"Progress" Destruction and Dualism....
Here are three books which, when taken together, allow one to see how the seeds of money, control, power, greed and fear work a patterned alchemy of opportunity, competition and destruction, the underlying intrigue of which is artistically played and supported by a curiously corrupt mix of finance, politics, business in the confines of ONE institution (The Federal Reserve), ONE individual (John D. Rockefeller, Sr. as they all worked and interacted in the dualisitic capital of the world, the ONE most infamous American city, New(NO) York(YES) City (NYC), USA.
As an antidote, I'd highly recommend anything from Thomas Paine.
Peace.
Light!
GO!!
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I ONE
1) The Creature From Jekyll Island, by G. Edward Griffin.
amazon.com
Editorial Reviews
Publisher/Editor, Dan Smoot Report
"A superb analysis deserving serious attention by all Americans. Be prepared for one heck of a journey through time and mind."
Ron Paul
Publisher/Editor, Ron Paul Report
Member, House Banking Committee
"What every American needs to know about central bank power. A gripping adventure into the secret world of the international banking cartel."
Mark Thornton
Asst. Professor of Economics, Auburn Univ.
Coordinator Academic Affairs,
Ludwig von Mises Institute
"A magnificent accomplishment - a train load of heavy history, organized so well and written in such a relaxed and easy style that it captivated me. I hated to put it down."
Dan Smoot
Publisher/Editor, Dan Smoot Report
Mark Thornton, Asst. Professor of Economics, Auburn Univ. Coordinator Academic Affairs, Ludwig von Mises Institute
"What every American needs to know about central bank power. A gripping adventure into the secret world of the international banking cartel." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Dan Smoot, Publisher/Editor, Dan Smoot Report
"A magnificent accomplishment a train load of heavy history, organized so well and written in such a relaxed and easy style that it captivated me. I hated to put it down." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Book Description
Where does money come from? Where does it go? Who makes it? The money magicians' secrets are unveiled. We get a close look at their mirrors and smoke machines, their pulleys, cogs, and wheels that create the grand illusion called money. A dry and boring subject? Just wait!
You'll be hooked in five minutes. Reads like a detective story - which it really is. But it's all true. This book is about the most blatant scam of all history. It's all here: the cause of wars, boom-bust cycles, inflation, depression, prosperity.
Creature from Jekyll Island is a "must read." Your world view will definitely change. You'll never trust a politician again - or a banker.
About the Author
Mr. Griffin is a graduate of the University of Michigan, where he majored in speech and communications. He is a recipient of the Telly Award for excellence in television production.
He is the founder of the Cancer Cure Foundation and has served on the board of directors of the National Health Federation and the International Association of Cancer Victims and Friends. He is a Contributing Editor for The New American magazine, president of American Media and founder of the Reality Zone.
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I'd highly recommend purchasing the tape along with the book direct from www.realityzone.com:
store.yahoo.com
II TWO
2) Gotham : A History of New York City to 1898 (The History of NYC Series)by Edwin G. Burrows, Mike Wallace
amazon.com
Editorial Reviews
>>Amazon.com
Like the city it celebrates, Gotham is massive and endlessly fascinating. This narrative of well over 1,000 pages, written after more than two decades of collaborative research by history professors Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, copiously chronicles New York City from the primeval days of the Lenape Indians to the era when, with Teddy Roosevelt as police commissioner, the great American city became regarded as "Capital of the World." The sheer bulk of the book may be off- putting, but the reader can use a typically New York approach: Those who don't settle in for the entire history can easily "commute" in and out to read individual chapters, which stand alone nicely and cover the major themes of particular eras very well.
