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| The Pornography of Power | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: Grand Central Publishing
Category: EBooks
List Price: $18.99
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $9.00 (47%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 24853
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.931
ASIN: B00196WV2O
Publication Date: June 9, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
Called "one of the best reporters of our time" by Joan Didion, Robert Scheer brings a lifetime of journalistic acuity to his impassioned call for a new way of thinking about national defense. He describes the useless weapons we manufacture; the quiet expansion of our military presence throughout the world; the insanity of our nuclear strategy; the immorality of corporations profiting in Iraq; and the arrogance of our foreign policy. Scheer's perspective is wholeheartedly liberal. He draws upon thirty years of experience to prove why progressive solutions will work.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
It's Alive and It's Not Boris Karloff September 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
So why does Boeing insist on making the wasteful and unneccessary C-17 military transport when not even the Pentagon wants it. Why not, for example, build civilian transports instead. Well, it's really a no-brainer, as they say. The C-17 pumps out a profit margin of 13 %, while the most profitable of airliners, the 747, earns less than 5% (p. 97). Think what that profit differential does for Boeing on Wall Street or for executive stock bonuses. And though Scheer doesn't mention it, military contractors don't have to claw as hard for the same buck as civilian outfits.
Then too, it's not like the C-17 is an isolated case. Think super-sophisticated jet fighters and cutting-edge submarines, all the billions being spent to defeat guys with razor blades and cell phones. There's a disconnect somewhere, but then maybe we're missing the dots. The book zeroes in on our now notorious military-industrial (& congressional) complex, showing how it's become all stomach and no brain, feasting like Frankenstein on the national treasury with no comparable enemy in sight. No wonder that despite our forefathers, we go in search of dragons to slay and where there are only toads, we make them into dragons. In short, our Frankenstein creation is running amok and feeds only on cash dollars.
Scheer's book reads more like an longer version of his late, lamented op-ed's in the LA Times, i.e. before the Tribune Co. decided he'd become bad for business and put a nice safe centrist in his place. Nonetheless, the story can't be told often enough. Of all discretionary spending (non-entitlement), 59% goes for the Pentagon, while the other 41% is for everything else, like health, transportation, education, and so on (p. 169). No wonder levees break, bridges fall down, and we rank somewhere behind Luxembourg in math and science.
Of course, the budget-gobbling monster couldn't continue without its shills in congress, the Pentagon, and corporate- sponsored think tanks. It's the Richard Perle, Barbara Boxer-type stories that the book also tells-- these little Igor's that keep the creature's pulse going. However, the author really doesn't face up to the problem of how we get out of this unsustainable war-making economy. Just where are the comparable civilian jobs when Corporate America is moving overseas and leaving us Walmart instead. No, we're in a pickle that's been building for some time and we best face up to it. The era of American exceptionalism is over. The empire we've built of which the military-industrial Frankenstein is the over-sized muscle is beginning to feast on us too. And only an aroused citizenry with pitchforks can turn up the heat to corral the monster in our midst.
 All hail! (the storm of efforts to boost defense spending) August 29, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Not one to mince words, President Calvin Coolidge declared: "The business of America is business." Deftly, Robert Scheer lays out
a chilling indictment of the military-industrial complex, getting
right to the point. Exposing the moral bankruptcy of the curious
cabal called neoconservatives, the author spotlights decades of a methodical looting of our national treasury. Blurring the divide
between the public and the private sectors, neocons introduced us
to a corollary to Coolidge's dictum: The business of business is
war.
I am reminded of William Randolph Hearst's reply to a telegram he received from the reporter he had dispatched to Cuba to cover the
threat of hostilities there, in the late 1890s. "No war, here, I
am coming home." Tersely, Hearst is reported to have said: "You
do the reporting; I'll supply the war."
Scrolling down to World War II, we see Senator (later, President)
Harry Truman addressing what he called the "jangles and jumbles"
in military appropriations, the needless duplication in military facilities, the boondoggles and cost-overruns in the ongoing war
efort.
This is an important book.
You dropped a bomb on me July 7, 2008
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
THE PORNOGRAPHY OF POWER serves as an update to the World War I-era book WAR IS A RACKET. The former expands on the latter's theme of money, not security, as the reason for both military action and peacetime armed forces spending. (You can read WAR IS A RACKET for free on-line with a web search of the title.)
A sensible response to box cutters and poorly-constructed cockpit doors should cost taxpayers less than billions of dollars for F-22 Raptor fighter planes. Yet as THE PORNOGRAPHY OF POWER details, the Bush Administration and Congress used the September 11, 2001, hijackings as an excuse to place orders for those and many other expensive, unnecessary killing machines beneath the Christmas trees of their weapons manufacturer campaign contributors.
Oh, and don't forget jobs. As if it were a contest to see if people will accept the stupidest rationale for spending tax dollars on overpriced, needless weapons, public officials cite jobs, THE PORNOGRAPHY OF POWER recounts. Imagine the community improvement were the government to use all that money on hospitals, schools or infrastructure instead of superfluous military stuff - while creating as many and probably a lot more paychecks. Perhaps school children should lobby Congress.
Nearly 100 years since World War I, war still proves the greatest racket. Read THE PORNOGRAPHY OF POWER.
 Defense Policy Not Trashed July 4, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book is disappointing for a writer of Robert Scheer's eminence. It is mostly a rehash of newspaper articles. It provides nothing new despite that there is so much new material that could have been used.
Ed Spievack
Down With The Military-Industrial Complex ! July 4, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
In a scathing examination of the bloated defense contracting industry, journalist Scheer exposes how the military-industrial complex manufactures and acquires advanced weaponry that has nothing to do with America's defense needs. Not only does the bloated "defense" budget entail untold waste and opportunity cost -- about 60% of each tax dollar goes for "defense," while more easily funded domestic priorities go unaddressed -- but the acquisition of this unnecessary military hardware, originally intended to defeat a Cold War foe that no longer exists, even drives our military and foreign policy decisionmaking. Scheer shows that this waste often takes the form of "pork" that Congress members are loath to relinquish. Scheer has fittingly dedicated this book to a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, whose warnings about the "military-industrial complex" have proven prescient. An excellent, in-depth examination of an important issue that neither party seems to want to tackle.
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