Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity – Page 17 – Public Intelligence Blog

2006/11/162009/12/04

Review: Screwed–The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class — And What We Can Do About It

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Justice (Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, True Cost & Toxicity, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

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Perfect Complement to Lou Dobbs' Own Book,

November 16, 2006

Thom Hartmann

Edit of 21 July 2009 to add links.

This book is a perfect complement to Lou Dobbs' own book on War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back and is also better in the single specific area where this author chooses to focus: on the middle class. The book by Lou Dobbs is the best book over-all, covering a number of topics related to the health of U.S. society and the economy, while this author focuses exclusively on the middle class.

If I were to recommend one other book, it would be Naomi Klein's No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs which discusses how individual citizens can track the abusive practices and behavior of corporations, and the multitude of individuals can punish them through simple boycotts of their products.

There is no question in my mind but that We the People will take back the power, this book, and Lou Dobbs' book, represent the end of an era of unquestioned repression and abuse of America's middle class and blue-collar labor force, and the beginning of a revolution that the banks and corporations will NOT be able to squelch.

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2006/10/072009/12/04

Review: Blind Into Baghdad–America’s War in Iraq

6 Star Top 10%, Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Amazon Page

The ONLY “Before and After” Book on the Iraq Mis-Adventure,

October 7, 2006

James Fallows

James Fallows is unique for giving us the only “before and after” book on Iraq. This book, while it consists of a collection of articles published in the run-up to the war on Iraq, is exemplary for showing what was known before the war, and how a combination of ideological bias, bureaucratic timidity, confusion, and general incompetence actually allowed this Nation to be led to an elective war of devastating consequence and cost.

The author provides both an introduction and a conclusion to the book that are unique to the book and set the articles in harmony as a whole.

There are other books that excel as retrospective reconstruction and finger-pointing, among which I would include HUBRIS, Squandered Victory, The End of Iraq, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and most recently, State of Denial, but this is the only book to focus on all that we knew prior to the war about the daunting difficulties facing us in making the peace, and why the political leadership of the Executive did not want us to think about that, and why the political leadership of the Congress refused to play its role as a co-equal branch with the power of both the purse and the declaration of war exclusive to it.

James Fallows documents how virtually every sensible element of the federal government, from the military to the diplomats to the commerce and treasury and agriculture and others, all KNEW that invading Iraq was going to open a Pandora's box of sectarian violence, ethic conflict over resources, a collapse of good order, the failure of infrastructure the US would not be able to repair quickly enough, and on and on and on and on!

Objective observers, including the British, considered the claims of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz with respect to the ease with which Iraq qould be liberated, to be the “ruminations of insane people.”

The author's bottom line is clear: the bureaucracy did its job and anticipated every single reason for not going to war, every single calamity that would befall us in Iraq. Where government failed was at the political level, with Dick Cheney closing out the policy process, spoon feeding the President lies from convicted thief and liar Chalabi, and with a full-court press backed by Wall Street and the media, to declare dissent to be treason–hence General Tony Zinni, former Commander in Chief for the Central Command, being called a traitor for sharing his knowledge.

The author and The Atlantic Monthly did not rely only on open sources. They sponsored a war game that came as close as possible to matching all that the US Government might be doing behind closed doors, using only open sources and overt experts, and here again, well in advance of the war, the conclusion was the same: don't do it!

The author concludes the book with several findings, all of which are completely consistent with the other non-fiction books I have read on Iraq and related blunders:

1) Corporations deciding on how to market a brand of toothpaste are vastly more meticulous and thoughtful that the political leadership in the Executive deciding to go to war on what proved to be whims, lies, and active mis-representation.

2) There was too little friction. The Administration got a “free ride” from the people, Congress, the media. Other than Senator Byrd, who shall long be my personal hero for his 80 speeches against the war (he alone among all the Senators stood fast on the matter of the Senate being equal to the Executive and having the right to question this idiocy–see my review of his book, Losing America), our Congress abdicated its responsibilities and failed the Nation. This was a bi-partisan failure, but the extremist Republican leaders were most to blame.

3) There has been no accountability. I remain shocked by the number of books and DVDs (see my list of Serious DVDs) that document the constant stream of lies and mis-representations from the political leadership and their tame uniformed members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who should be fired for confusing loyalty with integrity). It is a sad commentary on the Nation that the pedophile charges against Congressman Foley seem to carry more weight with the public than our 65,000 amputees.

I like this book very much. It is important for all Americans to understand that good minds working only with open sources of information easily anticipated the reasons why an elective war on Iraq was not a good idea. It is important for all Americans to know that the good people in State, Defense, and elsewhere got it right, but Dick Cheney shut them down, shut them out, and alone, bears responsibility for leading a young President ignorant of national security matters, on a very irresponsible and costly course of action.

Dick Cheney has a great deal to answer for–none of the others could have achieved their ill without him.

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2006/03/152009/12/04

Review: Twilight in the Desert–The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy (Hardcover)

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Environment (Problems), Priorities, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Reveals both US Senate and Oil Executive Dishonesty,

March 15, 2006

Matthew R. Simmons

This book, does, as at least one reviewer notes, “drag on,” but it does so because it is a meticulously presented case, a case that would stand up in Court, on the death of Saudi Arabia and its oil reserves.

The book concludes with an Appendix C, “The 1974 and 1979 Senate Hearings,” that I believe should be used to impeach, retrospectively, the Senators then responsible for Energy oversight. The documented public record is quite clear, and the Senate and media and banking and industry cover-ups are also quite clear and carefully documented: all of the Brahmins, including Dick Cheney, knew in 1974 and then again in 1979, that Peak Oil had been hit and we were on a downhill slope. For purely short-term political and profiteering motives, the oil industry and the U.S. Senators responsible for energy oversight, conspired to keep silent. This is, in a word, treason.

Exxon's CEO today, on the basis of this book, is either stupid, mis-informed, or a world-class criminal. I don't think he is stupid. I do think he is mis-informed. I also think that if he does not come to grips with reality soon, he will be proven to be a world-class criminal before 2008. The other energy CEOs, with British Petroleum a possible exception, are clearly duplicitous and in my own mind, display behavior that demands a nationalization of the energy industry, and a draconian criminalization of information withholding on this extraordinarily vital aspect of national security and prosperity.

This book has a world class bibliography, a world class index, and is, alone, sufficient to indict the energy company CEOs for high crimes against the Nation and the rest of the world.

For the reviewer upset that the author did not offer alternatives, I would make two points: 1) that is not the point of the book, it is about revealing the decrepitude of Saudi Arabia and the dishonesty of both the U.S. Senate and the oil industry executives in America; and 2) go to the two WIRED magazine articles, the one on doubling electrical output by creating a two-way system and localizing production; the other on the price points at which oil makes all other energy alternatives cheaper.

For those who want alternative views:

on Oil and 9-11: Michael Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil

on Oil and Other Converging Catastrophes: James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

on Saudi Arabian and US corruption, Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism and Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

on US Political Incompetence and Corruption, Peter Peterson, Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It William Greider, Who Will Tell The People? : The Betrayal Of American Democracy and Tom Coburn, Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders as well as The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy).

See my 1000+ other books. This book is the tip of the spear that just went into the heart of the CEO of Exxon and his pals, all of whom will be held accountable by the American people, as will the corrupt politicians that have sold out to Wall Street and to bribery from lobbyists. We are in for a very rude and rough 20 years.

2006/03/152009/12/04

Review: The Coming Economic Collapse–How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel (Hardcover)

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Economics, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Get out of oil-dependent assets, as long as politics corrupt, energy policy will never be real,

March 15, 2006

Stephen Leeb

I am giving this book a 5 instead of a 3 or 4 because I believe that it does a superb job of laying out some facts that every normal adult needs to understand, and I want to encourage everyone to buy and read this book.

