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USA
Oct 3, 2013 3:53:27 GMT
Post by dodger on Oct 3, 2013 3:53:27 GMT
Brilliant plan to rebuild the USA, June 8, 2010
By William Podmore
This review is from: Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now (Hardcover)
Felix Rohatyn starts this fascinating book, "The nation is falling apart - literally. America's roads and bridges, schools and hospitals, airports and railways, ports and dams, waterlines and air-control systems - the country's entire infrastructure - is rapidly and dangerously deteriorating."
Levees failed to hold New Orleans' floodwaters, a Minnesota bridge collapsed during rush-hour, three-quarters of America's school building are outdated and inadequate, more than a quarter of its bridges are obsolete or deficient, and half the locks on its waterways are obsolete. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the USA needs to invest $1.6 trillion in the next five years to make America's infrastructure safe.
He shows how large-scale public investments have worked in the past: the Louisiana Purchase; the Erie Canal; the transcontinental railroad, Land Grant colleges and the Homestead Act - all backed by Abraham Lincoln; the Panama Canal; FDR's Rural Electrification Administration and Reconstruction Finance Act; the G.I. Bill; and the interstate highway system.
Rohatyn argues that the USA needs a National Infrastructure Bank to select, finance and manage the needed investments in infrastructure. "America needs to rebuild its infrastructure. It is a critical national priority, a costly long-term investment, and a visionary enterprise. It is a program that can provide tens of millions of much needed jobs. And it is an undertaking that can only succeed if it is directed, coordinated, and largely financed by the federal government."
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USA
Oct 3, 2013 4:02:07 GMT
Post by dodger on Oct 3, 2013 4:02:07 GMT
Useful study of secret CIA operations in the USA, March 11, 2008
By William Podmore
This review is from: The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Hardcover)
Hugh Wilford, previously of the University of Sheffield, now at California State University, Long Beach, has written an astonishing account of the CIA's front operations in the USA during the Cold War. In 1967, research by Ramparts magazine exposed this covert system, which broke the law banning CIA operations in the USA.
The CIA funded front organisations within trade unions, New York intellectuals, émigrés, writers, artists, musicians, Hollywood, the National Student Association, aid workers, civil rights activists, clergy, women, and black nationalist groups like the American Society of African Culture. For example, Harvard University got $456,000 in disguised subsidies from the CIA between 1960 and 1966. The CIA collaborated with the major news media, particularly the New York Times, the Reader's Digest, Columbia Broadcasting System and Time magazine.
The CIA backed and funded the American Committee for a United Europe, which backed the emerging EEC. The CIA had a secret alliance with US Catholicism, for instance, between 1959 and 1966 it funded the Family Rosary Crusade's operations in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Australasia and Africa.
Associations that accepted covert state patronage violated their own proclaimed principles of voluntary association. Many members of these organisations knew about the CIA's role, but many did not. Americans were systematically deceived by the state. And the CIA's undemocratic covert activities did not cease with the 1967 exposures, or with the end of the Cold War. Even now the CIA is `a growing force on campus', as the Wall Street Journal recently noted.
This book exposes the CIA's role in the USA and leaves one asking what it did and does in Britain.
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USA
Oct 16, 2013 21:19:10 GMT
Post by dodger on Oct 16, 2013 21:19:10 GMT
Superb overview of US foreign policy and its effects, 16 Oct 2013
This William Podmore review is from: America's Deadliest Export: Democracy - The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else (Paperback)
William Blum, author of such classics as Killing Hope, Freeing the world to death and Rogue state, has produced another vital book. If you want to know what is really going on in the world, this is one of the books you should read.
He shows how since 1945 the rulers of the USSR have tried to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected; interfered in the elections of at least 30 countries; tried to kill more than 50 foreign leaders; bombed the peoples of more than 30 countries; and tried to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries. Oh sorry, just noticed a typo, I wrote USSR but it was the USA did all this.
Blum notes that Germany's president Horst Koehler resigned in June 2010 after he said that German forces were fighting in Afghanistan because the German government had "to protect our interests, for example free trade routes, or to prevent regional instability which might certainly have a negative effect on our trade, jobs and earnings."
The author reminds us that a 1986 US Army manual outlined the then secular Afghan government's policies towards women: "provisions of complete freedom of choice of marriage partner, and fixation of the minimum age at marriage at 16 for women and 18 for men ... abolished forced marriages ... bring [women] out of seclusion, and initiate social programs ... extensive literacy programs, especially for women ... putting girls and boys in the same classroom ... concerned with changing gender roles and giving women a more active role in politics." So the US government did all it could to help that government against the bigots who wanted to force women back into serfdom - oh no, sorry again, it armed and backed the bigots.
In January 2011 the USA, led by caring sharing President Obama, seized $4.2 million in funds given to Cuba by the United Nations Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Blum reminds us that in the 1950s US agents in West Germany began a campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany. As the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, of Washington, DC, stated, "The open border in Berlin exposed the GDR to massive espionage and subversion and ... its closure gave the Communist state greater security."
But the border was never wholly closed. In 1984, 40,000 people left the GDR. In 1985 the West German government noted that 14,300 East Germans had returned to the GDR since 1975.
Blum cites a 2006 US Senate report, The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices, which said, "Over the past few years, large financial institutions, hedge funds, pension funds, and other investment funds have been pouring billions of dollars into the energy commodities markets ... to try to take advantage of price changes or to hedge against them. Because much of this additional investment has come from financial institutions and investment funds that do not use the commodity as part of their business, it is defined as `speculation' by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). According to the CFTC, a speculator `does not produce or use the commodity, but risks his or her own capital trading futures in that commodity in hopes of making a profit on price changes'. The large purchases of crude oil futures contracts by speculators have, in effect, created an additional demand for oil, driving up the price ..."
Against his critics, Blum writes that their claim is that "I should be so grateful for my freedom of speech that I should show my gratitude by not exercising that freedom."
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