American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips, Viking, 2006, 462pp.
Multittude: War and Democracy in the Age of the Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Viking, 2005, 426pp.

Denigration, deterioration, degradation and a whole host of other negative words clearly describe the world I see reflected in most of what I read and experience.

The legal system in which I am entangled has little to do with justice and each day presents me with a new more egregious example of its failure.

Yesterday, I was given more information about one of the cases that I have been following for awhile. A case filled with a lot of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct, ignoring of the basic rules of procedure and finally such contradiction that all I could do was laugh.

The facts are simple in the latest twist: after having a motion for a retrial denied, the defendant made a request for a transcript, so he could file an appeal. The request is pro forma and there is no reason that it should not be granted, but it was, as the hearing contains prima facie evidence of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct.

My friend hollered loudly in a legal matter.

A transcript arrived, but it was doctored and neither certified by the court reporter or signed by the judge.

He hollered some more to the Justice Department and other higher powers. He then received pounds of documents (no certified transcript) that included the judge’s order for the transcript.
The two orders (one denying the order for the transcript, the other granting it) were signed by the judge at exactly the same time and on the same day.

So my friend now has two orders from his judge in his possession that are exactly similar: one granting him what he needs to file his appeal, the other denying it. And of course a useless transcript as it is neither certified nor signed.

Such behavior is emblematic of the behavior I see everyplace I look in American society and what I have experienced under the color of law since my return to the USA in July of 2001.
The legal system is bankrupt and anyone denying that assertion must be classed with those who still deny global warming through the conversions in that area are coming thicker and faster as the glaciers and ice caps melt at ever increasing rates and our daily weather seems to be produced by an erratic roulette wheel rather than by the ‘seasons’ I grew up with.

In May, I have experienced mainly October for most of the month, then 900 heat (rare) for a few days, then a thunderstorm that would have frightened Thor. Anyone who is older and with some semblance of memory knows that the weather is changing before their eyes.

Review

The two books under review both address problems I and the friend mentioned above, face as we struggle to reclaim our lives in a system that has gone mad.

The Phillips book is totally focused on the USA, providing over 450 pages of evidence for his thesis that reflects my preface above. It could easily be entitled: ‘We’ve Lost It’ or ‘The Decline of the USA.’

Anyone reading my letters written during the past 5 years would not be surprised by any of it. I have lived through the recent degradation and described it as honestly as I am able to do.
Phillips concentrates on three areas:

1. The coming oil shock – we re running out of oil, the petroleum age is over, habits run deep and those in charge of our government are deaf, dumb and blind wherein the needed changes are concerned.

2. The religious takeover of the Republican party by born again fundamentalists who, under the aegis of W , have pushed an agenda on the American people that is alien to both our founders and most of our history. An agenda based on ideology that is an inadequate way to handle our problems and that can’t begin to deal with them for biblical hand waving can’t solve complex 21st Century problems.

“Ideology is a lot easier, because you don’t have to know anything or search for anything. You already know the answer to everything. It’s not penetrable by facts.” (page 235, Ex-Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neil)

The main criticism I have of W and his cohort of fumblers has little to do with politics per se. What I object to most is the continual lying, the almost total incompetence and a pride in ignorance that is a horrible model in a society that increasingly requires a lifetime of learning to survive.

Phillips has great expertise in polling and getting people elected. His discussion of religion and voting patterns is packed with data and a must read for anyone concerned with what has happened to the USA.

3. Debt is the third issue which Phillips and a few courageous others think is the most frightening factor in the current American situation. We are now the largest debtor nation in history and so beholden to others that if one debt holder panics and begins selling $s or a big oil nation insists on denominating oil in euros, the slide of the $ could land the nation in the territory of 1923 Germany.

“Debt, directly or indirectly, as decayed the very soul of America.” (265), James Medoff & Andres Harless, The Indebted Society.

We are borrowing close to three billion dollars a day just to survive.

In essence the world produces products and we print $s to buy those products. A scam of gigantic proportions. The USA is now borrowing and spending most of the world’s savings and our own savings are now in negative territory.

Phillips goes into the debt crunch at length. It is the best popular discussion of the matter I have read.

