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The End of Ice; Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, Dahr Jamail,2019
Dahr Jamail

We are already facing mass extinction. There is no removing the heat we have introduced into the oceans, nor the 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere every single year. There may be no changing what is happening, and far worse things are coming. How, then, shall we meet this?
“The question is not are we going to fail. The question is how,” author and storyteller Stephen Jenkinson, who has worked in palliative care for decades, states, “The question is, What shall be the manner of our inability to care for what was entrusted to us? The Question is our manner of failing.” Jenkinson, who now makes his living by teaching about grief and the acceptance of death as an integral part of living, spoke eloquently about grief and climate disruption during a lecture he gave at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. When he talks about our failure to care for what is entrusted to us, he is also saying that the time to change our ways is long past. Grief requires us to know the time we’re in,” Jenkinson continues, “The great enemy of grief is hope. Hope is the four-letter word for people who are willing to know things for what they are. Our time requires us to be hope-free. To burn through the false choice of being hopeful and hopeless. They are two side of the same con job. Grief is required to proceed.”

Accelerated Melting of Greenland Ice Cap

This short work is a world wide tour of glaciers, Bering Straight fishing villages, mountain tops, coral reefs, rain and other forests, while interviewing leading experts in the areas he visits.
Miami Beach
In his chapter “The Coming Atlantis” he visits Miami and the Everglades. He meets an engineer who is raising roads in Miami Beach 2 feet while leaving all buildings and infrastructure alone. James Hansen points out that Sea level rise is absolutely non-linear. Hansen has a plausible 15 foot rise by 2100 and 10 foot rise by 2050. The entire of South Florida and its aquifer would be totally lost at 10 feet, as would Mumbai and many other large coastal cities and areas. One scientist living in south Florida is planning to retire to Washington D.C. He fully expects his South Florida home to be worthless by the time he retires. It is estimated that by 2100 75% of Florida homes will be underwater. Jamail thinks that only when homeowners fail to find mortgages or insurance for their homes will denial stop. Miami and Miami Beach continue to build high rise condominiums. Current estimates have 2 billion refugees from sea level rise by 2100.
Global Coral Bleaching
In his chapter “Farewell Coral” Jamail points out that if the amount of human generated heat we added to the oceans between 1955 and 2010 were placed in the atmosphere instead, global temperatures would have risen by 97 degrees F. This added heat melts the polar ice and bleaches the coral. Because we know so little about the oceans we can only imagine the impact on sea species and their extinction.

His trips to the forests finds even the redwoods succumbing to the changes as beetles attack them. As forests die they burn releasing their CO2. The Amazon rainforest will soon transit to net positive contribution to CO2 emissions. We can only imagine the mass extinction of species not yet discovered as the rainforests change.
Changing patterns of rain, flooding, and droughts worldwide will severely reduce our ability to grow our food. The inability to grow food locally is estimated to contribute another 2 billion food refugees by 2100.

A willingness to live without hope allows me to accept the heartbreaking truth of our situation, however calamitous it is. Grieving for what is happening to the planet also now brings me gratitude for the smallest, most mundane things. Grief is also a way to honor what we are losing.

Bottle of Lies; The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom, Katherine Eban, 2019
Katherine Eban
The US government is prevented from negotiating drug prices through Medicare, Medicaid, and the ACA because of industry lobbies. The exclusive way the government has chosen to attempt to control runaway drug prices is through generic drugs. Generic drugs must be proven to be bioequivalent to brand-name drugs. Healthy volunteers are given the drug and their blood measured to determine the maximum concentration (Tmax) and peak concentration (Cmax) of drug in the blood. The blood can not fall below 80% or rise above 125% of the brand-names concentration. Companies are required to impose a 90% confidence interval on their testing to assure that less then 20% of samples fall outside the range. Drug companies are required to run these tests themselves. What happens if a foreign or domestic drug company sets out to systematically generate false test results in order to deceive and defraud the FDA? This is the story of one such company Ranbaxy Laboratory of India.
To increase companies incentives to produce generic drugs, the FDA offered a six month exclusive to whichever company first filed an application to produce a generic dug. On Aug 19, 2002, Ranbaxy submitted a 7,500 page application to produce Pfizer’s Lipitor then a blockbuster drug at $2.5 Billion annually. The Lipitor patent was set to expire in 2011.
Ranbaxy hired two Indians working for Bristol-Meyers Squibb. Rashmi Barbihaiya had been developing drugs for BMS for 21 years. Dinesh Thakur specialized in the application of robotics to eliminate human error from the manufacturing process. Thakur had helped Barbihaiya transfer and reconcile data from a BMS purchase. Barbihaiya decided to join Ranbaxy, set to acheive sales of $1 billion in 2002, and suggested Thakur join him. Thakur arrived in India on Aug 17,2002, two days before the Lipitor application was filed. Thakur had just become a US citizen.
Barbihaiya mysteriously quit Ranbaxy in 2004 receiving a sizable severance package (Hush money?). Thakur’s new boss in 2004 was London trained Arun Kumar who immediately started finding troubling discrepancies in testing and data. In mid 2004 he assigned Thakur to thouroughly research the records and data. On October 14,2004 Kumar met with members of the scientific committee of the Ranbaxy board of directors. Kumar showed a PowerPoint of 24 slides prepared by Thakur entitled “Risk Management for ANDA Portfolio”. The presentation showed that Ranbaxy had lied to regulators, falsified data, and endangered patient safety in almost every country where it sold drugs. More than 200 products in more than 40 countries had data that were fabricated to support business needs. The board asked Kumar if he could bury the data. Realizing the problems were systemic coming from the top, Kumar resigned. Ranbaxy did not know Thakur had prepared the presentation.
Dinesh Thakur
Thakur’s grandmother read him tails from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and he credits his moral and ethical grounding in these stories. He resigned Ranbaxy after 32 months and with no plans for what to do next. On Aug 15, 2005, after wrestling with his conscience for four months following his resignation, Thakur posted, in broken English, an email using a newly created Yahoo account. Thakur did not consult his wife about his action, because whistle-blowing in India can be fatal with no legal protection. Finally on Nov 2, 2005, Thakur sent the incriminating Power Point Presentation to FDA’s Rivera-Martinez. Andrew Beato’s whistleblower law firm agreed to represent Thakur. Thakur was now protected and his identity would remain secret.
On Nov 30, 2011 the FDA notified Ranbaxy that it was approved to start producing generic Lipitor. Ranbaxy promised they would purchase the active ingredient from Pfizer and produce the drug in an FDA approved facility. They did neither, using their own non approved active ingredient and producing in a non approved facility. The FDA did nothing about this deception believing Ranbaxy would need the revenue from generic Lipitor to pay the settlement. Ranbaxy shipped $600 million in their 6 month exclusive period.
The case was settled May 13, 2013 for $500 million. Thakur received $48 million for his role as whistleblower. No individual was held to account. It had taken the FDA and Justice Dept. almost 8 years to settle the case. Japanese drug maker Daiichi Sankyo had purchased Ranbaxy during this period relying on false information so they sought redress from the International Court of Arbitration in Singapore. In Apr 2016 the court ordered to Singh brothers to pay Daiichi Sankyo $550 million in legal damages.
Former Ranbaxy employees, all highly trained in fraudulent data manipulation and generation are today scattered throughout the industry, even in the US.

The Ranbaxy case defied the imagination of US regulators and investigators so long because the fraud was so all-encompassing. The company’s intricate system for faking data involved hundreds of people. And the US government all but volunteered to be fooled by announcing its inspections in advance.

Rajiv Malik $25 million per year
Another company featured here is Mylan Pharmaceuticals, a Pennsylvania based company registered in the Netherlands. In June 2003, Rajiv Malik resigned from Ranbaxy. In Jan 2007, Mylan acquired Matrix Laboratories, an Indian publicly traded drug manufacture. Along with Matrix, Mylan acquired Malik who became executive VP in charge of global technical operations. Malik brought his team of specialists from Ranbaxy with him to Mylan. He quickly rose to become Mylan COO. Heather Bresch, daughter of West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, became CEO of Mylan in 2012. She advocated for and got passed in Jan 2012 the Generic Drug User Fee Amendment (GDUFA) which called for drug producers to pay fees into a fund at the FDA in increase inspections. The fees were also intended to speed up applications for new drugs which had a huge backlog.
Bresch did not understand that her own corporate culture, thanks in large park to Malik, was in need of massive reform.
Mylan agreed to purchase for $1.6 billion, Agila Specialists in India. In June 2013 the FDA scheduled an inspection at a sterile injectable plant in India as part of the Agila purchase. FDA inspector extraordinaire Peter Baker was part of the inspection team. The problems uncovered were massive. Inspection Problems at two more Agila plants followed. All three plants had to be shut down. These plants also supplied Pfizer and GSK creating a worldwide panic.
Deb Autor FDA’s Revolving Door
Mylan hired Deb Autor, one of FDA’s top officials as its senior vp of strategic global quality and regulatory policy. Malik had suceeded in corrupting almost every Mylan owned plant in India. A Mylan whistleblower came to FDA headquarters with detailed accusations about Malik’s data fraud in India. His detailed information could have guided further inspections of specific plants. The FDA did nothing for a full Year. Remember that Deb Autor was formerly at the FDA and Bresch was a Senator’s daughter. The whistleblower in July 2016 jolted the FDA in an email, holding the FDA accountable for what happened to US patients and suggesting that the FDA revolving door (Autor) was responsible for their inaction. Two inspections at Nashik (India) and Morgantown followed.
Tom Cosgrove Covington Food, Drug and Device Practice Group 2017
In May 2017 FDA’s director Tom Cosgrove downgraded the FDA findings from Official Action Indicated to Voluntary Action Indicated. Cosgrove then left the FDA.
Another whistleblower from within the Morgantown plant came forward in early 2018 saying that Mylan had developed an embedded culture that permitted fraud. The Ranbaxy fraud virus had spread to the US.

