Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Class War (Global)

00 Remixed Review Lists, Atrocities & Genocide, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Problems), Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Worth A Look

Class War (Global)

Review: Bad Samaritans–The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Review: Eco-Imperialism–Green Power, Black Death

Review: Global Inc.–An Atlas of the Multinational Corporation

Review: Global Reach–The Power of the Multinational Corporations

Review: Open Veins of Latin America–Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

Review: Opening America’s Market–U.S. Foreign Trade Policy Since 1776 (Luther Hartwell Hodges Series on Business, Society and the State)

Review: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

Review: SAVAGE CAPITALISM AND THE MYTH OF DEMOCRACY–Latin America in the Third Millennium

Review: The Global Class War –How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win it Back (Hardcover)

Review: The WTO (Open Media Pamphlet Series)

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Blue Collar

00 Remixed Review Lists, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Secession & Nullification, Security (Including Immigration), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Worth A Look

Blue Collar

Review: Blue Collar Ministry–Facing Economic and Social Realities of Working People

Review: Deer Hunting with Jesus–Dispatches from America’s Class War

Review: Exporting America–Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas

Review: Talking Politics with God and the Devil in Washington, D.C.

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Theocracy

00 Remixed Review Lists, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Impeachment & Treason, Justice (Failure, Reform), Leadership, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Worth A Look

Theocracy

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

Review: American Theocracy–The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Hardcover)

Review: Blood in the Sand–Imperial Fantasies, Right-Wing Ambitions, and the Erosion of American Democracy (Hardcover)

Review: Dreaming War–Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta

Review: Foreign Follies–America’s New Global Empire

Review: Hegemony or Survival–America’s Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project)

Review: Losing America–Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency

Review: Obama–The Postmodern Coup – Making of a Manchurian Candidate

Review: Power Trip (Open Media Series)

Review: The Ambition and the Power–The Fall of Jim Wright : A True Story of Washington

Review: The Bush Tragedy

Review: The Price of Loyalty–George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Disinformation, Other Information Pathologies, & Repression

00 Remixed Review Lists, 9-11 Truth Books & DVDs, Censorship & Denial of Access, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Extra-Terrestrial), Iraq, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Science & Politics of Science, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Worth A Look

Disinformation, Other Information Pathologies, & Repression

9/11

Review: 9-11

Review: 9-11 Descent into Tyranny–The New World Order’s Dark Plans to Turn Earth into a Prison Planet

Review: Access Denied–The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering

Review: Painful Questions–An Analysis of the September 11th Attack

Review: The 9/11 Commission Report–Omissions And Distortions (Paperback)

Review: The Big Wedding–9/11, the Whistle Blowers, and the Cover-up (Paperback)

Review: The Hidden History of 9-11

Review: The New Pearl Harbor–Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 (Paperback)

Review: The Terror Timeline–Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11–and America’s Response (Paperback)

Review: The War On Truth–9/11, Disinformation And The Anatomy Of Terrorism (Paperback)

Censorship

Review DVD: The U.S. vs. John Lennon

Review: Censorship of Historical Thought–A World Guide, 1945-2000

Review: Forbidden Knowledge–From Prometheus to Pornography

Review: Gag Rule–On the Suppression of Dissent and Stifling of Democracy

Review: Into the Buzzsaw–Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press

Review: Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect

Review: The Age of Missing Information

Cover-Ups

Review: Scorpion Down–Sunk by the Soviets, Buried by the Pentagon: The Untold Story of the USS Scorpion

Review: Silent Steel–The Mysterious Death of the Nuclear Attack Sub USS Scorpion

Extra-Terrestrial Withholding

Review: Hidden Truth–Forbidden Knowledge

Iraq

Review: A War Against Truth–An Intimate Account of the Invasion of Iraq [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

Propaganda

Review (Guest): Propaganda–The Formation of Men’s Attitudes

Review DVD: Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)

Review: Big Lies–The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth

Review: Disinformation –22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror (Hardcover)

Review: Fog Facts –Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin (Nation Books) (Hardcover)

Review: HOW ISRAEL LOST

Review: Interventions

Review: It’s Not News, It’s Fark–How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News

Review: Manufacturing Consent–The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Review: State of Fear

Review: The Infernal Machine–A History of Terrorism

Secrecy

Review: Lost History–Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’

Review: Nation of Secrets–The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life

Review: Secrecy–The American Experience

Review: Secrets–A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

Review: Secrets and Lies–Operation “Iraqi Freedom” and After: A Prelude to the Fall of U.S. Power in the Middle East?

