Environment (Problems) – Page 15 – Public Intelligence Blog

2007/01/092019/09/06

Review: VICE–Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

7 Star Top 1%, Atrocities & Genocide, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Biography & Memoirs, Censorship & Denial of Access, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Democracy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Privacy, Public Administration, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

7 Star Life Transformative Showing True Perfidy in White House = 23 Documented High Crimes That Should Put Cheney in Irons Immediately,

January 9, 2007

Lou Dubose

EDITED 5 September 2007 to add ten links to other related books.

This book is vastly more detailed, and covers more high crimes and misdemeanors, than either State of Denial, which misunderstands Bush as being in charge, or Crossing the Rubicon, which focuses primarily on Cheney's role in first permitting 9-11, and then working assiduously to cover up his malicious malfeasance. See also Ron Susskind's book, “One Percent Doctrine,” which crucifies Cheney, Rumseld, and Rice.

I take this book so seriously that I urge everyone to get the “Do It Yourself Impeachment” kit. He should be required to immediately resign or be impeached. He should not be allowed to serve another month in office.

For the sake of brevity, here is a list of impeachable offenses documented by this book:

1) Secret meetings in violation of the law to include exclusion of government experts
2) Refusal to honor demand from Congress for a list of participants
3) Lies to the public about Iraq, while holding maps of oil fields and already having in mind a US-only domination of those oilfields (he first focused on Iraqi oil while serving Secretary of Defense Brown)
4) Over-ruling of the Environmental Protection Agency on very important matters including its concern over Halliburton's reliance on hydraulic fracturing that uses chemicals that contaminate aquifers–Cheney personally ensured that the EPA's wording was replaced with Halliburton's wording.
5) Consistent and pervasive usurpation of Congressional authorities and consistent and maliciously deliberate avoidance of appropriate disclosure.
6) Fostered attacks on Sy Hersh, and considered authorizing a break-in on his home.
7) From the 1970's, see also Ron Susskind's One-Percent Doctrine, subverted the authority of the Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller, and teams with Justice Scalia (then an assistant attorney general) to increase executive privileges and push back reforms.
8) As a Congressman personally blew off Russian offer in 1983 for arms cuts, and subverted the authority of the President and the Secretary of State then serving.
9) As an extremist Republican, supported Ollie North and the White House in violating the Congressional prohibitions on aid to the Contras, and obstructed justice thereafter.
10) Page 78 has a lovely discussion of how Cheney and North were “in the zone” in deceiving the public and Congress during the televised hearings.
11) Adopted as his own the lunatic report by Khalizad (who is a very lazy scholar, see my review of his rotten RAND book on revolution) and Libby, on how the US as a superpower should be able to do ANYTHING.
12) Attempted to undermine due process and keep tactical nuclear weapons in the Army inventory.
13) Subverted the authority of the Secretary of State (Colin Powell) by allowing his daughter to overrule Ambassadors and meet privately with various heads of state.
13) Lied repeatedly to the public about his continuing financial equities with Halliburton, and was so involved in giving Halliburton up to 16 billion in no bid contracts.
14) Shut both foreign competitors and more cost-effective indigenous contracting solutions, severely harming the national security of the United States by fostering an environment of unproductive looting by Halliburton, Bechtel, and others.
15) Ignored his dual mandates on terrorism and intelligence. The book suggests that Bush was not briefed on Al Qaeda for the first eight months he was in office (the Vice President's priorities were energy and missile defense).
16) Personally impeded negotiations with North Korea after they proved amenable to diplomatic engagement.
17) Personally rejected Iranian overtures for negotiation conveyed by the Swiss in 2003
18) Personally reinforced Rumsfeld on use of torture, by-passing the President's more measured restrictions.
19) Conspired with Speaker Hastert to subordinate the House of Representatives, using a special office of his own (first time in history) so that Representatives could be brought to him rather than his calling on them.
20) Manipulated the President into numerous “signing statements” inconsistent with the will of Congress that ignored legislation then in force.
21) “Bureaucratically emasculated” the President (page 177–if the President has a friend that reads this review, PLEASE get the book and the review to the President–he really may have no idea his balls have been cut off)
22) Contemptuous and manipulative of the CIA, refusing to accept their best professional judgments based not only all source intelligence, but on a extraordinary effort by Charlie Allen in running line crossers into Iraq to document beyond a shadow of a doubt that there were no weapons of mass destruction there.
23) Lied repeatedly, over and over, to the public, to Congress, to the President, to foreign leaders, even after the lies were exposed he continued to repeat them.

The book does not discuss the 9-11 situation and emerging findings that place the Vice President at the center of our deliberately inept response.

Two gems apart from the impeachable offenses:

1) The search for a Vice President was a complete fraud, he was picked from day one, and made a fool of every serious candidate, while also personally leaking to destroy Keating just to ensure the only real rival would not be considered at the last minute.

2) The discussion of Joe Lieberman's refusal to confront Cheney with all that was known to be wrong with him was explained at the time as “taking the high moral road.” I am not so sure. I speculate that Lieberman is actually a neo-con and has been playing the Democrats for fools while minding the interests of his Wall Street masters.

On page 147 the authors discuss how Cheney accused Clinton and Gore of “extend[ing] our military commitments while depleting our military power.” Lovely. And now?

The authors conclude that Dick Cheney is “nakedly amoral.” I agree.

One final scary note: in the many doomsday drills that Cheney participated in across his career and inclusive of his Vice Presidency, they always failed to reconstitute Congress.

Dick Cheney has done more damage and is a greater threat to our Republic and others, than Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein combined.

The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition
State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III
The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America
9/11 Mysteries Part 1: Demolitions
9/11: Press For Truth
9/11 – The Myth and the Reality
Aftermath: Unanswered Questions from 9/11

For those wondering why Congress failed to do its Article 1 job (hence all Members are impeachable for dereliction of duty as well):
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
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

2007/01/042009/12/04

Review: The True Cost of Low Prices–The Violence of Globalization

5 Star, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Economics, Environment (Problems), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

Superb Overview of True Cost of False Profits (Pun Intended),

January 4, 2007

Vincent A. Gallagher

“True Cost” has become a meme that is rapidly spreading and revealing to the public how insane and unfair many of our so-called “free trade” policies are. This book is a superb piece of informed scholarship with a strong foundation on real-world practice, and the auther is both objective and empathetic. True costs and real slaves of the global economy (who join the US prison population in slavery).

Soon Paul Hawken (see Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution) will open the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER) and WikiCalc will be available. I anticipate a huge outpouring of information that allows anyone with a cell phone to scan the barcode, send it to WISER or Amazon, and get back both the “true cost” of any good in terms of carbon, water, slavery, and tax avoidance, and pointers to the nearest green and local alternative products.

SUPER BOOK.

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2007/01/022009/12/04

Review: Blue Frontier–Dispatches from America’s Ocean Wilderness

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Economics, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Information Society, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Survival & Sustainment, True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Amazon Page

Extremely Important Work,–Tsunami of Data NOT Reaching Public,

January 2, 2007

David Helvarg

There is so much solid, worthwhile information in this book, including valuable insights in why Western political interests are undermining proper representation of our national oceans, coasts, and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in Congress, that I would urge those interested in the oceans (hugely more important to our future than the Amazon or globla forestry, just to make the point), to buy this book, suffer its limitations, and ultimately benefit from the wisdom and experience of the author, for whom my respect is unqualified and whole-hearted. In passing, it would probably be helpful if the first thing we all demanded was that EEZ stand for Exclusive Environmental Zone, rather than treating the oceans as a for-profit target area.

There is one other information-related observation I would make that emerged from reading this book: both the United Nations and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are clearly doing heroic and deeply important work vital to the future of the oceans–and they are doing a terrible job of communicating the basic information about the oceans and their work to the larger world of voters and concerned citizens. What really came home to me as I reflected on what to emphasize in this review is that there is a very wide, almost impenetratable, barrier between what the UN and NOAA know, and what is being communicated to the citizens who have the right to know (they paid for that information with their tax dollars) and the need to know and the desire to know. From this I would say that the next big step for those who would seek to save the oceans, is to demand that all UN and US Government information paid for by the taxpayer be put online henceforth, available at no further cost to the public. It is this information, the bullets and beans of the information war between corporate and citizen interests, that will decide the future of the oceans.

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2006/06/112009/12/04

Review: The Weather Makers –How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth (Hardcover)

5 Star, Environment (Problems), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design

Amazon Page

One of Two Best Out of Four Read on This Topic,

June 11, 2006

Tim Flannery

I realize some prefer this book to The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations which just edged this one out in my personal opinion–see my review of the other book for a sense of why.

This book is, however, easily of the same caliber, and more readable to boot. The author points out that climate change is different from “limits to growth” focused on resources. He is less focused on and consequently provides less detail than others on the intimate relations between climate, water scarcity, disease, poverty, and failed states. He does emphasize that absent more respect for climate change, human health, water, and food security are all at risk.

The author points out that the Earth's average temperature for the past 10,000 years has been 57 degrees Fahrenheit, and focuses his book on the need to transition to a carbon free economy.

Among the points he makes that jumped out at me: only four nations have refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty: the US, Australia, Morocco, and Liechtenstein.

His best chapter for me was focused on the cost BENEFITS of addressing climate change.

He attacks the oil and coal companies for disinformation, which has unfortunately had great effect. He likens them to dinosaurs with dinosaur brains that have been wounded, but stagger on.

As a former clandestine case officer, long fed up with the tens of billions of dollars we waste on satellites (most of whose data we cannot make sense of in a timely or coherent fashion) I was quite pleased to have the author recount a story about the conflict between satellites in space and lowly thermometers on the ground. The satellites were averaging the temperatures of the cooling stratosphere with the warming troposphere, and getting ground truth wrong. As I like to say over and over again, ground truth comes from the ground, not from satellites.

In his conclusion, the author notes that both the energy grid and the transport grid are candidates for decarbonization, but between the two he recommends the energy grid as the first priority. Readers may be interested to know that the same month that Vice President Cheney was meeting secretly with Enron and Exxon and others to plan the invasion of Central Asia and Iraq, WIRED Magazine published a thoughtful cover story on how to get from the wasteful (50%) one way energy grid to the much more productive two way and localized energy grid. This is not about brains; it is about ideology in the White House against practicality and the common interest across the Nation.

The author ends with a simple and credible 11 item list of ACTIONS that translate into IMPACTS.

2006/06/112009/12/04

Review: Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum–How Humans Took Control of Climate (Hardcover)

5 Star, Environment (Problems), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design

Amazon Page

Very small print, good work, falls between big picture and farming,

June 11, 2006

William F. Ruddiman

This is a fine book that ties with When the Rivers Run Dry: Water–The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century and falls slightly below The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth and The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations all of which I read in this week-end's series. Better books in the larger scheme of things include E. O. Wilson's The Future of Life and J. F. Rischard's High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them.

The books is blessed with many useful figures.

The author focuses on farming, which requires deforestation through burning, as preceding the impact of cities on climate.

He titillates with his discussion of 6 billion humans producing methane in huge quantities via rice irrigation, livestock tending, biomass burning, and human waste.

I especially appreciated the author's discussion of climate studies as being relatively new, and his itemization of the number of specializations that now bear on climate study, including geologists, geochemists, meteorologists, glaciologists, ecologists, biological oceanographers, climatologists, etc.

The book is somewhat mis-titled in that the humans are not in CONTROL of the climate as much as impacting upon it in ways not fully understood but largely understood to be negative (e.g. hurricanes twice as intense as 30 years ago, witness New Orleans and KATRINA).

It takes 50 years to raise a forest.

Plagues are a form of natural control. People die, farms are abandoned, forests grow back, and emissions are reduced.

For a taste of the future, the author shows us the past, when Africa and India and China had much greater moisture across their regions. The author ably argues that the water cycle is as important if not more important than the energy cycle in relation to the future of life.

Page 152, the author provides a superb discussion of climate response time, noting that the land mass is much more responsive, which the varied layers of the ocean run from months-years at the top to years-decades in the middle, and centuries in the deep ocean–with the average being decades.

On page 182 the author demonstrates a lack of understanding of politics when he says “Politicians generally vote for policies their constituents want.” Not so fast, bubba. Read 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; and The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy) among many other works on corruption in Congress, where the bottom line is money from special interests, or privileges and committee assignments from the party that demands one vote the party line rather than as constituents' desire.

The author is the only of the four that I really felt made the point that BOTH extremes are bad: the extremists that deny climate change, and those that demand draconian corrective measures. He points out, in a very balanced way, that pollution is as old as the earth itself.

As with other authors who value the truth in this arena, this author makes it a point to lament the unethical and unreasoned “alternative universe” of industry-funded contrarians and the actively malicious mis-representation and disinformation they purvey. I was quite pleased to read his suggestion that citizens need to get organized and “follow the money” in order to out the connections from industry to “front organizations” to specific liars and agents of influence seeking to deceive the public.

He discusses the concept of ecosystem services and the costs to replace, something E. O. Wilson does in a more thorough and readable manner in The Future of Life but the coverage here is useful if you do not wish to buy many books.

Finally, the author concludes that global warming is not the most vital issue–that energy and then water scarcity are more important, followed by the issue of topsoil replenishment (no longer from clean natural ice melts, now from petroleum-based fertilizers).

There are no notes in this book, with disconcerted me a bit.

2006/06/112009/12/04

Review: When the Rivers Run Dry–Water–The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century (Hardcover)

5 Star, Environment (Problems)

Amazon Page

First-Person Account, No Notes,

June 11, 2006

Fred Pearce

This is a good book if you like first-person accounts with no notes that fail to mention other stellar works. I confess to being spoiled by Marc de Villers “WATER: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource,” and by David Helvarg's “Blue Frontier: Dispatches from America's Ocean Wilderness” as well as William Langewiesche's “The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime.”

