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Susan Linn "Consuming Kids" 2004 and Juliet Schor "Born to Buy"
Mainstream media would obviously never want to advertise these two books because they're among the best at exposing how advertisers, primarily through MSM, indoctrinate children from an early age.
And both of these can be read free on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/consumingkidshos00linn
https://archive.org/details/borntobuycommerc00scho
This is important to read for parents of children, as well as anyone else, since they both expose massive indoctrination that impairs critical thinking skills and enables corporations to indoctrinate the public starting at a very early age, before children learn to think for themselves and recognize scams by corporations.
Research into the most effective propaganda inevitably leads to indoctrinating people as soon as possible, since children that learn critical thinking skills are much more likely to recognize deceptive propaganda, whether it's for selling overpriced products, promoting a deceptive candidate making promises during campaigns they never intend to keep, wars based on lies, protection of the environment and much more.
They both write about how the marketing industry is far more concerned about maximizing profits without concern about how it impacts children's education, and even that massive amounts of advertising from the moment children learn to talk, if not sooner, has a massive negative impact on their education.
For a long time advertising to children was banned in schools, but after many cuts to schools, especially among the poorest children, schools are often forced to raise funds anyway they can, and it still isn't enough. This includes money from gambling, advertising and other sources, that often come with strings attached.
Susan Linn writes about how she attended an Advertising and Promoting to Kids conference, as part of her research and worked with some young people getting into the business, and even helped discussing ways to advertise to children. She was approached by someone who asked her if she was from the Judge Baker Children’s Center by someone who turned out to be the president of Brunico, which was involved in advertising to children.
When asked what she thought she said it was the first conference she was at about children where no one asked what was best for children, which lead to the end of the conversation, after he offered no good answer to her concerns.
Both Susan Linn and Juliet Schorr had discussion with advertiser who had some doubts about what they were doing, but they often tried to justify it. They both covered Cheryl Idell's research which studied what became known as "The Nag Factor," where advertisers literally try to encourage children to nag their parents to buy stuff that might not be good for them, or they might not be able to afford, regardless of what it does to relationships.
They also Research "The Girls Intelligence Agency" which recruits "cool" kids to market to other kids, once again, regardless of what it does to their relationships or if it turns children against each other.
Profits are more important than the best interests of children.
Susan Linn also expressed outrage about the Social Responsibility Principle which was removed from the American Psychological Association's ethics guidelines in 2003, as a result of decisions made during an August 2002 meeting that took place when Philip Zimbardo was president of the APA, which I went into in a previous article.
There's also information from both books showing how corporate interests is influencing the education programs as a result of their influence due to funds they provide.
This is outrageous, which is totally incompatible with the Democratic process, since voters need to have critical thinking skills to make important decisions, but if corporations indoctrinate them from as early as age two or three, they may not have those skills.
Here's the article I previously mentioned Susan Linn and the APA, Juliet Schorr is equally good and they confirm each others work, followed by a few excerpts from both books: http://zacherydtaylor.blogspot.com/2015/03/corruption-or-bias-in-american.html
Born to Buy excerpts:
Marketers are videotaping children in their private spaces, providing in-depth analysis of the rituals of daily life. They are taking to the streets, to stores, and even going into schools to observe and record. Researchers are paying adults whom kids trust, such as coaches, clergy, and youth workers, to elicit information from them. p.22
But there’s another side to what scholars Shirley and Joe Kincheloe have insightfully called the “Corporate Construction of Childhood.” It’s the growing scope, market power, and political influence wielded by the small number of megacorporations that sell most of what kids buy. p.27-9
When all else fails, there’s always nagging. Or what the British side of the industry calls Pester Power. Thanks to Cheryl Idell’s widely influential “nag factor study,” and numerous derivative reports, this time-honored technique of kids has become heavy artillery in the industrial arsenal. p.61
…Chat rooms are seeded with paid representatives to promote brands. E-mail lists are used to advertise products. While teens and young adults have been the target of many of the early viral campaigns, these techniques are filtering down to children ....
One of the more intriguing companies in the business is the Girl’s Intelligence Agency. In 2002, its first year of operation, the company had already developed a network of 40,000 girls, aged eight to eighteen, ready to swing into action on the drop of a dime to create buzz for whatever product the company sends their way.. GIA was founded by Laura Groppe, an academy award winning film producer .... p.76
Businesses are willing to spend millions of dollars on crummy classroom material, but have proven unwilling to pay taxes to support high-quality, serious curricula for the nation’s children. p.96
Schools have sold rights to probe kids as young as age seven. Noggin, a joint venture of Nickelodeon and PBS, set up shop an elementary school in watching, New Jersey....
…..Each kid was equipped with a headband with a lens built into it, which was then connected to a camera hidden in a backpack. They were sent into the store and asked to pick any twenty things they would like to buy, the camera recorded everything the children did, such as what they looked at, which aisles they lingered in, what they picked up, and what they ultimately chose to put in the cart.
The study was conducted with what at Strottman are called “rookies,” that is, kids who had not yet been interviewed or briefed by the firm. (They were also unaware of the purpose of the study.) ....
…. Unfortunately, the Bush administration, a recipient of considerable sums of money from tobacco, alcohol, and big pharmaceutical companies, rejected these insightful suggestions. Levi Strauss…was one of the earliest companies to employ children in innovative ways…as official consultants ...
Josh reports that, “they were pretty blunt.” If he didn’t comply with their request, they made it clear he would be fired. They’d send a disposable camera, a notebook, and a tape recorder, and ask him to comb the city. He was on the lookout for cool kids he could interview and whose outfits and accessories he would record. p.103-6
Consuming Kids excerpts:
I didn’t know it then, but the Disneyfication of my daughter’s musical education was just a small sign of the times. It occurred only a year ago or so before Ed Winter, an enthusiasts for marketing in schools who would have a profound effect on its nature, told Business Week, “Marketers have come to realize that all roads eventually lead to the schools.”
In-school advertising began escalating in earnest in 1990. It now includes (but isn’t limited to) corporate-sponsored newscasts, field trips, classroom materials, vending machines, gymnasiums, walls, and whole buildings. Have you visited your child’s school lately? Perhaps she’s learning about energy production and consumption through the lens of companies like Exxon Mobil or professional associations like the American Coal Foundation (“Unlocking Coal’s Potential through Education”). Her inspiration for reading may be coming from Pizza Hut-complete with coupons to be redeemed at your local franchise. She may be attending mandatory assemblies where she can learn about job interviewing from McDonalds. If she lives in Washington, D.C., and wants to go into the hotel business, she might be attending the Marriot Hospitality Charter School. If she’s a kid in trouble, she could attend a Burger King Academy.
If she’s on a school athletic team, her shoes may come from Nike or Adidas. Her school’s scoreboard could owe its presence to the countless bottles of Coke or Pepsi she’s bought from school vending machines and a sport company logo. Access to her opinions and ideas may have been sold to a market research company. Her only exposure to current events might be brought to her courtesy of the aforementioned Ed Winter. He’s the guy who thought of Channel One, the twelve-minute news program that includes two minutes of commercials that her school is obligated to show daily for 90 percent of the school days each year. p.75-6
In 1929, the National Education Association’s position that corporate control of school curriculum was based on the fact that presentation of such material bypassed review by the school board members elected from the community. More recently, others have expressed, and some continue to express, concerns about that content.
The only goal for creating classrooms materials should be furthering the education of students using that material. Once a goal becomes imprinting brands into students’ consciousness, or creating a positive association to a product, education is likely to take a back seat. Is, for instance, a corporation likely to be unbiased in its presentation of subjects in which it has a vested interest? According to Consumer Union’s 1995 review of seventy-seven corporate-sponsored classroom kits that claimed to be educational, the answer is “no.” Nearly 80 percent were found to be biased or incomplete, “promoting a viewpoint that favors consumption of the sponsor’s product or service or a position that favors the company or its economic agenda. A few contained significant inaccuracies.” Materials from energy companies and professional organizations such as Exxon (now Exxon Mobil) or the American Coal Foundation, for instance, were found to be biased in their presentations of the pros and cons of reliance on fossil fuel. Through the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industries produce classroom materials about energy. These can be downloaded at a site called classroom-energy.org. In addition to the Institute’s own materials, the site includes links to science lessons produced by oil and gas companies. p.81
classroom-energy.org from Wayback Machine
Inside the oil industry’s not-so-subtle push into K-12 education 06/15/2017
How the Oil and Gas Industry Has Broken Climate Education 11/16/2021 This article is very slow getting to the point devoting a large portion of the begginning to a presentation by an oil representative before explaining the problem.
Robert McChesney "Rich Media Poor Democracy" 1999 and "The Problem Of The Media" 2004
Another two exceptional books the media doesn't advertise, and these books partly explain why the media doesn't advertise the best books, sometimes even when they're more profitable than the books they do promote.
Both of these books are available on the Internet Archive, and the author has said he supports the Archive in their lawsuit to continue providing access to books to the public free.
https://archive.org/details/richmediapoordem0000mcch_d8s0
https://archive.org/details/problemofmediaus00mcch
Professor McChesney reports on the history of the media since the founding of our country, and how some of the founders recognized how important diverse media was and provided postal subsidies so that there would be a greater chance of producing diverse media.
These subsidies were gradually eliminated, or when media was dominated by radio and eventually television they became obsolete. Media has always favored the wealthy, but starting no later than the eighties they began consolidating into much fewer corporations controlling the vast majority of the media.
