Customer Reviews

Fat Cats and Running Dogs

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This is something that will not be shown on prime time television. It will not win the support of the corporate controllers who buy time and form conglomerates so that courageous stories like this will not be told, but in today's topsy turvy world, where control is amassed by every smaller numbers of greedy multinationals, this is a story that needs to be revealed in every shocking detail.

The author takes this account of appalling corporate greed to the level where it must go if the true story is to be revealed, to the linkage between large corporations and the huge international drug network. This is in turn linked to the oil network, and it in turn is attached to the warmaking machine with the chilling potential to amass fortunes by sending youngsters choked off from good jobs by greedy corporate globalism to do their fighting. Chicken hawks like Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Perle cheer from the sidelines as these youngsters are sacrificed on an altar of corporate greed.

The CIA is not spared by this courageous author. In many instances it has been used to soften up economies before replacing leaders who demand a fair share of the pie for the people of their respective nations. In other times the influence is more direct, as in overthrowing democratically elected governments in Guatemala, Iran and Chile. Meanwhile the propaganda machine spiels off the message that people hate America because it is such a rich nation with prosperous and happy people. Try telling that to those who have been reduced to fragmentary existences through the oppressive yoke of globalization. Look into what happened in Russia after the old Communist bosses were overthrown.

The Enron picture is tied ever so closely to the Bush regime. While Cheney warned us that California was being torn asunder due to a lack of sufficient energy resources, the truth finally came out in a stinging government report revealing what informed sources already knew, that a savage ripoff led by the Enron brigade had fleeced California's taxpayers. Why not let these evil wrongdoers do the hard time in federal prisons rather than non-violent drug offenders who need treatment rather than prison incarceration?

These are just some of the questions arising from a detailed reading of this brilliant book. We need more courageous authors like this who are not afraid to take on the establishment. This kind of courage is what is needed to turn things around amid suffocating greed at the corporate international level. Perhaps enough courageous voices can ultimately end the tragic concept, which former President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned emphatically against, of preventive war.

The author's perspective is cogent, insighful and pentetrating. He has accurately honed in on the essential elements of American imperialist-capitalist-corporatist-militarist hegemony, a form of rapacious predation devoid of any semblance of humanity. The use of Enron as the "Poster Boy" for everything wrong with Amerika mirrors my own comment back in 2001 that its demise signalled the barest tip of a massive iceberg towards which the USA Titanic was headed at full steam. The book was written in 2003, with all was roses and cream in the burgeoning US economy, but, as well all know now, it was as illusory a prosperity as Enron's juggled smoke and mirrors accounting wealth. The description of Enron's international thuggery meshes well with its domestic shenanigans, notably the manufactured Californian electricity crisis. One would like to think that we've learned our lessons now, after Enron and the mortgage meltdown, but let's face it; predatory beggar-thy-neighbor greed is as American as buying an apple pie bakery, firing its employees and shipping its machinery to China. It's just a question of when, not if, the next fatal crisis occurs. All in all, a quick read that elucidates the profound end result of neo-liberal baloney about "free" markets and the invisible hand that slaps silly consumers upside their heads.