From 2012 to 2018, the agency (FDA) downgraded 112 inspections in India to make the final classification less severe. For company after company — Mylan, Cipla, Aurobindo, Dr. Reddy’s, Sun Pharma, Glenmark — findings of Official Action Indicated (OAI) became Voluntary Action Indicated (VAI). These downgraded essentially nullified the judgments made by its investigators in the field and replaced them with judgements made by bureaucrats in Maryland. Cosgrove and other officials waived import restriction. They chose to communicate confidentially with some firms through so-called untitled letters instead of issuing public reprimands. Politics seemed to guide the agency’s enforcement actions.

Peter Baker FDA Inspector

After Baker’s inspection at the Pfizer-affiliated Zhejiang Hisun plant, the FDA restricted the import of thirty of the plant’s drug products. But fifteen of the drug ingredients were in short supply in the United States, so the agency lifted the restriction on about half of the drugs, including a crucial chemotherapy drug for treating Leukemia and breast and ovarian cancers.
To Baker, the decision made no sense. According to regulations, the drugs had no place in the US supply. They weren’t good or safe enough. Shortages didn’t change that fact.

In July 2018 a widely used active ingredient for Valsartin a blood pressure medication was found to contain a cancer causing toxin known as NDMA. The ingredient was made by Chinese Zhejiang Huahai Pharmaceuticals who had changed its production process in 2012. In the US more than a dozen manufactures had to recall their product as did dozens more worldwide. Some patients had been consuming the toxins for 6 years. Just a year earlier the FDA had downgraded an investigators report of impurities at another Valsartin ingredient plant to VAI. The company was let off the hook only to end up in the middle of a worldwide scandal a year later.

In 2013 Harry Lever, cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, sent a detailed letter to the FDA concerning Wockhardt’s generic metropolol succinate which he found could not control patient’s chest pain, heart rate, or blood pressure. NPR’s The People’s Pharmacy radio program with the Graedons had been flooded with complaints about this generic. The FDA sent Peter Baker to inspect the plant in India. Baker on July 24, 2013 joined two Indian FDA inspectors already on site. Baker had previosly inspected this plant in March. On this inspection they got a partial confession from an employee and amassed further damaging information. One of the inspectors became ill and their hotel room was bugged. Both Wockhardt and Dr. Reddy’s recalled their metoprolol succinate from the market with admission that the drugs were not bioequivalent at all. Lever had been right after all.
In 2008, again reacting to the People’s Pharmacy and Harry Lever’s patient’s generic Toprol XL experience, The Graedons began to focus on extended release (ER) drugs. In 2006 Teva began marketing a generic antidepresent for Wellbutrin XL sold by GSK. The FDA didn’t respond to the deluge of complaints. The FDA had 85 independent reports in 2007 which they ignored. Consumerlabs joined the fight and tested the Teva generic against the GSK. The result was that the generic dumped four times as much active ingredient in the first two hours as the brand name did. So a new, largely unidentified cause, dose dumping, came to the forefront of Doctor’s attention but not that of the FDA. The FDA’s bioequivalence tests were set in 1992. New drugs often feature extended release (ER). They release their doses evenly over a twelve hour period. If a generic dumps its dose quickly, the patient can be potentially harmed, sometimes in dramatic ways. The FDA 1992 bioequivalence definition is out of date and unable to account for the time pattern of dosage for an ER drug. The FDA ignored the results and one official even suggested the difference in dosage might be an advantage. On Apr 16, 2008 the FDA asserted that they had been right to approve the generic. Reading the report, it was clear the FDA had tested the 150 mg and not the 300 mg dose where all the complaints were centered. When asked, the FDA said they were afraid to test the 300 mg because it “might lead to seizures”. When Graedon looked at the 150 test results, the dosage dumping of the generic was still clear and unmistakable. It took five years for the FDA to agree to revisit the tests. They finally agreed that Teva’s drug was not bioequivalent. In 2010, the FDA official obstructing the Teva investigation, Gary Buehler, left the FDA to become vp of global regulatory intelligence and policy at Teva, another classic example of regulatory capture and the FDA revolving door.
Gary Buehler FDA To Teva
In June 2018 a woman arrived at Cleveland Clinic suffering from chest pain and shortness of breath. The 35 year old woman had had a successful heart transplant three years previously and had been taking the immunosuppressant Prograf daily to prevent organ rejection. But six months earlier, a CVS pharmacy refilled her prescription with generic tacrolimus, made by Dr. Reddy’s. Over the six months she felt progressively worse. Lever and his colleague Randall Starling sent her blood tests and tacrolimus capsules to a Massachusetts laboratory. The patient died of a heart attack in Sept. 2018. Preliminary test results from Massachusetts showed that tacrolimus released its active ingredient very rapidly compared with the brand.
Revising bioequivalence to address ER and dose dumping has not been done by the FDA. Peter Baker was no longer sent to do inspections and has left the FDA.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism; The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff, 2018

This is a look at the transformation of Google, Facebook, and others from their initial mission to serve their users to the exploitation of those users by selling their privacy to the highest bidder to achieve enormous personal wealth and power.

In her personal experience Zuboff describes sitting as a nineteen year old in the back of a seminar where Thomas Friedman (founder of the Chicago school of economics) instructs doctoral students who will soon run the economy of Chile after the CIA inspired coup and assassination of elected President Salvador Allende in favor of the Pinochet military dictatorship in 1973.

Thomas Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, economics as ideology and their opposite John Maynard Keynes

Zuboff also briefly alludes to debates she had at Harvard with the aging and discredited behaviorist BF Skinner, author of the novel Walden Two. She spends time in the book discussing Alex Pentland of the MIT media lab who she considers a BF Skinner intellectual successor armed with the tools Skinner could only dream of having and using. She calls Pentland a high priest of Surveillance capitalism. Pentland helps provide the intellectual justification that legitimizes instrumentarian (a new word coined by Zuboff) practices. Pentland never mentions Skinner in his work but his behavior modification goals are the same.
BF Skinner at Harvard and Alex Pentland of MIT Media Lab

Zuboff explains why user consent through opt-in or opt-out has been rendered meaningless under Surveillance Capitalism. To read a single contract agreement in detail might take hours and with third parties almost always involved there may be 1,000 individual contracts to read and digest. If you opt out surveillance capitalists will threaten to downgrade your system and will probably still collect and distribute your information without your permission. You have no way to find out what they are doing. If you ask for the information collected, as a Belgium privacy attorney attempted to do of Google, they are unable to retrieve it for you. It is buried somewhere in a second tier of automatic computation technology. The user has no way of determining what software is currently running on your computers or smart phones or what peripherals like GPS, cameras, microphones, etc. have been usurped for external control. To add insult to injury, you will pay for the transmission bandwidth they secretly steal from you to illegally surveil your activities. If you have installed smart home devices like thermostats or security systems you have no way to know what these smart devices are observing and collecting. Your car driving behavior can be monitored with bad insurance consequences, not only by your new car, but by your smart phone. Your new car can be disabled by the finance company and its GPS location sent to the REPO people to come get your car. Then imagine advances in voice and face recognition and you start to get the terrifying idea. Then imagine all of this surveillance capability in the hands of a non democratic government like China. You can’t do anything at all without the state monitoring (and influencing) your behavior.

What does older capitalistic history teach us?

It (government interventions into free market capitalism) appeared in the trust busting, civil society, and legislative reforms of the Progressive Era. Later it was elaborated in the legislative, judicial, social, and tax initiatives of the New Deal and the institutionalization of Keynesian economic during the post-World War II era; labor market, tax, and social welfare policies that ultimately increased economic and social equality.

In fact the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 created a new world economic order based on a US-centric dollar based fixed exchange rate system, created the IMF and World Bank, and was a complete repudiation of Keynesian economics. This system worked only so long as the US remained the dominant manufacturing power, creating large trade surpluses that the US could recycle as investments. When trade reversed around 1970 and the US became a trade debtor nation, the American economy shifted from manufacture to financialization, convincing trade creditors to invest their surpluses with Wall Street, who kept inventing new and innovative ways to use the mountains of cash suddenly at their disposal. The Neoliberal contribution to all this was the erosion of government regulation of corporations and the use of IMF and Worldbank loans to vulnerable nations and colonies whose defaults resulted in the massive transfers of state owned commons into private hands like Wall Street hedge funds. See Greek Spring by Yanis Varoufakis. None of this history is clear from her book. For an excellent introduction to macro economics from Bretton Woods to the present see Yanis Varoufakis’ minotaur book. The breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s was another opportunity for the Neoliberals who descended on the former Soviet Union members with plans to transfer all public commons into private hands. The result was to create a new class of asset owners in each country that more resembled a mafia than capitalists. We remain in this condition to this day. The massive and fundamental shift of the American economy from manufacture to financialization is not mentioned by Zuboff.

