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Shlomo Sand

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Complement to First Book! December 6, 2012

“The Invention of the Land of Israel” is the follow up to the fascinating and controversial “The Invention of the Jewish People“. This excellent book serves as a complementary addition to the aforementioned book and fills gaps left behind. Historian and outspoken professor, Shlomo Sand does it again with this enlightening and educational book that reveals the history behind the Land of Israel. This 304-page book is composed of the following five chapters: 1. Making Homelands: Biological Imperative or National Property?, 2. Mytherritory: In the Beginning, God Promised the Land, 3. Toward a Christian Zionism: and Balfour Promised the Land, 4. Zionism Versus Judaism: The Conquest of “Ethnic” Space, and 5. Conclusion: The Sad Tale of the Frog and the Scorpion.

Positives:
1. A well-researched and well-cited book that takes you into the always fascinating world of Jewish history.
2. As candid and forthright a book as you will find. Professor Sand provides solid and well-cited evidence in support of his arguments.
3. Enlightening and thought-provoking book to say the least.
4. An excellent complement to his best-selling book “The Invention of the Jewish People”.
5. The myth that was the forced uprooting of the “Jewish people.”
6. The book does a wonderful job of explaining how the dissemination of a formative historical mythos occurred. “Never did I accept the idea of the Jews’ historical rights to the Promised Land as self-evident.”
7. Clarifies some of the misunderstood points made in his previous book.
8. Professor Sand takes pride in his historical scholarship and it shows. The quest for primary sources. The author does a good job of letting the readers know what he does have a good handle on and what he doesn’t.
9. Explains what really precipitated the establishment of the State of Israel.
10. The book achieves its goal of tracing the ways in which the “Land of Israel” was invented.
11. The book achieves the main goal of disparaging the official historiography of the Zionist Israeli establishment.
12. The notion of “homeland” in perspective. “It is important to remember that homelands did not produce nationalism, but rather the opposite: homelands emerged from nationalism.” The concept of territorial entity.

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Jospeh P. Farrell

5.0 out of 5 stars This is an Information Operations / Counterintelligence Hidden Gem, December 23, 2012

The cover does this book a dis-service. This is a SERIOUS book that should be used in serious courses of instruction for both Information Operations (IO) and Counterintelligence (CI). The book lacks an index, a terrible mistake on the part of the publisher, but I have to say the notes are world-class and this book earns my intuitive respect quickly.

This book is a bit rough but I put it at a solid five stars and even considered six (my top ten percent across 1800+ books) because this book does something extraordinary:

01 It makes the case for UFOs being a terrestial Information Operations (IO) Psychological Operation (PSYOP — never plural).

02 It connects US underground tunnel civilization (a possible explanation for the Pentagon’s missing 2.3 trillion) and advanced technologies including “Nazi physics” versus “Jewish physics”

03 It connects the Rockefeller-Morgan Nazi-philes, Latin America, Switzerland, the Bank of International Settlements, and the drug cartels — in other words, this is also an excellent reading for Counterintelligence (CI).

I draw two major insights from this book:

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Gerard Prunier

5.0 out of 5 stars a comprehensive account of a vast conflict May 29, 2009

By Kirk Huff

This is going to be a complicated review.First, if you know nothing about the wars of central Africa over the past 15 years or so, in particular the Rwanda-related conflicts, this is an awful book to pick up and try to use as orientation. It assumes the reader already has a basic knowledge of the recent political events in about eight African nations and often launches directly into building cases against the conventionally-held wisdom, often without actually stating what the conventional wisdom is. I did my graduate thesis on the formation of an African Great Lakes rebel group, and I often had to stop reading to give my overworked brain time to process the flood of information or reread a section to make sure I understood Prunier’s arguments. I can only imagine what readers who know nothing about the topic have to endure.

Second, one has to decide to what degree one trusts Prunier. If this book was written by someone besides Prunier, I would probably dismiss it largely or in whole. However, Prunier is the author of ‘The Rwanda Crisis,’ considered a seminal early book on the genocide, and the author of ‘Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide,’ also considered one of the best books of that conflict. In this recent book, Prunier recants entire storylines of ‘The Rwanda Crisis’ and basically says, “Fourteen years ago, I discounted information that I now believe to be credible and this is the story as I now believe it to be.” So one has to decide if this is a sign that (1) Prunier has suffered some sort of mental breakdown or has perhaps been subverted by some political agenda or (2) Prunier has reexamined his sources and arguments in the light of new information, as a good historian should, to compile a more accurate portrayal. I seriously considered both as options, but decided that Alternative 2 was the most likely. You will see other reviewers who have decided otherwise.

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Michel Chossudovsky

4.0 out of 5 stars Five for Detail, Three for Bias, Solid Four for the Serious Reader / Researcher, October 8, 2012

Michel Chossudovsky is a known researcher and writer who is easily left of center; his greatest value lies in his presentation of truth in detail, something the neo-conservatives (far right of center) are incapable of doing. Anyone who demeans this author or his work is evidently incapable of understanding that Dick Cheney led the telling of 935 now-documented lies in taking the US to war on Iraq and in Afghanistan.

The book is NOT easy to read, with small print and 70 distinct separately titled pieces, all well-organized but reading like an op-ed book. The author also over-states, in my view the threat of a global nuclear war, while very pragmatically outlining the many ways in which the US and NATO are giving all indications of both tolerating an Israeli attack on Iran, perhaps with an Israeli nuclear bomb into Iran so they can pretend that they destroyed a nuclear facility that was no nuclear at all.

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Lewis Sorley

A Man Promoted Above his Ability September 12, 2011

By Hrafnkell Haraldsson VINE™ VOICE

I grew up during the Vietnam War. I was seven years old when General William Westmoreland was sent to Vietnam by LBJ to take charge of things there. I was eleven when he lost his job and by then, had lost us the war. Vietnam was in the news the entire time, on TV, in the paper, in Time Magazine – as was Westmoreland’s iconic chin. Being the son of military parents I’d early gotten the history bug and I was fascinated by what was taking place over in Southeast Asia, even if I didn’t understand it well. As I grew older, and things over there grew worse, I began to wonder how we could possibly lose such a war (as I thought it was) against such a small country.

Lewis Sorely’s “Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam” will tell you how. Sorely has the credentials for this book. He is himself a graduate of West Point. He served in Vietnam. He even served in the office of the Army Chief of Staff, General William C. Westmoreland, and taught at West Point. This isn’t just a book by some journalist trying to get at the bottom of things. Sorely has been “at the bottom of things” and he has done the leg work over a period of years, talking to 175 people in his search for the events he here recounts.

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Mark Dery

Bad Thoughts, Great Book March 27, 2012

By Supervert<

I find it impossible to discuss Mark Dery’s I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts in anything other than the first person. The book speaks so eloquently of its time that, uncannily, I can’t help but feel it speaks of me. So many of my own interests and obsessions rise from its pages — death, deviance, intellect. I recognize my iTunes library in Dery’s tours de force on David Bowie and Lady Gaga. I recognize my bookshelf in Dery’s essay on Amok Books, whose productions were once textbooks in the éducation sentimentale of the counterculture. I recognize my own rhetorical strategies in the move Dery makes in “Toe Fou,” updating George Bataille’s meditation on the big toe by riffing on a picture of Madonna’s bare feet. Weirdest of all, I recognize what I thought was my own obscure fondness for “invisible literature” in Dery’s essay on the New York Academy of Medicine Library — a place I too have plundered in quiet hours of mad and horrible research. Was I sitting across the table from you, Mark? I feel as though you, like Baudelaire, have addressed your book to “mon semblable, mon frère.”

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Brian Latell

4.0 out of 5 stars Three for Accuracy, Five for Details, On Balance a Four,May 3, 2012

I was reviewing this book here at Amazon as I went, but lost patience with it as other priorities emerged, and deleted my review as it was incomplete. I have gone over the book again. In comparison with all that I have read from other non-fiction sources, and what I know personally from service in the Latin American Division including service under Nestor Sanchez, I give this book a three for accuracy, a five for interesting details that are useful to the larger mosaic, and a four over-all.

Right up front I have misgivings:

1) The vaunted prime source for the author gave up stories but no names. This is immediately suspect.

2) The author claims CIA had four dozen agents in Cuba that proved to be doubles. I strongly suspect the actual number is under two dozen.

3) The author exaggerates the value of the Cuban penetrations of the US, particularly the DIA analyst.

4) The author exaggerates the importance of the Cubans being able to defeat the polygraph. The US Government and CIA especially are the last to admit that the polygraph is largely worthless. My personal preference is for the new NoLie technology that is 95% accurate if not slightly better, while the polygraph is at best 64% accurate on naive subjects that have anxiety indicators, and not at all useful against Arabs, Chinese, and others who have mastered blandness.

Beware — Amazon has a very ugly tendency to offer people the Kindle version by default and NOT show other editions, something I find both unethical and annoying. You have to search for the title and the word “hardcopy”. Having said that, I praise the publisher for pricing this book fairly, and Amazon for taking another chuck off the price. At $20 with shipping, this is a BARGAIN.

I was a clandestine case officer and handled one of the Cuban defectors in the 1980′s (not named in the book, resettled to the USA, a very very rare thing). I also had two classmates exposed on Cuban national television after all the double-agents led them into video traps.

Right up front I can tell the author is wrong on one thing and perhaps mistaken on the second.

01 Oswald did not kill Kennedy. Oswald was a CIA patsy. Below I list several books on this point, every day the evidence mounts that JFK was killed with LBJ’s tacit consent, by a mix of the Texas rich, New Orleans crime, the FBI, and CIA trained and equipped Cuban exiles angry over the Bay of Pigs, not realizing that CIA led JFK into a trap and knew it would fail beforehand.

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters
Someone Would Have Talked: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy to Mislead History
A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History
Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace

02 On the defectors, I am very skeptical that any of them actually blew Castro’s double-agents. Certainly not in time to help my two classmates-extremely competent officers whom I continue to admire. Castro’s intelligence has been running rings around the tontos utiles (useful idiots) for decades, generally from after Che Guevarra’s demise in Bolivia. Today, working with money from Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, they are doing some very interesting things across the continent, most recently shutting the US and Canada out of a new regional organization, CELAC (i.e. OAS without the two annoying northern countries).

I certainly recommend this book. I know for a fact that in the 1980′s several Senators and Representatives were on the payroll of countries hostile to the United States. That was when I started to realize just how corrupt our Congress was, never imagining that we would see the say when all but a tiny handful are traitors to the public interest.

The author is unique, the book is unique, but the reality is that the book is a CIA-approved version of reality, and probably, at best, 60% of the picture, if that.

Some false notes:

1) On the one hand, the author stresses how all Cuban defectors have to go deep under cover to avoid Cuban assassination teams, at the same time that he lauds the Cubans for their excellence-best in the world-on the street. Then he accepts at face value to hardly credible stories about how Aspillaga survived two assassination attempts that I consider high theater. Tontos útiles, ¡presten atención!

2) The author claims to be absolutely certain Aspillaga was genuine, and goes on about the varied and deep methods CIA used to ensure this. So what about the “four dozen” double-agents that CIA did NOT detect?

3) The author claims DGI was riddled with corruption. This may well be true, I do not have the breadth of sources that he does, but this does not feel right. The DGI officers I knew overseas were superb professionals, true believers, and I just do not see the ones I knew being corrupt in the manner that the author offers without much in the way of evidence.

4) The claims about the US “neutralizing” the DGI in the aftermath of the Aspillaga defection are in my view laughable. The author also fails to mention some very considerable successes that the Soviets and the Cubans (who *do* work together) had against the US.

5) I greatly enjoy the author’s account of where the DGI is very very good, and am then shocked when he presumes to suggest that the Cubans are not good at code-breaking. Really? This from the country with the most advanced high tech health industry in the Western Hemisphere?

6) I lose patience with the author’s assertion of page 42 that the DGI exists exclusively to target Americans. This is outright foolishness. The DGI has been steadily chipping away at US influence across Latin America, not by targeting los tontos utilies, who shoot themselves in the head on a regular basis, but rather by targeting indigenous key personnel. In my view CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, i.e. OAS without the Canadians or Americans) is a triumph for the DGI and for Casto’s diplomats as well as the Cuban military and Cuban science, technology, and cultural as well as commercial outreach ventures.

Chapter 3. The two so-called “big stories” on Fidel as a diabolical monster are pedestrian. It is also at this point that I note that the book completely avoids mention of the Kennedy-Khruschev back channel striving for peace in spire of their respective generals. I have a note “this is our best shot at slandering Castro?”

Chapter 4. Claims Atlee Phillips and other CIA case officers of the era were pro-Castro. Page 66, fascinating observation that DGI monitored who CIA was developing (toward recruitment) in foreign capitals, then they got there first, made the recruitment, so when CIA finally made the pitch, a) it was a cake walk and b) they were recruiting a double-agent already under DGI control. Author exaggerates the importance of the Russian illegals in US in 2010. Author suggests that Chavez of Venezuela was recruited by DGI and trained in Cuba. I know from serving in Venezuela that the Soviets and Cuba have had the run of the place for some time, and that the US has been complacent and careless in not recognizing that in Venezuela the US was being played, perhaps more so than in other Latin American countries.

Chapter 5. This is a fascinating chapter with a great deal of information that is new to me, including passing references to the closeness of Angleton to Israel, the size of Ted Shakley’s JMWAVE operations (largest Navy in the Caribbean, 600 CIA, 1000 contractors, in touch with 15,000 Cubans one way of another….but also including Shackley’s admission that such assets as CIA had in Cuba were at the NCO and “food handler” level. The rest of the book is at worst a hit job on the Kennedy brothers, and at best a CIA version of half the story. As with the Kennedy-Khruschev back channel, the author either does not know about, or is unwilling to include, the fact that there was also a back channel between Kennedy-Castro, and if Kennedy had not been assassinated in Dallas, he was planning to not only disengage from Viet-Nam, but also moderate the relationship with Castro. There are a couple of truly astonishing quotes in this chapter, including on page 102 the author’s conclusion, based on a CIA record of a meeting, that President Kennedy was “complicit in acts that constituted a deliberate and massive campaign of international terrorism.” The author accepts at face value his primary source’s claim that Castro knew in advance that JFK would be assassinated in Dallas.

Chapter Seven is a mess. The author has either not ready anything of substance about the JFK assassination and the now conclusively known facts that Oswald was a patsy, tested negative for gunspower residue, and was standing in the door (photo now available) when JFK went by and was assassinated), or the author’s book is part of an on-going CIA covert operation to muddy the CIA role in the JFK assassination. On balance I think the author is simply too quick to accept “blessed” interpretations of events, and has forgotten how to be an independent analyst able to capture his own sources outside the CIA. There is nothing in here about how Oswald was a Marine doing SIGINT on Okinawa, and the fact that he was sent to make a scene in Mexico.

What *is* valuable is the account of Castro’s direction to re-enact the Kennedy assassination with his own snipers on island, ultimately concluding-as those of us who read broadly now know-that Oswald could not have killed Kennedy.

This chapter also overlooks or fails to mention decades of DGI work with students and labor.

As a general statement, I find this book a phenomenal “benchmark” of names, dates, and places that can be useful to others. As the author himself notes, the day will come when Castro’s records become public, and I believe at that time we will learn that US counterintelligence failed across the board, Cuban counterintelligence did extremely well, and as it is said about CIA adventures in Laos, (I recollect from memory): “we spent a lot of money, got a lot of people killed, and in the end, have nothing to show for it.”

My more or less complete list of books on intelligence that I have reviewed, all reviews leading back to their Amazon page, is easily found by searching for the phrase below:

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Most)

For anyone seeking to understand the long dirty relationship between the US and the South, I recommend the following books:

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
SAVAGE CAPITALISM AND THE MYTH OF DEMOCRACY: Latin America in the Third Millennium
War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’

There are many more-generally CIA has done great evil, and in overturning the governments of Guatemala and Iran in the 1950′s, set the stage for the persistent growing antipathy toward the US and what I now regard as a half century of unilateral militarism, predatory capitalism, and virtual colonialism. What has been done in our name and at our expense has been disgraceful-a consistent preference for dictators and elites over the public interest of our own public or the indigenous public.

My two master lists of reviews are easily found below.

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)

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I hate electronic books for many reasons, including being an old guy that still thinks in hand – eye – brain terms, so let me start by saying this is the first e-book that for me has been a pleasure to read. Plenty of white space, clearly separated chapter, a great inter-spersal of photographs, and finally — my most important touch point — really superb sources at the end of each chapter, with many of them actively linked.

As the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, reading in 98 categories, I read a lot — over 30 books (with a leavening of DVDs) on 9/11, but to put that in context, that is just 0.016 of my reading in the last decade. Do not for a moment think of me as a conspiracy theorist or anti-Semite. I am an intelligence professional, with integrity.

