Buchanan

The Best of Roy Buchanan: 20th Century Masters - The Millennium Collection
$11.98
A lot of people may not know of Roy but true guitar aficionados will know of his work.He was asked to replace Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones when he died and preferred to play his own bluesy type of music.His 1954 fender telecaster combined with the fender twin reverb and the way he uses the volume control knob on his guitar to create the harmonics that almost sound like a violin and he uses every fret on the guitar going all the way down to the bridge and the speed of his riffs are amazing.A must buy for all guitar players to listen to and check him out on youtube and you will see what I mean about the control he has over his guitar !!!! Also check him out on wikipedia to find out more of his life before he died its fascinating.

Live From Austin Texas
$16.98
I have waited a long time for a good quality DVD from Roy Buchanan. This guy was a true guitar god that was never recognized during his time. The footage here has been around on You Tube for some time but it is presented here in excelent color and sound. Get this DVD along with Jeff Beck's Performing This Week: Live at Ronnie Scott's and you will have complete and fulfilling electric guitar overdose.

Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart
$14.95
Buchanan does a great job in this book exposing the complete and utter intellectual bankruptcy of American trade policy since 1976.Jimmy Carter,acting as a representative of the giant Wall Street investment banks and their libertarian hedge fund-private equity firm,supply side allies ,started America down the road to the hollowing out,downsizing,and outsourcing of America'a industrial manufacturing sector.Every President since Carter has gone along with this Wall Street banker game plan.

The most important pages in the book are pp.192-199.Every American, Republican and Democrat ,should read these pages before voting in the 2010 elections.The problem is that both parties are controlled by Wall Street by means of private donations ,campaign contributions,political fund raising,and lobbyists who provide all expense paid vacations and free sex to Senators and Representatives in exchange for creating swiss cheese like loopholes in so called reform legislation.Buchanan's call for an American industrial policy a la George Washington and Alexander Hamilton is the only way out.The current Bush-Obama bailout policies, aimed at creating another bubble to distract Americans from the reality of their continued econmic decline ,comes right out of the Wall Street (and Wall Street Journal) orchestrated libertarian-Austrian-supply side game plan .

I have one criticism of the book.Buchanan does get his J M Keynes right.Buchanan rightly points out that Keynes realized that retaliatory and revenue tariffs were sound policies,as opposed to protectionist tariffs.He correctly points out and rejects the nonsense in Milton Friedman's bizarre libertarian,Utopian claims about free trade.Unfortunately,Buchanan misses the opportunity to cite Adam Smith's identical rejection of Milton Friedman's ideological,Utopian dreams from pp.434-439 of Smith's 1776 Wealth of Nations [Modern Library(Cannan edition) with the forward by Max Lerner].Smith's analysis on these pages,in favor of retaliatory and revenue tariffs,as well as a very go slow approach to opening up local markets in order to avoid destroying the concentrated fixed capital invested in the industrial-manufacturing sector, is the best that has ever been presented .It is not surprising that Washington and Hamilton had well read copies of the WN in their libraries because their economic policies came right out of Adam Smith's play book for economic growth.

Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World
$20.00
Patrick Buchanan takes a lot of liberties with this albeit well written book.

Ultimately his primary aim is to identify the greater evil of the 20th century - Stalin or Hitler. As an American, a nation far more threatened by the Soviet Union and the threat of intercontinental nuclear war, Buchanan takes the position that the West would have been better off to leave Hitler alone to run rampant in the East and thus initiate the mutual destruction of his and Stalins regime.

He seems to forget that Hitler desperately wanted revenge for Versailles which meant not only the defeat of France (which he barely touches upon) but the forced occupation of all previously 'German' territories regardless of the true ethnic mix and history.

Buchanan almost condones many of the Nazi leaders actions even in essence blaming Churchill's defiance as a cause for the Holocaust.

Buchanan insists that Churchill alone was the instigator for the Second World War and the Cold War after it.

It is fortunate that Buchanan's justification of appeaseement with all its repurcussions was not the ultimate tone of the day.