To her credit, Zuboff does site French economist Thomas Piketty’s monumental work on wealth and income distribution in England and America from the eighteenth century to the present.

A market economy…if left to itself…contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based…If we are to regain control of capital, we must bet everything on democracy.

Our present economic system has been accurately described as corporate welfare with massive government subsidies for agriculture, energy, extraction, and other industries. Hayek and Friedman would turn over in their graves if they knew where American capitalism has taken us. This trend reached its pinnacle (we only hope) with the Bush-Obama massive bailouts of the financial institutions and Zuboff’s beloved General Motors after the sub-prime financial scandal-crisis of 2008. Shiela Bair (W appointee to head the FDIC) was fully prepared to break up the big banks starting with Citibank using her FDIC authorization and charter, but was prevented from doing so by Tim Geithner who was shockingly appointed by Obama as his treasury secretary. See more at Scamming a President. No meaningful reforms were enacted to prevent a recurrence of this collapse and we anxiously await the next iteration.

Zuboff mentions Rand Corporation futurist Herman Kahn’s 1967 book The Year 2000, where the author anticipates the future possibilities of computer power intrusions into our lives characterizing this as “a twenty-first century nightmare”. She says Kahn was the model for the character of Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie. No!

Herman Kahn wrote an earlier book published in 1960 “On Thermonuclear War” where Kahn speculated that it would be possible to create a “Doomsday Machine“; a vast collection of nuclear weapons connected to an automated trigger mechanism that, upon detection of a threat and without any human intervention, would initiate nuclear holocaust. Most experts at the time believed such a system could not be built. In fact the Soviet Union built just such a secret machine called The Dead Hand whose current status is unknown. See Daniel Ellsberg’s Doomsday Machine book. Kahn’s 1960 book was the inspiration for Kubrick’s movie where the Soviet Union have successfully built a doomsday machine but have kept it secret from the US. The character Dr. Strangelove is a caricature of a former Nazi scientist, not Kahn. Kahn was a consultant on the movie.

Zuboff uses a discussion of totalitarianism to illustrate how slow academics and intellectuals are to understand completely sui generis unprecedented developments. Our understanding of totalitarianism came into focus only in the 1960’s, well after the demise of European Fascism and dramatic changes following Stalin’s reign of terror. She points out that between 1930 and 1953 Stalin appears ten times on the cover of Time magazine. She leaves out any discussion of Mao’s China, but China emerges later in her discussion of State uses of surveillance capitalism.

She introduces and coins Instrumentarian power as a contrast to totalitarian power.

Instumentarian power moves differently and toward an opposite horizon. Totalitarianism operated through the means of violence, but intrumentarian power operates through the means of behavioral modification, and this is where our focus must shift. Intrumentarian power has no interest in our souls or any principal to instruct. There is no training or transformation for spiritual salvation, no ideology against which to judge our actions. It does not demand possession of each person from the inside out. It has no interest in exterminating or disfiguring our bodies and minds in the name of pure devotion. It welcomes data on the behavior of our blood and shit, but it has no interest in soiling itself with our excretions. It has no appetite for our grief, pain, or terror, although it eagerly welcomes the behavioral surplus that leaches from our anguish. It is profoundly and infinitely indifferent to our meanings and motives. Trained on measurable action, it only cares that whatever we do is accessible to its ever-evolving operations of rendition, calculation, modification, monetization, and control.

Deng Xiaoping Architect of Democracy Free Capitalism in China

Instrumentarian power in the hands of non democratic States like China is almost beyond comprehension in its potential power. Yanis Voroufakis describes Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew and his disciple Deng Xiaoping who transformed China’s economy using the Singapore model as democracy free capitalism.

Voroufakis primary point in Voroufakis Ted talk is that Western capitalist corporations are hording massive mountains of profit, investing only in corporate consolidation, and are in direct contradictions of Keynesian economics to recycle surpluses to level the cycles of boom and bust. These uninvested surplus mountains may doom democracy and life as we know it.

Industrial capitalism depended upon the exploitation and control of nature, with catastrophic consequences that we only now recognize. Surveillance capitalism…depends instead upon the exploitation and control of human nature. The market reduces us to our behavior, transformed into another fictional commodity and packaged for others’ consumption.

Surveillance capitalism’s successful claims to freedom and knowledge, its structural independence from people, its collectivist ambitions, and the radical indifference that is necessitated, enable, and sustained by all three now propel us toward a society in which capitalism does not function as a means to inclusive economic or political institutions. Instead, surveillance capitalism must be reckoned as a profoundly antidemocratic social force.

As Thomas Paine noted in the Eighteenth century; “…a body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody, ought not to be trusted by any body.”

Surveillance capitalism’s antidemocratic and anti egalitarian juggernaut is best described as a market-driven coup from above. It is not a coup d’etat in the classic sense but rather a coup de gens: an overthrow of the people concealed as a technological Trojan horse that is Big Other…It is a form of tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people.

The young people we have considered…are the spirits of Christmas yet to come. They live on the frontier of a new form of power that declares the end of a human future, with its antique allegiances to individuals, democracy, and the human agency necessary for moral judgment. Should we awaken from distraction, resignation, and psychic numbing…it is a future that we may still avert.

Zuboff starts her book with the assertion that Surveillance capitalism cannot be controlled or contained through the lens of antitrust or privacy. She mentions the EU regulation the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which only went into effect in May 2018 and only within the EU. It is too early to see if this ambitious effort will have any impact as it works its ways through EU regulators and the courts. She appears sceptical. For the Guardian’s take on GDPR. So what do we do?

If democracy is to be replenished in the coming decades, it is up to us to rekindle the sense of outrage and loss over what is being taken from us. In this I do not mean only our “personal information”. What is at stake here is the human expectation of sovereignty over one’s own life and authorship of one’s own experience. What is at stake is the inward experience from which we form the will to will and the public spaces to act on that will…That Surveillance capitalism has usurped so many of our rights in these domains is a scandalous abuse of digital capabilities and their once grand promise to democratize knowledge and meet our thwarted needs for effective life.

For more on the despotic behavior of Facebook and Google

Anti-Social Media; How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, Siva Vaidhyanathan, 2018

Even when we post and share demonstrably false stories and claims we do so to declare our affiliation, to assert that our social bonds mean more to us than the question of truth…How do we train billions of people to value truth over their cultural membership when the question of truth holds little at stake for them and the question of social membership holds so much?

The social aspect of social media trumps any effort to build or spread civic responsibility into the system. Facebook is a pleasure machine. The pleasure is light and fleeting. That’s what keeps us coming back. But Facebook is also an anxiety machine, an anger machine, and a resentment machine…but the resentment is deep and durable.

Facebook attracts us, hooks us, encourages us to declare our affiliations, divides us, and tracks every single interaction along the way. Facebook’s surveillance system is part of its pleasure system. They cannot be severed.

The influence of Facebook on the violent attacks in Charlottesville is difficult to trace but important to address. I live in a nation that no longer seems able to filter out of its public sphere the most odious calls for an ethnically pure state, that has a major political party that can no longer resist fringe elements, and has a media ecosystem that rewards the most alarming and spectacular claims and is now willing to take seriously the claims of white supremacists. One man sympathetic to white supremacists even assumed the presidency in 2017 because the established filters all failed. Facebook did not generate these problems. It did amplify and normalize them by scrambling our senses of truth and justice and fracturing a sense of collective national fate. Mostly Facebook makes it hard to think.

Between Google and Facebook, we have witnessed a global concentration of wealth and power not seen since the British and Dutch East India Companies ruled vast territories, millions of people, and the most valuable trade routes. Remarkably, and unlike the East India Companies, Google and Facebook have achieved this feat nonviolently and with only tangential state support…They did all this by inviting us in, tricking us into allowing them to make us their means to wealth and power, distilling our activities and identities into data, and launching a major ideological movement – what Neil Postman described yet only predicted in 1992: technopoly.

Postman: “It (technopoly) consists of the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks it authorization in technology, finds its satisfaction in technology, and takes its orders from technology.” This ideological domination demands a sacrifice of all previously stable belief systems. So trust in institutions, ancient or modern, erodes. Local identities and traditions are rendered valueless except as raw material for remixes, parody, tourism, tapestries, and games rather than expressions of deep human narratives and connections.

Postman: “Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.” If it didn’t happen on Facebook, it didn’t happen.

The problem is, Facebook by 2013 already was so dominant that for may people absence from Facebook meant invisibility

The most fruitful response to the problems that Facebook creates, reveals, or amplifies would be to reinvest and strengthen institutions that generate deep, meaningful knowledge. We must support scientific communities, universities, libraries, and museums around the world. We must foster deliberation through publically funded better journalism, forums for debate, and commissions that could harness expertise to address our most pressing challenges.

Modi Duterte Trump

The book is very good on the exploitation of Facebook by despots such as Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Narendra Modi in India. He talks about the efforts of the Trump campaign to target potential Hillary voters with negative information, such as highlighting the Bill Clinton record of criminalizing crack cocaine, black incarcerations, and Hilary comments on blacks. These efforts probably further suppressed Hillary’s votes in key states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

In the meantime, Vaidhyanathan continues to use Facebook.

Reporter; A Memoir, Seymour M. Hersh, 2018
This is Hersh’s eleventh book. His Henry Kissinger book was first published in 1983, long after Kissinger left the government. We are still awaiting his Dick Cheney book. Hersh explains that writing always came easy to him:

<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> Sy Hersh

I grew up in a world where the incentive to learn came from within me, as did a sense of whom to trust and whom to believe. I was guided as a confused and uncertain eighteen year old by a professor who saw potential in me, as did Carroll Arimond at the Associated Press, William Shawn at The New Yorker, and Abe Rosenthal at The New York Times. They published what I wrote without censorship and reaffirmed my faith in trusting those in the military and intelligence world whose information and friendship, I valued but whose names I could never utter. I found my way when it came to issues of life and death in war to those special people who had the integrity and intelligence to carefully distinguish between what they knew — from firsthand observation at the center — from what they believed. The trust went two ways; I often obtained documents I could not use for fear of inadvertently exposing the sources, and there were stories I dared not write for the same reason.
I never did an interview without learning all I could about the person with whom I was meeting, and I did all I could to let those I was criticizing or putting in professional jeopardy just what I was planning to publish about them.
I will return to the Cheney book when the time is right, and when those who helped me learn what I did after 9/11 will not be in peril.

Kissinger Cheney Bush

Cardinal O’Conner Archbishop of New York told Hersh:

“My son, God has put you on earth for a reason, and that is to do the kind of work you do, no matter how much it upsets others. It is your calling.”

<> <> <> <> <> Abe Rosenthal

Some of the more interesting parts of this book deal with the relationship of Hersh with Abe Rosenthal, Executive Editor of The New York Times. Their first interaction was a phone call while Hersh was working on the Meadlo (a soldier at the My Lai massacre) story. A copy of the story had been sent to the Times and Rosenthal wanted to send a Times reporter to interview Meadlo. Hersh grabbed the phone:

“Mr. Rosenthal, it’s Sy Hersh. Listen, you want an interview with Paul Meadlo? Well he’s somewhere in New York. Find him.”

Hersh slammed the phone down. Seconds later the phone rings again. Hersh grabs it:

“Mr. Hersh”, Abe Rosenthal yelled, ” Do you know who I am?”. “Yes”, replied Hersh and hung up on him again.

CBS Evening News aired Mike Wallace’s interview with Paul Meadlo that same evening. Hersh later regretted his temper tantrum but Rosenthal hired him anyway.
William Calley, the only soldier court martialed for My Lai served three months in prison. Stories continue to break about the attempted cover up and the role of higher officers. My Lai was not an isolated event. On the same day as the My Lai 4 massacre, at My Khe 4, another massacre occurred with more than a hundred civilian deaths.
The Times hired Hersh on the basis of his My Lai reporting. Hersh wanted to pursue three other stories at the Times; the secret bombing of Cambodia and military falsification of documents; Nixon, Kisssinger, and the CIA’s interference with the Allende government in Chili; and the several hundred million dollar effort by the military to recover a Soviet Nuclear submarine sunk in the Pacific. Rosenthal, however, was tired of reading the daily Washington Post reporting by Berstein and Woodward on the Watergate break in and reassigned Hersh to this story. Hersh uncovered the existence of the Nixon plumbers operation and the break in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst’s office in California. Nixon was paranoid that Ellsberg might have other documents beyond the Pentagon papers that might be damaging to him. Ellsberg and Hersh became friends and saw Oliver Stone’s movie Platoon together. Ellsberg did have additional documents about nuclear war planning which he hid in a trash dump. A mud slide destroyed those files and Ellsberg spent almost 50 years reconstructing them for his latest doomsday machine book.
When the Nixon white house tapes were found, the Watergate story exploded and Bob Woodward and Hersh started sharing information to save duplication and time. They often met over tennis and Woodward quipped that Hersh never paid for the tennis time. Hersh clarifies here that Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post was paying for the court time.

William Calley 3 months Reality Winter 5 years

This book doesn’t deal with whistle-blowers other than to note how tough Obama was on them. Virtually all NSA whistle-blowers have had their careers ruined. The latest, Reality Winter, has been sentenced to at least five years for telling the public that the Russians attempted to hack electoral systems and voter lists during the 2016 elections. Calley, convicted of killing 21 innocent Vietnamese, served three months.

<> <> <> <> <> <> Mob Fixer Korshak

Hersh briefly dipped into an investigation of organized crime with a series of articles on the Chicago Jewish fixer attorney for the mob Sidney Korshak. Korshak’s influence with the Teamsters in New York prevented delivery of part 1 of the Times Korshak story.

When Hersh undertook to investigate the New York based corporation Gulf and Western, he hired a graduate school knowledgeable about securities issues to help him. Unfortunately, Punch Sulzberger, publisher of the Times did not want to offend his club buddies from Gulf and Western and the articles were mercilessly edited and all anonymous quotations removed. Rosentenhal was unable to defend Hersh and this was the start of the end of Hersh’s career at the Times. Nonetheless, John Kenneth Galbraith, Harvard economist wrote Hersh:

“The pieces on Gulf and Western are excellent — better than most readers will know. Extracting usable information from these characters, as I can attest from slight experience, is more difficult by a factor of ten than from the CIA. Thanks again.”

<> <> <> <> <> <> John Kenneth Galbraith

Hersh wondered why there was still so little cooperation between the intelligence community even after 9/11. He asked a long time CIA operative:

Don’t you get it Sy? The FBI catches bank robbers. We rob banks. And the NSA? Do you really expect me to talk to dweebs with protractors in their pockets who are always looking down at their brown shoes?”

When Hersh had a story about the killing of Osama Bin Laden that contradicted much of the Obama administration account, neither the Times nor the New Yorker (under David Remnick) would touch the story and Hersh published the story with the London Review of Books. He then published the book about the killing. Steve Cole in his recent book about Afghanistan and Pakistan entitled Directorate S does not mention Hersh’s killing account but seems to endorse the Obama version of events. Hersh comments:

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The possibility that two dozen navy SEALs could escape observation and get to bin Laden without some help from the Pakistani military and intelligence community was nil.

Hersh says the focus of the coverage should have been the double cross of Pakistan, not the refusal of the Times and The New Yorker to publish the story. During his long career he has often been challenged sometimes very bitterly. Hersh replies;

I will happily permit history to be the judge of my recent work.

Hersh discovered that James Jesus Angleton oversaw CIA domestic spying on Vietnam war protestors from 1967. Hersh’s story led to Angleton’s resignation in 1974.

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Hersh disclosed that in 1968 6,000 sheep died in a nerve gas experiment gone wrong at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. A different wind could have carried the gas to Salt Lake City.

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Also featured in this book is Harrison Salisbury who covered the Soviet Union for the Times from 1949 to 1954. He returned to New York where he covered the civil rights movement, the assassination of JFK and other stories until he retired from the Times as associate editor in 1973. He wrote his book on the Times, Without Fear or Favor in 1980. In this book, Salisbury wrote about the Watergate investigation:

“It was as though Sy Hersh had been born for this moment.”

In all Salisbury wrote 29 books including the 1969 Siege of Leningrad. He witnessed the Tienanmen demonstrations and massacre in 1989 and wrote The New Emperors: China in the era of Mao and Deng in 1992, portraying Mao and much of the leadership as Opium addled. Salisbury was from the beginning against the Vietnam War and was the first American journalist to be given a visa to visit Hanoi in 1966. He wrote extensively about the US bombing of Hanoi at this time. Hersh was the second American reporter to be given a visa to Hanoi. There he met Defense Minister Vo Ngyuyen Giap and the Paris negotiator Le Duc Tho .

The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Daniel Ellsberg,2017

Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg, whistle blower of the Pentagon Papers here reveals that the 7000 pages of the Pentagon Papers were the smaller part of the material Ellsberg copied. The larger portion were documents relating to the threat of nuclear annihilation due to insane policy planning. The nuclear papers were lost during a Hurricane. Ellsberg has spend almost 50 years reassembling documents and material in preparation for this book.

Ellsbergs major revelations here:

•First: our nuclear plans are and have always been based on launching a first strike, not reacting to a nuclear attack.
•Second: the US nuclear first strike will launch our entire arsenal (presently about 25,000 nuclear weapons) many 1000 times the power of the first Hiroshima bomb) with nothing held in reserve.
•Third: authority to initiate the first strike has been delegated to the military (even low level personnel) to prevent the enemy from decapitating US civilian and government decision making. The decision making may have even been automated like the Soviet Dead Hand.
•Forth: Nuclear plans must be kept secret from the public and from the civilian government (with rare exceptions) including the US President. In fact the public and congress are deliberately misled and systematically lied to about nuclear plans.
•Fifth: All of the above are the product of total insanity.

The bottom line, once again: This is not a species to be trusted with nuclear weapons. Above all, not to be trusted with a full or partial Doomsday Machine. And that doesn’t just apply to “crazy” third world leaders.

The title of the book, The Doomsday Machine, is based on RAND corporation physicist Herman Kahn’s 1960 book On Thermonuclear War and further described in some popular articles written by Kahn in 1961. Kahn proposed that within 10 years and at low cost a “Doomsday Machine” could be created by placing enough nuclear weapons on US territory and in the oceans to destroy all life on earth. The machine would be triggered automatically upon detection of threat. The term “omnicide” was coined to describe this event. Neither Kahn nor nuclear father Edward Teller believed at the time that such a machine was possible. They were wrong. In 1983, climate scientists weighed in, announcing that as few as 1,000 nuclear weapons would unleash firestorms releasing enough smoke and soot into the atmosphere to send the earth into nuclear winter. The winter would last at least a decade killing and starving virtually all life on earth. There is now scientific consensus that this conclusion is sound. Ellsberg believes all nuclear armed nations today possess a virtual Doomsday Machine because of the size of their arsenal.

