Turn off your T.V; post liberal/progressive book recommendations here

[Clarkie1]

The Republican win by appealing to selfishness, immediate gratification, and ignorance. Democrats win by appealing to altruism, long-term thinking, and knowledge. What books you think all liberal/progressives should read and why?

I recommend "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" by Thom Hartmann for ecological perspective (the most important kind of perspective).

"What Would Jefferson Do?" by Thom Hartmann for political perspective.

"Don't Think of an Elephant" by George Lakoff for changing perspectives.

If every American read the first two books, I believe we'd be living in a completely different society.

What are your recommendations?

[Stop_the_War]

1. here are some:

"Liars and the Lying Liars who Tell Them" by Al Franken - a book that documents right-wing lies.

"1984" by George Orwell - A book that describes what our society is becoming like.

[gater]

2. Hoffman's "Steal This Book", "Mash", "Catch 22", The New Testament...

that is if you actually read it and not just yank a line here or there for your own use.

[Laurab]

3. I'd recommend

"Cruel and Unusual - Bush & Cheney's New World Order" by Mark Crispin Miller. I've read just about all of them, and I think that one scared me the most. I believe it touches on the Constitutional damage this regime is attempting, more so than most.

[blondeatlast]

4. "The One Hour Activist."

I just checked it out of the library. Don't know the author, but it's published by Jossey-Bass.

Written with a gentle LW slant, too.

[idlisambar]

5. some good ones

These are not partisan, but they are interesting

"Endless Enemies:The Making of an Unfriendly World" -- Jonathan Kwitny
Kwitny, a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, argues that U.S. foreign policy has been marked by support for Third World governments that deny their citizens the economic and political freedom we enjoy. He "makes a strong case for the benefits that would accrue if the U.S. government ceased intervening covertly in other nations' affairs,"

"Unsustainable" -- Eamonn Fingleton
When financial journalist Eamonn Fingleton anticipated the meltdown of the New Economy in the late nineties, his predictions were dismissed by mainstream economic writers as "farfetched." Now, with the New Economy in ruins and America mired in recession, Fingleton’s avowedly contrarian take on mainstream economic thinking is all the more urgent. Written in clear, lucid prose that renders the complexity of the world economy clear to the general reader, Unsustainable is a masterly survey of how the U.S. economy’s turn from manufacturing to a more service-based, "postindustrial" economy—based on finance, entertainment, and computer software—has been an unmitigated disaster for working- and middleclass America and threatens the long-term viability of the U.S. economy. Taking on free market ideologues like Thomas Friedman, Fingelton shows how those who claim that a global service economy is the key to America’s salvation are living in a fool’s paradise. Completely revised and updated, this timely contribution is an indispensable survey of American's economic downturn.


"Natural Capitalism" -- Lovins, Hawkins

[EVDebs]

6. Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the

Super Rich and Cheat Everybody Else by David Cay Johnston.

Body of Secrets by James Bamford
Puzzle Palace by James Bamford
Blind Man's Bluff by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew
Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Phillips

[Lone_Wolf_Moderate]

7. I'm feeling foundational tonight: I'll recommend:

Paine's Rights of Man, Mill's On Liberty and Other Essays, and the Bible. I'm serious about all three, especially the last one.

Also, there's anything by Mark Crispin Miller, particularly The Bush Dyslexicon. Don't forget Howie Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Oh yeah, and Orwell.

[Lone_Wolf]

8. Here are a few

Books by Noam Chomsky:

Manufacturing Consent
Necessary Illusions
Hegemony or Survival

Some other good ones are Zinn's A People's History of the United States and Parenti's Democracy for the Few

[begin_within]

9. "What's the Matter with Kansas" by Thomas Frank

[hyperium]

10. Currently reading

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins

Great insight into how the U.S. has expanded through the use of economic warfare during the latter part of the 20th century.

[Tinoire]

11. Chomsky Zinn and that similar vein

What a good thread! I still need to read Lakoff- is it really that interesting? Tell me more.

