David Rothkopf

Pearl Ruled

Rating: 3.25* of five (p189)

The Book Description: Each of them is one in a million. They number six thousand on a planet of six billion. They run our governments, our largest corporations, the powerhouses of international finance, the media, world religions, and, from the shadows, the world's most dangerous criminal and terrorist organizations. They are the global superclass, and they are shaping the history of our time.

Today's superclass has achieved unprecedented levels of show more wealth and power. They have globalized more rapidly than any other group. But do they have more in common with one another than with their own countrymen, as nationalist critics have argued? They control globalization more than anyone else. But has their influence fed the growing economic and social inequity that divides the world? What happens behind closed-door meetings in Davos or aboard corporate jets at 41,000 feet? Conspiracy or collaboration? Deal-making or idle self-indulgence? What does the rise of Asia and Latin America mean for the conventional wisdom that shapes our destinies? Who sets the rules for a group that operates beyond national laws?

Drawn from scores of exclusive interviews and extensive original reporting, Superclass answers all of these questions and more. It draws back the curtain on a privileged society that most of us know little about, even though it profoundly affects our everyday lives. It is the first in-depth examination of the connections between the global communities of leaders who are at the helm of every major enterprise on the planet and control its greatest wealth. And it is an unprecedented examination of the trends within the superclass, which are likely to alter our politics, our institutions, and the shape of the world in which we live.

David Rothkopf is the author of Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power. He is the president and chief executive of Garten Rothkopf, an international advisory firm; a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and a teacher of international affairs at Columbia University's Graduate School of International and Public Affairs.

My Review: I am on Outrage Overload. When next I am asked to declare citizenship, I'm going to say I am a denizen of Indignation. I just can not go further into this book, despite its enormous importance and its trenchant analysis of the world that so terrifyingly affirms that I'm correct to have nightmares of a world dominated by the contemptible and the greedy. The irredeemable people described in this book made me want to unswallow about every fifth paragraph.

It's election season here in the USA. I need not mention to any who have ever seen any of my posts before reading this review that I am a leftist, and more libertarian than authoritarian in my outlook. No candidate in US politics remotely approaches representing my viewpoint. REMOTELY. So I read books that explain the way these horrid people “think” in order to make the least bad decisions. I read books like Superclass to see what the politicos we-the-people end up sending into office are up against. (I do not count the president or his challenger among the ~6,000 Superclass members Rothkopf describes.)

But I've collapsed. I can't do any more. Yes I'll vote. No I won't vote for a theocrat with a mercantilist running mate. But I am all out of hope for the future, and all out of faith in the basic human decency of anyone who has more than $1.59 in his bank account.

Never the chirpiest or most sanguine of men, I'm now more liable than ever to pick up a red-hot poker and jab it at an office-holder than to greet her warmly and offer a donation to her re-election campaign. As to business leaders, I herewith volunteer for the firing squads that will eliminate them come the Revolution. I know how to shoot, and the chance to blast a Walton or a Koch sounds just ducky to me.

But that, I am sadly certain, is only a lonely old man's dream. The sheeple of Murrika will never rise up. They, too, will one day be the Rich and Powerful. If they work and pray and atone for their sins to the slitty-eyed vicious bastard of a gawd they've created, they will Be Winners!

Ha. As if. And reading this book would explain to the sheeple just exactly why that's such a crock of moldy cat poop. Which is why they won't, and why I had to stop.

Recommended to any and every one who wants to know why the world is how it is, and isn't yet terminally and cynically depressed already.

You will be. show less

American Resistance by David Rothkopf is an insightful and spot on account of the ways in which many of the career public servants helped save (for now) democracy from the authoritarian attempts to undermine it by Trump and his flunkies.

You'll see the people who either support Trump (like liquidbrains) or are sympathetic to the ideals he encourages (usually with cries of being too biased) do what they can to give the book less credit than it deserves. Well, one-star ratings with no review show more (because liquidbrains can't read well enough to grasp the book) only speaks to the person's idiocy, so ignore the moron. The ones who complain about not being unbiased, well, when someone who supports their country's democracy is writing about someone who is doing everything possible to destroy it, I don't think I will call their unwillingness to pull punches being biased, but rather very frank in their portrayal of the orange menace.

My biggest issue with the book isn't one of content but of sourcing. Much of what he talks about is either from personal interviews (which he usually mentions in the text) or has been widely circulated elsewhere. Even though we know about, for instance, Trump's exaggeration of his time at military school and that it has been verified, it would have been nice to have more notes showing sources. It isn't that I doubt very much in the book, but those who want to defend the anti-democracy leanings of the former moron-in-chief will use the lack of source acknowledgements as ammunition to pretend to find fault with the book. Unless the notes are only missing from the ARC I read, this is a negative. If the final copy has notes, well, "never mind."

Like many Americans I often make fun of civil servants at the same time that I acknowledge they are the ones keeping the country on a relatively even keel. This volume shows just how important these people are. It isn't about whether many of them lean left or right, they all support the idea of a government that tries to function well and for the benefit of all. They perform their duties as required even if they don't agree completely with the policies. But when the attempts at creating new policies circumvent established norms and are designed to destroy the government, they find every conceivable legal path to avoid implementing them. And we need to thank them.

I would recommend this to those who know how lucky we as a nation, as well as the world at large, were to dodge the bullet that was the tRump administration. This shows some of the ways honorable people resisted. Did they have personal reasons as well as public good? Of course! We all have multiple reasons for what we do. It is horribly disingenuous to pretend that having those other reasons as well as doing good somehow minimizes the good that was done.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. show less

Have you guys ever watched a TED Talk? Well, apparently some of those Ted Talks are turned into published works so that the ideas can be delved into a little deeper. (To see more you can visit their website here. (They haven't asked me to review today's book by the way.)) I hadn't watched David Rothkopf's talk but The Great Questions of Tomorrow was featured in my regular 'what's new at Simon & Schuster' email and it seemed to be calling my name. Rothkopf is exploring a very wide and diverse show more range of topics with a central theme of 'what does this mean for the future?' running through them all. I guess it should come as no surprise that this book thoroughly freaked me out while at the same time fascinating me. Have you thought about the future of drone warfare and whether or not it might constitute the necessity for intelligent machines to have rights as members of society? WELL, NOW YOU ARE. He jumped from frightening scenarios like that to ones that hadn't even occurred to me such as complete mobile banking which would see the demise of physical currency and brick and mortar banks. O_O I especially enjoyed his take on government and how we should be trying to elect leaders who not only understand technology but can look towards the future to prepare accordingly. His example of how this was not done was that just because there was one shoe bomber it shouldn't mean we have to remove our shoes at airports into perpetuity. All in all, it was a fascinating read that I zipped right through. It's great for the people in your life (or yourself!) that enjoy philosophical discussions about the future and how actions of today and yesterday have and should continue to have direct bearing on how we handle events in the future. 10/10 show less

I have read several books about the state of our politics since the election of the 45th president and the tragedy into which this plunged this nation. This book is, by far, the best among them because it places the horror of the last five years in historical context. The use of language is magnificent. The sentiment is positive. Highly recommended.