Review DVD: Peace One Day (2003)

4 Star, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Reviews (DVD Only)

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Idealistic, Successful, and Serious,

August 16, 2006
Dalai Lama
This is quite a nice personal effort, and has not only been added to my List of “Serious DVDs” but also led to my buying a companion DVD “The Peace!” that features interviews with peace advocates world-wide.

For me, one of the most valuable aspects of the DVD was the individual snap-shots of various global leaders including United Nations, Organization of African Unity, and so on.

Costa Rica was initially key and then blew it. French is clearly the language of Africa and the language of peace and inter-cultural communication.

This individual demonstrated that good ideas can raise funds from both individuals and corporations.

The film maker concludes that inter-cultural collaboration and communication are critical, and supplements this with several statements that suggest that truth and reconciliation commissions are essential across the board. One person points out that Palestinian and Israeli schools are both in the business of teaching hate for the other side, and until that is fixed, there will be no peace.

Over all, I found this quite worthwhile. In my own mind I tie it to the Collective Intelligence movement (e.g. Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute and author of “The Tao of Democracy,” to spiritual films such as “What the Bleep Do We Know,” and to prayer sit-ints that have demonstrably reduced crime in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere for their duration.

Sadly, just as the film maker was about to succeed, the UN day of peace, 11 September, was turned into a day of terror, 9/11. While the film ends on an uplifting note, we clearly have our challenges.

Most definitely worthwhile for anyone willing to sit still for bit over an hour and absorb all that this film has to offer.

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Review: How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok (Paperback)

Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics

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Fine Book by Constitutional Lawyer, Read with “The Case for Impeachment”,

June 16, 2006
Glenn Greenwald
This is a fine book, by a constitutional lawyer, and it focuses largely on how the Bush White House had violated all of the constitutional provisions with respect to checks and balances. On page 79 the author says, after a lengthy discussion, that “the president possessess the power neither to make laws nor to interpret them.” That is of, course, the heart of the matter.

An earlier quote (page 15) sums up the why: “Unbridaled extremism and contempt for the legal limits imposed by Congress and the Courts.”

The author does a fine job of quoting from the Federalist Papers to illustrate just how severe are the violations of the intent of the Founding Fathers by the incumbent President.

This book, which ends with an Epilogue on Iran and the fact that the incumbent President is using the terrorism card to justify any action anywhere, does not make the case for impeachment as ably as another book (see below). It focuses mostly on the NSA wire-tapping.

I strongly recommend this book be bought and read together with Senator Robert Byrd's Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency and The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office by Dave Lindorg and Barbara Oshasky.” Below is an extract from my review of the latter book:

BEGIN EXTRACT The Republicans set the stage for hard-ball when they actually impeached President Clinton, not for having oral sex with an intern, but for lying about it. This book lists ten specific documented reasons for impeaching President Bush:

1. Stole Florida election in 2005.
2. Lied on Iraq to Congress, the Public, and the United Nations.
3. 9-11 Cover-Up and Obstruction of Justice.
4. Violated Rights of Citizens including Habeas Corpus.
5. NSA Program to Listen to Citizens without Warrant.
6. Violated International Treaties Including Geneva Convention.
7. Actively Encouraged, as a Policy, Use of Torture.
8. Gross Negligence on Hurricane Katrina.
9. Iraq Contract Corruption–Bremer “Lost” $8 billion in cash, sole source awards, and gross negligence in managing the peace.
10. Stole Ohio election in 2004.

This book is not just an indictment on the specifics, it is also a very useful primer for citizens on the purpose and process of impeachment. END EXTRACT.

Both books, together, make it clear that any time the American people want to force Congress, on threat of not being re-elected, to impeach this President, he is toast. The question then arises, are *enough* citizens paying attention?

Sometime after reading this book, I read three books that focus on the failure of Congress:
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

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that we need to dump virtually every single Senator and every single Representative, demand an Electoral Reform Act, and end the ‘wnnier take all” nonsence for both the Congressional leadership positions and the Cabinet. Transpartisan leaders with a balanced budget, that's the ticket!

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Review: Stand for Something–The Battle for America’s Soul (Hardcover)

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Democracy, Education (General), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics

 

Amazon PageQuick Read, Somewhat Bland, Best of Intentions,

June 4, 2006
John Kasich
I certainly do not regret buying and taking the time to read this book. It is a relatively quick read (lots of white space between and around the lines). For me the best and most important chapter dealt with the corruption of politics, and I include some memorable quotes from there below.The books reads rather blandly and inoffensively (typical of Presidential Hopefuls writing “please get to know me” books but I have to say that after putting down this book, I felt that the author had indeed made his point: he is a decent man who stands for core values, and believes in a balanced budget to boot.Memorable points from the political chapter, alone worthy of buying and reading the book:

Reagan Republican who echoes President Carter's “malaise” concerns by saying “there's a feeling of hopelessness out there.”

p 21. “Good politics shouldn't be about us or them”

On page 75, after starting off by saying that politics should be about saving the world, he says “We haven't seen middle ground for so long I am no longer certain it exists.”

Both these comments tie in very well with the newly launched Unity08 movement to use the Internet to field a split party presidential team for 2008, and the new non-rival Citizens-Party (wing for each existing party to have “dual membership”) which will be launched shortly to field not just a mixed party presidential team, but a coalition cabinet committed to electoral issue as the non-rival issue for all, and a balanced transparent budget with public intelligence and dialog driving public policy in the future, instead of party line politics or special interest money (the author addresses both).

On page 77 he directly slams the Bush II administration is noting rather pointedly that we need leaders who represent our core values and are not simply committed to winning and holding power at any cost.

On page 94 he specifically identifies one of the times when Dick Cheney broke his word, and one gets the feeling that the author is intimately familiar with the propensity of the sitting Vice President to lie and break his word to one and all.

The books by Tom Coburn on Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders and by Joe Klein on Politics Lost: From RFK to W: How Politicians Have Become Less Courageous and More Interested in Keeping Power than in Doing What's Right for America as well as Norman Cousins on The Pathology of Power – A Challenge to Human Freedom and Safety are much more detailed and sophisticated than this book, but in his own way the author has told a simple elegant personal story about politics lost to party corruption and special interest money, and I respect him all the more for this chapter.

In comparison with the chapter on politics the chapters on sports, business lack of ethics, loss of religion to Paris Hilton and sex on TV, loss of discipline in education, and the loss of culture as celebrities fail to walk the wholesome road, are straight-forward.

The book ends with a general but rather bland “call to arms” asking each of us to believe in the greater good and act accordingly.

Bottom line: good guy, leader, “must have” on any coaltion ticket to save America from the Republican and Democratic extremists that are killing the Republic.

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

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

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5.0 out of 5 stars 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.

See also:
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back
War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War onthe American Dream and How to Fight Back
Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class – And What We Can Do about It (BK Currents)
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

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Review: The Disposable American–Layoffs and Their Consequences (Hardcover)

4 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

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4.0 out of 5 stars Imperfect but Riveting and Essential,

April 30, 2006
Louis Uchitelle
Some of the criticisms ofThe Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead this book are valid, but I completely disagree with those who sound more and more like a corporate fascist every day, equating the “social contract” with socialism. If they would take the time to read William Greider's book The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy or Herman Daly's Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications or John Perkins Confessions of an Economic Hit Man or any of a wide variety of books that I have reviewed for Amazon readers, they might realize that the concept of the corporation as a legal entity that absolves its managers and stock-holders from immoral, predatory and even illegal behavior, is one that we can do without. I will go further–I have coined the term “Communal Capitalism” to describe that condition where the people retain ownership of the factors of production, and the managers are well-paid employees but not war profiteers or out and out thieves against the commonwealth.”

Hans Morganthau clearly identified the people–the demography of a nation–as a major sources of national power, and Thomas Jefferson was among the first to say that “A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry.” Most recently I have reviewed the new book by Alvin and Heidi Toffler on Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives and there is much agreement between the two books, both of which address the dysfunctionality of our educational, health, energy, and transportation systems.

I am especially taken by the author's tracing of how a series of Presidents, but most terribly, President Clinton, essentially left the American worker to the wolves at the door, and made them disposable. Perhaps Clinton sold out to Wall Street and to bribes from corporations, a standard practice in our (see my review of the book by that title). Whatever the case, what this book clearly documents, albeit with more personal vignettes than I really cared to deal with, is that we are killing not just our middle class, but our worker class as well. This is nothing short of economic and social suicide.

There is one thing and one thing only that we can do to address this unhealthy economic situation that is exhacerbated by the double deficits (trade and debt): this book should be a call to arms for the public, which should demand that both its legislative candidates its presidential candidates in 2008, restore their integrity by once again serving as the champions of the worker-people rather than the corporate special interests.

There is a great deal that is wrong with our predatory form of capitalism, one reason why I champion communal capitalism (my term, not to be confused with socialism or communism but rather with capitalism of, by, and for the people). This author has very capably summarized the real costs to the people, and to the country, of irresponsible lay-offs from which we do not recover.

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Review: The End of Poverty–Economic Possibilities for Our Time (Paperback)

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

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5.0 out of 5 stars Nobel Prize Material with One Small Flaw,

April 6, 2006
Jeffrey Sachs
From an American perspective, now that everyone knows Senator John Edwards has focused on poverty as the underpinning for his revisitation of the “two Americas” divide (see also Barbara Ehrenreich Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and David Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible in America, this book should receive even more attention.

The author is extraordinary, and I take issue with some of the quibbling pot shots (when you are in fact so central to something that both the UN Secretary General and the President of Columbia University want you in the top position, perhaps you just might *be* central).

The most important thing I can say about this book is that the timing is perfect–there is a “correlation of forces” emerging that combines An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths (see my review of that book), The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (ditto), Collective Intelligence (see my review of Tom Atlee, The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All) and a massive public awareness that both the Republican and Democratic parties are corrupt and dysfunctional (see Peter Peterson's Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It and Tom Coburn's Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders ), and that the rampant unilateral evangelical militarism and immoral capitalism that the Bush dynasty has imposed on the earth is in fact a stake in the heart of the American Republic.

It may not be an exaggeration to say that this book represents the pinnacle of “new thinking” in which the public is energized into realizing three great precepts:

1) Republics belong to the people–the government of a Republic can be dissolved by the people when it becomes pathologically dysfunctional. See The Vermont Manifesto.

2) Sovereignty as defined by the Treaty of Westphalia is passe, in that it supports 44 dictators and massive corruption, censorship, genocide, state crime, and so on. There is a place for sovereignty, but only when certain standards of legitimacy, morality, transparency, and sustainability are present. See Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025 and Philipp Allott's The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State.

3) Poverty is the fulcrum issue for the world, just as democracy is the fulcrum issue for America. If one reads this book in combination with C. K. Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks), it is crystal clear that a shift of money from militarism to education, health, wireless access, and micro-cash economics will unleash the entrepreneurial innovation of five billion people, and literally save the world.

There are a number of stellar aspects to this book.

The author warms my heart when he slams the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank for being ignorant and having the wrong economic model. His articulations of the need for “differential diagnosis,” and for the development of “clinical economics” are Nobel Prize material. He is right on target when he lambastes the IMF for overlooking “poverty traps, agronomy, climate, disease, transport, gender, and a host of other pathologies.” A different take on the IMF and World Bank is provided by John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man while the contributing delinquency of immoral multinational corporations is addressed by William Grieder in The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy and US insanities are addressed by Clyde Prestowitz in Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions.