When it became difficult for Republicans to overcome opposition to continued consolidation in the nineties, for political reasons, Bill Clinton was elected and he continued support for this consolidation, overcoming Democratic opposition from the Congress, and five or six corporations gained control of over 90%, if not 95% of national media, and it's been like that since.
He also reported on how the Bush administration tried to consolidate the media even more, but faced massive opposition from the grassroots, so they failed to do more damage, but most of the damage was already done. There were additional efforts to consolidate the media even more under Obama and Trump, although he obviously couldn't have covered this in these books, but probably did in other articles or books since then.
Professor McChesney also covered the debate when radio was first introduced in the United States and there were many educators or other activists that rightfully thought that this should be used, at least partly, for educational purposes to inform the public about many issues as well as the news. But wealthy corporate interests opposed this and wanted the media to be in completely private hands with little or no obligation to educate the public about many important issues.
One of those important issues, which I've covered repeatedly, was the leading causes of violence or many other social problems. I've repeatedly said there has been an enormous amount of research showing how to reduce violence and if the public was aware of it and politicians based policy decisions on this research then we would have a much lower crime problem, including murder, which most other wealthy countries already have.
Professor McChesney doesn't actually cover this research, but he does partly explain why it's absent from traditional media.Since our rates of violence could have been cut in half, if the public was informed of the best research that improved dramatically between the sixties and nineties, and continues to improve since then, it's reasonable to assume the lack of education due to media policies controlled by the rich is actually a contributing cause to violence!
He wrote a couple dozen books, but none of the half dozen other books I read so far as good as these two, which are very hard to match.
Additional information about Professor McChesney is also available at his web site, the Third World Traveler, and in his articles from the Common Dreams archive.
https://robertmcchesney.org/
https://thirdworldtraveler.com/McChesney/Robert_McChesney_page.html
https://www.commondreams.org/author/robert-mcchesney
Upton Sinclair "The Brass Check" 1920
This is a classic, but it's still relevant today, and not surprisingly there were efforts to censor it or refuse to publish it at all, when it first came out. Traditional media almost never mentions Upton Sinclair, and on the rare occasions they do it's usually a brief mention of "The Jungle" which had a large impact on history and lead to the development of the FDA protecting food.
This is available free online, since it's a classic; but, he never actually copy-wrote it in the first place, because he wanted it to reach the widest audience, since he was more concerned about educating the public than maximizing profit for himself.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64657/64657-h/64657-h.htm
If he did anything as good or even better than "The Jungle" it must be this, although most people never heard of it.
This is about how the media has always been heavily rigged in favor of the rich, and also exposes efforts to censor criticism of rich and powerful corporations.
He opens the book by comparing the media to a "Brass Check" which was a common payment for prostitutes in his day. He's essentially saying the media is worse than prostitutes, and rightfully so, to this day.
Most of the problems he describes haven't changed much since then, and in a relatively recent edition Robert McChesney writes a new introduction which explains this. The original book is free, as I said, but if you want to read McChesney's new introduction just Google his name, along with the title of the book and you should be able to read the complete introduction on Google Books. Gavin DeBecker is apparently writing another introduction for an edition coming up soon, although I wouldn't expect him to be as good as McChesney.
He explains how the media is obviously biased and leads us into war based on lies, even in his time, as well as a strong bias against labor unions, and how they censored many things and tried to censor more.
At one point he also writes about an obvious bias following an open letter he wrote to Vincent Astor, and even though he was a very popular writer almost all media outlets ignored it, but at least one outlet favorable to labor published it. If there had been no reply, this might have been the end of it; but Vincent Astor did reply and traditional media printed his complete reply, while only printing a small portion of Sinclair's letter to let people here both sides, assuming the even did that. They were obviously much quicker to publish material supported by the rich.
There are many more important examples of how the media has always been rigged in favor of the rich in this book, which you'll have to read to find, since it would be to long to post all the good excerpts.
This is one of many good books on propaganda written in the 1920s, which explain tactics still used today, although there's very little effort to teach the public about how they're being manipulated, and not nearly as many books exposing propaganda in recent years.
In Upton Sinclair's case, as well as Robert McChesney's case, which I recently explained in another post about him, they're trying to explain propaganda in a manner that will warn the public so they don't fall for it. Other authors also do this at times, perhaps including Walter Lippmann, author of "Public Opinion" although he may have used it for the wrong reasons; as well as others that almost always used propaganda for the wrong reasons, including Edward Bernays, the most infamous propagandist and author of "Crystallizing Public Opinion" and "Propaganda," George Creel author of "How We Advertised America," which refers to war propaganda for the First World War, and most infamously, Adolf Hitler in "Mein Kampf," not that I'm praising him, of course.
However, it's important to understand how powerful people manipulate the masses, and this may involve reading the writings of those who betrayed us so we can prevent them from doing it again.
Adolf Hitler described the propaganda tactics he used to manipulate the masses in his book before he gained power in Germany. If a widespread effort was made to educate the public about what he was doing and how, then they might have prevented him from gaining power, ultimately preventing World War II and the Holocaust.
But, of course that never happened, and the reason is obvious; those in power are also using propaganda to manipulate the masses to this day and they don't want to expose their own tactics to wider scrutiny!
All the propaganda books I mentioned above from the 1920s, and more, can now be downloaded free.
The most fundamental principle of propaganda is "A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth," or at least it seems to, especially when opposing views never get across. This is why we need much more diverse media, instead of having everything controlled by the rich, which is what we have now.
"The Merchants of Death" H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen 1937 If you thought "War is a Racket" by Smedley Butler was a great classic that everyone should read then you may also agree that "The Merchants of Death" H. C. Engelbrecht is as good, or in some ways better. I already quoted an early excerpt where a French arms maker sold Hitler weapons shortly after he rose to power, which was used against them three to six years later.
The authors suspected how dangerous Hitler was, but even they probably didn't realize how bad he would get in World War II and the Holocaust. Even after this ominous warning about how extreme war can be our government is still relentlessly pushing weapons around the world leading to permanent War!
Selling weapons to both sides while working class people died was routine then, and it still is. The wealthy, of course, make the decisions, and working class people die.
That excerpt is below, along with a few other good ones, but, when you have time read the whole damn book, it's free!:
He is a French citizen, M. Eugene Schneider, president of the Schneider-Creusot Company which for a century has dominated the French arms industry and which through its subsidiaries now controls most of the important arms factories in Central Europe. Some of Hitler's financial support, then, was derived from a company owned by a leading French industrialist and arms maker.2 p.14
https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Merchants%20of%20Death_2.pdf
All these incidents took place in times of peace. Presumably arms merchants become strictly patriotic once their countries start warlike operations. Not at all! During the World War at one time there were two trials going on in France. In one, Bolo Pasha was facing charges of trying to corrupt French newspapers in the interest of the Central Powers. He was convicted and executed. In the other, a group of French industrialists were tried for selling war material to Germany through Switzerland. Although the facts were proved, these industrialists were released because they had also supplied the French armies. This is but one of a number of sensational instances of trading with the enemy during the war.8 p.16-7
Dealers in arms are scrupulously careful in keeping their accounts collected. Previous to the World War, Krupp had invented a special fuse for hand grenades. The English company, Vickers, appropriated this invention during the war and many Germans were killed by British grenades equipped with this fuse. When the war was over, Krupp sued Vickers for violation of patent rights, demanding the payment of one shilling per fuse. The total claimed by Krupp was 123,- 000,000 shillings. The case was settled out of court and Krupp received payment in stock of one of Vickers's subsidiaries in Spain.9 p.17 Du Pont did not need a war, but the gods smiled and gave him one. In 1854 England, France, Turkey, and others went to war with Russia, and guns in the Crimea required powder. England had exhausted her own supply and she turned to Du Pont, while Russia also sent orders to Wilmington. Du Pont filled them both. After all, he, like other Americans of the time, felt no particular sentiment for either side in that remote struggle. From the homespun little factory on the Brandy wine, shipments of the "black death" went forth to the far corners of the globe. p.41 (Du Ponts previously rejected two large orders for patriotic reasons) p.44
Locally the Du Pont Company is very powerful. It "owns" the state of Delaware; and the city of Wilmington, with its various Du Pont enterprises, hospitals, foundations, and welfare institutions, everywhere recalls the powder maker dynasty. The three daily newspapers of Delaware are all controlled by Du Pont. 9
This local control, like that of a great feudal lord over his fief, has by and large satisfied the Du Ponts. They have never sought prominence in national politics, though members of the family have—almost by accident—been United States Senators. Their relationship with the government has always been very close, and that was due just as much to the government as to the Du Ponts. In their early period the demand for hunting and blasting powder was so active, and later their enterprises were so diversified, that they did not need wars to insure prosperity. But whenever the government required its aid, in peace and in war, the company was ready to cooperate—usually with neat profits for itself. p.47
Colt became immensely wealthy and a large part of his business came from abroad. He sold to the Czar of Russia, particularly, and his products were in use during the Crimean War, on both sides. His home in Connecticut, well named Armsmear, was filled with jeweled snuffboxes, diamonds, testimonial plates and other gifts from such monarchs and leaders as the Czar of Russia, the Sultan of Turkey, the King of Siam, Garibaldi, and Louis Kossuth. p.53
During the Russo-Turk War (1879) both belligerents placed their orders with the Remington company. The Turk order of 210,000,000 rounds of ammunition was the largest order placed in the United States up to that time. The rest of this tale must be told by the official historian: "Then Russia and Turkey decided to fight. Both patronized the Bridgeport factory, and the strange situation developed of one plant daily grinding out thousands of cartridges for the combatants to fire against each other in deadly battle. Both nations had their inspectors at the works. The officers treated each other with formal courtesy while they inspected millions of the little messengers of death which were to fill the air of Southeastern Europe with noise and destruction." p.58
(JP Morgan bought antiques that were useless and sold them to the government for about twenty times the cost he paid. The government refused to pay but after a lawsuit was forced to even though the guns were useless and even blew the thumbs of soldiers off. JP Morgan, of course bought his way out of the Civil War draft, so it was the poor and the government that paid for his crimes.) p.70-3
Maxim, it is all right and highly commendable for a man to be very patriotic and do all he can for his country, but you are one of the directors of an English company. We are neutral; we cannot take sides.—A fellow director to Hiram Maxim.
WHEN Hiram Maxim, world famous as the inventor of a wholesale killing machine, turned his inventive genius to perfecting a medical inhaler, he was told "that he had ruined his reputation absolutely" and a scientific friend deplored that he should descend to "prostituting his talents on quack nostrums." This caused the Yankee from Maine to philosophize: "From the foregoing it will be seen that it is a very creditable thing to invent a killing machine, and nothing less than a disgrace to invent an apparatus to prevent human suffering." Curiously enough Maxim's life seems to show that he accepted his ironic reflection as literally true and he spent far more time on his "killing machine" than on anything else. p.104
Merrill Singer "Drugging the Poor" 2008
This is the first in a series of good books that get little or no promotion from mainstream media, and often do a much better job explaining how the wealthy rig the economy in their own favor.
Merrill Singer is a good college professor most people have never heard of and he writes about how the "war on drugs" was created by wealthy elites, as part of an effort to control the masses, although he might not exactly use those words.
He explains how the wealthy are not punished nearly as bad, without even mention Hunter Biden, who became infamous for getting away with doing cocaine after this book was written.
A week or so I asked if anyone ever heard of a good labor leader to make a point that the best researchers don't get the best coverage. Most people didn't get my point at first, because frankly, I didn't do a good job making it.
This is available on the Internet Archive, where you can read it free:
https://archive.org/details/druggingpoorlega0000sing
A few months ago I made a point about the biggest publishing companies declining to publish many of the best non-fiction books, and noticed that many of my best nonfiction books were being published by obscure publishing companies that few heard of, but they ensure these good books make it into print. They're often non-profit and struggling for funds.
In this case it's Waveland Press; feel free to check them out for more good books:
https://www.waveland.com/browse.php
Here are some good excerpts from this book:
Many of the drugs that reach the poorest sectors of American society are used to self-medicate overt and hidden indignities of social marginalization, discrimination, and poverty. ..... The primary thesis of this book is that "drugging the poor" helps to maintain a social order that is predicated on marked social disparity. .... As Levy and Sidel explain:
Social injustice often occurs when those who control access to opportunities and resources block the poor, the powerless and those otherwise deprived from gaining fair and equitable access to those opportunities and resources. Social injustice enables those in the upper class to receive a disproportionate share of the wealth and other resources—”the good guys in life”— while others may struggle to obtain the basic necessities of life. (2006:11) p.15
For example, when Coors attempted to translate one of its slogans developed for the U.S. market—”Turn it Loose”—for use with Spanish-speaking customers, the slogan was mistranslated into “Suffer from Diarrhea.” Similarly, Pepsi’s slogan “Come alive with the Pepsi generation,” was initially translated for use in China as “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.” p.14
Drug abuse among the rich has little enduring impact on society as a whole or on rich people as a social class. Drug treatment, not a prison cell, is the most common social response to drug abuse among individuals from wealthier social classes. ..... Furthermore, they enroll in drug treatment programs that, quite literally, only money can buy, such as a 90-day stay at the Betty Ford Center, which costs $21,000. p.18
While both the rich and the poor use marijuana, the poor suffer greater negative outcomes ... p.210
Sociologists of work have long recognized that the presence of a sector of semi-employed workers at the bottom of the labor pool is an effective means of lowering salaries in the general working class. p.232
During 2006, Georgia NeSmith was facing eviction from the second-floor apartment in Rochester, New York, where she had resided since 1999. Her offense? NeSmith initiated a community battle to stop open drug dealing on the corner near her apartment. p.247
"Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics" By Marie Gottschalk 2015
This is the second in a series of exceptional books exposing how the political and economic system is rigged against us, that gets almost no promotion from traditional media, so we have to promote these books at the grass roots level.
It's about mass incarceration, obviously. If you liked Michelle Alexander "The New Jim Crow," which got a modest amount of attention you'll like this.
It shows how mass incarceration skyrocketed, and it has little or nothing to do with reducing crime, protecting the public, or the best interest of the public.
This book isn't on the Archive or any free source I know of, except, perhaps, your local library, which is where I found it; but I found the Introduction plus some additional excerpts.
http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s10330.pdf
https://zacherydtaylor.blogspot.com/p/marie-gottschalk-caught-prison-state.html
Here a few of the best excerpts, although more are available on the link above:
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Crime does not necessarily rise during periods of economic distress, but protests, strikes, and civil unrest often do as the unemployed, unions elderly, veterans, the poor, and the sliding middle class take to the streets. When that happens government officials, politicians, and prominent commentators often conflate crime and social protest. Labeling demonstrations and other acts of protest as crimes is an age-old strategy to justify expansions of law enforcement and to delegitimize challenges to the prevailing political and economic order. As the Occupy Wall Street movement gained national traction in fall of 2011, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) warned about the “growing mobs on Wall Street and in other cities across the country.” p.26-31
With a few exceptions, U.S. cities have not experienced large-scale civil violence and civil unrest since the upheavals of the 1960s. p.30-1
Crime continues to pay in other ways for public officials. Faced with tighter budgets, more public officials now view the courts, corrections, and law enforcement as revenue-generating opportunities. This has not only intensified the war on the poor in the United States but also the war on key civil rights protections of the U.S. Constitution. Law enforcement has an enormous financial stake in continuing the war on drugs, which has become a huge cash cow and in some instances a huge slush fund for police and prosecutors. This is thanks to civil forfeiture laws that permit law enforcement officers (usually the police) they “suspect” may be associated with criminal activity. Criminal forfeiture requires that a person be convicted of an offense before his or her property may be confiscated. But in civil forfeiture cases, ... p.34-41
some instances, people are serving more time in jail for failing to pay court costs than they served under their original sentence.97 “Honey Holes” To ease their budget woes, states and municipalities have sought other ways besides civil forfeitures and LFOs to turn a profit from the criminal justice system. p.37-8
The goal of turning prisons into moneymaking machines or at least ensuring that they pay their own way isn’t that far-fetched. The United States has a long history of exploiting inmate labor to make prisons and penal farms highly productive and lucrative. .....
At the same time that legislators have been pushing back against UNICOR, they have been pushing hard to liberate the private sector to enter the inmate labor market in a big way. With the decline of organized labor and the onset of the neo-liberal era in the closing decades of the twentieth century, the hard fought restrictions on the sale of prison made good and the use of prison labor have been eroding. .....
A who’s who of corporate America – including Wal-Mart, Victoria’s Secret, Boeing, and Starbucks – discovered the potential windfall of a captive labor force as their subcontractors began to harness penal labor. .....
As with many penal innovations in the age of mass incarceration, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative lobbying organization, has been a key player in liberating the private sector to employ penal labor and expand privatization of corrections. .....
At one point, it contracted out female chain gangs to Martori Farms, one of Wal-Mart’s leading suppliers. The women worked for fifty cents an hour, far below the prevailing wage, in blistering heat without proper water, breaks, or protection from the sun. p.58-63
ALEC runs a “sophisticated operation for shaping public policy at a state-by-state level,” … Over the years, private prison companies and the National Rifle Association (NRA) have played leading roles in ALEC. Both Correction Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group p.62-3
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She also discusses the "draconian crime bill in 1994," which was created by Biden, and much more. In many cases they're trying to convince us the people creating these problems are the lesser evil compared to Trump.
Jonathan Kozol "Savage Inequalities" 1991 This is one of the best books available about inequality in education, and it shows how the system is rigged in favor of the wealthy. Not surprisingly wealthy media companies that benefit from the rigged system never gave it much if any promotion, so only those hearing about it at the grassroots level are familiar with this book.
He doesn't use the term "American Apartheid" in this book, but he clearly describes it and eventually refers to our system as an Apartheid system in a follow up book, "The Shame of the Nation," which is also an exceptional book.
Unfortunately "The Shame of the Nation" is no longer available free online, but it is available at many libraries. "Savage Inequalities" is still available free, and since it's in a text version it's easy to save, so it will be hard to retract it permanently.
https://archive.org/stream/SavageInequalities-Eng-JonathanKozol/savage-inequalities-jonathan-kozol_djvu.txt
This book shows how politicians have been forcing minorities into inferior schools despite the claims that segregation was banned by Brown v. Board of Education, which most people are taught ended segregation.
However, that Supreme Court ruling was never fully implemented, and he writes about the opinion in San Antonio v. Rodriguez which, for all practical purposes, ended potential enforcement of Brown v. Education. In one excerpt he wrote:
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“To a real degree, what is considered ‘adequate’ or ‘necessary’ or ‘sufficient’ for the poor in Texas is determined by the rich or relatively rich; it is decided in accord with their opinion of what children are fitted to become, and what their social role should be. This role has always been equated with their usefulness to us; and this consideration seems to be at stake in almost all reflections on the matter of the ‘minimal’ foundation offered to schoolchildren, which, in a sense, is only a metaphor for ‘minimal’
existence. When Justice Powell speaks of ‘minimal’ skills, such as the capacity to speak, but argues that we have no obligation to assure that it will be the ‘most effective’ speech, he is saying something that may seem quite reasonable and even commonplace, but it is something that would make more sense to wealthy folks in Alamo than to the folks in Edgewood.”
Powell, however, placed great emphasis on his distinction between “basic minimal” skills, permitting some participation, and no skills at all, which might deny a person all participation; and he seemed to acquiesce in the idea that some inequity would always be inevitable. “No scheme of taxation . . . ,” he wrote, “has yet been devised which is free of all discriminatory impact.”
In any case, said Justice Powell in a passage that anticipates much of the debate now taking place, “experts are divided” on the question of the role of money in determining the quality of education. Indeed, he said, “one of the hottest sources of controversy concerns the extent to which there is a demonstrable correlation between educational expenditures and the quality of education.”
In an additional comment that would stir considerable reaction among Texas residents, Powell said the district court had been in error in deciding that the Texas funding system had created what is called “a suspect class” — that is to say, an identifiable class of unjustly treated people. There had been no proof, he said, that a poor district such as Edgewood was necessarily inhabited mainly or entirely by poor people and, for this reason, it could not be said that poverty was the real cause of deprivation, even if there was real deprivation. "There is," said Powell, "no basis on the record in this case for assuming that the poorest people -- defined by reference to any level of absolute impecunity -- are concentrated in the poorest districts." Nor he added, is there "more than a random chance that racial minorities are concentrated in property-poor districts."
Justice Thurgood Marshall, in his long dissent, challenged the notion that an interest, to be seen as "fundamental," had to be "explicitly or implicitly guaranteed" within the Constitution. ....
Marshall also addressed the argument of Justice Powell that there was no demonstrated "correlation between poor people and poor districts." In support of this conclusion, Marshall wrote, the majority "offers absolutely no data -- which it cannot on this record ...."
....
On Justice Powell’s observation that some experts questioned the connection between spending and the quality of education, Marshall answered almost with derision: "Even an unadorned restatement of this contention is sufficient to reveal it's absurdity." It is, he said "an inescapable fact that if one district has more funds available per pupil than another district," it "will have greater choice" in what it offers to its children. p.214-8
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This opinion was written by Lewis Powell, as he mentions in his book; but he doesn't mention that this is the same person that wrote the Powell Memo, which is available free online, and Hendrick Smith wrote about this in "Who Stole the American Dream," explaining how this Memo inspired policies that reverse many reforms by the grassroots when the public is active.
This is also the same Supreme Court Justice that wrote the opinion on Ingraham v. Wright, which allows corporal punishment in schools to continue to this day in seventeen states. No other, including Jonathan Kozol, can cover all aspects of this problem; but he does provide some evidence showing that it actually costs more to solve escalating social problems before they escalate than it does to ignore the. This means that by refusing to fund schools fairly the government is wasting much more money as a result of other social problems, including escalating crime, inability to participate in the economic system, and much more.
There are many other researchers that confirm some of this, but few that cover inequality in education as well as he does.
The Lewis Powell Memo: A Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy:
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/
Sonia Shah "The Body Hunters" 2006
This is another obscure book that does a great job exposing how the wealthy rig things in their own favor. In this book Sonia Shah explores how poor people, especially in third world countries are much more likely to be used for research, while most, if not all the benefits go to the rich, either in the form of higher profits, or improved health care, only for those that can afford it.
Drug companies often shop around the world for places where they can disregard the of human research subjects. In many cases they offer access to health care for those who participate in research, without necessarily delivering.
It also demonstrates that if we provided fair health care, either in the United States, or the entire world, then it would be much more difficult, if not impossible to find volunteers for research, especially if they provide full disclosure.
In order to maximize medical research improvements for the wealthy, they have to ensure that the poor don't get these opportunities.
It also reminds the public that some of the successful research projects, including Jonas Salk's vaccine, went through a research stage where people were put at risk, and suffered negative consequences, before a successful vaccine could be given safely to the majority of the public. Once you understand this is should be clear that discussion of "Operation Warp Speed" in medical research should raise major alarm bells, yet recently anyone questioning this was silenced.
In other cases they find that tactics that worked best in the wealthy countries are rejected, not because they don't work, but they don't enable maximum profits for corporations, or enable research helping the rich, but not poor.
This is, of course, why traditional media doesn't advertise this book, and in some cases they may even smear it.
This can be read free on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/bodyhunterstesti00shah
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While innovative approaches to the health dilemmas posed by the lack of clean water and safe food, for example, are needed, the answer does not lie in new brand-name drugs. And even when new products are indeed what are most needed, from new malaria drugs to cures for sleeping sickness, those that aid the poorest are generally of little interest to drug companies which commit themselves to the financial needs of their investors. ....
..... But for many others, industry trials in poor countries offer an impossible choice—be experimented on or die for lack of medicine—that undermines human rights. .... p.xiii
Back in 1954, Americans offered their children as human guinea pigs by the millions for Jonas Salk's experimental polio vaccine. ...... But not long after, the hastily approved vaccine infected 220 children with polio, and public trust in clinical experimentation started to deflate .... p.4
According to the bank, "improved water and sanitation," the very public works that lifted the West out of its infectious soup, were "not particularly cost effective as health measures," 50 And so in Zaire, for example, World Bank and IMF "economic recovery measures" require the government to slash its spending on social services. p.12
Access to cheap medicines to address these ills is scarce. Multinational drug companies eager to access the growing markets of countries such as Brazil and India have pressured these governments to crack down on cheap local producers that undercut their sales. p.14-5
.... in 1998, thirty-nine multinational drug companies sued the South African for allowing the cheap drugs into the country. 64 p.15
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She also discusses how, in many cases drugs are intentionally withheld, even when it costs lives, for the sake of research. Profitable research for cosmetic purposes, or to create more profitable drugs, often almost identical to existing drugs, but with new patents, are considered far more important than developing drugs that save many poor peoples lives, but these people can't afford to pay massive mark-ups for these drugs.
In many cases the research is actually developed with tax-payer money, but drug companies keep the patents anyway, although other books like "Deadly Monopolies," by Harriet Washington and "The Truth About Drug Companies" by Marcia Angell cover that aspect more, and, nor surprisingly, their books get little or no promotions from mainstream media either.
Did anyone read this far?
Read the Damn Books Wall Street Doesn't Advertise before I start screaming at people!
Marcia Angell "The Truth About Drug Companies" 2004 & Harriet Washington "Deadly Monopolies" 2011
These are two exceptional books that get almost no media promotion, which isn't surprising, since one of the things they point out is that pharmaceutical companies are much more likely to promote drugs with high mark-up, and recent patents because they're much more profitable, for both drug companies and the media that sells the ads, than repurposed drugs that are no longer patented, and have been on the market much longer so there's little or no doubt about unknown long term side effects.
Unfortunately they're not available free online, that I know of, but they are available at many libraries, which is where I found them, and there are some excerpts which I'll post links to at the end available.
Both of these books are well researched, very credible, and they were written before the pandemic, so they don't directly address recent claims on either side about the quality of new vaccines. However, they do address many of the financial conflicts of interests or flaws in research practices that have been discussed by many anti-vaxxers, not that this guarantees the anti-vaxxers are right about everything, far from it.
On at least one occasion, since the pandemic, Harriet Washington has attempted to debunk some claims from conspiracy theorists; however, her previous work has discredited some false conspiracy theories while confirming other more credible ones.
One thing both Washington and Angell point out is that the vast majority of medical research is financed by the government, not corporations that are supposedly taking the risk, then they give the drug companies patents anyway, which is a brazen massive subsidy to drug companies enabling them to gouge people for massive amounts, often making it impossible for some people to get reasonable medical care, and driving others into bankruptcy.
They also point out that financial incentives often discourage research for the most important drugs that might save lives, like those that cure malaria or other health problems effecting the poor that can't pay outrageous prices for drugs, while encouraging research for "me-too" drugs that are very similar to existing drugs, but that can be re-patented and marketed for higher prices, even if they're not much more effective than older drugs that aren't patented.
This might include some drugs like ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, although they don't mention these, and I don't guarantee that vaccine skeptics are right about these drugs being effective. What it does mean is that drugs which are "Generally recognized as safe," or what they call GRAS, are often worth serious consideration when doing research, since even if they don't know if they're effective for a new disease, at least they know they're not likely to do much if any harm, and if they turn out to be effective they can be sold at a much lower price.
But, as I said, this doesn't guarantee they're effective, and now they've had more than three years to research the new virus and more than two years to test the vaccines, and most sources say they weren't effective, although they didn't know that early in the pandemic, when they called Ivermectin "horse-de-wormer" even though they knew it was also previously prescribed for humans before the pandemic.
The fact that they misrepresented some drugs that were made for humans and pretended there were no financial conflicts of interests does raise major doubts about the establishment; however, I don't claim to have the medical expertise to support or oppose vaccines, instead I still recommend informed consent, although it's very hard to get reliable educational material.
I still believe that people should be able to do their own research, but online discussion from people that have no medical background isn't the best way to get that research.
These two books are much more credible when it comes to researching financial conflicts of interests than most online sources, and in some cases, they might provide good medical advise, which can be confirmed or refuted by doctors, but they won't provide the final word on vaccines that didn't come out until years after they were published, although they might narrow some things down.
Here are some excerpts from both books, or check your library for copies:
https://zacherydtaylor.blogspot.com/p/harriet-washington-deadly-monopolies.html
https://zacherydtaylor.blogspot.com/p/marcia-angell-truth-about-drug-companies.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20150412155653/https://webcampus.drexelmed.edu/medhumanities/TheTruthAbouttheDrugCompanies.pdf
David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz "Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children" 2013
Another exceptional book that gets no media promotion, perhaps because it exposes how corporations profit by polluting, and in many cases killing the public, especially the poor.
If a poor person tried to poison and possibly kill a rich person, they would, of course, be prosecuted for attempted murder; should this also apply to rich people who profit by poisoning the poor on a much larger scale, often causing many more health problems and even deaths? Lead poison is one of many cases where that may not be the case.
Rosner and Mrkowitz's work is also supported by Harriet Washington, "A Terrible Thing To Waste," who uses them as her primary source, when it comes to lead poisoning, and adds some additional details, as well as other poisons. This book is available free online, although Washington's isn't that I know of.
https://disaster-sts-network.org/sites/default/files/artifacts/media/pdf/california_milbank_books_on_health_and_the_public_gerald_markowitz_david_rosner_-_lead_wars_the_politics_of_science_and_the_fate_of_americas_children-university_of_california_press_2013_0.pdf
It shows how major corporations including DuPont, Sherwin-Williams, and many other companies, along with trade organizations like the Lead Industry Association (LIA) all know how damaging lead paint was to people's health over a hundred years ago, if not a hundred and twenty years or more, yet they fought tooth and nail to cover it up, and even advertised it as safe, sometimes falsely claiming it was safer than alternatives.
They also reported how the Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI) intentionally recruited families with children in Baltimore to live in houses they knew was full of lead endangering them, and lied to them for a sake of an experiment.
Harold Needleman was one of the best researchers trying to expose them, so they tried to smear him with false accusations of academic misconduct; but he was eventually acquitted and many good researchers confirmed he was right all along, and this was a smear all along, although officially they didn't quite prove the researchers making false accusations were tied to the lead industry; but, despite her loss of credibility as a result she somehow received increased funding for her work, which, coincidentally, or not, supported the industry views. This was an about face for her, since she was previously a colleague of Needleman's and he was surprised when she reversed herself and filed a complaint against him.
This problem isn't limited to lead poisoning, of course, although Rosner and Markowitz focus on this; other researchers report on hos similar tactics are to cover up health problems caused, by asbestos, mercury poisoning, Climate Change, tobacco, of course, and much more.
When the rich profit by polluting the poor they're practically never criminally charged, and even when they lose in civil court they almost never have to pay more than a modest percentage of their past profits in criminal damages. In cases where they're found at fault for larger amounts, they often just declare bankruptcy, whether there's evidence of their profits being sent to an offshore account or not.
Also, as I reported previously, the biggest four or five publishing companies are much less likely to publish the best research exposing fraud by wealthy people, for one reason or another. A large portion of these books are published by nonprofit publishing companies concerned about educating the public, and they're often struggling for funds.
In this case, it's the University of California Press; check out their web page for other good nonfiction books Wall Street doesn't advertise. A few other good books I've read also came from them.
https://www.ucpress.edu/
Graham Hancock "Lords of Poverty" 1989 Many people may recognize Graham Hancock for his research into unsolved mysteries, and may doubt some of his fact checking at times; however, he also wrote this, which just might be his best and most credible book, yet few people ever heard of it, and since it also exposes massive corporate fraud rigging the economy for the rich it fits the category of books Wall Street won't advertise.
This book can be read free on the Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/lordsofpovertypo0000hanc
He opens his book by explaining that many charities that recruit volunteers at the grassroots level and help local people, or in some cases beyond the local areas, aren't what he's writing about.
He mostly writes about how powerful institutions claiming to help the poor, mostly in third world countries are often doing more to rig the economy for the rich than actually help the poor; and this "aid" often comes in the form of loans that have strings attached, often buying from well connected companies who are gouging the poor, high interest rates, or even demands that they cut programs to the poor instead of increasing them.
In many cases "aid" is designed to help foreign companies extract resources without actually helping the local people, which eventually became known as the "resource curse," although Hancock didn't use this term. When some sources like Rachel Maddow eventually used this term they act as if it's an unintended consequence of "aid" and they can't understand how it happened.
Which means they simply don't want to know how or why it happened.
The Resource Curse is no accident, it's part of epidemic fraud, and Hancock explained how it happens more than thirty years ago.
Way too much of what they call "aid" is sophisticated plundering or resources from the poor to enrich the wealthy!
The following are a few excerpts from this book:
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Those of us, for example, who wish to evaluate the progress, or effectiveness, or quality of development assistance will soon discover that the aid bureaucracies have already carried out all the evaluations that they believe to be necessary and are prepared to resist—with armour-plated resolve—the ‘ignorant,’ or ‘biased’ or ‘hostile’ attentions of outsiders. Even the few apparently independent studies in this field turn out in the majority of cases to have been financed by one or other of the aid agencies or by institutes set up with aid money. p.viii-ix
As one African refugee asked petulantly, "Why is it that every US dollar comes with twenty Americans attached to it?' 19 p.7
The charges, most of which were strenuously denied, came from other relief workers on the spot. According to these witnesses, World Vision employees frequently used the threat of withholding food supplies to coerce Salvadorean refugees into attending Protestant worship services. It was also alleged—and again denied—that World Vision employed several ex-members of the local secret police (DNI) and had a policy of allowing the Honduran military free access to the refugee camps that it administered. The most serious accusation was that, on the night of 22 May 1981, two Salvadorean refugees who sought sanctuary at the Honduran village of Colomoncagua were picked up by World Vision, installed in a vehicle and told that they were being taken to the refugee camp in Limones. Instead they were handed over to the military. A few days later the same two refugees were found dead at the border. 27 World Vision once again denied involvement in these events. p.9
By contrast, some humanitarian aid can kill. For example. Map International Inc., of Wheaton, Illinois, received a donation of $17 million worth of heart-regulating pacemakers from the American Hospital Supply Corporation. The donation solved a problem for AHS by giving it a hefty tax write-off from an area of its operations that it had anyway decided to close down. The pacemakers, which duly went to the Third World, quickly began to give the recipient countries other problems, however; most of the units were susceptible to battery leakage and other life-threatening malfunction. 57 p.15
If the Third World governments actually implement IMF and World Bank ‘policy reforms’ sought to serve rather than dominate their own people, if they were genuinely devoted to the public good rather than to their private wealth and power, then it might not be necessary for structural adjustment to cause such pain. ...
The agencies know this—and ignore it; the conditions that governments must meet prior to receiving structural adjustment loans have, for example, never included improved human rights, increased freedom of speech, reduced military spending, controls on graft, or any other similar reforms. p.64
Even UNESCO, dedicated by its charter to promote ‘human rights and fundamental freedoms’ (including freedom of speech), requires staff ‘not to communicate to any person any information known to them by reason of their official position’-an obligation that does not cease when they retire or resign. 136 Exactly the same restriction applies in all other UN agencies p.66
The obstinate poor may, at times, have to be treated even more harshly than this. In Africa, for example, the Bank is engaged in a messianic campaign for ‘structural adjustment’ and notes with pleasure that: ‘There are definite signs of greater willingness of African governments to consider policy reforms.’ 68 Since these reforms involve, inter alia, cuts in public expenditure on ‘aspects of education and health’ and cuts in subsidies for basic food items, it is inevitable that the most vulnerable sections of the population will suffer—as the Bank admits: ‘The urban poor have lost out through higher food prices and deteriorating services,’ it tells us, while ‘rural dwellers in areas of low potential’ have also ‘not benefited.’ Such people may even "object" to the development that is going on around them and passing them by. This, however, should not be allowed to slow down the reforms that are taking place in the name of increased productivity and efficiency. Indeed, the Bank defines the main function of external aid as helping to ensure that governments ‘sustain reforms against the opposition of those who are adversely affected.’ 69 p.129
Alternatives such as energy-efficiency improvements, and the building of smaller-scale dams which would be environmentally, socially and economically less risky, have not even been considered by the global lender in its Gadarene rush to commit ever larger sums to India’s most grandiose ‘development’ scheme. 158 p.143
Similarly, on the Thai island of Phuket, one recent World Bank project—a $44 million tantalum-processing plant—was regarded as such a fiasco by the local inhabitants that they burnt it down. Keen to disburse funds rapidly, and indifferent as ever to the opinions of the poor, the Bank had not taken the trouble to canvass local opinions of the scheme before going ahead with it. Theislanders, however, knew that the huge ore-refinery would be messy, noisy and would thus represent a serious threat to the tourist trade which provided the majority of their incomes. When it became clear in addition that the plant was capital intensive—and would create only a few new jobs—a rational decision was taken by all concerned to get rid of it; accordingly it was razed to the ground shortly before its doors were opened for business. 186
This example of poor people taking action against a project which did not offer them any benefits—indeed, imperiled them—and seemed largely to be in the interests of faraway investors and consumers, is rare indeed. Usually the money of international development agencies, combined with the muscle of borrower governments, is enough to enforce acceptance of any scheme—however irrelevant, cruel, unusual or hare-brained it in fact may be. p.149-50
In virtually all international forums, and for many years, the British government has declared itself to be staunchly in favour of free enterprise; it thus seems odd to discover that a growing slice of the official aid budget, rather than being used to help the poor, is in fact earmarked for a determined effort to subvert global market forces. ... p.157
Somalia will still be repaying the Community’s long-term, low-interest loan in the year 2023. This is unfortunate in view of the fact that the road itself had virtually ceased to be serviceable by 1988. p.171
Both Bangladesh and Bolivia are significant recipients of foreign aid. In Nicaragua, by contrast, which has had virtually all its aid cut off since the collapse of the Somoza regime in 1979, things have improved noticeably during the 1980s. Without any of the so-called ‘help’ that outsiders normally offer, the Government of National Reconstruction has succeeded in reducing illiteracy amongst adult Nicaraguans from 53 per cent to just 13 per cent and has, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, achieved more advances ‘in most areas of social welfare than in fifty years of dictatorship under the Somoza family.’ 29 .... p.192
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Hancock also discusses several cases like Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos where they were allowed to loot the country blind, before finally being removed from power, as long as they helped corporation profit from extracting natural resources without helping the local residences, then even though the poor never received any benefits from the "aid" and tyrants like Marcos transferred their stolen money to off-shore accounts, the poor were stuck with massive amounts of debt.
