Capitalism (Good & Bad) – Page 32 – Public Intelligence Blog

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Bottom Line: Unfettered Capitalism is Destructive, Need Government,

June 27, 2006

Jeffry A. Frieden

I read books in groups, and bought this one along with David Walsh's “Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations” which I recommend above this one is you are only buying one book. I also read and have reviewed “Global Class Wars” as well as all other books I recommend below.

Although I was less interested in the history, which is very well documented and clearly explained, and more in the lessons for the future, I found two clear bottom lines in this book that are supported by its extensive research:

1) Open societies and open democracies generate more money and more opportunity and more innovation than closed or failed societies; and

2) Keynes was right, there is an urgent vital role for government to play in addressing the social networks, including education, transportation, rules of commerce, and so on, that allow capitalism to work.

The author distinguishes between individual, cooperative, and competitive capitalism, and I found validation in this book for my concept of communal capitalism, a capitalism that is guided by government in avoiding the exportation of jobs, the importation of poverty, and the impoverishment of the middle class.

Unlike David Walsh's book, this book has more of a focus on what is moral and pragmatic, and so I recommend William Greider's “The Soul of Capitalism” as well as John Perkins “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.”

I have a very strong feeling from this book and others, that the era of “out of control” capitalism is drawing to an end. We may even see the end of the corporation as a separate legal personality in the next 12 years. The transparency of information that is available when people attach themselves leech-like to a corporation and hold it accountable (see my review of “No Logo”) is creating a powerful antidote against the Enrons and Exxons and Wal-Marts of the world who bribe elites and screw over the publics on both ends. I also see Wall Street losing its ability to “explode the client” (see my review of “Liar's Poker”). A great deal of good will be done in the next quarter century, and it will come from a combination of good government and educated engaged citizens working together across all boundaries.

2006/06/262009/12/04

Review: No Logo–No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (Paperback)

6 Star Top 10%, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Consciousness & Social IQ, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

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Modern Manifesto in Defense of Citizen Public Against Corporate Fascism,

June 26, 2006

Naomi Klein

EDITED 22 Oct 07 to add some links.

Preliminary note: there are some really excellent reviews of this book that I admire and recommend be read as a whole.

Although I have reviewed a number of books on the evil of corporate rule disconnected from social responsibility such as democratic governance normally imposes, books such as Lionel Tiger, “The Manufacture of Evil,” and more recently, John Perkins, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” and William Greider, “The Soul of Capitalism,” this is the first book in my experience to actually focus on the pervasive process of branding and the spread of corporate control (into schoolrooms and chambers of governance), and also focus, with great originality, on the emergence of an active citizen-based opposition to corporate dominance.

In terms of lasting effect, the most important value of this book to me has been the identification of the World Social Forum as a “must attend” event. I plan to do so.

The bottom line in this book, at least to me, is that government has failed to represent the public and sold out to special interests. The author notes how the US helped derail a United Nations effort to establish, in 1986, a transnational oversight body to help avoid the “race to the bottom” and develop standards of equal opportunity and human rights for labor. Other books, such as “The Global Class War” have focused on the emergence of a global elite that works together to exploit the public and the workers, and that is a part of this story.

The author is very forceful in singling out Microsoft as an exploiter of temporary labor, and goes on from there to highlight both the sweatshops overseas and the “temp” gulags here in the USA, not least of which is Wal-Mart, where other books give us great detail.

I learn for the first time about “culture jamming” and the rise in activists who seek to out corporations, I am reinforced in my view that corporate facism is rampant in America, and I am much taken with the quote on page 325, from Utah Philips, to the effect that those killing the earth have names and addresses.

I am inspired by the author's discussion of “selective purchasing” as the ultimate means of bringing corporations to heel. WIRED Magazine has explored how bar codes can be used to connect potential buyers to all relevant information. Whereas before I have advocated information about water and oil content, now, instructed by this author, I believe it should be possible to also acquire information about labor content (hourly wages, benefits or not, cost paid to labor for the item) and source of capital.

Over-all the book discusses the broken relationship in the triad between the people, the government responsible for representing them, and the corporations that exploit them as consumers and employees and stockholders. I put this book down reflecting on how much power individuals actually have, and how little they know about how to use it.

2006/06/162011/10/22

Review: Hostile Takeover–How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government–and How We Take It Back (Hardcover)

4 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform)

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Serious Book for Serious People,

June 16, 2006

David Sirota

I bought and read both this book, and John Stossel's Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel – Why Everything You Know is Wrong This is a serious book for serious people. Stossel's book is full of trivia and generally a waste of time.

This author focuses on the substance of taxes, wages, jobs, debt, pensions, health care, prescription drugs, energy, unions, and legal rights, and he does it in an engaging methodical manner that discusses the issue, highlights in turn myths, lies, and half-truths, and then ends with proposed solutions, all of them sensible.

It merits comment that this book is endorsed on the back cover by many people I respect from Al Gore An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming to Bill Greider Who Will Tell The People? : The Betrayal Of American Democracy and The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy to Jim Hightower Thieves in High Places: They've Stolen Our Country and It's Time to Take It Back.

The bottom line is clear: the U.S. government at the political level, whether Republican or Democratic, is completely corrupt. Every Congressman and every President, every Senator, have so many conflicts of interest as to be incapable of representing the people honestly. Congress no longer represents the people. Let me repeat that: Congress no longer represents the people. They are either bribed by special interests or forced to follow the party line. See, with reviews: Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It; The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy); and Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders.

This author ends with a sensible bottom line: engage from the bottom up, and push for public financing of elections (I would include free television time from the PUBLIC airwaves), and until then, contribute to honest politicians who will forego campaign contributions.

The Unity '08 movement established by Hamilton Jordan proposes to field an Independent candidate fully funded by the people. As Joe Trippi and Howard Dean demonstrated, the people CAN out-spend and out-vote the corporations if they have a mind to. Jordon is half-way to the right answer–the rest of the answer is a Democratic President, a Republican Vice-President, two new Deputy Vice Presidents (John McCain for national security, overseeing Defense, State, and Justice, and Bill Bradley for everything else), and a COALITION cabinent. Separately a NON-RIVAL party has been created, the Citizens Party, to post a transparent national budget that is also balanced, and to engage voters from ALL parties in support of one single public interest issue: electoral reform in 2007, in time for an honest election the extremist Republicans cannot steal as they stole in 2000 via Florida and in 2004 via Ohio.

Lest anyone doubt the depth of this book's documented concerns, see my review of The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office by Dave Lindorf and Barbara Olshansky, and also How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok by constituional lawyer Gleen Greenwald.

For a list of 23 documented high crimes and misdemeanors by Dick Cheney,see my review of Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

2006/06/152011/10/22

Review: The Global Class War –How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win it Back (Hardcover)

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Capitalism (Good & Bad)

Amazon Page

Borrowed Title, Missing Bits, Worthy Restatement of the Threat to Labor,

June 15, 2006

Jeff Faux

The title appears borrowed from Sam Marcy's original work in 1979 on “The Global Class War and the Destiny of American Labor,” but then, no one wanted to listen in the 1970's, when I did my first master's degree, to the three major themes in the political science literature:

1) Limits to Growth and need for Ecological Economics (Club of Rome, Herman Daly);

2) Global Reach of Multinational Corporations and the Home-Host Country Issues and Threats to Domestic Labor and Social Welfare (Barnett)

3) Need for World Government to address global issues (Falk).

This book is valuable for its one main point reiterated and documented over and over again: the American elite has joined with other elites world-wide to reach accommodations that favor the investors and the ruling elites over the individuals that are employees.

If I had not also read William Greider's The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy as well as John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and (over two decades ago), Lionel Tiger, Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System I might have seen this book in a different light. In the larger context of the 700+ books I have reviewed at Amazon, this book sums up a key factor that the public must consider when going to elect its leaders over the next few years.

As the author documents and discusses, the combination of neoliberalism and neo-conservatism has led to government being in the service of corporations and the wealthy, rather than the public and especially the working public. The author suggests, citing another author, that the working class is 62% of America, the middle class 36%, and the ruling class 2%. He also notes that America is no longer a mobile society, with 77% of the people “stuck” in their parent's rut, and with wages now BACK to where they were in the 1970's–in other words, no real gains in quality of life or purchasing power across the land.

The author spends a great deal of time on NAFTA, and his views are all negative. He is passionate on the topic of Mexico being a socio-economic bomb waiting to explode, and on how NAFTA and the deliberate tolerance of illegal immigration have essentially served as a pressure value, where the US imports poverty from Mexico in order to keep it from a worse explosion.