Those who can step back from our present context and overview it dispassionately are rare, as money usually generates immense passion.

The essence of what Phillips is saying about American decline is based on previous models of past imperial and financial powers: Roman, Spanish, Dutch and British.

I’ve read some of the scholarship and agree with what Phillips is saying about how indicative the present state of our economy is: We now make money from money, not products. Finance not manufacturing is in control. In the past that has always indicated decline, end time.

Combine that with American dependence on oil from without, our religious imperial fanaticism and the recipe is a perfect match up with past declines.

W is to Phillips a know-nothing leader who is exacerbating all these trends and literally leading the country off a cliff.

Alas, I agree.

Hardt and Negri are all well aware of the American debacle, but their focus is planetary and what they are selling is hope.

Now without hope, we are lost. No argument about that. As a prisoner, I am doubly aware of that, but, that hope requires a tad more facts to function for me and though Hardt and Negri are astute theoreticians and have read through libraries of leading edge material their practical suggestions are very flat.

If you are short on hope, Multitude may juice your mind and help you breathe more easily – a necessary function – but its admitted practical paucity will make the reader aware of just how dire our situation is.

And the elephant in everyone’s living room is not adequately discussed in either book.

The books on global warming and its most dangerous consequence are flooding out. We are back in 1969 waiting for the equivalent of Earth Day to happen, but on a planetary level. That event will focus our minds and subsume the concerns of both Phillips and Hardt and Negri, for what we are headed for will force a rethink of everything we are doing, since the human actions of the past 250 years have set loose a series of changes that will require a reorganization of human life, as the very parameters that define the air bowl in which we live are transmuting before our relatively unaware eyes.

Crossing The Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, Michael C. Ruppert (New Society Publishers, 2004)

“Codenamed Operation Northwoods, the plan, which had the written approval of the chairman and every member of the joint chiefs of staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American Streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked, using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lekinitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing they needed to launch their war.”

Body of Secrets, James Bamford, Page 82

“The nation’s most senior military leadership was proposing to launch a war, which would no doubt kill many American servicemen, based solely on a fabric of lies.”

Ibid. Page 71

I am an alien, a foreign body which has been re-implanted into a body politic that I left in January of 1981 out of disgust at the treatment accorded to me by the judicial system. I am in no way anti-American, though I much prefer, after living for 20 years in five European countries, the life style of Europe to that of the United States.

I find United States’ influence on present world events to be pernicious. I find the imperial mode to be totally counter to the ideas of those American signers of the Declaration of Independence who risked their necks to establish freedom at the outer edge of European civilization. I find the religion of the market, as it is so often preached, to be a hypocrisy whose spread in any way to a presently more civilized Europe, to be a total disaster. The imperialism of the dollar is a scam run by a group who are precipitously destroying the very basis of our future. A group which represents our basest instincts and whose symbolic behavior is orchestrating the worst as representative of the American people, alas turning the possible hatred of us into everyday reality.

I find the self-centered religiosity that is daily making American air harder to breathe, a travesty of the truth that many around me carried into their daily lives of struggle during the 60s and early 70s. It was about helping others, bearing witness for those wronged; it was behavioral not linguistic and it still had some rude connections to that much fought over being who died on a cross almost 2,000 years ago. It had to do with sacrifice, love, compassion and mercy; it had nothing to do with the nonsense of property consciousness, tele-evangelism or just saying no. It was positive, affirmative, communal. It did not elevate the ‘free market’ over every other value.

Imperial fortress America seems filled with obese workaholics who consume more pornographic than Hollywood movies, whose culture, consisting of TV sports and celebrity, is micron thin and about as sustaining as the fast food that requires teen age stomachs, in increasing numbers, to be ligated.

Its electronic media are filled with voices whose tone belies any possibility of conversation or debate. People scream imprecations at each other. Public space, so precious to our heritage, has become a wasteland. The severely compromised Mr. Powell the closest thing we have to a statesman.

So many Americans now seem proud to be ignorant; an ignorance furthered by PC and universities too concerned with social adaptation rather than the difficulties and stresses inherent in a good education and confirmed by our woefully inadequate placing in international testing.

Our economy, in spite of all the noise, is now being run by people whose presence has always heralded the last stage of a particular historical development in capitalism, indicating a shift in power that the present decline of the $ symbolizes. Financial instruments now dominate our economy, not productivity. The failure of one hedge fund (LTCM), threatened our entire global system, not the failure of any particular enterprise that actually produces a product. Financial instruments that make money from what is essentially a system more akin to a casino than a productive economy, rule our world, destroy the economies of entire countries, threaten the future of our progeny and have quickly made us the cynosure of hate on the planet.

This process of decline was well underway before 9/11. 9/11 quickened the pace and allowed a gang with a plan to immediately use the opportunity that Michael Ruppert demonstrates as being self-generated, to sew fear in the land, move much closer to fascism (in this sense a merger of the state, corporations and the media) and to totally compromise the stated intentions of our founders.

The plot to use 9/11 as a flash point for obliterating freedom and seizing areas key to future energy supplies, due to the problem of peak oil, was carried out by a select few but has been colluded with, after the fact,. by most public figures and major media.

Most people appear to be frightened or asleep: focused on a hang nail when the house is burning. The unwillingness of so many to reflect upon the combination of 1984 and Kafka, that has become daily life in the United States, a sad comment on our commitment to our supposed ideals.

Our young men and women lack basics as they try to do daily tasks in the most dangerous place on earth while Donald Rumsfeld hand waves and supports a redundant satellite system that would cost $9.5 billion. The lack of concern shown by this man for both the American military and the Iraqi people boggles the mind. Over 2,000 of “ours” dead, 15,000 wounded; the combined Iraqi figures easily top 100,000 in an insurgency mess that the elections have not settled, but rather, under present conditions, will only exacerbate.

In a long deeply researched heart felt book that is suffused with the courage and honesty that few bring to any task, Mike Ruppert has culminated seven years of publishing his now highly regarded newsletter, FROM THE WILDERNESS, with Crossing The Rubicon.

Ruppert’s book is a long, detailed, fact filled account that provides the ABC’s of the avoidance of certain problems that a small group of people have been working on since the late 60s when it was discovered that the CIA was deeply implicated in the drug trade. I provided such information to the Attorney General of Pennsylvania through an old school mate acting as a back channel. The back channel soon told me that a face to face meeting was requested, thus beginning more than a decade of my providing information and eating lunch and dinner with some of those - mostly men - who were supposedly running the show, but often having to do so with information that was inadequate.

I was fueled by my generalist education, encouraged by a brilliant professor of Victorian literature who became for a period of 5 years my closest companion, and 3 years of intense study of the 9/11 of the 60s: the assassination of J.F.K.

When I combined the two above pursuits with an intense study of ecology and its impact upon economics, I soon realized that the entire structure of our society was predicated upon a fallacy on infinite growth that would bring about a collapse of our entire system during my lifetime.

This awareness was deeply reinforced by a year long one-on-one seminar that I shared with a young financial genius – Shel Gordon – who was in temporary retirement after selling his investment business for many multiples of $10 million, real money in those days.

The fallacy of all present economic thought soon became apparent to this keen mind in the light of Georgescu-Roegen’s light years ahead of time book on the relationship between the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) and the economic process.

A book that exposed two basic economic fallacies: the idea of infinite growth and its correlative fallacy; the writing of equation after equation without consideration of any boundary conditions, something that no physicist would ever do.

The masking of this fallacy, seemingly an abstract problem in economics, is the key to the behavior that ex-detective Ruppert is investigating and thus a major thread in all the important events of our time:

1. We live in a finite, bounded space with limited resources.

2. Our major energy source - oil - is running out.

Ruppert’s Chapter One is a brilliant Tour De Force on this theme: the end of petroleum man. Peak oil as the major issue.

Sadly the rest follows as the night the day, through 674 pages and over 1,000 footnotes.

An almost total refusal of entrenched interests to think through their habitual behavior in the face of rapidly changing conditions.

A shift, as mentioned above, demonstrated in Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century and Peter Gowan’s The Globalization Gamble, from productive to finance capital, an omen, as such past historical shifts demonstrate, of a loss of power.

