Review: Day of Reckoning–How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Culture, Research, Democracy, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Politics, Priorities
Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars

One of A Handful of “Must Reads” for Christmas

December 13, 2007

Patrick Buchanan

Amazon ate my earlier review, probably because they did not like all the links I included to make the point that while Patrick Buchanan is dead on target as an individual minds, there is a *huge* convergence of public opinion from left to right that boils down to this: government is broken, from war criminals in the White House to doormats in Congress abdicating their Article 1 responsibility to balance the power of the Executive.

This book is a perfect complement to that by Lou Dobbs. This may well be one of the most important books at the dawn of the 21st Century, along with Independents Day: Awakening the American SpiritThe Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, and A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.

I regret the loss of my detailed review, here are just a few of the notes from the flyleaf:

+ Insufficient focus on Cheney, but does correctly evaluate Wolfowitz as a madman.

+ Tars Bush's ideology as a “false God”as “modernity's Golden Calf.”

+ Respect Gore Vidal in citing “perpectual war for perpetual peace.”

+ Opens book with excellent discussion of the cost of lost wars and the mismantling of artificial nations (there are 177 failed states today,up from 148 in 2006 and 75 is 2005.

+ This may be the most credible and thoughtful author on the subject of treason in modern times. He explicitly accuses corporate chiefs who favor globalization and “transnationalism” with being traitors to the Republic.

+ He states that Islamic militarism is not a threat to America. I agree.

+ Pages 153-154 provide a brilliant articulation of seven reasons why China is not a threat to the US.

+ I note: “This is the epitaph for the village idiot.”

A few other books supporting his thesis that 2008 is a tipping point year:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition

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Review: An Enormous Crime–The Definitive Account of American POWs Abandoned in Southeast Asia

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars USG Has Betrayed Us All

November 28, 2007

Bill Hendon, Elizabeth Stewart

Edit of 26 Jan 08: see the comments for additional give and take that illuminates the treason of our own government against those “left behind.”

I recommend my review of Is Anybody Listening?: A True Story About POW/MIAs In The Vietnam War and also Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POWs in Vietnam.

This book is more of a scholarly work and has eye-glazing detail. However, as best I can tell, this is the single best and most carefully documented book, with the stellar advantage of having as a co-author the Honorable Bill Hendon, who is not only a former Representative (R-NC) but was on the POW/MIA beat while there.

I am very very very angry. Our politicians, both Republican and Democratic, have betrayed us all, and this brings me to tears, betrayed the honorable warriors who became POWs or were MIA in Viet-Nam.

There are several points that grab me:

Over 1,500 POWs still known to be in Viet-Nam and probably alive.

Viet-Nam had a clear strategy for capturing AND KEEPING ALIVE our personel in order to charge the US for reparations after the war was inevitably won by the Vietnamese

The authors explicitly suggest that Senator John McCain has been fully witting of the reality of how many have been left behind, and complicit in our federal government's deliberate decision to abandon them rather than pay Viet-Nam the compensation they appear to fully merit given our violation of the Geneva Convention and our intrusion into the civil war between North and South.

I hold the authors of this book, and the excrutiating detail that they have assembled, in the greatest regard.

It is now clear to me that the Federal Government as it is now constituted, cannot be trusted. We need Electoral Reform, open books, and an end to secrecy.

See also:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Why We Fight
The Fog of War – Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

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Review (Guest): Kiss the Boys Goodbye–How the United States Betrayed its Own POWs in Vietnam

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Misinformation & Propaganda, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Amazon Page

To the right is the current mass paperback cover that is available.  Below is the cover of the original hard-copy, and a guest review (Amazon is deleting top reviewer's old reviews to make room for new reviewers, we missed this one when creating this web site to counter that “lost history”).

Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning Expose Of Government DesertionOf Its Vietnam Vets!