Valery Yarynich, Soviet Whistle blower

In fact, the Soviet Union actually built a real world Doomsday Machine called the Soviet Perimeter System designed by Valery Yarynich who until his death in 2012 believed the system safer than its alternative. He ultimately became a whistle blower, being interviewed by David Hoffman who wrote the book The Dead Hand. Upon Yarynich’s death Hoffman wrote:

In later years, Yarynich expressed grave doubts about the very systems of annihilation he had devoted his career to perfecting. He once told me it was utter stupidity to the keep the Dead Hand secret; such a retaliatory system was useful as a deterrent only if your adversary knew about it. (This is exactly the scenario in Dr. Strangelove) More broadly, he came to doubt the wisdom of maintaining the cocked-pistols approach to nuclear deterrence, the so-called hair-trigger alert, especially after the Cold War ended. He feared it could lead to an accidental or mistaken launch.

Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove wrestles with his NAZI saluting gloved hand Wernher von Braun?

Ellsberg describes going to see Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece Dr. Strangelove. Ellsberg, then a RAND consultant at the White House, thought he was watching a documentary with accurate details like the inability of the military to recall the rogue bomber pilot heading for the Soviet Union and thereby triggering the Doomsday Machine. Dr. Strangelove recurs throughout Ellsberg’s book.

Ellsberg describes the US system of classification and security clearance which keeps these secrets from the public and from our own government. What he describes is a many tiered classification scheme far more complex than is publicly understood. Those holding clearance form what amount to a religious order where its acolytes aspire to ever higher levels where more secrets will be revealed. The cost of membership in the order is silence. Revealing a single secret gets you thrown out of the order ending your career. Ellsberg’s father designed the Detroit B24 factory and the Detroit B29 engine factory during WWII. Ellsberg didn’t know what his father did after this until his father decided Daniel had high enough security clearance to discuss his own career. His father designed the Plutonium production facility at Hanford Washington. When they asked his father to help build the 1,000 times more powerful Hydrogen bomb he quit as a matter of conscience; the only instance Daniel has found of a high level insider doing so. His father was not a whistle blower and was not thrown out of the order. He finished a successful career doing other work.

An excellant work on CIA secrets is the book Legacy of Ashes, the History of the CIA. Another excellent work on CIA secrets is the book Ghost Wars.

Ellsberg was a RAND consultant to the White House during the Cuban missile crisis and gives a detailed account here. He reveals that the Soviet submarines in the Caribbean were nuclear armed but that the submarine crews only knew they were carrying “special weapons”. When the US dropped small depth charges not intended to destroy a submarine but damaging nonetheless the decision on the submarine to launch its “Special Weapons” was averted by the presence of a third officer on board who voted not to launch. The nuclear weapon would have destroyed every US naval vessel in the area (and probably the submarine itself). The US would likely have believed the nuclear weapon blast was from a missile that had been launched from Cuba and would have responded with a massive retaliatory strike. Ellsberg has made extensive (classified) studies of near nuclear accidents of which there are many. Given the actual deployment of real world “Doomsday Machines”, it is a miracle we are still here.

Ellsberg also gives an excellent history of how civilian populations have become acceptable targets during wartime, starting with Gen. Sherman’s march through Atlanta to the sea during the American Civil War. When airplanes made aerial bombing possible legitimate bombing targets because a subject for military discussion. Ellsberg largely blames the British, not Hitler, for the decision to start bombing non military or production targets; to start deliberately targeting civilians living in cities. The US quickly joined in. The firestorm started by the bombing of Dresden led to a new level of civilian destruction and death. Dresden became the model for the bombing of cities in Japan.

Does LeMay resemble George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove?

Curtis LeMay became a US master tactician during German bombing runs leading to lower loss of bombers and higher production of devastation. LeMay insisted on personally leading his German raids. LeMay was given command of Japanese city bombing once the US got within range toward the end of the war. In the last five months of the war before Aug 1945, official war policy was to kill as many Japanese as possible. Large scale use of incendiaries in a deliberate attempt to start firestorms was standard procedure. Hundreds of Japanese cities were destroyed excluding Hiroshima and Nagasaki which were reserved for later atomic testing. After the war LeMay was promoted to head the newly created SAC in 1948. LeMay was central to developing plans for aerially bomb the Soviet Union and was a strong lifelong advocate of first strike. He was also fiercely protective of the primacy of the Air Force against the other branches of the armed forces. Eisenhower supported the Air Force as the more cost effective way to conduct modern warfare. LeMay tried to get Ellsberg fired when he found Ellsberg was behind John F. Kennedy’s questions about the number of deaths expected in a first strike attack.

And the Weak Suffer What they Must? Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future, Yanis Varoufakis, 2016

White and Keynes at Bretton Woods

Shortly after D day in 1944, the allies met at Bretton Woods to hammer out a post war global economic order. The American delegation was led by New Deal economist Harry Dexter White:

Bretton Woods offered White an opportunity to project the New Deal onto a global canvas. His brief for the Bretton Woods conference was nothing less than to design from scratch a stable, viable worldwide financial system for the postwar era.

But the New Deal stabilized capitalism in the US by instituting a broad range of political recycling mechanisms; among them the Federal Reserve, the FDIC Federal Deposit Insurance with the power to restructure failed banks, social security, even the military budget.

John Maynard Keynes attended the conference armed with a plan that would stabilize global capitalism for the long run by creating just such political recycling structures on a global scale. But White, who as a student had been heavily influence by Keynes, was charged to push through a very different and flawed system, totally dependent on America maintaining a global trade surplus and recycling that surplus to deficit nations at the will and whim of the American government. Thus was born the system wherein all other currencies would be tied to the dollar at fixed rates of exchange and the dollar would in turn be tied to gold at $35 an ounce.

By the late 1960’s, America’s trade surplus evaporated as Europe, led by Germany, and Japan started exporting more manufactured goods to the US than the US was exporting to them. This could not continue and in 1971 the Nixon administration, led by Paul Volcker, announced the Nixon Shock, dumping the gold standard and cutting all other currencies loose from the dollar.

The moment men like Paul Volcker saw that political surplus recycling was beyond the American economy’s capacity, they brought the whole damned (Bretton Woods) system down- with the 1971 Nixon shock. For they understood the fallacy that Europe refuses to grasp: if you set up a free trade, free capital and single currency system without a political surplus recycling mechanism, you will end up with something like the 1920’s gold standard.

From the moment that Europe was discarded form America’s comforting postwar dollar zone, European elites struggled to re create the defunct dollar zone within Europe. Never having grasped the lessons that the New Dealers learned during the 1930s and 1940s, European officialdom repeated the same mistakes made during the 1920s, creating an ill designed gold standard like currency in the heart of Europe

It is dangerous error to believe that monetary and economic union can precede a political union or that it will act (in the words of the Werner report) “as a leaven for the evolvement of a political union which in the long run it will in any case be unable to do without. Cambridge economist Nicholas Kaldor 1971

France’s Francois Mitterrand and Britain’s Margaret Thatcher believed that the next big economic shock in Europe would force Europe into a political federation with the creation of political institutions capable of recycling surpluses just as the US has done in the 1930’s and 1940’s.

Francois Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher

Thatcher’s mistake was to assume that Mitterrand’s scheme would succeed. She failed to recognize, as Mitterrand had also failed, that is was not in the European Union’s DNA to carve a federation out of its monetary union’s troubles…Only inefficient, sweeping authoritarianism could emerge from its wooden underbelly.

So, unable to learn from history and unwilling to forget their petty agendas, Europe’s ruling class set out to re-create the gold standard, demonstrating a grandiose failure of perception of what they were doing. Keynes had described the gold standard as a “a dangerous and barbarous relic of a bygone era.” Little did he know that Europe would re-create it in the late 1990’s, thus replicating circumstances ripe for another Great Depression in the 2010’s; and economic crisis that ended up…preventing the very political union that was to have been its antidote.

Lacking a political surplus recycling mechanism, Europe’s monetary union meant that the weakest nations and their frailest citizens had to suffer a sharp contraction the moment Europe’s capitalism went into a spasm in response to financialization’s inescapable seizures. Mitterrand’s original hope (that a future global financial would force upon the euro zone a federal solution) offered any respite from the pitiless reality. By 2010, two years after the type of crisis Mitterrand had in mind, that hope had died out too.

Paul Volcker, now President of the New York Federal Reserve next brilliant move came during the Carter Administration with his little known Warwick speech in which he declared: “A controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate objective for the 1980’s.” Here is what Volcker, about to become Federal Reserve Chairman had in mind:

Volcker’s Controlled Disintegration

If America cannot recycle its surplus, having slipped into a deficit position back in the mid-1960’s, it must now recycle other people’s surpluses!
The trick for America to gain the power to recycle other countries’ surpluses in the 1980’s, Volcker believed, was to persuade foreign capitalists to voluntarily send their capital to Wall Street…The trick was to hit two usually contradictory targets at once: on the one hand push American interest rates through the roof while on the other, ensuring that Wall Street offered a more lucrative market for investors than its equivalent in London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Paris, or anywhere else.

