116 of 137 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Super-Rich Entertainment/Hardcore Economic Warfare in, 'Oh My God' Detail, September 19, 2009
This review is from: Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! (Hardcover)
Humphry Bogart's character in A Passage to Marseille says in effect/I Don't trust this Major Duvall. Claude Rains's charcter replies in effect/Yes. Why not? Bogart/He,ll radio the police. I've been fighting his kind all my life. I know what to expect. Rains/ There are many ways to serve your country, my friend. Bogart/I don't care about my country. The country you & I loved is dead Captain. She's been dying for a long time. I saw her die.
Like Rains's character Ralph Nader is a super-patriot who will never say die to the American way of life. When reality says the Republic is either dead or on it's last legs Nader will dig in and fight. He has always used truth as the weapon. Now he artfully uses fiction to speak these truths in a form that that simply had me smiling from ear to ear. His knowledge in so deep/intricate in the workings of this country's political/economical entanglements that he misses nothing in the telling of this story.
The story opens Sept/2005 with Hurricane Katrina. Warren Buffet is at home watching in disbelief the nonstop coverage of floating corpses, people on roof tops crying, seeing nothing but chaos & collapse personifying this reality of his country. How could this be happening in the world's wealthiest country? He hadn't a clue about the ineptitude or recklessness or rotteness of the people in power. Even the poorest of country's buried their dead quickly.
Warren then assembles 16 bilionaires and people of influence to turn this country back over to the people, return it to a Republic the world could once again admire, where the statue of liberty (w/o handcuffs) is again a shining beacon of librerty & justice for all. Crazy idea. Daunting task to say the least.
Ralph Nader uses his superb organizational talents with respect to political/economic changes to effect this fictional miracle. It is a virtual how to. This time there is beaucoup money/connected people with access to many needed platforms of attack, who are patriots in Nader tradition, raring to fight the good fight. It is going to get down & dirty. For instance, the American elections alone are breathtaking in scope and detail that the author has no bones about getting the real skinny on (devilishly humorous).
In this novel there is no mainsream press cuttings on the floor, no sound bites that cut to commercials. Want to know the REAL story? Ironically, your going to have to read fiction just to get away with it.
Worth more than its weight in gold.
The best book I've read in decades.
In reading this fine work I'am reminded of a quote from a young JFK, "If you can't help the many who are poor, you can't save the few who are rich".
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED !!!!!
P.S.
"All governments lie. But disaster lies in wait for the countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out."
- I. F. Stone
P.P.S.
When a powerful category-5 hurricane hit Cuba in 2004 neighborhood citizen committees and local Communist Party personnel evacuated some 1.5 million people, more than 10% of the country's population. The Cubans lost 20,000 homes - but not a single person died. Of course, they didn't have a free market working for them or a subsequent/requisite shock doctrine therapy to help them.
P.P.P.S. To hear more on economic warfare google Michael Hudson economist-click his website-Also recent appearance on Guns & Butter March 16, 2011 The View From Europe/ Also google Ellen Brown Blog Web of Debt/click on her website
NEW: Google: Understanding deep politics conference, revealing the driving forces benind world events and creating alternative solutions.
google Fall of the Republic
BRAND NEW! for 2011 Google: Guns and Butter Max Keiser Dec 29, 2010
also google: progressive news hour john mccurtry jan 08, 2010
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30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
MOVE OVER VONNEGUT, HELLER, CHAYEFSKY: RALPH NADER'S ROLLICKING SATIRICAL MASTERWORK, September 27, 2009
This review is from: Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! (Hardcover)
In "Network," Paddy Chayefsky's 1976 Academy Award winning satirical screenplay, TV news-anchor Howard Beale electrifies and awakens a nation from lethargy shouting, repeatedly, "I'm as mad as hell,and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
In "OTSRCSU," Nader's rollicking satirical admixture of virtuosity, imagination, and mega counter-corporate strategy, Patriotic Polly, a resplendent scarlet parrot ("the trumpeter of truth") galvanizes millions of Americans into action squawking, repeatedly, in 15-second spots aired on thousands of TV stations, "Get up! Don't let America down!"
Nader's cinematic political novel describes in fascinating insider detail a titanic struggle between the "Meliorists," a team of 17 rebellious real-life retired (or elderly) super-rich billionaires/megamillionaires battling for the people, and the "corporatists," a formidable cabal of entrenched super-rich CEOs battling to retain their control of the federal government. The Meliorists (Ted Turner, Barry Diller George Soros, Paul Newman, Phil Donahue, Warren Beatty, Yoko Ono, and others) are led by Warren Buffett, the world's second richest person; the CEOs, by Jaspar Cumbersome III, head of Leviathan Corp., who hires Lancelot Lobo ("a beyond-the-pale corporate raider") and Brovar Dortwist (patterned after real-life conservative political strategist Grover Norquist) to defeat what he calls the SROs (Super-Rich-Oldsters). Lobo and Dortwist, in turn, enlist combat-hardened talk-radio veterans Bush Bimbaugh (Rush Limbaugh) and Pawn Vanity (Sean Hannity).
And the galactic battle for America is engaged.
The most innovative of Nader's organized civic initiatives are brought into play, including Citizens' Utility Boards, the People's Chamber of Commerce, the People's Court Society, the Clean Elections Party, Congress Watchdogs, Sub-Economy Leaders.
The pitched ten-month battle waged by the Meliorists and a reawakened citizenry to redirect America from corporate to patriotic populist objectives is richly instructive in the political intrigues hatched in corporate boardrooms and inside the Washington Beltway.
It is also fabulously entertaining. The whimsically named characters and, on occasion, their absurd behavior are reminiscent of Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five," and of Milo Minderbinder in Heller's "Catch-22." There is the supporting cast: including Senators Thurston Thinkalot and Fred Flagrant, lawyer Theresa Tieknots, organizers Luke Skyhi and Evan Evervescent, domestic CEOs Samuel Slick and Justin Jeremiad, and global CEOs Hugh Mongous, Sam Selitoff, Manny Tentacles, Sy Clopean. There are the antics: when stressed, Lancelot Lobo exchanges rapturous kisses with his pit bull and devours raw carrots to the point that his skin turns orange; dapper Brover Dortwist earnestly consults with his Doberman (Get'Em) during strolls around the Tidal Basin; after a rare Dartford warbler alights on the Capitol Dome, drawing crowds of activist bird watchers in too-close proximity to their elected representatives, an anxious Senator Thinkalot suggests calling in a naval sonar warfare team.
And there is Patriotic Polly, Woody Harrelson planting hemp seeds in front of the White House, Yoko Ono's Seventh-Generation Eye, Ted Turner's Sun-God festivals.
But, above all, in Nader's neo-utopian work, there is hope and passion and courage and optimism. Enabled by the Meliorists, the people prevail in the end, with reforms enacted, corporate power circumscribed, democracy revived. "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why," Bobby Kennedy once remarked. "I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?"
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57 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Visionary super-rich & consumer movement alliance, September 19, 2009
This review is from: Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! (Hardcover)
Courtesy of The San Francisco Chronicle, this review-article is reposted here for the benefit of Amazon-readers:
Novel Approach: Ralph Nader Turns to Fiction
by Hillel Atalie
Published on Saturday, September 19, 2009 by The San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph Nader, the consumer activist and corporate scourge, is saying nice things about the kind of folks you'd expect him to despise.
"Never in America have there been more super-rich people with relatively enlightened views," says Nader, lean and hopeful at age 75, dark eyes aglow as he speaks at the offices of Public Citizen, the progressive research and advocacy group he founded nearly 40 years ago.
"Not all the super-rich are craven greedhounds, dominators and bullies. Some of them take on their counterpart greedhounds, dominators and bullies."
It's as if Glenn Beck had found the bright side of socialism.
Nader hasn't turned conservative and he isn't making this stuff up, although he is, in a way. After decades of speeches, articles, policy papers and policy books attacking corporations and politicians, Nader has turned to fiction.
"Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" is more than 700 pages, worthy of a billionaire's portfolio, and its heroes are a gang of 70-something plutocrats, from Warren Buffett and Ted Turner to Bill Cosby and Yoko Ono, who conspire to set off a progressive revolution.
The story begins in 2005, not long after Hurricane Katrina. A secret gathering is convened by Buffett at a Maui mountain retreat, where 17 very wealthy people agree to take back the country they think has been betrayed.
They give speeches, write books, organize community action groups. They infiltrate corporate boards of directors, stage demonstrations for the environment and better wages. They start a People's Chamber of Commerce, advocate changing the national anthem to "America the Beautiful" and dream up a politicized parrot, "Patriotic Polly," that becomes a media folk hero.
"Fiction is a way to liberate the imagination," Nader says, "to see what could happen if 17 billionaires and super-rich people really put their minds to it, along with a parrot, and took on the existing business power bloc and the politicians in Washington who serve (it)."
The super-rich name themselves "Meliorists," believers that people can make the world better. They persuade the elusive Warren Beatty to run against Arnold Schwarzenegger for California governor. They conspire to force Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to allow its workers to unionize. They push for universal health care. They start a new political party, dedicated to publicly financed elections. They are so quick, and clever, their foes can't catch up.
The masses respond. Conservative smear campaigns fail. The corporations and the politicians retreat, powerless against the joy and fire of an engaged public.
It all works.
"In the real world?" asked Victor Navasky, publisher emeritus of The Nation, the liberal weekly where some of Nader's early writings appeared. "In the real world of satire I can imagine it, but not in the other world, the one we inhabit. But Ralph is a prophet; he has been right about so many things the rest of us couldn't imagine."
"The cast seems a bit like People magazine, doesn't it?" said author-journalist Alexander Cockburn, who supported Nader's 2000 and 2004 third-party presidential campaigns and has frequently published his essays in Counterpunch, a left-wing newsletter Cockburn co-edits.
"Good luck to Ralph. God knows how he found the time to write a 700-page novel. ... But the use of billionaire's money for anything other than malign purposes is extremely rare, as Ralph well knows."
Nader teases, but doesn't kid. He believes the top can motivate the masses and wants very much for the people mentioned in his novel to read it. He already has some success: Early blurbs came from Beatty ("With this utopian fantasy, he shows us how good he thinks things could be") and from Patti Smith, whose "People Have the Power" becomes a progressive theme song in the book.
Messages left with Buffett and fellow Meliorist Barry Diller were not immediately returned. Spokesmen for Ono and Turner each said their client had yet to read the book and would have no comment.
Since the days of Karl Marx, revolutionaries have debated how much, if any, help from the top was needed to overthrow the ruling class. Nader thinks that the aging rich make for ideal instigators - wise and wealthy, beyond accusations of personal ambition, people of the highest achievement, yet also frustrated.
"They're very demoralized as to the state of the country," Nader says. "They play golf and they grumble and they've persuaded themselves that they're powerless, which is absurd."
His book includes pages of detailed policy proposals, Nader's common literary format, and draws upon public and personal observations. He believes each of the super-rich included is capable of the actions taken in his novel, citing as an example Turner's well-documented interest in the environment.
Nader says his decision to write a novel was in part a response to the nonfiction books he had read in recent years. The corruption of politicians and financial institutions is diligently investigated and revealed. But only the problems are addressed; solutions either are not provided or are too dull to inspire.
"You can see it on TV," he says, "when (liberal author-journalist) Bill Greider gets on Bill Moyers, for example, and he talks about the failure of the Federal Reserve and the Wall Street collapse and that's all very interesting.
"And then he gets to, `Here's one thing you can do about it. You can re-enact the usury laws and control the skyrocketing, gouging interest rates that fed all this speculation.' People look the other way."
Greider, whose books include "Come Home, America" and "The Soul of Capitalism," countered that he had received strong, positive reaction for his advocacy of usury laws, which set maximum interest rates for loans.
"But I agree, in general, about what happens with exposes," he says. "It's a basic complaint, that there's not a follow-through of outrage and action to books like mine, and to his, I might add."
Parts of the novel are now physically impossible. The super-rich crusaders include Paul Newman, who last year died of cancer (Nader says he was already well into the book, and that Newman's role was too important to remove him from the story).
Another Meliorist is Leonard Riggio, the chairman of Barnes & Noble Inc., whom Nader places in charge of organizing street rallies. The reason: Riggio once told Nader that he had a lifelong dislike of bullies, strange comfort for the many independent booksellers - retailers long championed by Nader - who blame Barnes & Noble for helping to drive them out of business.
"I'm pretty sure that's accurate, what he feels about bullies, but it's still ironic," says Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, which represents the country's independent stores.
"There are ironies," Nader acknowledges. "These people are not angels. And that's one reason they're so effective, because they're not angels."
The son of Lebanese immigrants, Nader was born in Winsted, Conn., in 1934, and remembers that as a teenager he finished "dozens" of socially conscious works such as Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" and the muckraking of Ida Tarbell. He would read and listen to the radio, to baseball games featuring, irony again, those ultimate underdogs, the New York Yankees.
"That's my only Yankee imperialism," he says. "But that was before (team owner George) Steinbrenner. I was coming off the image and history of Babe Ruth and my hero, Lou Gehrig ... because he showed me stamina."
His education was pinstriped: Princeton University as an undergraduate, then Harvard Law School. In his 20s, he taught and worked as a lawyer in Hartford, Conn., and freelanced articles, notably a 1959 piece for The Nation in which he charged the leading automakers with caring more about design than about safety.
Six years later, he published "Unsafe at Any Speed," a slow seller at first that helped launch the modern consumer movement, thanks in part to those he attacked. General Motors, builder of the Corvair, the "sporty" little deathtrap that was the main target of Nader's book, assigned private investigators to dig up dirt. The resulting publicity propelled the book onto the best-seller lists, got Nader a personal apology from the president of GM, and pushed Congress to pass new auto-safety laws and regulations.
"Ralph Nader became famous 40-plus years ago operating on a fairly straightforward logic, that if you expose wrongdoing and get attention, it will produce a political reaction," Greider says. "And that's what his campaign was about, and it was successful, and helped lead to laws for clean water, clean air and a rather long list of legislation."
Nader said it took just months to finish the novel, "the words flying out" of his Underwood typewriter, a process so flush that when an occasional thunderstorm knocked out the electricity he would continue to work, by candlelight.
He cites a couple of reasons for waiting until now to try fiction: "insufficient" imagination and a stubborn belief, now worn down, that the truth was enough, that "around the corner we'd have a breakthrough in health care, we'd have a breakthrough in corporate accountability." His mind was not changed by the election of Barack Obama.
Even Utopia isn't perfect. Of all the hurdles cleared and miracles realized in his novel, one great leap is never considered:
Ralph Nader becoming president.
"Fiction has some boundaries," he says with a laugh.
© 2009 Hearst Communications Inc.
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