In choosing books for this list I considered the importance of the information contained in them, the quality of the evidence the authors use to make their case, and how easy they were for me to read and understand and enjoy. I feel that my understanding of today’s world was improved a great deal as a result of reading each of the books that I describe in this post – which is the main reason I wanted to share them. They are discussed here in alphabetical order.
The Authoritarians – by Bob AltemeyerBob Altemeyer is a retired psychology professor who spent most of his life researching authoritarianism. The first chapter of his book, “
The Authoritarians”, defines “authoritarian followers” as having three core characteristics:
1) High degree of submission to authority
2) Willingness to attack other people in the name of the authority
3) Highly conventional attitudes
Altemeyer provides a 22 question personality survey in his first chapter, which measures a person’s right wing authoritarian propensity (Not all authoritarians are right wing, but the great majority are). He calls it the right wing authoritarian (RWA) scale.
In previous posts I’ve discussed authoritarianism
as a major cause of war, how it
fits in with the Republican Party, and their
excessive submission to authority. I believe that the propensity to support war is the most tragic aspect of the RWA personality. There are three RWA traits that are highly conducive to steering a nation into war:
Submission to authorityA strong propensity for submission to authority is one of the most important prerequisites for war. The national leaders who plan and create wars require the support of large portions of their population. The more RWAs in their population, the easier that support is to obtain. If a U.S. President tells his people that another nation has accumulated weapons of mass destruction which pose an imminent threat to his people, RWAs will believe it no matter how little evidence there is to support it. They’ll believe it even when there is a vast amount of evidence to contradict it. Surely wars perpetrated by the United States would be much less politically feasible and much less frequent without the large minority of right wing authoritarians in our country.
ConformityThe tendency to conform is used by authoritarian leaders to push their followers into war. That’s what right wing “patriotism” is all about. In the right wing authoritarian mind, “patriotism” is difficult to distinguish from conformism. That was the kind of thinking behind the ludicrous question to presidential candidate Obama at the April 17, 2009
Democratic Primary debate concerning why he doesn’t wear an American flag label more often. Altemeyer describes the importance of conformism to the RWA mind:
If you ask subjects to rank the importance of various values in life, authoritarian followers place “being normal” substantially higher than most people do. It’s almost as though they want to disappear as individuals into the vast vat of Ordinaries.
Hatred and crueltyFinally, it is the fact that RWAs tend to be filled with hatred that enables RWA leaders to spur them on to go to great lengths to support or fight for the causes that the leaders cherish. Altemeyer describes that aspect of RWAs:
They find “common criminals” highly repulsive and disgusting, and they admit it feels personally good, it makes them glad, to be able to punish a perpetrator. They get off smiting the sinner; they relish being “the arm of the Lord.”… which suggests authoritarian followers have a little volcano of hostility bubbling away inside them looking for a (safe, approved) way to erupt….
The
torture of many hundreds or thousands of our prisoners in George Bush’s “War on Terror” provides a good example of RWA hatred and cruelty in action. I’ve read myriad accounts of that torture. The more I read about it the more I became convinced that the torture of our prisoners had a lot more to do with hatred and cruelty than it did with any desire to obtain information.
Censored 2009 – The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007-08 – by Peter Phillips and Andrew Roth from Project Censored“Project Censored” is a project whose purpose it is to bring the American people important news stories that have apparently been censored by our corporate news media. Cynthia McKinney explains why we need organizations like that in the preface to Project Censored’s latest book, “
Censored 2009 – The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007-08”:
I welcome a real discussion of all the issues that face our country today and the real public policy options that exist to resolve them. For many Americans, this important discussion has been too vague or completely non-existent. Now is the time to talk about the concrete measures that will move our country forward…
You would not have read about these issues if you had relied solely on television news for your information… The media in this country obviously do not want the people to be informed about the truths presented by Project Censored…
In the first chapter of their book, Project Censored explains perhaps the main reason why our corporate media censor so many important stories:
The uncovered news stories in Censored 2009 reveal an increasingly desperate demand on the part of US corporations for conquest of international resources, as well as the increased reliance on military means to silence and eliminate dissent and achieve compliance. Our list this year shows more clearly than ever that the People’s Will is the main enemy to be violently reckoned with by corporate America. The term “terrorism” is quickly expanding to include even thoughts that run contrary to US agenda of conquest.
But wait! Our corporate news media claims that they have been unfairly criticized for “censoring” news stories. We need to understand that news professionals have hard and legitimate choices to make about what news to cover. It isn’t that they censor news. It’s just that there is not enough time and space to cover all the important news stories.
To assess that claim, Project Censored did an analysis of corporate TV news coverage. They identified ten “junk” news stories and then looked to see whether important news went uncovered on the days of the junk news stories, or whether our corporate news media just had to present junk news on those days because nothing much else was happening.
In
this post I note 5 of those junk TV news stories, and then list what else was happening on those days that TV news couldn’t cover because they
claimed they didn’t have enough time.
Come Home America – The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of our Country” – by William GreiderI love books that boldly point out our country’s faults, because without recognition of our faults there is no possibility of improvement. William Greider touches on the American taboo, its importance, and its solution in the first two paragraphs of his book, “
Come Home America”:
We are in much deeper trouble than many people suppose or the authorities want to acknowledge… We must be honest with ourselves, face the hard facts, and put aside some comforting myths. Then, we must find the nerve to take responsibility again for our country and democracy…
But truth telling is too frequently politically taboo in our country:
We live in a country where telling the hard truth with clarity has become taboo. Its implications are too alarming. Any politician who says aloud what some of them know… is vilified as defeatist or unpatriotic. Many are clueless, of course, and others are too scared to raise forbidden subjects. I understand their silence and I do not forgive them.
Greider discusses numerous reasons why we can expect substantial American decline in the coming years (if we don’t radically change course). Here are three:
MilitarismA major contributor to U.S. militarism is that few if any American elites are willing to question the moral basis for war. Greider points out:
After the disastrous invasion of Iraq, politicians and policy thinkers argued about whether “mistakes” were made, but very few were willing to oppose the assumption that the United States has the right to invade another country based only on our own justifications….
The end result is that we arouse the hatred of the Muslim world, waste hundreds of billions of dollars to combat that hatred, and ruin our international reputation and standing among former allies – all at the same time.
Radical “free market ideologyThe reign of “free-market” ideology has been characterized by an ideological ban against government intervention in economic matters to help those who most need it, which has played out domestically and internationally. Greider explains how this played out on the international stage:
The WTO enforces rules that protect capital investors and corporations, but it has no rules protecting workers and communities, that is, people. The so-called Washington Consensus – a stern dogma imposed on developing countries that borrow from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund preaches that national governments must not try to protect their people from the harsh side effects of capital and commerce. America’s representative democracy, meanwhile, is offered as the model the world should follow, despite the democratic breakdown that Americans well know is in progress….
The decline of American democracyWith the increasing role of money in politics and the
increase in the income gap to unprecedented levels, our elected representatives have become relatively much more focused on serving the needs of wealthy individuals and corporations, to the exclusion of other people. Greider explains:
The political system that allows powerful interests to exercise virtual veto power over major reforms is not a new condition. But the stakes of failure and paralysis are much higher today because the country is on far more dangerous ground… The status quo is stuck, deformed by the concentration of power… We may want to ask ourselves whether great accumulations of wealth and power actually deliver the “good life” and for whom.
Crunch – Why Do I Feel So Squeezed – by Jared BernsteinJared Bernstein is
Joe Biden’s economic policy advisor. Too bad our president doesn’t use him.
Bernstein’s book is like an economics 101 guide to help non-economists to understand the basics of economics – as it relates to ordinary real people, not just the corporate elites. The first page of his preface sets the tone for the whole book in that regard:
Economics has been hijacked by the rich and powerful, and it has been forged into a tool that is being used against the rest of us. Far too often, economists justify things many of us know to be wrong while claiming the things we believe are critically important can’t be done. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen smart people with good hearts crumble in the face of economic arguments. Many of us will defer to such arguments, no matter how nuts these arguments seem, because they come shrouded in the mysterious authority of science.
Bernstein’s book teaches us how
not to defer to those arguments. One important example is his debunking of the right wing myth that we need to prevent unemployment rates from getting too low, lest that will cause inflation to get out of control and destroy our economy. This theory provides an excuse for them to initiate measures, through the Federal Reserve, to keep unemployment at “acceptably high” levels. Despite their rationalizations for this, the deliberate raising of unemployment by the right wing financial elites is more likely a manifestation of class warfare, practiced by the elites against everyone else. Bernstein explains how this works, in his book:
It takes a truly tight job market – the kind of job market that gives workers some bargaining power – to give most folks a shot at an equitable distribution of the fruits of their labor. The problem is, despite recent evidence to the contrary, some influential high-rollers in the stock market and at the Federal Reserve believe that low unemployment leads to an overheated economy with price pressures and squeezed profit margins… the other problem is that the folks on one side of this argument – the Fed – can actually do something about it, and in doing so, boost or undermine the efforts of working people. How about that? ….
JFK and the Unspeakable – Why he Died and Why it Matters – by James DouglassThis is one of the most enlightening
books I’ve ever read. It deals with John F Kennedy’s presidency and assassination. The aspect of Kennedy’s presidency that Douglass emphasizes the most is his frequent standing up against the “powers that be”. This book goes farther than any book I’ve previously read in concretely describing the conflict between the PTB and a U.S. President. Indeed, Douglass makes a strong case that it was some members of this PTB who finally had enough of President Kennedy, and so arranged his assassination.
Standing up to the steel industryWhen the steel industry double crossed Kennedy by increasing steel prices despite promising him they wouldn’t, JFK went straight to the American public with a
press conference to the nation on April 11th, 1962, in which he said:
Simultaneous and identical actions of United States Steel and other leading steel corporations increasing steel prices by some $6 a ton constitute a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest… The American people will find it hard, as I do, to accept a situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185 million Americans…Some time ago I asked each American to consider what he would do for his country and I asked the steel companies. In the last 24 hours we had their answer.
Standing up to his military against pressure to invade CubaJFK refused to invade Cuba, despite intense pressure to do so from the US military and the CIA, four times: Following the April 15-19, 1961,
CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs by a Cuban Expeditionary Force, Kennedy refused to commit to the full scale invasion that his military and CIA attempted to pressure him into; in March, 1962, Kennedy rejected
Operation Northwoods, presented to him by his Joint Chiefs of Staff as a false flag terrorist operation meant to draw the United States into war against Cuba; in his handling of the
Cuban Missile crisis, Kennedy repeatedly resisted advice from his military advisors to escalate the situation by invading Cuba; in the spring of 1963 Kennedy undertook vigorous military action against the CIA-sponsored Cuban exile group
Alpha 66, to halt its raids against Cuba, as described in a
April 6, 1963 article in the
New York Times.
Refusing military intervention in Laos and the Congo and plans to withdraw from VietnamIn the face of strong advice from outgoing President Eisenhower and his own military, advocating military intervention in Laos, Kennedy pursued a diplomatic solution instead, joining thirteen other nations in signing the “
Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos” on July 23, 1962.
JFK “
promoted (UN Secretary-General) Hammarskjold’s vision of a united, independent Congo, to the dismay of multinational corporations working ceaselessly to carve up the country and control its rich resources”, and against the advice of his military for direct military intervention.
Several reliable sources explain that Kennedy developed plans to withdraw from Vietnam, and that those plans would have been carried out had he lived much longer.
Plans to end the Cold WarMost important of all, Kennedy intended to end the Cold War, as evidenced by his
peace speech at American University four months before he died, his announcement of the
first nuclear test ban treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union, and his
secret negotiations with Fidel Castro to reach an accommodation with him.
The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor – The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi – by Les LeopoldOne of the best visions that I’ve ever seen articulated for the American worker – and American society in general – was articulated by Tony Mazzocchi,
founder of the U.S. Labor Party, the man who
allied with Karen Silkwood in her attempts hold her corporate bosses accountable for their abuses of the environment and their workers, and one of the greatest and most progressive labor leaders of the 20th Century. Mazzocchi fought all his life for his progressive vision of labor, while doing whatever he could to ally the U.S. labor movement with the environmental, anti-war, and universal health care movements, in the belief that we’re all in this together. He
was the driving force behind the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA). Before he died of pancreatic cancer in 2002, at the age of 76, he articulated this vision:
Look at how life is defined today in this society. You should toil almost all your waking hours, and you should toil for as many years as you can – longer and longer. Why not a vision of society where people are able to enjoy the arts, relaxation, interaction with other people, free time? They shouldn’t have to be out there working to enrich other people… You listen to any TV financial program and they’ll say, “Well, you should be saving today for tomorrow. In other words, you should be scrimping so that in your old age you can pay for that long-term nursing home, where somebody’s going to be spoon-feeding you, so you’re not laying in the gutter.” …
Life is really short… Instead of some guy at the top skimming millions of dollars, you could pay for health care for a hell of a lot of people…. You know, there’s an awful lot of wealth out there. If it was distributed appropriately, everyone could have a fairly decent life – I think globally… Not having anyone live in a crappy place. Not everyone has to live in a mansion, but everyone can live in a decent environment. It’s all possible.
Mazzocchi’s biographer, Les Leopold,
sums up Mazzochi’s vision:
His highest calling was to demand human freedom – freedom from demeaning and dangerous work, freedom to learn, freedom to live a life full of ideas, engagement, beauty, and friends… The Labor Party was his vehicle to promote such a vision. That it might fail was irrelevant, in the same way that the possible failure of abolition was never an issue for (Lloyd) Garrison. What mattered was trying until you could try no more.
The Predator State – How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too – by James GalbraithJames K. Galbraith is the Chair of Economists for Peace and Security and the son of the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith. In his book “
The Predator State”, he notes that the concept of a predator class is not new, and he introduces the concept by first discussing Thorstein Veblen’s “
Theory of the Leisure Class”, published in 1899:
The leisure classes do not work. Rather, they hold offices. They perform rituals. They enact deeds of honor…The leisure class is predatory as a matter of course… The relation of overlords to underlings is that of predator to prey. Vested interests… live off the work of others by right and tradition, and not by their functional contribution to the productivity of the system… Predators rely on prey for their sustenance, but they also require and must motivate their assistance…
I have to warn you that this book is difficult to read – much of it was technically from an economics standpoint above my ahead. But it is too important to leave off my list. The primary gist of Galbraith’s book is to describe the takeover of our country by predators, the process that made it into a predator state:
In the late 1970s and 1980s… business leadership saw the possibility of something far more satisfactory from their point of view: complete control of the apparatus of the state. In particular, reactionary business leadership, in those sectors most affected by public regulation, saw this possibility and directed their lobbies – the K Street corridor – toward this goal. The Republican Party… became the instrument of this form of corporate control. The administration… of George W. Bush became little more than an alliance of representatives from the regulated sectors seeking to bring the regulatory system entirely to heel. And to this group was added… those who saw the economic activities of government not in ideological terms but merely as opportunities for private profit on a continental scale…
This is the predator state. It is a coalition of relentless opponents of the regulatory framework on which public purpose depends, with enterprises whose major lines of business compete with or encroach on the principal public functions of the enduring New Deal. It is a coalition, in other words, that seeks to control the state partly in order to prevent the assertion of public purpose… They are firms that have no intrinsic loyalty to any country… They assuredly do not adopt any of society’s goals as their own, and that includes the goals that may be decided on by their country of origin, the United States. As an ideological matter, it is fair to say that the very concept of public purpose is alien to, and denied by, the leaders and the operatives of this coalition… In the predator state, the organization exists principally to master the state structure itself.
None of these enterprises has an interest in diminishing the size of the state, and this is what separates them from the principled conservatives. For without the state and its economic interventions, they… could not enjoy the market power that they have come to wield. Their reason for being, rather, is to make money off the state – so long as they control it. And this requires the marriage of an economic and a political organization…
The Road to 9/11 – Wealth, Empire and the future of America – by Peter Dale ScottPeter Dale Scott’s book, “
The Road to 9/11 – Wealth, Empire and the future of America”, plumbs the depths of shadowy powers that wield tremendous influence in our country (and the world) behind the scenes. Scott discusses several specific examples in his book. One is the Reagan administration’s plans for expanding so-called plans for “Continuity of Government” (COG).
“Continuity of government” is a reassuring title. It would be more honest, however, to call it a “change of government” plan, since according to Alfonso Chardy of the Miami Herald, the plan called for “suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to FEMA, emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments, and declaration of martial law during a national crisis.” The plan also gave the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which had been involved in drafting it, sweeping new powers, including internment.
More ominous are the widespread detention camps, as part of a plan called “
Endgame”:
In August (2002)… (Attorney General) Ashcroft disclosed a plan that “would allow him to order the indefinite incarceration of U.S. citizens and summarily strip them of their constitutional rights and access to the courts by declaring them enemy combatants”… After widespread protest from legal scholars, the plan for military detention camps was not discussed publicly further. It seems clear, however, that the camps exist and that… the authority already exists for them to be used… On February 6, 2007, homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff announced… more than $400 million to add sixty-seven hundred additional detention beds. Both the contract and the budget allocation were in partial fulfillment of an ambitious ten-year Homeland Security strategic plan, code-named Endgame, authorized in 2003.
In the beginning of the last chapter of his book, Scott summarizes the essence of the problem we face:
Will we deal with the problem of terrorism primarily by working to resolve issues that provoke conflict and projecting values that the rest of the world will wish to share? Or will we trust primarily in our own military power and become increasingly a garrison state and empire, conducting more and more of our global strategies in secret and projecting our military and covert strength into further and further corners of the earth?
The cult of secrecy in government, though necessary in some areas, has become counterproductive… It makes it easy for special interests to falsify intelligence input and not be corrected. We saw this recently with Ahmed Chalabi’s disastrous advice on Iraq… This book has argued that secrecy has served America even worse on the policy level. We need to admit that the secret powers of our government helped to create and train this enemy (al Qaeda), whose presence is now invoked to further augment the government’s secret powers. Those secret powers themselves are becoming the major threat to the survival of the open republic.
The Sane Society – by Erich FrommErich Fromm was a widely renowned humanist psychologist and philosopher. He explains the gist of humanist psychology in the forward to his book, “
The Sane Society”:
The main thesis of humanistic psychoanalysis is: that the basic passions of man are not rooted in his instinctive needs, but in the specific conditions of human existence, in the need to find a new relatedness to man and nature…
Much of his book discusses the difficulties that humans have in accommodating their own distinctly human needs to the society in which they live. Some would call the needs of which Fromm speaks “spiritual” needs, though he doesn’t use that term. These needs include relatedness, transcendence, rootedness, a sense of identity, and the need for “a frame of orientation and devotion”. I discuss some of those needs in some detail in
this post. In discussing these needs, Fromm explains how humans may attempt to meet them in either a healthy or a pathological manner. For example, he explains that the need for relatedness is often achieved in a pathological manner through excessive submission or domination, whereas it is achieved in a healthy manner through love. Fromm explains that the use of pathological means to achieve our human needs is a manifestation of insanity – on a societal as well as an individual level.
A prevalent theme of his book is man’s “alienation” from capitalist society – meaning the problems that capitalist society poses for the development of our human potential. As a remedy to this alienation Fromm discusses socialism as clearly and thoroughly as anything I can recall reading. He discusses several different schools of socialist thought, beginning with
Francois Noel Babeuf, from the time of the French Revolution in the late 18th Century.
Fromm notes the central core of socialist philosophy as advocating the welfare of humankind, rather than any specific economic or materialist goals. To the extent that specific economic/materialist goals are advocated, they are advocated as a
means to an end. The end goal is satisfying the needs – spiritual as well as material – of humankind. Fromm cites
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as the best embodiment of this idea. He says that to Proudhon:
The central problem is… the building of a political order which is expressive of society itself. He sees as the prime cause of all disorders and ills of society the single and hierarchical organization of authority… His vision of a new social order is based on the idea of “… reciprocity, where all workers instead of working for an entrepreneur who pays them and keeps the products, work for one another and thus collaborate in the making of a common product whose profits they share amongst themselves”.
Why Do you Kill? – The Untold Story of the Iraqi Resistance – by Jurgen TodenhoferJurgen Todenhofer is one of the few (if not the only) Western journalists to have interviewed several members of the Iraqi resistance – the people whom the U.S. government routinely refers to as “terrorists”. Contained in those interviews, which are described in Todenhofer’s book, “
Why Do you Kill – The Untold Story of the Iraqi Resistance”, are details that could help Americans better understand the scope of the tragedy caused by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. I think it would be a very good thing if all Americans were to read this book, or similar accounts of this tragedy. And as we read about the individual deaths we should try to multiply them in our head by about a million times – an impossible task, but worth at least some effort.
Here is one example – an Iraqi resistance fighter (Zaid) who hates violence explaining to Todenhofer why he joined the resistance:
On July 4th, 2006, Haroun (Zaid’s brother) sets off from his uncle’s house to go back to his family. He is dribbling a ball… A shot rings out. Haroun sinks to his knees… and falls forward with his face hitting the dust… Nobody dared to go out to see, scared of becoming the American sniper’s next target… Zaid stops talking… His whole body shakes as he sobs….
Weeks and months pass. In early 2007, heavy fighting erupts in Ramadi again. A missile fired from an American helicopter hits right beside the house and destroys a generator that provided electricity to their house. The panic-stricken family runs away from the fighting… They walk to the house of an uncle… They suddenly realize that they had forgotten to turn off the kerosene heaters. Karim (Zaid’s youngest brother) decides he will run back… There is a burst of machine gun fire… Karim collapses, riddled by American bullets… Shrieking with pain and fury, Zaid is determined to go out and fetch the body of his little brother lying in a large pool of blood in the middle of the road… His father holds Zaid back… The whole family is wailing and crying in despair…
Zaid hates violence; he never got into fights at school; but now something snaps inside him. He tells me quietly that after the death of his little brother he realized that it was not enough to just support the resistance passively. He comes to the conclusion that he must do more – like most of his friends. The number of dead in Ramadi is now in the thousands. Almost every family has lost somebody.
Some other books that I’m still readingThere are several very good books that I didn’t consider including on this list because I haven’t finished reading them yet, some which I may write about later:
Daybreak – Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union – by David Swanson
Endgame – The Problem of Civilization – by Derrick Jensen
Half the Sky – Turning Oppression into Opportunity Worldwide – by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Legacy of Secrecy – The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination – by Lamar Waldron
The Man Who Sold the World – Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America – by William Kleinknecht
The Return of Depression Economics – and the Depression of 2008 – by Paul Krugman
Threshold – The Crisis of Western Culture – by Thom Hartmann
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