As I said there's no doubt this book is far more credible than his other books about lost civilization, and many of the details can be confirmed by other books like "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein, "Open Veins of Latin America" by Eduardo Galeano, and many other books, some that I'll also review before too long.
Susan Clark and Woden Teachout "Slow Democracy" 2012 This is a very obscure book published by a small publishing company; but it's exceptionally good. It's about how many people at the local level addressed important social problems, often despite efforts by large corporations and national governments to control decisions from distant places, for the benefit of the rich.
Fortunately this is available at the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/slowdemocracyred0000clar
A good review of this book from the publishing company says "Slow Democracy chronicles the ways in which ordinary people have mobilized to find local solutions to local problems. It invites us to bring the advantages of “slow” to our community decision making. Just as slow food encourages chefs and eaters to become more intimately involved with the production of local food, slow democracy encourages us to govern ourselves locally with processes that are inclusive, deliberative, and citizen powered."
They describe how one community overcame efforts to privatize water, which was devastating to local people as it is all over the world, another community banned local use of genetically engineered products, and how another community held a meeting about dealing with violence, and the media found out about it and sent a crew to cover it; but when they found out there was no violent incident, and they were discussing how to prevent violence, the media left and never covered the story.
This is an important issue that I've been trying to point out for years. We have an enormous amount of research about preventing violence, but the media refuses to cover it; but when it comes to using violence to attract ratings or use for entertainment, without teaching about prevention, the media provides obsession coverage.
This is why I consider the media a contributing cause of violence. In order to have a functioning Democracy the public has to be educated about the most effective solutions to many social problems, which means a diverse media that covers the best research about solving problems.
Unfortunately we don't have that kind of media in this country; instead we have a media controlled by a fraction of one percent of the public that is only concerned about their own profits, not the best interests of the majority.
Slow Democracy focuses on local solutions, which is an important start. But of course, to make major changes we need larger global solutions as well, but without taking the first steps, we won't get there.
This book is published by Chelsea Green, which is a small employee owned company that focuses on sustainable living, organic farming, environmentalism, and other issues, sometimes including antiwar books, or helping not for profit organizations in a social responsible way. They don't publish a large number of books, but like other non-profit or educational publishers, the books they do publish are much better than the ones published by the four or five biggest for profit publishers.
https://www.chelseagreen.com/
Radley Balko “Rise of the Warrior Cop” 2013
This book warned us about excessive militarization of the police ten years ago, and in many parts of the country, little or nothing has been done to reverse this. Often the parts of the country with the most violence that need the best police forces get the worst, which often means increased militarization when improved education is far more likely to solve social problems.
Fortunately this is available on the Internet Archive; there was previously a copy in HTML available free, but this was taken down, although it could just as easily be put back up as is often the case with copyright wack-a-mole.
https://archive.org/details/riseofwarriorcop0000balk
At one point he writes, "Their general message was that some people are simply ‘born bad’ and there’s just no helping them. Talk about root causes, social intervention, or curing or rehabilitating deviancy was a futile attempt to debate away evil. Rioters, drug pushers, drug addicts, career criminals––these people were beyond redemption. The only proper response to the evil was force––and then only to keep the evil from harming the good. These ideas found a home in the Reagan administration, where many of the people who had been advancing them found high-ranking appointments." p.142-5
At another point he writes about how the Kennedy administration, and perhaps the early Johnson administration, was concerned about the root causes of crime and violence, and how to solve problems before they escalate. but this changed drastically with the Nixon administration with his tough on crime policies, that only got tough on crimes committed by poor people, like most, if not all tough on crime politicians since then.
He covers the history of how police tactics gradually changed to become more militaristic, escalating with the development of SWAT teams in the late seventies, on a couple occasions facing well armed crooks. But these cases are the minority, and SWAT is much more likely to be used for unarmed drug deals, often in the middle of the night, supposedly so they won't have a chance to destroy evidence.
He writes about many cases where they've invaded the wrong house, killed innocent people, or where people unaware they were being raided by police fought back in self defense, and killed police.
He points out that in some cases where there really is a violent threat, like when the FBI caught James "Whitey" Bulger, they know damn well that no-knock raids could be a potential disaster, and they carefully watched him until he was out of his apartment, and they could take him by surprise, without any threat of a shoot-out; yet when they're arresting non-violent drug dealers they often refuse to use safer tactics like this.
False raids, killing of the innocents, shootings against people that were surprised by what they considered home invaders continued for years after he wrote this book and still haven't stopped, including one infamous case where they threw a flash-bang grenade into a babies crib in Georgia, another incidents where they killed an EMT in Kentucky, when the real suspects weren't even there, and dozens of not hundreds of other cases that went badly wrong.
I've written several articles listing many of these cases, and there are many other cop watchers tracking this as well.
As I mentioned, he did provide some discussion about how the police and politicians were no longer focusing on the "root causes" of violence or crime; but mostly what he researches is the history of how the police became more militarized. No author can cover all aspects of crime, and other like Lisbeth Schorr author of "Within Our Reach," and "Common Purpose," James Garbarino, author of of "Lost Boys, and many other exceptional books, and other researchers do a much better job showing how to address the root causes of violence, and prevent social problems from escalating before some people think we need a militarized police, but of course, they don't cover the history of police, which is obviously why we need to read diverse researchers on various subjects.
James Carroll "House of War" 2006 Jame Carroll received more attention than most of the authors of the best non-fiction books that get virtually no promotion from Wall Street, and he wrote articles for the Boston Globe for over two decades, but this book, which is probably his best, got almost no attention from traditional media anyway, and it exposes how our support for war has been disastrous.
This can be read free on the Internet Archive, at least for now, under the controlled lending process, which is under litigation.
https://archive.org/details/houseofwartextei00carr/mode/2up
Carroll was born into a military family, the son of a General and FBI agent, and was raised to worship other generals of his time, like Curtis LeMay, and many others, although he eventually came to the conclusion they were warmongers doing far more harm than good.
He writes about the rise of the Pentagon and how he grew up with it, and reviews the war mongering attitudes of many in the military, including some that said things like, "If there are two of us still living at the end of the and none of them, then we win the war!" Of course one person responded to this extreme view by saying "Then you better hope one of those two is a man and the other is a woman!"
Carroll became a priest when he was young, but turned against the Vietnam War, which led him to leaving the priesthood, rethinking his views of the military, and decades later writing this book.
He writes about how he spoke to Robert McNamara, and after leaving government he eventually admitted that man of the things he did or helped organize were War crimes, including the fire bombing of Tokyo, possibly the nuclear bombs, although I'm not sure he was involved in that, and most importantly, his participation in Vietnam.
Most other military men, especially the highest ranking ones, never had second thoughts like this, including Curtis LeMay. James Carroll wrote of him, "LeMay probably had this declaration in mind when, long after the war, he explained the rationale for his campaign by telling Michael Sherry, 'There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not fighting an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.'” p.99
When LeMay said this he was referring to the Japanese during World War II, but there's other evidence, either from Carroll's book or elsewhere to indicate that he had the same attitude about all potential enemies, including in Vietnam about two decade later. There was no consideration by many people in the military for the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, signed on September 2 1945, shortly after they helped us defeat Japan, partly because of the claim that the war was to "defend democracy," but they showed later that was never what they had in mind and refused to allow Vietnam to govern themselves, killing well over two million people before the war ended and leaving them destitute with an environment devastated by the war.
Most war monger were in total denial for decades, or until they died, including Curtis Lemay.
He writes about how some people tried to stop or minimize military carnage, including Henry Stimson, who tried to ensure atomic weapons wouldn't be used, or perhaps even built, but he was overruled by the majority of people in the military, who were much more militant, and antiwar people weren't invited to participate in decisions like this.
He also writes about how many of the most important decisions leading to constant war were almost all based on lies, and in many cases, our government told as many lies, if not much more, as our perceived enemies. This included constant lies about the missile gap, claiming the USSR had much more weapons than us so we had to build more; this lie was exposed repeatedly, but they rolled out the same lies over and over again claiming the gap kept growing, even after being discredited.
The reason they got away with this is the government and media would repeat the lies over and over again, and when those lies were exposed it was only briefly, then they allowed the truth to fall down the memory hole so they could repeat the lies again, repeating the cycle every few years for decades.
"History" is written by the victor, and if people try to report the "truth" despite the propaganda, they're portrayed as "radicals" for disagreeing with the rich and powerful, and honest books get little or no media promotion!