What do bankers do when such a tsunami of capital comes their way daily? When billions of dollars, net, run through their fingers every morning of each week? They find ways to make it breed on their behalf. Throughout the 1980’s the 1990’s and all the way to 2008, Wall Street took in the daily influx of foreign capital and, on its back, built mountains of derivative trades which, in time, acquired the property of private money.
Financialization, as we now call this process, was the critical byproduct of maintaining and enhancing US dominance on the back of increasing trade imbalances and in the interest of financing America’s ever-expanding twin deficits. It began as froth on top of the stream of profits flowing from Germany and Japan to Wall Street, once Volcker’s “controlled disintegration” of the world economy was taking effect. But soon the froth took over, usurping the underlying stream of actual values, turning finance into the driver and industry into the servant.

Reagan’s Massive Government Spending Program

But things began to go awry after 1986 when American authorities decided to wind back their vacuum cleaner, limiting the rate at which US deficits grew. The recession in the early 1980’s, caused by Volcker’s sky high interest rates and Ronald Reagan’s early budget cuts, frightened the Reagan administration into action. Using the US military budget as its main instrument, Washington effected the most Keynesian macroeconomic expansion in America’s history… The president,who had won the 1980 election by preaching against public spending and in favor of shrinking the state, won reelection in 1984…on the basis of a massive public spending spree.

Undermining New Deal Regulations

Enter Bill Clinton in 1993:

The Clinton administration, and especially Robert Rubin and Larry Summers in the National Economic Council and the US Treasury Department respectively, were busily working toward maintaining the Minotaur’s feeding frenzy. America’s deficits kept global capitalism effervescent, creating the illusion of a Great Moderation when underneath the surface, markets were increasingly addicted to America’s growing imbalances. If the American Minotaur’s frantic consumption of other people’s products and money were to end, markets take a hit, banks would go under, and the global economy might keel over. Precisely as it did in 2008.

Global Minotaur

As we have seen, the birth of America’s global Minotaur needed finance to be liberated so that the beast could do its work (supplying German, Japanese, Swedish, and later Chinese factories with sufficient demand) while also being nourished (by the profit of the German, Japanese, Swedish, and later Chinese factory owners), who sent them streaming into Wall Street.

The banker’s emancipation from their New Deal fetters was both a symptom and prerequisite for the new phase of American dominance. Who else but the bankers could facilitate the vast capital transfers, the perpetual tsunami of capital necessary to satiate American deficits that had to keep growing in order to maintain the illusion of what Ben Bernanke, one of Volcker’s successors, named the Great Moderation? Fair-weather recycling writ large, had taken over globally from the planned, political recycling that was the essence of the Bretton Woods system. Though this was never going to end well, it had the capacity to put the global economy on a spending spree that lasted three decades before crashing down in 2008.

During the same period, from the 1990s onward, Europe’s banks were copying the practices of the Anglo-sphere’s all-singing all-dancing financial sector, without having the safety net of a Federal Reserve, or a Bank of England, or even a Bank of Japan to catch them when the inevitable fall from grace occurred. The combination of the euro zone’s flimsy monetary architecture and the imperatives of Anglo-Saxon financialization, which infect the Parisian and Frankfurt banks under the noses of Brussels and Frankfurt, produced a reliance on money markets that Europe’s monetary union could not withstand.

Of American Officials views, Varoufakis notes:

They know America no longer has the power to stabilize the world economy by itself. They understand that Europe’s policies are detrimental to America’s future. And they are frustrated that their European interlocutors are not only ignorant of simple macroeconomic laws, but, curiously that they are not even ashamed of their ignorance.

Ponzi Austerity

The European monetary union’s reaction to the 2008 crisis was to create the mother of all Ponzi schemes Ponzi austerity:

These toxic transfers (of bank debt into taxpayer debt), effected in the name of European solidarity, led to a death dance of insolvent banks and bankrupt states, and couples that were sequentially marched off the cliff of competitive austerity. Deflation, ultra-low investment, social fragmentation and rising poverty ensured that large sections of proud European nations, most the weakest of their citizenry, were dragged into the contemporary equivalent of the Victorian poorhouse.

The Devil’s Chessboard, Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, David Talbot, 2015

This book is a reminder that our government’s journey to the dark side did not begin with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and W, or even with Henry Kissinger and Nixon. No its real roots go back to the OSS in WWII and to one man in particular, Allen Dulles.

Any book dealing with Allen Dulles must also include his older brother John Foster Dulles. We will take Talbot’s nomenclature and use “Dulles” when referring to Allen, and “Foster” when referring to John Foster. There was also a brilliant younger sister Eleanor Dulles who was a lifelong diplomat and ambassador to Bonn Germany under Eisenhower. The Dulles clan were the children of a Presbyterian minister and Dulles sometimes referred to himself as the Calvinist.

Eleanor recalled a childhood incident summering on lake Ontario when Dulles was ten, Eleanor eight, and Nataline five. Nataline was playing with a rock when she fell into the lake. Eleanor screamed but Dulles, a strong swimmer, stood passively on the dock observing the struggling sister. He never moved but the mother, hearing Eleanor, ran from the house to rescue Nataline.

and Carl Jung Agent 488

Dulles joined the OSS in WWII and assigned himself to serve in Bern Switzerland. His own wife Clover called Dulles the “shark” and she and Dulles’ long time mistress Mary Bancroft (they became close friends) sought counseling from Carl Jung in Switzerland. Jung observed in Dulles the disturbing mix of magnetism and ruthlessness common to dictators but Dulles had an impenetrable blankness making him hard to read. Other people, for Dulles, were either useful or nonexistent. Dulles was not capable of experiencing love. Only power was real to him. Dulles met Jung in 1943 and gave Jung an OSS spy number, Agent 488.

When Dulles’s brilliant only son Allen Jr., an Oxford graduate, failed to win affection or even attention from his father, he volunteered for the Korean War and was seriously brain damaged. Dulles subjected his son to CIA brain control researchers first with the notorious Dr. Wolff at Cornell and later with the equally notorious McGill University psychiatric facility. Clover finally intervened, moving Allen Jr. to a private institution in Switzerland where he remained until Dulles death. Allen Jr. was terrified of his father. Was Dulles a sociopath or a psychopath? Talbot never uses either term.

The Dulles brothers both worked at the Sullivan and Cromwell Wall Street Law Firm where Foster was the top executive. After WWI the firm developed a deep understanding of Swiss banking and played a central role in arranging German reparation contracts for leading German industrial firms like the cartels IG Farbin and Krupp steel. The brothers knew the key players in both Switzerland and Germany. It was no accident that Dulles positioned himself in Switzerland during WWII. For their entire lives, the Dulles brothers put their Sullivan and Cromwell clients and other American elite families like the Rockefellers, the Fords, the Carnegies, the Morgans ahead of the interests of their government. They remained throughout their lives faithful and trustworthy servants and stewards to those C Wright Mills referred to in his 1956 masterpiece as The Power Elite. Their class were almost exclusively ivy league educated WASPS belonging to the proper clubs.

C Wright Mills

The men of the highest circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability…They are not men shaped by nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues this nation now so unintelligently confronts. They are not men held in responsible check by a plurality of volunteer associations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision. Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility.

from The Power Elite

FDR was considered a traitor to their class because of his “radical New Deal” policies and they worked actively to ignore or undermine his policies. When FDR announced that only unconditional surrender would end WWII, Dulles acted treasonously to negotiate a truce with the fascists in Italy and attempted the same with the Nazis in Germany. He felt only existing right wing leaders in Italy and Germany would be able to withstand the encroachment of hated communism in both countries.

After FDR’s death in 1945, the Dulles brothers and their power elite set out to purge the government of all New Deal supporters. One of those recruited by Dulles for this purpose was Richard Nixon. Nixon was a Californian with Quaker roots and educated at Whittier College and Duke Law School. He applied to top law firms in New York in 1937 including Sullivan and Cromwell and received no offers (wrong class) an experience that left him bitter for the rest of his life. In 1945, naval officer Nixon was sorting through Nazi papers in an old torpedo factory in Alexandria when he found documents showing how the Dulles brothers laundered Nazi funds during the war. Nixon did what any patriotic military officer would do, he blackmailed Dulles. In return for his silence about the documents, Dulles would sponsor Nixon in the 1946 congressional race run against Jerry Voorhis, leader the the progressive caucus and one the the most powerful New Dealers in Congress. Dulles corporate friends supported Nixon lavishly and he won the election taking significant cash and a new car to Washington.

Alger Hiss hearings

Nixon then went after New Dealer and FDR high ranking State Dept official Alger Hiss. Foster had just appointed Hiss to head the Carnegie endowment but Hiss had embarrassed Nixon in front of the HUAC and Nixon wanted revenge. Nixon discovered incriminating documents hidden in a pumpkin and Hiss career was finished. President Nixon later bragged to his staff how he had forged the documents.

The Dulles brothers expected to take over the State Department and CIA with the election of Dewey in 1948. When Truman won a surprising victory, Dulles had to look elsewhere. In 1949 Dulles founded an obscure intelligence outpost in the State Department meaninglessly named the Office of Policy Coordination. Dulles maneuvered Frank Wisner into position as OPC Chief and by 1952 OPC was operating 47 overseas stations and employed 3000 people. It specialized in the black arts of espionage sabotage, subversion, and assassination. Money for its operations came from Nazi loot that Dulles had access to. Many of its recruits were ex-Nazis. The OPC operated with no oversight or supervision. Few even knew it existed.