The author is quite provocative when he examines the “rescue” of Mexico by Secretary of the Treasury Rubin. He “follows the money” and discovers that the U.S. taxpayer did not bail out Mexico per se, but rather Goldman Sachs and all the other investors in Mexico, investors who were supposed to evaluate risk and take risk and accept the consequences, but instead used their Goldman Sachs brother in arms to bail them out at taxpayer expense. Today of course President Bush has just appointed another Goldman Sachs leader to be Secretary of the Treasury (after the more honest Paul O'Neil resigned when he discovered that Vice President Dick Cheney was making all the policies without regard to the Cabinet process (see my review of The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill)

The author is compelling in discussing how the Reagan Revolution broke the backs of the labor unions and also broke up the postwar social safety nets. The author discusses how there is no corporate mind-set that puts the home country, the USA, first. He discusses at length how we are coming off decades during which multinational corporations, aided and abetted by their class collaborators in government and the media, have essentially broken the social contracts with each country's public, and disconnected their global investments from any social benefit for labor.

The author is very illuminating when he points out that it is NOT China that is flooding the US with cheap goods, but rather Wal-Mart and Wall Street, investing US dollars in China to leverage low-cost Chinese labor while off-shoring jobs and driving both salaries and quality down across the board within the USA where Wal-Mart has been proven to destroy small businesses for 50-100 miles around any one of its main stores (see my review of both the DVD Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price and the book The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works–and How It's Transforming the American Economy).

The author is an optimist and an idealist, and I will end my review with a quote that I hope a future enlightened President will support. The author says on page 246:

“To this end, a conference, or congress, of North American civil society, state and local officials and representatives of labor, and small businesses, should be held every year. One of its functions would be to do a public review of the state of continental integration and to discuss, debate, and make proposals for the future.”

I am reminded of Falk's genius in knowing in the 1970's that we would one day need global council for both religions and peoples. Government has failed to be just or to represent the public. This book comes at a good time. In America, November 2006 is a necessary pre-requisite to electoral reform and getting an honest wise President and a Coalition Cabinet in 2008. To do that, enough people have to vote so as to defeat the extremist Republican skill at stealing elections that are close. It has to be a landslide.

I venture to say tha there is a very tight connection between Congress being broken and corrupt, and the global class war. Labor unions and the middle class have been rolled back, standards and protective regulations have been rolled back, and on every front, “We the People” have been abused by those we have entrusted.

EDIT of 10 Dec 07: As I write this, Lou Dobbs on CNN is urging every American to register as an Independent, and Jim Turner, #2 Naderite, is telling me he hopes 100 million Americans will come back to vote the two broken parties out of office. Amen!

2006/05/062009/12/04

Review: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Paperback)

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

Free Market Not Free, Ills of the 21st Century, Brilliant,

May 6, 2006

Michel Chossudovsky

Although it saddens me to see a strong literature emerging today that was largely anticipated and ignored by people like David Barnett with his Global Reach work in the 1970's, it is a good thing that strong voices like those of this author are now making very comprehensive documented cases for how corporate power and privatized wealth are collapsing nations, bankrupting economies, and impoverishing more and more people unnecessarily.

The table of contents of this book is extraordinarily details and brilliant in its organization. Although the book is mostly case studies that one can read through rapidly if accepting of the author's key points, this may well be one of the finest itemizations of the ills of the 21st century: corporate power run amok, privatization and concentration of wealth (which is, incidentally, one of the precondition for revolution), the collapse of national and local economies (e.g. Wal-Mart), the dismantling of the welfare safety net in most countries, and the outbreak and spread of famine and civil war.

The author is probably the foremost scholar and commentator on how the “free” market is not so free, and how the existing capitalist system is predatory, aided by locked in privileges that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank impose on nations foolish enough to accept their intervention. In this the author is consistent with Jeffrey Sachs (The End of Poverty) who has put forward the need for a complete make-over of developmental economics, to include an end of the normal business practices of the IMF and the World Bank.

I was tempted to remove one star for lack of sufficient reference to the works of others, but the personal insights and comprehensive review caused me to leave the ranking at five stars. I see a clear pattern emerging in the literature (see my other 700+ reviews) and what I am waiting for is for someone to cut the spines off all these books and “make sense” of the total picture in a manner comprehensible to the indivdual voter.