Marion Nestle "Food Politics" 2007 This is another excellent book which shows how corporations try to corrupt science so they can increase profits at the expense of the health of the public.
There is a text copy of this free online, and I tried post it below, but Facebook wouldn't let me and it's not as easy to read without paragraph breaks, so it would be better to get a local library copy, which should be easy to find.
Like other books exposing fraud by powerful corporations there was little or no promotion for it when it came out, and apparently there was an attempt to smear it and a weak threat of a lawsuit for libel or slander, which she recognized as an obvious bluff immediately.
Marion Nestle is a nutritionist and professor that has worked for various universities, as well as the government, and has plenty of credentials, which you can look up; but once you read her book you might agree that the most important credentials she has is the quality of her work, and the fact that she doesn't cave to corporate interests.
I'm sure I'm not the only one that noticed that many industry supporters have as many credentials as their critics, which is why I consider the quality of her work more important than her credentials. In fact she's one of the good researchers that exposes industry hacks.
She's primarily interested in writing about good nutrition, but with so much false information being pushed by the food industry it's necessary for her to debunk that to get her point across.
In the 2007 edition she opens the book by describing how the first three reviews of her book came out weeks before her book was available and they trashed it, but before she could reply the fourth one came from Sheldon Rampton, the coauthor of "Toxic Sludge Is Good for You" and "Trust Us We're Experts" coming to her defense and exposing the first three responses as obvious food industry PR. His books are among the other good ones exposing corporate propaganda deceiving the public, although I haven't read them yet, several sources recommend them.
She then goes on to report on how the industry lawyers threatened her writing:
'But then a second attack came a few weeks later from a lawyer for the Sugar Association, a group representing the interests of producers of sugar cane and beets. The letter charged me with making “numerous false, misleading, disparaging, and defamatory statements about sugar” such as “the false and inaccurate statement that soft drinks contain sugar.” It said soft drinks “have contained virtually no sugar (sucrose) in more than 20 years,” and if I did not “cease making misleading or false statements regarding sugar or the sugar industry . . . the only recourse available to us will be to legally defend our industry and its members against any and all fallacious and harmful allegations.” Mind you, the ingredient labels of soft drinks say they contain “high fructose corn syrup and/or sucrose,” and both sweeteners are made of glucose and fructose—sugars. Thus, the lawyer’s letter could have only one purpose: intimidation. I wrote back saying so and heard nothing further from this group.'
In addition to writing about good nutrition and how the food industry routinely puts profits ahead of the health of the public, she also writes about several previous attempts to censor critics of the food industry including McDonald's versus London Greenpeace: McLibel; Cattlemen versus Oprah Winfrey; and Chiquita Banana versus the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Oprah won her case, technically the industry won the McLibel case, but the payout was not worth the legal expenses, and they never tried to collect. Eventually the European Court of Human Rights ruled the defendants didn't receive a fair trial, and with no action from McDonald's this seems to have virtually overturned the original verdict, and it was a public relations disaster for them all along, so for all practical purposes Helen Steel and David Morris, the Greenpeace activists won.
The case Chiquita Banana versus the Cincinnati Enquirer, unfortunately went in the other direction, even though my best guess is they reported mostly the truth. I don't know the specifics of this case, but they accused Chiquita of abusive labor practices that were incredibly common according to many sources in countries south of the border. If the industry victory was partly justified it was probably based on trivial mistakes and details, and possibly a biased court system.
As I said the text appears to be available free online but it's hard to read without paragraph breaks, or if you can figure out how to download the PDF it may be easier; however Facebook won't let me post it; but this is available in many libraries, so that may be easier.
Marion Nestle "Food Politics" 2007 Text no paragraph breaks
Randall Sheldon "Controlling the Dangerous Classes" 2018
This is one of the best books Wall Street doesn't advertise; and it's not hard to figure out why.
He comes right out and argues that those who make laws overwhelmingly come from wealthy classes while those who fill up court rooms across the country on any given day are overwhelmingly poor, and there's an enormous amount of evidence supporting his conclusions.
This is the Third Edition, which is probably the best, and the one I read. Excerpts below come from this edition, but the first edition, which is about the same length, is on the Internet Archive to read free, if anyone wants to skim it before buying, or save some money. Very few traditional libraries are likely to have copies of this.
https://archive.org/details/controllingdange0000shel
He argues throughout his book that laws are as concerned about controlling the masses as they are about protecting the people from violence. Laws are created for the benefit of the wealthy at the expense of the poor, and, in many cases, to ensure that cheap labor is available, although that's not the main point of his book.
There are actually many researchers and books that support his conclusions, including some that focus more on how laws are created to suppress the rights of workers in favor of employers. He focuses mainly on law and the courts, but other researchers, including some I already reviewed or will get to soon, show the same principles apply to any given research subject.
The best researchers from other subjects also get no promotion from traditional media, because, of course, they also cover other ways the rich rig the economy in their favor.
The review from Amazon says:
Throughout history, the powerful have created laws, developed agencies to enforce those laws, and established institutions to punish lawbreakers. Maintaining the social order to their advantage resulted in the systematic repression of disadvantaged groups the "dangerous classes." The third edition retains a historical approach to exploring patterns of social control and, through current examples, demonstrates how those strategies continue today.
Here are some of the best excerpts from the 3rd edition, 2018, not necessarily the one linked above:
However, the most severe treatment is usually reserved for those at the bottom of the social order, as a cursory look at the inhabitants of the nation's jails and prisons reveals. The more privileged segments of society who break the law can afford to hire attorneys who argue for more lenient treatment--particularly evident with corporate and white-collar crime (Friedrichs, 2010).
....
... Put succinctly, the entire legal system has been and continues to be controlled and dominated by those in power at any given historical period and thus favors those with the most resources at their disposal. Those receiving the brunt of the full enforcement of the law have been predominantly those who make up the dangerous classes.
... The ideal government "of the people, by the people and for the people" should not exclude large numbers of people. In addition, the ideal references being governed by the rule of law, which is presumed to be unbiased.
... Perhaps nowhere is this better illustrated on a daily basis--sometimes for all to see--than in our system of justice. Because those who create laws and those who interpret laws are drawn largely from the wealthiest class, it comes as no surprise that those brought into the criminal justice system will be those drawn largely from the lowest social classes. On any given day, in courtrooms all over the country, we have essentially one class passing judgment on another class. Our system is fundamentally a system influenced by class (and race). p.17-9
....
In most cases, the result has been unmistakable--those who have been arrested and processed through the criminal justice system have consistently been drawn from the lower rungs of the social class structure.
Let's return to laws about homicide. ... The current law against homicide is not as clearly defined as one might expect. Typically, such laws refer to acts such as the willful taking of another person's life (premeditated murder), the accidental yet negligent taking of another life (as in a fight), or killing someone while committing another crime (as in a robbery). Missing from the law of homicide are such cases as (1) the production of goods that can cause harm or even death to consumers (e.g., Takata airbags exploding and killing the driver), (2) various working conditions that cause death (e.g., black lung disease among miners), and (3) the perpetuation of conditions that cause sickness and death (e.g., presence of lead in impoverished areas).
Gustavus Myers wrote about the accumulation of wealth by landlords such as the Astors at the expense of the poor.
Is it not murder when, compelled by want, people are forced to fester in squalid, germ-filled tenements, where the sunlight never enters and where disease finds a prolific breeding-place? Untold thousands went to their deaths in these unspeakable places. Yet, so far as the Law was concerned, the rents collected by the Astors, as well as by other landlords, were honestly made. The whole institution of Law saw nothing out of the way in these conditions, and very significantly so, because, to repeat over and over again, Law did not represent the ethics or ideals of advanced humanity; it exactly reflected, as a pool reflects the sky, the demands and self-interest of the growing propertied classes. And if here and there a law was passed (which did not often happen) contrary to the expressed opposition of property, it was either so emasculated as to be harmless or it was not enforced. (History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I: Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times 1908 by Gustavus Myers available free on Gutenberg)
The real-life circumstances of an offense rarely correspond to the abstract specifications of the law. The interpretation of homicide varies tremendously depending on the context. The police can shoot fleeing felons, soldiers in war are ordered to kill, and the state carries out executions. States may also engage in mass murder and genocide. ...
... Crimes committed by the wealthy are frequently not perceived as dangerous (Chomsky, 1989). Yet collectively these offenses cost more than 100,000 lives and trillions of dollars each year. Wealthy white males are rarely imprisoned; racial minorities (and the poorer in general) are overwhelmingly subjected to the actions of the criminal justice system and fill our jails and prisons. p.52-3
......
As an institution, law enforcement serves the interests of the dominant groups (Bacon, 1939). Quite often, as we will see, a police system has developed as a response to organized threats against the dominance of a small ruling class. p.59-60
....
Alan Silver (1967) has offered another explanation behind the passage of the Metropolitan Police Act, namely, that it would shield the rulers from the masses.
If the power structure itself armed itself and fought a riot or a rebellious people, this created more trouble and tension than the original problem . But , if one can have an independent police which fights the mob , then antagonism is directed toward the police, not the power structure. A paid professional police force seems to separate "constitutional" authority from social and economic dominance. (p.11-2)
Hence, there was a shift from control of policing on the community level (as it was with the constable form of policing) to control by the state. To address crime and disorder, elites endorsed expanded police powers rather than the elimination of economic inequality (Lynch & Michalowski, 2006).