While Gotham is fact-laden (with a critical apparatus that includes a bibliography and two indices--one for names, another for subjects), the prose admirably achieves both clarity and style. "What is our take, our angle, our schtick?" ask the authors, setting a distinctly New York tone in their introduction. No matter what it's called, their method of weaving together countless stories works wonderfully. The startlingly detailed research and lively writing bring innumerable characters (from Peter Minuit to Boss Tweed) to life, and even those who think they know the history of New York City will no doubt find surprises on nearly every page. Gotham is a rarity, reigning as both authoritative history and page-turning story. --Robert McNamara --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.>>
III THREE
3) Titan : The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
by Ron Chernow
1489535http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679757031/qid=979238644/sr=2-1/ref=sc_b_1/104-6421648-1489535
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
The patrician accent of George Plimpton (author of Truman Capote and The X Factor), with its edge of aristocracy and money, is perfectly suited for telling the rags-to-riches story of America's most famous businessman and philanthropist. Indeed, Plimpton seems to positively relish the superlatives that describe the life of John D. Rockefeller, who was far and away one of the most calculating, secretive, competitive, merciless, and talented figures ever to dominate the free market. Showing, early on, his keen attachment to hard work and keeping accounts, Rockefeller started out as an accountant in Cleveland. From there he went into the produce business, and then on to oil. By the time he was 31, he was the most powerful oil refinery owner in the world. His strategies for suppressing competition and controlling all aspects of the oil business while still paying attention to the smallest details make for dramatic listening in this well-documented and accessible narrative. Plimpton recounts how Rockefeller was the ultimate clutch player, calm in the face of adversity, a manager who was constantly searching for talented people and another way to grow Standard Oil into a megalithic modern corporation. Ultimately his rapacious business practices would make him head of the most powerful monopoly in America and the richest man in the world. Plimpton's engrossing reading of Titan brings out the human side of Rockefeller, a man of contradictions who was greedy yet giving, a capitalist villain and a do-gooder. A teetotalling Baptist, he began giving to charity when he was earning just a few dollars a week. As his wealth grew, so too his financial gifts. In the end, Rockefeller's philanthropic acts rivaled the precedents he set as a businessman. The oil baron died just short of his last goal--to reach the age of 100--but the indelible imprint he made on America's financial landscape will live on into the 21st century. (Running time: six hours, four cassettes) --A.E.D. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.
The New York Times Book Review, Jack Beatty
This book is a triumph of the art of biography. Unflaggingly interesting, it brings John D. Rockerfeller Sr. (1839-1937) to life through a sustained narrative portraiture of the large-scale 19th-century kind. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The New Yorker, John Cassidy
...prodigiously researched ... Chernow surveys almost everything that is already known about his subject ... and also unearths some original material. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Wall Street Journal, Maury Klein
Past authors have usually cast Rockefeller's life as some sort of morality play. To admirers he was a poster child for the Protestant ethic, with its aura of pious acquisitiveness, indomitable righteousness and relentless energy. To detractors he was a malign, unsleeping engine of greed bent on crushing all who opposed him. Rockefeller's career is a minefield of controversies and complexities through which Mr. Chernow makes his way with admirable balance and judgment. His most important contribution is to place Rockefeller's achievements in the context of the closest examination yet made of a bizarre and improbable life. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
Its narrative is wonderfully fluent and irresistibly compelling. It is filled with outsize characters involved in actions of great magnitude.... Rockefeller is vividly present in these pages.... --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Richard Parker
Chernow's gift is for providing us with an immense, almost baroque detailing of a complex human life. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The San Francisco Chronicle, Mark Dowie
The book is long. But it needs to be because this is no simple story. There are passages about fighting anti-trust legislation that will be of far greater interest to Bill Gates than the rest of us, and others that might be skimmed by all but the most dedicated students of business minutiae. But they are rare, short and worth the wade, for between them unfolds the mind of an unforgettable protagonist who took many of his secrets to the grave but left enough for Chernow to spin a timeless parable of our civilization. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Slate, Brent Staples
Inside every fat book is a slender one struggling to get out. The fat book here surveys the hundreds of books and articles already written about Rockefeller and re-examines transactions, business partners, and supporting characters in skillful--though excessive--detail. The slender book dispersed throughout the fat one is a fascinating meditation on the monopoly capitalist's moral life--and the role that evangelical Christianity played in it. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The Economist
...[a] thorough and thought-provoking biography... --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Upside
In the terrific book Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr., author Ron Chernow describes the social environment that spawned Rockefeller and the way in which he responded to his opportunities. Readers today will be struck by similarities to software titan Bill Gates. "For Rockefeller, success in the oil business required a bullish, nearly glandular faith in its future," writes Chernow. Like Gates, Rockefeller had the will to create and dominate his industry--by any means necessary. Titan is a long, dense book, but Chernow is such a good writer and Rockefeller such an important subject that it's well worth the time. You'll come away with not only a better understanding of one of the giants of the industrial age, but also of the lessons his story holds for the information age. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
