One could almost condense the whole of Kolko thought into a single sentence: “Political problems have political and social, not military solution.” He says this at least four or five times in the current volume, as he has even more often previously. A common criticism of Kolko is that he's repetitive. This doesn't speak to the fact that the deafening silence with which his work is greeted is a far harsher, and equally invalid, criticism. Kolko's alleged repetitiveness is more grasp of nuance and comprehensiveness than it is lack of imagination.
World in Crisis: the End of the American Century is an implicit rejoinder to what Kolko himself calls the lunatics in the Bush regime. It is the typically unique type of excellence in political observation I, at any rate, expect of Kolko. The essays in the current volume are a second, yet enduring draft of history reviewing the political turmoil of the last four or five years. They examine the financial crisis, US foreign policy, Israel, the current and historical US alliance system, US intelligence agencies, and other US policies. The essays have appeared previously on ZNet, […], Counterpunch, in anthologies, and elsewhere. All of them are updated for this book, because, as Kolko notes, they become obsolete almost as soon as they are published due to the accelerated trajectory of geopolitical, technological, financial, and sociological events.
A new book suggests that “It's the economy, stupid,” may be more than political strategy; it may also be the key to environmental sustainability. The book is Green Washed: Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet, by Kendra Pierre-Louis. The argument developed is not just that the consumer choices of an individual won't save the planet without collective action, but also that the only collective action that will save us is abandoning the whole idea of consumer choices.
Pierre-Louis lays the groundwork for her argument by walking us through the hazards of supposedly environmental approaches to numerous fields. First is clothing, in which a big trend is toward organic cotton. While reducing pesticides is all to the good, Pierre-Louis writes, growing cotton — any cotton — is a rapid way to exhaust the earth's stores of fresh water. Among the preferable proposals the author suggests is creating or altering your own clothing so that it means more to you and you throw it away less rapidly. The low-hanging fruit in improving our clothing practices is in quantity, not quality: buy less clothing!
Amazon Page
Next comes diet. Our poisonous farming practices are killing the Mississippi River, exhausting our underground water supplies, drying up the Colorado (on this I recommend the 3-D movie “Grand Canyon Adventure”), eradicating biodiversity, eliminating soil, and consuming fossil fuels. Genetically modified crops are outrageous failures on their own terms, resulting in increased, rather than diminished, use of pesticides and herbicides. Last week, I would add, the Obama administration approved new Monsanto corn despite 45,000 negative public comments and 23 positive, corn that will mean the widespread use of a major ingredient in Agent Orange as herbicide. According to Pierre-Louis, we cannot ethically shop our way out of this, not even by buying local, and we couldn't even if products were meaningfully labeled and the accuracy of the labeling was verified. Instead the easiest solution lies in the fact that, in the United States, we throw away 40 percent of the food we buy. Stop doing that! Start buying and using only what you need.
Brilliant on the problems, missing the reality of the two-party tyranny,December 30, 2011
I received this book as a gift, along with Capitalism 101. Of the two I prefer this one.
On the positive side, both books represent a growing body of citizens who understand that big government is very much alike to central government, and both are forms of fascism / socialism that are bad for the majority.
On the negative side, neither book seems to appreciate the fact that the Republican Party is every bit as corrupt as the Democratic Party.
Being already predisposed to agree with the author on the fundamentals, I found the book interesting but disconnected from a great deal of what I have been working on, including transparency, truth, and trust. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are corrupt; both have been busy borrowing a trillion dollars a year in our name while seeking to regulate our lives into misery.
There is a place for limited government, and a vital role: keeping business honest. Trust lowers the cost of doing business. The two-party tyranny has corrupted America, turned America into The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead.
The books well researched with many interesting notes, and it has an index [the same is not true of Capitalism 101, which is more like a bunch of personal stories bundled together.]
Where I have a problem with books like this (agreeing with the author on the basics) is in the denial of the raw fact that the Republicans have done as much if not more than the Democrats to loot the Republic, they just work in a different way. It was a Republican, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who as banking chairman put in 200 pages of lobbyist written deregulation five minutes before the bill was to be voted on, and it was the other 99 Senators, from BOTH parties, who lacked the integrity to cry foul. It is the Republicans that started the practice of borrowing a trillion dollars a year so they could earmark their way to personal wealth at our expense, charging 5% for each allocation of the public's money to projects we do not need and cannot afford.
We live in a two-party tyranny, and the first thing my fellow lovers of liberty have to get a grip on is that BOTH the Republican AND the Democratic parties are corrupt, have sold us out, and cannot be trusted with the White House in 2012. One reason I am running for the presidential nomination within the Reform Party is because I have concluded that there is nothing wrong with America the Beautiful that cannot be fixed by flushing BOTH parties down the toilet, uniting the Independents, moderates from both parties, the Greens, Libertarians, Constitution, and others in a massive rebirth of a Republic that is Of, By, and For We the People.
So this book, and the Tea Party, are welcome voices, but both need to get a grip on reality: BOTH parties are corrupt, BOTH parties have enabled Wall Street corruption AND Welfare / Socialism corruption. I share the author's view that three fifths or more of the federal government should be shut down, and I advocate a balanced budget and true cost economics as a means of getting all of us back in harmony with reality and one another.
On the positive side, both books represent a growing body of citizens who understand that big government is very much alike to central government, and both are forms of fascism / socialism that are bad for the majority.
On the negative side, neither book seems to appreciate the fact that the Republican Party is every bit as corrupt as the Democratic Party.
Being already predisposed to agree with the author on the fundamentals, I found the book interesting but disconnected from a great deal of what I have been working on, including transparency, truth, and trust. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are corrupt; both have been busy borrowing a trillion dollars a year in our name while seeking to regulate our lives into misery.
The book is clearly a labor of love and a gift to us all. It does not have an index or references. I salute the author for taking the time to write and publish this book–Thomas Jefferson said “A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry,” and one can clearly find educated citizens reading this book and thinking about these challenges.
5.0 out of 5 stars Preliminary Review: Understanding the Trade-Offs & True Cost of Empire,December 8, 2011
I have ordered this book and am very much looking forward to providing readers (and myself, this is how I keep notes) with one of my more detailed reviews. The publisher is to be scolded for not using Inside the Book, one of Amazon's best features, and for failing to provide the best possible use of the Book Description and Editorial Reviews section. While the existing review is good and I have voted for it, it does not do this book justice. My decision to buy was based on the easily found review in The Guardian (UK) by Richard Drayton, “Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression, and Revolt by Richard Gott — review,” published 7 December 2011.
Where I am going to go with my review is toward an in-depth articulation of what has never been done before that I know of, an examination of the trade-offs of Empire and the opportunity costs of Epoch A hierarchical “rule by secrecy.” I have reviewed many books on Empire, Class War, Elite Rule, all easily found in master list online, Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative). I also recommend the observe, Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive).
Russell Ackoff would say that Empire represents centuries of doing the wrong thing righter–and at greater expense across the political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic domains. As we approach the Mayan calendar's start date for Epoch B, 12 December 2012, many of us are conscious that we must abandon old ways and rethink how we organize society. Occupy is a sympton of this – organized people against organized money, organized consciousness against organized violence.
5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond Five Stars-A Liberating / Empowering Book,December 6, 2011
1. On first impressions the book is a major slam. The author and publisher have collected some of the most serious testimonials possible–better than any I have seen on a book of this type.
2. Ten chapters, each chapter at least five segments, means over 50 “snapshots, each easy to digest–my only disappointment with this book is that it fails to provide maps at key points. My favorite book in this regard is Nelson's Complete Book of Bible Maps and Charts, 3rd Edition.
3. I cannot do this book justice. The first and most positive impression I get halfway through the book is that this is a Cliff Note's for smart busy people, boiling down history, philosophy, and putting everything in a sensible context. I dismissed the religion requirement in college, now I am finding that religion is “core” to everything I encounter and if I had to do it over again, would take multiple religion courses as part of my liberal arts education. Certainly this book is a phenomenal offering for any student of any age, as well as adult continuing education.
4. Put bluntly, this book skewers the Zionist hypocrites by name, by government, by time period, by deceptive “offering.” This is not a book that does the same for the Palestinians, I certainly would like to see such a book that could also in passing skewer the Arab dictators as well as the European “enablers” that have made it possible for so much genocide and so many other atrocities to occur for so long in Palestine.
5. The book ends with six strategies, a deeply spiritual and totally practical final chapter on values and emancipation, a section on questions and answers, and an appendix on resources for peace.
6. What I had NOT expected at all, was the RADICAL itemization of ideas from the Bible that are not radical as much as they are FUNDAMENTAL, and including to my enormous surprise, both the seventh year sabatical with debt forgiveness, and the fifty year jubilee with total debt forgiveness across the board. These two–and everything else about this book–make it as timely as one could wish for dealing with the global financial crisis that boils down to corrupt banks eating corrupt governments.
7. I have to read this book again. Being nagged (comment below) led me to rush this out, mostly to honor the author and the spirit of the ideas in this book, but this review is shamefully inadequate–I need to do for this book what I did for Daniel Elsberg's Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, create a table with key points, keywords, do a sort, and then write a summary. I fear I will not get to that anytime soon, so this is my best for now.
Other books I have reviewed and recommend along with this one:
2. What characterizes all books with sensible implementable solutions is one word: INTEGRITY. When politics, intelligence, or commerce lose their integrity, they become corrupt, and as I wrote in my January 2011 letter to The Most Holy Father, “corruption in the secular world is an obstacle to spiritual harmony” and later in the letter, “we need a faith-based global intelligence exchange.” To my enormous surprise, many months later the Vatican pumped out a declaration along these lines (search for Vatican, Ethics, & Truth).
3. There are in my view three “ground-zeros” today for anyone contemplating how to create a prosperous world at peace. The first is Palestine (remember Gandhi: “Palestine is to the Palestinians as France is to the French,”) and what has become an Israeli Zionist plague of genocide and other atrocities perpetrated against the Palestinian people against the wishes of moderate ethical Jews and all others who wish to see a prosperous safe Israel that is not a caricature of Nazi Germany in how it treats “the other.” The second is the global financial system that the Rothchilds and Goldman Sachs [and the Chinese-Indonesian gold masters] have managed to dominate to the point of its–and our–near-death experience. I am a huge fan of Truth & Reconciliation and seek no retrospective vengeance, but it is time for the Rothchilds and Goldman Sachs to go out of business and be absent from the affairs of men. The third is water. I have reviewed twelve books on water here at Amazon and for UNESCO, any my essay containing all reviews can be found by searching for Reference: WATER-Soul of the Earth, Mirror of Our Collective Souls.
Price for 160 Pages Beneath Contempt,November 16, 2011
I am angry–I really wanted to buy and read this book, but a price of $50 for 160 pages is beneath contempt. The author is being abused by the publisher and I urge the author to consider a new publisher for the paperback, or demanding that the paperback be published immediately. Barnes and Noble has been shut down by Amazon — all other publishers appear in intent on staving off their ultimate demise in the face of on demand publishing by gouging the public.
This book in hardcopy should not be sold for more than $25, and in paperback for $16. Please join me in boycotting this publisher, as someone who cares deeply about the dissemination of important knowledge — which the author clearly offers — I find this pricing an utter outrage.
Brilliant on the problems, missing the reality of the two-party tyranny,December 30, 2011
Price for 160 Pages Beneath Contempt,November 16, 2011