In 1952 Foster went to London to convince Eisenhower, then head of NATO, to run for President. Foster simply bored Eisenhower and Churchill wickedly quipped, Dull, Duller, Dulles. Nevertheless Eisenhower ran and won and the Dulles era was launched in 1953. Dulles thought the HUAC was useful in the effort to purge New Deal government employee and he counted on Nixon to hold McCarthy in check. But no one could control McCarthy and he immediately attacked the Eisenhower administration starting with Foster’s State Department. Foster also felt cleaning New Dealers from his State Department was important and cooperated with the HUAC, even initiating purges of his own. State Department morale dropped to an all time low as countless careers were crushed. The US Information Service (USIS) was almost totally decimated and its libraries around the globe badly censored of material. Even the music of Aaron Copland (Appalachian Spring, Billie the Kid, etc.) was banned. When McCarthy turned to the tougher Dulles CIA the story was a little different. Dulles initially ignored or misplaced the HUAC subpoenas and when McCarthy refused to take the hint, Dulles went to McCarthy’s capital hill office to confront McCarthy with the extensive intimate dossier the CIA had assembled on McCarthy’s homosexual activities. McCarthy backed off the CIA and his ultimate downfall and Senate censure followed. McCarthy drank himself to death soon after.

The Dulles brothers sabotaged the government’s antitrust case against big oil’s Seven Sisters by having the case moved to Foster’s state department where it languished. Dulles organized the overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh’s government in Iran because they nationalized British oil production and cancelled a $650 million contract with Sullivan and Cromwell client Overseas Consultants. Eisenhower resisted efforts to overthrow the Iran government until the brothers convinced him that Iran’s oil was at risk of falling into communist hands. This new tactic worked magic with administrations for decades. Teddy’s grandson Kermit Roosevelt headed the coup efforts for the CIA and when the Shah ran away to Rome, Dulles went personally to escort him back to Iran and put him back on his Peacock throne. In 1954, CIAs Howard Hunt (of Bay of Pigs and Watergate fame) was sent to Guatemala to overthrow the legitimate Arbenz government because he had promised to redistribute unused United Fruit (another Sullivan and Cromwell client) lands to the people of Guatemala. United Fruit would have been compensated under the plan. Again Eisenhower bought into the fallacious threat of communist takeover argument. Then in 1956, CIA contractors picked up Columbia professor Jesus de Galindez who had written a 750 page dissertation critical of Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo, from the streets of Manhatten and flew him to the Dominican Republic where he was handed over to Trujillo who tortured and murdered the scholar. This is the first documented case of CIA Extraordinary Rendition.

This was the era of two revealing movies The Manchurian Candidate about mind control, and Dr. Strangelove.

CIA no match for Castro

After 8 years of continuous black ops, Dulles planned the ill fated Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Castro in Cuba that internal CIA assessments knew was doomed to failure. The CIA could never have successfully conducted an operation of this scale and against combat hardened well armed troops. Eisenhower amazingly approved the shoddy third rate plan scheduled to take place shortly after the inauguration of the new President JFK. Talbot says it was as if Eisenhower intentionally handed Kennedy a live grenade with the pin pulled. JFK, against the best advise of his team, kept Dulles and Hoover in their jobs upon assuming office but after the Bay of Pigs, for which Kennedy had to take full responsibility, Dulles career at the CIA was finished. Dulles, to the end of his life acted and was received by top CIA officials as if he still ran the agency. The CIA ran a black ops site near Williamsburg nicknamed the farm where Dulles kept an office til near his death in 1969.

Eisenhower had changed while in office. He no longer kept contact with his long time military friends but spent his spare time in the company of the power elite, most famously at Augusta National Golf Club. He embraced coups, assassinations, and other black ops as an inexpensive alternative to costly military action and also embraced massive nuclear retaliation as a reasonable response to soviet aggression. Kennedy promised a different future in this 1957 speech.

The most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile–it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism–and today that means Soviet imperisam and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism…If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines, or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our security.

Congo President Patrice Lumumba

Kennedy was a supporter of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected leader following Belgium’s brutal colonial rule. In an act of incredible insubordination, Dulles went ahead with a CIA plan to kidnap Lumumba and hand him over to his enemies. Dulles was again acting on the wishes of Sullivan and Cromwell client firms with interests in the Congo. Lumumba was horribly tortured and killed but it was more than a month before Kennedy was told of his death.

Warren Commission Controlled by Dulles – Report Widely Discredited

Almost a third of this more than 600 page work is given to the assassination of the Kennedy brothers. This reader does not follow the research or theories of these events so is uncomfortable commenting on Talbot’s discussion. Talbot clearly believes JFK’s murder was a CIA, FBI, Secret Service conspiracy and a coup d’etat. He thinks RFK, an avid follower of all the research and writing on the JFK assassination did not support reopening the investigation because of the power of those responsible. RFK thought only if he were to occupy the white house would he be able to bring those responsible to justice. Talbot discusses the Jim Garrison New Orleans research which was the subject of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK . Federal agencies in Washington refused to provide documents to Garrison and others who were interested in further investigation like RFK were afraid to join Garrison’s efforts.

RFK’s assassination was eerily similar to that of his brother – problems with facts and evidence, fouled up investigations, and cover-ups. According to Talbot’s research both assassins had to be CIA patsies neither capable of executing anyone. Sirhan Sirhan may have even been drugged and pushed into place because he was totally incoherent at the time and later had no recall of events. During RFK’s assassination, fifteen shots were fired and the fatal shot came from the wrong direction, etc., etc. Dulles very cynically kept up a friendly exchange of letters with Teddy Kennedy after the RFK assassination, no doubt to assure himself that Teddy would not turn into the next big threat to investigate the assassinations.

De Gaulle at JFK’s funeral

Talbot found an interesting quote published in France only in 2002 from Charles de Gaulle, who survived an attempted assassination in 1961 as dramatized in the movie Day of the Jackal.

America is in danger of upheavals. But you’ll see. All of them together will observe the law of silence. They will close ranks. They’ll do everything to stifle any scandal. They will throw Noah’s cloak over these shameful deeds. In order to not lose face in front of the whole world. In order not risk unleashing riots in the United States. In order to preserve the union and to avoid a new civil war. In order not to ask themselves questions. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out.

The CIA’s Gray Ghost
A minor character in the book is OSS spy James Jesus Angleton who met Dulles in Rome in WWII and remained Dulles life long acolyte. On his deathbed in 1987:

Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars. The better you lied and more you betrayed, the more likely you were to be promoted…Outside their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was a part of it and loved being in it…Dulles, Helms, Wisner–these men were the “grand masters”. If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell. I guess I will see them soon.

Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman, Greg Grandin, 2015

Grandin spends some time examining the influence of Oswald Spengler on Kissinger’s metaphysical beliefs:

Spengler wrote as if decline was inevitable, as if the cycle he described – in which each civilization experiences its spring, summer, autumn, winter – were as unavoidable as the spinning of the earth. Once societies pass their great creative stage and the logicians, rationalists, and bureaucrats arrive on the scene, there is no turning back. Having lost a sense of purpose, civilization lurch outward to find meaning. They get caught up in a series of disastrous wars, propelled forward to doom by history’s cosmic beat, power for power’s sake, blood for blood’s. Imperialism is the inevitable product, Kissinger wrote summing up The Decline of the West‘s argument, an outward thrust to hide the inner void. Kissinger acceped Spengler’s critique of past civilizations but rejects his determinism.

The lesson of the Korean War for Kissinger was that the threat of nuclear annihilation had rendered America powerless. Kissinger believed that Moscow had to be convinced that a major war with the United States which he called the only real deterring threat was a significant possibility. To make the threat credible Kissinger developed his mad man president notion which he deployed for both Nixon and Ford to demonstrate (with Cambodia as the victim) that the president was just crazy enough to launch such a major war. Reagan followed this example by invading tiny Granada after assuming office to establish his credentials as a legitimate mad man.

In order to “test” power – that is, in order to create one’s consciousness of power – one needed to be willing to act. And the best way to produce that willingness was to act..”inaction” has to be avoided so as to show that action is possible. Only action could overcome the systemic “incentive for inaction”. Only action could overcome the paralyzing fear (that is, nuclear escalation) that might result from such “action”. Only through “action” – including small wars in marginal areas like Vietnam – could America become vital again, could it produce the awareness by which it understands its power, breaks the impasse caused by an over reliance on nuclear technology, instills cohesion among allies, and reminds an increasingly ossified foreign policy bureaucracy of the purpose of American power.

“Power” is history’s starting and ending point, history’s “manifestation” and its “exclusive objective”. He had built his own perpetual motion machine; the purpose of American power was to create an awareness of American purpose. And since Kissinger held to an extremely plastic notion of reality, other concepts he was associated with, such as “interests”, were also pulled into the whirlpool of his reasoning; we can’t defend our interests until we know what our interests are and we can’t know our interests are until we defend them.

I know, Let’s Secretly Bomb Cambodia!

Into this crazy circular metaphysics, American foreign policy was sucked starting in 1969. With Obama’s endless war in more than a hundred countries we see the evidence of the ever growing whirlpool. Interestingly Kissinger uses Obama’s drone strikes as justification for his 1969-1973 secret bombing of Cambodia which was the start of this whirlpool and is the central theme of this book.

