Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corruption. Show all posts

The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos Review

The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos ReviewRavi Batra is still at it, almost three decades since he penned the classic "The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism: A New Study of History". We have come a long way with this author since then and never been bored. Batra's thesis is that we have entered the era of financial capitalism, the last stage of the Age of Acquisitors, where an increasingly uneven distribution of wealth feeds into increasing financial leverage and speculation, until the system can't handle it anymore and collapses. Following the collapse is financial destitution of many and social chaos. Such an outcome is still the most potent form of criticism of Capitalism. If Batra is at some point proved right that
a) the Great Depression of the 1930s was no fluke and
b) that innovations and safeguards to our financial system adopted since then cannot prevent another meltdown,
then that is a major an indictment of our form of social organization and, ultimately, our way of life.
At the heart of Batra's writings are the ideas of his mentor P.R. Sarkar. Batra has done more than anyone to publicize the message of this giant of modern day Indian thought in the West. This book is yet another installation into that body of work. While the message may no longer be as novel or fresh as it was in the 1980s, his work now builds on three decades of experience, including a multitude of accurate predictions (although the most important one has so far been a spectacular failure - the Great Depression of 1990!). He is now more circumspect about such things, including the adoption of a fiat monetary system in the 1970s and how monetary policy has been successfully used to forestall a major crash. In one sense he is quite correct, our monetary and financial system is an ongoing social experiment. Batra's work is, if anything, a reminder that we take a lot of things for granted. It is healthy to consider the alternatives, such as if the systemic stability were to give way to catastrophe. Central banks all over the world now devote considerable resources into researching this question and government surveillance of the financial market is now commonplace with stock markets all over the world soaring. Interestingly, all of that, albeit important, is not really the key focus of his work. As the name of his new book suggests, it is the glorious new dawn of a world based on the sentient philosophy of his mentor that is his main message.
Time will tell if Batra and the ideas he promotes are the real deal. So far, he has yet to prove the worth of these ideas with his major prediction. However, he has offered many novel insights into how modern capitalism works. For instance, in the 1980s he was one of the first to talk about how the financial sector was becoming the key to social developments in the West. Today, we take such insights for granted. Overall, the ideas he is describing are more than worthy of our careful consideration. Let us also not forget that he made a prediction in the book mentioned above in 1978 that Communism would fall. It did. As is the norm for him, the book is exceedingly well written and the message as fascinating as ever. Batra tends to be a few steps ahead of the rest of us, even if it sometimes looks as if he going down the wrong path. Even if he has made a big misstep, in my opinion, he is still headed in the right direction. The ideas are serious and profound and also filled with hope. The book is highly recommended for the intellectually curious or those scoping about for a more meaningful approach to life than what the real world has on offer in the early 21th century.The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos Overview

Want to learn more information about The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...

The Global Class War : How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win it Back Review

The Global Class War : How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win it Back
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy The Global Class War : How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win it Back? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on The Global Class War : How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win it Back. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

