AE

Doug Rushkoff became famous from predicting the 1999 dot com bubble. He's written 20 books. He's a professor at Queens College. He's been heavily involved in critiquing and defending digital culture.

As such, he gets frequently invited by billionaire ghouls to talk about how/where things are going. The billionaire ghouls are finally recognizing that their slash and burn, exponential growth at all costs capitalism is actually not sustainable and will inevitably result in a societal collapse. Therefore, during recent visits, they asked Rushkoff how they can maintain control of their wealth and power post-societal collapse.

This is the textbook definition of “Capitalist Realism” as defined by the titular 2009 book by Mark Fisher: The belief that the world will end before capitalism does and there is no feasible alternative to capitalism.

Instead of using that term, he calls it “the mindset” held by the corporate ghouls destroying the biosphere and grounding us down into dust. I prefer the term “liberal mind prison” as coined by Thought Slime. Any of the 3 terms are valid.

Rushkoff always manages to thoroughly explain the issues we face in this digital age but without outright saying “we gotta burn this whole thing down and start anew”. He's thoroughly critical without coming off as radical. I mark this down as a fault.

His book does not mention the term “capitalist realism”. His solutions are quickly brushed through with minimal explanation. I think this is because he wants to reach a mass audience and doesn't want to scare away too many people with overtly anticapitalist ideologies & nomenclature. This is also a fault.

This is the 2nd book I've read from Douglas Rushkoff. The previous one was “Team Human”, which was also the name of his podcast. I listened to that for a while after finishing the book. The books have very similar themes: technology isn't designed for the betterment of people, they're designed to control us and suck money out of us.

If you've never read a Rushkoff book, pick this one up, as it's good and concise on what he thinks is wrong with the world (spoilers: capitalism) and how to fix it (spoilers: less capitalism). If you've read of his books, I doubt you'll get much out of this one.

I liked it, but it seems like a lot of the same stuff repackaged into a new book thanks to one weird meeting he had with some ghouls. The book is short. I knocked it out in a day. Read it if you've never read one of his books. If you have, just listen to his interview with TrueAnon.

There has been an explosion of junk science resulting in countless lives thrown into the meat grinder of the US criminal justice system. It's only been within the last decade or two that the truth has come out and innocent people are becoming freed.

My complaint with this book is that it goes from talking about the history of various junk science elements, but ends with long transcripts of cross examinations of “experts” in court cases the author participated in. Meanwhile he drops a bomb about how apparently shaken baby syndrome is junk science? But doesn't go into it at all while going way into bite mark matching. Very frustrating. I wish it were more equally thorough about the history of each junk science concept. Other than that, the book is great, though sad.

Here are some quotes and thoughts:

Everyone wants to live in a just society. The scientific method has the best track record for discovering objective truth. No one wants to see an innocent person sent to prison for a crime they didn't commit. But it is nearly impossible for people to live with unsolved violent crimes, especially the victims of said crimes. And our police system is designed first and foremost to “solve” crimes and convict “criminals,” not to find objective truth.

“Good science is objective; it has no stake in the outcome of the trial; it rests on research grounded in the scientific method, rather than simply ‘training and experience.' ‘Junk science' sounds like science but there is no empirical basis for the ‘expert opinion'; it is subjective speculation masquerading as science, typically tilted in the government's favor against an indigent person of color.”

There are people locked away in prison forever that were sent there thanks to junk science. Many have been freed, but likely not all of them. There have also undoubtedly been people executed by the state thanks to junk science. This is one of the many reasons why the death penalty should be abolished. No matter how certain we are on the day of sentencing, there is a likely chance that the tools used to prove guilt were actually faulty. The risk of killing an innocent person is too high. The number of innocent people the state has killed via the death penalty should be zero. They have already surpassed that number, proving they cannot be trusted with that authority. Therefore, the death penalty should be abolished.

“Few appreciate that the ‘subdisciplines' of forensic odontology [dentistry] have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, though they can be made to sound like they do: Forensic dentists identify people through their teeth, and through the bite marks their teeth make. That sounds straightforward, but it's actually more like a geologist claiming that because he can identify rocks, he can identify the rock that was used to bash in someone's skull.”

“Forensic science in the United States [...] is an entirely unregulated industry. The only thing standing between the use of ‘scientific' evidence and a jury is a judge. The judge, however, will almost certainly rely on legal precedent—not science—to make a decision.” So once they got the made up bite mark analysis into a courtroom, it opened the floodgates for other bullshit: “ballistics, shoe prints, tire treads, and especially microscopic hair comparison evidence. All without requiring empirical evidence of reliability.”

“Forensic boards, like most guilds, are extremely hierarchical and largely dominated by older white men. Aspiring experts are dependent on the mentorship the guilds offer for credentials and professional development. Second-generation practitioners seek to make their contributions to the field by building on their mentors' work—not by questioning it. The cultural norms create powerful disincentives to challenging orthodoxy or asking the guild masters tough questions. Questions like, What evidence is there that this method works?“

Everything in the below list is junk science with no basis in factual reality:
• Psychological profiles of violent killers
• Hypnosis to unlock memories
• Bite-mark analysis
• Microscopic hair matching
• blood spatter analysis
• comparative bullet lead analysis
• polygraphs
• voice spectrometry
• handwriting

Through police manipulation and coaxing, even things like...
• eyewitness testimony
• false confessions
• snitch testimony
...can be made up. Police often manipulate suspects and witnesses into making false confessions. It happens all the time.

“'Snitch testimony' and junk science [...] are two of the leading causes of wrongful conviction.”

“The ‘confession' Walker signed bore all the hallmarks of a false confession, which we know today to be the third-leading cause of wrongful conviction. And we know why innocent people can be compelled to confess, even to capital crimes: personal character traits such as age, intelligence, race, and fear of authority play a role; and coercive interrogation tactics—physical and psychological—also contribute. Young, naive, fearful, isolated suspects are particularly susceptible to coercive questioning.“

And in case you think you are immune from the risk of being falsely accused, know this: “Though Walker was uniquely vulnerable, psychologically coercive interrogations like the one he endured are effective against far more empowered suspects. Lies, threats, and more subtle manipulations, coupled with physical isolation, can break down anyone's defenses, even in the absence of physical coercion, the ‘third degree.' It takes time and pushing the right buttons.”

From the 1970's to the 1990's, the US saw “the exponential growth of the American legal system, fueled by two parallel forces: the rise of mass incarceration, and the explosion of personal injury litigation. In both the criminal and civil arena, litigants relied evermore on scientific evidence to ‘win.' These dynamics created the expert witness industry as we know it today, and board-certification entities proliferated to meet the demand. Bald assertions of scientific validity made by board-certified experts were never seriously questioned by the courts. Judges deferred to the forensic boards, few of which vetted their members beyond the ability to pay dues. Virtually none engaged in basic scientific research.”

With the erosion of regulations, unions, and the social safety net, the only option for recommence against a negligent employer or business became the courts. With the conservative “tough on crime” laws, the number of people (mostly black and brown men) in prison exploded.

DNA analysis, while having a rocky start, is a legitimate science. With every person proven guilty via DNA, countless more have been proven innocent, including the currently incarcerated. The number of people being proven innocent, including men on death row and even men who've already been executed is astounding. This is evidence alone to abolish the death penalty.

One's philosophy on criminal justice boils down to how you answer this question: ‘Is it worse for society if an innocent person is imprisoned or a guilty person set free?' I think most people, when you frame it like that, will say it would be theoretically worse if we imprison innocent people. But in practice, the criminal justice system in this country, at every level, prioritizes results. Coupling that with people in power who materially benefit from trusting the infallibility of the system, despite its obvious biases, bullshit, and corruption, results in countless innocents dragged through it.

There's this idea in criminal prosecution called the “Principle of Finality,” which basically means that whatever the jury decides is the final truth no matter what. This philosophy is so counter-intuitive to justice I find it horrifying. This is authoritarian absurdity with no basis in reality. And it's the principle that's kept falsely imprisoned people from seeking justice.

“Long before forensic evidence is delivered to the crime lab, implicit and explicit biases conspire against people of color, drawing them into the
criminal justice system—or to their deaths at the hands of police officers. [...] ‘Afrocentric features' are given longer prison sentences than defendants perceived to have fewer ‘Afrocentric features'; prospective jurors are more likely to interpret the same conduct as ‘aggressive' by someone with a name associated with African American culture than someone with a ‘white name'; judges set bail at 25 percent higher rates for Black defendants than similarly situated white defendants.”
We've always been a racist country.

