Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy


Matt Stoller - 2019
    A concentration of power, whether in the hands of a military dictator or a JP Morgan, was understood as autocratic and dangerous to individual liberty and democracy. This idea stretched back to the country’s founding. In the 1930s, people observed that the Great Depression was caused by financial concentration in the hands of a few whose misuse of their power induced a financial collapse. They drew on this tradition to craft the New Deal. In Goliath, Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed. Today’s bitter recriminations and panic represent more than just fear of the future, they reflect a basic confusion about what is happening and the historical backstory that brought us to this moment. The true effects of populism, a shrinking middle class, and concentrated financial wealth are only just beginning to manifest themselves under the current administrations. The lessons of Stoller’s study will only grow more relevant as time passes. Building upon his viral article in The Atlantic, “How the Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul,” Stoller illustrates in rich detail how we arrived at this tenuous moment, and the steps we must take to create a new democracy.

The Story of the Irish Race: A Popular History of Ireland


Seumas MacManus - 1921
    Sketches a rough and ready picture of the more prominent peaks that rise out of Ireland's past-the high spots in the story of the Irish race. Written especially for the American reader (whom the author found to be as unknowing about Ireland's past as about the past of Borneo)... --alibris ... 'Indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the Irish people--their political struggle, their magnificent literature, and their whole great contribution to Western Civilization, a contribution amazing in its richness and variety." --from jacket flap.

Socialism Is Evil: The Moral Case Against Marx's Radical Dream


Justin Haskins - 2018
    But the most significant danger posed by socialism isn’t that its implementation would lead to greater poverty and fewer property rights, it’s that socialism would create numerous moral problems, including the limits it would place on individual liberty and religious freedom. In Socialism Is Evil: The Moral Case Against Marx’s Radical Dream, conservative columnist and think tank research fellow Justin Haskins examines the moral perils of Marx’s socialism and explains why if socialism were to be imposed in its fullest form, it wouldn’t just damage people’s freedoms, it would obliterate them. Haskins argues it would be dangerous to attempt to create Marx’s utopian socialist world, and even more importantly, that such an attempt would be so highly immoral that it could reasonably be called “evil.” In Socialism Is Evil, Haskins makes the moral case against socialism and also describes in detail what socialists believe, the differences between socialism and communism, why Marx’s socialism will never be completely adopted, and why even the more moderate European-style socialism, called “democratic socialism” by some, is highly immoral and anti-American. Many socialists are kind, generous people with good intentions, but sometimes, good intentions can create devastating results. Socialism Is Evil briefly tackles some of the most important moral controversies surrounding Marx’s socialism, providing supporters of individual liberty with the tools they need to stop the rise of socialism in its tracks.

The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era


Michael Grunwald - 2012
    Grunwald’s meticulous reporting shows how the stimulus, though reviled on the right and the left, helped prevent a depression while jump-starting the president’s agenda for lasting change. As ambitious and far-reaching as FDR’s New Deal, the Recovery Act is a down payment on the nation’s economic and environmental future, the purest distillation of change in the Obama era. The stimulus has launched a transition to a clean-energy economy, doubled our renewable power, and financed unprecedented investments in energy efficiency, a smarter grid, electric cars, advanced biofuels, and green manufacturing. It is computerizing America’s pen-and-paper medical system. Its Race to the Top is the boldest education reform in U.S. history. It has put in place the biggest middle-class tax cuts in a generation, the largest research investments ever, and the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. It includes the largest expansion of antipoverty programs since the Great Society, lifting millions of Americans above the poverty line, reducing homelessness, and modernizing unemployment insurance. Like the first New Deal, Obama’s stimulus has created legacies that last: the world’s largest wind and solar projects, a new battery industry, a fledgling high-speed rail network, and the world’s highest-speed Internet network. Michael Grunwald goes behind the scenes—sitting in on cabinet meetings, as well as recounting the secret strategy sessions where Republicans devised their resistance to Obama—to show how the stimulus was born, how it fueled a resurgence on the right, and how it is changing America. The New New Deal shatters the conventional Washington narrative and it will redefine the way Obama’s first term is perceived.

how the poor die


George Orwell
    Orwell gives an anecdotal account of his experiences in a french public hospital which triggers a contemplation of hospital literature in the context of 19th-century medicine.

An Introduction to Austrian Economics


Thomas C. Taylor - 1980
    Taylor discusses all the fundamental aspects of Austrian thought, from subjectivism and marginal utility to inflation and the business cycle. This new and revised edition is widely influential among economics students.For the newcomer, this work represents a concise introduction to both the historical setting of the Austrian School and to the ideas espoused by its members.This volume includes chapters on:Social Cooperation and Resource Allocation Economic Calculation The Subjective Theory of Value The Market and Market Prices Production in an Evenly Rotating Economy From an Evenly Rotating Economy to the Real World Inflation and the Business Trade Cycle96 pp. (pb)

Blood of the Liberals


George Packer - 2000
    Packer's father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely--and ultimately fatally--tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, this is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.

You Don't Want to Know: The grisly, jaw-dropping and most macabre moments from history, nature and beyond


James Felton - 2021
    (Except secretly you really do you masochistic, beastly person you.) Illustrated, painfully funny and drop-your-jaw ridiculous, this is trivia from the cesspit of time that you won't be able to stop reading once you start.*To aid childbirth.**They exploded it with 100 times too much dynamite and rained blubber down on unsuspecting people and buildings.***Decency prevents us from answering this one here. You'll have to buy the book to find out.

Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives


Edwin Black - 2006
    and the world to an oil addiction that could have been avoided, that was never necessary, and that could be ended not in ten years, not in five years, but today. Edwin Black, award-winning author of IBM and the Holocaust, has mined scores of corporate and governmental archives to assemble thousands of previously uncovered and long-forgotten documents and studies into this dramatic story. Black traces a continuum of rapacious energy cartels and special interests dating back nearly 5,000 years, from wood to coal to oil, and then to the bicycle and electric battery cartels of the 1890s, which created thousands of electric vehicles that plied American streets a century ago. But those noiseless and clean cars were scuttled by petroleum interests, despite the little-known efforts of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford to mass-produce electric cars powered by personal backyard energy stations. Black also documents how General Motors criminally conspired to undermine mass transit in dozens of cities and how Big Oil, Big Corn, and Big Coal have subverted synthetic fuels and other alternatives. He then brings the story full-circle to the present day oil crises, global warming and beyond. Black showcases overlooked compressed-gas, electric and hydrogen cars on the market today, as well as inexpensive all-function home energy units that could eliminate much oil usage. His eye-opening call for a Manhattan Project for immediate energy independence will help energize society to finally take action. Internal Combustion, and its interactive website www.internalcombustionbook.com, will generate a much-needed national debate at a crucial time. It should be read by every citizen who consumes oil -- everyone. Internal Combustion can change everything, not by reinventing the wheel, but by excavating it from where it was buried a century ago.

A History of the Supreme Court


Bernard Schwartz - 1979
    John Rutledge stepped down as Associate Justice to become a state judge in South Carolina; John Jay resigned as Chief Justice to run for Governor of New York; and Alexander Hamilton declined to replace Jay, pursuing a private law practice instead. As Bernard Schwartz shows in this landmark history, the Supreme Court has indeed travelled a long and interesting journey to its current preeminent place in American life. In A History of the Supreme Court, Schwartz provides the finest, most comprehensive one-volume narrative ever published of our highest court. With impeccable scholarship and a clear, engaging style, he tells the story of the justices and their jurisprudence--and the influence the Court has had on American politics and society. With a keen ability to explain complex legal issues for the nonspecialist, he takes us through both the great and the undistinguished Courts of our nation's history. He provides insight into our foremost justices, such as John Marshall (who established judicial review in Marbury v. Madison, an outstanding display of political calculation as well as fine jurisprudence), Roger Taney (whose legacy has been overshadowed by Dred Scott v. Sanford), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and others. He draws on evidence such as personal letters and interviews to show how the court has worked, weaving narrative details into deft discussions of the developments in constitutional law. Schwartz also examines the operations of the court: until 1935, it met in a small room under the Senate--so cramped that the judges had to put on their robes in full view of the spectators. But when the new building was finally opened, one justice called it almost bombastically pretentious, and another asked, What are we supposed to do, ride in on nine elephants? He includes fascinating asides, on the debate in the first Court, for instance, over the use of English-style wigs and gowns (the decision: gowns, no wigs); and on the day Oliver Wendell Holmes announced his resignation--the same day that Earl Warren, as a California District Attorney, argued his first case before the Court. The author brings the story right up to the present day, offering balanced analyses of the pivotal Warren Court and the Rehnquist Court through 1992 (including, of course, the arrival of Clarence Thomas). In addition, he includes four special chapters on watershed cases: Dred Scott v. Sanford, Lochner v. New York, Brown v. Board of Education, and Roe v. Wade. Schwartz not only analyzes the impact of each of these epoch-making cases, he takes us behind the scenes, drawing on all available evidence to show how the justices debated the cases and how they settled on their opinions. Bernard Schwartz is one of the most highly regarded scholars of the Supreme Court, author of dozens of books on the law, and winner of the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award. In this remarkable account, he provides the definitive one-volume account of our nation's highest court.

A History of Modern Psychology


C. James Goodwin - 1998
    They will also develop a deeper understanding of the many interconnections that exist among the different areas of psychology. Goodwin's book not only provides accounts of the lives and contributions of psychology's pioneers set into historical context; it also contains original writings by these psychologists, interwoven with informative comments from the author. The text is written in a conversational and engaging style with discrete attention to recent scholarship in the history of psychology, especially that of the past 150 years.

Economics In Wonderland: Robert Reich's Cartoon Guide To A Political World Gone Mad And Mean


Robert B. Reich - 2017
    Secretary of Labor and The Daily Show and CNBC commentator's podcast, viewed on his Inequality Media website, has seen Reich's informal lectures on student debt, social security, and gerrymandering, which he accompanies by quickly drawing cartoons to illustrate his major points. Collected here, for the first time, are short essays, edited from his presentations, and Reich's clean-line, confident illustrations, created with a large sketchpad and magic marker. Economics in Wonderland clearly explains the consequences of the disastrous policies of global austerity with humor, insight, passion, and warmth, all of which are on vivid display in words and pictures.

This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe


Robert Tombs - 2021
    Islands cannot have the same history as continental plains. The United Kingdom is a European country, but not the same kind of European country as Germany, Poland or Hungary. For most of the 150 centuries during which Britain has been inhabited it has been on the edge, culturally and literally, of mainland Europe.In this succinct book, Tombs shows that the decision to leave the EU is historically explicable - though not made historically inevitable - by Britain's very different historical experience, especially in the twentieth century, and because of our more extensive and deeper ties outside Europe. He challenges the orthodox view that Brexit was due solely to British or English exceptionalism: in choosing to leave the EU, the British, he argues, were in many ways voting as typical Europeans.

Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, and the Rise of America's Xanadu


Les Standiford - 2019
    Trusting his remarkable instincts, within less than a year he had built the Royal Poinciana Hotel, and two years later what was to become the legendary Breakers--instantly establishing the island as the preferred destination for those who could afford it. Over the next 125 years, Palm Beach has become synonymous with exclusivity--especially its most famous residence, "Mar-a-Lago." As Les Standiford relates, "the high walls of Mar-a-Lago and other manses like it were seemingly designed to contain scandal within as much as keep intruders out."With the authority and narrative prose style that has gained Standiford's work widespread acclaim, Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, and the Rise of America's Xanadu tells the history of this fabled landscape intertwined with the colorful lives of its famous protagonists. Flagler's own marriages to Ida Alice Shourds and Mary Lily Kenan perhaps initiated the dramas to come. While sewing machine heir Paris Singer and architect Addison Mizner created the "Mediterranean look" of Palm Beach in the 1910s, inspiring the building of such modern day palaces as Eva and Ed Stotesbury's "El Mirasol," the centerpiece of Palm Beach became the fever dream of Marjorie Merriweather Post and her equally wealthy husband E. F. Hutton, for whom Ziegfeld Follies designer Joseph Urban built "Mar-a-Lago" in 1927. Marjorie "ruled" social Palm Beach through two other marriages and for years on her own until her death in 1973. The fate of her mansion threatened to tear apart the very fabric of the town until Donald Trump acquired it in 1985.Les Standiford brings alive a fabled place and the characters--the rich, famous and infamous alike--who have been drawn inexorably to it.

Ancient Post-Flood History


Ken Johnson - 2010
    This can be used as a companion guide in the study of Creation science. This revised edition adds the background history of nine new countries. Learn the true origins of the countries and people of France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Scotland, Greece, Italy, Russia, Egypt, Israel, Iraq, Iran, China, the Arabs, the Kurds, and more. Some questions answered: Who were the Pharaohs in the times of Joseph and Moses? When did the famine of Joseph occur? What Egyptian documents mention these? When did the Exodus take place? When did the kings of Egypt start being called "Pharaoh" and why? Who was the first king of a united Italy? Who was Zeus and where was he buried? Where did Shem and Ham rule and where were they buried? How large was Nimrod's invasion force that set up the Babylonian Empire, and when did this invasion occur? What is Nimrod's name in Persian documents? How can we use this information to witness to unbelievers? Brought to you by Biblefacts Ministries, Biblefacts.org