The author has clearly been influenced by Paul Farmer and his book Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (California Series in Public Anthropology, 4) and uses the emergency medicine model to discuss how clinical economics varies from developmental economics. One could say that some nations need to learn to read and feed themselves first, and only after doing so, are they capable of moving up the rung. Lest anyone think the author is over-reaching, he is quite clear on limiting his objective to the elimination of EXTREME poverty, not all poverty.

The bottom line is quite clear: for just 1% of the US GDP, or a 5% surcharge on families making over $200,000 a year, extreme poverty can be eliminated by the year 2025. Anyone familiar with Hans Morgenthau and the “sources of national power” will understand that people rather than geography or resources or military power are the fundamental unit. People can think and share information and innovate. The author clearly discusses how disease destroys labor–including the entire male working class in Africa, and how disease, poverty, and education interact. The checklist for “medical triage” of a country, on page 84, is superb. The “big five” interventions are Agricultural, Health, Education, power-transport-communications, and safe drinking water-sanitation.

The author takes special care to dispel a number of myths, chief among them the myth that African corruption makes foreign aid irrelevant. While there is a great deal to be said for aid mis-management leading to black markets and such (see William Shawcross, Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict) the bottom line is clear: the US Government is both well behind other more enlightened governments in its rate of giving, and downright incompetent at “doing” aid. Indeed, the author can be noted for his general critique of all “official advice” as being generally ignorant.

This is not an ivory tower idealist. He discusses ten examples of global scale success stories from the Green Revolution to cell phones in Bangladesh, and settles on Stabilization, Liberalization, Privatization, Social Safety Net, and Institutional Harmonization as the steps needed to migrate from failed state to stabilized state.

Interestingly, he disassociates himself from the Harvard professors that helped the Russian oligarchs loot the Russian state through predatory privatization, and deliberately slams Professor Andrew Shleifer's role on page 144.

The author appears to be the first person to write a fifteen page plan for migrating a country (Poland) from a socialist economy to a market economy, writing from midnight to dawn due to local time pressures. This book is nothing short of riveting. It will stand the test of time as a prescription that can be explained to the voters, understood by politicians, and enforced by democratic elections.

There is only one small flaw: ending poverty will increase the number of stronger beings jostling for a move up in the pecking order. The program will need to be accompanied by both very strong militaries and police, and by very strong conservation efforts to keep increasingly strong billions from fighting over decresing resources.

EDIT of 11 Dec 07: Since reading this book, 24 of us have come together to co-found the Earth Intelligence Network, and we have a vision for teaching the five billion poor “one cell call at a time” using Telelanguage.com and 100 million volunteers with Skype and Internet access, covering among them the needed 183 languages. By creating wealth locally (see below list of representative books), this is stabilizing and addresses my own concern from the earlier review.

See also:
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives

and most importantly,
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

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Review: An End to Poverty?–A Historical Debate (Hardcover)

Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

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5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Historical Underpining to Sachs' Current Work,

April 4, 2006
Gareth Stedman Jones
It is very disappointing to see so little information provided by the publisher on this book, not even a table of contents. The time has come for Amazon to demand a higher standard of due diligence by publishers.

For those who wish to immerse themselves on the pros and cons of the debate over poverty, this is an essential intellectual foundation to the current work by Jeffrey Sachs who is both the advisor to the Secretary General of the UN on the Millennium project, and the head of the Columbia Earth Institute.

Thomas Jefferson said that “A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry.” He probably would have agreed to amend that to say an educated, healthy citizenry able to work. A historical appreciation of the phrase “pursuit of happiness” suggests that Jefferson actually meant, in lieu of selfish pleasure, the pursuit of self- actualization.

This book completes a circle with C. K. Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks) which suggests that there is a four trillion a year marketplace among the five billion poorest, and that unleashing their entrepreneurial initiative could save the world, and the definitive work by Jeffrey Sachs, on how can end poverty for $70 per year per person.

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