I grew up during the Vietnam War. I was seven years old when General William Westmoreland was sent to Vietnam by LBJ to take charge of things there. I was eleven when he lost his job and by then, had lost us the war. Vietnam was in the news the entire time, on TV, in the paper, in Time Magazine – as was Westmoreland's iconic chin. Being the son of military parents I'd early gotten the history bug and I was fascinated by what was taking place over in Southeast Asia, even if I didn't understand it well. As I grew older, and things over there grew worse, I began to wonder how we could possibly lose such a war (as I thought it was) against such a small country.
Lewis Sorely's “Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam” will tell you how. Sorely has the credentials for this book. He is himself a graduate of West Point. He served in Vietnam. He even served in the office of the Army Chief of Staff, General William C. Westmoreland, and taught at West Point. This isn't just a book by some journalist trying to get at the bottom of things. Sorely has been “at the bottom of things” and he has done the leg work over a period of years, talking to 175 people in his search for the events he here recounts.
3.0 out of 5 stars 5 as Personal Memoir, 1 for Nonsense About “Hard Measures”, May 3, 2012
As a memoir of time in the CIA bureaucracy and occasional righteous deeds in the field, the book is a must read along with a handful of others by former case offices of stature-no one denies the stature of the primary author-I do question the role of the second author. Unfortunately, the author himself may not realize the falseness of the context, the premises, the claims, the reports, and the ethics surrounding rendition and torture. All I can do is point this out and hope that readers will take the time to reflect and read beyond this book.
I am a former clandestine case officer from the Latin America Division, and among those from CIA, including former Director Stansfield Turner, case officers Robert Bauer and Vince Cannistraro, and many others, who signed the letter to Senator McCain against torture.
Real professionals, which is to say, not the Ollie North's of CIA, know that torture does not work. Anything in this book that says it does, and that leads came out of torture that were important, is in my independent judgement a lie-perhaps not a deliberate lie. The primary author was so far removed from the ground reality as to be unwitting of the lies being told to him by contractors and case officers who sought only to improve their “record” without regard to the truth or the consequences.
Anytime there is an argument over whether something is torture or not, it is. This will not be understood by the loosely-educated who lack an appreciation of ethics and the strategic value of morality.
Dick Cheney committed over 20 impeachable crimes (I itemize them in my review of Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, while also telling 935 now documented lies. The primary value of this book may be in clearly identifying the author as an enabler of Dick Cheney's crimes and lies, and a subject for future investigation if the USA ever gets an honest government again.
The CIA is an empty shell, with child analysts and no bench in the clandestine service. This is one reason DIA is working so hard to create its own “Class A” clandestine service, but sadly, DIA is turning to the same low standards that CIA has had all these years, and will be hard pressed to get much beyond its present standard for clandestine operations, “push ups done silently.”
I love books and I love the truth. I have written, edited, and published nine books on intelligence so far, and believe with all humility that I am helping set the gold standard for what ethical intelligence could and should be. In my personal opinion, this book demeans everything that CIA, the US Government, the Constitution, and the Republic should stand for.
You can find almost all of my reviews on books about intelligence at one single consolidated list easily found by searching for the phrase below (all reviews lead to their respective Amazon page). Buy something other than this book — it shames us all and does no service to the craft of intelligence.
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Most)
Here are nine other books [Amazon has a ten link limit]-the first two show CIA at its best, the rest at its normal worst.
5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star Starting Point for National Counterintelligence Outing of Zionist Traitors in US Government and Industry, April 29, 2012
I hate electronic books for many reasons, including being an old guy that still thinks in hand – eye – brain terms, so let me start by saying this is the first e-book that for me has been a pleasure to read. Plenty of white space, clearly separated chapter, a great inter-spersal of photographs, and finally — my most important touch point — really superb sources at the end of each chapter, with many of them actively linked.
As the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, reading in 98 categories, I read a lot — over 30 books (with a leavening of DVDs) on 9/11, but to put that in context, that is just 0.016 of my reading in the last decade. Do not for a moment think of me as a conspiracy theorist or anti-Semite. I am an intelligence professional, with integrity.
This particular book, unlike all the others I have read in relation to 9/11, does four things no other book has done:
01) Connects the dots of all the dual Israeli-US citizens in the US Government and US commercial circles (mostly in NYC) that were active participants in the 9/11 false flag operation. The role of the owners of the 81st floor and the massive bank of “batteries” that were never used but are precisely where the airlines hit, impressed me.
02) Integrates, for the first time, the history of Israeli false flag operations, the 1980 recognition by Israel that an attack on NYC and specifically against the tallest building in NYC whatever that might be, and the total complex context of 9/11 as both a catalyst for forcing the USA into a “war on terror” and a cover-up for the most massive financial crimes in history, including a special role for AIG and its specifically-identified Zionist leadership.
03) Introduces me for the first time to the facts about the Estonia that the Swedish government evidently covered up–it was carrying Russian contraband to Estonia, and two explosions blew off the front loading doors, dropping the ferry and 800 Swedes into a point almost halfway between Estonia and Sweden, as planned in a previous exercise. The author also covers NATO, the NATO presence that night, and the confounding combination of NATO being “asleep” the whole time, with the outage of the regional telephone networks for the duration.
04) Clarifies the depth of Israeli involvement in the drug trade — not just laundering the money in NYC and elsewhere, but actively nurturing the drug trade and drugs toward the US in particular — as a budget item. What comes out clearly is that Israel is not just bribing the US Congress, controlling the US White House, and castrating US intelligence and counterintelligence, but that Israel is using the USA as a two-track piggy bank — stealing all that it can from the US Treasury (Goldman Sachs provides the Secretary of the Treasury), while earning all that it can from running drugs into the US with the active collaboration of elements of the US Government and the Texas crime families including the Bush Cartel.
For some time I have been concerned about US false flag operations and corruption within the US government and US commercial circles. Although I have from time to time recognized that Israel treats the USA as a “shicksa” (as in gentile girls don't count, they are “fair game before and after marriage to a Jewish princess”), and I have been as outraged as any at the USS Liberty–the point at which I realized Israel is actually the enemy of the USA, a parasitic animal sucking the life out of the USA–I must say that this book moves me to place Israel and American citizens who are more loyal to Israel than to the Republic and the Constitution, in first place as the primary target for the emerging national counterintelligence network.
For years I have been talking about the need for religious counterintelligence. Originally I was concerned about Mormon penetration of the CIA and FBI, and with Mitt Romney being rumored to be the banker for at least one major drug cartel, one has to ask, when do we stop being an Idiot Nation? Then my focus shifted to Opus Dei, which has done quite well in US Navy circles and elsewhere. It is only in the past ten years, with the USS Liberty, the USS Cole (almost certainly another Israeli false flag operation), 9/11, and then a series of truly idiotic plots including the underpants bomber and the print cartridges on UPS, that I have realized that apart from political and appointed officials committing treason every day, Israel is the #1 enemy of the United States of America.
This is not anti-Semite. We are all Jewish in one way or another, and I have had the operation. This is about a Zionist cabal in Israel marrying up with the neo-con and rabid-Christian cabals in the USA, leveraging the global drug and arms trade to do evil to others all in the sake of saving Israel. The atrocities against the Palestinians, and the walls that out-do Hitler (there is one excellent picture of an Israeli wall with watchtower, three times higher than any prison wall), in combination with all that Israel and its embedded traitors have done to undermine the US and UK and to disgrace us all while stealing from us all, bring me to the line. ENOUGH.
I ran for President in the USA, accepted by the Reform Party as a candidate, for two reasons: 1) to put in one place (BigBatUSA.org) the four core ideas necessary if we are to restore the rule of law in the US; and 2) to be able to write to all other presidential candidates urging them to unite with Occupy, the Tea Party, Independents, and one another (six of the eight parties in the USA are treated as if they were shicksa Palestinians–of no account, access blocked) to restore the integrity of the electoral process, to create a coalition cabinet and a balanced budget, and to present America with a legal, ethical, non-violent revolutionary choice. I failed. From Ron Paul to Dennis Kucinich to Jill Stein, Buddy Roemer, Rocky Anderson–I reached all of them and all of them were, to the man, egotistical selfish deer in the headlights candidates, playing their own personal game with no thought of how to actually rescue America.
Zionist Israel (not Jews) is a cancer. I am glad to see the Arab dictatorships begin to fall, they are as responsible as Israel and the USA for the plight of the Palestinians, but Israel is hypocritical — it has cut deals with every dictator on the planet — as has the US — to its own ends. In a nutshell, the era of government Of, By, and For We the People is over. Governments have failed to maintain their integrity. We the People now need to create public intelligence in the public interest; to engage in massive non-violent tax revolts; and to begin using open source information to empower hybrid networks that route around corrupt governments, corrupt banks, corrupt media, corrupt universities, corrupt religions, corrupt labor unions–and reconstitution society from the bottom up. George Soros to his credit has finally recognized the Enlightenment Fallacy. I now recognize the Israeli Terror.
At Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, halfway down the middle column, you can find a single link to all of my 9/11 reviews, all leading back to Amazon, but please do not stop there. I am the proponent for the third era of national intelligence, the era of Smart Nations, World Brain, Global Game, and connecting all people to all information in all languages all the time — only such a tsunami of public consciousness will overcome the evil that is done in our name and at our expense. I am optimistic.
It began with that monstrous young man so evil we needed to blindfold him and strap him to a board, that confusing young man who looked like Christ but cast us in the role of crucifiers, that treasonous young man who brought dark and heathen evils across linguistic and cultural borders and brought torture onto the list of accepted government actions.
When you hear the phrase “American Taliban” you probably think of a young American who betrayed his country, aided its enemies, and – like Saddam Hussein – was behind the attacks of 9-11. John Walker Lindh was an American. That part is accurate. He converted to Islam at age 16 and traveled to Yemen to study classical Arabic and Islamic theology. In 2001 he went to Afghanistan to join an ongoing battle between a political group funded by Russia and another group funded by the United States. Lindh joined the group that was backed and funded by the Bush Administration. It was called the Taliban. Lindh trained to fight the Northern Alliance, not civilians, and not the United States. But, after 9-11, the United States attacked the Taliban, and Lindh attempted to escape and return to America.
Instead he and other soldiers were captured by the Northern Alliance and beaten senseless in the presence of two CIA officers, Johnny “Mike” Spann and Dave Tyson, who interrogated Lindh and threatened him with death on the spot. When some of the other prisoners rebelled (Lindh was not involved), Northern Alliance troops shot and killed scores of prisoners, many with their arms tied behind their backs. Lindh was shot in the leg. Spann was killed. (Though he was not involved, Lindh was later charged with conspiracy to murder Spann.)
Co-authors Peter Ressler and Monika Mitchell have been 20-year Wall Street insiders as partners in an executive search firm. Their book is a page-turning account of the 2007-8 meltdown and continuing unsolved issues that will inevitably lead to the next crises. Woven throughout their analysis are conversations with dozens of top executives from Lehman, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, AIG, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and many hedge funds and private equity firms.
Only the executives' first names are used (for obvious reasons), which makes their recorded interviews with the authors more revealing, with all the vivid expletives un-redacted. We hear first-hand of how Wall Street's culture actually worked based on the “buyer beware” treatment of sophisticated clients. Pension funds were considered “big boys” who should do their own due diligence and against whom it was OK to bet that the securities sold to them would blow up. These were the market makers who, unlike the partnerships of yore, regularly took both sides of deals with their often unsuspecting customers while pushing ratings agencies to stamp these toxic products as triple-A. The prevailing culture is reflected in their language: “eat what you kill,” “ripping the face off” clients and the jungle rule of “survival of the fittest” (often incorrectly associated with Charles Darwin rather than originally coined by Herbert Spencer, a British economist of that era who wrote for The Economist).
What makes this book spectacular–and strongly recommended for anyone–student or adult–who desires to understand the history of the United States of America with intelligence and integrity–is the elegantly straight-forward but devastatingly disturbing blend of facts–with superb notes at the end of each chapter.
I am very disappointed that the publisher has not taken advantage of Amazon's absolutely priceless “Look Inside the Book” feature, so I will take the time here to list chapters and appendices.
5.0 out of 5 stars Diplomatically Provocative — A Foundation, Not a Structure, March 22, 2012
I come late to this book but my review will be much more detailed and useful than most others now posted, including the several that I voted for. I received it this afternoon and it has absorbed me every since.
As someone who ran for the Reform Party nomination for President with the specific intent of putting all the good ideas in one place (BigBatUSA (org), and who also tried to get Occupy to understand that electoral reform was the one thing that would make them central to all stakeholders, allow them to raise money from a broader coalition, and flush Congress down the toilet, I have three contextual disagreements that I place at the end of this review. In no way do they detract from this specific work that does what it set out to do.
The highest praise I can give this book is that I found it engrossing and learned from it. Gary North has done a great job in his article at featured at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, “Administrative Law (New World Order) versus Democracy (Live Free or Die).” What I learned from this author is that administrative regulations are how Congress creates its “protection racket” and manipulates conditions so that those who gain ($1 in lobbying yields $6 to $20 in government earmarked pork) have to “give” every year.
From start to finish this book provokes me. As a professional intelligence officer who has been fighting since 1988 for a Smart Nation and a Whole of Government decision-support capacity that is not secret, not expensive, and not obsessed with contrived threats to the detriment of opportunities to create a world that works for all, I love the following:
QUOTE (1): Government is an embarrassment It has lost the capacity to make the most essential decisions.”
That is of course because all of government is corrupt — the Cabinet officers are there to protect budget share and serve the recipients of the taxpayer dollar, not to serve the taxpayer — the President is a puppet, all theater, today with a nanny from Goldman Sachs installed as “National Security Advisor.” The Supreme Court, thanks to Lewis Powell, is equally corrupt — the author is too kind to them in this book, while offering some very deep criticism of Justice Kennedy and CITIZENS UNITED.
MUCH later in the book, on page 247, the author relates the Jon Stewart – Bill O'Reilly exchange that got him started on this book, I would have liked it up front so I offer it here with a strong recommendation to buy this book because as these two neo-toxic opponents were quick to agree, corruption is at the heart of all these problems. I will give them the benefit of the intellectual doubt and hope they mean a lack of integrity — I consider lies to be corruption, and all forms of deception and propaganda and misinformation to be sand in the gears of an extraordinarily complex delicate system of systems. You can look for my posting on this topic, “Journal: Reflections on Integrity UPDATED + Integrity RECAP” and see especially the first two earlier postings cited there.
Mindful of Amazon's quote limit, here is the heart of the book:
QUOTE (7): The greatest threat today is in plain sight. It is the economy of influence now transparent to all, which has normalized a process that draws our democracy away from the will of the people.
The bulk of the first third of the books explores the twin outcomes, bad governance and lost trust, and the three corruptions: the author's articulation of “dependency corruption” that is in turn the foundation for very limited “venal corruption” (direct bribery) and pervasive “systemic corruption” where a “gift economy” and implied obligations destroy the integrity of the government across all topics.
The author offers examples that lead to the conclusion that government cannot be trusted to keep products safe. I know from many other readings that the USA is now considered a dumping ground for products not allowed in Europe; that the government is creating ceilings for state regulation instead of floors especially with respect to environmental responsibility (were I a governor, I would be nullifying at least half the regulations, most written by mega-industries intent on putting small town butchers and others out of business); and that the government is completely lacking in decision support across the board. The US Intelligence Community spends $80 billion a year in corporate welfare, and this produces, according to General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret), then Combatant Commander of US Central Command, “at best” 4% of what he needed to know. [Disclosure: I helped create the Marine Corps Intelligence Center precisely because nothing the national or other service centers did was useful to a force specializing in expeditionary operations. This is when I realized — and subsequently testified and proved to the Aspin-Brown Commission — that there is nothing in the secret data bases useful to 90% of our needs.]
I love the author's brief but point examination of the role that money plays in distorting conclusions across a range of industries. When industry pays, the information is severely constipated. When independent efforts are undertaken, the results are severely critical. There is no think tank, anywhere, that I consider to be completely honest or capable, and I share Derek Bok's concerns in Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education.
About halfway through the book I have a note that this is a subtle graceful book. The author is adroit at stating ugly facts in a beautiful way. He emphasizes the value of trust, which I also emphasize in my next book, and points out that when addressing systemic corruption it is not about the absolute good or absolute bad, but about all the gray shades of bad in-between.
The author's discussion of the financial ruin that Congress is bringing upon us all is illuminating. With all my reading, there is stuff here I did not know and do appreciate. Especially enlightening to me is a much deeper survey of not only how much we do in the way of subsidizing bad business that externalizes diseconomies to the public, but how FEW are the beneficiaries. The author points out that the 1% are essentially poor businessmen who have figured out how to harvest the public treasury by bribing the US Government.
A number of charts are offered throughout the book, and I like them very much. Two of these charts make the point that anti-reformers outspend reformers by 10 to 1. With respect to the financial derivatives crash, the author names names: Mark C. Brickell, Phil Gramm, Bill Clinton, and Alan Greenspan. He does not mention the Secretary of the Treasury (owned by Goldman Sachs for the last several administrations) or the Office of Management and Budget which has not known how to manage anything for a very long time.
I really like the author's bottom line and how he clearly places the responsibility on government (too little and totally lax regulation) combined with promised bailouts from the Fed and Treasury. He also explores how New York members of Congress such as Charles Schumer came to represent Wall Street. What this really means — and Joe Markowitz, one of the few minds still in government for whom I have absolute respect has said this before — is that contractors do what the government incentivizes them to do. While this does not excuse the high crimes of the financial industry, it does place the blame where it belongs: corrupt government.
Here is an astonishing fact from this book (page 83): Financial Services spend more to lobby congress and contributed more to Senate and House campaigns thatn the COMBINATION of those spending for energy, health, defense, and telecommunications.
He cites a good member of Congress, Jim Leach from Iowa, using his honest service as an example of the good that comes from NOT taking money from those you are supposed to be helping to govern. Indeed, the author stuns me in citing Dennis Thompson to the effect that Congress today is among the least corrupt Congresses in history. I find this very hard to believe given the inability to stop borrowing money we cannot pay back. I know for a fact, from Hill staff, that the standard payback for an earmark is 5%, and that the earmarks have not been eliminated, they are just hidden now in “defense support.” Evil triumphs when silence enables it.
To understand the failure of Congress one must understand the corruption of the two-party tyranny, something not addressed at all by this book, for those insights I recommend Peter Peterson's Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It and Theresa Amato's Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny. I honor her by adopting her sub-title, never mind the angst it causes those who prefer fairy tales. Obama was elected by 30% of those voting, 56.4% of the eligible voters. A TEAM of Independents and excluded parties could still win in 2012, but only if we all come together in an Electoral Reform Summit that also creates a coalition cabinet in which each of the presidential candidates agrees to abide by public choice as crowd-sourcing blesses the final slate just prior to election day.
I learn that in the period up to 2004 50% of retiring Senators and 42% of retiring Representatives migrated to K Street as lobbyists. The author makes the point that apart from the systemic corruption associated with campaign finance, there is now the revolving door corruption, in which Congressmen act in Congress in such a manner as to “qualify” for “promotion” to K Street. Sickening.
As the author moves toward solutions, I am taken by his articulation of the Founding Fathers' intent in establishing checks and balances and INDEPENDENCE among the elements of government, precisely to avoid any dependency OTHER THAN on the will of the people. I am charmed by the phrase on page 130 “sophisticated constitutional architects.”
I will not summarize a very strong section on how money and systemic corruption destroy good governance, the author addresses:
01 Distraction from duty
02 Distortion of agenda
03 Lost trust of the public
Between charts and text I am fascinated to learn that Congress uses Administrative Law to extort funds from those affected. This is the flip side of how the extreme rich in the USA become so by manipulating changes in government policy (the KEYSTONE pipeline is criminally insane at multiple levels, including use of water to flush tar sands, external diseconomies running the length of the pipeline, and the aged legacy refineries being used to create products for EXPORT. We have more than enough energy in the USA, this is a rip off and Obama has sealed his servant status with his recent support for this anti-public project.
Discussing CITIZENS UNITED I am surprised to learn that the Supreme Court had a leg to stand on, the First Amendment does not speak to freedom of speech for *people* only to freedom of speech, but the author then dismantles Justice Kennedy for confusing contributors with voters, and points out that chasing contributions is completely different from chasing voters.
QUOTE (247): Our Congress is politically bankrupt.
To which I would add, and so is everything else in this country, including universities, charities, foundations, labor unions, and law enforcement, the latter prostituting itself for counter-terror funding while Mayors neglect everything else — just today the news is out that cities across America are prohibiting the feeding of the homeless.
Buy the book to understand the solutions the author proposes. I like the democracy voucher but government should not administer it (just as I am now worried about government hijacking IRAs as collateral on debt). Imagine 100 million voters giving $10 each to BigBatUSA, whose purpose is to fund a coalition cabinet and balanced budget announced in advance of election day. Game over.
QUOTE (269): We have corporate welfare because we have privately funded elections.
The author really renders a service in pointing out that $3 billion a year spent to fund honest open elections would allow for the elimination of over $90 billion in corporate welfare (I think the total is closer to one trillion including agriculture, energy, defense, intelligence, and homeland “security”).
Some of his strategies intersect with mine, but I believe mine [because I have drawn on Jim Turner (#2 to Nader for many years and much more personable), Mike Cudahey (key aide to Barry Goldwater), Jock Gill (communications specialist for Bill Clinton) and many others], are more comprehensive and coherent. I must mention that my solution called for Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Rocky Anderson, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, and Buddy Roemer to all agree to support an Electoral Reform Summit at which we would also announce that we were all running as a TEAM, with a publicly validated ticket and coalition cabinet and balanced budget announced in advance of election day. Rocky Anderson had the grace to call me, but all of the others were like deer in the headlights — beyond their ego trips, for sure. I am thinking about posting my letters (in my former status as a Reform Party candidate) to all of them — clay feet to the man and woman.
The author has been championing a Constitutional Convention for some time, and while I think it is a bridge too far, and the Electoral Reform Act of 2012 with its eleven crowd-sourced points is more than ample for cleaning house, I totally enjoy this section of the book and especially appreciate his naming several “good rich:” Arnold Hiatt, Alan Hassenfeld, Jerry Kohlberg, Edgar Bronfman Jr., and Vin Ryan; his mentioning that the greatest fear when he speaks about this is the fear of public ignorance; and his recounting of how Google under Eric Schmidt has blown it, refusing to use its powers to empower the public. [I am a huge critic of Google, as I am of Microsoft — Google is math hacks on digital garbage, Microsoft is second rate buggy heavy software long over due for being thrown out, as the universities in India have just done — they are going open source everything, and just in time.] My graphic of what Microsoft could have done to rise like a pheonix reached the new CTO who blew it off, it can be easily found by searching for < Graphic: One Vision for the Future of Microsoft >.
The book ends with 42 pages of notes — this is not an opinion piece, it is a scholarly work — and I learn for the first time about WebCitation (org).
Below are three contextual disagreements I have with the author, and hope that one day we might be together at a round table. This book made my day. This book deals with reality, is authentic, and is very much in the public service.
Robert Steele
THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust
First disagreement: getting money out of politics means nothing if the two-party tyranny continues to block ballot access, use gerrymandering to pick its voters, engage in ballot fraud across all fronts, undermine the Electoral College with “winner take all” hijackings of losing candidate delegates, and so on. We need an Electoral Reform Act of 2012. Watered down versions of this act have been introduced nine times, four of those times by Ron Paul. Congress has the power to demand that all states put all accredited national parties (there are eight: Constitution, Democratic, Green, Libertarian, Natural Law, Reform, Republican, and Socialist) on all state ballots for FEDERAL offices; and that candidates from all parties be included in all debates regardless of who is sponsoring the debate — if it is federal, it must be inclusive.
Second disagreement: to expect Congress (as now monopolized by a two-party tyranny driven by fund-raising and control of access to the public purse including the unconstitutional act of borrowing one third of the federal budget and creating an Administrative Law state that micro-manages what it does not understand in order to extort funds from those affects) to do anything in the public interest, is in my view delusional. Occupy had Congress worried for a couple of months but Occupy blew it. Had they occupied every Congressional home office over the holidays and demanded the Electoral Reform Act of 2012, they could have formed a public majority and accomplished far more than this author imagines in this book. But they did not.
Third disagreement: Systemic corruption — the author's signal contribution discussed throughout the book — pervades all elements of the USA. We have become a The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead as David Callahan describes it so well. I wrote “Paradigms of Failure” as a preface to one of my books, it can be found free online. There are eight major intellectual “tribes” in the USA and around the world: academic, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental/non-profit. Every single one of them is corrupt, lacking in integrity (my definition is the holistic one, I agree with the author that systemic corruption embraces good people trapped in a bad system).