“[...] most state district attorneys and judges are elected officials, answerable as much to constituents as to the rule of law, and convicting innocent people is bad politics. Careers, reputations, municipal liability, and professional pride are all on the line. Mistakes and misconduct may have stolen decades of freedom, maybe even cost a life. All of which provide powerful disincentives to even consider the possibility of a wrongful conviction.”

The system is designed to lock away innocent people and those in charge are incentivized to leave them locked up. Clinton made it harder to reversing death sentences because of course he did. Bill Clinton sucks. Prosecutors can (and often do) bury exculpatory evidence, both before trials and years after the revelation proves someone was convicted via false testimony or junk science.

Remember:
• Do not talk to the police without your lawyer present
• Do not consent to unwarranted searches under any circumstances
• Remember that the police can and will lie to you at every stage of your interaction with them
• The police have thrown lots of innocent people in jail and they can do it to you if they wanted. Don't make their job easy.

Short review: It was good. Got a bit confusing with the philosophical nomenclature.

This is a short book about how armed resistance against reactionaries is necessary and can be more effective than nonviolent resistance. Violent resistance was erased from US history by liberals who don't want real material change and by reactionaries who think they invented it.

This book was cited a lot in the book I read last year about the subject “In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action” by Vicky Osterwell (2019), which I highly recommend.

Robert F. Williams' thesis was that in societies where the state does not protect victims of oppression, violent resistance may be needed in order to achieve equal protection under the law. Is it always necessary? No. Does it always work? No. But to take it off the table is to fight injustice with one arm tied behind our backs. We must learn our history. We must not fall for the whitewashed propaganda. Reactionaries, conservatives, fascists, they all understand this. They are ready for mass unrest. They are ready for civil war. We must not go looking for violence but we must be prepared in the event of violence. We must not assume the state will protect us from itself or our fellow man.

Short book. Pretty good.

This book is about the legalized brutality of the British empire in India-Pakistan, Palestine, Kenya, South Africa, Cyprus, Ireland, and Malaysia (formerly Malaya) throughout the 20th century. The author is a foremost historian on the true, non-whitewashed history of British Imperialism and was an expert witness to a famous lawsuit filed in 2011 by the victims of the empire's regime in Kenya decades ago.

When I say “legalized brutality” I mean the most horrible brutality a government can do to a subjugated people. The author came up with an interesting term for it: “‘legalized lawlessness'—or the colonial violence that produced laws that, in turn, legalized extraordinary acts of coercion and suspensions of due process.”

Another critical term used was “Liberal Imperialism” meaning liberalism at home (free trade, generally free speech, electoralism, democracy, etc), and brutal, dictatorial regimes for the colonies.

To summarize, the MO of British imperialism in the 20th century consisted of
• declaring a state of emergency
• instating “legalized lawlessness” by passing authoritarian laws to crack down on descent: censor the press, outlaw assemblies, throw people in jail without a trial or right to appeal, search people and property without a warrant, torture and kill people, etc
• put anyone who disobeyed into a concentration camp to brainwash them into becoming a loyal subject of the crown, (they called it a ‘hearts and minds' campaign. Yeah they created that too)
• The colonized peoples would stage reprisals, the Brits would stage counter-reprisals
• then the Brit's retreat and be forced to let the country become independent because they're losers
• Then burn all records of their crimes against humanity so no one can prosecute them.

Rinse and repeat across the entire planet.

Here's one quote example from Palestine that sums up the same basic strategy:
“Necessity and legitimate violence—issues that had animated legal debates over state-directed violence in colonies like Demerara, Jamaica, Ireland, and India—would be resolved through an extraordinary regulatory measure in Palestine, where the high commissioner, and with him, all security forces, including the police and military, could do whatever they liked, which included punitive destruction of property and trial by military courts without right to appeal. Legalized lawlessness—ideologically rooted in the birthing of liberal imperialism, and having evolved over decades in various empire theaters and courtrooms, and at home under the Defence of the Realm Act—was now fully matured.”

Here's my book report:

~~
Everyone knew they were just like the Nazis.

The biggest theme from this book is that “Fascism is Imperialism come home”. This isn't like a philosophical thought experiment. It's just objective fact. The British Empire was incredibly similar to fascist dictatorships. But because their cruelty was done mostly to non-white people in distant colonies, we don't ever hear about it.

Often when people in the 21st century compare the evils of British imperialism to Nazi Germany, they're met with feigned shock and swift rebuttals like “By comparing them you're downplaying the severity of nazi war crimes” or “it's absurd to measure these past actions by today's standards” or some malarkey like that. But even the people at the time, in the thick of it, could very clearly see the parallels between what the British Empire was doing in real time and what the Nazis were doing/did.

1938 Palestine: “According to one British soldier, David Smiley, when Arab suspects refused to talk, the police turned one of them upside down and beat the soles of his feet ‘with a leather belt'; another applied ‘a lighted cigarette to his testicles' before they got him to spill the proverbial beans. At the time, Smiley observed that ‘this sort of thing savours of the Gestapo,' and his likening of British tactics to those of Europe's rising fascist regimes was not isolated. Such comparisons were also based on visual images of the police force who, according to Burr, ‘stuck large Swasticas' on the ‘fronts of [their] shields,' and when ‘passing one another in the street' gave the ‘Nazi salute.'”

“[Reginald] Sorenson was no stranger to imperial critique, having leveled charges at the Labour Party Congress in 1933 that ‘the operation of Imperialism in India is in essence no different from the operations of Hitlerism....We are appalled by what is happening to the Jews in Germany, but what has been happening in India is just as bad.'”

In 1937, “[Jomo] Kenyatta wrote a piece in the New Leader with the headline ‘Hitler could not improve on Kenya.' He lambasted ‘British Labour organisations' for being unable ‘to distinguish the difference between the imperialist forces and the anti-imperialists,' and pointed to the detention camps in Kenya as ‘similar to concentration or labour camps in fascist countries.'”

1938, The New Leader magazine published: “We have done this because there is a great danger at present time that our hatred of the tyranny of Fascism may cause us to forget the tyranny of imperialism. Our pages show that the barbarities which Mussolini and Hitler practice in Italy and Germany are being practiced constantly within the British Empire....The truth is that four-fifths of the British Empire is as much a dictatorship as the Fascist countries....The democratic rights which we enjoy in the British Isles are due only to the oppression which is practiced within the British Empire.”

Hitler greatly admired the British Empire, writing in his famous book “No people has ever with greater brutality better prepared its economic conquests with the sword, and later ruthlessly defended them, than the English nation.”

The Bengal Famine of 1943 in India was caused by the British Empire and was exacerbated by the white supremacist Winston Churchill. “At the time, Secretary for India Amery accused Churchill of having a ‘Hitler-like attitude' toward the entire lot, though he himself insisted that the famine was the result of some kind of Malthusian dilemma and refused to send relief.” 2-4 million people died.

Operation Anvil, 1954, Kenya — “Observers described the operation as ‘Gestapolike,' and by the time Erskine declared it a success, his forces had packed over twenty thousand Mau Mau suspects into caged-in trucks for transit to Langata Camp.”

~~
Concentration camps

Concentration Camps — South Africa
The Brits invented the concentration camp during the Boer War in present-day South Africa, 1899-1902.

“British troops also razed homesteads, poisoned wells, and corralled into concentration camps Afrikaner women and children as well as African laborers.“

“[Herbert Kitchener] designed concentration camps, about one hundred in all, as punitive hostage sites. Women and children of active guerrillas endured harsher treatment with smaller rations as Kitchener sought to ‘work on the feelings of the men.' [...] As far as Milner and Kitchener were concerned, the Afrikaners in the camps were ‘verminous,' no doubt emaciated from meager rations and poor sanitation's effects. Kitchener's forces had to either capture the “infested” Afrikaner population or kill them.”

‘Verminous'...'infested'...concentration camps...where have I heard this before?

That was just some of the many war crimes committed by the empire during that war. After the war, the Africans had to pay the Brit's reparations and then the Brit's oversaw the rise of apartheid. Cool and good country.

Concentration Camps — Ireland

They put the Irish in concentration camps too. The MO wouldn't change country to country. But funnily enough the colonies started learning more from each other too so they'd be better at fighting their oppressor.

“In the wake of the Easter Rising, the British government detained fifteen hundred men without trial under Regulation 14B. Largely held in the Frongoch internment camp, a crude conglomeration of huts and an abandoned distillery on the Welsh coast, detainees like Michael Collins took the lead in transforming their incarceration into a recruitment opportunity. [...] Collins and others gave lessons in revolutionary ideology and guerrilla tactics, which included those deployed in South Africa.”

