Reddit reviews Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans-Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild

If you aren't already aware, this evidence, research and journalism was all done by Greg Palast and his team.

Greg Palast is an exiled American Journalist, who is forced to publish articles through the BBC and through his book publisher 'Plume'.

I recommend his wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Palast) and the book (the new revision) that I read (which contains this reference research among MUCH more, from the 2004 elections until current situations with OPEC): http://www.amazon.ca/Armed-Madhouse-Greg-Palast/dp/0452288312/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220824660

The end.

My 2¢: the Euro is a very flawed currency. The Euro block is not an optimal currency area (see the Wiki for the criteria outlining what makes a currency area optimal).

But worse than that, all Euro block countries are subject to the Maastricht Treaty. This treaty limits the debt and deficits of member nations. Now, this may sound like a good thing, but in times of financial crisis, it's useful for governments to be able to stimulate their economies with deficit spending(what is called a Keynesian stimulus).

As Greg Palast wrote in Armed Madhouse:

> [Robert Mundell, the architect of the Euro,] explained how it will work: “Monetary discipline forces fiscal discipline on the politicians as well.” What he means is that every Euro nation must adhere to strict limits on bor­rowing (no more than 60% of GDP) and on deficits (no more than 3% of the government budgets). Furthermore, nations will no longer have their own central banks printing money. That’s all quite extraor­dinary, really. No congress of a European nation may call on the key tools used to pull a nation out of a recession (increased government spending to create jobs, lowering interest rates to boost investment, printing more money to create demand through more liquidity).

> [...] If a nation can’t control its own interest rates, borrowing, or money supply, how can it keep up employment? Answer: by stealing the jobs from their Euro neighbors, luring industry away by cutting out rules and slashing business taxes.

I agree he got carried away in this piece. As I read through it really struck me how poorly written it was - a lot of hyperbole and insinuation. After watching this speech he gave in 2007 (worth watching, BTW) I went out and bought his book Armed Madhouse and read the whole thing. What I came away from it with was that he does indeed have the data to back up what he's saying, but he's too dramatic about how he's saying it.

In the case of the article OP linked to it seems he used all of his dramatic speech and didn't really nail down the concrete elements that a reader needs to know. I suppose if he'd had an entire chapter's space to ramble maybe he would've gotten around to explaining it better. Or maybe I'm just enough of a discerning reader that I was able to get through his book and pull the relevant info from the irrelevant fluff around it. I do remember there were passages where I thought to myself, "Come on, pull it together."

The funny/sad thing was ... I read the article thinking about how poorly written it was, then scrolled up to see who the author was, and thought, "Oh Greg, why'd you have to do that? You're just making yourself look bad now."

Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast