Public Intelligence Blog – Page 4026 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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Superb Easy to Understand Itemization of the Fraud Inherent in Any Corporation,

May 2, 2006

Jane Akre

I admire a number of the reviews that have already been posted, and am doing this one primarily as a personal record and for those that follow my reading in non-fiction about national security and national competitiveness (690+ reviews).

This is a superb DVD. I did not realize there was a book by this name, but all things being equal, the visuals that come with the DVD, and the shorter time to absorb the message that can been carefully crafted, make this a great value.

For those that were not around or students in the 1970's I have to say that Barnett and others did a lot of study on the topic of out of control ungovernable unregulatable multinational corporations, and a lot of this was anticipated thirty years ago. However, this DVD provides a wonderfully coherent and fresh look at some key points that need to be understood by the general public.

* Modern corporation is today's dominant institution, with global reach and global impact, yet it is ungovernable by national or state or local governments, has limited liability, and seeks to maximize internal profits by externalizing all possible costs including environmental degradation, the importation of poverty, spread of disease from lack of health benefits, etc.

* “A few bad apples” (e.g. Enron, Worldcom, Exxon, etc) is a “jingle” that has been used to cover up the fact that a lack of ethics is a predominant characteristic, not an exception. See my reviews of Lionel Tiger (The Manufacture of Evil), The Informant, The Cheating Culture, etc.

* The corporation is a paradox–it creates great wealth, and it also does great harm. It is, however, an ARTIFICIAL creation, and we have it in our power to reverse its limited liability status.

* The corporate agenda does indeed compete with the public interest agenda, and can be likened to the damage that occured with the loss of the commons–while the corporation has done much good, the concept of the people belonging to and being at one with the land was lost forever when the land could be “owned” by an artificial person as well as a real person.

* Corporations can and tend to be psychopathic. The definition of a psychopath includes callous unconcern, unable to maintain enduring relationships, reckless disregard for tohers, deceitfullness, inability to experience guilt, failure to conform to social norms–gosh, this defines the Bush White House, not just corporations. It also defines the media, religions, and some labor unions. No wonder we have problems!

* The corporate mind-set is divorced from the good of the group–only a corporation would develop the concept of a terminator one time use seed, or throw away goods.

* 9-11 was capitalized on by traders, as was the war in Iraq. I am reminded of General Smedley Butler's recommendation in “War is a Racket” when he suggested that when the US goes to war, everyone in the private sector be absorbed into the government at enlisted and junior officer ranks, and not allowed to carry out war profiteering.

* The DVD does a good job of examining the sophistication of marketing, describing it as a smart bomb in comparison to early day “bb guns.” The DVD discusses the seduction of the consumer and the use of branding as an invasive form of producing customers almost against their common sense (because of this DVD I am buying the book NO LOGO).

* Corporations today are allowed to patent life, which is wrong and was always excluded, until a court did not realize that a microbe was life, and considered it a chemical formula instead. From that mistake, hundreds of cases have been filed by corporations under the laws intended to protect the life and property of former slaves.

* The DVD expresses concern over who might protect the public interest when information is controlled and filtered by the corporations. Monsanto is troubling case study, with good coverage in this DVD of how they were able to deceive EVERYONE in the US from academics to reporters to regulators, but only because they did not do their homework. In Canada, Montanto was stopped in its tracks by effective food safety regulators.

* The DVD is somewhat inflammatory in attempting to make the case that corporations not only helped fascism in Germany but are a form of fascism themselves. There is something to that, just as the is something to the reports that the major Nazis resettled in the USA and produced Karl Rove and Otto Reich as well as some really really bad covert operations and regime changes against democracy and in favor of dictatorships.

* The DVD ends on two notes, one troubling and one positive. The troubling note is that corporations are now trying to take over water, privatizing water, to the ridiculous point that in Bolivia the natives were not allowed to collect rainwater–this is not only obscene, but radicalizing. On a positive note, the DVD ends with an interview of a person describing in Spanish how many small battles are being won, and the corporations are being beaten back.

This is a very fine DVD, which joins Lords of War and Ghandi among others in my serious collection. Very worthwhile.