The Irish also helped radicalize Indians.
“Arguably, it was Dan Breen's ‘My Fight for Irish Freedom' that had the greatest impact on Bengali revolutionary activity. Published in 1924 and translated into Hindu, Punjabi, and Tamil, the book was the first memoir by an Irish Republican Army member. It quickly became a how-to manual for rebellion and outlined the necessity of taking out “Irish ‘traitors,' police, informants, and high government officials.” Bengali revolutionaries referred to the text as ‘one of our bibles.'” Beautiful.

Concentration Camps — Malaya

• British Malaya's concentration camps and forced migration: “In total, officials displaced and relocated approximately 650,000 workers into the “labour lines,” which brought the overall forced migration and resettlement of British subjects and alleged aliens to nearly 1.2 million.”

• The terrorist campaign against Chinese civilians in Malaya was the first example of a “hearts and minds campaign.” Just like all subsequent attempts, it did not go well. “No analysis bears out any kind of full-scale socioeconomic reform effort in the midst of government-sponsored terror, intelligence gathering, hit squads, deportations, mass resettlements, and detentions.“

Concentration Camps — Kenya

• “Kenya's minister for defense assessed the colony's works camps where labor was ostensibly voluntary and paid, remarking, ‘We are slave traders and the employment of our slaves are, in this instance, by the Public Works Department.'”

~~
Notable ware crimes and massacres worth a google:

• “Jallianwala Bagh massacre” AKA the “Amritsar massacre”. Winston Churchill tried to justify this horrible massacre. Winston Churchill is a piece of shit.

• Hola Massacre - massacre of hundreds of people in the Hola Concentration Camp in Kenya.

• War Crimes in Iraq: “Iraq became a playground for weapons testing. In late 1922, London's Air Ministry circulated a “Forms of Frightfulness” memo in which it considered smoke bombs, aerial darts, tear gas, phosphorus bombs, war rockets, long-delay “action” bombs, tracer ammunition, man-killing shrapnel bombs, “liquid” fire (the precursor to napalm), and crude oil to pollute water supplies.”

• “According to [Desmond] Woods, his men put ‘Arabs from the cage [a temporary holding pen]' in commandeered taxis to lead army patrols, which was a form of human mine sweeping that left Arabs blown to bits. When taxis filled ‘with Arabs, the naughty boys' weren't heavy enough to detonate the mines, the Ulster officer recalled that ‘we got hold of buses and we used to fill them with Arabs and send them down the road in front of our patrols and that did the trick.'”

• A 1947 report from the UK-run Bad Nenndorf torture facility: “With several detainees dead, and the overwhelming corroborating evidence of physical and psychological torture, malnutrition, humiliation of various kinds, the use of Nazi-era instruments such as shin screws, and routine use of prolonged solitary confinement, Hayward's report made for disturbing reading.” Lieutenant Colonel Robin Stephens was court-martialed for overseeing the torture but was ultimately set free. “He would soon reemerge in the empire as part of MI5's operations clamping down on nationalists who threatened Britain's imperial resurgence efforts.”

• Other torture facilities & concentration camps include “Camp 020”, Langata Detention Camp,

• Operation Anvil (1954), Operation Shark (1946)

• The Brits inspired Apartheid: “It was for good reason that South Africa's Afrikaner Broederbond looked to the British Empire for cultural inspiration and legal guidance. In the early 1950s, the apartheid state's prime minister, D. F. Malan, praised Kenya for having ‘given him an example of how to treat discontented Africans.'”

• Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa - The UK-backed government running the same exact playbook as their former imperial overlords

~~
Indoctrination & Consent Manufacturing

In order for Britain to do all of these horrible crimes, they needed to indoctrinate their people into believing what they were doing was right. Indoctrination is critical to maintain control, and they had it down:

“School textbook publishers similarly peddled a civic pride in the empire and provided teachers with history and geography texts that extolled Britain's civilizing mission and reminded Britain's youth of ‘native savagery.' Whether in or out of the classroom, generations of British schoolchildren were weaned on a triumphant imperial narrative that depicted their nation as waging a moral battle to defend civilization while also bringing light.”

They pretended to have a “free press” but just like the US's corporate media, their press stood on the side of empire and manufactured consent for the empire's brutality. They didn't even pretend to hide it like the US's news does:

“Alfred Harmsworth, declared that the raison d'être of his newspaper [The Daily Mail] was to stand ‘for the power, the supremacy and the greatness of the British Empire.‘”

“Here again the fourth estate, including The Daily Chronicle, echoed the government's right to repression as well as its nationalist demonizings and ever-elusive search for moderates who understood the civilizing, if forceful, ways of their colonizer.”

“The mainstream press cleaved to a positivist reporting style and preferred not to run a story if it meant contravening government-ready facts with the slimmest of suggestive evidence—evidence that the press could rarely verify given its limited access to the camps and villages as well as to security forces, who seldom broke rank.”

~~
Numbers Game

This is a side note tangent not directly related to this book...

Those who have been indoctrinated by Capitalist propaganda often repeat some wildly absurd number of killed under Communism. Ignoring the laughable and blatantly falsified calculus used to come up with such numbers, no one ever seems to look at the other side of that balance sheet, what are the death tolls in the black book of Capitalism? Here's a good one: the Capitalist British Empire killed 1.8 BILLION people in their colony India. Give that number a google.

Additionally, there's the propaganda about famines. But no one ever talks about the famines caused by the Capitalist British Empire. Namely:
• The Great Bengal Famine of 1770, and the Bengal Famine of 1943 in India
• The Irish Potato Famine (1840's). Yeah. Bet ya didn't know that whole potato thing was actually caused by Britain.

