Product Description: America is on the brink of a financial meltdown. I.O.U.S.A. boldly examines the rapidly growing national debt and its consequences for the United States. Burdened with an ever-expanding government and military, increased international competition, overextended entitlement programs, and debts to foreign countries that are becoming impossible to honor, America must mend its spendthrift ways or face an economic disaster of epic proportions. Over 125 minutes of bonus materials, including exclusive interviews with Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan and others.
I.O.U.S.A. educates people about the very real and very dangerous financial problems our government is facing. The producers of the film pull no punches here and they don't sugar-coat it; and that was the right thing to do. The way Americans live today is essentially “living for the moment” without thinking of the importance of saving money for a rainy day; and the film goes into great, great detail highlighting that the American government does the same. I will tell you just some of the points made by this movie; although it will seem as if I've given it all away I assure you that I haven't. Continue reading “Review (Guest) DVD: I.O.U.S.A. DVD on US Bankruptcy”
Beyond 6 Stars–Could Help Destroy Strong, Gore, & IPCC
December 4, 2009
This is a preliminary review as there are no others. I will spend the week-end creating a timeline, sorting out the good guys and the bad guys, and charting the costs real and projected.
Short version: bad science, bad media, bad politics, bad finance.
I list these–and point to others at the end of this preliminary review–to make the point that this author's stellar and very complete work with very good notes is the coup de grace–the final bullet in the head of the IPCC, a mercy killing long over-due. [Disclosure: I funded the first three years of the Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 Public Charity that accepts the ten high-level threats to humanity for action, and places climate change within priority #3, Environmental Degradation–we also place a very high priority on clarity, diversity, integrity, and sustainability of effort.
I received this book in pre-publication form so as to offer a blurb for the jacket. Below is my take on this book.This book will simultaneously tease your brain, arouse your emotions, and motivate you as it probes deeply into the soul of man, society, and capitalism as the engine of Western civilization.
The author gifts us with a counter-culture manifesto that resurrects the goodness of capitalism while also connecting to the roots of humanity, of the human soul as a microcosm of the soul of society.
Be patient, the first third of this book will amuse, enlighten, & provoke, at which point it will grab you by the throat and shake your fundamental perceptions of life. The author is compelling in both a scientific sense, weaving psychology, biology, economics, and sociology together; and in an artistic sense, delivering theater of the mind, new visions, poetic turns of phrase page after page, and a massive amount of purpose-laden provocative minutia, all of which culminates in blinding flashes of insight that explain the mind-expanding role of circuses, the failure of religion, and the natural cycles of fission and fusion, splintering apart and coming together.
5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely a Core Reference, August 21, 2009
I am so very glad to see this book at least available from some sellers in second-hand form. I still have my orginal hard cover from 1976 and took it down from my military shelf to appreciate it once more. I urge the publisher to re-print this book, and I would be deeply honored to be asked to write a foreword to the next edition. Norman Dixon has made a signal contribution that will long out-live all of us.
Although I despise Amazon for pre-emptorily deleting over 350 of my shared images to get rid of 12 copies of Bush-Obama sharing a face, I think so highly of this book that I have taken the time to scan and load my own original book cover. You can find all of my uncensored work at the Public Intelligence Blog.
This is nothing less than an essential reference in the leadership arena, and particularly in the national security arena. The author is a deeply original speaker of truth to power, and his work on the characteristics of incompetence, his chart on the role of “bull,” his discussions of the reactions to criticisms, the concept of “efficiency” in the armed forces, and his examination of both the kinds of relationships and the interplay among the authoritarian personality and “group-think” are all very very important.
Most of our military officers (in the USA) have for decades forgotten that they swear an Oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and instead they translate that oath into blind obedience to the chian of command, no matter how illegal, idiotic, or illogical those orders might be.
Three for Lacking an Index, Beyond Five Stars for Content
July 25, 2009
Webster Griffin Tarpley
This extraordinary work, first developed in the mid-1990's and updated recently for a second edition, would normally receive 3 stars from me for lacking an index. I know the author and I admire Progressive Press, but to put out a book of this quality in terms of content, without taking the week needed to create an index, is to me as a professional utterly unforgivable. I urge the publisher to create an index online and modify the description here at Amazon to alert readers to the availability of an index. Without an index for looking up Greenspan, Rubin, Goldman Sachs, or Morgan Stanley, this book loses half its value.
OK, that's the end of the rant. The content of this book–given that it was written a decade before Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) was bribed by lobbyists to put 200 pages of deregulation into a bill five minutes before it was to be voted on (and all Senators voted knowing this)–is beyond five stars. This is precisely the kind of knowledge that many, not just this author, have been putting before the public without effect since at least the 1970's.
At $26 this book is a gift and I urge one and all to buy it as both an education and as a keepsake. The author, whose books on Bush, on Obama, and on 9-11 I have found to be superbly researched and ably presented, is one of the modern greats in historical fact-finding and investigative history.
Up front he lays out a five point program for overcoming the world depression, and I am pretty sure that the Goldman Sachs executive now in charge of the US Treasury has absolutely zero interest in this public intelligence. The plan:
2. Nationalize the Federal Reserve System and re-start lending and the credit system generally. [I stand with Ron Paul in calling for its elimination after an interim period of public control, I am certain the audit that is being planned will reveal high crimes and misdemeanors such that I would keep Guantanamo open just to hold the Fed and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and City-Bank executives, among others, until we reclaim their stolen wealth from the public. The author includes here zero interest loans for real physical production and construction.
3. Restart borrowing for production with a vast program of infrastructure development and science drivers for the modernization and recovery of the economy.
The author itemizes $12.8 trillion in gift money from the taxpayer to the bankers at our expense, and this is a debt that I hope we not only renounce, but follow up with a confiscation of the overseas accounts where all of our money has been converted into foreign currencies so that the bankers can literally double their money–I am not making this up–when Obama declared a bank holiday and federalizes the police in late August or early September, and the US dollar devalues to half its current value (which is in turn half its value in the early 1970's).
Most of us do not need to read this book in its entirety, especially those of us on heart medication. This is a thoughtful balanced book that will make any intelligent person with integrity ANGRY. America remains a great Nation in its people and its land, but its leadership is criminally corrupt and has committed treason against the public since at least 1974 when Peak Oil was first briefed to the Senate and Exxon/Esso and the banks persuaded the U.S. Government's political leadership to ignore the research and carry on with Empire as Usual.
The re-issuance of this book validates and vindicates the author's research and integrity, and I for one, as the top Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, am more than pleased to stand alongside Webster Tarpley, pledging my sacred honor to the Republic–the sovereign people of American who created the federal government as a SERVICE. The federal government is NOT in charge, Goldman Sachs and the Fed are. It's time for a non-violent revolution, and I believe that books like this need to be in circulation among the two thirds of the eligible voters planning to kick the two-party tyranny out of office in 2010.
Webster Tarpley is an American hero in the tradition of Paul Revere.
I love the book, not least because it reiterates the Secretary of Defense view that the military cannot win this Long War alone.
What this book does NOT address is the raw fact that we are our own worst enemy, and that as long as we make policy based on delusional fantasies combined with rapid profiteering mandates from Goldman Sachs and Wall Street, as long as we lack a strategic analytic model, and as long as we are completely opposed to actually creating a prosperous world at peace, then the USA is destined for self-immolation.
HOWEVER, if you recognize as I do that those in power are completely divorced from reality, having become “like morons” as Daniel Ellsberg lectured Henry Kissinger in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and that both Congress and the White House consist of good people trapped in a bad system that robs each and every one of them of their integrity, then no happy ending is possible.
The power and common sense of the Average American (see the book by that title, I am out of authorized links) can still be brought to bear, but first we have to stop this nonsense of thinking that if we only have the right strategy, we can evil and force not just the emerging powers, but Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards like the Congo, Malaysia, Pakistan, South Africa, and Turkey into their “role” as playthings of the American Empire.
Please. We have gone from a village idiot to a major domo that gives good theater, and books like this are still being written? Get a grip!
Phi Beta Iota, the new honour society committed to public intelligence in the public interest, is now publishing the free online Journal of Public Intelligence. There are no costs or qualifications save one: have a brain and use it in the public interest.
The corruption of the leaders and the complacency of the West in accepting that corruption is a recurring theme. If the USA does not stop supporting dictators and embracing corruption as part of the “status quo” then no amount of good will or aid will suffice.