Vietnam, he said in 2010, was America’s first experience with limits in foreign policy, and it was something painful to accept. This is a disingenuous interpretation… Rather, the critics that most rankled Kissinger were those – protesters, Congress and former Harvard colleagues like Thomas Schelling – who told him that there were limits to what he could do to Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam…”I don’t see how it is possible to conduct foreign policy when there’s a systematic attempt to destroy both your threats and your incentives”.

Kissinger didn’t use his time in office to “instruct” citizens in political realism, as he had earlier define the responsibilities of statesmen. Rather, he helped adapt the imperial presidency to new times, based on an increasingly mobilized and polarized citizenry, more spectacular displays of power, more secrecy, and ever more widening justifications for ever more war.

Kissinger and Mao with much admired Zhou Enlai

With the autocratic Mao (Tse-tung) he could fantasize about what it would be like to conduct foreign policy and not be tormented by the press and Congress.

Mao and Kissinger shared a mutual appreciation of German metaphysics. Mao: Do you pay attention or not to one of the subjects of Hegel’s philosophy, that is the unity of opposites? Kissinger: Very much. I was much influenced by Hegel in my philosophical thinking…Mao: If it were not for Hegel and Feuerbach, there would not be Marxism,

But, as Nixon and Kissinger themselves put it, they used foreign policy to “break the back” of domestic opponents and “destroy the confidence of the American people in the American establishment. They had mixed results with the former but succeeded stunningly, with the latter. By the end of Kissinger’s tenure, all of the institutional pillars of society that previous administrations could rely on to uphold government legitimacy – the press, universities, the movie and music industries, churches, courts, and Congress – seemed to be pushing against it, creating that entrenched adversary culture that so worried conservative.

From the New Yorker in 1973:

There was the Kissinger who “established relations with China, improved our relations with Russia, and successfully completed the first phase of SALT – and for these achievements, most Americans are grateful.”…But then there was the Kissinger, who with Nixon, “planned the undisclosed bombing of Cambodia…initiated the unauthorized wiretapping of members of Kissinger’s staff and of newsmen in 1969…planned the invasion of Cambodia in 1970…planned the use of American air power to support the invasion of Laos in 1971…planned the mining and blockading of North Vietnamese harbors…planned the ‘Christmas bombing’ of North Vietnam – all this done in secrecy and without Congressional consent. While the President and the men of Watergate were, it now appears, undermining our democratic system of government in domestic affairs, the President and Henry Kissinger were undermining the system in foreign affairs.

In the years following the end of the Vietnam War, Kissinger, in one region after another, executed policies that helped doom his own grand strategy. Then, once he was out of office, he threw in with America’s new militarists, who were intent on tearing down Détente…By 1980, he was with them, sanctioning their jump-starting of the Cold War and their drive to retake the Third World…In a way, Kissinger did to the larger Third World what he did to Cambodia: he institutionalized a self-fulfilling logic of intervention.

What is certain is that individually, each of Kissinger’s Middle East initiatives – banking on deposits, inflating the shah, providing massive amounts of aid to security forces that tortured and terrorized citizens, pumping up the US defense industry with recycled petrodollars, which in turn spurred a Middle East arms race financed by high gas prices, emboldened Pakistan’s intelligence service, nurturing embryonic Islamic fundamentalism, playing Iran and the Kurds off Iraq, and then Iraq and Iran off the Kurds and committing Washington to defending Israel’s occupation of Arab lands – has been disastrous in the long run.

On a personal note: this blogger had a college friend who was a conscientious objector, a varsity wrestler, and a violinist with the University orchestra. He was assigned to teach English in Laos as his alternate service. In 1969-1970, he witnessed the B52’s and bombings as he sat on his porch playing his violin. When things got too dangerous, he left Laos, stopping briefly to visit us in Honolulu where we first learned of the secret bombing. He was later convicted of draft avoidance and sent to prison in Walla Walla.

Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, Samir Amin, 2014 (originally published in 1997)

Samir Amin is a French-Egyptian Marxian economist. He lives in Dakar, Senegal. Amin’s primary focus in this work is this challenge:

The first (capitalism) wishes to fix evolution, more or less submitting it to the perspective of the unilateral action of capital. Socialism on the other hand permits one to see why this capitalist globalization remains truncated, generating, reproducing, and deepening global polarization step by step. The historical limit of capitalism is found exactly here: the polarized world that it creates is and will be more and more inhuman and explosive. Challenged by this enormity, socialism has a duty to propose an alternative vision of globalization, the means of achieving it in the true sense of the word and giving it a human and truly universalistic character. This is, in my opinion, the challenge.

Rejection of capitalism by turning to ethnicity and religious fundamentalism actually have become integrated into this brutal globalization and are made use of by it. They cannot be the answer to apocalyptic capitalism.

Capitalism today is sustained by the existence of five monopolies enumerated by Amin:
1. Technological Monopoly. This monopoly is sustained by huge state expenditures especially through military spending.
2. Financial Control of worldwide financial markets. With deregulation and the liberalization of rules governing finance, finance has become capital’s most global component. Past empires like the British maintained financial control through trade surpluses. The US attempts to maintain its dominance and the dollar as the global currency despite massive trade deficits. As a result, today’s financial system is extraordinarily fragile.
3. Monopolistic access to the planet’s natural resources. The reckless environmental dangers of this monopolistic exploitation are dangerous and increasingly obvious.
4. Media and Communications monopolies. These lead to a uniformity of culture and provide effective means for political exploitation. These monopolies are a primary source of the erosion of democratic practices.
5. Monopolies over weapons of mass destruction. The US monopoly of 1945 was held in check through the cold war but today the US again has an unacceptable monopoly that cannot be held in check through international democratic controls.

Bangladesh Factory Collapse

Amin’s central focus is the evolving social contract between Capital and Labor. The early 20th Century saw the spread of Fordism by which Amin not only refers to mass industrial production but to the rise of labor organization and negotiated social contracts between capital and labor. The name is perhaps unfortunate given Henry Ford’s antipathy toward union organizing. By the end of WWII and up til about 1970, organized labor proved able to hold their own in upholding dignified social contracts with capital. Today, with capital able to physically relocate for tax and labor advantage, the social contracts enabling workers to enjoy a decent middle class living have evaporated to be replaced by a capital induced permanent state of unemployment or “surplus labor” as capital economists prefer to refer to it. Global capital uses subcontracting at the periphery to limit liability (from collapsing factories, indentured labor, environmental damage, etc.). Amin is not a numbers guy (in sharp contrast with French economist Piketty) but he does point out that modern finance is able to move capital around the globe at about 30 times the volume of trade. This has to exaggerate short term opportunism and instability as capital lurches from crisis to crisis.

Amin prefers to refer to the global economy as having a center and a periphery. This replaces the nomenclature of first, second, third, and forth worlds. As the global economy moves away from its center, the level of surplus labor increases until virtually the entire population is included in this category. This state of economic affairs makes modern capitalism inherently unstable lurching from crisis to crisis. Modern capital managers are trained in crisis management and little else. Capital has no long term objectives, vision, or dreams. It blindly lurches along putting out fires as best it can.

Amin equally decries the damage capital is doing to our environment seemingly without constraint or cost. The environmental damage, like “surplus labor” only intensifies as one moves from the center toward the periphery.

The US is the absolute center of destructive capitalism. There is potential for a second East Asian center of China, Japan, and the tigers. India is another potential regional center. The European EC has had some success in integrating markets and allowing some mobility of labor but capitalism intentionally created the EC with very weak central political structures including a weak central bank. The result is becoming a German dominated EC. Germany’s current project is the “Latin Americanization” of Eastern Europe under German control. Already the Czech Republic has become a German protectorate. The EC must strengthen central democratic institutions if it is not to fall apart or become totally dominated by Germany. Amin spends some time examining the failed example of the Bandung Project, the loose coalition of 29 non aligned nations (neither aligned with the US nor the Soviet Union). Formed at the Bandung Conference in 1955, this coalition represented more than half the world’s population.

A major objective of imperialism and colonization as controlled from the center was the Balkanization of Africa and the Middle East. Britain had the same objective in India but largely failed, only able to carve out the two Pakistans as they left India. This Balkanization makes it much more difficult to build regional solutions, whether in Eastern Europe, Africa, or the Middle East. All this leaves only the US-Canada as a continental region with the potential to do something about breaking up the five monopolies of capitalism.

Amin speculates that the IMF, the World Bank, and the GATT-WTO could potentially be reformed to serve to correct some of the extreme problems of global capital but today they serve the interests of global capital at the center and promote neoliberal objectives. Unless they are reformed they will continue to contribute and exaggerate the global economic crises and not abate those crises.

Amin decries the absence today to a towering intelligentsia like that of the enlightenment able to have a profound impact on thinking about new forms of social contract between capital and labor. Amin finds the academic apologists of capital with their non empirical talk of the magic and invisible markets risible and dangerous. Amin admires Marx’s analysis of the problem but finds Marx fell far short of suggesting organizational and political solutions to the problem. He refers to the Soviet revolutionary experience as “Sovietism” and the Chinese revolutionary experience as “Maoism”. He refuses to call either Communism. He believes there has to be a regional political organizational solution to the problem of capital and control over its five monopolies. Amin admits he doesn’t have the answer.