Economics – Page 44 – Public Intelligence Blog

2006/11/162009/12/04

Review: War on the Middle Class–How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Crime (Corporate), Democracy, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Justice (Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

Single Best Handbook for We the People Seeking to Take Back the Power,

November 16, 2006

Lou Dobbs

I read a lot, and my highest praise for this book is that it is easily a single coherent substitute for at least 50 others books including Barbara Ehrenrich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America; David Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible in America; Jeff Faux, The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back; Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and many many others including books I have reviewed on the broken government, immoral capitalism, the failure of education and health care, and so on. He covers it all, including how Wal-Mart is trying to use the World Trade Organization to force US states to back down on laws protecting them from this predatory organization (see my reviews of the book and DVD about Wal-Mart).

Although the author draws most heavily on his own broadcast remarks, and does not provide an annotated bibliography for further study, Amazon reviews by many others could serve to this end–just search for the topic and read the reviews of the book for a broader study.

Lou Dobbs may well have swung the 2006 election with his series on Broken Government and Jack Cafferty's robust commentaries, and thank God he did.

The book ends with key documents–the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitutional Amendments.

Summing it all up: take back the power by voting and demanding that Washington represent the people instead of corporations; fair trade not free trade; end illegal immigration (and I would add, demand English as a common language); self-insure as a Nation with respect to health care.

This topic is so important, I bought a second book with a more aggressive title, Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class – And What We Can Do about It (BK Currents) by Thom Hartmann, also published in 2006, and I am pleased to report that these two books complement one another perfectly.

Lou Dobbs would have my vote if he ever ran for President. Now if we can just get him to add a 15 minute “national intelligence review” to the CNN line-up or web site….all the topics he deals with are right on target, but missing is the larger picture: America faces ten high-level global threats, America has no strategy and no coherent policies across twelve policy areas from Agriculture and Debt to Security and Water, and America has no plan for helping the eight challengers (Brazil through Venezuela) avoid our enormous mistakes, mistakes the planet cannot afford (we consume one third of the energy and create one third of the waste if not more).

Of all the books I have read, this is the one that I hope everyone buys, reads, and discusses before the 2008 primaries and general election.

There is also hope. Jim Turner, #2 Naderite, tells me he is seeing signals that 100 million Americans who opted ou8t of partisan politics and jumped back in with both feet in 2008. Below are the books that those people are reading:

Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

There are many more. I have gotten fed up with Amazon's refusing to provide a means for reviewers to sort their reviews, so I am posting, at Earth Intelligence Network, a sortable searchable Word table that covers all of my reading across the ten threats, twelve policies, eight challengers, and other areas. This will dramatically improve the efficiency for anyone seeking to leverage the free reviews that I offer for any given topic. We need to come back angry, non-violent, and INFORMED. Amazon, for all its flaws, is the People's Schoolhouse, and a big part of why public intelligence is a reality, not an oxymoron like “central intelligence.”

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2006/10/292019/09/06

Review: Rule by Secrecy–The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids

7 Star Top 1%, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Censorship & Denial of Access, Complexity & Catastrophe, Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Justice (Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

7 Star Life Transformative insights – Bankers, Politicians, Spies, Patsies, and Secret Societies, October 29, 2006

Jim Marrs

This book is extraordinarily interesting, broad, and paradigm-altering.

The table of contents provided enough detail to be an executive summary. The book is somewhat deficient on sources (heavily reliant on superficial “encyclopedic” references) but the alternative explanation of history and reality is not to be missed.

I bought the book thinking it was about government secrecy. Not so. Much more importantly, this book is about the secret societies used by the 300-500 wealthiest individuals in the world, the ones that own the central banks that can cause financial panics, move inflation or deflation, all to the end of profiting, while “exploding the client,” the individual “patsy” whose hard-earned wages are nothing more than a supermarket shelf from which these elites pluck extra funds to buy another castle. See my review of Mark Lewis's “Liar's Poker” to understand Wall Street use of individuals as *disposable* sources of cash, and my review of John Perkin's “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” to get a sense of the larger global methods being used to loot the commonwealths. Also relevant is Jeff Faux, “The Global Class War : How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win it Back” and many of my other reviews of books by others on the loss of government legitimacy and credibility with the people, combined with the predatory immorality of corporations that now own government.

Much of what the author attributes to a grand master plan can also be explained by the natural tendency of wealth to create wealth (compound interest) and for wealth to influence politics, but this book is deeper than that.

The author begins with an introduction of the Rothchilds, and gradually builds up a detailed picture of how they funded “barons” around the world, and in America, where the Morgans and the Rockefellers were their chosen instruments. The Bush family is second tier but right up there. Special attention is given to the Federal Reserve, which is NOT controlled by the government and has NEVER been audited in its history, and to the ease with which bankers make money from advance knowledge of changes in domestic and foreign policies that they often simply mandate.

The USA was until around 1837 a “value-based” economy in which real assets–gold, silver, land, labor–paid in full. There was no debt, no interest. From Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson, bankers from Europe were rejected and considered “more dangerous than armies, swindling the future.” Jefferson also believed central banks to be unconstitutional, since the right to create a national currency is reserved to the U.S. Treasury. The author notes that both Lincoln and Kennedy were unique for issuing debt-free currency, and for being assassinated. Reagan was shot by Hinkley, whose relative was dining with a prominent member of the Bush family the night before, and he suggests this was intended to move Bush, a member of the secret society world and leading pawn, into power years sooner.

An extensive discussion is provided of bankers themselves causing financial panics, wars, and other confrontations. The author refers to the Rothschild Formula as being to spawn wars and finance both sides. The book discusses the bank-rolling of Hitler, Trotsky, the US Civil War, the French Revolution, the Boar War, and on and on.

Credible evidence is provided that the terrorism in Italy, as part of a “Strategy of Tension” described in a captured document, was intended to create enough of a perception of leftist terrorism to justify a shift in the government toward fascism. The P2 Lodge behind the terrorism was a secret society on the right, not the left, and is said to have been guided by the Alpine Lodge in Switzerland, the “Gnomes of Zurich.” George Bush senior is alleged to have been an honorary member of this lodge, while Henry Kissinger is said later in the book to be a member of the Alpine Lodge. Most interesting for me is the CIA connection. The “Strategy of Tension” was first devised by James Angleton to prevent a communist take-over in Italy following WWII, and is STRICKINGLY apt in considering the allegations that 9/11 was allowed to happen if not made to happen. See my review of “Crossing the Rubicon,” of “9/11: Synthetic Terror Made in the USA,” among other books (use my lists).

Summing up this book early on, I found it to be 1/3 wealth begets wealth; 1/3 corruption begets wealth, and 1/3 conspiracy begets wealth. However, once I entered the secret society segment of the book, I reverse the above order.

This book gave me a completely new perspective on Cheney and Rove as front men rather than the prime movers, intended to take the heat and be “sacrificed” without the public every realizing that it is Citi-Bank (the same bank said to have secretly received Yamashita's Gold from Douglas McArthur, as told in “Gold Warriors” by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave), and Chase Manhattan, the two owned sufficiently by the Morgan and Rockefeller families to be the hubs for their power. The author also discusses the 40,000 tax exempt organizations that serve as fronts for banks and foundations and corporations, all manipulating the individual citizen-voter without paying a cent in taxes.

On page 408 the author says “Whatever the truth may be, we must be wary of leaders who attempt–whether by force, manipulation, or deceit–to move whole populations in directions they may not wish to go and might not be beneficial to all.”

On page 409 the author says “Knowledge is indeed power. It is time for those who desire true freedom to exert themselves–to fight back against the forces who desire domination through fear and disunity [enabled by secrecy.” The author notes that there are more of us than of them (see my review of Jonathan Schell's “Unconquerable World.”)

I have one word for what I plan to work toward: TRANSPARENCY. Collective public intelligence is going to survive and prosper. The times, they are a'changing.

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2006/10/042010/05/31

Review: State of Denial–Bush at War Part III

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Democracy, Diplomacy, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Impeachment & Treason, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

Stake in the Heart of the W Presidency

October 4, 2006

Bob Woodward

Here are the highlights I drew out that make this book extraordinary and worth reading even if it leaves one with a political hang-over:

1) The Federal Government is broken, and was made worse by a President who knew nothing of foreign policy, a Vice President who closed down the inter-agency policy system, and a Secretary of Defense who was both contemptuous of the uniformed military and held in contempt by Bush Senior.

2) My opinion of the Secretary of Defense actually went UP with this book. Rumsfeld has clearly been well-intentioned, has clearly asked the right questions, but he let his arrogance get away from him. Given a choice between Admiral Clark, a truth-telling transformative person, and General Myers, an acquiescent warrior diminished to senior clerk, Rumsfeld made the right choice for his management style, and the wrong choice for the good people in our Armed Forces. I *like* Rumsfeld's Anchor Chain letter as it has been described, and wish it had been included as an Appendix. Rumsfeld got the control he wanted, but he sacrificed honest early warning in so doing.

3) This book also improves my opinion of the Saudis and especially Prince Bandar. While I have no tolerance for Saudi Royalty–the kind of corrupt debauched individuals that make Congressman Foley look like a vestal virgin–the Saudis did understand that Bush's unleashing of Israel was disastrous, and they did an excellent job of shaking up the President. Unfortunately, they could not overcome Dick Cheney, who should resign or be impeached for gross dereliction of duty and usurpation of Presidential authority.

4) Tenet's visit to Rice on 10 July is ably recounted and adds to the picture. It joins others books, notably James Risen's “State of War,” “Hubris,” FASCO” and “The End of Iraq in presenting a compelling picture of a dysfunctional National Security Advisor who is now a dysfunctional Secretary of State–and Rumsfeld still won't return her phone calls…..

5) The author briefly touches on how CIA shined in the early days of the Afghan War (see my reviews of “JAWBREAKER” and “First In” for more details) but uses this to show that Rumsfeld took the impotence of the Pentagon, and the success of CIA, personally.

6) The author also tries to resurrect Tenet somewhat, documenting the grave reservations that Tenet had about Iraq, but Tenet, like Colin Powell, failed to speak truth to power or to the people, and failed the Nation.

7) Rumsfeld recognized the importance of stabilization and reconstruction (and got an excellent report from the Defense Science Board, not mentioned by this book, on Transitions to and From Hostilities) but he vacillated terribly and ultimately failed to be serious on this critical point.

8) This book *destroys* the Defense Intelligence Agency, which some say should be burned to the ground to allow a fresh start. The author is brutal in recounting the struggles of General Marks to get DIA to provide any useful information on the alleged 946 WMD sites in Iraq. DIA comes across as completely derelict bean counters with no clue how to support operators going in harms way, i.e. create actionable intelligence.

9) Despite WMD as the alleged basis for war, the military had no unit trained, equipped, or organized to find and neutralize WMD sites. A 400 person artillery unit was pressed into this fearful service.

10) General Jay Garner is the star of this story. My face lit up as I read of his accomplishments, insights, and good judgments. He and General Abizaid both understood that allowing the Iraqi Army to stay in being with some honor was the key to transitioning to peace, and it is clearly documented that Dick Cheney was the undoing of the peace. It was Dick Cheney that deprived Jay Garner of Tom Warrick from State, the man who has overseen and understood a year of planning on making the peace, and it was Dick Cheney that fired Garner and put Paul Bremer, idiot pro-consult in place. Garner clearly understood a month before the war–while there was still time to call it off–that the peace was un-winable absent major changes, but he could not get traction within the ideological fantasy land of the Vice Presidency.

