Capitalism (Good & Bad) – Page 34 – Public Intelligence Blog

Historical, Contextual, Critical Reference,

December 12, 2005

Richard Heinberg

There are other books that I consider to be better at the over-all challenge of “connecting the dots” among cheap oil, drugs and drug money gladly laundered by U.S. banks, and war profiteering, but this book must be considered one of the finest underlying reference works that support the more speculative conclusions of others.

This book provides both a solid history of how we got to where we are and why we continually dismiss the known future consequences of not providing for energy conservation and alternative energy; and it also provides a very finely presented review of what the author calls the “banquet of consequences” across transporation, food and agriculture, heating and cooling, the environment, public health, information storage and transmission, and the over-all geopolitics of oil.

Had we all read this book, The Long Emergency, and Crossing the Rubicon prior to Dick Cheney's taking us to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we would have realized that invading and occupying those two countries is about the oil catastrophe and Wall Street's need for drug money to provide liquidity (a point made in Rubicon, not in this book).

Cheap Oil has been the Fool's Gold of this era. Unhappily, the fools (We the People) have ended up with our pocket's picked, and Wall Street and a few very large immoral organizations have ended up with the Gold.

The party is indeed over. The only question that remains is: can we repossess the Commonwealth from those that have stolen it using profits from cheap oil?

2005/12/102009/12/04

Review: Crossing the Rubicon–The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (Paperback)

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

People's Grand Jury Sufficient to Indict Dick Cheney for Murder,

December 10, 2005

Michael C. Ruppert

Edited 30 June to add links to ten books and observe that rankism is bad, but providing credentials to outweigh the ridicule that is used against books such as this (also rankism from Cheney et al) is not bad.

As the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction about global issues and national security (#66 over-all), as a former spy, founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Command, and CEO and proponent for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), I think I have a good foundation for evaluating this book. It is so compelling and so troubling that I was obliged to create an eight-page worksheet to ensure I understood the details.

The author alleges that Dick Cheney personally oversaw the 9-11 scenario, with largely fabricated hijackers used by the U.S. military as OPFOR exercise personnel and aided by Israel and Saudi Arabia, that most of the so-called hijackers were not actually on the airplanes; that the two airplanes hitting the WTC were flown by remote control in at least the final minutes from WTC 7 where the Secret Service (Cheney's personal vehicle for running the government) and CIA had their offices; that all three buildings, including WTC 7 which was not hit at all were brought down by controlled explosions, and the Pentagon was hit by a missile aided by a homing device, not Flight 77, which was put down elsewhere. (He notes that Congress was not evacuated, suggesting that either Cheney was incompetent or he knew the missile would hit the homing device in the Pentagon.)

Bottom line: he has NOT provided enough evidence to convict Cheney, but he HAS provided enough evidence to suggest that the 9-11 Commission was very derelict in its duties; that very select elements of the U.S. Government are engaging in a cover-up after facilitating the murder of U.S. citizens; and that a public investigation and trial of Dick Cheney are required.

Here are just a few highlights from this very complex and earnest book:

1) The end of cheap oil is a global crisis. Central Asian reserves were thought to be a temporary respite from global chaos. When this was known not to be the case, in 2000, Wall Street cashed out and allowed the public to bear the brunt of the stock market crash, and the Clinton Administration began to develop Al Qaeda, with Saudi Arabia and Israel, as a covert operation. I am more inclined to believe we allowed Al Qaeda to develop, rather than nurtured them deliberately.

2) Wall Street depends heavily on drug money for liquidity. When the Taliban killed the opium crop in Afghanistan, this was a form of economic warfare against Wall Street's immorality, and they were more than glad to support a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan which had the direct result of jumping Afghanistan's contribution to global heroin from 0 to 80%, with all that money going to Wall Street. Stunningly, the author reports that the head of the Stock Exchange traveled to Colombia to invite the FARC to invest its drug money in US stocks–the “ultimate cold call.” Specific companies associated with laundering drug money through off-book deals include HP, Ford, Sony, GM, Whirlpool, GE, and Philip Morris.

