5.0 out of 5 stars Can Cause Discomfort, But This Book MATTERS
May 17, 2008
Grover Norquist
I was given this book as a gift, along with Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies and to my great surprise, being an estranged moderate Reagan Republican, I found that I am much more of a Libertarian than I realized, and this author, although he causes me great discomfort in some areas (such as privatizing Social Security), he makes complete sense. I learn he has been voted one of the 50 most powerful people in DC by GQ (2007) and I believe it. Senator McCain has better listen this time around. I urge all who are enthused with Senator Obama to read Obama – The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate. Senator Obama is NOT transparent and I consider his top foreign policy advisors to be dangerous–Dr. Strangelove (Brzezinski) has one last war with Russia left in him, and seriiousl believes he can confront the Chinese in Africa–this is lunacy (search for my Memorandum online <Chinese Irregular Warfare oss.net>.
The book lacks an index. This is a HUGE MISTAKE on the part of the publisher because there are too many important ideas in this book. The publisher should create and post online an index to this book. The publisher can also be criticized for failing to provide Library of Congress cataloguing information. This is a REFERENCE work. The author should consider holding the publisher accountable for such fundamental incompetencies that detract from the book's lasting value.
The five core reforms that he builds up to are:
1) Portable pensions
2) Competitive health care
3) Educational choice including home schooling
4) Outsourcing of all government functions possible
The author posits a stark choice between the Leave Us Alone movement, that appears to be growing daily (and included 27 secessionist movements that meet annually at a conference organized by Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale, and what he calls the Takings Group, the tax and spend elected officials both Republican and Democratic.
This is a serious reference work with an even mix of books, articles, and online citations.
There are some areas where the author could benefit from knowledge that is not yet mainstream–for example, we can blow away the Medicare unfunded obligations by negotiating prices that are 1% (ONE percent) of what we foolishly pay now, and as a recent PriceWaterHouseCooopers study documented so well, also eliminating the 50% of the medical professional that is waste, including (the author does address this–the tort lawyers like Senator John Edwards who make millions putting good doctors out of business so bad doctors can do more elective operations).
On balance–and this was my first exposure to this individual–I put the book down thinking to myself that this author deserves his reputation, and that he combines a very powerful intellect with an equally powerful moral force.
Compelling Story of US Government Role in Death of Martin Luther King,
May 4, 2008
William F. Pepper
Edit of 8 May 08: Reverend Wright preaches in the negative, but this does not mean he is wrong, only inflamatory. Senator Obama's first instinct was correct: he can no more deny those who walked with us than we can the truth. In renouncing Reverend Wright, Senator Obama demonstrated his subordination to “the system,” the same subordination that swallowed Colin Powell, who confused loyalty with integrity.
John 8:32 Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
The updated book is better than the original because it includes a post 9-11 Afterword.
So many people are going to consider this book to be a provocation, a conspiracy theory, revisionist, etc. I will start with three compelling reasons to take this seriously:
1. The author is a recognized barrister in England and lawyer in the US. His reputation is impeccable, and he is respected by heads of state and of international organizations concerned with human rights.
2. The author brought a civil suit in which it took the jury less than one hour of deliberation after all the facts had been laid out, to find for the plaintiffs (the King family survivors) and agree that the US Government was complicit in his murder.
3. The evidence of US Government complicity in crimes against humanity as well as high crimes and misdemeanors of all sorts, is now over-whelming within the non-fiction literature. Cover-ups are the norm.
Here are my flyleaf notes:
+ King was leading a coalition of peace and civil rights in 1967, one that expanded to address economic injustice and the rights of indigenous people's everywhere, but especially in Viet-Nam. This “new politics,” like the third party politics of today, was so threatening to the Mafia, to banks and corporations, and to the US political and FBI leadership committed to “because we say so, right or wrong,” that he was ordered killed.
+ Unlike others who accepted the government's fictional account at face value, the author actually interviewed James Earl Ray in prison, and over time clearly established both Ray's veracity, and additional evidence.