11) Apart from State, one military officer, Colonel Steve Peterson, clearly foresaw the insurgency strategy, but his prescient warnings were dismissed by the larger group.

12) General Tommy Franks called Doug Feith “the dumbest bastard on the planet,” –Feith deprived Garner of critical information and promoted Chalabi as the man with all the answers.

13) The author covers the 2004 election night very ably, but at this point the book started to turn my stomach. The author appears oblivious to the fact that the Ohio election was stolen through the manipulation of 12 voting districts, loading good machines in the pro-Bush areas, putting too few machines in the pro-Kerry areas, and in some cases, documented by Rolling Stone, actually not counting Kerry votes at all on the tallies. Ohio has yet to pay, as does Florida, for its treasonous betrayal of the Republic.

Today I issued a press release pointing toward the Pakistan treaty creating the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan as a safehaven for the Taliban and Al Qaeda as the definitive end–loss of–the war on terror, which is a tactic, not an enemy. As Colin Gray says in “Modern Strategy,” time is the one strategic variable that cannot be bought nor replaced. As a moderate Republican I dare to suggest that resigning prior to the November elections, in favor of John McCain, Gary Hart, and a Coalition Cabinet, might be the one thing that keeps the moderate Republican incumbents, and the honest Democrats–those that respect the need for a balanced budget–in place to provide for continuity in Congress, which must *be* the first branch of government rather than slaves to the party line.

It's crunch time. This book is the last straw. The American people are now *very* angry.

2006/10/032010/01/13

Review: Human Scale

5 Star, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Intelligence (Public), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Secession & Nullification, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Should be Re-Issued, a Seminal Publication Relevant to Governance

October 3, 2006

Kirkpatrick Sale

I am finding that books written in the 1970's and 1980's a making a comeback and people realize that certain of those authors were a quarter century ahead of their times. Richard Falk is one, Kirkpatrick Sale is the other. This book could usefully be read with Leopold Kohr's “The Breakdown of Nations,” Joel Garreau's “Nine Nations of North America,” and Philip Alcott's “The Health of Nations,” on why sovereignty and the Treaty of Westphalia should be overturned in favor of more localized governance with more universal rights and protections.

The bottom line in this book is crytal clear half-way through the book: at a specific point of scale, variable depending on natural resources, technical and cultural sophistication, etc, an individual's share of earned income goes MORE toward “power” goods and services of common concrn than to their own benefit. It is at this point that “the state” has outgrown its utility and becomes a burden on the individual taxpayer.

It merits comment in this context that there are 27 seccessionist movements in the United States of America, and at least 3 in Canada. As we look at the idiocy of the elective war on Iraq, and the very real prospect that the German Pope has cut a neo-fascist deal with the Karl Roves and Otto Reichs of this world–all descendants of Nazi war criminals admitted to the US under espionage cover, we have to contemplate the possibility that our big states are *out of control* and need to be chopped back to more “human scale.” This is a Nobel Prize kind of book, quite extraordinary.

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2006/06/272009/12/04

Review: Knowledge and the Wealth Of Nations–A Story of Economic Discovery [ILLUSTRATED] (Hardcover)

4 Star, Economics, Information Society

Amazon Page

Online Education for EVERYONE Especially the Poor,

June 27, 2006

David Warsh

This is one of two very engaging books I bought for vacation reading. The other, harder to read but just as good, is Jeffrey Frieden's Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century.

After a very engaging book-length discussion of the history of economic theory in modern times, the author gets to the bottom line: education for everyone, and especially the poor, is essential. The author goes beyond this to state very clearly that the existing educational book industries and education institutions (normal schools) are generally worthless in an era of fast changing knowledge. Online education, or at least online selections of up to date mix and match materials that are AFFORDABLE, is the key to bringing entire populations up.

I recommend this book along with Thomas Stewart's The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization Barry Carter's Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution and most recently, Alvin and Heidi Toffler's Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives as well as their earlier major work, Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century.