2006/05/012011/10/22

Review: Off Center–The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (Hardcover)

5 Star, Democracy, Politics

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We Have to “Go For Broke” in 2008,

May 1, 2006

Professor Jacob S. Hacker

This is a tremendous book. It joins The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World; The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics and Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders (by Tom Coburn, about how the “Party” turns elected representatives into slaves to the party line and against their constituencies). When combined with the latter books and Ralph Nader's long-standing complaints about “the system,” these authors can take credit for adding useful new insights as to how extremist Republicans (who can indeed be likened to Hitler's movement in the efficacy of their take-over of a Nation with limited numbers–and I say this as a moderate Republican furious over the loss of MY party's reason) have pulled off the theft of a Nation and the looting of the middle class through the working poor.

I am especially taken with the authors' examination of how the extremist Republicans have been able to systematically lie to the public and get away with it. Their discussion of “backlash insurance” and how they have managed to coerce the moderate Republicans (such as my favorite moderate Republican, Congressman Rob Simmons, R-CT-02) into going along is a very helpful contribution to public understanding of how we got so far off center.

The authors conclude with a fine review of the four major obstacles to political reform.

Where they fall short is in failing to develop a solution. A number of us in the Greater Democracy movement have in fact developed a solution, and in the next three lines I hope you will see our solution as a fitting epilogue to this five-star book:

1) Accept that the Democrats cannot beat the Republicans base on base, issue on issue, or even on leadership, nor do we want them to. Instead, we need to create a Citizens Party that is a non-rival (this is important–NON-RIVAL) “second home” or “dual membership” party with wings for each of the existing parties–Democratic, Republican, Green, Reform, Libertarian, etcetera. This coalition of moderate Republicans, conservative Democrats, and all others can indeed beat the extremist Republican base if it aligns with the left of center but at least not lunatic Democratic base.

2) Accept that there is one issue and one issue ONLY where we can all agree: that the government is out of control and we need to restore representative democracy through a National Electoral Reform Act of 2007.

3) Finally, focus in 2008 on getting every incumbent and every challenger to join the Citzens Party and testify in writing that they will support the National Election Act of 2007 or face recall. Agree, or retire.

This is not rocket science. With the Internet where it is now, and the ground-breaking work of Joe Trippi (see also my review of his book, of Bill Moyer's Doing Democracy, and of Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics), we can do this.

The authors help make the case for WHY we have to go for broke this time around–it's all for one and one for all time. We stick together on this one, this time, or we surely will go nuclear, fascist, and broke.

2006/04/302009/12/04

Review: Prelude to Terror–the Rogue CIA, The Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network the Compromising of American Intelligence (Hardcover)

4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

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Some Inconsistencies, But Best Synthesis of Bush-Mafia-Dictator-Privatized Intelligence Network,

April 30, 2006

Joseph J. Trento

This is not a perfect book. It has inconsistencies and errors but this book has helped connect many dots from the other 690+ books I have reviewed.

I had no idea while I was at CIA as a clandestine officer that there are really multiple CIA's and that there are three *external* CIAS: the “Safari Club” led by Saudi Arabia, with France, Egypt, Morocco and Iran (during the Shah's time, not since); the murder network (South Africa, Israel, South Korea, and probably also Chile and Argentina during their worst years); and a privatized CIA running drugs and arms, laundering money, and generally doing things that were “off the books and out of control” as the author titles one of his chapters.

According to the author, Allen Dulles has the first private intelligence service at 44 Wall Street, relying heavily on the recruitment of former Nazis. There is a direct path from the CIA's fascination with former Nazis to the presence of Karl Rove in the White House.

The author draws on good sources to document the long-time relationship between Wall Street and certain companies such as the house of Morgan and Brown that leads us right up to when Buzzy Kronguard, formerly of Alex Brown, was executive director of the CIA at no salary. Prescott Bush, farther of the first President Bush, features heavily in the corrupt relations between CIA and the Wall Street mafia. These people financed the Nazis and weapons that killed Americans.

Interestingly, the Dutch are known to have all the details on the Bush family ties to the Nazis, and I have personally heard from the Dutch that they also have full details from the Chinese on drunken teen-ager George W. Bush, of whom photos are said to exist while he is incoherent and perhaps posed in naked compromising positions with his male Chinese tennis teacher). All of this is inevitably going to be in the public consciousness–right now it falls into what one author calls “Fog Facts”–known openly but not “computed” by the public.

This entire book is a tale of the corruption of intelligence, caused in part by the abysmal failure of US intelligence in the early years, ranging from failing to predict the Korean invasion to trying to assassinate Chinese premier Chou En Lai.

The Viet-Nam era empowered people like Ted Shackley (who died in 2002 and whose memoirs are coming out shortly). CIA learned to run drugs and arms, launder money, start its own banks, and generally avoid Congressional funding limitations and Congressional oversight. Unfortunately, creating a rogue CIA further incapacitated “CIA proper” of which I was a part, and the author reasonably points out that the fall of the Shah of Iran, the failure to understand the 1975 concerns about Shiite terrorism training camps, the assassination of Sadat, the CIA coup plans that were pre-empted by Qadafi, the growth of Al Qaeda, the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban (which deprived Wall Street of its drug crops, now restored courtesy of the U.S. Army)–the list goes on.

According to the author's sources, the CIA opened the Far East to the US mafia, and helped develop pipelines for the drugs that included piggy-backing on US servicemen corpses coming back into Dover AFP. Fast forward to CIA using Special Operations Forces to protect transmitters that allowed hundreds of drug airplanes to land in Panama where drugs could be traded for money and arms.

The author centers the book on Ted Shackley as a bridge figure among many “external” intelligence activities, but Clark Clifford is also key in the founding of the BCCI bank and in asking the Saudis directly to fund an alternative CIA to be known as the Safari Club. BCCI had overtly good intentions–to attract terrorist and criminal funds, but at root it represented the complete “sale” of US intelligence to the Saudis.

The politicization of intelligence is the other major theme in this book, and the Bush family features very prominently.

Side notes:

Ted Shackley recruited Zbigniew Brzezinski as a young Polish-American student, and had full access to him later when he was National Security Advisor.

Don Rumsfeld, today Secretary of Defense, was instrumental in persuading President Ford not to appoint Eliot Richardson, a reformer of known integrity, to the DCI position, and instead got Kissinger to invite Bush from Beijing, all to ensure that Kissinger's role in subverting Chile would be concealed.

As DCI, Turner shut the Israeli's out, essentially forcing them to adopt Shackley as their “black CIA” partner, and then Bush as DCI turned CIA over to the Saudi government.

Shackley fought Inman for the soul of CIA, and the evidence suggests that Shackley won, in part by blackmailing Inman in collaboration with the Israel lobby.

CIA placed officers under cover on the Hill, notably in Senator Dan Quayle's office.

The book left me with three thoughts for reflection:

1) 9-11 was the culmination of decades of CIA corruption and politicization. Of course there are other factors, but from 1975 forward CIA “sold out” and it can be safely said that Viet-Nam killed CIA and opened the doors to the privatization of dirty tricks, murders, and generally very bad out of control covert foreign policy and a consequent subversion of national security.

2) Cheap oil resulting from our support of ruthless dictators set the stage for the radicalization of the Muslim world against America. People are not stupid–they see the link between the US situation, US support for dictators, and their own suffering and exclusion from the wealth.

3) One day, someday, I am going to fund an ABLE DANGER analysis of the history of secret intelligence, starting with Richard Secord, who is in charge of GRAY FOX (the successor to YELLOW FRUIT) and who is not killing terrorists, which is what he is supposed to be doing, but instead continuing the for-profit external CIA, and Ted Shackley.

This is an important book.

2006/04/302009/12/04

Review: American Foreign Policy in a New Era (Hardcover)

2 Star, Diplomacy

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Narrowly Focused on Critique of Bush and Iraq,

April 30, 2006

Robert Jervis

This would have been a three-star review, but as the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction about global issues, I have decided to begin penalizing publishers for low-rent publications that are poorly presented on Amazon–for this book there is no description, no table of contents, no cover (low rent, no jacket hence no cover art, and small print to boot), and so on. This is essentially a 138 page essay with a lot of notes thrown over the transom.

The greatest deficiency, for one who was waiting breathlessly for this great man's appreciation of “American Foreign Policy in a New Era,” is that the book turned out to be poorly titled and narrowly focused. This book is essentially a very thoughtful discussion of why the Bush Administration has acted very unwisely in attacking Iraq and failing to pick up on the terrorism warnings from the Clinton Administration.

Unfortunately, the book fails completely to address the *other* nine threats to global stability, within which terrorism falls ninth, just above organized crime. The other global threats that we must address, as identified by LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft and other members of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change (A more secure world: Our shared responsibility, United Nations, 2004). They focused, in this order of priority, on: Poverty; Infectious Disease; Environmental Degradation; Inter-State Conflict; Civil War; Genocide; Other Large-Scale Atrocities; Nuclear; radiological; chemical; biological weapons; and (after Terrorism); Transnational organized crime.

