, tells me he is seeing signals that 100 million Americans who opted ou8t of partisan politics and jumped back in with both feet in 2008. Below are the books that those people are reading:

Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

There are many more. I have gotten fed up with Amazon's refusing to provide a means for reviewers to sort their reviews, so I am posting, at Earth Intelligence Network, a sortable searchable Word table that covers all of my reading across the ten threats, twelve policies, eight challengers, and other areas. This will dramatically improve the efficiency for anyone seeking to leverage the free reviews that I offer for any given topic. We need to come back angry, non-violent, and INFORMED. Amazon, for all its flaws, is the People's Schoolhouse, and a big part of why public intelligence is a reality, not an oxymoron like “central intelligence.”

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2006/11/162009/12/04

Review: Screwed–The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class — And What We Can Do About It

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Justice (Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, True Cost & Toxicity, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Amazon Page

Perfect Complement to Lou Dobbs' Own Book,

November 16, 2006

Thom Hartmann

Edit of 21 July 2009 to add links.

This book is a perfect complement to Lou Dobbs' own book on War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back and is also better in the single specific area where this author chooses to focus: on the middle class. The book by Lou Dobbs is the best book over-all, covering a number of topics related to the health of U.S. society and the economy, while this author focuses exclusively on the middle class.

If I were to recommend one other book, it would be Naomi Klein's No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs which discusses how individual citizens can track the abusive practices and behavior of corporations, and the multitude of individuals can punish them through simple boycotts of their products.

There is no question in my mind but that We the People will take back the power, this book, and Lou Dobbs' book, represent the end of an era of unquestioned repression and abuse of America's middle class and blue-collar labor force, and the beginning of a revolution that the banks and corporations will NOT be able to squelch.

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2006/10/292019/09/06

Review: Rule by Secrecy–The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids

7 Star Top 1%, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Censorship & Denial of Access, Complexity & Catastrophe, Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Justice (Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

7 Star Life Transformative insights – Bankers, Politicians, Spies, Patsies, and Secret Societies, October 29, 2006

Jim Marrs

This book is extraordinarily interesting, broad, and paradigm-altering.

The table of contents provided enough detail to be an executive summary. The book is somewhat deficient on sources (heavily reliant on superficial “encyclopedic” references) but the alternative explanation of history and reality is not to be missed.

I bought the book thinking it was about government secrecy. Not so. Much more importantly, this book is about the secret societies used by the 300-500 wealthiest individuals in the world, the ones that own the central banks that can cause financial panics, move inflation or deflation, all to the end of profiting, while “exploding the client,” the individual “patsy” whose hard-earned wages are nothing more than a supermarket shelf from which these elites pluck extra funds to buy another castle. See my review of Mark Lewis's “Liar's Poker” to understand Wall Street use of individuals as *disposable* sources of cash, and my review of John Perkin's “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” to get a sense of the larger global methods being used to loot the commonwealths. Also relevant is Jeff Faux, “The Global Class War : How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win it Back” and many of my other reviews of books by others on the loss of government legitimacy and credibility with the people, combined with the predatory immorality of corporations that now own government.

Much of what the author attributes to a grand master plan can also be explained by the natural tendency of wealth to create wealth (compound interest) and for wealth to influence politics, but this book is deeper than that.

The author begins with an introduction of the Rothchilds, and gradually builds up a detailed picture of how they funded “barons” around the world, and in America, where the Morgans and the Rockefellers were their chosen instruments. The Bush family is second tier but right up there. Special attention is given to the Federal Reserve, which is NOT controlled by the government and has NEVER been audited in its history, and to the ease with which bankers make money from advance knowledge of changes in domestic and foreign policies that they often simply mandate.

The USA was until around 1837 a “value-based” economy in which real assets–gold, silver, land, labor–paid in full. There was no debt, no interest. From Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson, bankers from Europe were rejected and considered “more dangerous than armies, swindling the future.” Jefferson also believed central banks to be unconstitutional, since the right to create a national currency is reserved to the U.S. Treasury. The author notes that both Lincoln and Kennedy were unique for issuing debt-free currency, and for being assassinated. Reagan was shot by Hinkley, whose relative was dining with a prominent member of the Bush family the night before, and he suggests this was intended to move Bush, a member of the secret society world and leading pawn, into power years sooner.

An extensive discussion is provided of bankers themselves causing financial panics, wars, and other confrontations. The author refers to the Rothschild Formula as being to spawn wars and finance both sides. The book discusses the bank-rolling of Hitler, Trotsky, the US Civil War, the French Revolution, the Boar War, and on and on.