May 20, 2002

William Stevenson, Monika Jenson-Stevenson

Review by Barron Laycock “Labradorman”

This is a book that should make ordinary American citizens exceedingly sad and angry. Although some may argue that its message is old news, and certainly very dated information, the horror and outrage it should occasion is neither old nor dated. For what the authors contend, and go on to impressively prove, is that our national government deliberately and maliciously betrayed its own soldiers trapped as Prisoners Of War (POWs) in Vietnam, abandoning them in favor of a quick and otherwise painless exit from the war in Southeast Asia. This, as the authors argue, is a truly devastating indictment of the Nixon administration, and one for which they cannot be forgiven.

However, it is more than that. It is also a bizarre story of men left behind for the sake of political expedience and due to a number of highly classified clandestine operations, which were purposely kept from the American people. The story line begins with the sad saga of a young ex-marine who escaped from Vietnam on the late 1970s and claimed to have seen a large number of fellow American servicemen still being held by the Vietnamese. However, he was quickly charged with desertion and collaboration with the enemy, in what seemed to be a desperate effort on the part of governmental officials to bury both him and his story of American prisoners as deeply as possible from public view. From here the plot takes a number of bizzare twists and turns.

As the authors began to investigate the young marine's story, layers of deception, half-truths, and active censorship began to emerge. What they finally uncovered was an amazing tale of official deception from the highest levels in government, and also a very well organized and relentless abuse of official governmental power. This book reveals convincing evidence of American soldiers and sailors deliberately abandoned for political expedience, and of families torn apart by these acts. It also raises quite provocative questions concerning the very nature of democracy, and the corruptibility of ordinary men given such power. Similarly, they show how the use of claims of national security were used to derail efforts to learn the truth, and of an active conspiracy to keep the public from discovering the truth.

There are many of us who have long believed that Nixon and Kissinger made a pact with the devil himself in order to to extricate the United States fro the ongoing horror of Vietnam. What is truly mind-boggling is to discover just how right we were to suspect that they, and many others in the government since that time, would take such drastic action as they have to conceal these facts and to evade the truth. This is a worthwhile book, and one that demands to be read. I hope you can approach it with an open mind. Its arguments and the evidence associated with it are, in my opinion, very convincing. Enjoy!

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Review: The Shock Doctrine–The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Corruption, Disaster Relief, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback
Shock Doctrine
Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars Easily one of the top ten on the death of the American dream

September 30, 2007

Naomi Klein

I read this book while crossing the Atlantic. The author has done something extraordinary, the equivalent of Silent Spring for industrial-era capitalism as an immoral form of human organization. This book is unique but also tightly linked to the books that I list below.

The conclusion of the book focuses on how Wall Street has discovered how to profit from mega-disasters and financial melt-downs, and contrary to popular belief, Wall Street makes money from these economic down-turns. It is the individual, and the indigenous owners who are forced to sell below market, that lose, every time.

The author's opening focus is on privatization, deregulation, and deep cuts in social spending, each as mandated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, with other nasty triggers demanded by the World Trade Organization, that have been systematically used to loot entire nations and their commonwealths–this is apart from the immoral predatory capitalism that uses bribes to clear areas of indigenous peoples so they can steal all the gold or other natural resources, and their only cost is the bribe, while the host peoples lose billions in natural resources.

The author teaches us that “disaster capitalism” is the next step above immoral predatory capitalism, in which wars and disasters have been privatized and the global military-industrial-prison-hospital complex has moved one step closer to displacing all governments.

She spends time discussion torture by dictators as a silent partner to the free-market crusade, and this is a good time to mention that the book is a standing condemnation of all that Milton Friedman and “the Chicago boys” inserted into the IMF and World Bank via their students.

She provides a helpful discussion of how believers in Armageddon, including the neo-conservatives, are motivated by the belief that there is such a thing as a clean slate, and that Africa without Africans, or Iraq without Iraqis, are both desirable for that reason.

She does a tremendous job of outlining the three shock waves of disaster capitalism:

1. Government Disaster/War out-sourced
2. Corporate looting
3. Police terrorism

A portion of the book focuses on the urgency of restoring unions and the middle class, unions because they protect fair wages that create a middle class. She stresses that the 1970's through the 1990's saw a global (but particularly southern hemisphere) campaign to use the cover of counter-terrorism to murder and terrorize union leaders. As a graduate of the Central American and Andean wars, I can certainly testify to the fact that government death squads were as about looting and killing opposition leaders, and I for one saw no terrorists, only indigenous people's at the end of their rope.