3) The author provides a very compelling case for the possibility that there are two CIA's–a very small elite that work for Wall Street, and were until recently led by Buzzy Krongard as Executive Director of CIA (his “former” firm did most of the puts on United Airlines and profited greatly from 9-11), and a “lip-service” CIA that bumbles around. The links that he establishes between oil companies and logistics support companies to the U.S. military, and their importation of drugs that seem to explode anytime CIA goes into Laos or Afghanistan or Colombia or anywhere else in a big way, are remarkable. He has very specific details, including references to drugs going to oil rigs off New Orleans and then directly in through the most corrupt police force in the country.

4) Congress passed the Patriot Act without reading it.

5) Massive deception has occurred in relation to terrorism. The U.S. refused multiple offers from both the Taliban and Somalia to deliver Bin Laden–everything about post 9-11 has been about damage control, not investigation; the Kean Commission was riddled with conflicts of interest that the author discusses in detail.

6) Specific corporations are named that appear to merit investigation, including Acxiom, Brown & Root, Carlyle, Goldman Sachs, Halliburton, DynCorp, Lockheed, and Raytheon. One corporation, from Israel, broke its WTC lease at great expense the week prior to 9-11.

7) Numerous individuals are named who were not properly interviewed by the 9-11 Commission. Both those on watch and off watch (e.g. BGen Winfield who asked to be relieved from 0830 to 1100 from his post as director of the national military command center) have not been grilled. Mayo Shattuck of Alex Brown resigned on 12 September. Dave Frasca, the FBI leader that blocked all investigations, Admiral Abbott, key person for Cheney, Karl Inderfurth, General Ahmad from Pakistan ($100K to Al Qaeda in US the week before the attack), a whole host of people were simply not investigated.

8) This is massive evidence of sustained fraud by Wall Street, mortgage companies, and others, inclusive of schemes to draw money out of the U.S. Government (i.e. from the taxpayer) through Housing and Urban Development mortgage fraud in drug-affected neighborhoods, and from the Department of Defense. The author alleges that by his detailed estimate, Wall Street has looted three trillion dollars from the U.S. Treasury. As a side note, he points out that Enron's records were moved to Switzerland in what could be a deliberate cover-up of their role in all of this.

9) Murder hangs heavy in this book. Lest anyone believe this is a fairy tale, the author ends the book with a copy of Operation Northwind, the JCS plan from 13 March 1962, to murder Americans in a series of events designed to provide a pretext for invading Cuba.

I cannot conclude that Cheney is guilty. I am completely persuaded that Cheney should be indicted, investigated, and tried by a jury of his peers, We the People.

Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition
Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict With a New Introduction by the Author
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
Game Without End: State Terror and the Politics of Justice
Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption

2005/12/092009/12/04

Review: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid–Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Hardcover)

6 Star Top 10%, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Economics, Future, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Nobel Prize Material–Could Transform the Planet,

December 9, 2005

C.K. Prahalad

There are some excellent and lengthy reviews of this book so I will not repeat anything that has already been said. This book review should be read together with my review of Stuart Hart's “Capitalism at the Crossroads,” which points to several other related books, and Kenichi Ohmae's book, “The Next Global Stage.” All three are published by Wharton School Publishing, which has impressed me enormously with its gifted offerings.

Here's the math that I was surprised to not see in the book: the top billion people that business focuses on are worth less than a trillion in potential sales. The bottom four billion, with less than $1000 a year in disposable income, are worth four trillion in potential sales.

In combination, Prahalad and Hart make it clear that business suffers from the same pathologies as the Central Intelligence Agency and other bureaucracies: they are in a rut.