It bears mention that the conclusion of Jeffrey Frieden in “Global Capitalism” bears on this author's determination: government is essential, and it is failed government that leads to the marginalization of education.

2006/06/272009/12/04

Review: Global Capitalism–Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (Hardcover)

4 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Economics

Amazon Page

Bottom Line: Unfettered Capitalism is Destructive, Need Government,

June 27, 2006

Jeffry A. Frieden

I read books in groups, and bought this one along with David Walsh's “Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations” which I recommend above this one is you are only buying one book. I also read and have reviewed “Global Class Wars” as well as all other books I recommend below.

Although I was less interested in the history, which is very well documented and clearly explained, and more in the lessons for the future, I found two clear bottom lines in this book that are supported by its extensive research:

1) Open societies and open democracies generate more money and more opportunity and more innovation than closed or failed societies; and

2) Keynes was right, there is an urgent vital role for government to play in addressing the social networks, including education, transportation, rules of commerce, and so on, that allow capitalism to work.

The author distinguishes between individual, cooperative, and competitive capitalism, and I found validation in this book for my concept of communal capitalism, a capitalism that is guided by government in avoiding the exportation of jobs, the importation of poverty, and the impoverishment of the middle class.

Unlike David Walsh's book, this book has more of a focus on what is moral and pragmatic, and so I recommend William Greider's “The Soul of Capitalism” as well as John Perkins “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.”

I have a very strong feeling from this book and others, that the era of “out of control” capitalism is drawing to an end. We may even see the end of the corporation as a separate legal personality in the next 12 years. The transparency of information that is available when people attach themselves leech-like to a corporation and hold it accountable (see my review of “No Logo”) is creating a powerful antidote against the Enrons and Exxons and Wal-Marts of the world who bribe elites and screw over the publics on both ends. I also see Wall Street losing its ability to “explode the client” (see my review of “Liar's Poker”). A great deal of good will be done in the next quarter century, and it will come from a combination of good government and educated engaged citizens working together across all boundaries.

2006/04/302009/12/04

Review: The Pro-Growth Progressive–An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity (Hardcover)

4 Star, Economics, Politics

Ignores Health, No Budget–Reflections Not Solutions,

April 30, 2006

Gene Sperling

Anthony Gibbens' review is superb, and I endorse it and amplify on it. THis book loses one star to two flaws: it begs too many key issues (such as health care, and corporate accountability), and it has no budget and no section on tax reform and increasing government revenue by eliminating fraud, waste, loopholes, and bribery-induced subsidies. That is always my litmus test for serious books about economic policy. One can use the National Budget Simulation, for example, and actually test all these ideas. I, for example, have taken the trouble to identify $550 billion a year in readily available increases in federal tax revenue, and another $300 billion a year in defense and intelligence spending that could be redirected toward soft power and open source intelligence/revitalization of education and national research. It's not real until it's in the budget. This book is platitudinous, worthy of consideration, but not legislatively enactable.

There is no question but that Gene Sperling performed ably for President Clinton EXCEPT that he sacrified the American worker by opening the door for broad indiscriminate lay-offs (see my review of The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences by Louis Uchitelle) and he evidently did not see the economic urgency of completely recasting our national educational system (including exile of the stake-holders in the old system to Chinese re-education camps near Mongolia).

On balance, Sperling is now one of those “has experience, listen to him” guys, but he is part of the last gasp of the old guard in the Democratic party, and for my money, a combination of Return of Rubin and Elevation of Matthew Miller would do more good. See my reviews of the books by both these stars.

The author lacks real familiarity with emergent technologies, especially bio-technologies that are CRTICIAL to reducing poverty and illiteracy (see my review of Tofflers Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives), and over-all the book does not represent a comprehensive strategy that reflects an understanding of system dynamics, both internal to the Republic and globally.

Bottom line: worth reading, 30% of this will be useful, somewhat tired. Rubin is more mature, Miller more innovative. Sperling needs to be in the car, but not driving.