+ The FBI burglarized Martin Luther King over 20 times.
+ At least two funded “hits” on King were discovered, but the one that succeeded involved Frank Liberto, a Mafia boss in the food business, who evidently forgave a major debt from Lloyd Jowers who served as the on-site cut-out for the weapon but did not do the shooting himself. Links are discussed between the FBI, the Mafia, and local police.
+ The local police pulled back all assigned security, took black officers off watch, and evidently arranged to have King moved from a protected inner courtyard room to an upper room directly in the line of sight from the bushes where the shooter was planning to be.
+ 30 years seems to be the magic time period that must pass before individuals sworn to secrecy to protect political malfeasance realize they should ease their consciences before death.
+ The book includes an appendix that shows the many times the Department of Justice willfully lied or omitted evidence in its own investigation.
+ The author presented nine areas to a court that found for the plaintiff; they are listed on page 108:
01 the background to the assassination
02 the local conspiracy
03 the crime scene
04 the murder weapon
05 Raul (the handler)
06 the broader conspiracy
07 the cover up–its scope and activities
08 the defendant's prior admissions
09 damages
The King family sought damages of just $100. Far more important to them was the verdict of the jury: the US Government, and particularly the FBI and US Army counterintelligence elements acting against US citizens on US soil, were complicit in the murder (assassination) of Martin Luther King.
The author places King is direct opposition to the materialism and the secularization of life to include a loss of morality in US foreign policy. Specifically mentioned in this book are King's objection to US Government support for dictators. See my review of Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025.
The author states that he could not have obtained a trial date, much less a verdict, without the full engagement of the King family. Their participation was of inestimable value, he says. He then goes on to describe how the media, which did not attend the trial, slandered (broadcast) and libeled (print) the family and the memory of Martin Luther King. [This is the same media that refused to run $100,000 cash in advance information advertisements against the elective war on Iraq.]
The author specifically warns of the discreet movement in 2007 of the Violent Radicalization Act allowing the White House to redirect the National Guard from any state to any other state, and believes that there is now an explicit fear among “the elite” of impending and complete system collapse and a public rebellion of consequence.
I have a note from the book, that Martin Luther King was branded a traitor. So also was General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret), the most recently retired Commander in Chief of the U.S. Central Command, and the single most knowledgeable authority at the time on Iraq, Iran, the Middle East, the Pakistan wild card, and Afghanistan. My bottom line: we are lied to; the “experts” are not expert and pander for access–it is time we assert the collective intelligence of We the People.
Completely unexpected to me, but relevant in the context of other books I have been reading, is the author's outline of how King and all that he stood for called into question the entire-military industrial complex and the misdirection of most of our money toward waging war. See my review of War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier and of the DVD Why We Fight.
The last page of the body of the book, page 288, has this quote that I marked:
“Martin King firmly believed that non-violent civil disobedience was the best strategy to obtain justice. There is little doubt in my mind that massive non-violent civil disobedience has the potential to shut down the nation, and compel substantive social, economic, political, and cultural change, leading to the reconstruction of the Republic with a focus on the needs of people rather than capital. His dream lives on in each of us who internalized it.”
This is a very serious movie and I volunteered to appear in it, April 22, 2008
Tommy Chong
I must disclose that I came into this movie at the very end when the brilliant producer realized I could provide a few bits that would bring it all together. I volunteered my time because I felt then–and I feel now–that this film was totally righteous. So I am listed as one of the “actors” but unlike some of them for whom file clips were used, I was taped speaking about this specific situation for this specific movie.
Our government is BROKEN. The civil servants and uniformed personnel are good people trapped in a bad system–a cesspool. Standing above them, hoarding the wealth, the power, and the personal privilege, are “elected” officials and their appointed cronies that have no business at all governing this great nation. They are inept and should be dismissed. We need a Constitutional Convention, an end to the Elctoral College, and deep Electoral, Financial, and National Security Reforms.
