Author name: davidswanson

Deliberation Day
March 12, 2004

“Deliberation Day” is the title of a new book by Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin. Ackerman was also the coauthor of The Stakeholder Society – a brilliant book proposing that we provide every young American with $80,000 through a 2 percent tax on wealth above $80,000, in order to give everyone the opportunity to acquire an education or launch a business. In Deliberation Day, Ackerman has produced an even more interesting idea, an even more exciting read more

Moore and More is Needed
June 29, 2004

Also published at http://www.opednews.com and http://www.democraticunderground.com and http://www.michaelmoore.com

Fahrenheit 9-11 reminds me of Howard Dean. Both were wildly promoted by the media in a manner not carefully thought through by media bigwigs, and then both were savaged by the media just before opening day.

The size of the audiences seeing this movie was guaranteed by the media hype, and the notion that the audiences consist mainly of liberal activists read more

Fortress America by William Greider

This book contains useful facts and analysis, but I doubt it’s moved many people to action. (Of course the policies it advocates have not been adopted by the Bush II regime.)

People like me who would like to see our military drastically reduced and who have little faith in the good intentions of anyone involved in it are likely to be turned off by Greider’s more middle of the road views and what appears to be his reluctance to express some of the read more

Framed
“Framed! Labor and the Corporate Media,” by Christopher Martin.

Reviewed by David Swanson

May 27, 2004

I didn’t need to be told that the corporate media do a horrendous job of covering organized labor. What this book tells us that I have not seen analyzed so well elsewhere is what the thought processes look like that lead to this horrendous coverage.

It’s simple enough to observe that the media support capital and work against the concerns of workers. But why are there read more

Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett

Reviewed June 5, 2004

This book veers off onto a number of topics in addition to free will and determinism, most of which material is well worth reading even if you’ve read Dennett’s other work. The argument with regard to free will is a somewhat original take on compatibilism – which is a longstanding position, all of Dennett’s bluster about his groundbreaking scandalbraving notwithstanding.

Our point of view as living acting human beings read more

“God of the Rodeo,” by Daniel Bergner.

“God of the Rodeo,” by Daniel Bergner, 1998, is a great book, an excellent account of life incarcerating and being incarcerated in Louisiana’s Angola penitentiary, a former slave plantation on which much has changed and much has not. The book is also about the struggle required in order to write such a book, a struggle that has recently been made much harder. Compare the following quotes.

(1)”There are countries in which read more

“HOSTILE CLIMATE: Report on anti-gay activity, 1999 edition,” produced by People For the American Way

“HOSTILE CLIMATE: Report on anti-gay activity, 1999 edition,” produced by People For the American Way (http://www.pfaw.org) is an overwhelming document, a 250-page book briefly chronicling 292 incidents of discrimination against homosexuals in the United States during 1998.
Excluded from this list are hate read more

“180 Ways to Walk the Recognition Talk”

Folks at the University of Virginia have been having some good – if sad – laughs over an almost unbelievably stupid and cruel book that was recently distributed to every department manager there. The state of Virginia is trying out a new pay plan on its underpaid university staff. The basic idea behind the plan seems to be avoiding pay raises. The basic idea behind the book seems to be moronic alternatives to pay intended to pacify read more

Efficiency of Factionalism, Fatality of Discipline
July 7, 2004

There’s a common tendency, even among organizers and activists, to assume that in some sense George W. Bush is right when he says “A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier.” We all support democracy in our unions and in labor media, but not of course in order to make our unions more efficient, rather to keep our members happy even at the understood risk of slowing down the important business of organizing and read more

Roots to Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing by Lee Staples

In recent decades, community organizing has become an increasingly powerful force mobilizing low- and moderate-income Americans to improve their neighborhoods. When those most shut out of power and benefits create an organization that is able to strategize, negotiate, promote legislation, demonstrate, engage in civil disobedience, work the media, and turn out voters, the result is that banks and corporations, school boards and lawmakers, read more

Also published on Alternet.org

“Oh, hey, wait a minute, I tried that and it was a major disaster. I still can barely even begin to face what I did it’s so awful looking back on it.” This is the message that the recent film “Fog of War” sends from Robert McNamara to Donald Rumsfeld, from one Secretary of “Defense” to another.

“There is no alternative in this age of terror,” might be the response we could expect from Rumsfeld, who continues to read more

“Secrets,” by Sissela Bok.

I recently read SECRETS, by Sissela Bok. She writes with the skill of a
philosopher and with the concern to actually do some good that is common to
most everyone except many philosophers. She distinguishes secrecy from
privacy. She distinguishes good secrets from bad ones. She defends the need
for privacy and secrets in several convincing ways, including some surprising
ones such as the need for surprise, but in an unconvincing read more

Seven Words That Can Change the World – A New Understanding of Sacredness, by Joseph R. Simonetta (Hampton Roads Publishing Company) is an encouraging little essay. The title, the cover, the preface, the introduction, and various other trappings suggest that it is a religious self-help book that will probably remind the reader of the importance of connecting with his or her inner whatchamacallit in order to find true peace and increased market potential. But the body of the book consists read more

“Sexual Personae,” By Camille Paglia.

Camille Paglia’s SEXUAL PERSONAE is a huge book in every sense. It makes me want to read and reread a great many books, examine and re-examine a great number of sculptures and paintings. There are in it interpretations of particular works with which I disagree, and others on which I am not qualified to judge, but the big themes in it – the continuity of paganism, the approaches to sex and nature – are a valuable contribution.

One read more

Silver City Smokes
August 14, 2004
Mark your calendar now and plan to go see John Sayles’ new movie “Silver City” when it opens on Friday, September 17. It’s a powerfully entertaining story and – more importantly for any good book or movie this year – it’s powerfully anti-Bush.

Someone told me “Manchurian Candidate” was an anti-Bush movie. I didn’t think so when I saw it, not even in the way that “The Day After Tomorrow” was read more

Solidarity Forever!

Nelson Lichtenstein’s new book, “The State of the Union,” gives a history of labor unions in the United States by way of arguing for the need to restrengthen them, and I think the case is very persuasive.

Lichtenstein weaves together a number of themes to explain the decline in union membership and power. One is increased reliance on individual rights and legal protections. Federal laws ban all sorts of discrimination, endangerment, and abuse, but the federal read more

The two books that I would most highly recommend to readers in the U.S. today are “A People’s History of the United States,” by Howard Zinn, and “Labor’s Untold Story” by Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais. These books tell a history of the country that is generally kept secret.

“Why Unions Matter” by Michael Yates is a terrific short introduction to something you’ll never learn in school or from the U.S. corporate media: what a labor union is read more

“Moral Judgment: Does the Abuse Excuse Threaten Our Legal System,” By James Q. Wilson.

James Q. Wilson’s “Moral Judgment: Does the abuse excuse threaten our legal system?” (1997) is a good contribution to a usually muddled discussion. I think that even people, like myself, who disagree with most of Wilson’s attitudes toward criminal justice should agree with most of what he says here.

Wilson favors a vocabulary of religion and traditional philosophy and displays read more