This particular book, unlike all the others I have read in relation to 9/11, does four things no other book has done:

01) Connects the dots of all the dual Israeli-US citizens in the US Government and US commercial circles (mostly in NYC) that were active participants in the 9/11 false flag operation. The role of the owners of the 81st floor and the massive bank of “batteries” that were never used but are precisely where the airlines hit, impressed me.

02) Integrates, for the first time, the history of Israeli false flag operations, the 1980 recognition by Israel that an attack on NYC and specifically against the tallest building in NYC whatever that might be, and the total complex context of 9/11 as both a catalyst for forcing the USA into a “war on terror” and a cover-up for the most massive financial crimes in history, including a special role for AIG and its specifically-identified Zionist leadership.

03) Introduces me for the first time to the facts about the Estonia that the Swedish government evidently covered up–it was carrying Russian contraband to Estonia, and two explosions blew off the front loading doors, dropping the ferry and 800 Swedes into a point almost halfway between Estonia and Sweden, as planned in a previous exercise. The author also covers NATO, the NATO presence that night, and the confounding combination of NATO being “asleep” the whole time, with the outage of the regional telephone networks for the duration.

04) Clarifies the depth of Israeli involvement in the drug trade — not just laundering the money in NYC and elsewhere, but actively nurturing the drug trade and drugs toward the US in particular — as a budget item. What comes out clearly is that Israel is not just bribing the US Congress, controlling the US White House, and castrating US intelligence and counterintelligence, but that Israel is using the USA as a two-track piggy bank — stealing all that it can from the US Treasury (Goldman Sachs provides the Secretary of the Treasury), while earning all that it can from running drugs into the US with the active collaboration of elements of the US Government and the Texas crime families including the Bush Cartel.

For some time I have been concerned about US false flag operations and corruption within the US government and US commercial circles. Although I have from time to time recognized that Israel treats the USA as a “shicksa” (as in gentile girls don’t count, they are “fair game before and after marriage to a Jewish princess”), and I have been as outraged as any at the USS Liberty–the point at which I realized Israel is actually the enemy of the USA, a parasitic animal sucking the life out of the USA–I must say that this book moves me to place Israel and American citizens who are more loyal to Israel than to the Republic and the Constitution, in first place as the primary target for the emerging national counterintelligence network.

For years I have been talking about the need for religious counterintelligence. Originally I was concerned about Mormon penetration of the CIA and FBI, and with Mitt Romney being rumored to be the banker for at least one major drug cartel, one has to ask, when do we stop being an Idiot Nation? Then my focus shifted to Opus Dei, which has done quite well in US Navy circles and elsewhere. It is only in the past ten years, with the USS Liberty, the USS Cole (almost certainly another Israeli false flag operation), 9/11, and then a series of truly idiotic plots including the underpants bomber and the print cartridges on UPS, that I have realized that apart from political and appointed officials committing treason every day, Israel is the #1 enemy of the United States of America.

This is not anti-Semite. We are all Jewish in one way or another, and I have had the operation. This is about a Zionist cabal in Israel marrying up with the neo-con and rabid-Christian cabals in the USA, leveraging the global drug and arms trade to do evil to others all in the sake of saving Israel. The atrocities against the Palestinians, and the walls that out-do Hitler (there is one excellent picture of an Israeli wall with watchtower, three times higher than any prison wall), in combination with all that Israel and its embedded traitors have done to undermine the US and UK and to disgrace us all while stealing from us all, bring me to the line. ENOUGH.

I ran for President in the USA, accepted by the Reform Party as a candidate, for two reasons: 1) to put in one place (BigBatUSA.org) the four core ideas necessary if we are to restore the rule of law in the US; and 2) to be able to write to all other presidential candidates urging them to unite with Occupy, the Tea Party, Independents, and one another (six of the eight parties in the USA are treated as if they were shicksa Palestinians–of no account, access blocked) to restore the integrity of the electoral process, to create a coalition cabinet and a balanced budget, and to present America with a legal, ethical, non-violent revolutionary choice. I failed. From Ron Paul to Dennis Kucinich to Jill Stein, Buddy Roemer, Rocky Anderson–I reached all of them and all of them were, to the man, egotistical selfish deer in the headlights candidates, playing their own personal game with no thought of how to actually rescue America.

Zionist Israel (not Jews) is a cancer. I am glad to see the Arab dictatorships begin to fall, they are as responsible as Israel and the USA for the plight of the Palestinians, but Israel is hypocritical — it has cut deals with every dictator on the planet — as has the US — to its own ends. In a nutshell, the era of government Of, By, and For We the People is over. Governments have failed to maintain their integrity. We the People now need to create public intelligence in the public interest; to engage in massive non-violent tax revolts; and to begin using open source information to empower hybrid networks that route around corrupt governments, corrupt banks, corrupt media, corrupt universities, corrupt religions, corrupt labor unions–and reconstitution society from the bottom up. George Soros to his credit has finally recognized the Enlightenment Fallacy. I now recognize the Israeli Terror.

At Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, halfway down the middle column, you can find a single link to all of my 9/11 reviews, all leading back to Amazon, but please do not stop there. I am the proponent for the third era of national intelligence, the era of Smart Nations, World Brain, Global Game, and connecting all people to all information in all languages all the time — only such a tsunami of public consciousness will overcome the evil that is done in our name and at our expense. I am optimistic.

See Also:

The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel’s Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship
They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution

Robert Steele
ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (and eight other books)

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Also Relevant:

James M. Wall: United Methodists To Boycott US Companies Selling to Israel in Support of Genocide and Atrocities Against Palestinians?

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Peter Ressler, Monika Mitchell

5 Stars

Co-authors Peter Ressler and Monika Mitchell have been 20-year Wall Street insiders as partners in an executive search firm. Their book is a page-turning account of the 2007-8 meltdown and continuing unsolved issues that will inevitably lead to the next crises. Woven throughout their analysis are conversations with dozens of top executives from Lehman, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, AIG, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and many hedge funds and private equity firms.

Only the executives’ first names are used (for obvious reasons), which makes their recorded interviews with the authors more revealing, with all the vivid expletives un-redacted. We hear first-hand of how Wall Street’s culture actually worked based on the “buyer beware” treatment of sophisticated clients. Pension funds were considered “big boys” who should do their own due diligence and against whom it was OK to bet that the securities sold to them would blow up. These were the market makers who, unlike the partnerships of yore, regularly took both sides of deals with their often unsuspecting customers while pushing ratings agencies to stamp these toxic products as triple-A. The prevailing culture is reflected in their language: “eat what you kill,” “ripping the face off” clients and the jungle rule of “survival of the fittest” (often incorrectly associated with Charles Darwin rather than originally coined by Herbert Spencer, a British economist of that era who wrote for The Economist).

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Josef Avesar

5.0 out of 5 stars Common Sense, Great Virtue,March 3, 2012

This is a *very* nice book, easy to read, well-ordered, full of common sense and a totally righteous contribution. The sadness is that there is nothing rational about how the Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs, and intervening (or abdicating) great powers are approaching the entire matter. The best book on the insanity of the artificial boundaries creating by Western colonialism / imperialism remains The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State.

I have an inherent sympathy toward the Palestinians, being genocided day by day by an out of control Israeli government that does not, in my own experience, truly represent the majority of the Jewish people. Just as we have a two-party tyranny in the USA that has sold us all out to the banks while excluding Independents and third parties (Constitution, Green, Libertarian, Reform) from the entire process, Israel appears to be under the control of a minority that has lost its mind and become all that they claim to abhor.

The book is noteworthy for presenting, in addition to its own arguments, the full gamut of alternative views and opposing points of view. In other words, this book has integrity.

I do not see this book — or the problem it confronts — being solved in my lifetime for the simple reason that corruption characterizes all but a few governments, and war is a racket — a means of profiteering. What is being done to the Palestinians is profitable for the few who control the agenda. I fully expect some form of neutron bomb or special gas poisoning of Palestine to occur one day, to be rapidly “covered up” as a fatal epidemic — the word Henry Kissinger likes to use is “eugenics.” The formal policy term is “Forced Population Reduction.”

As I look back at the history of the land, see for instance Nelson’s Complete Book of Bible Maps and Charts, 3rd Edition, it is clear the Palestinians merit half of Israel including full access to the sea. It is equally clear that Israel will never agree to this while it has the arms and the financial support from the USA.

It pains me to contemplate this, but I fear that the common sense and virtue of this book will be sidelined. There is no hope for any of the parties in the near term.

See Also:
War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier
Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict
Poets For Palestine

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