I have tagged this DVD with the word treason, because that is what CIA, DEA, the FBI, and the White House are guilty of when they protect drug wholesalers and allow entire neighborhoods to go down the crack drain, not because of Ricky Ross, but because of high crimes and misdemeanors all the way up the chain above him.
In my world, accountability is supposed to start and be enforced from the top down, not the bottom up. I hold John Deutch and later George Tenet accountable for failing to manage all five of the CIAs (the Wall Street CIA, the White House CIA, the front CIA, the paramilitary CIA, and the sodomy Safari Club CIA). I can only imagine the counterparts in DEA and the FBI and other elements of the government with the power to commit treason and get away with it while making a personal profit from the power We the People have assigned to them.
This is a rather unusual book, one that takes a clever approach of seeking to understand Bush Junior in the context of a Shakespearian tragedy, and specifically, Henry V.
Here are my flyleaf notes–this is a totally worthy book by a real professional with insight.
+ Three myths of the House of Bush:
– Made it on my own
– Not really rich
– Running for office to serve the Nation
+ Seven Lessons from the House of Bush
– Treachery of the press
– Importance of moment
– Money before politics
– Primacy of manners
– NE moderates an endangered species
– Don't give up
– Trust only the family
+ The author opens early with his conclusion that George Junior is a Walker (the differences are explained), not a Bush and the rest of the book is a lovely explanation of a family tragedy in three acts:
– ACT I: the loser struggling to be like Dad and failing
– ACT II: success at being different (drunk, boorish, inept, but different)
– ACT III: descent into mesianism (what happens when a village idiot gets the illusion of power)
+ Early on I have a note: national and global catastrophe rooted in a broken family whose black sheep got promoted more than one rung too far. It must gall the second fiddle that his own mother does not like him and thought the Presidency should have gone to Jeb.
+ Despite my extensive reading on the last eight years of high crimes and misdemeanors, this book contains information I have not seen before. The author hits the reader early on with:
– Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice were “enablers” for George Juniors' idiocy (Powell in my view confused loyalty with integrity)
– The second term flame-out was avoidable–Bush had good intentions but Rove held sway
+ The author addresses Bush's faith as false, non-theological, more like “self-help Methodism,” using Alcoholics Anonymous meetings instead of church as a group activity.
+ There is a superb discussion of the juxtaposition of Bush's linguistic blunders combined with the manner in which he was gifted at using evangelical and conservative code words.
+ There is fine coverage of George Juniors meanness and overbearing humiliating toward all, Rove in particular, who accepted every humiliation, including the nickname “Turd Blossom.”
+ The author summarizes the scandals on Rove's watch: Plume, Katrina, Iraq, firing of prosecutors (I would also add, subversion of Congress in violation of Article one, see Breach of Trust and also Broken Branch).
+ We learn in passing that Rove was abandoned three times:
– By his father who ran away
– By his stepfather who ran away (one of the two was homosexual, I forget which)
– By his mother who committed suicide
+ It was Rove, the author tells us, who pushed privatization of social security. As I review this book there are ads on the radio that seek to communicate that 40% of America's shares are owned by normal people. What they do not tell you, which you can lean in John Bogle's book, The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, is that we are no longer an ownership society, we have abdicated to financial management intermediaries, and they have skimmed one fifth of the value off for themselves, a select few.
+ According to the author it was Rove and not George Junior that pressed for a strategy of demonizing terrorism. The author says Rove destroyed the Bush II presidency with the “catastrophic blunder of politicizing the War on Terror.”
+ When the author finally gets around to covering Dick Cheney he casts him perfectly as “Lord Chief Justice” from Henry V, the sycophant who revels in pulling the strings behind the scenes. I have the line, my own interpretation of the author's words, “played Bush like a fiddle.”
+ The author asserts that Cheney was not transformed, as Brent Scowcroft believes, but rather finally found an opportunity to exercise his own judgment about the irrelevance of Congress and the need for a unilateral Presidency autonomous from oversight and able to take bold initiatives without consultation. [See One Percent Doctrine for a review of Cheney's mal;feasance going back to the Ford Presidency, in ursurping Presidential power].
+ The author, editor in chief of Slate, observes that the press really missed this about Cheney, his intent focus on expanding Presidential power and dismissing Article 1 of the Constitution.
+ Addington receives concise but chilling coverage.
+ Pages 170-171 are a priceless summary of how Cheney
– Managed Bush's mind
– Framed choices
– Accelerated Bush's neurotic shoot from the hip uninformed decision making (while ensuring behind that Cheney's decision was preset or, if necessary, counter-manding the President behind his back after the fact, alleging to others not in a position to question, that President had changed his mind).
+ The author discovered in Lynn Cheney's “Executive Privilege” (evidently no longer carried by Amazon) a telling fictional tale all too real.
+ The section I found most interesting outlined the six phases of Bush Doctrine:
– 1.0 Unipolar Realism (we make reality in our own image)
– 2.0 With us or Against Us
– 3.0 Preemptive attack
– 4.0 Democracy in the Middle East
– 5.0 Freedom Everywhere
– 6.0 No doctrine at all
+ The author surprises me with one defense of Cheney that I consider credible: Cheney truly wanted to vaccinate the entire nation against smallpox because he truly believed the threat existed. I am reminded of Daniel Elsberg who in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers recounts how he warned Henry Kissinger that reliance on Top Secret Codeword information would “make him like a moron, unable to listen to those who actually know.”
+ The author tells us that Bush II reads books many of them “but does not know how to think historically.” I am reminded of my youngest son, 12 years old, a brilliant wide receiver and first baseman, who at this point can read a book and not remember a thing from the plot.
+ The author ends with a devastating comparison of Winston Churchill, who did outgrow Lord Randolph and make his mark, and George Junior who “in the end, … failed to be his own man or displace his father.” Naturally there is the humiliating irony of proving that his father was right not to have gone on to Baghdad.
I just shake my head wondering how the American people have been so silent. Here are a few other books that round out the catastrophic decrepitude of the Bush-Cheney regime:
Some time a go I wrote a piece on 9/11, “who's to blame,” and it boiled down to this: We the People are to blame, for having dropped out of the democracy and abdicated our civic responsibilities. Cheney's high crimes and misdemeanors, not least of which was letting 9/11 happen as FDR let Pearl Harbor happen, Congress abdicating its Article 1 responsibilities, the mainstream media refusing $100,000 fully paid ads against the war; a piss-ant like Wolfowitz being able to get away with questioning Shinseki's experience, insight, and honor–all of these are secondary causes and I would hasten to include the “failure of generalship,” flag officer who, like Colin Powell, forgot their Oath of Office and confused loyalty with integrity. The prime cause is that we gave our government over to what I now consider to be four organized crime families: the Clintons, the Bushes, the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party.
As McCaffrey said on CNN last night (13 Feb 08), “anyone who votes for an incumbent in 2008 should lose their American citizenship.” Tongue in cheek? Perhaps. Relevant and actionable? Absolutely. It's time to abolish this government and start over.
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.
To the right is the current mass paperback cover that is available.Ā 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!
5.0 out of 5 starsDick Cheney Pulls Noam Chomsky to the Center (Relatively Speaking)
October 18, 2007
Noam Chomsky
Edit of 15 Jun 09 to correct factual error in original review (nuclear deal with Iran under Gerald Ford, not Ronald Reagan, in 1974).
Chomsky is actually starting to win over the balanced middle with his common sense. I have long respected him, but it took Dick Cheney and his merry band of nakedly amoral and obliviously delusional henchmen to really bring home to America how much his straight talk and logical thinking can help us.
There is virtually no repetition from past works. This series of interviews took place in 2006 and early 2007, and I found a great deal here worth noting.
* In 70 New York Times editorials on Iraq, not once did they mention international law or the United Nations Charter. He uses this and several other examples to show how pallid, how myopic, how unprofessional our mainstream media has become.
* A wonderful section talks about how civil *obedience* of immoral and illegal orders is our biggest challenge in this era, and I agree. The “failure of generalship” in the Pentagon resulted from a well-meaning but profoundly misdirected confusion of loyalty to the civilian chain of command, however lunatic, with the integrity that each of our senior swore to the Constitution and to We the People in their Oath of Office.
* His knowledge of Lebanon, a country I have come to love as representative of all that is good in the Middle East, is most helpful. His many remarks, all documented, make it clear that Israel has been abducting people for decades, and that the Lebanese have quite properly come to equate US “freedom” with the “kiss of death.” I am especially impressed with his discussion of Hezbollah as having legitimacy based on providing social services to those ignored by past governments, and as having a significant strategic value to Iran as a flank on Israel. His observations on how the US consistently refuses to recognize honest elections that do not go as the policymakers (not the US public) wish, are valid.
* He reminds us that the US made an enormous strategic mistake in using Saudi Arabian extremist Islam as a counterpoint to Nasser's natural Arab nationalism. As Robert Baer puts it, we see no evil and slept with the devil like a common whore lusting for oil.
* His comments on China and the Shi'ites who sit on most of the reserves (including Saudi reserves in one corner of that country, are provocative. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that the USA needs to cede the oil to China and execute a Manhattan Project to leverage solar power from space, tidal power, air power, and–for storage–hydrogen power made with renewable resources.
* Chomsky's comments on Chavez track with my own understanding. Chavez is a serious and well-off revolutionary who is sharing energy with his Latin American brethren, and leading the independence of Latin America from the overbearing and often hypocritical and predatory US government and US multinational corporations.
* He offers compelling thoughts on how India is sacrificing hundreds of thousands of poor rural people who now commit suicide or migrate to cities after losing their lands, for the sake of the high technology investments. I wonder why India is not doing more to teach the poor “one cell call at a time.”
* His observations on US electoral fraud are brilliant. He points out that the fact that elections are stolen is much less important than the fact that the entire electoral process in the US is fraudulent, without substance, only posturing and platitudes.
* He discusses how the US public is completely divorced from the policy choices of the dual tyranny of the US (political) government and the US corporate sector.
* At every turn Chomsky offers common sense observations, for instance, Pakistan, not Iran, is vastly more likely to leak nuclear capabilities to jihadists. In passing, he points out that it was the US that gave the Shah of Iran an entire MIT nuclear program and substantive assistance that is now being harvested by Iran, in 1975. Kissinger, Cheney,Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz as well as Gerald Ford are mentioned by name.
* He observes that Israeli influence is vastly larger than the lobbying effort, because the entire US intellectual network has “bought into” the Israeli myths and lies. The American fascists (see American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America), the Christian fundamentalists, are actually anti-Semitic, but support Israel because of their belief in the apocalypse.
* The Internet is having a pernicious effect on dialog and debate and compromise, because it creates little cul-de-sacs for lunatics of like mind to find and reinforce one another, divorced from larger realities.
* Avian flu (and our lack of preparation for it) is vastly more dangerous than a nuclear event. (See my review of the DVD Pandemic).
* Missile “defense” is actually code for allowing a first strike by the US on Russia or China, as a means to moderating their counter-strike. This is the first time I have heard it put this way, and I agree. All Americans should oppose “missile defense.”
* State secrecy is about keeping our own citizens ignorant of the crimes being done “in our name” not about keeping secrets from the enemies we a re covertly screwing over time and again.
* Darfur is being dumbed down, at the same time that the *millions* being genocided in the Congo are being ignored.
* He ends on two good notes. Like Thomas Jefferson (A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry”) he says that “educating the American people is the main thing to be done,” and love of the people is fundamental.
Great book, completely fresh and absolutely worth reading for the mainstream that might have in the past written Chomsky off as a perennial leftist, which he is not. Chomsky is what we must all seek to be: an educated engaged citizen.
USG Has Betrayed Us All
