Predictable and Lightweight, But Serves a General Purpose
June 27, 2007
Drew Curtis
I read a lot, and list some related interesting books below that expand on the author's rather predictable and lightweight review. He does serve a general purpose, so I do recommend this book as a fast overview.
Here is an even faster overview of mass (corporate-dominated) media:
1) Fearmongering
2) Unpaid (and paid) placement pretending to be news
3) Headlines contradicted by content
4) Equal time for nut jobs (extreme right and extreme left as well as lunatics)
5) Out of context celebrity commentary
6) Seasonal garbage
7) Media fatigue
8) Lesser media space fillers
All of the above are called the “news hole” around which advertising, op-eds, and other garbage are placed.
I wish I could say that I cried over this book, but the truth is that I am so accustomed to America's legacy of genocide, social injustice, and external fraud, regime change, and invasion that I simply sighed and thought, “wow, about time this came to light.”
This is a stunning book that should be read by every American of every race, creed, and class.
I previously reviewed a book today that discussed how white supremacy views were one of the causes of the downfall of democracy after the Civil War. I believe this. As a Marine, I learned there are only Marines, some dark green, some light green. That lesson has NOT been learned by all Americans, and that is one reason I favor a restoration of universal national service (including two years for any immigrant granted citizenship, at any age), with the option of armed, peace, or homeland service.
I am Latino by culture, white by race, intelligent by design (pun intended). I believe that America genocided the native Americans, genocided the people of color, and is now in the process of disenfranchising the Latinos while making commons cause with the Asians. None of this bodes well for a Republic that is supposed to offer Liberty & Justice for all as the foundation for collective intelligence and the sovereign We the People.
The Constitution has been trashed by Dick Cheney and his neo-conservative and Christo-fascist supporters, and it is high time someone stood up and said ENOUGH–we must make common cause with the people of color, embrace their leaders, both self-selected and elected, and MOVE ON beyond the corporate socialism and the corrupt political party environments that have broken the middle class and impoverished the working ppor–which the author of the book by that title points out, should be but is not an oxymoron.
This is an important book. I hope it shames some, causes dispair in others, and that overall, it rises to be a liberation manifesto, a starting point for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission within America, to reveal, curse, and forgive all that has been done to the people of color on the assumption, the grotesque assumption, of white supremacy.
I share Martin Luther King's dream, and I am committed to seeing it fulfilled.
I have been reading since the 1960's, but it is only in the last ten years that I have seen a virtual nuclear explosion of discovery, dissemination, discussion, and deliberation over matters that in the past have been hushed up, censored, ignored, ridiculed, or crushed.
This is such a book. I list a few others that merit study below. America was, as the author puts forth, a virgin territory in which the Indians were genocided (both deliberately and accidentally, e.g. by infectuous diseases not yet known to them) so that a European war could play out between Catholics, Protestants, and secret societies, the Freemasons in the forefront.
I am not a fan of conspiracy theories, but I do believe that when documentation reaches a critical mass, it is essential that we keep an open mind and “deal with it.”
EDIT Inspired by 1st Comment: Rule by Secrecy, which slipped my mind, ends by suggesting that aliens populated the earth and the secret societies evolved as their “straw bosses” when it was realized that the larger mass of now much more intelligent humans could not be “penned up” as slaves. This is certainly plausible, but my own interim explanation is that the secret societies, which evolved to challenge the authorities of both king and pope, may have seen it convenient to claim that they were the represenatives of a “higher order” such as the Illuminati appear to claim. Either way, the longer we continue to eat our own seed corn and kill our own children of the Earth, the less likely we are to defeat these secret societies and redistribute the wealth–there is PLENTY of money for peace and prosperity across the planet, it is simply too concentrated in greedy, corrupt, arrogant, and irresponsible hands.
There is no question in my own mind, as a reader of non-fiction reviewed here at Amazon (the last 1000 books, not the first 2000+), but that the US Government is not in charge of anything. We the People are not in charge of the US Government. I see a very clear connection between secret societies, select bankers, corrupt corporate chiefs all too eager to screw their stockholders and their employees and their customers, and a Congress and a White House that are nothing more than prostitutes.
This is an important book, because it begins to fill the gaps. The people have a digital memory now, and those that have abused power cloaked in secrecy, now need to help create infinite wealth–there is no need to confiscate ill-gotten gains as long as those who have the concentrated wealth now do not stand in the way of our creating “seven billion billionaires” (Medard Gabel's term).
I read a lot. I think strategically and am in the process of developing a holistic approach to the ten high-level threats to humanity, the twelve policies needed to deal with them, and the eight challengers (all with huge populations). It is in that context that I see this book as a hysterical, incoherent, badly written kludge of hot button issues summarized from Internet searches and Op-Eds. I went through the footnotes and while I may have missed one or two, I could not find a single BOOK–not a single one. This is hyped out of context garbage.
This is incomplete, inauthentic, and incoherent. It does not propose solutions. This author cannot add and is incapable of putting together a balanced sustainable budget. See the list below for more thoughtful books.
On pharmaceuticals, the author rails against the industry's successful lobbying that prevented the US Government from negotiating for reduced prices, but completely misses the larger context: that health care is a four-part solution of lifestyle, environment, alternative or natural cures, and–last and least–medical remediation. He is also evidently unaware that units that sell for $600 in the US and $60 in Canada sell for $6 everywhere else, and we can eliminate the forecasted unfunded future obligations for Medicare overnight.
He lists Cuba as a sponsor for terror. As I reviwed this book I thought to myself, “fired by the left, pandering to the right.” This is not a pretty piece of work, and it is almost pathetic in its ranting.
There is no mention in this book that I could find of the two issues that really matter: restoration of the Constitution, and electoral reform to restore We the People as sovereign.
The author(s) try to end on the cute note that Outrage is better than Cynicism, but I find nothing in this book that contributes to a more measured strategic executable program.
This book is second-hand hype, and largely worthless to any serious discussion. I have put it away, never to be looked at again, and washed my hands after doing so.
See my lists on democracy and on transpartisanship for more serious reading. A few books that are head and shoulders above this one:
I was moved, impressed, and inspired by this book. There are a couple of other reviews that do excellent jobs of summarizing, so I will try to limit my ten pages of notes to a few highlights, and some other books that I believe can help the 3 out of 5 Americans that want “none of those now running.” The Republican and Democratic parties have sold out (this is best documented in Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It) and it is time we restored the Constitution and demanded Electoral Reform to restore We the People as sovereign.
Written in 1978, this book could not have come to me, and others in the transpartisan movement, at a better time.
The author opens with very helpful overviews of how a mass culture, a mass indoctrination, if you will, is a much cheaper and easier way to keep the mass docile, than a forced or fascist solution. He reminds me of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
He then stresses how in a damaged or constrained democracy, public resignation and private escapism are the dominant features of the mass public.
He then moves into an overview of the agrarian-based populist movement that was crushed by the railroads, Pinkerton's as an illegal army, and the banks, with the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 being the consummation of the banking victory over the people.
He notes that mass protest requires a higher order of culture, education, and achievement, especially in harmonization of disparate nodes. He identifies four steps within which the third is clearly of vital importance:
1. Autonomous institution emerges as a hub
2. Recruiting of masses takes place
3. Educating of masses takes place (40,000 “lecturers”)
4. Politicization of the masses actualizes their power to good effect.
The author does a superb job of stressing the importance of internal communication, and says that IF this can be achieved, THEN a new plateau of social responsibility is possible. He calls this plateau of cooperative and democratic conduct “the movement culture.”
He examines the Civil War and concludes that it changed everything–it fragmented the nation into sectarian, religious, and racial prejudices. Latter in the book he examines the pernicious effects of white supremacy, which ultimately undid the potential collaboration among poor whites, poor blacks, and poor Catholics factory workers in the Northeast.
The populists tried to break free of the railroads and banks that conspired to keep them in debt forever. Among their brilliant leaders, one stood out, conceptualizing both a large scale credit cooperative (i.e. public ownership of the essentials of society including food, water, energy, and communications), and a sub-treasury that would ensure that natural resources were applied to the needs of the people and not to squatter or absentee landlords.
The seven “demands” of the populists, ultimately crushed by the banks:
1) Abolishment of banks, issuance of government tender
2) Government ownership of the means of communication & transportation
3) Prohibition of alien ownership of USA land
4) Free and unlimited coinage in silver
5) Equitable taxation among classes
6) Fractional paper currency
7) Government economy
The populists opposed “organized capital”, emphasized living issues over dead or archaic contracts, and tried to establish their own newspapers because they understood that the mainstream media had been co-opted by the railroads and the banks.
The following quote on page 168, from the year 1892, is eerily relevant to today:
“The people are demoralized. …The newspapers are subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrate; our homes covered with mortgages; labor impoverished; and the land concentrated in the hands of capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right of organization for self-protection; imported pauperized labor beats down our own wages; a hireling standing army (Pinkerton's), unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down; and they are rapidly disintegrating to European conditions. The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes, unprecedented, while their possessors despise the republic and endanger liberty.”
Wow. I am reminded of virtually every book I have read in the past four years on unilateral militarism, virtual colonialism, and predatory immoral capitalism. Just a couple can be mentioned here:
The author draws the book to a close by observing four trends that spelled the demise of the populist movement:
1. Banishment of “financial issue” from public debate
2. Corporate mergers (and one could add, corporate “personality”)
3. Decline of public participation in democracy
4. Corporate domination of mass communications
He identifies three persistent flaws in the existing American economy:
1. Land ownership permitting alien, absentee, and predatory landlords
2. Basic financial structure that imposes debt rather than credit
3. Corporate centralization
He stresses that populism is not socialism, but rather a democratic promise emergent. He is optemistic that lessons from the populist failure could be used by farmers, laborers, and others to do a mass insurgency, to “work together to be free individually.”
If we are to defeat the current corrupt Republican and Democratic parties, we must do so in a transpartisan fashion: a third party must be based on the disaffected from both of the corrupt “main parties” while attracting back to the debate and the electoral process the lapsed voters and the new voters. I think we can do that for 2008.
I might have leaned toward four stars on this book, which is certainly a useful contribution, but it falls into the second tier for being a clear hit job—and shallow to boot. Gaps in the author's reading (or writing) appeared from the very beginning. Lost first star there.
He defines strategic intelligence as focused on threats and the use of force. Despite his mention of Adda Bozeman, he does not seem to have understood that the heart of strategic intelligence is deep and sustained study and understanding of foreign cultures, histories, languages, genealogies, and ties that bind–financial, religious, tribal, ethnic, etc. Lost second star here.
There are ten high-level threats, twelve remediation policies, and eight global challengers, and all 30 of these factors must be studied as a whole and in relation, in the present, near, and far term. Anything less is not strategic intelligence.
His coverage of 9-11 is also deficient. While he properly criticizes CIA for failing to actually ramp up both clandestine penetrations and analytic talent, and he faults the FBI for not sharing with CIA, he fails to mention the 9 specific warnings from foreign governments that the White House chose to exploit to achieve “our Pearl Harbor”–the Israeli's even sent a video crew to capture the known-in-advance event for their archives, while Dick Cheney organized an “exercise” with a command center NOT in the target building where the command center was originally built at great expense.
On Iraq, I found the author irritating–almost whining–in his never-flagging effort to tar the CIA. Evidently he is not aware of, or does not wish to credit, the defection of Salaam Hussein's son in law and the 25+ line crossers Charlie Allen is said to have sent in, as recounted in Bob Woodward's State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III all of whom came back with the same story: kept the cookbooks, destroyed the stocks, bluffing for regional influence's sake.
I agree with the author on some key points:
1) DNI should not have been created, this just created another layer of bureaucracy so we could promote the losers who got us here one more time.
2) CIA is out of touch with reality. While the author glosses over the importance of open sources of information, he is evidently completely unfamiliar with what properly done OSINT can do, to include tribal genealogies and orders of battle, financial-family ties and asset mapping, and so on.
3) The author is certainly correct to whale away at CIA security. On the one hand, they did not want my wife's report on the 300 foreign intelligence officers she met at one of my conferences, including the LtGen from the KGB (“did you sleep with any of them? No? Forget about it.”) and on the other these are the morons who harassed a GS-15 who dared to call Kazhikistan to solicit local views, to the point that she quit CIA and is now very happy as the Chief of the Intelligence Analysis Division at one of the Combatant Commands. I was barred from the campus by these fools for properly returning a classified document from USMC to CIA, taken with permission and transported both ways via authorized couriers.
4) The author is correct on the fossilized layers of “management” and bureaucracy, and he does provide a good review of shortcomings, but I for one, with experience across three of the four Directorates back in the day, consider this book to be a case of “several hundred bleats too many.” Yes, CIA is a mess. Yes, CIA should not have 800 SES positions and 200-400 compartments that do not share with another. It is all that bad? No. I could turn CIA around in 90 days just by recruiting Amazon to mobilize all the top authors and readers on every topic; by creating external non-secret multinational intelligence-policy councils on every topic of importance as I am doing now with the Earth Intelligence Network; by asking DoD to make the Coalition Coordination Center into a Multinational Information Sharing Hub that does OSINT as well as multinational HUMINT and close-in emplacement of US-provided technical devices. Somewhere in there I would fire two thirds of the contractors, half of the security people, two thirds of the lawyers, and most of FBIS. This is not rocket science.
The book ends weakly, with a mention of horizon scanning, which Singapore has turned into a 21st century new craft of intelligence, but the author evidently has not read Tom Quiggin's Seeing the Invisible: National Security Intelligence in an Uncertain Age, and is unfamiliar as well with the broader literatures on information society, modern intelligence, strategy & force structure, emerging non-traditional as well as catastrophic and disruptive threats, anti-Americanism and blow-back, and the negative impact of domestic politics on sound foreign and national security policy.