Review: The American Truth

Two-Party Tyranny

Review: Grand Illusion–The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

Review: Leave Us Alone–Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives

5 Star, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Economics, Impeachment & Treason, Insurgency & Revolution, Justice (Failure, Reform), Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), True Cost & Toxicity, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars Can Cause Discomfort, But This Book MATTERS

May 17, 2008

Grover Norquist

I was given this book as a gift, along with Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies and to my great surprise, being an estranged moderate Reagan Republican, I found that I am much more of a Libertarian than I realized, and this author, although he causes me great discomfort in some areas (such as privatizing Social Security), he makes complete sense. I learn he has been voted one of the 50 most powerful people in DC by GQ (2007) and I believe it. Senator McCain has better listen this time around. I urge all who are enthused with Senator Obama to read Obama – The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate. Senator Obama is NOT transparent and I consider his top foreign policy advisors to be dangerous–Dr. Strangelove (Brzezinski) has one last war with Russia left in him, and seriiousl believes he can confront the Chinese in Africa–this is lunacy (search for my Memorandum online <Chinese Irregular Warfare oss.net>.

The book lacks an index. This is a HUGE MISTAKE on the part of the publisher because there are too many important ideas in this book. The publisher should create and post online an index to this book. The publisher can also be criticized for failing to provide Library of Congress cataloguing information. This is a REFERENCE work. The author should consider holding the publisher accountable for such fundamental incompetencies that detract from the book's lasting value.

The five core reforms that he builds up to are:

1) Portable pensions

2) Competitive health care

3) Educational choice including home schooling

4) Outsourcing of all government functions possible

5) Transparency (see not only Groundswell, but also Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

The author posits a stark choice between the Leave Us Alone movement, that appears to be growing daily (and included 27 secessionist movements that meet annually at a conference organized by Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale, and what he calls the Takings Group, the tax and spend elected officials both Republican and Democratic.

This is a serious reference work with an even mix of books, articles, and online citations.

There are some areas where the author could benefit from knowledge that is not yet mainstream–for example, we can blow away the Medicare unfunded obligations by negotiating prices that are 1% (ONE percent) of what we foolishly pay now, and as a recent PriceWaterHouseCooopers study documented so well, also eliminating the 50% of the medical professional that is waste, including (the author does address this–the tort lawyers like Senator John Edwards who make millions putting good doctors out of business so bad doctors can do more elective operations).

On balance–and this was my first exposure to this individual–I put the book down thinking to myself that this author deserves his reputation, and that he combines a very powerful intellect with an equally powerful moral force.

Other books I recommend:
The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Inspire and Define Our Nation
The Revolution: A Manifesto
Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!
Crashing the Party: Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender
Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America
The Vermont Manifesto

Vote on Review

Review: 1491–New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

5 Star, History, Truth & Reconciliation, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Amazon Page
Amazon Page

Extraordinary, Inspires Need for 183 Other “Lost History” Studies, January 27, 2008

Charles C. Mann

Paul Hawken recommended this book during a Seattle lecture introducing his latest book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. It took me a while to get to, but it is certainly an extraordinary achievement, and it has enormous meaning for future studies of both lost histories of 183+ indigenous cultures and languages, and for a new appreciation of how humans can and should shape the environment, not just try to protect it.

The maps alone are a treasure, and are complemented by perfectly selected photographs and graphics, including one on page 144 that documents the deaths of 50 million indigenous Indians in Mexico alone, over the course of a 100 years from 1518 to 1623. The maps highlight the extraordinary contribution of this book and this author in documenting the scope and sophistication and massive numbers of native Americans across both continents, and with some documentation going back to 5000 BC.

The author opens by pointing out, as “Holmberg's Mistake,” the long-standing incorrect views that history began in 1492, and that the indigenous people's were few in number and lacked any semblance of influence or “agency” over what historians over hundreds of years assumed was a “state of nature” in which the indigenous humans were nothing more than a higher state of animal.

The book, which comes with 140 pages of endnotes, is world-class scholarship and world-class investigative journalism. It compellingly documents an Inka Empire spanning a continent in the 15th century and before, with 25,000 miles of roads that last to this day. Tens of millions, many languages, a great deal of trade, sophisticated culture with metalurgy and stone masonry equal to or superior to the Europeans.

I was particularly impressed by the author's description of how language analysis, looking for common words or syllables, helped to document a breadth of unique languages going far back in time.

Overall the book documents how the introduction of smallpox from humans and many other pandemic diseases from pigs that spread to wildlife and then humans, killed perhaps 100 million indigenous American Indians (north and south).

The book ends, appropriately for our time, with a section on the Five Nations of native American Indians who in the early 17th Century were practicing the Great Law of Peace. The Chinese brought Dick Cheney's airplane down over Singapore with precision electronic pulses, and have demonstrated that they can sneak up on our carriers and also immobilize or neutralize are mobility and weapons systems which are completely unprotected against advanced electronic warfare. Simultaneously, the Chinese are waging peace across the southern hemisphere, and rapidly displacing the US and Europe as the primary external actor (see my one-page memorandum on Chinese Irregular Warfare).

I mention other books below that are relevant to the larger issue of “what can we know” about the past or about reality that can help us craft a future that delivers a good life for all, including the five billion poor, a prosperous world at peace. I am persuaded that the emphasis on secret intelligence and military “might” has gone a long way toward destroyed the Earth and Humanity's hopes. The ten books below do not include any books I have written, edited, or published, but I do want to mention that they are all free online at OSS.Net, or more recently, Earth Intelligence Network, where we have posted the new edited work, “COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.”

See also:
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
The Lessons of History
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Organizational Intelligence (Knowledge and Policy in Government and Industry)
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
The Age of Missing Information
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

Review: An Enormous Crime–The Definitive Account of American POWs Abandoned in Southeast Asia

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars USG Has Betrayed Us All

November 28, 2007

Bill Hendon, Elizabeth Stewart

Edit of 26 Jan 08: see the comments for additional give and take that illuminates the treason of our own government against those “left behind.”

I recommend my review of Is Anybody Listening?: A True Story About POW/MIAs In The Vietnam War and also Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POWs in Vietnam.

This book is more of a scholarly work and has eye-glazing detail. However, as best I can tell, this is the single best and most carefully documented book, with the stellar advantage of having as a co-author the Honorable Bill Hendon, who is not only a former Representative (R-NC) but was on the POW/MIA beat while there.

I am very very very angry. Our politicians, both Republican and Democratic, have betrayed us all, and this brings me to tears, betrayed the honorable warriors who became POWs or were MIA in Viet-Nam.

There are several points that grab me:

Over 1,500 POWs still known to be in Viet-Nam and probably alive.

Viet-Nam had a clear strategy for capturing AND KEEPING ALIVE our personel in order to charge the US for reparations after the war was inevitably won by the Vietnamese

The authors explicitly suggest that Senator John McCain has been fully witting of the reality of how many have been left behind, and complicit in our federal government's deliberate decision to abandon them rather than pay Viet-Nam the compensation they appear to fully merit given our violation of the Geneva Convention and our intrusion into the civil war between North and South.

I hold the authors of this book, and the excrutiating detail that they have assembled, in the greatest regard.

It is now clear to me that the Federal Government as it is now constituted, cannot be trusted. We need Electoral Reform, open books, and an end to secrecy.

See also:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Why We Fight
The Fog of War – Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

Vote on Review