Interestingly the author singles out visionaries as being among the top targets for being hunted down and “disappeared.” Visionaries counter the government lies that seek to rule by secrecy, impose scarcity, and concentrate wealth within a small elite.

The author damningly documents how eager corporations have been to work with dictators to create police states that eliminate unions and enslave peoples at wages that cannot support a family, much less create a middle class.

She focuses on national debt and on government corruption as the two pillars of social destruction. As a student of E. O. Wilson and Medard Gabel, and many others, I can testify that there is plenty of money for all of us to be virtual billionaires, but it is corruption and greed at the top, enabled by secrecy, that have allowed a handful to create a global class war and impoverish the 90% that do the hard work (see my list on this one).

I am utterly blown away by the author's overall assessment, in the middle of the book, to wit, that crisis is now used routinely to side-step reasoned democracy and completely halt political and social reform while furthering the ends of those who seek to concentrate wealth and power exclusive of the larger body of We the People.

The author is damning across the board of the failures of neoliberalism, which has been a “second pillage” of the looting of state-owned enterprises, following the first pillage, the looting of the natural resources of the commonwealth being targeted.

As part of this the author explicitly accuses the IMF of deliberately fostering crises in part by fabricating and manipulating statistics, or as the author puts it, “statistical malpractice.”

The author suggests that unlike the Mexican bail-out, when Rubin was seeking to protect Wall Street investments, Asia was allowed to collapse financially because the US wanted to put an end to the prospects of their being a “third” way that was more balanced than either capitalism for the few on one side, or socialism for all on the other. This is especially noteworthy because Latin America is today pursuing a similar “third way” and very likely to succeed.

The author declares that Donald Rumsfeld's over-riding objective as Secretary of Defense was the privatization of war. The author tells us that he declared war on the Pentagon bureaucracy on 10 September (this is the same day that Congresswoman McKinney's was grilling him on the missing 2.3 trillion dollars). On 11 September the missile won Rumsfeld his war with the Pentagon bureaucracy *and* it destroyed the computers with all the records on the missing money.

The author goes on to document how the Bush Administration privatized Homeland Security across the board.

As the book draws to a close she reviews the history of corporate-driven foreign policy, summing it up in three steps:

1. Corporation suffers set-back in a foreign country
2. Politicians loyal to the corporation demonize the foreign country
3. Politicians “sell” US public on the need for regime change.

The author scorns political appointees, noting that their “service” these days is little more than a pre-raid reconnaissance.

She concludes by suggesting that disaster apartheid is leaving 25-60% of the populations as an underclass, destroyed middle classes, and creating walled cities for the elite, death and suffering for everyone else. Dubai is one such walled city.

Corporations are red-lining the world, using stocks, currency, and real estate markets to crash economies, buy cheap, and then restore with a sharp re-concentration of wealth.

Ending on a positive note, she suggests that We the People are in the process of reconstructing our own world, and while I did not see mention of the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER) or Interra and the other community-oriented systems, I believe she is correct, and that the Earth Intelligence Network, the Transpartisan Policy Institute, the People's Budget Office, are all part of taking back the power and the commonwealth.

This is a great and necessary book. Others (the first two DVDs) listed below reinforce her findings.

The Corporation
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back
The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

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Review: The New American Story

3 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Corruption, Politics

BradleyBill Bradley (D) for President and Bloomberg (I) for VP?,

May 28, 2007

Bill Bradley

Edit of 5 Jul 09 to observe Bradley is theater–a fraud–as are all the others. With Obama it has become clear that the Borg consists of Wall Street (including Allen & Co) owning Congress, Treasury, Justice, and the Fed. We the People have been mugged.

Edited 25 Jun 07 to focus on possibility of Bradley-Bloomberg and comment.