Currently I'm reading these books because my sister gave me a nice little credit at Common Courage Press and now I'm hooked on their whole store because it's geared to Progressives and Progressive thought.

So in answer to your question- anything and everything by Chomsky and Zinn in order to get real perspective on how our understanding of history and world events have been completely manipulated.

Right now, I'm reading/about to read these:



Freeing the World to Death
Essays on the American Empire

A collection of essays written by William Blum, some of which were published over the past decade in various magazines and anthologies, some appeared in his regular internet newsletter: The Anti-Empire Report, some which appeared only on his website, and some written explicitly for this book. The essays include:
The bombing of PanAm Flight 103: Case not closed
Cuban political prisoners ... in the United States
What do the imperial mafia want in Iraq?
Myth and denial in the war against Iraq.
Hiroshima: Needless Slaughter, Useful Terror
Hostages in Peru: Their terrorists, our freedom fighters
Madeleine Albright: Ethically challenged
The myth of America's booming economy
A New Yorker trapped in Los Angeles
Treason: None dare call it nothing

AUTHOR BIO
William Blum is the author of:"Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II", "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower", and "West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir"
http://www.commoncouragepress.com/index.cfm?action=book&bookid=306



On the rampage
Corporate Predators and the Destruction of Democracy
by Russell Mokhiber Robert Weissman

On the Rampage is a cool, clear and sprightly written down-to-earth series of stories about how the relentless greed and power of corporations control human beings here and abroad. It informs you of the kind of resistance to these corporate supremacists and how you can be alert and avoid some of these erosions of your daily living standards. Mokhiber and Weissman demonstrate how to blend unassailable evidence with irresistible rhetoric.
-Ralph Nader

Mokhiber and Weissman again strike at the heart of corporate power and malfeasance in this excellent book, On The Rampage. Chronicling the seamless transition the corporate elite enjoyed from the Clinton to the Bush administrations, these journalists uphold the time-honored and now all-too-rare tradition of dogged muckracking, exposing corporate criminals and their bought politicians in the spirit of Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and I.F. Stone. In this age of endless war and limitless war profits, we need Mokhiber and Weissman and independent journalists like them now more than ever.
-Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!

On the Rampage treats readers to 71 trenchant essays on corporate soulessness from two of America's leading reporters on corporate misbehavior.
-Congressman Dennis Kucinich

"Mokhiber and Weissman are veteran trackers of the corporate beasts that pillage the globe. In On the Rampage, they are on the tail of GM, Exxon, Philip Morris and other snakes, showing how they prey on workers, the environment and consumers. To escape from being snack food for the corporate godzillas, We The People need to get On the Rampage."
-Jim Hightower, radio commentator and author of "Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush"

www.commoncouragepress.com/index.cfm?action=book&bookid=214



The Broken Promises of America Volume I
At Home and Abroad, Past and Present, An Encyclopedia for Our Times Volume 1
by Douglas F. Dowd
Introduction by Howard Zinn


"As I could say also of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn: there's no one in my life from whom I've learned more than my friend and mentor Douglas Dowd. I have been strengthened in my determination to help make good our country's so-far broken promises."
--Daniel Ellsberg

"A master reference work by a guy who personifies everything that is great about America."
-Robert McChesney

With 160 entries from arrogance to zoos, Douglas Dowd puts the U.S. back in its cage. The ultimate primer and reference work on what has gone wrong in our country. Biographical sketches from Kissinger to Sacco and Vanzetti, combined with solid analysis of horrific deeds provides the reader with an education like no other.

This is a must-have reference work that's as entertaining as it is profound. From racism to violence, from militarism to power, Dowd's entries provide an education by provocation.

"The bitter truth is that although we have had every opportunity to become a truly wonderful society, we have failed to shed our past faults and are now evolving toward something the opposite of wonderful: The gap between our realities and our ideals, despite important changes now and again, widens to resemble the Grand Canyon."-from the preface

A professor of economic history at Johns Hopkins University in Italy and also at the University of California, Douglas F. Dowd has written over 10 books critical of capitalism, including Capitalism and Its Economics: A Critical History, The Twisted Dream: Capitalist Development in the United States Since 1776, and Understanding Capitalism: Critical Analysis From Karl Marx to Amartya Sen.

http://www.commoncouragepress.com/index.cfm?action=book&bookid=312



Oil, Power and Empire
Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda
by Larry Everest

This unique volume compiles in one place a history of US intervention against Iraq and the devastating consequences for the people and the region. It shows the ways in which war today is a continuation of that history, but also a radical leap to more direct military control in Iraq and around the world. The “Bush Doctrine” is both built on our imperial history and yet new and far more dangerous.


In Oil, Power and Empire, Everest rips away the shroud of Bush pretext. He

1. Exposes the true U.S. agenda: war on Iraq is part of plan for U.S. global domination, monopolizing world energy sources, and restructuring the Middle East.

2. Dissects Bush Administration arguments -- “weapons of mass destruction,” the al-Qaeda connection, violations of UN resolutions -- as pretexts for pre-planned agenda.

3. Shows that for 80-some years, U.S. actions in Iraq and the Middle East, often Machiavellian in the extreme, have been guided by considerations of oil, power and empire, have brought horrendous results for the peoples of the region (including helping Saddam Hussein to power), and led not to justice and stability, but a deepening spiral of U.S. military intervention.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. PLOTTING WAR AS THE TOWERS BURNED
How the Bush Administration decided to go to war on Iraq within 2 months of Sept. 11, despite the lack of an Iraqi connection.

2. IMPERIALISM AND THE CREATION OF IRAQ.
A history of imperialism shows how the conflicts and tensions of today arose and why a U.S. colony would be no better.

3. 1945-1979: BUILDING A MIDDLE EAST PILLAR OF EMPIRE
After World War II the US moved in initiating a spiral of greater military involvement and intervention in the region, which is now going to take another leap.

4. THE 1980s: DOUBLE-DEALING DEATH IN THE GULF
Encouraging the IRan-Iraq war, arming Iraq, assisting in chemical warfare; everything Bush charges Hussein with, the US was complicit in.

5. NEW WORLD ORDER, TAKE 1: DESERT STORM & KILLER SANCTIONS
The Persian gulf war was the first conflict after the collapse of the Soviet Union and intended to send a global message more about that than any concern about Kuwait.

6. IRAQ and THE BUSH DOCTRINE
September 11 gave the U.S. an opportunity to achieve a long-held agenda and it forcefully and deliberately and step-by-step nothing less than an imperialist master plan for world domination.

7. CREATING PRETEXTS: THE POST-9/11 CAMPAIGN FOR WAR.
As they were preparing pretexts, they had already decided to attack and were already positioning materials.

8. AN UNJUST WAR OF EMPIRE. <[BLURBS} “An excellent book with analytical discussions of all the relevant matters of foreign policy which all to often in the current era are left undiscussed or are framed in slogans and propaganda. Should be made 'required reading—especially for policy makers in Washington.” [br />--Dwight Simpson, Prof. International Relations at San Francisco State University.

http://www.commoncouragepress.com/index.cfm?action=book&bookid=246



===
Common Courage Press
Books for an Informed Democracy
1 Red Barn Road
Monroe, ME 04951
207-525-0900


By publishing books for social justice, Common Courage Press helps progressive ideas to find a place in our culture. The press provides a platform to spread these ideas to activists and ordinary citizens alike. It has sold a total of over one million copies since its founding in 1991, and its books have been translated and reprinted in 24 countries.

Skillfully edited, graphically striking, and popularly accessible, Common Courage books explore corporate power, ecology, race, gender, economics, health, welfare, and media politics, and U.S. policy from Central America to the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Its authors include Noam Chomsky (The New Military Humanism), Howard Zinn (The Future of History), Jean Bertrand Aristide (Eyes of the Heart), Jennifer Harbury (Bridge of Courage), Philip Berrigan (Fighting the Lamb's War), Norman Solomon (The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media), Judi Bari (Timber Wars), Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber (Toxic Sludge Is Good For You), Physicians for National Health Care co-founders David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler (Bleeding the Patient), Edward Said (The Pen and the Sword), Mike Males (The War on Youth), Peter Breggin (The War Against Children of Color), Phyllis Chesler (Patriarchy), and Paul Farmer (The Uses of Haiti).

These books and others have made a strong impact through major media coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, among other outlets. More important, the press has given a voice to people and organizations who might otherwise never have been heard, and inspired many who might otherwise have stayed silent.


Project Censored has repeatedly highlighted stories revealed in Common Courage books on their yearly list of the most censored published material. In 1999, they selected Karl Grossman's work exposing the likelihood that shuttle and other launches carrying plutonium-powered satellites could fall back to Earth, as featured in his book, The Wrong Stuff. In 1997, they selected two adaptations from Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. They also chose Mike Hudson's work in The Nation, drawn from his Merchants of Misery.

Common Courage often publishes books that larger houses deem too controversial. Genetic engineering expose Against the Grain, for instance, was due to be published by a major publisher, until Monsanto wrote a threatening letter, and the original publisher pulled it. Common Courage then published the book, even though authors Marc Lappe and Britt Bailey warned the press about potential liability issues. A local paper asked co-editor Greg Bates if the press had liability insurance. "Yes, we do, as does every American," Bates replied. "It's called the First Amendment."

Against the Grain ended up helping activists working on politics of genetics. And Common Courage works closely with a wide array of activist citizens' groups:

• Global Exchange co-founder Kevin Danaher has written three books for the press on the corporatization of the global economy.
  
  
• Prison Legal News has made great use of The Celling of America.
  
  
• Physicians for a National Health Plan used Bleeding the Patient to promote the need for universal health care; California consumer rights groups used Making a Killing in their fights against HMOs; and Dying for Growth and Women Poverty and AIDS helped raise awareness for Partners in Health.
  
  
• The Center for Public Integrity produced and promoted Citizen Muckracking, as did the Center for Media and Democracy with Toxic Sludge Is Good For You and Mad Cow USA.
  
  
• Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting raised money by giving away the four books of Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen as a membership premium, along with Laura Flanders' Real Majority Media Minority.
  
  
• When Marla Felcher wrote It's No Accident, about corporations' inadequate testing of baby products, Common Courage gave out free copies to the citizen's group Kids in Danger, so they could hand them out to sympathetic Congresspeople.
  
  
• Paul Farmer's and Jean Bertrand Aristide's royalties go to help Haiti; and Jennifer Harbury's royalties from Bridge of Courage: Life Stories of the Guatemalan Companeros and Companeras, to Guatemalan efforts for justice. Harbury's Guatemalan husband, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, was captured, tortured, and killed by the Guatemalan military. After publishing the book, the Common Courage editors helped publicize Harbury's struggles to find out what happened to her husband, including hunger strikes that triggered a US Congressional investigation and revealed the CIA's high-level involvement with the Guatemalan military.
  
  
• Father Javier Giraldo, head of Colombia's Inter-Congregational Commission of Peace and Justice, risked his life to publish Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy. His book has become a core resource for the Colombia Support Network. Shortly after it was published, a woman who'd left Colombia telephoned Common Courage editor Greg Bates to describe how her friends had been rounded up by the Colombian military in a recent operation, and no one expected to hear from them again. She said that press, by publishing Giraldo's book, gave her hope to proceed onward.
  
  As a handful of huge corporations control more and more of the flow of ideas, Common Courage offers an important way for alternative voices to be heard.
  
  http://www.commoncouragepress.com/index.cfm?action=about

[Tinoire]

12. Never mind my question about Lakoff. I'll read him next

Linguistics professor George Lakoff at the Free Speech Movement Café. (BAP photos)

Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics


BERKELEY – With Republicans controlling the Senate, the House, and the White House and enjoying a large margin of victory for California Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's clear that the Democratic Party is in crisis. George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science, thinks he knows why. Conservatives have spent decades defining their ideas, carefully choosing the language with which to present them, and building an infrastructure to communicate them, says Lakoff.