That's 3 different famines caused by 1 country.

~~~
Human Rights and the United Nations

One of the book's most interesting points is the rising tide of international human rights campaigns that came to prominence after WW2 and how the British Empire saw these efforts as a threat to their colonies. They knew their evil acts would be thrown into question, so they sabotaged and undermined the humanitarian end goals in order to prevent their nefarious actions in their colonies from getting international scrutiny.

This is because Britain had a different ideology around human rights compared to US progressives: “Churchill processed the language of rights in a different register than Roosevelt did. Britain and its empire—and all modern European nations and their empires—did not regard rights as universal. Rather, they were something that a state created and bequeathed to its citizens.” Hey Fuck Winston Churchill btw.

• UN Charter — Article 73 was written to legitimize the existence of the British Empire's colonies. “Under the charter, League mandates would become Trust Territories, and the new International Trusteeship System—as opposed to an International ‘Partnership' System—differed little from the former Permanent Mandates Commission except for the fact that it was even more attuned to issues of sovereignty and was explicitly aligned with great power interests.”

• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) — Unenforceable thanks to the Brit's efforts to decouple the declaration (which Britain signed) from the legally binding covenants with its colonies. “In the words of the Colonial Office, Articles 13, 21, and 25 of the declaration—freedom of movement, right to participation in government, and right to basic standards of living—‘may be extremely difficult to reconcile' in the empire.” The empire refused to publish its contents or make reference to it in colonial papers. Why would they? Telling colonized people about the UDHR might make them revolt!

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 — Common Article 3 “rendered the conventions applicable to noninternational armed conflicts. Its initial draft reached not only into domestic state matters but into imperial ones as well.” The British and French empires successfully watered down the definitions in this article to make its not applicable to their ongoing global imperial terrorism. “Britain and France put up all sorts of fuss, and they were either individually or collectively behind the removal from the conventions of any reference to ‘colonial wars' and the elimination of the preamble with a ‘blanket' mention of ‘human rights.'” Since they had the power and they wrote the rules, they could do whatever they wanted to their subjugated peoples.

The European Convention on Human Rights — Article 15 was specifically designed as “an out clause for liberal imperialism's unrestrained use of force.” Article 63(3) “enabled Britain to ratify the convention in 1951 ‘without immediately committing the dependent territories,' according to one official.”

In the 1950's, the Brits obstructed the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from providing humanitarian relief in Kenya, claiming Common Article 3 didn't apply.

~~
The Cover-Up

There is already a laundry list of evil things the British Empire has done listed above, but one that I want to call out specifically is their efforts to cover up the crimes.

Every time they had to abandon a colony, they would burn as much of the documents as they could. These documents showed the cold, hard evidence of their war crimes. They knew how bad it would make them look, so they burned every file they had.

Why this angers me so much is that it destroys history, erases the true legacy of British Imperialism, and allows them to manufacture their own history of being “righteous stewards to uncivilized children”. Truly truly evil.

“British practices of systematized violence were to be expunged from the imperial record. Plumes of document ashes littered India's independence day ceremonies, but they would recede in future end-of-empire exits. [...]like the violence they inflicted on local populations, they became better at covering them up. [...] British officials around the globe embarked on processes of document removal and destruction that reflected an increasingly secret Cold War government and further shaped the myths of British imperial benevolence and triumph.”

“In [1956] Malaya, colonial officials began sorting, culling, transferring, and burning files. Much like interrogation systems and those created for deportation, resettlement, and detention, those spawned for document sifting and destruction had evolved from haphazard processes, such as those in India and Palestine, to ones that were increasingly bureaucratized”

Operation Legacy — “The document-purging process, called Operation Legacy in some parts of the empire, drew on systems of destruction that had unfolded in Malaya and India.”

Anyway, moral of the story is: British Imperialism is as evil, if not more evil, than US Imperialism.

“The one who deals the blow forgets.
The one who carries the scar remembers.”
—Haitian proverb

This is my new favorite book. It will undoubtedly reach my top 5 of the year and is my #1 recommendation about the history of US Imperialism.

This book ties together 3 stories:
• A biography of Major General Smedley Butler and his adventures in US Imperialism from the Spanish-American War to campaigning against war before WW2.
• The author traveling the world to see the real places associated with Smedley's adventures
• An expanded history of US Imperialism beyond what Smedley Butler was involved in.

His story IS the story of US Imperialism. He fought the Spanish after the original false flag explosion of the USS Maine, resulting in the US colonizing Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the creation of the infamous military installation in Guantanamo Bay. He was in China during the Boxer Rebellion, the first time the United States invaded China, along with other Imperial nations. Then he defended corporate oil interests the SECOND time the US sent soldiers into China. He personally overthrew the democracy of Haiti and implemented slave labor. This is why Haitians see him as a devil, but Americans don't have any idea about any of this.

He did a lot of terrible things at the behest of the US government. He also helped stop a fascist coup to overthrow FDR. One that has eerie similarities to the January 6th putsch.

But it wasn't until he left the military that he was fully able to articulate what he truly was: A racketeer for capitalism.

There's a reason why the US empire grew in power right alongside US companies becoming international mega-corporations. These two things went hand in hand. Smedley Butler saw it. Hell, he DID it!

“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank [now PNC] boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers [now BBH] in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil [now Chevron, ExxonMobil, Amoco, and Marathon] went its way unmolested”

He committed atrocities against oppressed people for the interests of corporations that still exist to this day. He blazed the trail for what the US Government and corporations continue to do to this day: oppress peoples across the world to extract wealth from weaker nations. We are rich because they are poor. Imperialism is truly the highest form of Capitalism. Two heads of the same hydra.

But there's another head of that hydra. The specter of fascism hovers over this nation. Capitalists stood with the fascists then, they plotted to overthrew the government in 1933 to stop the modest Social Democrat reforms from FDR, the self-proclaimed “savior of capitalism”. They stood with Mussolini and Hitler before the US joined and actively got rich off of those fascist countries. And they'll do it again if given the chance. Because they would rather give up Democracy itself than an iota of profits. Fascism is Capitalism in decay.

Read this book. It's incredible and important.

This is a feminist text that argues the witch burnings of Europe and the US were primarily about keeping women subservient and maintaining the patriarchy. The author then draws a direct line from the barbarity of that era to the misogyny and sexism women still face in the modern era, including but not limited to: reproductive rights, unrealistic beauty standards, double-standards with regards to aging men vs women, societal pressure regarding marriage and motherhood, women being unknowingly used as science experiments while under anesthesia by medical school students, etc.

The theory about why the witch burnings occurred do make a lot of sense to me:

“Talking back to a neighbor, speaking loudly, having a strong character or showing a bit too much awareness of your own sexual appeal: being a nuisance of any kind would put you in danger. [...] every behavior and its opposite could be used against you: it was suspicious to miss Sunday Mass too frequently, but it was also suspicious never to miss it; it was suspicious to gather regularly with friends, but also to have too solitary a lifestyle.”
The witch-hunts were a reactionary response to women striving for equality in a highly puritanical and patriarchal society. They were not just crazy Christians going nuts. Though they were definitely that too.

She argues that as modern medicine began taking shape, its pioneers (white men) used the specter of witchcraft to push out the healers, medicine women, and midwives to be replaced by an arguably barbaric early form of obstetrics and other highly dogmatic medical fields, all if which ignored centuries of evidence-based practice from said healers & “witches” to instead use old classics like leaches: “Despite their parallel activity as sorceresses, about which we may be skeptical, and much more than the era's official doctors, the female healers targeted by the witch-hunts were already working within the parameters of the rational; indeed, they are characterized by Ehrenreich and English as ‘safer and more effective' than the ‘regular' doctors. These doctors had studied Plato, Aristotle and theology; prominent among their repertoire were bloodletting and the application of leeches.”

It's written from a first-world perspective and makes zero mention of trans people.
Other than that, I thought it was pretty good and an excellent choice this spooky season.

I have tried my damndest to keep this review short. I wanted to read something critical to modern America for the 4th of July weekend but there is no audiobook for “When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973” (1996) so I got this one.

The first third was interesting, covering a lot about anti-federalism, pre-revolutionary stuff, the war of 1812, and other things I didn't really know about. Then we get to Lincoln, reconstruction, and the 20th century and it's just more stuff I've heard a thousand times.

This is like baby's first “US Bad” book. It's a broad overview of things our US history textbooks whitewashes, ignores, or covers in half a paragraph. The content is decent, but it has to keep moving to cover ~400 years of crap. It was written by a history professor and really reads like a guy going through his lesson plan.

Once the book got to the 20th century it was just “then we got this president and he sucked because XYZ and the things his detractors said about him weren't true but he definitely wasn't as great as people remember” rinse and repeat from until we get to Obama. He's no Marxist (he teaches at West Point, the military academy), but he does criticize all presidents despite the color of their tie.

Definitely read this if you want to understand why American Exceptionalism is bad. If you already know that, check it out to fill in some gaps to that knowledge, as this does cover a lot.

The long short of it is: The US is an empire, the Civil War was about slavery, the revolutionary war was about slavery, the Mexican-American war was about slavery and imperialism. The Spanish-American War, WW1, WW2, and all the rest of the US wars were about imperialism. The US was built upon white supremacy and it stands as a white supremacist nation to this day. All presidents are war criminals. Obama was also bad and a war criminal.

Alright I lied. There were some provocative quotes. Here are my favorites:

~~ 1600s to 1700s~~

Bacon's Rebellion (1676-1677) was “a populist army savagely assaulted hated Native Americans and aristocrats alike. A mix of black and white former indentured servants demonstrated the fragility of Virginian society. The planter class was terrified. To avoid — at all costs — a repeat, the landed gentry made a devil's bargain. To ensure stability, they realized they must co-opt some of the poor without ceding their own privileged status. Enter America's original sins: racism and white privilege. Plantation owners simply hired fewer indentured servants and became more reliant on black African chattel slaves for their labor force. [...] Bacon's Rebellion linked land, labor, and race in nefarious ways. Landownership remained the path to freedom. Labor remained essential to profiting from the land, and race came to define the relationship between land and labor. After 1676 a class-based system morphed into a race-based system of labor and social structure.“

“Colonial New England was inhabited by zealots — conformist and oppressive fundamentalists who strictly policed the boundaries of their exalted theocracy. Forget the Thanksgiving feast: this was Islamic State on the Atlantic!”

George Washington started the tradition of US Presidents all being War Criminals. He started the French and Indian War (1754–1763) “This was supposed to have been as much a diplomatic as a military mission, and no state of war had been declared. Washington's choice to open fire was strategically and ethically questionable; however, his inability to control his native allies and the assassination of a prisoner must certainly constitute a war crime.”

We've been an empire since before we were even an independent country. “Despite contemporary memories to the contrary, in the coming revolution against Britain the colonists hardly rebelled against the concept of empire itself. Rather, they desired a new, expansive American empire, unhindered by London and stretching west over the Appalachians and deep into native lands.”

Most people of the colonies weren't even on board with independence. “Probably no more than one-third of all colonists were actually anti-imperial ‘patriots.' Our Founding Fathers and their followers weren't even in the majority.” One third wanted independence, one third supported the British Empire, and one third were fence sitters. Not a ringing endorsement for bloody revolution.

“Some colonists simply resented military occupation. The British decision to send uniformed regular army troops to rebellious hotbeds like Boston had an effect opposite to what was intended. This is an old story. American soldiers in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq have learned this lesson again and again as foreign military presence angered the locals and united disparate political, ethnic, and sectarian groups in a nationalist insurgency.” Burn.

“The patriot minority used threats and violence to enforce their narrative and thrust their politics on the loyal and the apathetic alike. There was little that was democratic about it. Discomforting as it may be, the patriot movement was hardly a Gandhi-like campaign of peaceful civil disobedience. Patriots were passionate, they were relentless, and they were armed. Firearms were ubiquitous in the colonies, more so, even, than in Britain. Guns are as American as apple pie. So is street violence.” Remember that the next time the White Moderate tells you to be peaceful.

The Revolutionary war was about slavery. The Brits were on their way to abolish the practice, and slavery kept the colonies' economies flowing and kept the wealthiest colonizers (the “founding fathers”) obscenely wealthy. George Washington was the richest person in the newly founded country:

“The ostensibly tyrannical British practiced very little chattel slavery within the United Kingdom itself. In fact, in the Somerset v. Stewart case of 1772, England's highest common-law court ruled that chattel slavery was illegal. This judgment spooked many southern colonial gentlemen, who began to fear that the British metropolitan authorities were ‘unreliable defenders of slavery,' and this convinced many to join the patriot cause.”

Native Americans and black people weren't stupid. They were fighting against the “patriots” because the “patriots” were going to genocide and/or continue to enslave them. “In proportion to their numbers in the population, black men were more likely than whites to serve as combatants in the Revolution, only by and large they fought against the side that had proclaimed all men were created equal.”

“Lord Dunmore raised eight hundred to a thousand slave volunteers by offering freedom to those who would flee their masters and gather under his banner. Word of Dunmore's proclamation spread rapidly through the colonies, giving hope to slaves and striking fear in planters throughout the Americas. It convinced many fence-sitting slaveholders that there could now be no reconciliation with the Crown. As Edward Rutledge, a South Carolina signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote, the Dunmore proclamation effected ‘an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies...more than any other expedient.'”

Blah blah blah Genocides, systematic rape, backstabbing the natives, slavery, blah blah blah. Tale as old as time.

The founding fathers really did not like Democracy. They were elitists. They wanted the rich and powerful and white and male people to be in charge. The Constitution was written in secret by (and for) those of wealth and power. They wanted to keep their wealth and power so they wrote the rules accordingly. And don't give me that “it was just the way things were back then” because there were plenty of people who recognized the indefensibly unjust reality these elitists were forcing upon them at the time.

There was a lot of interesting stuff about federalism vs anti-federalism, and apparently the Constitution was treasonous at the time because the Articles of Confederation were in effect at the time. My thoughts on federalism have wavered over the years and now I might just have to support US Balkanization, as that would result (at least in the short term) in less global imperialism, which would be better for the 3rd world.



~~~Okay but how many US wars were started with false flags, exactly?~~~

I kept getting this recurring theme popping up as I read. A LOT of US wars were started under false pretenses.

• War of 1812, supposedly declared because Britain was commandeering US merchant vessels which they claimed were full of British deserters. (The Brit's were correct in this). So the US declared war first, the Brit's rescinded the law that let them commandeer ships, but the rambunctious young empire would never let a good war go to waste, and used it to do more Native genocide, colonizing, and even tried to conquer Canada. But by golly those Canooks came down and lit the White House on fire. Hilarious. The powers that be claimed the Brit's were trying to take their colonies back (false).

• Mexican-American War - “Until 1836, Texas was a distant northern province of the new Mexican Republic, a republic that had only recently won its independence from the Spanish Empire, in 1821.” Mexico had abolished slavery, but a bunch of Yankees kept crossing the border south into Texas, the province of Mexico, bringing their slaves. The Mexican government tried to enforce their own country's laws (about how you can't have slaves any more) within their own country's borders (Texas, a part of Mexico). Santa Anna marched his army north, so a bunch the invading Yankees held up in the Alamo (a fort). “The men inside the Alamo walls were pro-slavery insurgents. As applied to them, Texan, in any real sense, is a misnomer. Two-thirds were recent arrivals from the United States and never intended to submit to sovereign Mexican authority. What the Battle of the Alamo did do was whip up a fury of nationalism in the United States and cause thousands more recruits to illegally ‘jump the border' — oh, the irony — and join the rebellion in Texas.” So we claimed we were attacked when we were the aggressors...hmmmmmm.......

The US stole Texas from Mexico because the migrants weren't obeying the laws. Oh god I hate irony so much my head hurts. Manifest Destiny is just Imperialism. Amerika Bad.

• Spanish-American War - USS Maine blew up on its own, but we didn't let that tragedy go to waste, so we declared war and scooped up more colonies.

• WW2 - We were already helping the allies well before the Japanese attacked.

I'm keeping this review short so I'm cutting this off here.

This is the first book in my unofficial series I'm calling “Understanding US Immigration”.

This book talks about the seven countries of Central America: Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. It briefly talks about the rise of Spanish colonialism, and the creation of a caste system between “Ladinos” (people of Spanish ancestry) and Indigenous peoples or “Indians”. Sound familiar? “As in the United States, racism against Central America's Indigenous populations existed on multiple levels and was expressed in policies ranging from genocide, erasure, coerced assimilation, legal exclusion, forced labor, and myths about ‘disappearing Indians.” Most exploitation was of the natives, compared to the US, which mostly imported slaves instead of forcing the natives to labor. Both used the lie of “civilizing the savage” to justify subordination and even extermination.

The US also has had an extremely large impact on the history of all Central American countries. This includes, but is not limited to:
• Refusing to accept election results if it didn't go the way they wanted (Guatemala 1952, Nicaragua 1984)
• Literally annexing and creating the country for the interests of corporations (Panama)
• Invasion (Guatemala 1954, Nicaragua 1912-1933 & 1981-1990, Panama 1989)
• US-backed coups (Guatemala 1954, Honduras 1963 & 2009)
• Slavery/corporate colonialism (google: Banana Wars)
Etc.

What this book really shows is that the USA does not care about democracy or self-determination for nations within its political influence (i.e. any country) if that country's actions results in negatively impacts the bottom line of US-based international corporations. That is the modus operandi of US foreign policy.

Specifically for Central America, the corporations of interest are the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) as well as coffee, sugar, and cotton plantations. The story is always the same:
• Country elects political leaders who want to make life easier for peasants who work on plantations owned by multinational corporations.
• They enact a welfare state and the dreaded LAND REFORM
• Corpos run to the US government
• The US lies and claims the country is being influenced by the USSR (no longer necessary these days)
• the US invades or funds rebels to instigate a coup or both so they can install a new puppet dictator to brutalize the people and appease corporate interests
• Neoliberal Chicago Boy economist ghouls come in to do “structural adjustment,” AKA: write laws to dismantle and privatize all government industry and services, gutting social safety nets. Then, replace them with “free trade zones,” signing away the nation's wealth to foreign investors. This resulted in plummeting median wealth and health for the people.

“‘By the end of the Cold War,' writes Greg Grandin, ‘Latin American security forces trained, funded, equipped, and incited by Washington had executed a reign of bloody terror—hundreds of thousands killed, an equal number tortured, millions driven into exile—from which the region has yet to recover.'”

A tail as old as time. It's not just Central America, but essentially any country that crosses the US.

But I've told this story over and over again. what did I learn that's different here compared to similar books?

1: The US government was (is?) absolutely involved in the international drug trade.

“US-built airstrips and US-funded private airlines [...] became key nodes in the transport of cocaine and marijuana from Colombia into the United States, and the secretive bases in Honduras proved an irresistible transit point. The US Drug Enforcement Agency briefly opened an office in Honduras in 1981. When the office began documenting the extensive Honduran military involvement in the drug trade, the office was abruptly closed in 1983.”

2: This gave me a better understanding of colonialism and racism.

“Where populations were small and virtually impossible to control, as in North America, the British developed a kind of colonial enterprise called settler colonialism. Rather than ruling over the people they colonized—like the Spanish in Mexico and Peru, or the British themselves in India—settler colonial projects were based on eliminating the people who were there and replacing them with a white, European population.”

“Traditional colonialism and settler colonialism shared an ideology of European superiority that continues to infuse the world today, now commonly termed racism. What we today call people of color are formerly colonized peoples. Simply acknowledging the colonial roots of race and racism helps us to understand how profoundly the past has shaped the present.”

“It's also worth noting that most of the wealth and power in today's world is concentrated in the former colonial powers (the United States and Europe), while most of the poverty is concentrated in their former colonies (Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia). This division too has its roots in a long history of colonialism.”

3: How US-backed Neoliberal hyperindividualism resulted in rising Central American immigration to the US

The US government destabilized Central America through a century of neocolonialism, repression, coups, puppet dictators, counterinsurgencies, and “structural adjustments”. The dogmatism spread by the US and its ilk since the 1980's has been “hyperindividualism — Look out for yourself, don't expect anyone to help you!”

These two facts resulted in something obvious. The people who want to make a better life for themselves in their families do what makes the most sense for themselves as individuals: emigrate. And where do they go? Why the largest economy they can reach, of course! The good ole US of A.

The book went more into the the complexities of the US immigration system and its history. That's a topic I hope to talk about further along in my quest.

4: The AFL-CIO has historically stood with the US government against pro-labor nationalist governments in Latin America (and likely in other places).

“Although the AFL-CIO campaigned against Reagan in 1980 and opposed many of his domestic policies, the federation wholeheartedly adopted his framing of Central American revolutions as communist threats to the security of the United States. [...] The organization offered money and resources to unions that agreed to follow its political orientation. It intervened in unions' internal politics, promoting candidates and positions that eschewed radicalism. It worked closely with the US Embassy, US multinationals operating in Latin America, and the CIA, earning the federation the nickname ‘AFL-CIA' among many critical Latin Americans.”

One of the many reasons why I'm not a big fam of the AFL-CIO. More specifically the first half of that acronym. See: “A History of America in Ten Strikes” by Erik Loomis for more on that.


That's about it.
Read the book if you're into this sorta stuff.

If you're interested in environmental justice, sustainability, environmental engineering, or fighting poverty criminalization, then this book is for you.
It was part autobiography, which was more interesting than some autobiographical books I've read, but still not something I'm very interested in ever, about anyone.

The crux of the book is about failing wastewater infrastructure in rural Alabama and one woman's journey to try and stop cops from throwing people in jail for being too poor to fix the problems, and instead getting money to fix the problems.
We claim to be the richest, most powerful country on earth. And yet we literally have people who live next to open sewage, and are too poor to fix the problem. For some reason, this country thinks throwing poor people in prison for being poor is somehow a solution.

A good country, a civilized country would create a universal floor of basic services (UBS) for every person living in the country. That way we don't have things like people living next to open sewage and getting infected with hookworm, a tropical parasite that was previously thought to have been eradicated in the mid 1900's.

While the previous president was trying to stop immigration from “shithole countries” we have people in this country literally living next to shit holes.
Good book. Fairly short. Extremely important. Highly recommended.

For most of my adult life, I was one of those liberals who didn't really try to understand the complex histories of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I just threw up my hands in indifference and said “I don't know. Seems messed up. Hope they work it out.”
Since then, I've learned a lot about this issue. The last month, I've learned a whole lot more. This book popped up on my recommended list, and it couldn't have come during a more apt time. It has really helped me understand. I don't claim to be an expert.
What I do know a lot about is US Imperialism, colonialism, domination, and the strong controlling the weak. It's clear to me now that this issue is far less complicated than I previously thought.
One side has all the power, is the strongest country in the region, and has unquestionable support from the most powerful country on earth, which provides more aid than to any other country. This side commits undeniable human rights violations and war crimes against the other with impunity.
I have members of my own family, self-ascribed “progressives” who to this day refuse to say Isreal is an Apartheid state, even after the Human Rights Watch report came out this year, after the 2017 UN report, and after AOC said so too.
I will no longer remain ignorant or neutral to this issue. I will not stand with a government committing countless crimes against humanity against a far weaker opponent. I will not support the ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and settler colonialism of Israel.
I implore every self-identified “progressive” to read this book and take a stand against this injustice.

Dr. Carl Hart is living in the year 2100. His bold proclamation is elegant in its simplicity: criminalization of ANY recreational drug causes more inherent harm to society than good. For that reason, EVERY drug should be decriminalized, legalized, regulated, and taxed.

Just like ending prohibition in the 1920's. Just like ending marijuana criminalization today. Just like some states are even pushing for legalization of some psychedelics. This fight will not end until all drug prohibition ends and the words of the Declaration of Independence finally ring true: the right to the pursuit of happiness.

Everything we were taught in school and told by the Mainstream Media about recreational drugs is either completely wrong or incredibly sensationalized.
Police over the last century have demonized & lied about a specific drug and use those lies as post-hoc justifications for the unjust murders they committed, to further brutalize the poor and marginalized communities, and to justify future murders.

Any time you hear “[New scary drug] makes people aggressive, gives them immense strength, and makes them impervious to bullets,” or anything like that, it's lies made up by cops. Every time.

Remember that guy who “became a cannibal after taking bath salts?” Well turns out he didn't have any bath salts (MDPV, methylone, mephedrone, etc) in his system at all at the time of the assault. But that didn't stop the cops from lying and the media from buying & repeating their lies. And now that class of drug, which had NOTHING TO DO with that assault, is outlawed. For no good reason.
The major cause of drug-related deaths is user's poor understanding of how to administer the drug safely, and the fact that because these drugs exist on a black market, they are unregulated and no one really knows what they're buying. This can be remedied through legalization, regulation, and education.

Brutalizing drug users will never eliminate the use of these drugs. Ever. These laws are always enforced in a manner that primarily harms the poor and marginalized people, despite the fact that drugs ARE expensive, and frequently used by the well to do. But if you're rich and white, the cops aren't gonna bust down your door for wanting to have a good time in the privacy of your own home.
Crack and cocaine are the same exact drug chemically and pharmacologically, yet the sentences for possession are 18x greater for crack. Why? Because historically black people used crack and white people used cocaine. That's literally the only reason. (Luckily it's down from what it used to be before 2010, which was 100:1. Thanks Obama, I guess)

Drugs won the “war on drugs.” It's time to end it. It's time to stop the prison industrial complex from continuing to enslave people who dare to want to alter their minds. It's time to legalize.

I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone. This is a fight that anyone who supports individual freedom and/or dismantling the racist, oppressive criminal justice system should support.

This is by far one of the best books I've read all year. I strongly recommend this book to everyone.

I've never been the spiritual type. I'm a methaphysical naturalist. But this book is the first book ever that has me questioning such an ideology. The ones who cleave the spirit from the natural world are also those who seek to dominate it at all costs.

If societally accepted fictions like corporations can garner personhood despite not tangibly existing, then we must expand our definition of personhood & individual rights to things and beings that do exist, like rivers and forests and animals. As these aren't “natural resources” to plunder. They're vital threads in the web of life.

Environmental sustainability is fundamentally incomparable with Capitalism. You cannot support both. Capitalism requires endless growth for the sake of growth. This is impossible on a finite planet, and unethical in a world filled with unjust suffering, poverty, and death caused by capitalism's unquenchable thirst.
GDP does not measure the health or wellbeing of the people or the environment, but the health and wellbeing of capital. Countries with lower GDP's have higher levels of happiness, wellbeing, lower carbon footprints, longer lifespans, etc.. In this country, we work ourselves to death not for ourselves, but to make the rich richer.

We must ignore GDP and shift our global economic system from an exchange-value system (underlined by unending growth and capital accumulation) to a use-value system (underlined by improving the health and wellbeing of the people, and becoming a more environmentally sustainable society.

This can be accomplished by de-comodifying healthcare via M4A, creating universal basic services, strengthening labor rights (reducing the work week without reducing pay, among other things)

It's really tough for me to get through books about US's criminally un-just system. Luckily this book is short. It lacks any filler. I like to highlight passages as I read but it would have resulted in highlighting every page. This is just jam packed with valuable insight in how our criminal justice system works and how it fails to achieve its directly intended goal.

The author offers heartbreaking stories of the systematic cruelty that runs rampant. It is not objectively possible for the United States of America to call itself the “leader of the free world” while detaining 25% of the world's prisoners, and doing so in the most needlessly cruel and horrible conditions on earth. We are not a “free” nation. This is propaganda to keep us complacent. We are an authoritarian regime that endlessly throws poor people and people of color into a bottomless pit.

Our system does not exist to “reform.” It exists to make people suffer. There is no rational basis to how the system operates other than “it's how we've always done it” or “criminals should pay”. When you take a step back and look at it rationally, the brutality is truly horrifying.

The author writes from the point of view as a lawyer and to an audience of lawyers in order to convince enough of them to try and fight for systematic changes. Lawyers have a unique role as those with power and enough agency to make systematic change, as long as they recognize their power and are willing to actually fight for the people rather than maintain their status as a cog in the “punishment bureaucracy” as he puts it.

A civilized society would not base their system of laws around how to most effectively brutalize and punish its citizenry. Every law that is broken, every crime committed is not an individual failure, it is a societal failure. Resolving these failures require societal solutions to things like: poverty, addiction, homelessness, white supremacy, poverty, poverty, and also poverty. But we don't live in a civilized society. We live in a society that has to be “tough on crime”. So we toss black bodies into the open maw of this hellworld we call a “justice system”.

I could go on forever about this. It really upsets me how broken this system is. I would recommend this book to anyone who thinks we live in a “nation of laws” or anyone associated with criminal justice, or any lawyer, or just anyone at all.

The book ends with this call to action:

“Legal academics, judges, and lawyers of conscience must take up this two-pronged challenge: we must bring intellectual rigor to legal discourse and doctrine that shape the punishment system, and we must use the energy that animates our bodies to ensure that the legal system looks in practice as it appears in our scrolls and on our marble monuments.”

Here are some other good quotes I found, they're all very long because they're so incredibly good:

“A lot of people are talking about ‘criminal justice reform.' Much of that talk is dangerous. The conventional wisdom is that there is an emerging consensus that the criminal legal system is ‘broken.' But the system is ‘broken' only to the extent that one believes its purpose is to promote the well-being of all members of our society. If the function of the modern punishment system is to preserve racial and economic hierarchy through brutality and control, then its bureaucracy is performing well.”

“[I]n 2015, more people were handcuffed and caged for marijuana offenses than for all ‘violent' crimes combined. In many jurisdictions, the single most common criminal prosecution is for driving with a suspended license, and about forty percent of suspended American drivers' licenses were taken away not for any reason related to driving, but because a person was too poor to pay court debts.”
We supposedly abolished indentured servitude and debtors prison. But not really. We just better bureaucratized it.
Also this shows why the state would oppose more public transportation: it would result in them having less control over its citizenry. If you have to drive, then the state has an exceptionally effective weight to hold over your head in the event you step out of line. And they have an exceptionally effective tool to criminalize poverty.

“A major achievement of the punishment bureaucracy is that it has retained mainstream respect even though its “law enforcement” choices crush unprecedented numbers of people with no evidence of any unique social benefit while simultaneously allowing enormous amounts of lawlessness that cause massive harm. Why are these choices still viewed as legitimate?
First, the groups who wield power in our society benefit from the punishment bureaucracy. It privileges their private property, their racial supremacy, their jobs, their voting rights, and their segregated neighborhoods.
Second, the growth of the punishment bureaucracy itself changes our culture and economy. As the bureaucracy expands, it employs larger and larger numbers of police officers, prosecutors, probation officers, defense attorneys, prison guards, contractors, and equipment manufacturers. People working in the system become dependent on its perpetuation for their livelihoods and even their identities. The path of least resistance is to grow more. Jobs are created, local political power is consolidated, and “law enforcement” activities are normalized and then rendered economically essential—such as roadblocks, prison guards, home raids, drug interdiction teams, neighborhood patrols, armed police in schools, SWAT teams, stop-and-frisk practices, social media monitoring, video surveillance, probation drug testing, and ‘intelligence' divisions.”

“[T]he punishment bureaucrats who created the contemporary ‘criminal justice system' are broadly comfortable with the way that our society looks. They market a crime problem in need of ‘law enforcement' in order to keep our society looking the way that it does. They do not want to solve the ‘crime' problem if that means a society that looks much different—say, more equal and with less private profit. Hence they both construct and respond to ‘crime' with strategies that increase inequality and control, but do little to stop the same problems they purport to care about—and that often make those problems worse, thereby justifying a circular call for more (selective) punishment. And that is why courts do not enforce the rules of law that are intended to make our society more equal when those rules conflict with the goals of the punishment bureaucracy.
The ‘law enforcement' religion is hostile to the view that a society that is more equal would have less crime, not because that idea is untrue, but because the very goal of the criminal legal system is to preserve certain elements of an unequal social order even if that inequality creates ‘crime.'”

“[F]ew ideas have caused more harm in our criminal system than the belief that America is governed by a neutral ‘rule of law.' The content of our criminal laws [...] and how those laws are carried out [...] are choices that reflect power. The common understanding of the ‘rule of law' and the widely accepted use of the term ‘law enforcement' to describe the process by which those in power accomplish unprecedented human caging are both delusions critical to justifying the punishment bureaucracy. ”

“No matter what one's views on drugs, there is one thing that all agree on: these laws were never based on empirical evidence about the best way to create a society with less use of harmful substances.”

“No government in any jurisdiction in the United States has proven that human caging is a way to reduce drug use at all, let alone the least intrusive way. Instead, a mountain of evidence suggests that the punishment approach to drugs has actually increased drug use and the harms associated with it, including by diverting funds from evidence-based alternatives.”

Decriminalization is objectively a more rational way to handle drug use. Anyone who says otherwise is merely sadistic.

The punishment disparity for crack vs powdered cocaine possession was once 100:1. This is one example of laws with a very clearly racist intent behind them. “For decades, even the cautious U.S. Sentencing Commission wanted to remove this disparity because there is no legal or scientific basis for it. And when Congress did reduce the disparity after a unanimous Senate vote in 2010—and millions of years in prison later—no one offered a justification for why it had existed. But for reasons that were never articulated, the government did not remove the disparity; it chose to lower the disparity from 100:1 to 18:1. And for more than eight years after that ‘Fair Sentencing Act' passed, the government chose not to make even these limited ‘fair' changes retroactive to help the thousands of human beings already in prison because of a law that everyone agreed had no basis.”
Yeah we sure do live in a “country of laws”: The country of AmeriKKKa.

There's lots more but this is getting too long. Every line is worth quoting. The book is fantastic but also very depressing.

This is far and above the most important book I've ever read. Everyone in the USA should know the atrocities their government actively funded and encouraged over the last 75 years around the globe. We have never reconciled with these atrocities, and this failure is partially why our politics is so backward compared to the other wealthy countries.

There's a reason why so many rabid lunatics scream about “socialism” without having any idea what that word means. There's a reason why so many poor countries' citizens migrate to our country. There's a reason why the global south is poor. It's all neatly connected.

The US Government is responsible for the overwhelming majority of human-induced atrocities of the last 75 years in order to prevent the creation of a more equitable, egalitarian world. Now we live in a world with the US being the singular global superpower, draining the wealth of the weaker nations to satiate the unquenchable thirsts of the rich and powerful.

I encourage every single person who is reading this sentence to read this book.

For those who have internalized the myth that “human beings are fundamentally greedy, selfish, & cruel, this book will set them straight. The “studies” and anecdotes people often cited by people claiming otherwise are all bullshit: “Stanford-Prison Experiment”, “Milgram Shock Experiment”, Easter Island, “Lord of the Flies”, all hoaxes, myths, and tall tales. There was a real “Lord of the Flies” incident and the children were quite peaceable. The 1914 Christmas Peace is another great example.

What this book shows is that humans are sociable creatures who want to help others, do a good job, and work toward a common goal. Sometimes they get misguided in believing a truly evil goal is for the greater good. The further the people are away from the actual acts, the more zealous and extreme they become.

This book has confirmed to me that we must flatten hierarchies, encourage autonomy, eliminate the useless managerial class, encourage direct democracy, encourage commons.

This book covers a lot and I am definitely not doing it justice. I highly recommend this book to anyone who thinks “humans are inherently greedy/cruel/evil”. Maybe you'll learn something.

My interest in M4A started like a lot of people's: In 2016 with the campaign of Bernie Sanders. As I slowly evolved beyond my progressive/neoliberal upbringing, I learned more about it and about the complete failure of the US Healthcare system.

As I learned more about the proposal, the more I liked it. But when pressed on specifics, I would hand-wave and away that Bernard had it covered in his bill. This book gets deep into the specifics, along with the 100+ year history of healthcare law reform in the US.

The overarching theme is clear: In this country, healthcare is a commodity in a market. M4A seeks to turn it into a public good. That is the only solution to eliminate the complexities, the bureaucratic muck, the highway robbery pricing, the insecurity the false choices. Every other effort is a half-measure that does not solve the underlying problem:
Healthcare should be a public good, not a commodity, and not attached to your employment. It does not operate like a commodity, nor do the “consumers” operate as such. M4A would be cheaper and more efficient than the status quo, resulting in a healthier, more productive society.

Basically every single argument for and against M4A is discussed here with citations to studies that back up their claims. This will be my go-to book for all future discussions on the matter, and if you have any fleeting interest in the policy at all, you should read this book.

My only issue is that this book was published at the beginning of the year and didn't include updated plague deaths or results of the presidential election (or even the Democratic Primary). It's in need of an updated edition, though given how things are going with the plague, it'll probably be quite out of date the instant it's published.

Highly highly highly recommended.

Bakan's original book “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power” (2003) helped me start down the path in 2019. So when I saw he had a sequel out, I was pretty stoked. My last book's eye-rolling final chapters about moving toward “ethical capitalism” was succeeded by someone trying to personally convince me that “ethical capitalism” is cool and good and totally not a con. Thus, this book immediately shot up to first in my to-read list and provided much more succinct retorts than I could muster.

The gist is short and simple: Corporations (even B-Corps) are capable of being mildly less evil, but the core of the system is still profit maximization above all else. Their efforts to be less exploitative will inevitably run into the profit motive, making substantive changes intrinsically impossible.

Corporations propagandize their meager good actions (real or often fabricated) to lobby for further deregulations, privatization, destruction of labor movements, and a reputation boost. This ultimately services their bottom line.

There is no such thing as “ethical capitalism.” It is an oxymoron. When the ultimate goal is profit maximization, every seemingly good action is done to serve that goal, or at least to not harm it. There is no morality, no altruism, only selfishness and greed with a shiny new veneer. No amount of regulations or ‘corporate social responsibility' programs will ever result in “ethical capitalism.” It is rotten to the core.

The solution is Democracy. Direct & electoral, workplace & municipal, liberation from the legal corruption of the US corporatocracy. The solution is direct action, protest, and mutual aid instead of charity. The solution is....

I would recommend both these books to anyone and everyone.

An interesting prediction of a totalitarian, classist, capitalist future. It's hard to accept a possible fascist future for the US that includes the complete abandonment of any sense of puritanical dogma and the patriarchal family unit and instead has a liberated sexual culture. Apparently a new show came out for this but it wasn't very good. They say this is among the top 100 greatest books of all time. Given my complete disinterest in reading fiction, I will abstain from commenting on this accolade. And I will abstain from recommending/not recommending either book in this category for that reason.

I read this book, then the Antifa book immediately after. Both show that, if you actually look at history and not media bloviation or your own biased opinions, violent action is sometimes (not always, not every time) justified in responding to injustices. We don't know this history because our media and textbooks are full of anti-revolutionary propaganda. Our 1960's history has been Disneyfied like Grimm's fairytales. We think MLK marched and then boom all the racism just up and vanished. This whitewashing of history is intended. It is purposeful. It is to prevent more radical, grassroots revolutionary action from disrupting the status quo. Learn your history. If there's one overarching lesson I've learned from reading all these books, it's: LEARN YOUR HISTORY before passing judgement, before making assumptions, before claiming you know everything needed to know about a subject. The saddest part about this book is that the version I had came out right before the George Floyd protests got big, which became the largest movement in US history. I'm sure the author will release a revised version that provides more historical contextualization of that movement.

After years of trying to ignore the term “deep state”, corporate media is overseeing an astroturf campaign to redefine it in order to downplay its meaning when used sincerely.

“Deep State” has always meant: “A consortium of unaccountable corporate oligarchs, banking institutions, intelligence agencies, and organized crime operating without the consent of the governed to maintain US imperial hegemony and corrupt profit maximization by any means necessary.”

However, the astroturf campaign is now trying to convince people that the term is synonymous with “bureaucrat”. E.g.: “the ‘deep state' EPA regulators are trying to keep poison out of the drinking water. I love the deep state!” Anyone who conflates the two is intentionally trying to be condescending.

After reading a dozen or so books about US intelligence operations in the 20th century, it is obvious that not only the Deep State real, but it is still the driving factor of US international policy, not the voice of the people.

This book never once uses the term “deep state”. But that is what it's about.

The CIA, and its predecessor the OSS, began working with organized crime elements in the 1940's during WW2. They used any means necessary to maintain US hegemony, defeat the US's geopolitical enemies both foreign and domestic, and they enriched themselves as icing on the cake.

The means they used, as thoroughly outlined in this book, included the sexual blackmail of people

Why didn't J. Edgar Hoover's FBI go after organized crime until it was already out of control? Because they had sexual blackmail on him, his well documented cross-dressing and homosexual proclivities kept him in line.

Hoover continued the cycle by sexually blackmailing others, including MLK and other threats to the powers that be.

This book lays the historical foundation for how Jeffrey Epstein managed to maintain his child sex trafficking empire under the nose of the most powerful people on earth. He was simply taking a roll that countless others have done over the last century: manufacture Kompromat in order to blackmail those who dare threaten the interests of the deep state.

They also had a great section on the Octopus Murders. It went way deeper and did a way better job explaining the connections than that mediocre Netflix documentary.

There were so many fascinating pieces of info from this extremely long PART 1 OF 2 book that it became too arduous to write a thorough review. It left me in a reading slump just thinking about tackling the mountain of riveting quotes and incites. But I had already written a good opener so I'm knocking it out and moving on with my life.

FANTASTIC BOOK. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

Before reading this, I was worried it would be the “enlightened centrist” take on US interventionism. My fears were absolutely correct. “The case against regime change in the Middle East in this book is a practical, not a moral, one.” The author very clearly supports the lie of American Exceptionalism and cares more about utility than morality. He worked in the Obama Whitehouse so no shock there.

This book is a mildly more conservative successor to “Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq” (2006) by Stephen Kinzer. But it has a much narrower focus (just Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, & Syria). Of course we haven't learned our lesson since 2006 so the latter 3 nations are a new edition not covered by “Overthrow”. For those interested in learning more about Iraq specifically, the podcast “Blowback” goes into much greater detail and I would strongly recomend it.

The author is a pragmatist and steeps the reader into the “damned if you do, damned if you don't” quandaries that presidents faced when deciding if overthrowing the ruler of a sovereign nation would be tactically wise. The history of the last 70 years is clear: don't do it. The author has no moral code guiding him, merely a metaphorical spreadsheet and cost-benefit analysis. It's pure coincidence that he and I agree on this specific subject. He is not opposed to US interventionism, military or otherwise. He's just against regime change, specifically. This made the book extremely frustrating to read.

I would only recommend this book to those who've already read “Overthrow” and want to learn more about 3 recently added victims of US Imperialism, or if you're a liberal/reactionary who thinks interventionism is effective and want to learn why you're wrong but aren't willing to entertain the possibility that US imperialism is fundamentally unethical.

This is the book I'm reading now. Snowden said in an interview that since this is his first book, the publishers made him make it an autobiography. So Part 1 is all about his childhood and early years, which is really dull and can/should be skipped. Otherwise, I'm enjoying it.

It's interesting to read this book and think about the media trying to scare us about China's “oppressive social credit score” system.

Meanwhile we have a patchwork of far less transparent black box systems that control...
• if you get into college
• if you get offered a job
• If you get a mortgage
• If you get targeted by scam universities or scam credit systems
• if you get approve to rent a home
• if you get fired or promoted
• if you get stopped by the police
• if you get bail
• if you get a longer criminal sentence
• if you get probation

And more. Existing systemic bias is coded into these algorithms, resulting in a venire of “science” and “objectivity” used to justify further systemic oppression.
Racist cops find more crime in poor non-white neighborhoods → algorithms designed to find “where crime might happen” takes this garbage data and outputs garbage results → Cops further oppress these neighborhoods, locking up more poor people → An algorithm looks at the material conditions of a defendant and determines that since he's poor, his friends and family are and have had run-ins with the law, and he has few professional prospects, he is likely to reoffend and gets a more stringent sentence.

This feedback loop reinforces our racist, classist criminal justice system while claiming to use “scientific, non-biased” tools. This is just one of the many examples of “big data” run amuck outlined in ths book.

Many more include leveraging big data to suck as much money out of poor people as they can possibly get away with. Because when we have a global economic system primarily driven by profit instead of helping people, the newest technological revolutionary tools will be used not to push humanity forward, but to suck up all our personal information to serve us targeted ads, many of which include ads to scam us.

Great book. highly recommended

I love talking with people about the policies I support: M4A, GND, UBI, universal pre-k, etc.. Inevitably, it always comes back to the thought-terminating cliché “but how are ya gonna pay forrr ittttttttt?” Before, I would wax poetic about taxing billionaires and cutting defense spending and the conversation would derail. This book will help you reset the way you think about “The National Debt.” The fear-mongering myths that the US government is “flat broke” or is “mortgaging our grandchildren's future” are just that: Myths. Modern Monetary Theory asserts that a government that has total control in printing their own currency (like the US, Canada, Japan, UK) cannot run out of money. We should not worry about the national debt because these types of governments should not be run like a household. Or, to put it more simply: Money isn't real. The stock market isn't real. “The national debt” isn't real. People dying from preventable illnesses is real. Homelessness is real. Childhood hunger is real. Human suffering is real. Let's solve real problems instead of bailing out the rich or bombing more countries. There is no excuse for solving these real problems beyond greed and selfishness. I recommend this book to anyone who is tired of hearing “But how are we going to payyy for it” When bringing up systemic solutions to the needless suffering of billions.

Highly Recommended