Sadly, I was expecting a learned discussion of each of these threats, potential inter-agency and coalition approaches to each of these threats, and a proposed plan of attack such as J. F. Rischard provides in High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them

I do not regret buying the book–anything by grand master Robert Jervis is important and worth reading–but he missed a larger opportunity here. Joe Nye's books Understanding International Conflicts (6th Edition) (Longman Classics in Political Science) and The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone (you can skip the more plebian Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics) are better. I also recommend the monograph, available at the Army War College Strategic Studies Institute web site, “Preventive War and Its Alternatives: The Lessons of History,” by Dan Reiter, and the recent monograph by Collin Gray, “Irregular Enemies and the Essence of Strategy: Can the American Way of War Adapt?” Both are free, concise, and brilliant.

2006/04/302009/12/04

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

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

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Imperfect but Riveting and Essential,

April 30, 2006

Louis Uchitelle

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

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

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

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

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

2006/04/302009/12/04

Review: The Pro-Growth Progressive–An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity (Hardcover)

4 Star, Economics, Politics

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Ignores Health, No Budget–Reflections Not Solutions,

April 30, 2006

Gene Sperling

Anthony Gibbens' review is superb, and I endorse it and amplify on it. THis book loses one star to two flaws: it begs too many key issues (such as health care, and corporate accountability), and it has no budget and no section on tax reform and increasing government revenue by eliminating fraud, waste, loopholes, and bribery-induced subsidies. That is always my litmus test for serious books about economic policy. One can use the National Budget Simulation, for example, and actually test all these ideas. I, for example, have taken the trouble to identify $550 billion a year in readily available increases in federal tax revenue, and another $300 billion a year in defense and intelligence spending that could be redirected toward soft power and open source intelligence/revitalization of education and national research. It's not real until it's in the budget. This book is platitudinous, worthy of consideration, but not legislatively enactable.

There is no question but that Gene Sperling performed ably for President Clinton EXCEPT that he sacrified the American worker by opening the door for broad indiscriminate lay-offs (see my review of The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences by Louis Uchitelle) and he evidently did not see the economic urgency of completely recasting our national educational system (including exile of the stake-holders in the old system to Chinese re-education camps near Mongolia).

On balance, Sperling is now one of those “has experience, listen to him” guys, but he is part of the last gasp of the old guard in the Democratic party, and for my money, a combination of Return of Rubin and Elevation of Matthew Miller would do more good. See my reviews of the books by both these stars.

The author lacks real familiarity with emergent technologies, especially bio-technologies that are CRTICIAL to reducing poverty and illiteracy (see my review of Tofflers Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives), and over-all the book does not represent a comprehensive strategy that reflects an understanding of system dynamics, both internal to the Republic and globally.

Bottom line: worth reading, 30% of this will be useful, somewhat tired. Rubin is more mature, Miller more innovative. Sperling needs to be in the car, but not driving.

2006/04/302009/12/04

Review: How Democrats Can Take Back Congress (Paperback)

3 Star, Politics

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Platitudes without a Balanced Budget–Not Tom Paine at all,

April 30, 2006

“Tom Paine”

This book reads like the last gasp of the old guard Democratic staff weenies who think that soundbites (one for every issue in this book) and platitudes will make up for ineptness. This book, for example, proposes programs such as eliminating social security taxes for 94% of the workers and paying for everyone's college tuition, without in any way suggesting how the Federal budget might be balanced. There is, in short, no tax reform focused on eliminating subsidies and loopholes and corporate fraud combined with corporate exclusion from the tax base.

Sorry, but on balance, this book is very loosely thought through, and I personally resent anyone using Tom Paine's great name in vain.

The only thing in this book that I think is right on target (sure, the issue positions are acceptable, but any high schooler could have put this list together) is the emphasis on the need to get back in touch with American labor, support the unions, and restore the vitality (the opposite of disposability) of the American worker.

This books makes no mention of Matthew Miller's The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love or Rabbi Michael Lerner's The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right or any of a myriad of good books on Cultural Creatives, New Progressives, Ecological Economics, Immoral Captialism, etc.

Bottom line: YUK. The author gets the third star for good intentions, otherwise this would have a been a two star vote.

At 57 pages, this book is light-weight in every possible sense of the word. It does not achieve its objective. See the image I am loading, if Amazon works today, for an idea of a policy framework that can then be costed out.