Books

Three Books Make The Case For A Universal Basic Income

December 4, 2018 James Mumm, Socialpolicy.org Educate! Books, Guaranteed basic income

Massive, disruptive change is happening in the world economy. Up to half of all current workers, both white and blue collar, could be driven into unemployment by technology. Automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are fueling a new industrial revolution. Once again, as in the past when steam, fossil fuels and biotechnology upended lives and fortunes, workers are getting the short end of the stick—this time robots may come for our jobs. Unless, as science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson warns, we become the robots ourselves, first. Instead of tinkering around the edges, several recent authors make a forceful case for a bold solution to our society’s growing levels of inequality and economic insecurity: a universal basic income (UBI).

Sarah Chayes On Kleptocracy In America

November 5, 2018 By Russell Mokhiber, Counterpunch.org Educate! Books, Ruling Class

“I was loading a lot into Thieves of State,” Chayes told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “I was saying that violent religious extremism is actually related to governmental corruption, not religious ideology. That was a big thing to try and say. I didn’t want to load this book down with too much controversial analysis.” “But I did have a chapter at the end that looked at Iceland, Ireland and the United States in the lead up to the 2008 financial disaster. Many of the factors I was identifying in developing countries were visible in the West. And if we weren’t careful to try and put some constraints on systemic corruption in the West, we were going to suffer the same kind of extremist uprising that could take who knows what form...

The Insurgent Power Of The Commons In The War Against The Imagination

October 12, 2018 David Bollier, Center for New Economics Create! Books, Ideology, Liberals

Thank you, Fred [Iutzi] and The Land Institute for inviting me to this wonderful festival! It’s a great honor to be speaking at an event at which so many illustrious thinkers, innovators, and activists have attended in the past. I want to thank the Land Institute for its pathbreaking research and leadership over the years – and give a special thanks to Wes Jackson for his vision, courage, and sheer persistence over so many years. I’m not a farmer or seed-sharer, and I don’t have a specific role in the farm-to-table world except as a grateful eater. However, I do live in a small, somewhat rural town, Amherst, Massachusetts, a place of maple trees and CSA farms, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost, and a town common.

The U.S. Military is Winning. No, Really, It Is!

September 13, 2018 By Nick Turse, Tomdispatch.com Educate! Books, US Imperialism, US military

But let’s begin with another number entirely: 145,000 -- as in, 145,000 uniformed soldiers striding down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s the number of troops who marched down that very street in May 1865 after the United States defeated the Confederate States of America. Similar legions of rifle-toting troops did the same after World War I ended with the defeat of Germany and its allies in 1918. And Sherman tanks rolling through the urban canyons of midtown Manhattan? That followed the triumph over the Axis in 1945. That’s what winning used to look like in America -- star-spangled, soldier-clogged streets and victory parades. Enthralled by a martial Bastille Day celebration while visiting French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris in July 2017, President Trump called for just such a parade in Washington.

On Economic Madness

August 4, 2018 Luke Pretz, Solidarity-us.org Educate! Books, History, Marxism

ONE HUNDRED AND fifty years after Capital Volume I was first published, David Harvey returns to the classic text and its posthumously published adjuncts, Volumes II and III. He does so in the hope of challenging the notion that Marx’s political economy is stuck in the 19th Century. Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason presents a systemization of Marx’s thought that demonstrates the continued relevance of Marx’s work. Harvey also shows how it can be recontextualized in light of the massive technological, social and industrial changes that have taken place since Marx wrote. More than a summing-up of Marx’s Capital, The Madness of Economic Reason also acts as a summary of the methodological kernel of Harvey’s own writings on Marxian value theory. In many ways this book is a concise rehashing of Harvey’s Reading Capital lecture series.

America’s Reporter: The Hersh Method

July 27, 2018 Vijay Prashad, Counterpunch.org Educate! Books, History

If Seymour Hersh had only broken the story of the massacre of unarmed civilians at My Lai in Vietnam by the United States Army in 1968, it would have been enough to make a career. But that was only one story in a range of stories that this feisty and independent journalist has broken over the course of his long career. He was the one who pointed his finger at a host of stories, including the U.S. programmes for chemical and biological weapons, the Israeli nuclear bomb and the shenanigans of the Nixon White House regarding Vietnam and Watergate. Recently, it was Hersh who wrote important stories on the death of Osama bin Laden and on allegations of the use of chemical weapons in the war in Syria. Each of his stories is received as a bombshell, largely because the story is likely to be a bombshell. Over his long career, Hersh has worked for major U.S. publications such as The New York Times and for smaller outlets such as the Dispatch News Service.

Mumia Abu Jamal And Stephen Vittoria: Murder Incorporated

June 20, 2018 David Swanson, Davidswanson.org Educate! Books, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Murder

Book One, “Dreaming of Empire,” is a critique of U.S. imperialism, a debunking of U.S. nationalist myths, a corrective or alternative history of the U.S. nation. Politically, a book like this would never be permitted in U.S. schools, and it’s clearly not aimed at clearing that hurdle. It uses curse words, which would provide a handy excuse for keeping it out. It’s also not straight history. It’s part chronological, part theme-based. It mixes historical accounts with pop-culture, with quotations from scholars, historical sources, and analysts interviewed by the authors. Dreaming of Empire also does not try to leave the past in the past. Instead it proposes to explain current wars, the weaponization of outer space, and the rhetoric of contemporary U.S. politics through a myth-busting hard look at the past.

Noam Chomsky’s Political Analysis Comes To Life In Graphic Novel

June 4, 2018 Mark Karlin, Truthout.org Educate! Books, Left Politics, Noam Chomsky

Coming together through activism is one way to imagine and experiment with creating a better future. The Occupy Wall Street Movement is one example we explore in the book. Chomsky begins by discussing aspects of mutual aid and solidarity he views as present within certain formations in Occupy. For instance, during the interview he specifically takes note of the organizing work done within The People’s Library, which was a part of the larger New York City occupation. With that discussion in mind, I went back and interviewed some of the librarians involved in Occupy. Here they offer important insights about what it means to practice mutual aid and solidarity and the necessity of a physical space for groups to come together to work against alienation.

Teacher Rebellion: Class Dismissed

April 18, 2018 By Steve Fraser, Tomdispatch.com Resist! Books, Class Struggle, Rebellion, Teachers

Are teachers professionals, proletarians, or both? One symptom of our pathological denial of class realities is that we are accustomed to thinking of teachers as “middle class.” Certainly, their professional bona fides should entitle them to that social station. After all, middle class is the part of the social geography that we imagine as the aspirational homing grounds for good citizens of every sort, a place so all-embracing that it effaces signs of rank, order, and power. The middle class is that class so universal that it’s really no class at all. School teachers, however, have always been working-class stiffs. For a long time, they were also mainly women who would have instantly recognized the insecurities, struggles to get by, and low public esteem that plague today’s embattled teachers.

The New York Post Hates My New Book — You Know It’s Good

March 29, 2018 David Swanson, Davidswanson.org Educate! Books, US Imperialism

In forming his opinion prior to reading the book, using “no thanks” as both a shield against learning anything and a supposed argument for refuting what he hasn’t learned, Michael Goodwin of the New York Post supports the book’s argument that exceptionalism is largely disconnected from facts. Quoting from the book: “Out of the Constitution and Bill of Rights came the wonderful benefits of the (always partial) recognition of freedoms of speech, assembly, religion, etc. But out of these, and an infinitely complex collection of other factors, came also some perverse results. Freedom of religion became the freedom to invent and buy into new religions, which amounts to the acceptance of claiming things without evidence, choosing to believe those things, and treating that choice as your sacred right.

Report From Winsted: Nader’s Museum

September 21, 2017 Steve Early, www.counterpunch.org Educate! Books, History, Museums

By Steve Early for Counter Punch - My favorite Helena Bonham Carter film is called Margaret’s Museum. In it, she plays Margaret MacNeil, the young widow of a Nova Scotia coal miner killed, on the job, like others in her family before him. Margaret’s grief leaves her mentally unhinged in a community steeped in fatalism and acceptance. After her release from an asylum, she turns her seaside cottage into a museum depicting the human toll of underground mining. The sign outside, drawing few tourists in the late 1940s, says simply: “The Cost of Coal.” As the movie opens, a man and woman drive up to Margaret’s home on Glace Bay and seek admittance. A moment later, the female vacationer comes running out the front door, screaming in horror. As we learn later in the film, the exhibits include fluid filled jars with the damaged lungs of Margaret’s grandfather, her late husband’s tongue, and her young brother’s penis, preserved because, as she explains, “it was the most important thing he had” before his untimely death on the job. I thought instantly of this movie, in late July, when I was the sole Sunday morning viewer of exhibits in a Winsted, CT. museum similarly suffused with righteous indignation over the human cost of hazardous products and dangerous occupations. The American Museum of Tort Law was created by Ralph Nader to remind visitors how workers, consumers, and our environment have all suffered when auto and asbestos manufacturers, Big Pharma, the tobacco industry, or fast food chains put corporate profit ahead of public health and safety.

“Hegemony How-To”: Rethinking Activism And Embracing Power

September 15, 2017 Bruce Levine, www.brucelevine.net Strategize! Activism, Books

By Bruce Levine for Bruce E. Levine - Occupy Wall Street insider Jonathan Smucker’s recently published Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals (AK Press, 2017) is the post-Occupy guide for how to be smarter about politics. Smucker, a long-time grassroots organizer, does not dismiss what Occupy did right but is honest about its failures. The 99% remain just as powerless as ever, and we still have endless wars, corporate control, and increasing social and economic injustices. In the tradition of Saul Alinsky and Antonio Gramsci, Smucker points out that “knowledge of what is wrong with a social system and knowledge of how to changethe system are two completely different categories of knowledge.” Before touching on how Hegemony How-To speaks directly to my own experience, a feel for Smucker’s punches. Smucker spares nothing and no one—including himself—in his passion to achieve political victory. Smucker asks himself: “How many times, I wondered, had I favored a particular action or tactic because I really thought it was likely to change a decision-maker’s position or win over key allies, as opposed to gravitating toward an action because it expressed my activist identity and self-conception? How concerned were we really, in our practice, with political outcomes?” Smucker concludes, “We often seemed more preoccupied with the purity of our political expression than with how to move from Point A to Point B. It felt as if having the right line about everything was more important than making measurable progress on anything.”

It’s Here Now: Cheap 100% Renewable Energy

August 10, 2017 Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, www.dissidentvoice.org Create! Books, Fossil Fuels, Renewable Energy

By Stuart Jeanne Bramhall for Dissident Voices - George Goodall’s The Switch: How Solar Storage and New Technology Means Cheap Power for All was enormously valuable in rectifying many of my prior misconceptions about renewable energy. First and foremost was my erroneous belief that high production costs would make renewable energy far more expensive than fossil fuels – that the renewable energy revolution would require either a) a major reduction in population or b) major sacrifice in terms of lifestyle choices. Both turn out to be totally untrue. Renewable energy (mainly photo-voltaic solar energy) is already cheaper than fossil fuels in many parts of the world. By 2040 the low cost of producing renewable energy will make fossil fuels virtually obsolete. The first section of the book focuses on a mathematical explanation of what he refers to as the “experience curve.” Energy economists use this formula to explain the rapid decrease in the cost of manufacturing PV cells, solar panels and solar batters. The same process can be used to predict future costs of manufacture. Which is one of the main reasons Wall Street financiers are refusing to invest in new coal and gas-fired power plants. They know the electricity they produce will never compete with the low cost and efficiency of renewable energy.

Eve Of Destruction…Or Revolution?

August 9, 2017 Ron Jacobs, www.counterpunch.org Create! Books, Ideology, Revolution

By Ron Jacobs for Counter Punch - “In order to replace capitalism with an ecological society we need a revolution.” That modest sentence is how Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, the authors of Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation, begin the last chapter of their new book. Although the chapter is the end of the book, it is also an opening to a new direction, a new movement. It is also the essence of the entire text. Capitalism is the reason our biosphere is collapsing and the only way humanity and the rest of earth’s species can survive is by ending capitalism. Given that capitalism and those who profit most from it have proven time and time again that not only are they unwilling to give up the rapacious economy that is destroying earth, but that they even refuse to admit that it is that system which is the cause, the only solution is revolution. This text is written by two environmental activists (and teachers) with credentials that more than back up the science they explain in this book. Indeed, it is their understanding of the science involved when discussing the ecological crisis we face that has helped inform their Marxist politics.

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