The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
David Gaeber
By Peter Richardson on March 19, 2015
What intense pleasure this book gave me, despite the dull topic: bureaucracy. Anthropologist David Graeber is perhaps best known for Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), which became required reading for the Occupy Wall Street movement. In that book, Graeber showed that the standard explanation for the origins of money, rehearsed in dozens of economics textbooks, was a fairy tale.
Ralph Nader
4.0 out of 5 stars Valentine for the Real Conservatives — Bland and Not Transformative, March 9, 2015
Positive up front: reading a book by another person is like getting a few hours of their time to yourself, so any book by Ralph Nader is a substantive value to anyone interested in ethics and governance. However, this is not the transformative book I was hoping for, and I even have to wonder if all the great minds providing blurbs even read the book. For the long critique of this book, which I totally embrace, see Herbert Calhoun's 3-star review, This is Both an Accurate and a Useful Treatise, But …?, October 25, 2014. I'd like to see it voted up, Mr. Calhoun, whom I have had the privilege of meeting at Amphoras in Vienna, is one of the most intelligent and broadly read individuals I have ever encountered.
Second positive up front: in terms of inspiring generations of independent thinkers some of whom have become thought leaders in their own right, Ralph Nader is special. Jim Turner — co-author with Lawrence Chickering of Voice of the People: The Transpartisan Imperative in American Life and Theresa Amato, whose own book Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny contributed to my radicalization, stand out.
EDIT: I have placed in bold the paragraph everyone is missing.
Alan Ryan
5.0 out of 5 stars Gem of a Book, Author's Synthesis is Priceless, March 6, 2015
I picked this up at Powell's Bookstore in Portland (10 times bigger than Tattered Cover in Denver, both worth going out of your way to visit) and it is a GEM of a book in two ways: the author provides a summary overview of Marxism that is hugely beneficial to anyone looking for a sound critique of capitalism as we know it today; and the author has selected a few pieces by Marx to be read in the original.
Peter Linebaugh's Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance (Spectre) is what forced me to reconsider Marx's critique of capitalism and I recommend that 2014 publication to anyone who wishes to think critically about capitalism today, with this book as a very fine follow-on.
QUOTE (64): “The modern republic attempts to impose political equality upon an economic inequality it has no way of alleviating.
Richard Wolff with David Barsamian
5.0 out of 5 stars SIX STAR Primer on the Necessary Socio-Economic Revolution, February 28, 2015
SIX STAR (my top 10% across 2000+ non-fiction book). This is an extraordinary book full of straight talk and common sense that sets the stage for a socio-economic revolution, first in the USA and then elsewhere. It does not address the many isolated incidents of collaborative capitalism and the commons that are in motion around the world — for that look up Michel Bauwens and the work of others on the economic commons — and it neglects the coincident need for a political revolution which is what my latest book on Open Power is about — but on balance this is easily a six-star offering.
Continue reading “Review: Occupy the Economy – Challenging Capitalism”
Peter Dale Scott
5 Star Connecting the Dots
By The Peripatetic Reader on December 13, 2014
Peter Dale Scott has written many books about the Deep State at work in the U.S. government. Scott depicts American society as structurally and inherently schizophrenic. Just as there is the public government and the deep government, and ordinary events and deep events, there are two dominant forces permeating United States history: One egalitarian, believing in fairness, inclusion, and free expression, and the other militaristic and exclusionary, which is only interested in social control.
Robert A. Needham
4.0 out of 5 stars Buy the Kindle not the Print — Thoughts Worth Considering, December 23, 2014
Enough substance to warrant my finishing the book and writing a summary review.
I accepted this book from a publicist because of my strong interest in “third way” economics. I like the concept of Collaborative Commonwealth very much, an alternative concept is one put forth by Michel Bauwens and others as Open Cooperativism. The two concepts are not as similar as one might think.
What I like most about the book is its very clever use of the water analogy (drops become streams become rivers feed lakes and oceans); its starkly interesting positioning of collaborative commonwealth as being in the sweet spot between the extremes of predatory capitalism and unbridled socialism, and its combination of clear patriotism including a defense of all of the Constitutional Amendments with an equally clear indictment of the US Government as the “gang in possesion” looting the Commonwealth and helping the banksters — including the private bank known as the Federal Reserve — squeeze the last drop of blood out of We the Economic Slaves.
Russell Brand
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, Intricate, Non-Violent, and Optimistic, November 4, 2014
In relation to the 2,000 plus non-fiction books I have reviewed here at Amazon, this book is brilliant. Normally I would consider giving it four stars for lacking an index and endnotes, obviously needed for the poorly educated morons that cannot grasp the many (many) direct references to top authors and thinkers. For crying out loud, Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is received by the author in his home and cited in this book, as are so many others. So a solid five stars for impact and self-made erudition.
Let me state very clearly that the publisher has sodomized this author by not including an index, a bibliography, or endnotes. As the top Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, reviewing books across 98 distinct non-fiction categories, I am blown away by the clever, poetic, and pointed manner in which the author has integrated a vast (vast) range of reading and personal conversations into this book.