(snip)

In 2000 Lakoff and seven other faculty members from Berkeley and UC Davis joined together to found the Rockridge Institute, one of the few progressive think tanks in existence in the U.S. The institute offers its expertise and research on a nonpartisan basis to help progressives understand how best to get their messages across. The Richard & Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the College of Letters & Science, Lakoff is the author of "Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think," first published in 1997 and reissued in 2002, as well as several other books on how language affects our lives. He is taking a sabbatical this year to write three books — none about politics — and to work on several Rockridge Institute research projects.

(snip)

Why was the Rockridge Institute created, and how do you define its purpose?

The background for Rockridge is that conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing. Even the new Center for American Progress, the think tank that John Podesta (former chief of staff for the Clinton administration) is setting up, is not dedicated to this at all. I asked Podesta who was going to do the Center's framing. He got a blank look, thought for a second and then said, "You!" Which meant they haven't thought about it at all. And that's the problem. Liberals don't get it. They don't understand what it is they have to be doing.


(snip)

Right now the Democratic Party is into marketing. They pick a number of issues like prescription drugs and Social Security and ask which ones sell best across the spectrum, and they run on those issues. They have no moral perspective, no general values, no identity. People vote their identity, they don't just vote on the issues, and Democrats don't understand that. Look at Schwarzenegger, who says nothing about the issues. The Democrats ask, How could anyone vote for this guy? They did because he put forth an identity. Voters knew who he is.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/27_lakoff.shtml

[bperci108]

13. Pastoral Economics as opposed to neo-con economic narcissism...

Not really a political book, at least not in the traditional sense, it's of a more of a "subversive" nature (which is why I love it so...)



"The Contrary Farmer" by Gene Logsdon

ISBN: 0930031741

FROM THE PUBLISHER (Chelsea Green Publishing)

{quote}

Gene Logsdon is known as a rabble rouser in progressive farm circles, for stirring up debates and controversies with his popular New Farm magazine column, "The Contrary Farmer." One of Logsdon's principle contrarieties is the opinion that - despite popular images of the vanishing American farmer - greater numbers of people in the U.S. will soon be growing and raising a greater share of their own food than at any time since the last century. Instead of vanishing, more and more farmers will be cottage-farming, part-time. This detailed and personal account of how Logsdon and his family use the arts and sciences of agriculture will inspire all those who seek an enjoyable and ecologically sane way of life. The Contrary Farmer offers the thoroughgoing, practical advice of a handbook for cottage farmers, as well as the subtler delights of a meditation in praise of work and pleasure. Logsdon gives his readers tools and tenets, but also hilarious commentaries and beautiful evocations of the Ohio countryside that this particular husbandman knows as his place in the universe.

{end quote}

It is the bible of "Pastoral Economics".

Anything else by Logsdon is also highly recommended.

[NoFederales]

17. Self sufficiency is not just intrinsically rewarding

I also heartily recommend Gene Logsdon's books as well as Homepower Magazine and the many "off-the-grid" power books that Rodale Press and others publish.

For pure enjoyment, and tasty rewards, visit http://www.bee-commerce.com
and try bee keeping; you'll always have a bee in your bonnet, and you don't need a farm to keep 'em.

NoFederales

[ckramer]

14. Turn off the TV, surf DU whole night

That's what I have been doing for quite a while

[BillZBubb]

15. "A Necessary Evil" by Garry Willis

This is a must read for those who wish to crush brainless Freeptards with facts about how and why our government was established the way it was. If crushes the right wing re-invention of "Federalism". It crushes the "states rights" argument. It also crushes the myth that the founders wanted a weak central government.

[NoFederales]

16. TV's off; try

"The Great Unraveling", Paul Krugman

"The President of Good and Evil", Peter Singer

"The Lies of George W. Bush", David Corn

"The End of Faith", Sam Harris

NoFederales