The Global Class War : How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win it Back ReviewAccording to Jeff Faux, erstwhile president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington DC, with the enfeebled nation-state and the absence of world government, the 2,000 plus people who manage and own the worlds largest multinational corporations meet every year at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland to set the agenda for the global economy. Even though the event includes political leaders, academics, journalists, and an occasional movie star, they are mere window dressing accompanying the real movers and shakers. This elite is what Faux calls the "Party of Davos." There is no countervailing party other than the World Social Forum which celebrates the likes of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, but they are of no consequence in the real order of things.
The Party of Davos is primarily the party of international global investors, who do their best to promote globalization and free trade. Elites around the world have bought into it, including the leadership of both the Democratic and Rebublican parties in the US, with the expectation that globalization would raise all economic boats, or so they would have us believe. However, this has not happened.
Faux correctly points out that prior to the age of globalization the US economy was more or less self-contained, and capital and labor were forced to deal with each other, thereby creating a social contract from which all parties benefited. What was once good for GM was also good for America; now it is only good for GM. (This may not be a good example since even the global investor is not happy with GM.) The point being that GM can now find cheaper labor and lower environmental standards in other countries.
Faux argues persuasively that globalization went astray with the Nafta agreement, which was supposed to protect workers and the environment in the US, Mexico, and Canada. Instead, thanks to the Clinton administration, multinational corporations were given a free hand in overriding those very protections. It's almost as if Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound" pulling high-wage jobs out of the US has been realized. Moreover, ten years and a WTO later, that giant sucking sound is pulling those jobs out of the entire Nafta block and ending up in China and India. The result is that workers' wages and middle-class living standards from all three Nafta countries have declined under "free trade".
Again Faux reminds us that rich countries have poor people and poor countries have rich people. The rich or the investor class in all countries have prospered whereas the middle-class and the poor have seen their fortunes decline.
To compound this problem, the US trade deficit was $726 billion last year and there is no evidence that it will decline in the future. Our manufacturing base is being hollowed out and the so-called knowledge economy is being outsourced. The primary job creation since the year 2000 has been in healthcare, government, finace, and the low-wage service sector. If this trend continues, it will become impossible to export our way out of this deficit, unless there is a significant devaluation of the dollar, which will inevitably lower our standard of living. This is going to happen no matter what policy is adopted in the near future, it is only a question of how much of a less prosperous future we will have.
Pat Buchanan in a recent article entitled "Our Hollow Prosperity" makes the same argument as Faux and indeed cites statistics from the Economic Policy Institute. Buchanan does not couch the argument in terms of class struggle (my main quibble with Faux's thesis), but he does believe when corporations are given the oppurtunity to find cheaper labor abroad they will do so and that the current free trade policy is undermining our prosperity. With the left and the right finding common cause against the corporate and political elite, there should be a significant political realignment when the next economic downturn hits.
What does Faux recommend? He is calling for a new global - or at least a regional, Nafta-wide - social contract. It looks something like managed trade. Let's face it, the economies that are running a surplus with us are practising managed trade. We should start bargaining for greater access to their markets and place a higher bar of entry to ours. Faux is not advocating protectionism, just smart policy instead of none at all.
We can now see the trajectory of globalization: Thomas Friedman proclaimed that it created a global and level playing field in the job market for workers heretofore excluded; Clyde Prestowitz proclaimed that the playing field was tilted against the industrialized world because our high wage requirements put us at a disadvantage; now Jeff Faux is saying that all workers are being sold short and that it's time to create a global social contract. Who says there is no such thing as progress?The Global Class War : How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win it Back Overview

Want to learn more information about The Global Class War : How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win it Back?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...

Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos Review

Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos Review"The UN is protected by a very high wall of political correctness," writes Dore Gold, "that makes criticism of it tantamount to an attack on all of mankind. But it is high time to recognize that it has utterly failed to achieve its founders' goals: to halt aggression and assure world order." This is the conclusion that Mr. Gold, author of "Hatred's Kingdom" and Israeli Ambassador the UN from 1997 to 1999, reaches after examining the UN's record.
Mr. Gold's grand narrative of failure begins in the beginning and ends in the end. His indictment of the United Nations comes even before the Cold War supposedly paralyzed it (the initial tests, writes Mr. Gold, were the first Arab-Israeli War and the first war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir) and lasts until the UN's failure to deal with Saddam Hussein, terrorism and WMD. In between are failures to deal with aggression, either across states or within them.
What is refreshing is that Mr. Gold has refrained from simply barraging the UN with its failures. Rather, he has identified certain trends that explain why the UN fails either when expressing the collective will of its members or when acting with its own mind. For Mr. Gold, the primary failure of the UN is its lost moral clarity; the UN founding fathers set up a system where evil existed and ought to be resisted. From the beginning, however, this clarity subsided-there are no aggressors and victims for the UN, writes Mr. Gold, just "warring parties"; and there is no cause and effect, just a "cycles of violence." This happens to avoid compromising the UN's most cherished ideal: impartiality. Even if it means standing idle to aggression, standing by evil.
In extremis, this lost moral clarity leads to moral equivalence-refusing to acknowledge that some party to a war might be more at fault than others, refraining from condemning outright violence, and seeking nonsensical explanations to justify armed struggle and even terrorism. This is tied to the proliferation of UN states that do not share the Western respect for democracy and human rights. As long as the UN reflects the aggregate of so many dictatorships, it is inevitable that it will lack either the political will or the political clout to punish those states with deviant behavior; "ultimately," writes Mr. Gold, "the UN's biggest problem is that it no longer establishes any firm standards of behavior for UN member states." The result, to name the most extreme example, is countries like Libya and Sudan being on the Human Rights Commission.
If this is the failure of the UN as a collective body, then unaccountability is the failure of the UN as an organization. That Kofi Annan, head of UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations during Rwanda and Srebrenica, was promoted to Secretary-General is only the most obvious evidence of an organization unwilling to punish its staff. This evidence, Mr. Gold continues, runs off to the accusations made against UN peacekeepers in Cambodia, East Timor, Mozambique, Bosnia, Ethiopia and Eritrea for their unethical and often egregious behavior, to say nothing of the oil-for-food program that the UN administered in Iraq. Mr. Gold's summation is reflected in Sweden's Per Ahlmark remark that the UN has become "an institution in which no shortcoming, it seems, goes unrewarded."
In all, Mr. Gold's unequivocal condemnation is a welcome break from the constant adulation and non-critical glorification that the UN receives in many countries across the world. At the same time, it not clear how and whether Mr. Gold's alternative, a community of democracies that is united by values and purpose, would operate. His coalition to fight terrorism, for example, would include Turkey, a notorious human rights abuser. And it is not clear for how long this democratic alliance would sustain converging views on who is the aggressor and who is the victim without resorting to the instinctive reaction of trying to mend fences rather than point fingers of blame. All the same, if there is a case to be made against the United Nations as it exists today, then that case is well contained in the "Tower of Babble."Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos Overview