And, serving as a backdrop to all this, the much denied fact of global warming, best envisioned in January 2005’s Scientific American wherein one can watch through a long lens the disappearance of all that arctic ice; entire great world cities, island nations, a good deal of South Florida will be under water during the lifetime of the grandchildren of some of us old folks.

So much of the panic filled horrific behavior meticulously described by this book is indicative of a ruling class unconsciously aware of the great threat to its existence as so much of our enormous efforts to save endangered species is a projective covering of the sense that we might be doomed.

And our fears will come to fruition if we don’t find a way to derail the madness that chapter after chapter of Crossing the Rubicon details.

The book is structured as a presentation to the jury, you, the American people.

It is one man’s massive gathering of the evidence that hundreds of 9/11 researchers have labored to collect. It is a group effort focused through the intense lenses of one American who refuses to eat the lies served up by the major media.

It is a NO! in thunder backed by hundreds of thousands of research hours.

It is a collective shout that must be read and acted upon if we are to have any chance of casting off the oppression that has the American Spirit in chains.

The research is meticulous; the questions asked are questions that should have been answered by the very public dog and pony shows that Bush and Co. reluctantly permitted. Questions that still reverberate as I write.

Our “leadership” is in public denial, for it is complicit in so many ways with the on-going failure to deal with global warming, peak oil, the fall of the dollar and most significantly, 9/11.

The jury is out. The evidence is strong and convincing.

Can our system rise to its greatest challenge: facing the facts of a researcher/prosecutor whose massive evidence says that our very own Vice President - Dick Cheney - mastermined 9/11, creating the context for our invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq.

As an alien, as someone removed from American life for over 20 years, I can more clearly see the multiple illnesses affecting the body politic.

Illnesses that only sunshine can begin to cure. This book is part of the sunshine.

It is written at great risk: “one can only live deeply immersed in evil and crime for so long without paying a price.” (Page, 392)

It is a great risk to read it, for it is very convincing and once convinced you will not be able to go on with things as usual, for the book forces anyone, who still lives in terms of an ideal, to consecrate themselves to seeing its truth confronted in public, for without such confrontation we are dead in the water as a nation.

Disclaimer: The foreword to the book was written by a very close friend who has had much influence on the author.

Conservatives Without Conscience, John W. Dean (Penguin, 2006)

Until the November 2006 election, the USA was firmly in the hands of a cabal of secretive republican authoritarian leaders who were systematically destroying what was left of our democratic tradition and acting with such incompetence that most of the planet has totally lost faith in America as a bastion of freedom.

Two men who had deep connections with republican politics, Kevin Philipps (book previously reviewed) and John Dean have written best about the rot and its underlying causes. What dean says in Conservatives Without Conscience is indicative of my feeling, expressed in another blog to accompany this one.

His cogent, calm book based upon his own experience in government and an actual wake up telephone call from Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes that threw Dean back on the public stage as the result of a totally unfactual book that implicated him and his wife as the forces behind Watergate. A book that cost the publishers much money when Dean sued for libel.

The incident brought about a desire to understand how the republican leadership could function in such a fraudulent incompetent manner.

Conservatives Without Conscience is the result of his attempt to understand.

I urge its reading, for in its short compass it explains quite clearly how men whose behavior has little to do with democracy were well on their way to dismantling the very fabric of our governmental structures when the 2006 election short circuited our march towards to fascism. This book helped produce that short circuit.

It’s method of analysis is based upon the psychological research of Bob Altemeyer whose book The Authoritarian Specter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) should be required reading for every voter who wishes to make sure it doesn’t happen here.

I read enormously. I have been horrified by the incompetent secretive behavior of W. Nerd Bush and friends. I have also been mystified by the failure of the media to complain about and to analyze their anti-American behavior. Dean has rectified that lack. Read him and then turn to Altmeyer. It will aide any sincere quest to provide a leadership whose intentions are democratic.

The Bush/Cheney nightmare is not over, but Conservatives Without Conscience is indicative of our being close to awakening from the trauma.

It is prophylactic. Use It.