I will end by emphasizing that I believe this author merits the Nobel Peace Prize. As the U.S. Department of Defense is now discovering, its $500 billion a year budget is being spent on a heavy metal military useful only 10% of the time. Stabilizization and reconstruction are a much more constructive form of national defense, because if we do not address poverty and instability globally, it will inevitably impact on the home front. This author has presented the most common sense case for turning business upside down. He can be credited with a paradigm shift, those shifts that Kuhn tells us come all too infrequently, but when they come, they change the world. It may take years to see this genius implemented in the real world, but he has, without question, changed the world for the better with this book, and make global prosperity a possibility.

NOTE: This book comes with a DVD that is an extraordinary value all by itself. Wharton Publishing has really delivered a one-two intellectual punch, first with the book, and then with the DVD which as a short introductory presentation by the author, and then a series of 2-4 minute multi-media snap-shots of the various case studies and the “faces of poverty” transformed. I am really impressed–I've had Wharton MBAs work for me before (but please note, it was Michigan MBAs that excelled in the work I am reviewing(, examining OSS.Net and how to take it to the next level, but the work reflected in these case studies and by the author as a manager of budding intellects has taken my respect for Michagan (and Wharton) to a whole new level.

Note: while this book is totally unique, and inspired my idea to create the Earth Intelligence Network and be intelligence officer to the poor, organizing 100 million people to teach the five billion poor “one cell call at a time,” there are several other books that have given me enormous hope, and I list them below.
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life
Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
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
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives

2005/12/092009/12/04

Review: Next Global Stage–The: Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World (Hardcover)

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Consciousness & Social IQ, Future

Exquisitely detailed and thoughtful–reinvention of economics & global profit centers,

December 9, 2005

Kenichi Ohmae

I have not in my lifetime seen a table of contents more exquisitely detailed and provocative. My very first note on this book reads: “TOC: Holy Cow!” This book earned five stars with the table of contents and got better from there.

I recommend that this book be read AFTER reading C.K. Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks) (a book that I earnestly hope wins the author the Nobel Peace Prize), and Stuart Hart's Capitalism at the Crossroads: Aligning Business, Earth, and Humanity (2nd Edition) (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks) Whereas those two books are essential background and strategically transformative, showing the four trillion in potential revenue from four billion people whose individual disposable income averages $10 a year, this book is more operational, a handbook for global profit.

The section on reinventing economics is a very useful preamble to the remainder of the book, where the author dissects both governments and business practices before going on to discuss platforms for progress inclusive of technologies and languages.

The last third of the book provides the “script” for future global prosperity. The most valuable and actionable pages are from 255-268, where the author concisely identifies the following areas as potential break-out zones for enormous profit: Hainan Island, Petropavlosk-Kamchatsily in Russia, Vancouver and British Columbia, the Baltic Corner, Ho Chi Minh City, Khabarovsk, Maritime (Primorye) Province and Sakhalin Island in Russia, Sau Paulo, and Kyushu in Japan. If I were a major multinational interested in doubling my gross and profit in the next ten years, I would immediately commission a single General Manager for each of these areas, and send them to build an indigenous networked business from scratch in each of these areas.

The author, who I am reminded wrote “The Mind of the Strategist” as a young man in the 1970's, has an extraordinay intellect that has been very ably applied to a most important topic: creating stabilizing wealth.

Wharton School Publishing has impressed me greatly with these three books. I have toyed with earning a third graduate degree in either environmental economics or Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) business management, and while I will probably not do so, what these three books make clear to me is that Wharton is a happening place and clearly making a difference. Good stuff!

2005/12/092009/12/04

Review: Capitalism at the Crossroads–The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World’s Most Difficult Problems (Hardcover)

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad)

Partner with Prahalad, Valuable Distinct Contribution,

December 9, 2005

Stuart L. Hart

Edited to respect new information I did not have before, and thank the person making the comment. Also adding hot links.

The author, who gives full credit to C.K. Prahalad, has been a co-author with Prahalad and they are both credited with this brilliant vision for a new kind of moral capitalism that addresses the needs of the five billion poor.

This book should be viewed as a valuable distinct contribution in its own right, read read with Prahalad's book as well as a third book from Wharton, The Next Global Stage: The Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World As I edit this, I am also remined of Paul Hawkin's Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, and the forthcoming book by Medard Gabel, Seven Billion Billionaires, with a preview here at Where to find 4 billion new customers: expanding the world's marketplace; Smart companies looking for new growth opportunities should consider broadening … consultant.: An article from: The Futurist

It also complements Yale Dean Garten's book, The Politics of Fortune: A New Agenda For Business Leaders which calls on business to be more responsible about the state of the world. All of these books contrast remarkably with William Greider's The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, Clyde Prestowitz's Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions and and John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

The math is quite clear. Business had been focused on high profit margins from the top one billion, with disposable incomes on the order of $20K or so. The bottom of the pyramid, five billion people, with disposable incomes on average of no more than $10 a year, represent a four trillion dollar marketplace.

Where business has gone wrong is in being bureaucratic, immoral, corrupt, and focused on outputs for profit rather than listening for solutions that can be profitable (with low profit margins, very high volume, and transformative effect).

I believe that these two individuals could one day win the Nobel Peace Prize for their work, which could literally save the world. As Jonathan Schell tells us in The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People there are not enough guns on the planet to keep these four billion dispossesed from impacting on us negatively. We can help them create indigenous stabilizing wealth in their home countries, or we can die with them as we all suffer the end of cheap oil, the end of free water, and the rise of pandemic disease.

This author is an extraordinary talent, equal to Prahalad. It merits comment that Wharton appears to have displaced Yale as a phenomenal publishing house. For me to find three world-class books on this topic, and for all of them to be from Wharton, is noteworthy.

2005/11/112009/12/04

Review: The Future of Work–How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life (Hardcover)

4 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Future

Light, Western-bias, but worthwhile,

November 11, 2005

Thomas W. Malone

The bottom line in this book is on page 33, with a table showing how the cost of moving a page of text around the world and to an infinite number of people has gone from astronomical to zero. In the author's view, this changes everything.

The book is somewhat shallow, written for undergraduates, and very western in bias–as I ranted to Interval in 1993 (“God, Man, and Interval” easily found via Google), until these benefits can reach every impoverished individual in the world, so that they can begin using information access to create wealth, then we are simply in isolation.

Interestingly, the zero cost of communications comes at the same time that we pass the “peak oil” point and the end of cheap oil, the end of free water, and the rise of pandemic disease.

In that vein, I give the author high marks, taking the book to 4 stars from 3, for his emphasis on values. There is an ethical underpining to this book that is helpful. There is a broad literature, some recognized by the author, others not, that suggests that we made a very serious mistake when we disconnected work from kinship, and commoditized the human employee. The gutting of the pension funds and the destruction of local production in the face of Wal-Mart using cheap oil to ship US jobs overseas are just the latest examples of how our loss of perspective and ethics at the top of the food chain has hurt our economy and our people.

I believe that the author is on target with his emphasis on communications, but he does not address the other half of the equation, “sense-making” or collective intelligence. For that aspect I recommend Howard Rheingold's “Smart Mobs,” and Tom Atlee's “The Tao of Democracy.” General Alfred M. Gray, then Commandant of the Marine Corps, drove this point home to Congress in the late 1980's when he said that the Marine Corps, alone among the military services, had communications and intelligence under the same flag officer “because communications without intelligence is noise, and intelligence without communications is irrelevant.” You need both.

One important point the author does not cover since he avoids addressing the needs of the Third World is this: the Department of Defense has enormous stores of abandoned communications satellite “residual capability,” that last 10-20% of a satellite that has been junked in favor of a newer fancier model. My Air Force colleagues tell me that a national project to make that capability available free could support T-1 connectivity across Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Government is not yet in the information age, and not yet able to realize that it is Internet connectivity to all, not guns over all, that will bring peace and prosperity to the Earth. I do believe this author understands that, and I hope he expands his vision to embrace intelligence, and global access.

2005/06/252009/12/04

Review: Three Billion New Capitalists–The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East (Hardcover)

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

Strategic, Economic Fundamentals, Compelling, Cannot Ignore,

June 25, 2005

Clyde Prestowitz

Before writing this review, I reflected carefully on the thoughts of those who say that the author, who is known to me, was wrong about Japan, that he emphasizes the best points of the new competitors (China and India) while neglecting our best points. There is certainly something to what they say, but as one who studies the entire world for our US Government clients, with a special familiarity with Chinese operations in Africa and South America, and a business familiarity with what is happening in India, I have to say that on balance, the author is more correct his critics will admit, and this is a book that we simply cannot ignore.

His most important point is made in one line: America does not have a strategy. America does not have a strategy for winning the global war on terror, it does not have an energy strategy, it does not have an education strategy, it does not have an economic or competitiveness strategy. The government is being run on assertion and ideology rather than evidence and thought–a media cartoon has captured the situation perfectly: as the VP tells the President that we are “turning the corner” the two walls behind them are labeled Incompetence and Fantasy. As a moderate Republican and a trained intelligence professional with two books on the latter topic, I have to say that this book by this author, a Reaganite businessman and senior appointee in the Department of Commerce is right on target. We *are* out of touch with reality, and we do not appreciate, at any level from White House to School House, the tsunami that is about to hit us.

The author makes two important points early on in the books: first, that information is the currency of this age, replacing money, labor, and physical resources; and second, that the best innovation comes from the right mix of sound education across the board, heavy investment in research & development, and a co-located manufacturing bases that can tinker with R&D and have a back and forth effect. America lacks all three of the latter, and is not yet serious about investing in global coverage of all languages, 24/7.

There is a great deal of commonality between this book and Tom Friedman's The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century both written and published in the same time frame. Both authors agree that the Internet has put an end to time and space constraints, and both agree that American labor is very much at risk because our basic education is flawed and we have no strategy for demanding continuing education from employers. The author excels at drawing the connection between poor education, “it's been twenty years since anyone at Bell Labs received a Nobel Prize,” and the massive increase in outsourcing of knowledge work, not just scut work.

I do have to say, having called Friedman's latest book a massive Op-Ed in my review of that book, that this author is more thoughtful, provides more historical context, and delves into more basic important detail that Friedman–put bluntly, his book is more serious and more valuable than Friedman's, as in this is the meat, where Friedman is the sauce. Prestowitz addresses the core issues of the value of the dollar, the central place of energy, the role of demographics, and the fundamental macro-economic and structural imbalances that will weaken America, that are weakening America, over the passage to of a century of time–this is not a “snap-shot,” this is a *deep* look into the soul of America.

Chapter 12, the author's recommendations, is alone worth the price of the book and should be required reading in every comparative economics and national security policy classroom. I won't list these recommendations but will highlight just a couple that struck me as immediately actionable: declaration of energy independence; DoD as a catalyst for socio-economic recovery by taking the lead in energy, education, and intelligence, learning how to wage peace; end to subsidies (the author uncharacteristically fails to note that we can increase government revenues by $500B a year if we not only eliminate subsidies, but stop import-export tax fraud and demand that corporations pay taxes on the profits they declare to their shareholders rather than the falsified and manipulated balance sheets they present to the IRS); join Japan and India to NAFTA–this is an outrageously brilliant idea.

Clyde Prestowitz is one of the most insightful, balanced, *sane* voices on national competitiveness today. He would make an excellent Secretary of Commerce in the transpartisan Administration.

Category: Capitalism (Good & Bad)

Review: The Party’s Over–Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (Paperback)

Review: Crossing the Rubicon–The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (Paperback)

Review: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid–Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Hardcover)

Review: Next Global Stage–The: Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World (Hardcover)

Review: Capitalism at the Crossroads–The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World’s Most Difficult Problems (Hardcover)

Review: The Future of Work–How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life (Hardcover)

Review: Three Billion New Capitalists–The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East (Hardcover)