Want to learn more information about Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...

Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind The Global Warming Hoax Review

Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind The Global Warming Hoax
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind The Global Warming Hoax? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind The Global Warming Hoax. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind The Global Warming Hoax ReviewThis book is not a simple, quick, easy read. However, if, by the end of it, you still believe in global warming, you have clearly not understood what you have just read.
If you're a global warming believer today, you'll be an informed skeptic after reading this book.Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind The Global Warming Hoax Overview

Want to learn more information about Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind The Global Warming Hoax?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...

The Global Economic Crisis The Great Depression of the XXI Century Review

The Global Economic Crisis The Great Depression of the XXI Century
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Are you looking to buy The Global Economic Crisis The Great Depression of the XXI Century? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on The Global Economic Crisis The Great Depression of the XXI Century. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

The Global Economic Crisis The Great Depression of the XXI Century ReviewYou want to read The Global Economic Crisis The Great Depression of the XXI Century, edited by Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, if you meet these criteria: you welcome information and analysis about critically important issues that come from great thinkers outside the mainstream media and publishing world; you can handle brain pain from detailed and brutally honest revelations; you are willing and able to challenge your own biases and preconceptions to let in new explanations of how the world really functions.
If millions of Americans read this book, we would probably see a far stronger uprising against the political establishment that has refused to severely punish the countless guilty people in the financial, banking and mortgage sectors that brought down the US and global economic system.
This book ties together a large number of factors in twenty chapters that reveal just how corrupt the world has become because of the power of plutocratic, wealthy and corporate interests. From Wall Street corporate boardrooms to the Federal Reserve and other central banks to the US military and NATO, a multitude of threads get woven into a disturbing tapestry of crimes against society that still have not been prosecuted.
This book is truly an instrument of anti-brainwashing. If you are willing to spend serious time reading it, then you surely will become much angrier about the dismal state of the economy that is causing so much pain and suffering to ordinary people worldwide. If you personally have escaped the worst ravages of the economic meltdown, then you will have much more compassion for those severely affected.
In all honesty, if the current global economic crisis has made you angry, pessimistic, fearful, paranoid, despairing and worse, then this book will most likely exacerbate all such feelings. By revealing still more connections, implications and causes, this book will motivate you to do anything you can to fight the corporate, plutocratic forces devastating the lives of ordinary people. If you already have little confidence in government, it will only make things worse. Does all this mean you should avoid reading it? Absolutely not.
Here are a few statements from the book that resonated with me and that you can use to decide whether the general philosophic orientation of it is compatible with your views:
"Wall Street's Ponzi scheme was used to manipulate the market and transfer billions of dollars into the pockets of banksters."
"Government rescue packages around the world are corporatist in their very nature, as they save the capitalists at the expense of the people."
"The global political economy is being transformed into a global government structure at the crossroads of a major financial crisis."
Just gin up the courage to read it, get out several color markers to highlight passages and expand your knowledge to overcome all the propaganda constantly being hurled at you. We need more citizen unrest to energize more public protests to overthrow the powers that have corrupted and perverted our government. A key voice in the mainstream media that is in sync with the painful messages in this book is Dylan Ratigan who has a terrific daily show on MSNBC. He too should read this timely book.
The Global Economic Crisis The Great Depression of the XXI Century Overview

Want to learn more information about The Global Economic Crisis The Great Depression of the XXI Century?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now
Read More...