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 Altemeyer

Bob 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 authority
A 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.

Conformity
The 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:


Hatred and cruelty
Finally, 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:


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”:


In the first chapter of their book, Project Censored explains perhaps the main reason why our corporate media censor so many important stories:


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 Greider

I 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”:


But truth telling is too frequently politically taboo in our country:


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:

Militarism
A 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:


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 ideology
The 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 decline of American democracy
With 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:



Crunch – Why Do I Feel So Squeezed – by Jared Bernstein

Jared 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:


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:



JFK and the Unspeakable – Why he Died and Why it Matters – by James Douglass

This 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 industry
When 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:


Standing up to his military against pressure to invade Cuba
JFK 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 Vietnam
In 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 War
Most 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 Leopold

One 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:


Mazzocchi’s biographer, Les Leopold, sums up Mazzochi’s vision:



The Predator State – How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too – by James Galbraith

James 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:


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:



The Road to 9/11 – Wealth, Empire and the future of America – by Peter Dale Scott

Peter 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).


More ominous are the widespread detention camps, as part of a plan called “Endgame”:


In the beginning of the last chapter of his book, Scott summarizes the essence of the problem we face:



The Sane Society – by Erich Fromm

Erich 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”:


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:



Why Do you Kill? – The Untold Story of the Iraqi Resistance – by Jurgen Todenhofer

Jurgen 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:



Some other books that I’m still reading

There 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