Although the author has written a more recent book, Emergence: The Shift from Ego to Essence, the later book is focused on helping the individual, while the book being reviewed focuses on the larger matter of social engineering.
I was growing up in Asia at the time that this extraordinary person was getting herself nominated, along with Geraldine Ferraro in 198, as a Democratic candidate for Vice President, and this book serves as both a practical statement of needs and next steps to achieve conscious evolution as a species in the aggregate (see also the book edited by Mark Tovey with 55 contributors, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peaceand as a very self-effacing overview of the extraordinary life and social network of the author. I am tempted to speculate that hers was the first social network of consequence in modern times.
The core strategic idea in this book is that we are now capable of coming together across all boundaries at all locations to discourse on Conscious Evolution.
Ron Paul + Jesse Ventura = Critical Mass, April 21, 2008
Ron Paul
Ron Paul excels at the Constitutional fundamentals: individual liberty, sound money, and non-interventionist foreign policies. Although I am dismayed by his unwillingess to play well with others (Ralph Nader has the same problem, Jesse Ventura does not), and he does not have a strategy for governance as much as a laundry list of non-negotiable starting points, he is still, for me as an estranged moderate Republican, an inspiration for breaking with the two-party spoils system.
This is an eloquent book in which he draws with extreme care from the thoughts of others, always attributed in the text, and provides a series of arguments that do not call for the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney, but certainly do call for the impeachment of the complicit Congress. Three books in particular support his angry denunciation of how Congress–both Republican and Democratic–has allowed the Executive to attack our civil liberties, sustain executive warmaking never intended by the Founding Fathers, and precipitated an unprecedented financial crisis. Congress standing still for “signing statements” [and I would add, for morons like Gonzalez that give all Latinos a bad name], is the last straw.
He cites Michael Scheuer with admiration, and as I am one of the very few to notice this in my reviews of Scheuer's books, I am delighted that he validates Scheuer's basic view, to wit, Bin Laden and terrorism against America are motivated by *our* presence in Saudi Arabia, our foreign behavior, our unilateral militarism, virtual colonialism, and so on.
He suggests that it was the Clinton Administration that first set the course on Iraq, being too willing to listen to lobbyists for Israel. Of course it was Cheney and Rumsfeld that gave Sadaam Hussein the WMD as–as the joke goes–kept the receipts.
He is very specific on Iran not being a nuclear threat to the USA (and in other writing, e.g. our weekly GLOBAL CHALLENGES report from the Earth Intelligence Network, we note that all the oil states are going nuclear as fast as they can).
He labels the neoconservatives as false conservatives.
At this point in my notes I have written “This is an original work rife with learned quotations from other scholars and practitioners.”
Halfway through the volume he takes issue with those who call for a “living” Constitution, and pointedly says that this would equate to a dead and worthless Constitution. Later in the book, but it goes beautifully here, he writes that the Constitution was intended to restrain government, not citizens.
He is also against the draft and income taxes, both of which suggest people are property of government and can therefore be forced into labor. As he states, “young people are not raw material” for the government to play with.
He cites former Comptroller General David Walker with admiration. Walker told Congress in the summer of 2007 that the USA is insolvent, and they ignored him. Today Walker runs the Peter Peterson Foundation and his mission is to educate citizens on their own governments high crimes and misdemeanors in the economic and financial arena.
He shares my view that the Federal Reserve should not exist and manufactures credit out of thin air, one reason we will see more credit bubbles.
He ends by pointing out that the Patriot Act not only violates all our liberties, but was unnecessary because the USG had all the information it needed in advance of 9-11 was was in his words, inept. I disagree. I am fairly certain Dick Cheney received nine different warnings, including from Pakistan and Israel, and he arranged an exercise so he could control the government and let it happen. I think Larry Silverstein, with Bush family assistance, planted controlled demolitions to get rid of his asbestos problem at tax payer expense, and I think Rudy Guliani should be indicted for his role in “scooping and dumping” fire fighter bodies in his rush to destroy the crime scene. See, among many other excellent books and videos, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, First Edition
He favors the legalization of marijuana and is opposed to attention deficit and other drugs being prescribed to children without adequate testing. I put the book down wishing that Gary Hart, Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, Michael Bloomberg, Jesse Ventura, and Ron Paul could have formed a new party, the Constitutional Party, and cleaned house. I have lost all respect for Bill Bradley–he sold out to the Trilateral Commission and greed (as did Al Gore). See Obama – The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate
John McCain is walking a tightrope. In my view, if McCain can form a Transpartisan Cabinet now–even if only a transitional one–and get David Walker and Ron Paul to lead the group in creating a balanced budget that wipes out the national debt and begins pulling back from all our overseas bases, especially the secret ones that are not worth the outrageous $60 billion a year we pay for the 4% we can steal and not process), then I think it is possible some good may come from this election. Otherwise, it is just four more years, and we MUST create a new political party.
I would normally give a book like this four stars because it is a collection of speeches entered into the Congressional Record over a 30-year period with no overview. I give it five stars because of the integrity and consistency of the author, and because he is the only person now running for President that has a completely serious book available for review.
I was disappointed that there was no strategic overview touching on each critical foreign policy region or each of the high-level threats to humanity such as depicited by the Earth Intelligence Network in support of the Transpartisan Policy Institute, but my disappointment is tempered by the realization that the author, in citing Thomas Jefferson on the dedication page, to wit: “Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship with All Nations–Engangling Alliances with None” (First Inaugural Address, 1801) makes it clear that it can indeed be “that simple.”
Throughout the book the author touches on truly fundamental themes:
1) Restoration of the Constitution as the fouindation for all Congressional and Executive policies, budgets, and decisions.
2) The importance of avoiding the cost of foreign adventures while investing in domestic needs for education, infrastructure, energy independence and so on.
3) The importance of having a currency backed by real wealth, not the fabricated wealth used by the banks to enrich themselves at our expense.
4) The importance of civil liberties, sound decision-making, and ethics
I'd like to see this honest man win and be President. His integrity and intelligence are absolute, something no other candidate can claim. However, unless he can pick a transpartisan Cabinet in advance of the election, and guide that Cabinet in producing a balanced budget that eliminates our multi-trillion unfunded future obligations, he will be no better than the others, and even at a disadvaantage, because voters hear platitudes. They need to see real policies with real budget numbers, or they will not see the difference between this author and the others in tangible terms they can appreciate.
A Theological Masterpiece–A Practical Manifesto
