Governments

I heartily recommend Richard Labunski's thoughtful and carefully researched book, "The Second Constitutional Convention." Our Constitution is probably the most revered document in U.S. history. Yet it was written long before automobiles, airplanes, telephones, or the Internet, and a lot has changed in our country. Labunski's point is that, when Congress refuses to obey the will of the people because of special-interest campaign money, for instance, we have a recourse: Though difficult, we can initiate the process of calling a new constitutional convention to revise the Constitution, so that it is, once again, of, by, and for The People.

Two years ago, at the University of Kentucky, I had my first class with Dr. Richard Labunski. I found him to be a very honest man who pulled no punches when it came to legal and journalistic issues.

This book reflects that personality. If you want a honest, frank opinion on our political system, this book is for you.

If you're close-minded about the greatness and pedestal-like stature of our Constitution, you might not like this book.

In this book, Labunski forced me to admit that our system of government has some glaring shortcomings.

This truth hurts, and it will keep hurting. It is a cavity in the political mouth of our nation, and it cannot be properly filled without a second convention.

In The Second Constitutional Convention: How The American People Can Take Back Their Government, educator and political observer Richard Labunski shows how United States citizens can utilize a long neglected section of the American Constitution to organize a constitutional convention, the first such since the original 1787 convention in which the Constitution was first framed and presented to then fledgling nation. Labunski also shows why such a present-day convention would be desirable to effectively deal with today's rampant cynicism about politics and government, solve the out-of-control and corruptive campaign finance system, reverse the alarming and increasing voter turn declines, the dangers and potential benefits of the Internet for our democracy, and more. The Second Constitutional Convention is "must" reading for anyone who has ever turned away in disgust with the politics and politicians that dominate and control the American government today.

Read this book! Whether you are a seething democrat, a bilious republican - or just a normal person - this book gives an historical perspective on the current day Bush administration by drawing parallels with the Salem Witch Trials and those who instigated them. The fear of the witch is replaced by the fear of the terrorist.

Frances Hill has created a powerful argument that draws the two regimes together through individual comparisons, and a minutely forensic approach in teasing out the similarities. Even the 'good' or 'believable' members of President Bush's and Governor Phips' teams are seen to be weak and pliable.

There is anger at the roughshod methods of both regimes; but anger tempered by incontrovertible facts. How has the US lost its way as a beacon of democratic freedom in the world? Why are the poorer being disadvantaged while the rich benefit?

Michael Moore may be funnier, but Frances Hill delivers a more devastating polemic.

The comparisons are uncanny; the initial outcomes chilling. The only question remaining is left at the very end... how will the world respond to the neocons' callous ministrations?

Who better than Frances Hill, an authority on the Salem Witch Hysteria, to recognize the chilling parallels between the men in power in 1692 and the Bush administration. Character by character, Frances Hill builds her case, describing in detail the self-righteous, greedy ideologues who led Massachusetts Bay Colony into the horror of 1692 and those who as early as September 17, 2001, began plans to invade Iraq.

When fanatics grab the rudder of the ship of state, is it a comfort to know we've been there before in history? Or just the reverse? This book, with its all-too-believable thesis that Cotton Mather and Paul Wolfowitz, for example, are separated by 400 years of history but not much else, offers little to comfort and much to concern the reader. Both then and now, the author suggests, a rabid 'religious' mindset spiced with personal greed has overpowered all other considerations, including justice and legality. What now? Let the present madness run its course to a 21st century equivalent of the carnage that followed the Salem witch trials? In the world today the aftermath is likely to be more devastating than the murdered innocents, abandoned farms, orphaned children and compromised justice system that followed Salem. Much more devastating. It has the potential to be apocalyptic.

This book should be taken with a medicinal dose of brandy.

Mr. Andrew Lohrey informs us in his introduction, to this collection of essays by the late Australian psychologist Alex Carey, that Carey was prevented from going to college by his parents after he finished secondary school as they wanted him to manage their sheep farm which he did with such success that he could sell it about a decade later and enter a university.

Here and there this book is dreadfully dry, particularly towards the end. His ideas probably would have been made clearer and much better organized if he would have been able to put together a regular book instead of a book of essays put together by someone else but he died in 1988 before he could get it done. But the topics he discusses are very important especially now when business and government propaganda has never been more powerful.

The main title of this book describes what big business and their intellectual and political minions have tried to do particularly in the United States as rights to vote and to organize in this country were extended to large segments of the population of this country over the last hundred years. Carey's old friend Noam Chomsky quotes in his preface the numerous intellectual advocates (Walter Lipmann, Harold Laswell,etc.) of what Thomas Jefferson called late in his life "a single and splendid government of an aristocracy" made up of the "banking institutions and monyed incorporations" whom he feared would destroy the freedoms gained during the American revolution. Many prominent liberal intellectuals devoted loyal service to the state during World War one particularly in the government propaganda agencies putting out massive bogus atrocity stories about the Germans and turning a largely anti-war population in a short period into a bunch of maniacs looking to destroy everything remotely connected with Germany and German culture. A young German soldier named Adolf Hitler was deeply impressed with the allied propaganda effort and blamed German weakness in this field for their defeat and vowed that Germany would learn its lessons by the time the next war came around.

The best part of Carey's text, by far, is about the first five chapters. The first topic discussed is the Americanization movement begun in the few years before World War one by big busisiness associatons who were particularly worried about such events as the victory of the IWW led strike of textile workers in Lawrence Massachusetts in 1912. Big business was particularly worried about the influence of IWW-type radicalism on the U.S. immigrant population which mostly worked under very bad conditions at very low wages and set to work with a somwhat successful drive to inculate immigrants as well as the population at large with "American" values like free enterprise and the status quo and social harmony and against alien values like socialism or the welfare state or non-pliable unions. Out of this campaign came the Fourth of July holiday signed into law into 1918. This campaign culminated in the government crushing of the labor movement during 1919-21 under the cover of chasing communists and German spies.

The labor movement, says Carey, did not recover until the Great Depression which forced the U.S. government to enact very basic welfare legislation and protection of unions. This greatly alarmed important segments of big business. The National Association of Manufacturers literature in 1938 warned of the "hazard facing industrialists" of the "newly realized political power of the masses."

The end of World War two saw the beginnings of a massive attack on independent thinkers and organized labor under the cover of a red scare. After a lag in the early 1970's, the elites in this country began to steer this country towards a very markedly right wing political climate, seeing the rise of previously regarded fringe elements as represented by such think tanks as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage foundation which featured such profound thinkers as former Nixon and Ford treasury secretary William Simon who fulminated about how the Carter administration was steering the country towards collectivist totalitarianism.

He goes into some detail examining the right wing apparatus in his native Australia. He ends with discussion of some matters dealing with industrial psychology and industrial sociology culminating in a study of the Hawthorne studies, laborious research at an Illinois assembly plant made up of female workers in the late 20's and early 30's where a group of industrial psychologists tried to secure evidence that workers don't care about money and just want to be left alone to do the wonderful jobs that the labor market has forced on them. The Hawthorne chapter is in large part almost unintelligible and very dry, probably inevitable given that it is a scientific paper.

Alex Carey's work is absolutely some of the best. My favorite quote of his is this: "The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." This has become a touchstone for Sheldon Rampton and me in our books Toxic Sludge Is Good for You, Trust Us, We're Experts, and our writing for PR Watch. Carey is much missed.

Carey points out that citizens living in totalitarian regimes have no choice but to tow the government line out of fear for their personal safeties. In free societies, Carey explains that more subtle means are used to keep populations under control. Specifically, propaganda is used to ensure that most people will think in a manner that is consistent with the corporate agenda (such as belief in the free market and business' right to unlimited profit). Carey documents how Americans and Australians have been subjected to corporate propaganda during most of the 20th Century, and explains how these efforts have perverted our democracy (for example, American's over willingness to fight communists, real or imagined, to protect capitalism). Indeed, while many Americans were conditioned during the Cold War to believe that propaganda existed only in the Soviet Union, China and other communist regimes, Carey persuasively argues that propaganda actually played (and continues to play) a more critical role in molding the attitudes of citizens in democracies.

The great state of Tennessee has produced some of the truly dynamic leaders of this century. One of the best of them is Senator Bill Frist, distinguished physician and surgeon and now a lodestar leader in the United States Senate. Reading this book is both informative and inspiring. You will gain a unique perspective on the twentieth century through the insightful biographical chapters on the Tennessee Senators who impacted the history of our nation and the world from 1911 to 2001. The theme of servant leadership, so evident in the author's own life, is illustrated in the lives of those benchmark Senators from Tennessee. This book is a very important study of leadership that forces us to redefine the title "politician". This book is a good, stimulating read!

Dr. John Lloyd Ogilvie, U.S. Senate Chaplain

While filling his role as an active United States Senator, Bill Frist has undertaken a task requiring a sense of history, perspective, and courage. His commitment to Tennessee history from the perspective of both information and inspiration is evident in his wide-ranging research into the careers of the seventeen Senators who are his subjects, and courage was surely necessary in his evaluation s of their constructive or detrimental contributions to their state and country. His introductory essay, "A Sense of Place and Time," provides an exemplary summary of the events and issues challenging the varied, fascinating, and intensely partisan group of twentieth century leaders who come to life in these pages. Their stories will remain a unique part of the Senator's legacy to history.

-Wilma Dykeman, Tennessee State Historian

With deftness, Senator Frist and Mr. Annis have mined a vein of Tennessee history rich in character and content. The reader will take delight in sifting through the settings, circumstances and fascinating personalities who have contributed so distinctly to a governing process which has led the United States to a pre-eminent position among all nations. Every student of Tennessee history will find in the content of this unique work a great storehouse of information, reminiscences, and intriguing insights concerning the unique individuals who have served their state and nation in the United States Senate. The book represents a valuable gift to every Tennessean.

-Governor Winfield Dunn

What a great book. If you find the CIA fascinating, then this is a must read. In fact, if you find your country fascinating, you must read this book.

This isn't your typical James Bond, Tom Clancy sort of thing. Get the real stories in just about the perfect amount of detail. The characters are easy to follow and the scenarios do not require a history refresher course to delve into.

The "Four" who did dare are all geniuses and each has played a part in making sure you sleep well at night. Each person is handled deftly and the book follows in a natural chronological order.

The most fascinating part of the book definitely revolves around the Kennedy administration and Bay of Pigs fiasco. Once again, the politics of politics can turn something so clear into a mess.

The best part of the book is that it handles bigger and smaller points equally well. There are many, oh by the way type quick tales, but the larger campaigns are also handled extremely well. You will find yourself paraphrasing stories and anecdotes from this book to your friends. Great after dinner discussion stuff.

Top of my list for recommendation.

They will never return it. It is that good of a book. Starts with introduction on how these men started it from WWII and walks the reader through the history of how it all got started.

This book was a required read for a college course that I took on the CIA & Congress. I found this to be an excellent book - full of substance, loaded with information, and a very easy read. Thomas's book was one of the very few required reads that I've actually completed of my own accord. I highly recommend this book to those who are looking for an in-depth study on the inner workings of the CIA's beginnings.

I agree with other reviewers that this book is as great as political science gets -- I grant you that such is faint praise. I also agree that, having read it, one should move on to later treatments.

...Please find it in a library and let it drip off your brain like fine wine down your tongue....

I can only agree with the other reviewers. This is as good as political science gets. Pure brilliance.

When you have read this book - you really should! - then you can move on to more current studies that uses Schattschneider's ideas and develops them much further. Rochefort & Cobb: "The Politics of Problem Definition", Baumgartner & Jones: "Agendas and Instability in American Politics", Cobb & Ross: "Cultural Strategies of Agenda Denial" and Jones: "Reconceiving Decision-Making in Democratic Politics" should all interest you once you've fallen in love with the thoughts of Schattschneider. Your view of politics will never be the same again.

I first read this book in college and have never forgotten it. During careers in politics, business and the church I've found myself returning again and again to Schattschneider's key themes. From his discussion of conflict and its scope to his simple point that whomever controls the agenda controls the outcome, Schattschneider has captured the essence of human interaction. Nearly forty years old, this is still a superb book not to be missed.

...thinkers I was exposed to in high school while researching for an essay report. His well-balanced thoughts on various agrarian and community-based themes are the most eloquent I have found from a single writer. His words and rationales spring from the land and argue pursuasively for more restraint for the betterment of the world by the human animal. The most compelling living philospher I know of is Wendell Berry. I recommend all of his written works.

This highly stimulating collection of Berry's essays contains some of the most important things Berry has written. The essay "Christianity and the Survival of Creation" is one of the most insightful and important theological statements of our day. It is in everyone's best interest to work to see that the organized churches take Berry's essay to heart. Of course, the book is also notable for the beauty of Berry's writing -- not coincidental, since he argues here and elsewhere for a recovery of the idea of work as sacred and for beauty as a measure of "right livelihood."

If you're a content postmodern, don't read this book. It will leave you unsettled. The title essay from Berry's book is worth the price of the whole book. If you were to read only one book this coming year to guide both your thinking and your behavior (aside from the Bible which undergirds Berry's thinking), this would be a great choice. If the following snippet from the title essay resonates with your spirit, you'll want to pick this one up.

"If you destroy the ideal of the "gentle man" and remove from men all expectations of courtesy and consideration toward women and children, you have prepared the way for an epidemic of rape and abuse. If you depreciate the sanctity and solemnity of marriage, not just as a bond between two people, but as a bond between those two people and their forebears, their children, and their neighbors, then you have prepared the way for an epidemic of divorce, child neglect, community ruin, and loneliness. If you destroy the economies of household and community, then you destroy the bonds of mutual usefulness and practical dependence without which the other bonds will not hold."

Why is it that we have our best thinkers like Berry running old family farms, and our worst thinkers running our national government? Sigh.

I knew this book delt with matters of oppression, but to see that people would actually harm children simply because they were poor, that breaks my heart. This book has many breath taking pictures of children suffering from oppression for some reason or another. The chapter on Iqbal Masih really brings it home. A HIGHLY recommended book.

When I first read this book I didn't exactly know what it meant. After I finished I did. It is really sad that kids my age or older or younger have to do more work than I could do in two years. It's not fair that they are being denied a childhood. They never will have the chance to fall out of a tree, or get grass stains on the new pair of jeans that they will never have. If you don't find this sad you need to find a heart, picutre yourself doing all the work. I don't think we could do it.

It was a stuinning book that truly opened my eyes

Great listen. If you want to hear juicy things about the most famous presidency, just buy this. It is great. Geoffrey did a great job on the writing, narrative, editing.. everything. Just get it, listen to it, and listen again. The closest thing you will get to the court room

Thanks Geoff!

I just let this run continuously when driving in my car. I bet I've listened to it 25 times already! The details are unbelievable. Linda was a real _itch to do this to a "friend" but it's a good thing she did or that A-hole never would have been caught. Monica talks in intimate detail about her affair with Bill...dates, places, activities, etc. There are 22 hours of tapes in all; this is just the best parts. Makes you want to say to Ms Tripp "get a life!" but it's a great listen!!

I was practically upsest with getting this tape. And the results - awesome! You finally get to hear Tripp and Lewinsky in their own words! I've never been so please. 5 stars all the way!!!

Best known for THE FATE OF THE EARTH (1982), Jonathan Schell is an anti-war essayist and frequent contributor to "The Nation," "The New Yorker," "Harper's," "The Atlantic," and "Foreign Affairs" magazines. In his pacifist manifesto, THE UNCONQUERABLE WORLD, Schell examines the history of conventional war, nuclear war, people's war and revolution, from Von Clausewitz's premise that wars are fought to secure political objectives, to the Bush administration's ongoing "war on terrorism," while simultaneously examining the history of nonviolence, from Jesus's commandment to "put up thy sword," to Gandhi's, Havel's, and Martin Luther King's more recent nonviolent victories. (King liked to say that Jesus gave him "the message," and Gandhi gave him "the method" to practice what he preached, p. 246.) Along the way, Schell carefully develops his argument that all government depends for its existence on the cooperation of its citizens, civil servants, and soldiers. If that cooperation is withdrawn, the government will fail in its objectives (p. 128). This philosophy ("satyagraha") was demonstrated by Ghandi, who prescribed nonviolent action in which the participants refused to cooperate with laws they regarded as unjust or otherwise offensive to their consciences, accompanied by their willingness to suffer the consequences (p. 119). "The nonviolent actor," Schell observes, "exhibits the highest degree of freedom also because his action originates within himself, according to his own judgment, inclination, and conscience, not in helpless, automatic response to something done by someone else" (p. 133). In other words, noviolence is a means by which "the active many can overcome the ruthless few" (p. 144).

Since September 11th, Schell writes, the "Augustan" policies of the Bush administration have brought us to the brink of "some nuclear 1914 or anthrax 1914" that could "send history off the rails" (p. 8). Americans are now faced with a choice between "two Americas" and two possible futures. In an imperial America, power would be put in the hands of the president and checks and balances would end; civil liberties would be lost; military spending would supercede social spending; the gap between rich and poor would increase; electoral politics would be dominated by corporate money; and social, economic, and ecological agendas would be neglected. In an alternative America, the immense executive power would be broken up into the three branches of government as the Constitution provides; civil liberties would remain intact; money would be driven out of politics; and the social, economic, and ecological agendas of the country and world would become government's chief concern (pp. 345-46). Whereas the Bush administration's policies rely upon individuals confirming the system, fulfilling the system, making the system, becoming the system ("living the lie"), Schell advocates a revolution in our hearts and minds in which violence becomes unnecessary, and we are able to live instead in truth, which means living in opposition to the repressive regime.

Carefully reasoned, thoroughly analytical, radical, brilliantly revolutionary, highly intellectual, and hopeful, Schell's UNCONQUERABLE WORLD is one of the most important books of our time.

G. Merritt

Schell's identification of the phenomenon of "people's war," the
bottom-up fight for freedom waged by colonized peoples over the last 250
years is nothing short of revolutionary. The basis of the analytical framework he builds to explicate the different varieties of colonial oppression and local resistance, Schell historicizes people's war in its most important incarnations starting with the Spanish resistance to Napoleon's invasion, moving through Gandhi's non-violent formulation which he developed in South Africa and employed against the British in India, discussing how this form of resistance taken up by Martin Luther King to fight the people's war against the squalid Jim Crow regime in the American South. He notes that over time, "people's war" has been successful more often than it has not, that colonial regimes cannot win against forces which refuse to fight using oppressor's tactics, or use the narrow forms of redress, such as "working through the system," which are offered by those in power under the head of democracy.

He begins by examining the great military strategist Von Clausewitz's theory of warfare. In a section that it perhaps somewhat overlong, Schell takes apart Clausewitz in light of the changes in warfare since Clausewitz's time. Clausewitz did witness the first examples of total war in which every citizen was enlisted in the war as either a soldier or as a possible target of war -- the great "democratic" army of Napoleon, and wrote about it in contrast to prior European wars where relatively small forces of men fought limited conflicts for their aristocratic masters. What Clausewitz could not see was that with the emergence of the atomic bomb, total war was extended beyond competing nations, their peoples and ideologies, to include the entire world and the possible destruction of humanity. He notes, as does Jeremi Suri does in his history of the post-nuclear age, POWER AND THE PEOPLE, that the possession of nuclear weapons and the protests such weapons engendered (including the proxy wars fought by client states which became a feature of the post WWII landscape and were much more likely to end a global conflagration than skirmishes before the bomb) ultimately served to push together the Soviet Union and United States out of fear of their own people.

Schell also discusses various theories of power, including the Hobbesian justification of power, the Weberian observation that the state holds power by reserving the right to violence. He upends a lot of this theory by noting that fear and intimidation only work for so long. Eventually people begin, like water freezing in a crack in the sidewalk, to break apart the structures of such regimes. He discusses how Vaclav Havel and his friends during the Soviet occupation initiated a small scale alternative "government" which sought to deliver minimal social goods, a stop that worked to give citizens a way to see they could exert control over their own lives even in the shadow of the totalitarian state. This strategy that has been used since the American elite formed the Committees of Correspondence and the Continental Congress to throw off the oppressive economic policies of their colonial masters. The "people's government" was in place and thus Washington's task was to outlast his opponents so that this government could take its rightful place -- a strategy which has been used in successful "people's war" ever since. Once the state is made irrelevant, it ceases to exist, an analysis growing out of Hannah Arendt's discussions of power.

It is hard to do justice to a work like this in a short review. Schell advances a fairly radical theory here, but his evidence is sound, his argument is clear and straightforward (although a bit repetitive). Perhaps most compelling in this age of "terror," Schell helps us see that resistance against colonial powers and homegrown totalitarian regimes has a long history, and that for the most part, that people's war has been successful.

Through incisive historical analysis, Schell demonstrates that people power has been ignored to our own peril. In the modern world people simply won't settle for the neo-colonial status assigned to them by the corporate globalization / militarization machine. Just think about the war in Iraq and the new regimes in South America, for example, or the collapse of the WTO talks in Cancun. And WMD have made the old and disasterous paradigm of all-out warfare obsolete.

Schell traces people power through the American, French, and Russian revolutions, onto Gandhi's non-violent action and Mao's peoples' war. What is amazing is that even the most violent and repressive regimes have eventually collapsed non-violently. Often the greatest violence has come during the drive to establish a new order.

Schell also suggests that we need to update the principles of liberal democracy. For example, respect for individual rights may need to be extended to include group rights, responsibilities, and power sharing. He cites the settlement in Northern Ireland as an example. This is, of course, tricky business, but he makes a compelling case that we need to be more flexible and far sighted in our concepts of democracy.

Schell, now a columnist for The Nation, is a creative thinker and analyst of the first order - a true public intellectual.