Probably your best introduction to today's issue... of life and extinction.
The Cause of Labour IS the Hope of the World choices by Susan Rosenthal
Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America by Joe Burns (2011).
Workers’ only real bargaining power is their ability to stop production and, to do this, workers must fight as a class. By abandoning these tactics, unions have lost their ability to defend the working class. Explains what it will take to revive the strike and regain lost ground.
Professional Poison: How Professionals Sabotage Social Movements --- and Why Workers Should Lead Our Fight by Susan Rosenthal (2009).
Middle-class professionals dominate most unions and social movements. How can working people organize to challenge them?
Autoworkers Under the Gun: A Shop-Floor View of the End of the American Dream by Gregg Shotwell (2011).
Autoworker Gregg Shotwell shows how General Motors and its junior partner, the United Auto Workers (UAW) bureaucracy, stole workers’ pensions, slashed wages and shed jobs to help expand GM's global empire.
The Civil Wars in US Labor by Steve Early (2011).
Chronicles the corruption, back-stabbing, power- grabbing, and opportunistic alliances that have characterized recent turf wars among American unions. Why did a generation of activists fail to democratize the unions, and what must we do differently to avoid repeating that failure?
Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice by Bill Fletcher, Jr. & Fernando Gapasin (2008)
Argues that unions must undergo a fundamental transformation to champion the interests of the entire working class. Is this possible?
The Lessons of Chile: 1970-1973 by Susan Rosenthal (2010).
Chile showed that a challenge to class inequality in the medical system is a challenge to the capitalist system as a whole. Consequently, any serious movement for reform must prepare to fight a class war.
Hans Morgenthau's top ten books (in 1976):
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition; Aristotle’s Politics; EH Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis; The Federalist Papers; Plato’s Symposium; Pascal’s Pensees; CN Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture; Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man; The Political Writings of Max Weber; The Collected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche.
'Confessions Of a Hitman' --- is the Best Book EVER !!! (and I BET you haven't read it!!!)
The Evil Empire Has The World In A Death Grip by Paul Craig Roberts
In my archives there is a column or two that introduces the reader to John Perkins’ important book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man [EHM].
An EHM is an operative who sells the leadership of a developing country on an economic plan or massive development project. He convinces a country’s government that borrowing large sums of money from US financial institutions in order to finance the project, will raise the country’s living standards. The borrower is assured that the project will raise Gross Domestic Product and tax revenues and that these increases will allow the loan to be repaid.
However, the plan is designed to over-estimate the benefits so that the indebted country can't pay the principal & interest. As Perkins’ puts it, plans are based on “distorted financial analyses, inflated projections, and rigged accounting,” and if the deception doesn’t work, “threats and bribes” are used to close the deal.
The next step in the deception is the appearance of the International Monetary Fund. The IMF tells the indebted country that the IMF will save its credit rating by lending the money with which to repay the countrhy’s creditors. The IMF loan is not a form of aid. It merely replaces the country’s indebtedness to banks, with indebtedness to the IMF.
To repay the IMF, the country has to accept an austerity plan and agree to sell national assets to private investors. Austerity means cuts in social pensions, social services, employment and wages, and the budget savings are used to repay the IMF. Privatization means selling oil, mineral and public infrastructure in order to repay the IMF. The deal usually imposes an agreement to vote with the US in the UN and to accept US military bases.
Occasionally a country’s leader refuses the plan or the austerity and privatization. If bribes don’t work, the US sends in the jackels — assassins who remove the obstacle to the looting process.
Perkins’ book caused a sensation. It showed that the United States’ attitude of helpfulness toward poorer countries was only a pretext for schemes to loot the countries. Perkins’ book sold more than a million copies and stayed on the New York Times best- seller list for 73 weeks.
Now the book has been reissued with the addition of 14 new chapters, & a 30-page listing of Hit Man activity during the years 2004-2015.
Perkins shows that despite his revelations, the situation is worse than ever and has spread into the West itself. The populations of Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the United States itself, are now being looted by Hit Man activity.
Perkins’ book shows that the US is “exceptional” only in the unbridled violence it applies to others who get in its way. One of the new chapters tells the story of France- Albert Rene, president of Seychelles, who threatened to reveal the illegal and inhumane eviction of the residents of Diego Garcia by Britain and Washington so that the island could be converted into an air base from which Washington could bomb noncompliant countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Washington sent in a team of jackels to murder the president of Seychelles, but the assassins were foiled. All but one were captured, tried and sentenced to execution or prison, but a multi-million dollar bribe to Rene freed them. Rene got the message and became compliant.
In the original print of his book, Perkins tells the stories of how jackals arranged airplane crashes to get rid of Panama’s non-compliant president, Omar Torrijos, and Ecuador’s non-compliant president, Jaime Roldos. When Rafael Correa became president of Ecuador, he refused to pay some of the illigitimate debts that had been piled on Ecuador, closed the United States’ largest military base in Latin America, forced the renegotiation of exploitative oil contracts, ordered the central bank to use funds deposited in US banks for domestic projects, and consistently opposed Washington’s hegemonic control over Latin America.
Correa had marked himself for overthrow or assassination. However, Washington had just overthrown, in a military coup, the democratically elected Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, whose policies favored the people of Honduras over those of foreign interests. Concerned that 2 military coups in succession against reformist presidents would be noticed, to get rid of Correa the CIA turned to the Ecuadoran police. Led by a graduate of Washington’s School of the Americas, the police moved to overthrow Correa --- but were overpowered by the Ecuadoran military. However, Correa got the message.
He reversed his policies toward American oil companies and announced that he would auction off huge blocks of Eucador’s rain forests to the oil companies. He closed down, Fundacion Pachamama, an organization with which a reformed Perkins was associated that worked to preserve Ecuador’s rain forests and its indigenous populations.
Western banks backed up by the World Bank are even worse looters than the oil and timber companies. Perkins writes: “Over the past three decades, sixty of the world’s poorest countries have paid $550 billion in principal and interest on loans of $540 billion --- yet they still owe a whopping $523 billion on those same loans. The cost of servicing that debt is more than these countries spend on health or education and is twenty times the amount they receive annually in foreign aid. In addition, World Bank projects have brought untold suffering to some of the planet’s poorest people. In the past ten years alone, such projects have forced an estimated 3.4 million people out of their homes; the governments in these countries have beaten, tortured, and killed opporents of World Bank projects.”
Perkins describes how Boeing plundered Washington state taxpayers. Using lobbyists, bribes, and blackmail threats to move production facilities to another state, Boeing succeeded in having the Washington state legislature give the corporation a tax break that diverted $8.7 billion into Boeings’ coffers from health care, education and other social services. The massive subsidies legislated for the benefit of corporations are another form of rent extraction and Hit Man activity.
Perkins has a guilty conscience and still suffers from his role as a Hit Man for the evil empire, which has now turned to the plunder of American citizens. He has done everything he can to make amends, but he reports that the system of exploitation has multiplied many times and is now so commonplace that it no longer has to be hidden. Perkins writes:
“A major change is that this EHM system, today, is also at work in the United States and other economically developed countries. It is every- where. And there are many more variations on each of these tools. There are hundreds of thousands more EHMs spread around the world.
They have created a truly global empire. They are working in the open as well as in the shadows. This system has become so widely and deeply entrenched that it is the normal way of doing business and there- fore, is not alarming to most people.”
People have been so badly plundered by jobs offshoring and indebtedness that consumer demand cannot support profits. Consequently, capitalism has turned to exploiting the West itself. Faced with rising resistance, the EHM system has armed itself with “the PATRIOT Act, the militarization of police forces, a vast array of new surveillance technologies, the infiltration & sabotage of the Occupy movement, & the dramatic expansion of privatized prisons.” The democratic process has been subverted by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and other court decisions, by corporate-funded political action committees, and by organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council --- financed by the One Percent.
Cadres of lawyers, lobbyists, and strategists are hired to legalize corruption, and presstitutes work overtime to convince gullible Americans that elections are real and represent the workings of democracy.
In a February 19, 2016 article in OpEdNews, Matt Peppe reports that the American colony of Puerto Rico is being driven into the ground in order to satisfy foreign creditors.
The airport has been privatized, and the main highways have been privatized --- in a 40-year lease owned by a consortium formed by a Goldman Sachs infrastructure investment fund. Puerto Ricans now pay private corporations for the use of infrastructure that tax dollars built. Recently, Puerto Rico’s sales tax was raised by 64% to 11.5%. A sales tax increase is equivalent to a rise in inflation, and results in a decline in real incomes.
Today the only difference between capitalism and gangsterism, is that capitalism has succeeded in legalizing its gangsterism and, thus, can strike a harder bargain, than can the Mafia.
Perkins shows that the evil empire has the world in the grip of a “death economy.”
He concludes that “we need a revolution” in order “to bury the death economy & birth the life economy.” Don’t look to politicians, neoliberal economists, and presstitutes, for any help.
Dear Friends, Many of you will be interested in a very special book I've taken great pleasure in reviewing for Tintean, the journal of the Australian Irish Heritage network:
A Practical Guide to Irish Spirituality, by Lora O’Brien
-- Links: Music: Maireid.com Multimedia Production: LyrebirdMedia.com Arts Action: GlobalArtsCollective.org Music Journal: AlternateMusicPress.com YouTube Lyrebird Channel: http://www.youtube.com/lyrebirdchannel Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maireid.sullivan
The invasion of Iraq was a crime and casts a blood slur on the UK Labour party --- until it recognises its responsibility.
Just published by Clarity Press is the heavily documented Genocide in Iraq by Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Tarik Al-Ani.
This contains all the proof the Labour party needs, to press for Blair and Bush's trials --- and cleanse its soul.
Every aspect of the operation to manipulate and dumb down people in the West has been exposed, but if you combine that with:
"The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" by Charlotte Iserbyt,
"Propaganda" by Edward Bernays,
and the global hypnosis effect of television on the World population, as explained by Jerry Minder in "Four arguments for the elimination of TV"...
the scope of it will be clear for everybody on the planet.
If you believe that there is a free press, I invite you to read the aforementioned books, and you will never say that again.
The recent death, at 76, of former US middleweight boxing contender, Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, reminds the world of the courageous and tenacious struggle this black man waged to overturn his wrongful conviction and imprisonment for murder in 1966.
It reminds us also, that - in the US - despite a black president having been "in power" for two terms, nothing changed.
Though whites and blacks commit drugs offenses at a comparable rate, African Americans are 37% of the people arrested for drugs offenses, while making up 13% of the population;
The police stop and search blacks and Latinos far more frequently than whites;
Once arrested, blacks are far more likely to be held in prison awaiting trial than their white counterparts.
In some parts of New York, blacks are 33% more likely to be detained awaiting felony trials than whites;
A 2009 report by the Sentencing Project found that two-thirds of the people in the US with life sentences are non-white. In New York, it is 83%.
Dr RUBIN CARTER's TOP TEN BOOKS (plus one!)
In Search of the Miraculous,
by P.D. Ouspensky
What Has Happened to Mankind,
by J. Krishnamurti
Man's Search For Meaning,
by Victor Frankl
The Old and the New Testament
The Bhagavad Gita
Autobiography of Malcolm X,
with Alex Haley
Manchild in the Promised Land,
by Claude Brown
Black Boy,
by Richard Wright
Native Son,
by Richard Wright
Makes Me Wanna Holler,
by Nathan McCall
and, finally, his own book:
Eye of the Hurricane: My Path From Darkness to Freedom,
by Dr. Rubin Carter with Ken Klonsky,
foreword by Nelson Mandela, 2011.
Rubin considers 'Eye of the Hurricane' to be his last will and testament.
Please visit the website here:
rubinthehurricanecarter.com
"You see, there are two flames burning in the human heart all the time. The flame of anger against injustice, and the flame of hope that you can build a better world. And my job... is going round and fanning both flames... because people need encouragement. Everyone needs encouragement, if you're going to do the best you can."
TONY BENN's TOP TEN BOOKS
1) The Bible
2) Das Kapital by Karl Marx
3) The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
4) Common Sense by Tom Paine
5) Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
6) Religion & the Rise of Capitalism by RH Tawney
7) In Place of Fear by Nye Bevan
8) The Making of the English Working Class by E P Thompson
9) Parliamentary Socialism by Ralph Miliband
10) The World Turned upside Down by Christopher Hill
TO GO TO EITHER TONY's BLOG SITE OR THE "BENNITES" UNOFFICIAL SITE PLEASE PRESS THE LINK(S) BELOW:
2 The Withered Garland by Peter Johnson (Wartime Bomber Pilot)
3 The Psalms (especially Psalm 8) The Bible
4 The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day (Catholic Worker founder)
5 In Solitary Witness by Gordon Zahn (the Franz Jagerstatter story)
6 The Fourfold Vision by Dr. Sherwood Taylor (Four roads to knowledge)
7 Praise of Folly by Desiderus Erasmus
8 The United Nations Charter (especially the Preface)
9 Edmund Campion S.J.(Jesuit priest and martyr) by Evelyn Waugh
10 Double Harness by Robin Tanner (Quaker educationalist and artist)
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Top 10 Fiction Books
1 The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
2 A Suitable Boy by Vikran Seth
3 South Riding by Winifred Holtby
4 Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
5 A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
6 Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
7 The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macauley
8 Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh
9 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
10 Sarum by Edward Rutherford
William Wall, Poet (a mighty man!)
Email kirwall@eircom.net www.williamwall.eu
WILLIAM WALL's TOP TWENTY (PLUS) BOOKS !
(in no particular order)
King Lear by Shakespeare
The Trial and Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Inferno by Dante
Ulysses by James Joyce
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
The Waste Land by TS Eliot
At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
The Barracks and That They May Face the Rising Sun by John McGahern
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
100 years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels
Empire by M Hardt and A Negri
Collected Fiction by Jorge Luis Borges
The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin
Famine by Liam O'Flaherty
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Austerlitz by WG Sebald
The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz' Top Ten Books
Fiction top ten:
1. American Woman by Susan Choi
2. A Person of Interest by Susan Choi
3. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
4. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
5. Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko
6. The Knight, Death, and the Devil by Ella Leffland
7. Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
8. Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
9. Four Hands: A Novel by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
10. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje
Non-fiction top ten:
1. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
2. About My Life and the Kept Woman: A Memoir by John Rechy
3. One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race by Scott Malcomson
4. Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View by Howard Adams
5. The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814 by John Grenier
6. Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
7. Guevara, Also Known As Che by Paco Ignacio Taiblo II
8. Get Up: A 12 Step Guide to Recovery for Misfits, Freaks, and Weirdos by Bucky Sinister
9. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War and Seeded Civil Rights by David S. Reynolds
10. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in 20th Century America by Richard Slotkin
John Stanton has, for the last 17 months, written on the US Army's Human Terrain System. Nearly 100 sources, and 47 articles... John's articles led to changes in the program.
JOHN STANTON's TOP TEN BOOKS:
1. 2666 by Roberto Bolano
2. Imperial by William Vollman
3. Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman
4. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
5. The Fall by Albert Camus
6. One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse
7. The Island of Crimea by Vasily Aksyonov
8. Death on the Installment Plan by L.F. Celine
9. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by F. Nietzsche
10. A Short History of Decay by E.M. Cioran
10(b)The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu
CAGE INNOYE’S TOP TEN BOOKS (WHICH INFLUENCED HIS DEVELOPMENT)
Andre Breton, Surrealist Manifesto, not a book, but a statement, first piece ever read that I really liked. After taking science and math classes in college this was a WMD.
Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, it blew my mind the first time I read it, I have since critiqued the framework but still it has truths within. It caused me to turn toward the study of economics.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral mind, also blew my mind and still does, if you are a right brain person this book is intriguing.
Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels, powerful ideas, explained well, very influential upon me.
Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson, here is a worldview that seems quite obvious today
Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci, a very interesting analysis of politics, culture and power
Buddhist Logic, Volume 1, Theodor Stcherbatsky, very informative, I learned much from it about Eastern philosophy, but also the general issues of all philosophy which were mirrored in India.
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, the concept of myth was revolutionary to me and I learned that personal myth supersedes all, and incorporates all science and theory as just a chapter within it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, a very fascinating thesis that unites ‘everything’ into one system, intellectually impressive.
Understanding the I Ching, Hellmut and Richard Wilhelm, the world’s first philosophy piece and it still holds up, many profound perceptions.
JAMES COCKCROFT's TOP BOOKS
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie
Emma Goldman’s Autobiography
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Chekhov, Collected Short Stories
Walt Whitman, Collected Poems
Malcolm X Speaks
Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man
The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels
The Speeches of Fidel Castro
Che Guevara’s Essay on Man and Socialism (in almost any collection of his writings)
STAN GOFF's TOP TEN BOOKS
"After Christendom," by Stanley Hauerwas
"Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale," by Maria Mies
"The Rivers North of the Future," by Ivan Illich, with David Cayley
"Bonds of Love," by Jessica Benjamin
"The Politics of Jesus," by John Howard Yoder
"The Sexual Contract," by Carole Pateman
"The Alchemy of Race and Rights," by Patricia Williams
"The Power of the Machine," by Alf Hornborg
"Money, Sex, and Power," by Nancy CM Hartsock
"Unbearable Weight," by Susan Bordo
STEPHEN LENDMAN SAYS:
I'll share one crucially important one
- Ellen Brown's Web of Debt -
absolutely required reading.
To understand the depth of the problem in
the US, read this book free online:
"The Iron Curtain Over America" by Col. John Beaty.
Again, it's free online.
STILL HERE !!!
Some of the South Wales Miners' huge library is still available on line... at Swansea university:
