Book picks similar to
The Good Fight: Declare Your Independence and Close the Democracy Gap by Ralph Nader
politics
non-fiction
history
political
The Constitution of the United States of America
Founding Fathers - 1787
This inexpesnive pamphlet edition is sure to be prized by Americans of all ages.
Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide
Miranda Devine - 2021
The dirty secrets contained in Hunter’s laptop almost derailed his father’s presidential campaign and ignited one of the greatest media coverups in American history. This is the unvarnished story of what’s really inside the laptop and what China knows about the Bidens, by the New York Post journalist who brought it into the open. It exposes the coordinated censorship operation by Big Tech, the media establishment, and former intelligence operatives to stifle the New York Post’s coverage, in a chilling exercise of raw political power three weeks before the 2020 election. A treasure trove of corporate documents, emails, text messages, photographs, and voice recordings, spanning a decade, the laptop provided the first evidence that President Joe Biden was involved in his son’s ventures in China, Ukraine, and beyond, despite his repeated denials. This intimate insight into Hunter’s dissolute lifestyle shows he was incapable of holding down a job, let alone being paid tens of millions of dollars in high-powered international business deals by foreign interests, unless he had something else of value to sell—which of course he did. He was the son of the vice president who would go on to become the leader of the free world.
Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?
Patrick J. Buchanan - 2011
The "one Nation under God, indivisible" of the Pledge of Allegiance is passing away. In a few decades, that America will be gone forever. In its place will arise a country unrecognizable to our parents. This is the thrust of Pat Buchanan's Suicide of a Superpower, his most controversial and thought-provoking book to date.Buchanan traces the disintegration to three historic changes: America's loss of her cradle faith, Christianity; the moral, social, and cultural collapse that have followed from that loss; and the slow death of the people who created and ruled the nation. And as our nation disintegrates, our government is failing in its fundamental duties, unable to defend our borders, balance our budgets, or win our wars.How Americans are killing the country they profess to love, and the fate that awaits us if we do not turn around, is what Suicide of a Superpower is all about.
Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era
Michael Mandelbaum - 2016
Until that moment, the United States used military power to defend against threats (real and perceived) that its leaders thought would either weaken America's position in the world order or--in the worst case--threaten the homeland. For the first time ever, the United States militarily was now actively involved in states that represented no threat, and with missions that were largely humanitarian and socio-political. After establishing the Kurdish no-fly zone, the US in quick succession intervened in Somalia, Haiti, and Kosovo. Even after 9/11, it decided that it had a duty to not just invade Iraq, but reconstruct Iraqi society along Western lines. In Mission Failure, the eminent international relations scholar Michael Mandelbaum provides a sweeping interpretive history of American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era to show why this new approach was doomed to failure. America had always adhered to a mission-based foreign policy, but in the post-Cold War era it swung away from security concerns to a near-exclusive emphasis on implanting Western institutions wherever it could. Many good things happened in this era, including a broad expansion of democracy and strong growth in the global economy. But the U.S. never had either the capacity or the will to change societies that were dramatically different from our own. Over two decades later, we can see the wreckage: a broken Iraq a teetering Afghanistan, a China that laughs at our demands that they adopt a human rights regime, and a still-impoverished Haiti. Mandelbaum does not deny that American foreign policy has always had a strong ideological component. Instead, he argues that emphasizing that particular feature generally leads to mission failure. We are able to defend ourselves well and effectively project power, but we have very little capacity to change other societies. If nothing else, that is what the last quarter century has taught us.
A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America
Philip Rucker - 2020
They peer deeply into Trump's White House – at the aides pressured to lie to the public, the lawyers scrambling to clear up norm-breaking disasters, and the staffers whose careers have been reduced to ashes – to paint an unparalleled group portrait of an administration driven by self-preservation and paranoia. Rucker and Leonnig reveal Trump at his most unvarnished, showing the unhinged decision-making and incompetence that has floored officials and stunned foreign leaders. They portray unscripted calls with Vladimir Putin, steak dinners with Kim Jong-un, and calls with Theresa May so hostile that they left her aides shaken. They also take a hard look at Robert Mueller, Trump's greatest antagonist to date, and how his investigation slowly unravelled an administration whose universal value is loyalty – not to country, but to the president himself.
Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind The Secret Plan To Steal America's Democracy
David Daley - 2016
Yet even as Democrats swooned, a small cadre of Republican operatives, including Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie, and Chris Jankowski began plotting their comeback with a simple yet ingenious plan. These men had devised a way to take a tradition of dirty tricks—known to political insiders as “ratf**king”—to a whole new, unprecedented level. Flooding state races with a gold rush of dark money made possible by Citizens United, the Republicans reshaped state legislatures, where the power to redistrict is held. Reconstructing this never- told-before story, David Daley examines the far-reaching effects of this so-called REDMAP program, which has radically altered America’s electoral map and created a firewall in the House, insulating the party and its wealthy donors from popular democracy. Ratf**ked pulls back the curtain on one of the greatest heists in American political history.
Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times
Robert W. McChesney - 1999
Robert McChesney, whom Marc Crispin Miller calls the greatest of our media historians, maintains that the major beneficiaries of the so-called Information Age are no more than a handful of enormous corporations, and that this concentrated corporate control is disastrous for any notion of participatory democracy.In a book that Noam Chomsky hails as a rich, penetrating study, McChesney combines historical sweep and unprecedented detail on current events as he chronicles the recent waves of media mergers and acquisitions, as well as the corrupt and secretive enactment of public policies surrounding the Internet, digital television, and public broadcasting. He also addresses the gradual and ominous adaptation of the First Amendment as a means of shielding corporate media power, and debunks the myth that the market compels media firms to give the people what they want.
The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America
Nick Gillespie - 2011
Everywhere, that is, except in our politics. There we are held hostage to an eighteenth century system, dominated by two political parties whose ever-more-polarized rhetorical positions mask a mutual interest in maintaining a stranglehold on power.The Declaration of Independents is a compelling and extremely entertaining manifesto on behalf of a system better suited to the future--one structured by the essential libertarian principles of free minds and free markets. Gillespie and Welch profile libertarian innovators, identify the villains propping up the ancien regime, and take aim at do-something government policies that hurt most of those they claim to protect. Their vision will resonate with a wide swath of frustrated citizens and young voters, born after the Cold War's end, to whom old tribal allegiances, prejudices, and hang-ups about everything from hearing a foreign language on the street to gay marriage to drug use simply do not make sense.
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
Jane Mayer - 2016
But as Jane Mayer shows in this powerful, meticulously reported history, a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system.The network has brought together some of the richest people on the planet. Their core beliefs—that taxes are a form of tyranny; that government oversight of business is an assault on freedom—are sincerely held. But these beliefs also advance their personal and corporate interests: Many of their companies have run afoul of federal pollution, worker safety, securities, and tax laws.The chief figures in the network are Charles and David Koch, whose father made his fortune in part by building oil refineries in Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany. The patriarch later was a founding member of the John Birch Society, whose politics were so radical it believed Dwight Eisenhower was a communist. The brothers were schooled in a political philosophy that asserted the only role of government is to provide security and to enforce property rights.When libertarian ideas proved decidedly unpopular with voters, the Koch brothers and their allies chose another path. If they pooled their vast resources, they could fund an interlocking array of organizations that could work in tandem to influence and ultimately control academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and, they hoped, the presidency. Richard Mellon Scaife, the mercurial heir to banking and oil fortunes, had the brilliant insight that most of their political activities could be written off as tax-deductible “philanthropy.”These organizations were given innocuous names such as Americans for Prosperity. Funding sources were hidden whenever possible. This process reached its apotheosis with the allegedly populist Tea Party movement, abetted mightily by the Citizens United decision—a case conceived of by legal advocates funded by the network.The political operatives the network employs are disciplined, smart, and at times ruthless. Mayer documents instances in which people affiliated with these groups hired private detectives to impugn whistle-blowers, journalists, and even government investigators. And their efforts have been remarkably successful. Libertarian views on taxes and regulation, once far outside the mainstream and still rejected by most Americans, are ascendant in the majority of state governments, the Supreme Court, and Congress. Meaningful environmental, labor, finance, and tax reforms have been stymied.Jane Mayer spent five years conducting hundreds of interviews-including with several sources within the network-and scoured public records, private papers, and court proceedings in reporting this book. In a taut and utterly convincing narrative, she traces the byzantine trail of the billions of dollars spent by the network and provides vivid portraits of the colorful figures behind the new American oligarchy.Dark Money is a book that must be read by anyone who cares about the future of American democracy.
My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency
Doug Henwood - 2016
But, as Doug Henwood makes clear in this concise, devastating indictment, little trust can be placed in her campaign promises. Rigorously reviewing her record, Henwood shows how Clinton’s positions on key issues have always blown with the breeze of expediency, though generally around an axis of moralism and hawkishness. Without a meaningful program other than a broad fealty to the status quo, Henwood suggests, “the case for Hillary boils down to this: she has experience, she’s a woman, and it’s her turn.”
