Public Intelligence Blog

Robert Paarlberg

Disappointing at Three Levels, January 25, 2012

This book is disappointing at three levels:

1) The publisher has been completely dishonest in failing to illuminate the fact that this is a book Of, By, and For Monsanto, the greatest force of evil to ever hit farming.

2) The author (naturally) does not address the total corruption of the US Government and most other governments with respect to all issues, not just food. Corn as fuel, corn as fake sugar, corn as inedible cattle feed that puts cattle feces into spinach, the poisoning of our children and our environment by pesticides and other toxins that substitute poison for intelligence, are not covered.

3) Finally, the author is completely lacking in a systemic approach to all of these matters. Here are the twelve core policies that must be harmonized if they are to be effective: Agriculture, Diplomacy, Economy, Education, Energy, Family, Health, Immigration, Justice, Security, Society, Water. This book is abysmally oblivious–no doubt for the convenience of Monsanto–to the fact that agriculture that is based on fossil fuel consumption, inter-continental transport, poisoning for both growth and packaging; that destroys small farmers and community-related farming; that destroys the health of entire nations; that destroys the chain of life in seed that gives birth to new seed (instead substituting suicidal seeds); and finally, the cost-benefit ratio of water use in relation to all that is grown or raised–none of this is to be found in this book, ergo this is a dishonest, incomplete, rather ignorant book.

From where I sit, the publisher, the publisher has disgraced their brand. Here are ten links to books I recommend instead of this book.

Food Inc.: A Participant Guide: How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer-And What You Can Do About It
How Everyday Products Make People Sick: Toxins at Home and in the Workplace, Updated and Expanded
Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense
Diet for a Small Planet
Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate (New in Paper) (Princeton Science Library)
Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy
The Republican War on Science
Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion
Pandora’s Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy
Debt and Death in Rural India: The Punjab Story

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Yves Smith

5.0 out of 5 stars ECONNED,March 3, 2010

M. M. Thomas (Brooklyn) – See all my reviews

I’ve written quite a bit about the financial crisis, and God knows I’ve read nearly every book on the subject, and I have no hesitation in saying that if there is one book that gets it whole, and gets it right, and is THE book for the intelligent, thoughtful reader to turn to, it is ECONNED. This is not an anecdotal recitation of deal gossip (like, for example, Sorkin’s book); it’s not “source-based” journalism reflective of the way certain participants in the dire events that unfolded in 2007-2009 wish themselves to be seen. It lays out, in what is easily as clear, as direct, as smart and with as much force of fact as any financial writing today how exactly the fun and games that have nearly wrecked our economy and the lives of so many of us went down. Yves Smith is, unlike so many other writers feeding off the crisis, writing about it from the inside: with an unfailing grasp of where the details (where the devil lurks) fit into the larger pattern of financial perfidy and destruction, in this Doomsday Machine that Wall Street put together. The intelligent reader will understand that if you want to know why you’re suffering from acute ptomaine, you have to understand what went into the sausage you got it from. And then you have to be made to see plain the kind of restaurant or market that serves up this toxic offal. And then the regulatory failures that allow such places to be licensed. We have undergone one of the great crises in this nation’s history. It needs to be seen plain and understood. Deadline-driven blahblahblah won’t get the job done. But ECONNED does. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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5.0 out of 5 stars America Desperately Needs More Illumination Such as This January 16, 2012

I received a review copy of this book [note to publishers: always ask first] and was glad to be offered a chance to read something as important as this. America desperately needs more illumination on the corruption in our government, and the evil done in our name without our permission but very much at our expense.

As a career veteran of the national security community–the Marine Corps and the Central Intelligence Agency–followed by seventeen years teaching 90 governments — 66 directly — how to get a grip on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that provides 95% of what we need to know at 2% or less of the cost of what we spend now on secret intelligence–I am well-qualified to read this book from a patriot’s point of view.

A strong national defense capability does NOT exist in the USA today. Posturing fools such as Senator Rick Santorum have no idea what they are talking about when they seek to discredit those of us who do. The infantry, four percent of the force, takes eighty percent of the casualties and receives ONE PERCENT of the Pentagon budget. Within the other 99%, half–at least–is fraud, waste, and abuse that makes America weaker, not stronger.

This book, edited by David Swanson, is a very good deal at $25. Its 368 pages include chapters from thirty other authors besides the editor, and include contributions from Ray McGovern and Karen Kwiatkowski, whose work I have admired in the past. If there were one flaw in the book, but not so serious as to lose a star, it would be its isolation from the pioneering work done by Pierre Sprey, Chuck Spinney, and Winslow Wheeler, with a genuflection toward John Boyd, the real pioneer of smart sufficient national security.