Credible evidence is provided that the terrorism in Italy, as part of a “Strategy of Tension” described in a captured document, was intended to create enough of a perception of leftist terrorism to justify a shift in the government toward fascism. The P2 Lodge behind the terrorism was a secret society on the right, not the left, and is said to have been guided by the Alpine Lodge in Switzerland, the “Gnomes of Zurich.” George Bush senior is alleged to have been an honorary member of this lodge, while Henry Kissinger is said later in the book to be a member of the Alpine Lodge. Most interesting for me is the CIA connection. The “Strategy of Tension” was first devised by James Angleton to prevent a communist take-over in Italy following WWII, and is STRICKINGLY apt in considering the allegations that 9/11 was allowed to happen if not made to happen. See my review of “Crossing the Rubicon,” of “9/11: Synthetic Terror Made in the USA,” among other books (use my lists).

Summing up this book early on, I found it to be 1/3 wealth begets wealth; 1/3 corruption begets wealth, and 1/3 conspiracy begets wealth. However, once I entered the secret society segment of the book, I reverse the above order.

This book gave me a completely new perspective on Cheney and Rove as front men rather than the prime movers, intended to take the heat and be “sacrificed” without the public every realizing that it is Citi-Bank (the same bank said to have secretly received Yamashita's Gold from Douglas McArthur, as told in “Gold Warriors” by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave), and Chase Manhattan, the two owned sufficiently by the Morgan and Rockefeller families to be the hubs for their power. The author also discusses the 40,000 tax exempt organizations that serve as fronts for banks and foundations and corporations, all manipulating the individual citizen-voter without paying a cent in taxes.

On page 408 the author says “Whatever the truth may be, we must be wary of leaders who attempt–whether by force, manipulation, or deceit–to move whole populations in directions they may not wish to go and might not be beneficial to all.”

On page 409 the author says “Knowledge is indeed power. It is time for those who desire true freedom to exert themselves–to fight back against the forces who desire domination through fear and disunity [enabled by secrecy.” The author notes that there are more of us than of them (see my review of Jonathan Schell's “Unconquerable World.”)

I have one word for what I plan to work toward: TRANSPARENCY. Collective public intelligence is going to survive and prosper. The times, they are a'changing.

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2006/08/092009/12/04

Review: The Wealth of Networks–How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Hardcover)

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Culture, Research, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Amazon Page

Manifesto for the 21st Century of Informed Prosperous Democracy,

August 9, 2006

Yochai Benkler

Edit of 14 Apr 08 to add links (feature not available at the time).

Lawrence Lessig could not say enough good things about this book when he spoke at Wikimania 2006 in Boston last week, so I ordered it while listening to him. It arrived today and I dropped everything to go through it.

This book could well be the manifesto for 21st Century of Informed Prosperous Democracy. It is a meticulous erudite discussion of why information should not be treated as property, and why the “last mile” should be built by the neighborhood as a commons, “I'll carry your bits if you carry mine.”

The bottom line of this book, and I will cite some other books briefly, is that democracy and prosperity are both enhanced by shared rather than restricted information. The open commons model is the only one that allows us to harness the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth, where each individual can made incremental improvements that cascade without restraint to the benefit of all others.

As I write this, both the publishing and software industries are in the midst of a “last ditch” defense of copyright and proprietary software. I believe they are destined to fail, and IBM stands out as an innovative company that sees the writing on the wall–see especially IBM's leadership in developing “Services Science.”

The author has written the authoritative analytic account of the new social and political and financial realities of a networked world with information embedded goods. There have been earlier accounts–for example, the cover story of Business Week on “The Power of Us” with its many accounts of how Lego, for example, received 1,600 free engineering development hours from its engaged customers of all ages. Thomas Stewart's “The Wealth of Knowledge,” Barry Carter's “Infinite Wealth,” Alvin and Heidi Toffler's most recent “Revolutionary Wealth,” all come to the same conclusion: you cannot manage 21st Century information-rich networks with 20th Century industrial control models.

Lawrence Lessig says it best when he speaks of the old world as “Read Only” and the new world as “Read-Write” or interactive. His fulsome praise for this author and this book suggest that the era of sharing and voluntary work has come of age.

On that note, I wish to observe that those who label the volunteers who craft Wikis including the Wikipedia as “suckers” are completely off-base. The volunteers are the smartest of the smart, the vanguard for a new economy in which bartering and sharing displace centralized financial and industrial control. Indeed, with the localization of energy, water, and agriculture, this book by this author could not be more important or timelier.

One final supportive anecdote, this one from the brilliant Michael Eisen, champion of open publishing. He captured the new paradigm perfectly at Wikimania when he likened the current publishing environment as one in which scientists give birth to babies, the publishers play a mid-wifery role, and then claim that as midwives, they have a perpetual right to the babies and will only lease them back to the parents. What a gloriously illuminating analogy this is.

I will end by tying this book and this author to C.K. Prahalad's “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.” That other book focuses on the fact that the five billion poor are actually worth four trillion in disposable income, versus the one billion rich worth one trillion. C.K. Prahalad posits a world in which capitalism stops focusing on making disposable high-end high cost goods, and turns instead to making sustainable low-cost goods. I see the day coming when–the avowed goal of the Wiki Foundation–there is universal free access to all information in all languages all the time.

If Marx and his Communist Manifesto were the tipping point for communism, this book is the tipping point for communal moral capitalism. Yochai Benkler is–along with Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, Lawrence Lessig, Jimbo Wales, Ward Cunningham, Brewster Kahle, and Cass Sunstein, one of the bright shining lights in our constellation of change makers.

He ends his book on an optimistic note. Despite the craven collaboration of the U.S. Congress in extending copyright forever into the distant future, he posits a reversal of all these bad laws (it used to be legal to discriminate against women and people of color) by the combination of cultural, social, economic, and technical forces that have their own imperative. Would that it were so, sooner.

I beg indulgence for listing five books I have published. I know you all know about Smart Mobs, Wisdom of the Crowds, Army of Davids, etc. See also the literature resilience, panarchy, and social entrepreneurship.

Peace (and prosperity) for all, in our time.

2006/08/022009/12/04

Review: The Marketing of Evil–How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised As Freedom (Hardcover)

4 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad)

Amazon Page

Ideologically biased with useful information, other books recommended,

August 2, 2006

David Kupelian

Edit of 26 Oct 06: for two excellent books that show there are two sides to any argument, see Mel White's Religion Gone Bad: The Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right and Reverend Barry Lynn's Piety & Politics: The Right-Wing Assault on Religious Freedom.

I have a taken a strong interest in immoral predatory capitalism and the cheating culture (see my reviews of Grieder The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy and Callahan, The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead among others) so when I saw this title, I was not only reminded of Lionel Tiger's path-finding work, Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System but also quite taken by the sub-title.

The book loses one star because it is an evangelical Christian tract that lacks depth (each of 10 chapters on 10 evils appears based on 1-2 key sources, with some “ibids” running over ten times in a row), and it is oblivious to a much larger serious literature such as Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography which makes this book look like a high school rant, or John Paul Ralston's Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West.

There is a lot of good in the book, and it fully merits reading and reflection. Seen in its best light, the author has brilliantly compiled “conventional wisdom” within the hard-corps Christian right, and neatly packaged screeds against gay rights, church-state separation, violence, sex, multicultural madness (i.e. mixed marriages and the loss of the white majority), family meltdown, bad schools, media as myth, abortion, and of course white American Christianity as the last best hope for America.

In comparison with Thomas Frank's One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy, this book is both lightweight and oblivious to larger strategic realities, but it is never-the-less quite a good means of understanding the filter through which white Christians on the hard right see the world.

The author loses credibility with well-read readers when he lambastes the gays and ignores biological evidence that we all start as women and evolve toward being men in the womb. Those that make it three quarters of the way are gay men; those that make it one quarter of the way are gay women. That is of course of grotesque simplification of a complex scientific and medical literature, but the point is that being gay is biological, and we can no more prosecute gays that we can prosecute people with diabetes or cancer.

The author is also overly dependent on the extreme right and evangelical Christian literature, and much too quick to accept “statistics” that are articulated as facts, for example, that 45% of America attends church regularly. Not in my world. In my world, they are sleeping late, out driving their Harleys (in Middle America nice normal people drive Harleys, not gangs), playing golf, or mowing the lawn.

The greatest weakness of the book, but not sufficient to take it down to three stars, is that while the author rails against radicals, elitists, and pseudo-experts, he fails to identify them by name. This is the politics of fear, the politics of creating a boogey-man to blame our problems on. To really understand this weakness, see the other book I review today, Frank's One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy where I detail that author's more compelling and more authoritative discussion of how Wall Street and the evangelical right came together to destroy labor unions, baseline government, and informed media, all in the name of a “free market” that ostensibly promotes democracy in passing.

Of the two books, Frank's is the better value, and receives five stars.

2006/08/022009/12/04

Review: One Market Under God–Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (Paperback)

4 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad)

Amazon Page

Solid thoughtful, nails our national policy failures in a big way,

August 2, 2006

Thomas Frank

This is a very serious book, one that any candidate for President would do well to read, especially so the centrist candidates willing to announce that both the Democratic and Republican parties have sold the public into slavery to corporate fascism.

In summary, the author documents in detail how the Reagan Revolution, and especially the firing of the air traffic controllers and the wrongful use of military air traffic controllers as “union busting” scabs, eliminated the counter-vailing force of labor unions, at the same time that government deregulated and abdicated its responsibility for a social safety net, the media converted into advertising with a “news hole,” and corporations lost all moral and social standards.

He deconstructs the “New Economy” in persuasive detail and caused me to re-evaluate some of my earlier readings, especially of Kevin Kelly and others in the WIRED generation who articulate with blind faith the democratic value of the network, but fail to see, as Robert Samuelson and this author would have us understand, that outsourcing is union busting, and the actual effect of the network has been to make it possible for corporations to outsource middle class jobs while importing poverty through illegal immigration. The net loser is the Nation, because one of its most important sources of national power, an educated engaged citizenry, is being sold short.

The author is brutally on target when he points out that corporations have achieved a slight of hand in disconnecting labor from the value of created wealth, claiming much more management value (to the point that CEOs make 400 to 1000 times what their workers make, up from 25 times long ago). He also points out that the democratization of the stock market is code for what Mark Lewis called, in “Liar's Poker,” “exploding the client. The smart money rides the early surge and then sells out to the middle class dreamers, who end up losing 80-90% of their value over time.

I have a note in the flyleaf that this book is “quite extraordinary, almost breathtaking in scope, with a compelling array of well-ordered facts.”

Overall, while many will not like the term “corporate fascism” and the author prefers to use “extreme capitalism” while others discuss immoral and predatory capitalism, or “class war” (see my review of Faux's “The Global Class War” and, somewhat less solid but still good, Pabast's “Armed Madhouse” (dispatches from the front lines of the global class war). The sorry reality is that Americans have been lulled to sleep like sheep for a slaughter, and do not seem to appreciate the fact that there has been a MASSIVE theft of public capital through what this author calls “the Wall Street tax” on America.

The greatest strength of the book is how the author documents the calculated and comprehensive manner in which Wall Street and the evangelical right came together to turn reality on its head, and persuade everyone including blue collar workers that it was okay to break the social contract with labor, and that what is good for Wall Street is good for America and its workers. In fact, as the author points out repeatedly, when workers get laid off, Wall Street stocks go up. His entire review reminds one of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's classic “Manufacturing Consent.” Public relations has been used in a classic manner by American corporations, to include penetration of teen-age sub-cultures and the manipulation of teen-age desires. In Europe they consider public relations to be, according to this author, advanced corporate lying.

The author draws an excellent connection between the “blind faith” that keeps the corporate illusion of free trade on the table, and the “blind faith” that led Dick Cheney to depose George Bush and invade Iraq without regard to the policy process, accountability, or reality. America is in the grip of a very destructive combination of corporate ideology, religious ideology, and political ideology.

The author is properly and comprehensively critical of the media for failing to do its job. Journalists, a few exceptions aside, have become “filler.” The author excels at picking Tom Friedman apart, and at mocking the Wall Street Journal for idiocy in print.

The book ends on a sobering note, where the author points out that reality has a way of unmasking ideological pretensions in a most painful manner. He specifically suggests that George Bush Junior (he does not mention Cheney) will go the way of Herbert Hoover in the history books. Reality–that's what one White House staffer is reported to have said had no relevance, because this White House “creates its own reality.” Yes it does–a reality of greed and theft and immorality at the top, poverty and disease at the bottom, and a loss of American honor around the world.

First class thinking and writing. A really strong book.

Category: Capitalism (Good & Bad)

Review: Natural Capitalism–Creating the Next Industrial Revolution

Review: War on the Middle Class–How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back

Review: Screwed–The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class — And What We Can Do About It

Review: Rule by Secrecy–The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids

Review: The Wealth of Networks–How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Hardcover)

Review: The Marketing of Evil–How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised As Freedom (Hardcover)

Review: One Market Under God–Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (Paperback)