It also falls second to “The Winds of Change” and to “The Weather Makers” (I tend to read books in sets to tease out varying perspectives), and ties with “Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum.”

The author's most exciting idea, absolutely worthy of global implementation, is to call for the marking of all products with their “water content.” He is stunningly education, truly original within my reading as reviewed at Amazon when he itemizes the amount of water needed to create a pound of rice or any of a number of other products. I would advise any future leader to demand that products be labeled as to their water content, their oil content, and their chlorine content (see my review of Joe Thorton's “Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy.”

The author notes that the US is exporting ONE THIRD of its water in the form of products that consumed that amount of water.

Other highlights from this book, for me personally:

Six water winners are Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Indonesia, and Russia, with Mongolia as a water wild card.

Treaties about water are out of date. Technologies, including cement as an answer for re-directing water, are mis-directed.

97% of the world is sea water–this suggests that we need a MASSIVE global desalination program to protect aquifers from further salination and deterioration (from my own experience: $100M will buy a desalination plant capable of desalinating 100M cubic meters of water a year, or Navy ship or an Army brigade with tanks and artillery, or 1000 diplomats, or 10000 Peace Corps missions, or a day of war over water. It's about trade-offs, and we and not making them wisely.

Kashmir is about Pakistan's Achilles heel, water.

India is on a path to destruction. “Water mines” are selling water for $4.00 (four dollars) a TRUCK TANKER LOAD, and basically mining India dry. When the author comments about a “spate of suicides” among Indian farmers, he fails to mention that this number runs toward 2,000 a year dead by their own hand. He predicts aquifer busts in India and China within 20 years, at which point, as other authors discuss more ably, disease, migrations, crime, and poverty will be as plagues unto those two nations.

Dams produce methane from rotting vegetation, with 8X the greenhouse effect of a coal powered plan of the same capacity. This should in the author's view change the Kyoto calculations. The author is very strong on this point, and suggests that breaking down dams and not building more (e.g. China) should be right up there with global warming as issues for action.

He notes that the 6 day war in the Middle East was about water, but neglects to mention that Israeli agriculture is using up 50% of the water stolen from the Arabs through underground pipes, yet produces less than 5% of Israel's GDP.

I was most taken with the author's discussion of “barefoot science” which emerging during his discussion of toxic or poisoned water such as found in Bangladesh. He cites with great admiration one individual who went from village to village testing wells, with very crude tools, providing reliable estimates of toxicity for 10 cents per well.

A fine book, some excellent insights, but it did leave me a bit cranky. Marq de Villier's book is still the best in class.

2006/06/012009/12/04

Review: An Inconvenient Truth–The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It (Paperback)

3 Star, Environment (Problems)

Watch the DVD First. Up to Four Stars if You Do That…..,

June 1, 2006

Al Gore

Note: Although the DVD is mostly Al Gore and Powerpoint slides, interspersed with views of the adoring audience, it is a VERY effective briefing, and after seeing the DVD, my appreciation for the book went up. It is still over the top on fonts and graphics–the next edition should be toned down–but if viewed together with the DVD, the book goes up to four stars.

I actually read The Global 2000 Report to the President: Entering the Twenty-First Century as published in 1982 and still in my library, and I follow the excellent work of Lester Brown, whose “State of the World” publications are extremely pointed, pertinent, and professional.

In that context, this book is a real disappointment. It is a superb “coffee table” book, with glorious photographs, some really excellent time phrase photos (showing melting ice and increased drought at the same place over three period. The writing is thoughtful, but the composition of the book makes it very inefficent at communicating the ideas in structured form. This is an artist's rendition, with what for me at least was an annoying jumble of mixed big font sizes, constantly changing lay-outs, and no tables or substantive “here are the ten threats, here are the ten solutions.”

I am waiting for the video, and I suspect that the movie will be ten times more valuable as both an educational and mobilization tool, much as the Wal-Mart video is superior to the Wal-Mart book.

I admire the author very much, and believe that his commitment to the environment and to doing the right thing is genuine.

The best part of the book is the end, which lists a number of things that one can do personally to help with the environment, and also puts a number of “myths” into boxes (e.g. melting of cold ice at the Poles is good), but sadly, the choice of fonts, colors, layouts, and so on make this book a 50% success, at best. “art” or COSMETICS triumphed over substance and seriousness, and the Vice President has lost, yet again, a chance to make a larger difference. I will pray that the movie makes this review, and this book, irrelevant.

This is certainly a book that is worth buying to support the Vice President, to appreciate the photos and content, but this book missed a great opportunity to provide America and the world with a more digestible serious document that could have led to action. In its current form, it is nothing more than a “what nice pictures, quite right, something must be done” and then it goes back on the coffee table and achieves nothing. Sorry, but that is my hard-nosed evaluation.