This is a very solid, well-written and well-documented, and with great insights that I am all too happy to absorb in my capacity as an estranged moderate Republican. On balance I find Bill Bradley to be smarter, more nuanced, more deliberate, and not so trivially, taller and fitter than Al Gore. I am so impressed by the possibilities that I am immediately going back to my existing copy of Price of Loyalty, the story of how Dick Cheney betrayed Paul O'Neill and all the rest of us moderate Republicans, to see if there is a cross-walk that can be done. If these two worthies will agree to electoral reform and a transpartisan Cabinet, we can save the Republic in 2008.

The book begins with a marvelous review of the many false stories the extremist Republicans and their White House neo-cons have been telling about everything from tax cuts and the deficit and Medicare to Iraq, terrorism, and so on He has mastered the story-telling dynamic so recommended by Stephen Denning, the World Bank's Chief Knowledge Officer until his retirement.

In Part II of the book the author explores the break-downs in global cooperation and global responsibility, and specifically points to the growth of religion as a force we cannot ignore. See Left Hand of God. He addresses the big picture issues including the concentration of wealth and the drop in savings, increase in inequality, and failure to invest in the future (education, infrastructure).

His review names three systems–economic, social, and national defense–where we are being pushed to the breaking point. In a somewhat scattered fashion, he moves across education, the deficit, tax reform, geopolitical instability, oil, water, pensions, stock market, and health care (specifically praising Paul O'Neil and holistic reform.

In part III he identifies voter turn-out and electoral reform as the two keys to victory over money and conglomerate media spin. The book then ends with what for me was complexly new and useful insight on why the Republicans cannot fix nor manage America, and why the Democrats continue to flounder.

His eight “curses” of the Democratic Party:
1) Fear of thinking big
2) Capitulation on defense (hard vs soft power)
3) Inability to counter accusations of being wasteful spendthrifts
4) Close-minded devotion to the secular
5) Wealth-bashing
6) Special Friends in teachers, trial lawyers, and auto workers
7) Ceased to stand on principle
8) Hypnotized by charisma

There is no one now running that I consider worthy of being the first transpartisan president. Bradley, if he adopted the three standards: electoral reform as the only truly urgent issue; transpartisanship and a transpartisan cabinet announced in advance; and a commitment to show a balanced budget addressing all ten threats with all ten policies by November 2008, I'd want to be part of that restoration of the Republic.

The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill
Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (Bk Currents)
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

Review: At the Center of the Storm–My Years at the CIA

4 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Corruption, Crime (Government), Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, Justice (Failure, Reform), Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Security (Including Immigration), Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), War & Face of Battle

Center StormDeceptive Beginning, Vital Middle, Disappointing End,

May 5, 2007

George Tenet

This is a very good book. There are some extremely important nuggets in here that essentially put the final nail in Dick Cheney's coffin while certifying the importance of holding Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Cambone accountable for their high crimes and misdemeanors. Condi Rice continues to be depicted, in this book and others, as a zero in the sense of having been ignored, sidelined, or run over by Dick Cheney and his minions.

The book loses one star for a lack of prior context. George Tenet was Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) for many years, and then Intelligence Director for Bill Clinton. He avoids any mention of his long-standing role in helping dismantle the very IC he ended up leading, and he is terribly deceptive when he says he asked for more funding for anti-terrorism, but fails to mention his inability to redirect funds within the $35-40 billon he had at the time. Today the IC has $60-70B and we are no safer–these clowns cannot even put together a consolidated accurate terrorist watchlist five years after 9/11.

The bottom line on the author is that he is a big-hearted staffer, not a leader and not a strategic thinker. He was a place-holder in a job that two presidents saw fit to relegate to losers–a mouse, a pit-bull, and a turtle.

He takes credit for months of redesign dialog but fails to point out that there was no substantive contact with iconoclasts, published author-practitioners. I am especially angry that he placed Buzzy Krongard in as Executive Director. In my view, Krongard was there to look out for Wall Street interests and ensure Brown and Root did not get caught smuggling drugs into the USA through New Orleans and heavy equipment being returned to the USA “for repairs.” I've come to the conclusion, after thirty years in this business, that there are four CIA's: 1) White House sychophants; 2) Wall Street support via Carlyle Group and a small network of retired intermediaries; 3) the “front” of earnest people working out of official installations, incapable of actually doing serious spying (I was part of this group); and finally, a multinational “dirty deeds” arm that does terribly immoral and illegal things with Saudi money, Egyptian sodomy of children (photographed so as to force them to spy on their fathers), and so on.