What is uniquely valuable about this book, something I have not seen elsewhere, is its provision of a holistic examination not just of the military-industrial process and fraudulent, wasteful, abusive bad design, bad performance, and bad cost, but of the costs that the military-industrial complex imposes on all of us and our economy and our society. This is a world-class book that should be translated into other languages to help others avoid our long-running mistakes.

Here are the blinding flashes of solid insight that stayed with me and merit the broadest possible public understanding:

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Richard Gott

5.0 out of 5 stars Preliminary Review: Understanding the Trade-Offs & True Cost of Empire,December 8, 2011

I have ordered this book and am very much looking forward to providing readers (and myself, this is how I keep notes) with one of my more detailed reviews. The publisher is to be scolded for not using Inside the Book, one of Amazon’s best features, and for failing to provide the best possible use of the Book Description and Editorial Reviews section. While the existing review is good and I have voted for it, it does not do this book justice. My decision to buy was based on the easily found review in The Guardian (UK) by Richard Drayton, “Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression, and Revolt by Richard Gott — review,” published 7 December 2011.

Where I am going to go with my review is toward an in-depth articulation of what has never been done before that I know of, an examination of the trade-offs of Empire and the opportunity costs of Epoch A hierarchical “rule by secrecy.” I have reviewed many books on Empire, Class War, Elite Rule, all easily found in master list online, Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative). I also recommend the observe, Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive).

Russell Ackoff would say that Empire represents centuries of doing the wrong thing righter–and at greater expense across the political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic domains. As we approach the Mayan calendar’s start date for Epoch B, 12 December 2012, many of us are conscious that we must abandon old ways and rethink how we organize society. Occupy is a sympton of this – organized people against organized money, organized consciousness against organized violence.

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Gordon Cook

I am honored that Eva Waskell has entrusted me to present The Privatization of Our Democracy, a work that I regard as her Profile in Courage. For 25 years she has labored to correct what is possibly the most significant public policy failure of the computer age—the privatization of vote counting carried out under the rationale that computers are simply automatic calculators that can tabulate votes more cost effectively than old analogue machines. I have known her for 19 of those years.

. . . . . .

People think they know that something is wrong with the way elections are conducted in this country.  They are correct. There is. But readers only now will get access to a full history of the abuse of public trust by the elected politicians of the United States of America. That’s a large claim to make, but see for yourself.

Click on Image to Enlarge

I believe that there are multiple publications here in what Eva has to say. The scholarly monograph. An Elections for Dummies paperback. A paperback of humorous tabby cat photos where the kitties are running elections.  Eva is a national treasure and I am proud to be able to use the Internet to make her story known. Fortunately, there are many, many public spirited citizens left.

Full Report (PDF 160 Pages)

Cook Report Home

Table of Contents and Selected Quotes Below the Line –

A SPECTACULAR Piece of Work

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William Engdahl

This book deserves a much more detailed review that illuminates the author’s early connection of Wall Street fraud and Washington neo-conservative lust for looting the world….a bi-partisan (never mind the 63 parties that don’t get to play, or the 43% of the US voters who are independent). Liar’s Poker by Mark Lewis blew the cover of Wall Street’s practice of “exploding the customer” and Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History later followed on John Bogle’s The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism and William Greider’s The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, but William Engdahl is the one who nailed down the Trilateral Commission and Wall Street cabal focus on looting the world way beyond what John Perkin’s discusses in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

Now the world is noticing. He appeared on Russia Today TV, which has eclipsed BBC as the English-language trusted source (and also excels at migrating its TV shorts to the web and to print), and here are some of his own words that illuminate how important his book is:

He says:

The ultimate goal of the US is to take the resources of Africa and Middle East under military control to block economic growth in China and Russia, thus taking the whole of Eurasia under control, author and historian William F. Engdahl reveals.

­The crisis with the US economy and the dollar system, the conduct of the US foreign policy is all a part of breakdown of the entire superpower structure that was built up after the end of WWII, claims Engdahl.

“Nobody in Washington wants to admit, just as nobody in Britain a hundred years ago wanted to admit that the British Empire was in terminal decline,” claims the author, noting that “All of this is related to the attempt to keep this sole superpower not only intact, but to spread its influence over the rest of the planet.”

William F. Engdahl believes the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa is a plan first announced by George W. Bush at a G8 meeting in 2003 and it was called “The Greater Middle East Project”.

While I personally do not believe that Washington is behind the Arab Spring – the Department of State has always been incompetent at public diplomacy and CIA places dictators about the public (losers there go to counterintelligence and covert action staffs) – what matters here is that the Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power have created an Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

The US Government is out of control, and it is out of control because a two-party tyranny (less turnover than the Politburo, in Peggy Noonan’s great line for use by Ronald Reagan) has nurtured a combination of Wall Street legalized greed and neo-con military-industrial complex that has sold out the US taxpayer — 5% earmarks “buy” a 95% corporate hand-out, one third of that money borrowed in our name.

I take this book and the author’s views with a small grain of salt, but the evidence is over-whelming. From Michael Kalre’s Blood and Oil : The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, we now know all we need to know about who is the greatest threat to the Republic and the Constitution: the two-party tyranny and their financial partners.

Occupy Wall Street is incoherent right now – when they get their act together, it is my hope they will focus on an Electoral Reform Act of 2012 – in my view, there is nothing wrong with America the Beautiful — all these enormous crimes against humanity not-withstanding – that cannot be fixed quickly by restoring integrity to our electoral system, hence our govenrment, hence our society and economy.

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Nicholas Shaxson

Selected Editorial Comments:

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Sheldon S. Wolin

Editorial Review:

Of the many books I’ve read or skimmed in the past seven years that attempted to get inside the social and political debacles of the present, none has had the chilling clarity and historical discernment of Sheldon S. Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated. Building on his fifty years as a political theorist and proponent of radical democracy, Wolin here extends his concern with the extinguishing of the political and its replacement by fraudulent simulations of democratic process. — Jonathan Crary, Artforum

4.0 out of 5 stars Managed Democracy, Superpower, and alas, even, “Inverted Totalitarianism”, June 17, 2008

ByJohn P. Jones III (Albuquerque, NM, USA) – See all my reviews  (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is a seminal work which “tells it like it is” concerning the current power arrangements in the American political system, as well as the political leadership’s aspirations towards global empire. Prof. Wolin sets the tone of his work on page 1, with the juxtaposition of the imagery of Adolph Hitler landing in a small plane at the 1934 rally at Nuremberg, as shown in Leni Reifenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” and George Bush landing on the aircraft carrier “Abraham Lincoln” in 2003. Certainly one of the dominant themes of the book is comparing the operating power structure in the United States with various totalitarian regimes of the past: Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Prof Wolin emphasizes the differences between these totalitarian powers, and the softer concentration of power in the United States, which he dubs “inverted totalitarianism.”

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Joshua Rovner

5.0 out of 5 stars It Takes Two: Strategic Intelligence and National Security Policy, September 30, 2011

By Retired Reader (New Mexico) – See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

In the U.S., the relationship between strategic intelligence and the formulation of national security policies has been to say the least complex and often confusing. This book provides what has long been needed, an objective and scholarly review of this relationship.

Rovner provides an excellent theoretical background to guide his examination of specific case histories that he has chosen to illustrate the relationships between strategic intelligence and policy. Ideally intelligence analysts should be able to operate without interference to produce strategic intelligence reports that are honest, objective, and supported by the best information available. Again ideally policy makers should be free to challenge such reports. Finally both analysts and policymakers should be able to hold rational discussions over differences in interpretation and conclusions in which the supporting evidence is considered objectively. Unfortunately this ideal is often thwarted by what Rovner calls “the pathologies of intelligence-policy relations.” He has identified three such `pathologies’:

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Ralph Peters

5.0 out of 5 stars Six Star Epilogue, the Capstone Work, September 26, 2011

I have been a fan of Ralph Peters for over fifteen years now, going back to the early 1990′s when the US Marine Corps was trying to get the Secretary of Defense (then Dick Cheney) to focus on most likely vice worst case threats. Having been the senior civilian responsible for creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Center, and the Study Director for the flagship study, Planning and Programming Factors for Expeditionary Operations in the Third World, I recognized both his deep integrity and his broad intelligence, both so uncharacteristic of the near-venal to all-banal US secret intelligence community that I had served since 1976.

This is his capstone work. Below are a few of his most notable recent works, there are many others, and I also recommend his Owen Parry series on the Civil War. If you only get one book by Ralph Peters, this is the one to buy.

Endless War: Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Western Civilization
Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the Twenty-First Century
Never Quit the Fight
Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph?

2012 in my view is a turning point year for America, and I pray that it is the year that citizens with integrity kick politicians without integrity (all of them) out of office and get a clean sheet fresh start in recreating a government of, by, and for We the People instead of what we have now, what Matt Taibbi describes so well in Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, “a highly complicated merger of crime and policy, of stealing and government.”

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