Reviews (Books & DVD) – Page 279 – Public Intelligence Blog

Essential Modern Middle Ground Book,

May 31, 2006

Lindsay Porter

This is NOT the foundation book for MGB maintenance and repair. That honor is still held by the Haynes MGB 1962 thru 1980 book published in the 1980's and often delivered as part of the “kit” to anyone buying an original MGB, as I just did.

This book, however, is a really superb rendition of modern guidance, with superb photographic essays of complex operations. Although it has a color cover, all of the photographs are in black and white. The book is a real build on top of a normal repair manual, with sections on history, buying (BUY THIS BOOK BEFORE YOU BUY AN MGB), and then bodywork, interior trim, mechanical, electrical, and so on.

The third book that I recommend is Anders Ditlev Clausager's “Original MGB With MGC and MGB GT V8.” This is a coffee table book, a “this is what perfect looks like,” and it is both inspirational and just plain delightful. I drove my 1964 MGB across the country in the four days after I bought it (at 2500 RPM most of the way, 65 mph, but on special stretches of Iowa, doing 4000 RPM for sustained periods) because I love this car as a sports drive, not a driveway show car. Still, it is really great to see what perfection without regard to long haul rallying looks like, and I could not do without all three books.

2006/05/072009/12/04

Review: While Europe Slept–How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (Hardcover)

5 Star, Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial)

No Footnotes, But a Clear Alarm on Intolerant Muslims,

May 7, 2006

Bruce Bawer

The Department of Homeland Security should be reading this book. We have wasted years since 2001 when we should have been identifying and expelling Muslims from America who refuse to be educated, emancipated, or integrated. The author, who took on Chirstian fundamentalist intolerance first (Stealing Jesus), has a personal ax to grind (he is gay and gays get attacked by Muslims all over Europe) but does a phenomenal job–a really superb job, of documenting (but without footnotes) how the intolerant Muslims (not to be confused with Muslims who accept integration) are a Fifth Column with a strategic plan for becoming a majority across Europe by 2030, already outnumbering Jews in America and most other places.

The most frightening facts that the author brings forward, apart from the grotesque intolerance of many Muslims, is how they refuse to integrate. The author lays bare the false assumptions by government authorities who anticipated integration over several generations. In one case study, Turkish men imported not one but three wives over time, and have an average of 6.4 children with each wife. A small group of Turkish male guest workers numbering less than 150 thus grew to over 2,500 non-integrated and largely rabid Muslims prone to anti-democracy.

The author also addresses–as Steve Emerson addressed in his PBS film in 1994–how immans in Europe uphold the Muslim traditional of female mutilation, female slavery, and the Muslims being under NO OBLIGATION to accept the rules and conventions of the secular states where they are guests.

The author discusses how anti-semitism is on the rise across Europe, spurred by intolerant Muslims, and how the authorities tend to ignore the Muslim attacks on Jews, their honor killings and other travesties within their own communities.

The author goes further and notes how many of the children are “dumped” back home to be brain-washed in madrasses, and even if taught in-country, are taught intolerance.

On balance, despite the lack of footnotes, this is an extraordinary book, and it gives reasonable rise to the informed judgement that expulsion edits are required if individual countries are to protect themselves from both Muslim intolerance and the importation of poverty that accompanies illegal immigration.

Over-all the author provides a very broad look at how the Europeans have become lazy, are not re-populating, and are all too inclined to be anti-American as a mind-set, without recognition of all that America has contributed. European anti-Americanism, combined with European blind eye toward Muslim intolerance, is basically gutting Europe, to the point that one third of the Dutch plan to leave the Netherlands.

This excellent book has helped me see that there are two distinct views on the Muslim threat that have to be balanced. On the one hand, there is the liberal view that Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were a concocted threat nurtured by the US Government in order to provide an excuse for invading Central Asia and Iraq. On the other, there is the conservative view that Muslims who are intolerant and who refuse education, emancipation of their women, and integration into the host society, should be regarded as a clear and present threat to the society, and should be expelled. I believe that both views have credibility and both views need to be considered as we move forward.

2006/05/062009/12/04

Review: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Paperback)

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

Free Market Not Free, Ills of the 21st Century, Brilliant,

May 6, 2006

Michel Chossudovsky

Although it saddens me to see a strong literature emerging today that was largely anticipated and ignored by people like David Barnett with his Global Reach work in the 1970's, it is a good thing that strong voices like those of this author are now making very comprehensive documented cases for how corporate power and privatized wealth are collapsing nations, bankrupting economies, and impoverishing more and more people unnecessarily.

The table of contents of this book is extraordinarily details and brilliant in its organization. Although the book is mostly case studies that one can read through rapidly if accepting of the author's key points, this may well be one of the finest itemizations of the ills of the 21st century: corporate power run amok, privatization and concentration of wealth (which is, incidentally, one of the precondition for revolution), the collapse of national and local economies (e.g. Wal-Mart), the dismantling of the welfare safety net in most countries, and the outbreak and spread of famine and civil war.

The author is probably the foremost scholar and commentator on how the “free” market is not so free, and how the existing capitalist system is predatory, aided by locked in privileges that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank impose on nations foolish enough to accept their intervention. In this the author is consistent with Jeffrey Sachs (The End of Poverty) who has put forward the need for a complete make-over of developmental economics, to include an end of the normal business practices of the IMF and the World Bank.

I was tempted to remove one star for lack of sufficient reference to the works of others, but the personal insights and comprehensive review caused me to leave the ranking at five stars. I see a clear pattern emerging in the literature (see my other 700+ reviews) and what I am waiting for is for someone to cut the spines off all these books and “make sense” of the total picture in a manner comprehensible to the indivdual voter.

If we are to restore informed democracy and moral capitalism, this book is one of the foundation stones.

2006/05/062009/12/04

Review: America’s “War on Terrorism” (Paperback)

4 Star, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Terrorism & Jihad

Thoughtful Views on US/CIA as the Threat, Totalitarianism Emergent,

May 6, 2006

Michel Chossudovsky

This is a helpful book, useful and pointed, that attempts to document, with some but not complete success, the charge that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were concocted threats spawned by the CIA and used by the Bush Administration to permit unilateral military operations aimed at capturing Central Asian and Iraqi energy resources.

The author has clearly done a great deal of research and independent thinking, but the book would have benefited considerably from an intergration of the timelines and other thoughts to be found in such excellent works as “Crossing the Rubicon,” “Resource Wars” etcetera.

The author's central thesis is that we are moving toward a totalitarians new world order in which war, police repression, and predatory economic policies are integrated and interface with one another to create a privileged wealth class, and impoverish the rest of the world including the American and Canadian middle classes. It merits comment that the author's primary scholarly accomplishments are in the economic arena, and this book is appreciated more if one also reads his “The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order.”

The author points out something I did NOT know from my other 700 books as reviewed here at Amazon: that Bin Laden was in a Pakistani military hospital on 10-11 September. This coincides with other authors who have suggested that 9-11 was originally intended to be a nuclear event, and was, by agreement between the Bush Administration and the Pakistani government, “downgraded” to a controlled hijacking.

The author is courageous and on point when he suggests that we now have war criminals in office who have the temerity to decide who is a terrorist and who is a criminal. As the author's work implies, Dick Cheney is right up there with Henry Kissinger in terms of actions against international law that could warrant his being extradicted to stand trial before the Tribunal.

The author also makes useful points–in harmony with other authors now emergent–to the effect that the drug crop in Afghanistan is essential to Wall Street and the international banks, and is fully the equal of oil trade in its importance to international speculators and economic power brokers.

There are some disconcerting errors within the book, for example, the author states that the budget of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is $30 billion a year, when anyone who follows the U.S. Intelligence Community knows that this was at the time the TOTAL budget for all the secret agencies, with CIA receiving roughly one tenth of the total. Today the budget is close to $60 billion, CIA is a disaster area, and America is no safer.

Overall the author focuses primarily on the CIA as the source of all evil, and completely neglects both the FBI, whose incompetence or collaboration were essential to both World Trade Center attacks (the car bomb, and then the airplane attacks), and he also tends to neglect, for lack of understanding, any mention of the Saudi Arabian private intelligence network that displaced CIA long ago, as well as the private global murder network (see my review of Joseph Trento, “Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA.”

There is a very clear pattern emerging in the broader literature that suggests that the Bush Administration is impeachable, and that the Clinton Administration before it is also impeachable, for a deliberate neglect of reasoned energy policy, and a deliberate nurturing of economic policies that enrich a few at the expense of both the home country middle class, and the billions around the world who are being driven to terrorism and insurgency by predatory immoral practices pursued by the U.S. Government in partnership with selected multinational corporations, many of which are fronts for importing impoverished illegal workers to the US, and destructively under-priced Chinese goods to the US marketplace–goods that destroy the local ecnomies.

I will end with a complement to the author: he offers and interesting combination of Chomsky and Sachs, a balance between deep critical commentary and deep scholarship. He speaks truth to power. His work merits our attention.

2006/05/042009/12/04

Review: Wal-Mart–The High Cost of Low Price (2005)

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), True Cost & Toxicity

Good News: People Power is Starting to Work!,

May 4, 2006

Robert Greenwald

This is an important and absorbing documentary. I have nine note cards on it, and I summarize the key points that this DVD makes because I believe it should be shown in every town hall meeting where a Wal-Mart exists or threatens to arrive.

The bottom line is that the Wal-Mart family of five had made over 100 billion dollars on the backs of its “slave” employees in the US and in China, and Wal-Mart can and should be viewed as a front from the Chinese government, as a means of undermining the US economy while building up the Chinese economy. Throughout this DVD (and in the book that inspired it) hard documented incontrovertible facts are provided with respect to the manner in which Wal-Mart is subsidized by the taxpayer (e.g. over $80 million a year in assistance to Wal-Mart employees in Florida that qualify for below the poverty line assistance)–the cost to taxpayers across the country is said to total over $1.5 BILLION; Wal-Mart also fails to meet its obligations, either in return for tax abatements, or in response to consent decrees when it has been found guilty of pollution or other crimes.

* Wal-Mart does not pay fair wages and is violently anti-union to include illegal surveillance and intimidation. They short-change payroll and demand off the clock overtime, which is illegal, in order to increase their profits. The personal stories told in this DVD about employees having to choose between eating lunch or buying medicine for their children are not only heart-rending, but remind me of Third World countries where the same choice has to be made by mothers. PEOPLE POWER IS STARTING TO WORK: Wal-Mart is losing hundreds of law suits across the country to employees suing for off the clock cheating.

* Wal-Mart lies a lot. It lies about its contributions to communities (there is clear documentation that Wal-Mart destroys communities and destroys the small businesses for hundreds of miles around). Wal-Mart lies about its benefits, its wages, its environmental concerns, it lies about almost everything. I have the note “hypocritical liars.”

* Wal-Mart is eroding global labor standards. They fire their own inspectors for doing their jobs and telling the truth.

* Wal-Mart parking lots are very very unsafe. Wal-Mart has known since 1994 that their parking lots attract a great deal of crime including night-time rapes and murders, and they have also known since 1994 that a couple of unarmed security guards in uniforms riding around in golf carts would eliminate almost ALL of that crime, but they are not willing to pay for that safety just as they are not willing to pay for living wages for their employees.

* Wal-Mart has established a clear and well-documented pattern of lying to courts–of flagrant active perjury.

* PEOPLE POWER II: “plantation capitalism” will forever be linked to Wal-Mart, but the wonderful news is that the people are starting to fight back, and across America, Wal-Mart is being stopped in its tracks from hijacking local planning processes and buying out city councils.

Two additional points not covered by the documentary:

* Reviewer John Staffa does us all a favor in pointing out that Hillary Clinton was a member of the Wal-Mart board and profited from the relationship. This simply drives home the point that Democratic “leaders” are simply “Republican Lite” and no longer really interested in supporting labor unions and people's rights.

* I have reviewed many books on the end of cheap oil, and many of them make the point that companies like Wal-Mart can bring all those goods from China to the USA because of the cheap oil, which is no more. In 1974-1979 the Senate and the White House knew full well that Peak Oil was upon us. They made the treasonous decision back then to conceal this from the public and take no action in order to keep the bribes from the energy companies, and the illusion of cheap gas going. Both Wal-Mart and the US Government have essentially lied to the US public and acted against the long-term public interest. It's time we tax them back.

I strongly recommend this movie as a means of mobilizing support for blocking all new Wal-Marts, and for beginning the process of closing down existing Wal-Marts. The facts are incontrovertible. Wal-Mart kills communities. Wal-Mart is now, like Standard Oil and Exxon today, like AT&T and Microsoft, a company that has gotten pathologically powerful and needs to be broken up.

This DVD, and “The Corporation” DVD, are both essential tools in nurturing a new movement to take back the power over the US economy and the corrupt US political system. Super super work.

2006/05/022009/12/04

Review: Failed States–The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (American Empire Project) (Hardcover)

4 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power

Preventive Wars Don't Work; Democracy Deficit in USA,

May 2, 2006

Noam Chomsky

Within the 900+ non-fiction books about information, intelligence, emerging threats, and national security that I have reviewed for Amazon, I count many of Noam Chomsky's books. As with others, there is some repetition here, and he could have done a better job of reviewing the function and purpose of the state before labeling the U.S. a failed state. I will say, before my concluding comment, that all of my reading bears out Chomsky's inherent correctness.

Among the points that earned a note on my flyleaf:

* US began with the genocide of the Indians, moved on to slavery, and now condones genocide across Africa and elsewhere.

* Quotes CIA Bin Laden analyst with appreciation in noting that all the US has to do to stop the problems in the Middle East is wean itself from dictators and cheap oil, remove its forces from the Muslim lands, and stop predatory capitalism. Hmmmm. There just might be a moral point in there someplace!

* Chomsky asserts that history documents that preventive wars usually bring about the outcomes they ostensibly seek to stop, and does very very well in detailing how the US invasion allowed hundreds of missile and weapons sites to be looted, moving many of the components of weapons of mass destruction into unfriendly insurgent hands–precisely what we allegedly sought to prevent.

* The author recounts the varied facts that have emerged on how the US specifically sought regime change, the British (at least those with integrity like the Foreign Minister who quit) refused to go along with that, so Blair and Bush together concocted pretexts.

* Chomsky confirms in this book what I have seen myself, which is that the only part of the US Government that is “at war” is the U.S. Army and select portions of the U.S. Air Force. The rest of the government is NOT at war, and simply pursuing business as usual. Our war on terrorism is ineffective in the sense of capturing specific terrorists, and counter-productive in the sense of producing tens of thousands more–as Chomsky recounts in the book citing RAND and other studies, 85% of the “foreign fighters” in Iraq were mobilized and radicalized by the US invasion of Iraq.

* Chomsky is provocatively on target when he anticipates the emergence of a Shiite regional power based on Iran that includes the Shiite controlled regions of Iraq and Saudi Arabia–and in the latter, that happens to include the most productive oil fields–in short, the extremist Republicans' worst nightmare.

* Chomsky harps, no doubt with reason, on the long record that the US has in sponsoring crimes against humanity including regime changes that are against democracy (Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Haiti, the list goes on) and in favor of dictators who will protect US private investment as the expense of the public interest in their own countries.

* Chomsky focuses a portion of the book on the crimes by Israel against the Palestinians, although he does not appear to balance this by noting how ill-treated the Palestinians have been by all the Arab nations. He emphatically and deliberately identifies Bush with Hitler in that the two share a strain of “demonic messiaism” and rely on “the big lie” that (if repeated often enough) will fool the people. Goebbels would be proud of his kin in the White House, Karl Rove.

* Chomsky concludes the book by discussing the “democratic deficit” in the USA, and while he is very much on point, he wanders somewhat. For a better appreciation of why we allowed the extreme right to take over and ruin the country, I recommend Jacob Hacker's OFF CENTER: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy as well as other books on my democracy list. As a moderate Republican, I can certify that the Republican party today is run by thieves, lunatics, extremists, and — in the case of John McCain — born again Bushophiles.

This book is, like, most of his books, a very long Op-Ed but with good footnotes. We need to move toward more analysis and toward finding solutions. Inspired by Chomsky and others, I am in the process of developing a monograph that takes the top ten threats to global and national security identified by the High-Level threat panel of the United Nations (with LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft as the US representative), and showing that 80% of the information we need to understand and address those threats is open source information (OSIF), not secret information, on which we spend $60 billion a year. At the same time, we are spending $500 billion a year on a heavy-metal military and missile defense, when in fact inter-state conflict is only one of the ten threats, or 10%. We are not, as a nation, trained, equipped, nor organized to do poverty, infectious disease, environmental collapse, civil war, terrorism, or translational crime. America is in effect, two Americas: a nation of sheep living for their next six pack, and a very small exclusive group of perhaps 10,000 really rich people dominating Wall Street, the energy companies, and a handful of other major corporate networks. They are busy looting the Republic on the false assumption that they will be able to retire to gated enclaves. They simply do not understand that within twenty years there will be no place for them or their heirs to hide, and this will all come back to haunt them.

I would also say that I am more optimistic than Chomsky. Collective Intelligence and a Citizens Party (as a second home party, non-rival) are emergent, and technologies are coming out that will help eliminate poverty and infectious disease while stabilizing the environment and population. What we lack right now is moral strategic leadership. It is my hope that Bush-Cheney have radicalized enough of the world so that we might thank them in 2008 for making possible the return of balanced centrist coalition leadership.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It

2006/05/022009/12/04

Review: The Corporation (2004)

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad)

Superb Easy to Understand Itemization of the Fraud Inherent in Any Corporation,

May 2, 2006

Jane Akre

I admire a number of the reviews that have already been posted, and am doing this one primarily as a personal record and for those that follow my reading in non-fiction about national security and national competitiveness (690+ reviews).

This is a superb DVD. I did not realize there was a book by this name, but all things being equal, the visuals that come with the DVD, and the shorter time to absorb the message that can been carefully crafted, make this a great value.

For those that were not around or students in the 1970's I have to say that Barnett and others did a lot of study on the topic of out of control ungovernable unregulatable multinational corporations, and a lot of this was anticipated thirty years ago. However, this DVD provides a wonderfully coherent and fresh look at some key points that need to be understood by the general public.

* Modern corporation is today's dominant institution, with global reach and global impact, yet it is ungovernable by national or state or local governments, has limited liability, and seeks to maximize internal profits by externalizing all possible costs including environmental degradation, the importation of poverty, spread of disease from lack of health benefits, etc.

* “A few bad apples” (e.g. Enron, Worldcom, Exxon, etc) is a “jingle” that has been used to cover up the fact that a lack of ethics is a predominant characteristic, not an exception. See my reviews of Lionel Tiger (The Manufacture of Evil), The Informant, The Cheating Culture, etc.

* The corporation is a paradox–it creates great wealth, and it also does great harm. It is, however, an ARTIFICIAL creation, and we have it in our power to reverse its limited liability status.

* The corporate agenda does indeed compete with the public interest agenda, and can be likened to the damage that occured with the loss of the commons–while the corporation has done much good, the concept of the people belonging to and being at one with the land was lost forever when the land could be “owned” by an artificial person as well as a real person.

* Corporations can and tend to be psychopathic. The definition of a psychopath includes callous unconcern, unable to maintain enduring relationships, reckless disregard for tohers, deceitfullness, inability to experience guilt, failure to conform to social norms–gosh, this defines the Bush White House, not just corporations. It also defines the media, religions, and some labor unions. No wonder we have problems!

* The corporate mind-set is divorced from the good of the group–only a corporation would develop the concept of a terminator one time use seed, or throw away goods.

* 9-11 was capitalized on by traders, as was the war in Iraq. I am reminded of General Smedley Butler's recommendation in “War is a Racket” when he suggested that when the US goes to war, everyone in the private sector be absorbed into the government at enlisted and junior officer ranks, and not allowed to carry out war profiteering.

* The DVD does a good job of examining the sophistication of marketing, describing it as a smart bomb in comparison to early day “bb guns.” The DVD discusses the seduction of the consumer and the use of branding as an invasive form of producing customers almost against their common sense (because of this DVD I am buying the book NO LOGO).

* Corporations today are allowed to patent life, which is wrong and was always excluded, until a court did not realize that a microbe was life, and considered it a chemical formula instead. From that mistake, hundreds of cases have been filed by corporations under the laws intended to protect the life and property of former slaves.

* The DVD expresses concern over who might protect the public interest when information is controlled and filtered by the corporations. Monsanto is troubling case study, with good coverage in this DVD of how they were able to deceive EVERYONE in the US from academics to reporters to regulators, but only because they did not do their homework. In Canada, Montanto was stopped in its tracks by effective food safety regulators.

* The DVD is somewhat inflammatory in attempting to make the case that corporations not only helped fascism in Germany but are a form of fascism themselves. There is something to that, just as the is something to the reports that the major Nazis resettled in the USA and produced Karl Rove and Otto Reich as well as some really really bad covert operations and regime changes against democracy and in favor of dictatorships.

* The DVD ends on two notes, one troubling and one positive. The troubling note is that corporations are now trying to take over water, privatizing water, to the ridiculous point that in Bolivia the natives were not allowed to collect rainwater–this is not only obscene, but radicalizing. On a positive note, the DVD ends with an interview of a person describing in Spanish how many small battles are being won, and the corporations are being beaten back.

This is a very fine DVD, which joins Lords of War and Ghandi among others in my serious collection. Very worthwhile.

Category: Reviews (Books & DVD)

Review: MGB Restoration Manual (Restoration Manuals) (Hardcover)