Chernow won the National Book Award for his epic profile, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (1990). He followed that with another heroic work, The Warburgs: The Twentieth Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family (1993). Now he tackles John D. Rockefeller, both the man and his reputation, and considers along the way the "proper role" of government in economic affairs. No comprehensive biography of Rockefeller, who died in 1937, has been attempted since Allan Nevins' Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist (1953). Since then, the Rockefeller Archive Center opened its doors to researchers, and Chernow has taken advantage of newly available resources. Almost everything to date that has been written about Rockefeller shows the influence of the political tenor of the time in which it was written and deals more with his accomplishments--good or bad--than with the man himself. Chernow does a masterful job of illuminating Rockefeller's personal life and exploring his contradictory legacy. David Rouse --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Kirkus Reviews , March 1, 1998
The archetypal American institution-builderin industry, philanthropy, and the family dynasty bearing his nameis etched with uncommon objectivity and literary grace by National Book Awardwinning business historian Chernow (The Death of the Banker, 1997, etc.). ``Silence, mystery, and evasion'' perpetually enveloped the founder of the world's first great industrial trust, enabling him to crush rivals to his Standard Oil Co. The same cocoon presented daunting obstacles to earlier chroniclers of John D. Rockefeller Sr., both detractors (crusading muckraker Ida Tarbell) and supporters (Allan Nevins). Greater access to family archives, including a 1,700-page interview given by Rockefeller in retirement, enable Chernow to tear at this membrance of artifice and to offer as detailed, balanced, and psychologically insightful a portrait of the tycoon as we may ever have. Chernow traces Rockefeller's contradictory impulses toward greed and godliness to his parents. His father, who abandoned the family for years at a time to ply rustic innocents with patent medicines, left him with shameful secrets (e.g., bigamy and a rape indictment) and acquisitive instincts; his mother instilled a devotion to the Baptist faith that manifested itself in philanthropy. Chernow is careful to deny some of the hoariest myths of Rockefeller demonology, to detail his managerial gifts, and to underscore his crimes (his alliance with railroads in the shell organization the South Improvement Company involved rebates, insider intelligence, and ``grand-scale collusion such as American industry had never witnessed''). Above all, he offers a figure abounding in paradox: the prototypical monopolist who sought to eliminate what he saw as wasteful competition, only to spark an antitrust suit that forced the dissolution of his company; a homeopathy advocate who funded medical research that marginalized this form of medicine; and a tightly wound, self-possessed, despised businessman who in his 40-year retirement displayed a joy in play and a talent for charming reporters, winning the affection of the world. Business biography on a grand scale. (b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Book Description
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
"A biography that has many of the best attributes of a novel. . . . Wonderfully fluent and compelling." --The New York Times
"A triumph of the art of biography. Unflaggingly interesting, it brings John D. Rockefeller Sr. to life through sustained narrative portraiture of the large-scale, nineteenth-century kind."--The New York Times Book Review
In this endlessly engrossing book, National Book Award-winning biographer Ron Chernow devotes his penetrating powers of scholarship and insight to the Jekyll and Hyde of American capitalism. In the course of his nearly 98 years, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., was known as both a rapacious robber baron, whose Standard Oil Company rode roughshod over an industry, and a philanthropist who donated money lavishly to universities and medical centers. He was the terror of his competitors, the bogeyman of reformers, the delight of caricaturists--and an utter enigma.
Drawing on unprecedented access to Rockefeller's private papers, Chernow reconstructs his subject's troubled origins (his father was a swindler and a bigamist) and his single-minded pursuit of wealth. But he also uncovers the profound religiosity that drove him "to give all I could"; his devotion to his family; and the wry sense of humor that made him the country's most colorful codger. Titan is a magnificent biography --balanced, revelatory, and elegantly written.
"Important and impressive. . . . Reveals the man behind both the mask and the myth."--The Wall Street Journal
"One of the great American biographies. . . . [Chernow] writes with rich impartiality. He turns the machinations of Standard Oil . . . into fascinating social history."--Time
Synopsis
Rockefeller was the richest man of his age; he founded and built Standard Oil into the country's most powerful monopoly, reshaping American capitalism in the process. A man of fascinating contradictions, a devout Baptist who was the son of a bigamist and snake-oil peddler, he was secretive and self-contained, shrewd and tight-fisted, yet also a legendary philanthropist. Tapping previously unmined sources, Chernow has crafted a mesmerizing biography full of startling revelations that will stand forth as the most vivid, comprehensive portrait ever written of the mysterious billionaire. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.
From the Back Cover
"It's a thrill to read a biography as good as this one! Ron Chernow's Titan is a triumph, a brilliant, riveting, and monumental portrait of a fascinating human being and his age."--Robert A. Caro
--This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.
About the Author
Ron Chernow's first book, The House of Morgan, won the National Book Award and the Ambassador Award for the year's best study of American culture. His second book, The Warburgs, won the Eccles Prize as the Best Business Book of 1993 and was also selected by the American Library Association as one of that year's best nonfiction books. In reviewing his recent collection of essays, The Death of the Banker, The New York Times called the author "as elegant an architect of monumental histories as we've seen in decades and chose the paperback original as one of the year's Notable Books.
ABOUT THE READER
George Plimpton is the founding editor of The Paris Review and a special contributor to Sports Illustrated and Esquire. He is the author of such books as Truman Capote and The X Factor. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition. |