If we are to restore informed democracy and moral capitalism, this book is one of the foundation stones.

2006/05/042009/12/04

Review: Wal-Mart–The High Cost of Low Price (2005)

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), True Cost & Toxicity

Good News: People Power is Starting to Work!,

May 4, 2006

Robert Greenwald

This is an important and absorbing documentary. I have nine note cards on it, and I summarize the key points that this DVD makes because I believe it should be shown in every town hall meeting where a Wal-Mart exists or threatens to arrive.

The bottom line is that the Wal-Mart family of five had made over 100 billion dollars on the backs of its “slave” employees in the US and in China, and Wal-Mart can and should be viewed as a front from the Chinese government, as a means of undermining the US economy while building up the Chinese economy. Throughout this DVD (and in the book that inspired it) hard documented incontrovertible facts are provided with respect to the manner in which Wal-Mart is subsidized by the taxpayer (e.g. over $80 million a year in assistance to Wal-Mart employees in Florida that qualify for below the poverty line assistance)–the cost to taxpayers across the country is said to total over $1.5 BILLION; Wal-Mart also fails to meet its obligations, either in return for tax abatements, or in response to consent decrees when it has been found guilty of pollution or other crimes.

* Wal-Mart does not pay fair wages and is violently anti-union to include illegal surveillance and intimidation. They short-change payroll and demand off the clock overtime, which is illegal, in order to increase their profits. The personal stories told in this DVD about employees having to choose between eating lunch or buying medicine for their children are not only heart-rending, but remind me of Third World countries where the same choice has to be made by mothers. PEOPLE POWER IS STARTING TO WORK: Wal-Mart is losing hundreds of law suits across the country to employees suing for off the clock cheating.

* Wal-Mart lies a lot. It lies about its contributions to communities (there is clear documentation that Wal-Mart destroys communities and destroys the small businesses for hundreds of miles around). Wal-Mart lies about its benefits, its wages, its environmental concerns, it lies about almost everything. I have the note “hypocritical liars.”

* Wal-Mart is eroding global labor standards. They fire their own inspectors for doing their jobs and telling the truth.

* Wal-Mart parking lots are very very unsafe. Wal-Mart has known since 1994 that their parking lots attract a great deal of crime including night-time rapes and murders, and they have also known since 1994 that a couple of unarmed security guards in uniforms riding around in golf carts would eliminate almost ALL of that crime, but they are not willing to pay for that safety just as they are not willing to pay for living wages for their employees.

* Wal-Mart has established a clear and well-documented pattern of lying to courts–of flagrant active perjury.

* PEOPLE POWER II: “plantation capitalism” will forever be linked to Wal-Mart, but the wonderful news is that the people are starting to fight back, and across America, Wal-Mart is being stopped in its tracks from hijacking local planning processes and buying out city councils.

Two additional points not covered by the documentary:

* Reviewer John Staffa does us all a favor in pointing out that Hillary Clinton was a member of the Wal-Mart board and profited from the relationship. This simply drives home the point that Democratic “leaders” are simply “Republican Lite” and no longer really interested in supporting labor unions and people's rights.

* I have reviewed many books on the end of cheap oil, and many of them make the point that companies like Wal-Mart can bring all those goods from China to the USA because of the cheap oil, which is no more. In 1974-1979 the Senate and the White House knew full well that Peak Oil was upon us. They made the treasonous decision back then to conceal this from the public and take no action in order to keep the bribes from the energy companies, and the illusion of cheap gas going. Both Wal-Mart and the US Government have essentially lied to the US public and acted against the long-term public interest. It's time we tax them back.

I strongly recommend this movie as a means of mobilizing support for blocking all new Wal-Marts, and for beginning the process of closing down existing Wal-Marts. The facts are incontrovertible. Wal-Mart kills communities. Wal-Mart is now, like Standard Oil and Exxon today, like AT&T and Microsoft, a company that has gotten pathologically powerful and needs to be broken up.

This DVD, and “The Corporation” DVD, are both essential tools in nurturing a new movement to take back the power over the US economy and the corrupt US political system. Super super work.

2006/05/022009/12/04

Review: The Corporation (2004)

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad)

Superb Easy to Understand Itemization of the Fraud Inherent in Any Corporation,

May 2, 2006

Jane Akre

I admire a number of the reviews that have already been posted, and am doing this one primarily as a personal record and for those that follow my reading in non-fiction about national security and national competitiveness (690+ reviews).

This is a superb DVD. I did not realize there was a book by this name, but all things being equal, the visuals that come with the DVD, and the shorter time to absorb the message that can been carefully crafted, make this a great value.

For those that were not around or students in the 1970's I have to say that Barnett and others did a lot of study on the topic of out of control ungovernable unregulatable multinational corporations, and a lot of this was anticipated thirty years ago. However, this DVD provides a wonderfully coherent and fresh look at some key points that need to be understood by the general public.

* Modern corporation is today's dominant institution, with global reach and global impact, yet it is ungovernable by national or state or local governments, has limited liability, and seeks to maximize internal profits by externalizing all possible costs including environmental degradation, the importation of poverty, spread of disease from lack of health benefits, etc.

* “A few bad apples” (e.g. Enron, Worldcom, Exxon, etc) is a “jingle” that has been used to cover up the fact that a lack of ethics is a predominant characteristic, not an exception. See my reviews of Lionel Tiger (The Manufacture of Evil), The Informant, The Cheating Culture, etc.

* The corporation is a paradox–it creates great wealth, and it also does great harm. It is, however, an ARTIFICIAL creation, and we have it in our power to reverse its limited liability status.

* The corporate agenda does indeed compete with the public interest agenda, and can be likened to the damage that occured with the loss of the commons–while the corporation has done much good, the concept of the people belonging to and being at one with the land was lost forever when the land could be “owned” by an artificial person as well as a real person.

* Corporations can and tend to be psychopathic. The definition of a psychopath includes callous unconcern, unable to maintain enduring relationships, reckless disregard for tohers, deceitfullness, inability to experience guilt, failure to conform to social norms–gosh, this defines the Bush White House, not just corporations. It also defines the media, religions, and some labor unions. No wonder we have problems!

* The corporate mind-set is divorced from the good of the group–only a corporation would develop the concept of a terminator one time use seed, or throw away goods.

* 9-11 was capitalized on by traders, as was the war in Iraq. I am reminded of General Smedley Butler's recommendation in “War is a Racket” when he suggested that when the US goes to war, everyone in the private sector be absorbed into the government at enlisted and junior officer ranks, and not allowed to carry out war profiteering.

* The DVD does a good job of examining the sophistication of marketing, describing it as a smart bomb in comparison to early day “bb guns.” The DVD discusses the seduction of the consumer and the use of branding as an invasive form of producing customers almost against their common sense (because of this DVD I am buying the book NO LOGO).

* Corporations today are allowed to patent life, which is wrong and was always excluded, until a court did not realize that a microbe was life, and considered it a chemical formula instead. From that mistake, hundreds of cases have been filed by corporations under the laws intended to protect the life and property of former slaves.

* The DVD expresses concern over who might protect the public interest when information is controlled and filtered by the corporations. Monsanto is troubling case study, with good coverage in this DVD of how they were able to deceive EVERYONE in the US from academics to reporters to regulators, but only because they did not do their homework. In Canada, Montanto was stopped in its tracks by effective food safety regulators.

* The DVD is somewhat inflammatory in attempting to make the case that corporations not only helped fascism in Germany but are a form of fascism themselves. There is something to that, just as the is something to the reports that the major Nazis resettled in the USA and produced Karl Rove and Otto Reich as well as some really really bad covert operations and regime changes against democracy and in favor of dictatorships.

* The DVD ends on two notes, one troubling and one positive. The troubling note is that corporations are now trying to take over water, privatizing water, to the ridiculous point that in Bolivia the natives were not allowed to collect rainwater–this is not only obscene, but radicalizing. On a positive note, the DVD ends with an interview of a person describing in Spanish how many small battles are being won, and the corporations are being beaten back.

This is a very fine DVD, which joins Lords of War and Ghandi among others in my serious collection. Very worthwhile.

Category: Capitalism (Good & Bad)

Review: Global Capitalism–Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (Hardcover)

Review: No Logo–No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (Paperback)

Review: Hostile Takeover–How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government–and How We Take It Back (Hardcover)

Review: The Global Class War –How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win it Back (Hardcover)

Review: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Paperback)

Review: Wal-Mart–The High Cost of Low Price (2005)

Review: The Corporation (2004)