Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing Stephen Marshall (Guerilla News Network, $13.22. Available from <> and <amazon.co.uk>) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism Naomi Klein, (London: Allen Lane, £25.00) ‘When new (forms of capitalism) emerged in the past …they sparked a flood of analysis and debate about how such seismic shifts in the production … Read more
The Observer is a pale shadow of what it once was but it still has a lively Business section. Every fortnight Business carries a column from the American investigative journalist Greg Palast who is about as good as it gets these days on the interface between corporate interests and politicians. (1) In that Business section … Read more
William Blum New York: Soft Skull Press, 2002, $15 www.softskull.com The working lives of writers, especially writers of non-fiction like Blum – or me – are rather dull. To produce Lobster and my other bits and pieces I have to stay in one place, read e-mails every day, books, newspapers, visit libraries, go to … Read more
Sterling and Peggy Seagrave London: Verso, 2003, h/b, £17 The story in brief: before and during WW2 Japan stripped the countries it occupied of its transportable wealth — gold and other precious metals, diamonds, cash, bonds and so on. As the war turned against them this was buried in various locations, many of … Read more
Gordon Carr Christie Books, 2003 p/b, £34 (inc. p and p) from www.Christiebooks.com This is a reprint of Carr’s 1975 book on the Angry Brigade (AB), done in an A4 format paperback, to which Stuart Christie has added dozens of photographs of the participants, the scenes of the various bombings, magazine covers and other graphic … Read more
Bilderberg Originally given as a paper at the British Association for American Studies 2002 Annual Postgraduate Conference, this draws on newly available archival evidence to document the origins of the Bilderberg Group. It also considers the various conspiracy theories which have attached themselves to the Group. Is it a CIA plot to undermine socialism or … Read more
Someone pointed out to me that Lobster 42 ranged from Gladstone to UFOs, a spread probably unique today. But this range has a downside: things get picked up and then sidelined. One such area is the field bounded on one side by what is known as mind control and on the other by non-lethal technologies. … Read more
The attack on the USS Liberty The short piece in Lobster 45 on the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty was curiously timely. Soon after it appeared Captain Ward Boston, senior legal counsel for the Navy’s Court of Inquiry into the incident broke his silence and stated, inter alia: ‘There is no question in … Read more
It now looks pretty certain to me that Kennedy’s assassination was the work of a local Texas conspiracy on behalf of, and with the knowledge of, the then Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Most of the extant evidence for this can be seen on the web site ‘The Men on the Sixth Floor'(1) which advertises the … Read more
The big switch Keeping track of the developments in the JFK assassination is something like a full-time job and I don’t have the time. Plodding along years behind the buffs, I came across Walt Brown’s Treachery in Dallas (Carroll and Graf, New York, 1995), an interesting book, dotted with new (to me) bits and pieces. … Read more