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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Informed, Engaged, Democracy
Collective Public Intelligence
By: Robert D. Steele
Introduction
If we want an extraordinary future for all of our children, America and Americans must embrace reality. While, as a society, we may have recently found it comfortable to ignore reality, reality is most assuredly going forward, with or without us. What we have allowed to happen from 2000 to date can only be described as a national break-down. We the People failed to do our duty, to pay attention, to stay informed, to remain actively engaged and to keep our government honest. Today, both the Republican and the Democratic Parties are ārunning on emptyā. They cannot be trusted to represent the Republic within the current āwinner take allā system. In addition, their exhausted 20th century solutions that got us to where we are today cannot be expected to get us to where we need to be tomorrow. After a great deal of reflection, I have come to the conclusion that we need a Citizens Party, not to compete with the Democratic or Republican, or the other 60 plus parties, but to bring all of us together on the one big issue that really matters: Electoral Reform. If we are successful, a Democratic or Republican Presidential candidate willing to field a Vice President from the counterpart party, and a Coalition Cabinet, could win in 2008.
Citizens Party
I have three ābig ideasā that I want to present for a ācollective public intelligenceā process.
Idea #1:
A Citizens Party (www.citizens-party.org) must be created. This new approach would be a party that is a āsecond homeā, or alternative party, that respects every individualās primary political affiliation, but offers them an opportunity to come together with citizens from other parties to keep government honest. It would NOT be a party set up to compete with all the other parties! Moderate Republicans like me, for example, can join forces with those from other parties to beat back the extremist ideological and fundamentalist tendencies of the original Republican Party. We can all, as Paul Ray explores in his discussion of āThe New Political Compass,ā create coalitions across all issue areas. We can use the power of actively engaged citizens, networked, collective, public intelligence, to hold the Democratic and Republican parties in particular accountable for representing their individual members rather than special interests.
Idea #2:
There are actually two really big issues on which we can all come together as citizens in 2006 and again in 2008. They are: 1] Electoral Reform and 2] Energy/Environmental policy — as discussed by Thomas Friedman. The reality is that our votes no longer count in the contrived monopoly that the Republicans and Democrats have established. Even if our candidate is elected, within weeks they have fallen prey to the corrupting combination of āthe party lineā which demands that they vote as they are told to vote by the party leadership; and special interests who bribe them to betray the people and favor specific corporations not acting in our interest.
Idea #3:
A Citizens Party can welcome immigrants enroute to citizenship as associate members who can use the Citizens Party as a neutral ground within which to both learn and practice their civic responsibilities, and be exposed to the many different parties that co-exist in America. A Citizens Party can offer generic civic instruction and opportunities for community service, and then once an individual becomes a citizen, they can be asked to declare a primary political affiliation, while retaining their āsecond homeā in the Citizens Party. Membership cards for non-citizen immigrants should show where they are in their path toward citizenship, and be a source of pride and evidence of their commitment.
Discussion
The U.S. political process has been lost to monied special interests, including the most corrupt of those special interests the Republican and Democratic parties, who use party line control as a means of achieving outcomes that are NOT in the best interests of the public at large. At the same time, the U.S. Government and the national infrastructures that it regulates, from education and health to water, energy, industry, finance, and telecommunications, have all become dysfunctional. Consider this summary drawn from Alvin and Heidi Toffler in Revolutionary Wealth
:
Their first key focus is on TIME and its relation to space, knowledge, and effectiveness as translated into wealth. Innovative businesses are going 100 mph; civil collective groups at 90 mph; the US family at 60 mph, labor unions at 30 mph, government bureaucracies at 25 mph, education at 10 mph, non-governmental organizations including the United Nations at 5 mph, US politics and the participation process at 3 mph, and law enforcement and the law it enforces at 1 mph. This is really quite a helpful informed judgment as to the relative unfitness of all but two of the groups.
Now, keeping in mindāand Henry Kissinger has expressed similar concerns about the archaic slow processes of government and politics and law enforcementāthe abysmally slow rating given by the Tofflers in relation to real life moving at 100 miles an hour, consider what this means when attempting to protect America and nurture American prosperity in the fact of global threats and in relation to global opportunities. Below is a threat table based on the report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change (A more secure world: Our shared responsibility, United Nations, 2004) where LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft was the US representative. Note that poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation head the list, and that terrorism is next to last on the list. The percentages for the contribution of Open Source Intelligence [OSINT] to understanding and addressing the problem are my own informed judgment, but they are consistent with the ā80-20ā rule. I believe we can rely on the general point being made by this table, i.e. that we need to redirect at least half the secret intelligence budget toward open sources and all ten of these threats, instead of obsessing on secrecy and terrorism alone.
Threat to the Security & Prosperity of the USAĀ Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā % Open Source
Average Importance of Open Source Intelligence Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā 86.4%
We are spending close to $60 billion a year on secret sources, and less than $600 million on open sources of relevant national security informationāon this alone the Bush Administration can be proven as derelict. At the same time, we are spending over $500 billion a year on a heavy-metal military, and next to nothing on waging peace or implementing what General Al Gray, then Commandant of the Marine Corps called for in 1988, āpeaceful preventive measures.ā We can still benefit immensely from the insights presented in May of 1966 by then Sec. of Defense Robert McNamara in his speech āSecurity in the Contemporary Worldā: In a modernizing society, security means development. At the same time, because our secret intelligence community is so out of touch with reality, and our political system makes it easy to ignore secret intelligence, we have a federal budget that is catastrophically mis-managed, combined double deficits (debt and trade) with excessive entitlements and subsidies, and mis-directed expenditures that over-spend on a heavy metal military — including missile defense and other unrealistic, or unnecessary capabilities, while severely neglecting āsoft powerā including cultural, diplomatic, economic, educational, and informational sources of national power. As McNamara said in 1966: The decisive factor for a powerful nation already adequately armed is the character of its relationships with the world. Finally, because our political system is corrupt and our national counterintelligence and crime intelligence capabilities are virtually non-existent, we have failed to increase federal tax revenues by failing to demand that corporations pay a fair share of the federal revenue (they pay 6% down from a high of 32%, this needs to be brought back up to 25%), by failing to eliminate subsidies and other tax breaks illicitly obtained by special interests, and by failing to detect tax fraud. Taken together, these could produce an extra $500 billion a year. A Citizens Party could utilize the National Budget Simulation, available online, to develop a balanced budget that clearly identifies the differing choices that each āwingā of the party makes, and puts before the larger public the specifics of the budget that demand resolution. Our budget is too important to be left to one party to manage without public oversight. Here are a few more thoughts:
1. 2008 will not be 2000.
The Cheney-Bush Administration has radicalized America, everyone is now ready for decisive and reasoned leadership, and we can field a unity-reform team rather than a weak Democratic choice. America is ready to be brought back together. A winning and collaborative coalition of 20% of the Republican vote, 20% of the non-Democratic vote and a further 20% of the immigrant vote, as influenced by their relatives still in Latin America, China, India, Korea, and Viet-Nam, can make an important contribution to a Democratic victory in 2008, especially if we begin setting the stage in 2006 while campaigning for others. However, Democrats can only win if they adopt the Citizens Party platform.
2. One Dog-Catcher Issue.
The ādog-catcherā issue is now and will remain this: ādoes your vote count?ā The answer to this question for most, including those that vote and then lose their Congressional representative to the party line and special interests, is no; consequently their concerns in other major issues are unheard and not represented. I believe that America will come together on our promise to reform the electoral processāeverything else, including governance, policy, and budgetary reform, will follow from that. Making voting the first issue will set the stage for the second: Energy & the Environment. It is important to make voting the hinge issue, not the environment, or anything else, as the latter are āintangibleā threats neither understood nor valued by a third of the electorate.
3. Citizens Party Breaks the Partisan Log-Jam.
Paul Ray knows what he is talking about when he discusses cross-over alliances on new progressive issues. I am a life-long moderate Republican who is also religious but in a practical rather than a fundamentalist sense. I have been giving speeches across the country and my sense is that we could begin the process of winning in 2008 by encouraging allies to start the Citizen Party in 2006. This new entity would be used to invite all Americans to consider a new concept: ādual political membershipā in this new party that welcomes moderate Republicans, conservative Democrats, Independents, Libertarians, Greens, Reforms, and the members of the Dean set into a safe haven with one common cause: restoring the integrity of the electoral and representational processes. Further, it would also allow for the creation of an innovative Coalition Cabinet (next point). This party will, at a minimum, be committed to electoral reform that levels the playing field and isolates the extremists. This coalition party could well enable us to re-establish the core American values of integrity, vision and compassion for the greater public in America as well as our stewardship of the global environment. In the event the Democratic Party nomination goes to a polarizing candidate who cannot win the general election, this new party could be critical for the candidacy of a more generally acceptable Democratic candidate willing to choose a moderate Republican as their Vice President, and commit to a Coalition Cabinet to be announced in advance of the general election.
4. We Must Form a Coalition Cabinet now.
Such a cabinet, formed now as a shadow government, has several potential advantages for bringing citizens from disparate political groups together, especially since the Democratic traditionalists will not be willing to abandon the Master/Slave hierarchical and star-centered system. Coalition Cabinet members can serve as our outreach Ambassadors in building the big umbrella for decisively wresting power from the extreme right by recruiting āwingsā from each party into the Citizens Party. Further, it could be used for developing, from 2006 to 2008, policies that make sense and pass the smell test. This will also allow us, in 2008, to articulate sound policies in detailādemonstrating the fruits of your innovative approachesāand to challenge the other candidates for President, in both the primaries and the final election, to identify their Cabinet choices. If they do not, we can mock them for not being able to pick a government, much less run one, and if they do, we challenge them to add selected Cabinet candidates (State, Defense, Justice) to the Presidential debates process. We win by showing that we have a balanced team, not a personality cult.
5. Peer-to-Peer Co-Intelligence.
There are creative resources, including Joe Trippi and the two authors of the new book on Crashing the Gate, as well as others, who have a lot to offer in the way of innovation in the peer-to-peer engaged democracy space. My friend Tom Atlee, for example, is at the forefront of the national Co-Intelligence or Collective Intelligence movement, and I believe that we are now at a point where Public Intelligence can both elect a coalition reform ticket, and drive sound Public Policy. We need votes, and contributions, but we also need a consensus of shared ideas.
6. Immigration & Catholic Social Justice.
I am in touch with the U.S. Council of (Catholic) Bishops on the matter of reducing poverty and increasing social justice among Latinos, who are inherently Catholic and more likely to be won over by a pro-immigration, pro-Catholic candidate (see point 9). This will be a big issue. Paul Rayās help in dissecting this issue by voting base will be important. However, it will also be connected to foreign perceptions of America, and foreign influence on immigrants that voteāwe need to promulgate our vision globally, in at least 15 languages. I believe that Michael Cudahy (a former Republican activists who worked on campaigns for G. H. W. Bush), Clyde Prestowitz, and a few other moderate Republicans can deliver 20% of that vote to Citizen Party candidates. I can find Citizen Party candidates another 20% bump in the voting immigrant pool. I am, incidentally, a white Latino, born in New York of a naturalized Colombian mother with Spanish ancestry and an American father of English and Scottish descent. This idea of a Citizens Party can, by the way, be migrated to all countries, and is not exclusive to our Nation.
7. Reality-Based Budgeting
This is a concept I have been working on for some time. I have been working with very senior former staffers from the Office of Management and Budget on developing this project. We are convinced that we could take the online National Budget Simulation and turn it into a tool for both establishing public consensus on revenue, spending; and for establishing a balanced budget at all levels of governance. We can make the budget process transparent and participatory, and we can really bring the power of the Open Source approach to help the voters understand where things now stand and are going at all levels of government and in the private sector.
8. Presidency.
I believe we should explore new concepts of governance in which the President focuses on the broad strategic issues, the really big picture and the really big alliances (both domestic and foreign), while the Vice Presidentāideally a former Governor with significant operational experienceāserves as Chief Operations Officer with three Chiefs of Staffāone for policy, one for strategy, and one for treasuryāways and means.
9. Faith-Based Governance.
Finally, I believe that Rabbi Michael Lernerās Left Hand of God and my friend David Johnstonās Faith-Based Diplomacy both have something to offer. If combined with due respect for the passion of the black church as identified by Bonhoeffer and represented in part by Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson, I believe we could find innovative ways of revitalizing the faith-based compassion of the Democratic Party, while opening doors to those of other faiths who have not found a haven where they feel they belong. Many Republicans of faith are beginning to see the hypocrisy of the extreme right fundamentalists. We cannot win the Latino vote, or the Korean vote, without showing that strong faith, loving faith and family values, are part of the proposition. America right now needs hope, and rational answers alone will fall flat. We need to offer pragmatic community-oriented faith versus nutty militant faith.
Conclusion
In 1994, Al Gore used the phrase āharnessing the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth.ā Now we have a clear and present emergence of networked ācollective intelligenceā or co-intelligence. It is clear today that the people in the aggregate can generate more campaign contributions, more votes, and more wisdom, than any collection of corporations or special interests. The Citizens Party is a non-rival means of taking back the power at the individual level, while respecting the unique concerns and insights of each of the traditional parties. Thatās what I think. What do you all think?
A note on Mr. Steele
In the course of a twenty-five year national security career, Mr. Steele has served as a Marine Corps infantry officer and service-level plans officer; fulfilled clandestine, covert action, and technical collection duties; been responsible for programming funds for overhead reconnaissance capabilities, contributed to strategic signals intelligence operations, managed an offensive counterintelligence program, initiated an advanced information technology project; and been the senior civilian responsible for founding a new national intelligence production facility. He was one of the first clandestine officers assigned the terrorist target on a full-time basis in the 1980's, and the first person, also in the 1980's, to devise advanced information technology applications relevant to clandestine operations. As a government employee, he was a founding member of the Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group, a member of the Information Handling Committee, and a member of the Foreign Intelligence Capabilities and Priorities Committee, among others. Mr. Steele, a political scientist liberally educated at Muhlenberg College, holds graduate degrees in international relations (Lehigh University) as well as public administration (University of Oklahoma), and certificates in intelligence policy (Harvard University) and defense studies (Naval War College). He is an elected member of Pi Alpha Alpha, the honor society for public administration, and has received the Meritorious Honor Award (Group) from the U.S. Department of State; Certificates of Exceptional and Special Achievement from the Central Intelligence Agency (Operational), and a Certificate of Achievement from the Department of Defense.
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.