Trump Saves America: Our Last Hope to Be Great Again
Charles Hurt - 2019
They are people who love their country, trust their higher God, obey laws and will do anything for their family and neighbors. They are the very people the Founders envisioned when they hatched the radical idea of self-governance. This is the story of a Leviathan government - the most powerful political force in the history of mankind - that has become dangerously unmoored from the people it represents. It is the story of how elites and the politically comfortable controlling both parties in Washington have utterly lost touch. They don't even realize how much the people they represent despise the uncontrollable Leviathan.The establishment has tried their best to ignore Donald Trump-except to brand him as a racist, a xenophobe, an isolationist, and a dangerous, violence-inciting war monger. All standards of reporting vanished. In the era of Trump, no sort of criticism was off-limits. They openly mocked his looks, ridiculed his private business accomplishments, pilloried his family and children and made fun of his foreign-born wife for her accent!The Leviathan has grown untamable. Democrats and Republicans run for office year after year on promises they have no intention of keeping. Neither side wants to fix a single problem. The whole thing has become one giant ungovernable, corrupt Ponzi scheme that - one day - will come crashing down.Charles Hurt advocates for the "Nuclear Option" for dealing with this mess: just blow the whole damned thing up. Whatever is presidential or diplomatic, let's try the opposite. Whatever these people in Washington find most horrifying, let's try that. Finally, the multi-headed Leviathan swamp monster has met the perfect dragon slayer in Donald Trump. Trump Saves America examines each corrupt head of this Leviathan, and why Donald Trump is the only good answer to fixing it.
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
Chalmers Johnson - 2000
In this incisive and controversial book, Chalmers Johnson lays out in vivid detail the dangers faced by our overextended empire, which insists on projecting its military power to every corner of the earth and using American capital and markets to force global economic integration on its own terms. From a case of rape by U.S. servicemen in Okinawa to our role in Asia's financial crisis, from our early support for Saddam Hussein to our conduct in the Balkans, Johnson reveals the ways in which our misguided policies are planting the seeds of future disaster.In a new edition that addresses recent international events from September 11 to the war in Iraq, this now classic book remains as prescient and powerful as ever.
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
John J. Mearsheimer - 2006
Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, was one of the most controversial articles in recent memory. Originally published in the "London Review of Books "in March 2006, it provoked both howls of outrage and cheers of gratitude for challenging what had been a taboo issue in America: the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy. Now in a work of major importance, Mearsheimer and Walt deepen and expand their argument and confront recent developments in Lebanon and Iran. They describe the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the United States provides to Israel and argues that this support cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds. This exceptional relationship is due largely to the political influence of a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. Mearsheimer and Walt provocatively contend that the lobby has a far-reaching impact on America's posture throughout the Middle East--in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--and the policies it has encouraged are in neither America's national interest nor Israel's long-term interest. The lobby's influence also affects America's relationship with important allies and increases dangers that all states face from global jihadist terror. Writing in "The New York Review of Books," Michael Massing declared, "Not since "Foreign Affairs "magazine published Samuel Huntington's 'The Clash of Civilizations?' in 1993 has an academic essay detonated with such force." The publication of "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy "is certain to widen the debate and to be one of the most talked-about books of the year.
Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country
Thom Hartmann - 2010
The result has been economic and environmental disaster. In this hard-hitting new book, nationally syndicated radio and television host and bestselling author Thom Hartmann outlines eleven common-sense proposals, deeply rooted in America's history, that will once again make America strong and Americans--not corporations and billionaires--prosperous. Some of these ideas will be controversial to both the Left and the Right, but the litmus test for each is not political correctness but whether or not it serves to revitalize this country we all love and make life better for its citizens.
Always Right
Niall Ferguson - 2013
Denounced by her enemies as divisive and dictatorial, Thatcher was the greatest leader Britain has produced since Winston Churchill. The standard bearer for a decisive economic regime-change, she was also a social revolutionary who shook up the stagnant English class system. Yet she was a foreign policy realist, who restored her country’s standing in the world. And far from being an over-bearing prime minister, she ultimately fell victim to the machinations of Cabinet government. ALWAYS RIGHT is a fittingly frank assessment of a great woman who made history.Niall Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. He has published fourteen books, including The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Civilization: The West and the Rest and, most recently, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. An accomplished broadcaster, in 2009 he won the International Emmy for Best Documentary. In 2010 he won the Benjamin Franklin Award for Public Service and in 2012 the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement.