Levels of Government Books - Page 12

Community Policing: Partnerships for Problem Solving (with InfoTrac®)

Linda S. Miller, Kären M. Hess

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Updated line-by-line and focusing throughout on the dual themes of problem solving and community/police collaboration and partnerships, this comprehensive text provides law enforcement students and police professionals with a career-focused up-to-the minute look at effective community policing. After presenting an historical perspective and the philosophy behind the movement, police veteran Linda S. Miller and renowned criminal justice educator Kären M. Hess turn to the practical strategies and essential skills needed to implement realistic, workable problem solving within communities today. And, because changes in technology and society continually present new challenges to police officers, COMMUNITY POLICING: PARTNERSHIPS FOR PROBLEM SOLVING (formerly titled THE POLICE IN THE COMMUNITY: STRATEGIES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY) illustrates the application of procedures to the latest issues, preparing students and professionals to understand the opportunities and responsibilities now faced by the police and the community they serve.

Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World

Ashraf Ghani, Clare Lockhart

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Today between forty and sixty nations, home to over a billion people, have either collapsed or are teetering on the brink of failure. The world's worst problems--terrorism, drugs and human trafficking, absolute poverty, ethnic conflict, disease, genocide--originate in such states, and the international community has devoted billions of dollars to solving the problem. Yet by and large the effort has not succeeded.
Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart have taken an active part in the effort to save failed states for many years, serving as World Bank officials, as advisers to the UN, and as high-level participants in the new government of Afghanistan. Now, in Fixing Failed States, they describe the issue--vividly and convincingly--offering an on-the-ground picture of why past efforts have not worked and advancing a groundbreaking new solution to this most pressing of global crises. Military force, while certainly necessary on occasion, cannot solve the fundamental problems, and humanitarian interventions cost billions yet do not leave capable states in their wake. Ghani and Lockhart argue that only an integrated state-building approach can heal these failing countries. As they explain, many of these countries already have the resources they need, if only we knew how to connect them to global knowledge and put them to work in the right way. Their state-building strategy, which assigns responsibility equally among the international community, national leaders, and citizens, maps out a clear path to political and economic stability. The authors provide a clear, practical framework for achieving these ends, supporting their case with first-hand examples of struggling territories such as Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo and Nepal as well as the world's success stories--Singapore, Ireland, and even the American South.
The battle against terror, poverty, climate change, and much more cannot be won unless we can save these nations. In Fixing Fixed States, two of the world's foremost authorities offer a way out of the current crisis--a framework for re-imagining the international system. It is a book that is unique in its essential optimism--an optimism that the authors have earned through their own substantial real-world efforts in failed states.

Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy

Lindsay Moran

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Total reviews: 99 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A clever, funny memoir from a young woman who fulfills her Mission: Impossible dreams by joining the CIA, only to discover that the life of a spy is not at all what she expected.

Lindsay Moran was a bright-eyed, idealistic Harvard graduate who hoped to serve her patriotic duty while living a life she'd first dreamed of as a child watching James Bond movies and reading Harriet the Spy. After applying to the CIA and passing lie detector tests, background investigations, and psychological screenings, she soon found herself in training at the Farm, learning how to crash cars through barriers at a hundred miles an hour, not to mention how to withstand interrogation.

But she was simultaneously learning that the life of a spy wasn't nearly the glamorous-not to mention principled-job she thought it would be. Her first posting, to Macedonia, confirmed it, as she witnessed firsthand the culture inside an organization whose intelligence failures led to tragic results during her own tenure. With a true story both thoughtful and funny, a wonderful new talent pulls open the doors to the CIA.

India: The Emerging Giant

Arvind Panagariya

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India is not only the world's largest and fiercely independent democracy, but also an emerging economic giant. But to date there has been no comprehensive account of India's remarkable growth or the role policy has played in fueling this expansion. India: The Emerging Giant fills this gap, shedding light on one of the most successful experiments in economic development in modern history.
Why did the early promise of the Indian economy not materialize and what led to its eventual turnaround? What policy initiatives have been undertaken in the last twenty years and how do they relate to the upward shift in the growth rate? What must be done to push the growth rate to double-digit levels? To answer these crucial questions, Arvind Panagariya offers a brilliant analysis of India's economy over the last fifty years--from the promising start in the 1950s, to the near debacle of the 1970s (when India came to be regarded as a "basket case"), to the phenomenal about face of the last two decades. The author illuminates the ways that government policies have promoted economic growth (or, in the case of Indira Gandhi's policies, economic stagnation), and offers insightful discussions of such key topics as poverty and inequality, tax reform, telecommunications (perhaps the single most important success story), agriculture and transportation, and the government's role in health, education, and sanitation.
The dramatic change in the fortunes of 1.1 billion people has, not surprisingly, generated tremendous interest in the economy of India. Arvind Panagariya offers the first major account of how this has come about and what more India must do to sustain its rapid growth and alleviate poverty. It will be must reading for everyone interested in modern India, foreign affairs, or the world economy.
An Economist Best Book of 2008.

State and Local Government

Ann O'M. Bowman, Richard C. Kearney

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The Fifth Edition provides comprehensive and current coverage of institutions, political behavior, and policy making at the state and local level. Updated to reflect recent policy changes and challenges, the text strives to foster student interest and involvement in local politics, stressing that state government continues to have more legislative responsibility.

With an up-to-date focus on policy, the text covers important issues facing institutions in this milieu such as education, economic development, social welfare, and health care.

• Revised web resources in every chapter offer the latest information on using the Internet to research state and local government.
• Expanded box features, Debating Politics and Breaking New Ground, reflect the text's focus on devolution, new challenges facing state and local governments, and the differing policies among states.

One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth

Dani Rodrik

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In One Economics, Many Recipes, leading economist Dani Rodrik argues that neither globalizers nor antiglobalizers have got it right. While economic globalization can be a boon for countries that are trying to dig out of poverty, success usually requires following policies that are tailored to local economic and political realities rather than obeying the dictates of the international globalization establishment. A definitive statement of Rodrik's original and influential perspective on economic growth and globalization, One Economics, Many Recipes shows how successful countries craft their own unique strategies--and what other countries can learn from them.

To most proglobalizers, globalization is a source of economic salvation for developing nations, and to fully benefit from it nations must follow a universal set of rules designed by organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization and enforced by international investors and capital markets. But to most antiglobalizers, such global rules spell nothing but trouble, and the more poor nations shield themselves from them, the better off they are. Rodrik rejects the simplifications of both sides, showing that poor countries get rich not by copying what Washington technocrats preach or what others have done, but by overcoming their own highly specific constraints. And, far from conflicting with economic science, this is exactly what good economics teaches.

New American Democracy, The (5th Edition) (MyPoliSciLab Series)

Morris P. Fiorina, Paul E. Peterson, Bertram Johnson, William G. Mayer

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With an emphasis on elections and their importance in our political system, Morris Fiorina and Paul Peterson's groundbreaking text offers a stimulating, analytical approach to American government that engages students as it gives them a unique understanding of their political system as it exists and functions today. The accessibility of instant public opinion polls, the growing influence of Internet, the ubiquitous nature of the news media, and the increasingly important role of interest groups--all of which Fiorina and Peterson use to demonstrate that America is moving toward a more popular democracy--have blurred the lines between campaigning and governing. Politicians today are constantly engaged in the campaign process--a "permanent campaign"--this has profoundly affected how our government functions today. The fifth edition of this presitgious text has been brought completely up-to-date through the second George W.Bush administration and 2006 midterm elections, includes engaging debate-style readings throughout, and is now available in a unique "Sandbox" format that allows instructors to seamlessly blend text chapters with policy material and/or selections from the "Great Questions in Politics" series.

The Environmental Case: Translating Values into Policy

Judith A. Layzer

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The Environmental Case gives readers a unique, first-hand feel for some of the most interesting and illuminating controversies in U.S. environmental policymaking--including the disaster at Love Canal, the dispute over snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park, and the global warming debate. Through 16 carefully constructed cases, Layzer covers the spectrum of environmental issues, from habitat conservation, air and water pollution, and overfishing to environmental justice and urban growth management. Each case elucidates various aspects of the U.S. political system but is also linked to the others by two main themes: environmental conflicts are, at heart, conflicts between advocates with fundamentally different values, and the way problems are framed in politics plays a central role in shaping how those values get translated into policies.

This second edition showcases all 12 of the original cases, thoroughly revised and updated. In addition, Layzer has added four new cases:

• Community activism propels the Dudley Street Neighborhood Association to fight for environmental justice and equitable redevelopment of a once-distressed area in the heart of Boston.
• The use of snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park divides environmentalists into bitterly opposing camps: those who regard parks as playgrounds and support unlimited motorized access, and those who advocate more conservative management that emphasizes protection of the park's flora, fauna, and quiet serenity.
• In the tuna/dolphin and shrimp/turtle disputes, competing advocates debate whether U.S. environmental protection measures constitute non-tariff barriers to trade and, more broadly, whether trade liberalization is good for the environment.
• Opponents of growth management campaign to undermine the city of Portland's strict policies curbing urban sprawl, the most stringent in the nation.

Layzer provides maps, tables, figures, questions to consider, recommended readings, and useful websites to help readers think critically and actively about the issues raised in each case and facilitate further research.

Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing

Tim Shorrock

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Useful Contribution, Neglects Outputs & Constituencies 4 out of 5 stars.
22 of 24 people found this review helpful.

Edit of 4 Jun 08 to strongly recommend Retired Reader's review as a companion to my own observations.

I sat down with this book today and found it absorbing. It is perhaps the best overview for anyone of names and numbers associated with the $60 billion (or more, perhaps as much as $75 billion) a year we waste on the 4% we can steal, and next to nothing on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). The book loses one star for failing to integrate over 300 relevant books (see the annotated bibliographies to my first two books), and for failing to apply any visualization at all. This book is a mass of facts and figures, names and places. With or without visualization, it is a seminal reference point and recommended for all university and public libraries.

The book focuses mostly on technical waste--the inputs--and does not cover outputs nor constituencies. The reality is as General Zinni has put it so well: the IC produces 4% of what is needed, at a cost so horrendously wasteful as to warrant severe outrage among all taxpayers.

Having read the book, I can state that the author's agenda, if he has one, is to expose the risk to our civil liberties of creating a national surveillance state in which the bulk of the expertise is outside the government and subject to corruption and cronyism as well as lack of oversight.

Here are three tid-bits that strongly support the author's general intent, and some links.

1) Secret intelligence scam #1 is that there is no penalty for failure. Lockheed can build a satellite system that does not work (for NASA as well as the secret world--two different failures--or get the metrics wrong so priceless outer space research does not deploy a parachute--}and get another contract. Similarly SAIC with Trailblazer, CACI in Iraq, Blackwater murdering civilians and ramming old men in old cars out of the way, this is all a total disgrace to America.

2) "Butts in seats" means that most of our money goes to US citizens with clearances who know nothing of the real world, *and* the contractor gets 150% of their salary as "overhead." That is scam #2.

3) Scam #3 is that the so-called policy world, when it exists, does not really care what the secret world has to say, unless it justifies elective wars, secret prisons in the US (Halliburton) and so on. Dick Cheney ended the policy process in this administration. But even without Cheney and his gang of proven liars, the dirty little secret of the secret world is that a) there is no one place where all information comes together to be made sense of; and b) less than 1% of what we collect gets looked at by a human; and c) most of the policy world could care less what Top Secret Codeword information is placed before them--as Colin Powell says so memorably in his autobiography, he preferred the Early Bird compilation of news clippings.

I have been saying since 1988 that the secret emperor is not just naked, but institutionalized lunacy. Books like this are helpful, eventually the public will hear our voice.

Here are specific tid-bits that caught my attention as I went through the book.

+ Two errors in reference to me: I was neither a committee chair nor a program director. The author does quote me accurately.

+ Early on I am impressed to note documented facts:

- 50% of the clandestine case officers at CIA are contractors

- 35% of the Defense Intelligence Agency workforce is contracted

- Virtually 100% of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is contracted

- 70% of all US Intelligence Community funds are spent on external contracts rather than internal capabilities.

- Booz Allen Hamilton has 10,000 employees with Top Secret Codeword clearances

- Revolving door is gutting the agencies (and most retirements will take place between 2007 to 2012--we have no middle management, no bench).

- Total Information Awareness (TIA) program never died, it went underground

- Pentagon under Cheney, then Cheney-Rumsfeld, now Cheney-Gates appears committed to outsourcing everything except the shooting--this is very very bad for all of us

- SIGINT data stream is wagging the dog--three V's of unstructured data are volume, velocity, and variety (183 languages we don't speak) but the author cited General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret) telling a conference that all the high-tech in the world cannot give him plans and intentions on the battlefield.

- History of outsourcing goes back to the Odeen (CEO BDM) report sponsored by the Defense Science Board, this was the beginning of trying to privatize everything possible. Combined with the Pentagon's inherent disrespect for the CIA, it made privatizing intelligence even more attractive.

- McConnell comes out of this book looking respectable, Woolsey and Tenet less so. Dempsey was not a Navy officer by career--they sent her to knife and fork school when she managed the Navy intelligence budget within GDIP, much as the USMC took care of Arnold Punaro who ultimately made one-star while being Staff Director of the SASC. Although the author excels at naming names, and he discusses failures where they are known, there is very little substantive understanding of how the US IC has collapsed on all fronts--personnel, budget, finance, facilities, global presence, global coverage, relevance to the customer, etcetera.

- CACI and SAIC come out of this book looking truly terrible, while ManTech and Booz Allen Hamilton come out as moderately competent. I have to remind myself that contractors are not evil--they do what we incentivize them to do, and right now it is OUT OF CONTROL.

- He names LtGen Ken Minihan, USAF, as the de facto ideologist for the intelligence-industrial complex, and provides a good review of how venture capital funds were created to focus specifically on secret contracts.

- John Brennan emerges from this book as the man behind the curtain, levering the International and National Security Alliance (INSA) to further the complex. I disagree with the author's characterization of the DNI and INSA alliance as unethical. I do however agree that it is unprofessional in that INSA is executing myopic orders and not contributing at all to the needed cross-fertilization and understanding of where the real innovation is happening, in Collective, Peace, and Commercial Intelligence (the latter the complete opposite of Contractor Intelligence, or butts in seats).

See also:
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Blond Ghost
The Very Best Men Four Who Dared:The Early Years of the CIA
Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam

There are success stories. Here are two books on one such case, where the White House and the Pentagon chose not to act over four days:
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
Jawbreaker: The Attack on bin Laden and al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander

Bottom line books:
On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

I put this book down wishing that the field of cognitive science would evolve more quickly. Our profession is in disarray, in confusion, seeking to substitute butts in seats and dollars for cultural, linguistic, historical, and other forms of context. We need several multinational life boats of change catalysts--such as a Multinational Decision Support Center in Tampa, taking over the rapidly vacating Coalition Coordinating Center, in order to create the world's first unclassified intelligence center dedicated to providing open decision support to all parties active in stabilization & reconstruction, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief (both at home and abroad). The IC is, as I said in Forbes ASAP, Inside Out and Upside Down. This is not the contractor's fault. It is our fault. We are a Dumb Nation instead of a Smart Nation. Bad. Very bad.

Editorial Review:

In Spies for Hire, investigative reporter Tim Shorrock lifts the veil off a major story the government doesn't want us to know about---the massive outsourcing of top-secret intelligence activities to private-sector contractors.

By Way of Deception : The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer

Victor Ostrovsky, Claire Hoy

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The first time the Mossad came calling, they wanted Victor Ostrovsky for their assassination unit, the kidon. He turned them down. The next time, he agreed to enter the grueling three-year training program to become a katsa, or intelligence case officer, for the legendary Israeli spy organization. By Way of Deception is the explosive chronicle of his experiences in the Mossad, and of two decades of their frightening and often ruthless covert activities around the world. Penetrating far deeper than the bestselling Every Spy a Prince, it is an insider's account of Mossad tactics and exploits. In chilling detail, Ostrovsky asserts that the Mossad refused to share critical knowledge of a planned suicide mission in Beirut, leading to the death of hundreds of U.S. Marines and French troops. He tells how they tracked Yasser Arafat by recruiting his driver and bodyguard; how they withheld information on the whereabouts of American hostages, paving the way for the Iran-Contra scandal; and how their intervention into secret UN negotiations led to the sudden resignation of ambassador Andrew Young and the downfall of his career. By Way of Deception describes the shocking scope and depth of the Mossad's influence, disclosing how Jewish communities in the U.S., Europe, and South America are armed and trained by the organization in secret ?self-defense? units, and how Mossad agents facilitate the drug trade in order to pay the enormous costs of its far-flung, clandestine operation. And it portrays a network that has grown dangerously out of control, as internal squabbles have led to the escape of terrorists and the pursuit of ?policies? completely at odds with the interests of the state of Israel. This document is possibly the most important and controversial book of its kind since Spycatcher.