Buzzflash

The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America by Daniel Brook is one of the most brilliant and important books to come along in many years. Synthesizing stories from people in real life with a strong and healthy dose of history (particularly the history of the 60s through today, both politically and economically), Brook's book paints a stark picture of the death of the American middle class as a direct result of the Reagan Revolution, and implicitly suggests that the clear and simple solution is to revert to the economic policies of the New Deal. This book is probably the most powerful and compelling attack on Reaganomics and the "conservative revolution" that I've read in a decade.

I'm a pretty jaded guy. Back in October of 2001, I wrote -- first anonymously under the pseudonym "Rusticus" and then over my own name -- the first widely-circulated article comparing the Republican response to 9/11 with the Nazi response to the burning of the Reichstag (Parliament) building in Germany in 1933 (it was titled "When Democracy Failed"). It was widely distributed and I was attacked for being an alarmist, although few say so these days.

Arguably, there's nothing whatever political about "Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck.

I took some drugs today to help me write this review. Specifically, a xanthine-family drug called caffeine that appears in the berries of a largely equatorial bush, along with a few weaker xanthine-family alkaloids that aren't as well known but are also present in the coffee bean.

Most Americans have never read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution in their entirety, even though the process would take the average reader less than an hour. There are several small pocket editions of the two documents, but this one is unique in that it contains an excellent introduction by Cass R. Sunstein, and that it contains Thomas Jefferson's brilliant 1777 "Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia."

In the Fifth Century BCE, in his "Art Of War," Sun Tzu wrote: "I say: Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle."

Why would it be that when the vast majority (78 percent, according to a 24 September 2006 Gallup poll) of registered Democratic voters favor a gradual or immediate withdrawal from Iraq, only about a third (36 percent, as noted by John Walsh in a brilliant article at Counterpunch) of the Democratic candidates in the tightest House races this fall share that view?

There is a group of people -- who often refer to themselves as "conservatives" -- who are not only committed to the destruction of our republic, but actively (and successfully) crippling governments all over this nation. Their main weapon is "direct democracy" -- the initiative system by which citizens can get measures on a ballot and bypass legislators -- and a series of seemingly commonsense citizen-promoted limitations on the growth of government.

As a resurgent Taliban takes over large swatches of Afghanistan, changing that nation's social mores, educational curriculum, and legal system, many Americans would be shocked to discover how massive and powerful the new American Christian Taliban has become. So powerful, in fact, that it could be argued it's taken over large portions of the federal government, several state governments, and thousands of county and municipal governments.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of "The Conservative Nanny State" by Dean Baker, a macroeconomist with a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.