That having been said, I also found it disappointing. The author's main points can be summed up in this review, and take less than an hour to absorb in the actual book:

1) Peak oil and the need for alternative energies are being over-shadowed by myopic media and lack-luster academics that focus on poverty, climate change, terrorism, everything but the core Achilles heel of the Western world, its addiction to cheap oil which is no more.

2) Cheap oil is made possible by blatant political and financial maneuvers that enrich a few and set the rest of us up for life long poverty. Government subsidies and tax breaks purchases by expensive lobbyists giving expensive gifts and cash bribes to our politicians are directly responsible for pre-determined failure of our energy policy and the lack of an energy strategy.

3) The catastrophic nature of the collapse of cheap oil is dramatically enhanced by the combination of the *huge* U.S. deficit and by the increased prospects of war over oil.

The author concludes with some bottom line advice for investors: get out quickly from stocks associated with high oil usage (airlines, autos, chemicals; followed by cosmetics, food requiring processing and transport, and retail dependent on far away factories and raw materials).

I disagree with one key point he makes. He assumes that Wall Street and the media have been ignoring this problem because of “group think.” I certainly do agree that the larger mass of the public and the average bureaucrat that do not know any better have fallen prey to unethical propaganda, but I am quite persuaded by Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy; Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil; The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century and other books that this catastrophe in the making was clearly understood by the White House and the US Senate in 1974-1979, and a very deliberate selfish even treasonous decision was made to profit in silence and let the people fry.

This is a much simpler book than most of the others I have read and recommend, but I give it a solid five stars because if you can only afford to buy and read one book, this is the one that will be easiest and most to the point.

And just to drive the point home, when WIRED had the cover story on alternative energy, Cheney was meeting secretly with Enron and Exxon, and went on to amass 25 documented high crimes, 23 of itemized in my review of this book (Cheney makes Agnew and Johnson look like wall-flowers–this is the guy that put HIGH into “High Crimes.”
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

2005/12/182009/12/04

Review: The Outlaw Sea–A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime (Paperback)

4 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Crime (Organized, Transnational), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Replays Atlantic Monthly But Pleasantly Surprising,

December 18, 2005

William Langewiesche

This is not the book I was expecting. Normally it would only have gotten three stars, for recycling three articles, only one of which was really of interest to me (on piracy), but the author is gifted, and his articulation of detail lifts the book to four stars and caused me to appreciate his final story on the poisonous deadly exportation of ship “break-up” by hand. It is a double-spaced book, stretched a bit, and not a research book per se.

Two high points for came early on. The author does a superb job of describing the vast expanse of the ungovernable ocean, three quarters of the globes surface, carrying 40,000 wandering merchant ships on any given day, and completely beyond the reach of sovereign states. The author does a fine job of demonstrating how most regulations and documentation are a complete facade, to the point of being both authentic, and irrelevant.

The author's second big point for me came early on as he explored the utility of the large ocean to both pirates and terrorists seeking to rest within its bosom, and I am quite convinced, based on this book, that one of the next several 9-11's will be a large merchant ship exploding toxically in a close in port situation–on page 43 he describes a French munitions ship colliding with a Norwegian freighter in Halifax. “Witnesses say that the sky erupted in a cubic mile of flame, and for the blink of an eye the harbor bottom went dry. More than 1,630 buildings were completely destroyed, another 12,000 were damaged, and more than 1,900 people died.”

There is no question but that the maritime industry is much more threatening to Western ports than is the aviation industry in the aftermath of 9-11, and we appear to be substituting paperwork instead of profound changes in how we track ships–instead of another secret satellite, for example, we should redirect funds to a maritime security satellite, and demand that ships have both transponders and an easy to understand chain of ownership. There is no question that we are caught in a trap: on the one hand, a major maritime disaster will make 9-11 look like a tea party; on the other the costs–in all forms–of actually securing the oceans is formidable.

Having previously written about the urgent need for a 450-ship Navy that includes brown water and deep water intercept ships (at the Defense Daily site, under Reports, GONAVY), I secure the fourth star for the author, despite my disappointment over the middle of the book, by giving him credit for doing a tremendous job of defining the challenges that we face in the combination of a vast sea and ruthless individual stateless terrorists, pirates, and crime gangs collaborating without regard to any sovereign state.

I do have to say, as a reader of Atlantic Monthly, I am getting a little tired of finding their stuff recycled into books without any warning as to the origin. Certainly I am happy to buy Jim Fallows and Robert Kaplan, to name just two that I admire, but it may be that books which consist of articles thrown together, without any additional research or cohesive elements added (such as a bibliography or index), should come with a warning. I for one will be more alert to this prospect in the future.

Having said that, I will end with the third reason I went up to four stars: the third and final story, on the poisonous manner in which we export our dead ships to be taken apart by hand in South Asia, with hundreds of deaths and truly gruesome working conditions for all concerned, is not one of the stories I have seen in article form before, it is a very valuable story, and for this unanticipated benefit, I put the book down a happy reader, well satisfied with the over-all afternoon.

2005/12/122009/12/04

Review: The Party’s Over–Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (Paperback)

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Environment (Problems), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Historical, Contextual, Critical Reference,

December 12, 2005

Richard Heinberg

There are other books that I consider to be better at the over-all challenge of “connecting the dots” among cheap oil, drugs and drug money gladly laundered by U.S. banks, and war profiteering, but this book must be considered one of the finest underlying reference works that support the more speculative conclusions of others.

This book provides both a solid history of how we got to where we are and why we continually dismiss the known future consequences of not providing for energy conservation and alternative energy; and it also provides a very finely presented review of what the author calls the “banquet of consequences” across transporation, food and agriculture, heating and cooling, the environment, public health, information storage and transmission, and the over-all geopolitics of oil.

Had we all read this book, The Long Emergency, and Crossing the Rubicon prior to Dick Cheney's taking us to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we would have realized that invading and occupying those two countries is about the oil catastrophe and Wall Street's need for drug money to provide liquidity (a point made in Rubicon, not in this book).

Cheap Oil has been the Fool's Gold of this era. Unhappily, the fools (We the People) have ended up with our pocket's picked, and Wall Street and a few very large immoral organizations have ended up with the Gold.

The party is indeed over. The only question that remains is: can we repossess the Commonwealth from those that have stolen it using profits from cheap oil?

2005/12/102009/12/04

Review: Crossing the Rubicon–The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (Paperback)

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

People's Grand Jury Sufficient to Indict Dick Cheney for Murder,

December 10, 2005

Michael C. Ruppert

Edited 30 June to add links to ten books and observe that rankism is bad, but providing credentials to outweigh the ridicule that is used against books such as this (also rankism from Cheney et al) is not bad.

As the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction about global issues and national security (#66 over-all), as a former spy, founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Command, and CEO and proponent for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), I think I have a good foundation for evaluating this book. It is so compelling and so troubling that I was obliged to create an eight-page worksheet to ensure I understood the details.

The author alleges that Dick Cheney personally oversaw the 9-11 scenario, with largely fabricated hijackers used by the U.S. military as OPFOR exercise personnel and aided by Israel and Saudi Arabia, that most of the so-called hijackers were not actually on the airplanes; that the two airplanes hitting the WTC were flown by remote control in at least the final minutes from WTC 7 where the Secret Service (Cheney's personal vehicle for running the government) and CIA had their offices; that all three buildings, including WTC 7 which was not hit at all were brought down by controlled explosions, and the Pentagon was hit by a missile aided by a homing device, not Flight 77, which was put down elsewhere. (He notes that Congress was not evacuated, suggesting that either Cheney was incompetent or he knew the missile would hit the homing device in the Pentagon.)

Bottom line: he has NOT provided enough evidence to convict Cheney, but he HAS provided enough evidence to suggest that the 9-11 Commission was very derelict in its duties; that very select elements of the U.S. Government are engaging in a cover-up after facilitating the murder of U.S. citizens; and that a public investigation and trial of Dick Cheney are required.

Here are just a few highlights from this very complex and earnest book:

1) The end of cheap oil is a global crisis. Central Asian reserves were thought to be a temporary respite from global chaos. When this was known not to be the case, in 2000, Wall Street cashed out and allowed the public to bear the brunt of the stock market crash, and the Clinton Administration began to develop Al Qaeda, with Saudi Arabia and Israel, as a covert operation. I am more inclined to believe we allowed Al Qaeda to develop, rather than nurtured them deliberately.

2) Wall Street depends heavily on drug money for liquidity. When the Taliban killed the opium crop in Afghanistan, this was a form of economic warfare against Wall Street's immorality, and they were more than glad to support a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan which had the direct result of jumping Afghanistan's contribution to global heroin from 0 to 80%, with all that money going to Wall Street. Stunningly, the author reports that the head of the Stock Exchange traveled to Colombia to invite the FARC to invest its drug money in US stocks–the “ultimate cold call.” Specific companies associated with laundering drug money through off-book deals include HP, Ford, Sony, GM, Whirlpool, GE, and Philip Morris.

3) The author provides a very compelling case for the possibility that there are two CIA's–a very small elite that work for Wall Street, and were until recently led by Buzzy Krongard as Executive Director of CIA (his “former” firm did most of the puts on United Airlines and profited greatly from 9-11), and a “lip-service” CIA that bumbles around. The links that he establishes between oil companies and logistics support companies to the U.S. military, and their importation of drugs that seem to explode anytime CIA goes into Laos or Afghanistan or Colombia or anywhere else in a big way, are remarkable. He has very specific details, including references to drugs going to oil rigs off New Orleans and then directly in through the most corrupt police force in the country.

4) Congress passed the Patriot Act without reading it.

5) Massive deception has occurred in relation to terrorism. The U.S. refused multiple offers from both the Taliban and Somalia to deliver Bin Laden–everything about post 9-11 has been about damage control, not investigation; the Kean Commission was riddled with conflicts of interest that the author discusses in detail.

6) Specific corporations are named that appear to merit investigation, including Acxiom, Brown & Root, Carlyle, Goldman Sachs, Halliburton, DynCorp, Lockheed, and Raytheon. One corporation, from Israel, broke its WTC lease at great expense the week prior to 9-11.

7) Numerous individuals are named who were not properly interviewed by the 9-11 Commission. Both those on watch and off watch (e.g. BGen Winfield who asked to be relieved from 0830 to 1100 from his post as director of the national military command center) have not been grilled. Mayo Shattuck of Alex Brown resigned on 12 September. Dave Frasca, the FBI leader that blocked all investigations, Admiral Abbott, key person for Cheney, Karl Inderfurth, General Ahmad from Pakistan ($100K to Al Qaeda in US the week before the attack), a whole host of people were simply not investigated.

8) This is massive evidence of sustained fraud by Wall Street, mortgage companies, and others, inclusive of schemes to draw money out of the U.S. Government (i.e. from the taxpayer) through Housing and Urban Development mortgage fraud in drug-affected neighborhoods, and from the Department of Defense. The author alleges that by his detailed estimate, Wall Street has looted three trillion dollars from the U.S. Treasury. As a side note, he points out that Enron's records were moved to Switzerland in what could be a deliberate cover-up of their role in all of this.

9) Murder hangs heavy in this book. Lest anyone believe this is a fairy tale, the author ends the book with a copy of Operation Northwind, the JCS plan from 13 March 1962, to murder Americans in a series of events designed to provide a pretext for invading Cuba.

I cannot conclude that Cheney is guilty. I am completely persuaded that Cheney should be indicted, investigated, and tried by a jury of his peers, We the People.

Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition
Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict With a New Introduction by the Author
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
Game Without End: State Terror and the Politics of Justice
Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption