Telling it like it is: A dozen books every American must read
Nonfiction
by Sherwood Ross | February 23, 2009
If newspaper readership is plummeting, maybe it's because readers are turning elsewhere to catch a glimpse of the causes behind the official story. Recognizing this, some book publishers courageously are using their printing presses to bring interpretive reporting to the reading public. Here are a dozen books Americans need to read as they paint a realistic picture of how our government's policies are inflicting needless suffering at home and globally.
"Legacy of Ashes: The History of The CIA" (Anchor) by New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winner Tim Weiner, contains some sweeping, but accurate, generalizations, such as this one: "By 1970, the CIA's influence was felt in every nation in the Western Hemisphere, from the Texas border to Tierra del Fuego." Weiner spotlights how the spy agency's operatives exerted more influence than the State Department. "In Mexico, the president dealt exclusively with the station chief, not the ambassador, and he received a personal New Year's Day briefing at his home from the director of central intelligence. In Honduras, two successive station chiefs had privately pledged the support of the United States to the military junta, in defiance of the ambassadors they served." Weiner doesn't mince words about how President Kennedy, who once said he was proud to be a liberal, "first approved a political-warfare program to subvert (Salvador Allende) more than two years before the September 1964 Chilean elections" when the CIA pumped $3 million into the pockets of his political opponent.
In
"Free Lunch" (Penguin Books), Pulitzer Prize-winner David Cay Johnston, writes, "Over the past three decades the rules affecting who wins and who loses economically have been quietly and subtly rewritten," and "In the past quarter century or so our government has enacted new rules that have created not only free markets, but rigged ones." One outcome of these policies is that, in 2005, "the 300,000 men, women, and children who comprised the top tenth of 1 percent had nearly as much income as all 150 million Americans who make up the economic lower half of our population."
"The Three Trillion Dollar War" (W.W. Norton) by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes charts the true costs of President George W. Bush's tragic aggression against Iraq, a war waged with borrowed bucks. Noting the total cost to American taxpayers "will turn out to be around $3-trillion" the famous economist and Harvard government finance expert, respectively, write large in their Preface: "Miserable though Saddam Hussein's regime was, life is actually worse for the Iraqi people now. The country's roads, schools, hospitals, homes, and museums have been destroyed and its citizens have less access to electricity and water than before the war. Sectarian violence is rife."
"Armed Madhouse" (Plume) by Greg Palast, is subtitled "Sordid Secrets & Strange Tales of a White House GONE WILD" and contains much factual data about how the members in good standing of the military-industrial complex are profiting from the Iraq holocaust. "For the first time in its (General Dynamics) history, (profits are) exceeding a billion dollars a year. Lockheed Martin is doing even better, scoring a record $2.5 billion. I know that with weaponry profits bouncing off the clouds, you're concerned that the firms will have a huge tax bill. Not to worry. In 2004, just before the election, the Bush Administration slipped a special provision into tax legislation to cut the tax on war profits to an effective 7% compared to the 21% paid by most U.S. manufacturers."
In
"House of War" (Houghton Mifflin), winner of the National Book Award, James Carroll writes, "The Pentagon is now the dead center of an open-ended martial enterprise that no longer pretends to be defense. The world itself must be reshaped. Nothing less than evil must be vanquished. Its good intentions heavily armed, its scope extending from 'prevention' to something called 'operations other than war,' the Pentagon has, more than ever, become a place to fear."
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