In many ways, this book is a capstone account of the death of US secret intelligence. It's gone. The DNI, DCI and USDI are earnest men, but they will fail because they simply do not comprehend the “paradigms of failure” (essay online) and are not willing to contemplate a clean-sheet fresh-start. On page 26 the author confirms that “time and technology [have] passed us by.”

As fascinating as his claims are of ramping up on Bin Laden, I go with Michael Sheuer's damnation as published by the Washington Post. Condi Rice blew off warnings, Dick Cheney focused on energy conspiracies with Enron and Exxon, and the plain truth is that the CIA refused to read the book by Yossef Bodansky or view the PBS broadcast in 1994 by Steve Emerson. They closed themselves off from open sources (called “Open Sores” within the now near-moronic secret world).

The middle of the book is sensational. Chapter Thirteen on “The Threat Matrix” and the succeeding chapters in Part II of the book are superb and contain many nuggets that restored much of my respect for the author.

The author damns Cheney on page 138 for taking over the National Security Council and it is clear that if there is one person to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, it is not the President, but rather the Vice President.

On page 317 he tells us that “Policy makers have a right to their own opinions but not their own set of facts.”

He slams Rumsfeld for blocking several 737's full of State people and language-qualified individuals specifically trained and organized to get the post-war reconstruction off to a good start. He does not mention Rumsfeld's idiocy in allowing Pakistan to evacuate 3,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda people from Tora Bora, but he does mention that General Tommy Franks refused to put the Rangers in Bin Laden's path, claiming he needed weeks to set it up (this is of course baloney, they could have been air-dropped in 24 hours with a 3-day resupply 24 hours after arrival).

He defends himself on the “slam dunk” as applying to the presentation plan for the UN, not the intelligence. I want to believe this, but the fact that he took imagery and other materials to the first NSC meeting, significantly on Iraq rather than terrorism, gives me pause. I certainly do believe that Dick Cheney hijacked the White House and closed out the entire policy process, but George Tenet, Colin Powell, and our generals all failed us by not resigning and screaming out at the top of their lungs against the high crimes and misdemeanors they witnessed Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Steve Cambone commit, day after day.

He lays bare Cheney's misbehavior in stating on 26 August 2002 that “there is no doubt” on Iraq's having weapons of mass deception but very strangely does not mention that both Hussein's son-in-law who defected to the US, and every one of the 25+ line crossers that Charlie Allen sent in, all said the same thing: kept the cook books, destroyed the stocks, bluffing for regional ego's sake.

He slams Paul Bremer for de-Bathification and confirms that “Iraq came at exactly the right time for Al Qaeda.”

The author avoids major criticism of Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, but he reveals the DoD operations against Iran. He tells us about Chalabi hoaxing DIA for millions, and that President Bush ordered Chalabi off the payroll.

He confirms Paul William's view on Al Qaeda having nuclear capabilities.

Pre 9/11 air travelers believed “be calm, see Cuba” when hijacked. Pre 9-11, and today still, our senior government executives are still confusing loyalty with integrity. We can do better. We need, right now, a “Smart Nation.”

On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11
Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
Osama's Revenge: THE NEXT 9/11 : What the Media and the Government Haven't Told You
The True Cost of Conflict/Seven Recent Wars and Their Effects on Society
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

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I Respond to Comments Here or There

Review: How The World Really Works

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Crime (Organized, Transnational), Religion & Politics of Religion

How World WorksBest Insight into Organized Crime-Vatican-Wall Street Collaboration,

January 29, 2007

Alan B. Jones

I am going to put my reputation on the line, and the 850+ non-fiction books I have read that make me the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction (and to my great surprise, today #49 over all fiction, movies, music, and software as well as non-fiction) for the simple reason that too many people discuss books such as this by labeling it “conspiracy theory.”

It's not a conspiracy theory if it is true. I will try to be brief as well as illuminative.

First off, the author has culled a handful of books that support his case against a global financial elite, and these tend, with the exception of the Quigley book, to be left of left of center. I am however happy to add a number of books that support his essential theses that a handful of banking families control the central banks which are NOT government banks, and through loans, control governments, impoverish the middle class, and harvest profit without conscience from the “working poor.”

Try these on for size:

1) Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. 85% rock solid, 15% flakey, but in my view, a perfectly reasonable slam on the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund as instruments for impoverishing lesser developed countries, not empowering them.

2) The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey Sachs, another slam on the WTO/IMF, which he relegates to third rate out-dated economist ranks, not at all focused or able to achieve what he calls “developmental economics.”

3) The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back by Jeff Faux, a fine discussion of how our elites bribe the elites in other countries, and the both screw the public by looting the commonwealths of gold, oil, etcetera, without returns to the people whose families have lived on top of these resources for centuries.

4) Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It, by Paul Peterson of the Council of Foreign Relations (which the author hates, in my view it has two types of members–one manipulative like Henry Kissinger, another honest, like Paul Peterson), in which both the Republican and the Democratic parties are lambasted for being the ignorant slaves of the ultra-rich elites, and hopeless out of touch with reality and unable to represent We the People.

5) War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It by General Smedley Butler, the highest decorated Marine of his time, who complained about being an enforcer for banks and businesses that lent money to the Third World then sent the Marines to get it back for them.

There are many other books that support this author's book reviews in great detail and from many varied perspectives. I refer you to my various lists, including the list on “Screwing the 90% that do the work.”

The author has some pretensions and some slop, his arguments are not always consistent, but then neither are mine. On balance I regard this book as a first rate personal effort that should be read by every middle class person wondering, as Lou Dobbs on CNN has wondered, why we are exporting middle class jobs and importing poverty in the form of illegal aliens.

The author wraps up his varied reviews with a focus on the relationship between organized crime and the super-elite as well as their political elite (e.g. the Bush family, the best of the servant class), and on the relationship between drugs, covert operations, and Wall Street. Here again the author draws on a very tiny sub-set of books while not listing many others that support his thesis so I will mention a few here.

Having been through both Viet-Nam as a youth and the Central American Wars as an adult, I am quite certain that there are at least four different slices of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) where I served for ten years as a clandestine case officer:

A small slice does what the White House wants, including black bag jobs.

A small but more important slice does what Wall Street wants, and helps Wall Street with access to financially relevant information that the public which pays for the CIA does not get. Buzzy Krongard, until recently Executive Director of the CIA, comes to mind as the most recent leader of this section.

A larger slice, that does covert action off the books with funding from Saudi Arabia and others, sometimes called the Safari Club, sometimes having off-shoots like Ted Shackley's Southern Air Transport, and so on. This slice can provide the intersection between criminal activities, white collar crime profits, illegal White House activities, and plain profiteering.

Finally, 90% of the CIA, folks like me that did not realize they were simply going through the motions and giving the local counterintelligence service a full-time rabbit to follow while the commercial clandestine boys and girls looted the bank in bright daylight.

I have two intelligence lists that can be helpful here, but I have not focused on creating crime lists. I'll just say that between the books on the The Working Poor: Invisible in America and on being Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in Americaand books on immoral predatory capitalism and unilateral militarism of the Dick Cheney variety (I have compiled a list of 25 specific impeachable actions by Dick Cheney based on three books:

The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil

There is a very clear-cut and direct relationship between dictators, transnational organized crime and terrorism, and Wall Street as well as the Republican and Democratic National Committees (see Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It)

That reminds me: there is an entire literature on petroleum, peak oil, petrodollars, and so on. Americans have been betrayed by their government since at least 1975, and more likely, back to the 1950's when naiveté about international affairs was replaced by active complicity.

Good news. 1) Internet leveled playing field. 2) Not enough guns to kill us all. 3) A few of the really rich have realized they need to help us create infinite wealth for ourselves, or lose all they have to locusts. Read, be vocal, be active, we're going to get a grip on our commonwealth soon.

Tip of the Hat to Jere for the following added links:
When Corporations Rule the World
The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents–The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. a. Hayek)
Money Masters of Our Time

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