Catastrophe (Hardcover)
Catastrophe (Hardcover)
Catastrophe (Hardcover) Reviews
When the critics start calling this book “Extreme Right Wing Dribble”, remember that the author of this dire warning was Bill Clinton’s Political Advisor for two decades. He helped make him President of the USA. So if Dick Morris is warning that a very dangerous Government created tidal wave is approaching, maybe we all should take time to check it out and head for the high ground if he is correct? This is not the only voice screaming in the wilderness. Glenn Beck has just published a book of similar warnings called “Common Sense.”
This 359-page tome has 16 chapters included in three major sections. Those overall sections are titled “How Obama Is Causing A Catastrophe,” “How Congress Causes Catastrophe” and “How Special Interests Cause Catastrophe.” The authors don’t pull any punches or go easy on any of the guilty parties responsible for this oncoming tragedy. “At a time when we needed a pragmatic centrist to lead us out of recession, we got a doctrinaire socialist who wants to use the crisis to put the government in charge of the economy and enact European Socialism here in the United States. Cars, banks–what’s next? He will keep at it until Washington governs every major business in America and sets all our salaries.” Never mind that socialism has never worked anywhere in the history of the world.
The individual chapter headings provide a pretty decent idea of the book’s content. “Obama’s War on Prosperity”, “The Bank Bailout That Bombed”, ” Obama’s Health Care Catastrophe”, “Obama’s Blueprint for Political Domination”, “Christopher Dodd and Charles Rangel: From Idealistic Reformers to Privileged Insiders” and “The Sheer Chutzpah of Countryside Financial Executives” reveal much and the material in those chapters backs up the chapter titles. The book also has an excellent introduction and nearly forty pages of Appendixes.
The basic theme is “It’s time to take back our country. Now. It’s that simple. It’s that urgent.”
“Obama has cancelled the war on terror and declared a war on prosperity.”
The President was not kidding when he told “Joe the plumber” that what he knew about was redistributing wealth. He stopped talking about “Civil War Reparations” early in the campaign and the media went along with burying that hot button issue. The same media ignored Mr. Obama’s almost complete lack of work experience and his connections with ACORN which is about to change it’s name and go underground and probably re-emerge in control of the tax payer funded “AmeriCorps” and/or a Homeland Security Army. Acorn isn’t really “COIN of the realm.” It may be the administrations muscle, but it’s not yet government financed.
Does anyone else hear any echoes of the rise of Hitler and Nazism?
“Upper-income taxpayers must feel a bit like hogs at the Chicago stockyards–being fattened with stimulus spending so they can be slaughtered with tax increases two years down the road…all to make a nice breakfast for the federal government.”"Obama cannot succeed by waging war on the rich. It didn’t work when FDR tried it, and it cannot work now.”
The speed at which all these changes are being pushed through under the Liberals two favorite disguises “Crisis” and “For the Children” resembles an out-of-control train. As Morris and co-author McGann so clearly report, this government is not only bankrupt but also it is in the process of bankrupting all future generations of Americas. The twin crisis of a bankrupt Social Security System and Medicare will arrive within the next eight years and there will be no money to save it. Worse, the United States won’t be able to borrow the money either. Our freedoms and our economy are on the verge of a virtual collapse. Wake Up America! The Snake Oil Salesmen have arrived. Normally, this recession would be over. Not this time. Why?
Believe it or not, it’s because the new administration doesn’t want it to return to normal and its programs are consciously designed to impede any recovery. Mr. Morris, by the way, predicted all this in print and on television more than a year ago when everything in the economy appeared rosy and now he can sit back and say, “I told you so!” Unfortunately he doesn’t want to be able to do that, because the next steps in his predictions will take away most of America’s wealth and freedoms. This is a very important read for anyone interested in his freedom and well being.
I’m not necessarily a fan of Dick Morris, but he does know how to write a book. At nearly 360 pages, Catastrophe is an interesting read and certainly thought provoking. If only half of what he and Eileen McGann say is true, then the middle class really is in danger of losing the country. As someone who has been on the right side of center on the political continuum, I’ve become leery of both the left and the right in recent years. As an American I’m distrustful of the government, whether red or blue and believe that the less government we have the better off we are.
As Morris and McGann point out, the United States’ economy is sliding (slipping might be a better term) into socialism, something, by the way, that is fairly obvious to anyone who learned and retained anything from their freshmen Economics in college. That the government is taking over the banking, insurance, and auto industries is pretty obvious. The next target is the healthcare system and no one seems to be able to stop what seems to be inevitable. All of this, by the way, is unconstitutional but no one, outside a few conservative voices, and I mean no one, is pointing that out.
Chris Dodd, Teddy Kennedy (senior and Jr.) Charley Rangel, and Bill Clinton are all singled out for attention by Morris and McGann. But others are mentioned as well, such as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.
One disturbing surprise for me in Catastrophe is the idea that American courts may become influenced by Shariah Law. This phenomenon has been reported in various sources as already happening in several European countries, but the idea that the American justice system would make this mistake is mind boggling, and unacceptable. Certainly Constitutional Law will continue to be the only law practiced in the courts in the United States. Shariah law is fine in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc. but, respectfully, that’s where it should stay.
Perhaps the most serious mention in Catastrophe is the fact that ACORN will be involved in collecting data for the 2010 census. If this doesn’t scare you, nothing will. ACORN has already been called to task about questionable voter registrations in several cities and also have refused to let auditors look at their books. Why would we let them count the population? Scary!
There are some claims made by Morris that I have a hard time understanding. For example, that Obama wants the current banking system to fail so that he can nationalize banking entirely. I have a hard time understanding how anyone will benefit from this, liberals or conservatives. Further, Morris makes the claim Obama wants to dismantle the war on terror. Again, I can’t see how anyone benefits from this, other than our enemies.
Dick Morris knows how to stir the pot. He’s certainly stirred up a hornets nest with Catastrophe. Like him or not, he does raise some thought provoking ideas, some of which are quite alarming. However you view the world you should enjoy the book.
If an author can be right on without being completely objective, Dick Morris and Eileen McGann have done it in “Catastrophe.” In the business of helping people with their finances, this book is clearly of interest. First by going over the “stimulus” package, which the authors show to be nothing more than a boondoggle to enrich special interests ($2 million for “Swine Odor and Manure Management Research in Iowa, anyone?) that won’t even take effect until 2015 for some instances. Please tell me how the money is supposed to stimulate the economy when it won’t even be spent for another 6 years. Just looking at the pages upon pages of government stimulus programs was dizzying. I haven’t seen that many zeros in all the tax forms I’ve ever seen.
The authors then go on to critique the bailouts, which I believe were a worse afront to the American way. They show how Obama intends to “socialize” the banking system (step 2 was: even if banks try to repay the TARP money, don’t let them; that was already seen in the stress tests that “allowed” banks to repay government funds). Unfortunately, Morris is too partisan on this issue. The bailouts were passed under Bush, who championed them. There was very little mention of this–where’s the criticism of Bush?
Morris and McGann go on to describe the corruption in Illinois, ear marks, , Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and, peculiarly enough: Shariah law being infused into the elite ranks of the economy.
This book is a deecent read if you can get past the partisanship and it compliments nicely Surviving the Second Great Depression (with some unconventional techniques on benefiting in this economy and Meltdown (with a comprehensive look into the bigger picture of what got us into the mess), books that more succinctly describe what got us into this economic mess (and no, it wasn’t Obama’s fault, though, as Morris makes plain, he is turning a crisis into a catastrophe). But, as the authors tell us, Obama is our president, not our dictator. We can still do something to prevent the chipping away of liberty.
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