... They could now serve more direct class control functions by patrolling impoverished communities. The unintended consequence of this change was that the police would eventually become the scapegoats for increased crime rates. If cities experienced crime, it was not because the social order had created a class of impovershed communities.; it was because the police failed to prevent crime (Lynch & Michalowski, 2006). Similarly, the creation of urban police also shifted the focus to the individual who committed the crime. Bad persons--not economic and social conditions--caused crime. p.65
Alan Friedman "Spider's Web" 1993
Is anyone wondering who provided the weapons and financing so that Saddam Hussein could invade Kuwait in 1990?
It was, of course, the Reagan and Bush administrations, with help from Margaret Thatcher and her administration!
Is there any wonder why the establishment would want to minimize coverage of this book assuming they provided any at all, and hope it falls down the memory hole?
Fortunately it can be read free on the Internet Archive if your local library doesn't have a copy.
https://archive.org/details/spiderswebsecret00frie/mode/2up?view=theater
Friedman writes about how Margaret Thatcher and George H W Bush arrived in Aspen to accept awards showing how great both of them were on August 2 1990; she was given the Statesman Award and he was given the Distinguished Leadership Award.
It would have been very awkward if the media widely reported the fact that Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, which began on that same day, was financed by these two; fortunately, as usual, they were able to count on the media burying the most important reporting so few people would know about it.
There was some reporting about this during the eighties, but it was mostly reported in bits and pieces, as usual, so most people didn't figure out what happened, and most of the details fell down the memory hole. Some of this was also reported in traditional media in 1993, when it was partly exposed, but most of that went down the memory hole too.
This book doesn't cover the coup in 1953 overthrowing the Democratically elected government of Iran, but many other sources cover that and it eventually led to the reason why our government armed and financed Saddam Hussein. Without help from the CIA and our government Saddam might not have been able to stay in power, assuming he gained it at all, nor could he have fought the eight year war against Iran.
Friedman also writes about how Banca Nazionale del Lavoro aka BNL was used to finance Iraq's purchases of arms, which in many cases he should have been banned from buying. How they covered it up, how, when they got caught the people at the top avoided accountability by using lower level people as scapegoats, which is a common practice, and much more.
He also writes about a visit from Senator Bob Dole where he expressed sympathy with Saddam Hussein and indicated he was a victim of a smear campaign by the press not the Bush government. Dole said, "I believe that your (Saddam's) problems lie with the western media, and not with the U.S. government. As long as you are isolated from the media, the press—and it is a haughty and pampered press—they all consider themselves political geniuses."
He also writes about how it impacted people in other third world countries like Chile, including 29 people killed in an explosion at Iquique Chile. He writes about manufacturing cluster bombs that were first used in Vietnam, which often killed many civilians back then, and when ever else they were used, including in Iraq, and now in Ukraine, although he obviously didn't write about that.
They weren't allowed to legally ship many of these weapons to tyrants with a bad human rights record, including Iraq or Chile, in many cases; but they did it anyway, saving money on labor and environmental protection at the same time. They shipped entire factories to Chile, despite the fact that Pinochet quickly became known as an abuser of human rights, and of course, they were still, for the most part, in denial about the CIA's part in the 1973 coup on Sept. 11.
This resulted in the explosion in Iquique killing 29 people, when most people in that area didn't even know they were manufacturing cluster bombs, and they certainly didn't know they were being shipped to Iraq.
This also resulted in use of chemical weapons against the Kurds, and Bush's betrayal against them as well.
Most of what the public is taught about global affairs is based on lies; and the truth is only reported in a low profile, then if anyone pays attention it's ridiculed as a conspiracy theory, even when overwhelming evidence supports it.
Sidney Lens "The Labor Wars" 1973
History has always been written by the wealthy, along with the news. The version written by the wealthy is repeated over and over again, while the truth is routinely forgotten, or if anyone remembers it, the establishment will treat it as "fringe" or "radical."
This is one of the books the establishment wants to fall down the memory hole because Sidney Lens writes about how the government virtually always took the side of employers against labor.
Fortunately it can be read free on the Internet Archive, at least for now; but some of the books they have are already being taken down, or no longer available to be borrowed.
https://archive.org/details/laborwarsfrommol0000lens/mode/2up
One of the few police officers to take the side of labor was Sid Hatfield, and he was assassinated by Baldwin-Felts detectives on the courthouse steps. Even though they knew who killed him they were never convicted because they claimed they acted in "self-defense," even though Hatfield wasn't armed.
Lens writes about how there were dozens of conflicts which they considered borderline wars between the Civil War and World War II. The vast majority of people killed were on the side of labor, and police, national guardsmen, detectives working for robber barons or vigilantes were almost never prosecuted.
However, even when there was no evidence to implicate those on the side of labor in other murders they were much more likely to be tried and convicted, and in some cases executed. There may have been a few times where they were actually guilty; but they were far fewer times than those acting on the side of employers were clearly guilty; and, in many cases, innocent people supporting workers were framed, including Big Bill Haywood.
In many cases various laws were passed specifically to give employers special rights and to prevent workers from defending their own rights. In some cases injunctions were imposed preventing workers from striking, or even refusing to work for outrageous wages, which is virtual slavery.
Naturally, under these circumstances, workers had to violate the laws to stand up for their own rights, but these laws were as extreme as laws allowing slavery, and they were clearly designed to help one class of wealthy people abuse the working class.
Sidney Lens and other sources claim that labor Wars where large numbers of people are killed almost came to an end after the depression, but this is only partly true. There are still a small number of conflicts with a modest amount of violence, at least in the United States; but one thing to keep in mind is that with the outsourcing of jobs, outsourcing of violence has also occurred.
There are still many violent incidents to oppress workers in the third world, and they're a result of control by multinational corporations shipping jobs overseas so they can profit from abuses of workers elsewhere as well as environmental damage, and more; and, of course, workers in this country now have to compete with workers in other countries that have no rights, in a race to the bottom.
And, of course, many laws are still being passed for the benefits of employers, sometimes even with support of those who claim to be defending workers, like a recent vote to ban a strike by railroad workers, which was supported by the so-called "Squad" and President Biden, all of whom are pretending to defend worker rights.
The following are a few excepts from the book, or you could and should just read the whole thing:
1. The labor wars were conducted outside the pall of narrow legality. Had the workers abided by court injunctions against picketing and had they shown the expected respect for the organs of law and order—police, militia, federal troops—unions today would have been dwarfs in size and impotent in influence.
2. The ultimate enemy was almost always the city, state, and federal governments. Had government been truly impartial, let alone oriented toward the exploited classes, unions would have attained decisive power before the end of the nineteenth century.
3. The labor wars, at first two-sided encounters between labor and capital, became triangular as a progressively entrenched AFL hierarchy gave both witting and unwitting aid to the scions of business. Certainly the mass production industries would have yielded to unionism decades before it did if it had not been for the Tory attitudes of AFL leadership; and the unions would unquestionably have been more dynamic if their own reactionary officials had not signed back-door contracts in the 1930s to prevent militant unions from organizing. p.8
..... But many if not most, of the illegal acts were instigated by the operators and perpetrated by their agents. Marvin W. Schlegel, an assistant state historian of Pennsylvania, even asserts that there was much more terror waged against the Mollies than those illiterate Irishmen ever aroused.” McParlan himself reported that arson at a Reading colliery in East Norwegian, allegedly committed by the Mollies, was believed by the strikers to have been set by the railroad itself to gain sympathy from the state legislature, which was preparing to investigate the railroads’ monopoly of the coal mining industry.
The almost universal hostility to the miners’ cause was joined even by the Church, the press, the courts, and other respectable institutions. Their attitude was manifest in a dozen ways before and after the upheavals. During one of the Molly Maguire trials, for instance, a judge defended industrial spying in these words: “We employ spies in wars between nations; is it any worse to employ them in wars in society?” During a strike of bituminous miners in Clearfield County, in central Pennsylvania, which occurred simultaneously with the anthracite stoppage, John Siney, Xeno Parks, an official of the Miners’ National Association, and twenty-six others were arrested for “conspiracy and riot.” Their crime consisted of picketing the mines in an effort to persuade a trainload of strikebreakers to leave the region. Parks and twenty-six others were found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail. Only Siney was acquitted. In sentencing two of the men, the judge indicated revealingly what Establishment saw as the real issue: “I find you, Joyce,” he said, “to be president of the union, and you, Maloney, to be secretary, and therefore I sentence you to one year’s imprisonment.” p.25-6
Much of the corroborating evidence in these cases was obviously faulty—for instance, the claim of one witness, Richard Andrews, that he had seen Thomas Munley, a union leader, kill a mine foreman named Thomas Sanger. When Munley was asked to stand, Andrews said: “That is not the man I recognize at all.” Munley’s lawyer cried out to the jury: “For God’s sake give labor an equal chance. Do not crush it. Let it not perish under the imperial mandates of capital in a free country.” Munley, nonetheless, was convicted and hung. In the embittered climate of the day, the defense could make no case stand on behalf of the workers. One after another, nineteen men were found guilty and executed, others sent to prison terms. p.28-9
.... Typically, the La Crosse and Milwaukee Railroad, according to a Wisconsin investigating committee, had passed around a million dollars in bonds and cash to thirteen senators, thirty assembly men, the governor ($50,000) and various newsmen to assure a land grant valued at $17 million.
.... That Congress should be so considerate of a firm that could barely raise a half million dollars on its own is perhaps best explained by the fact that Ames spread around $436,000 where it would “do the most good,” and promised instant wealth to a host of insiders, such as the future presidential candidate Senator James G. Blaine, and future President, James A. Garfield. p.37
In March 1877, the heads of four trunk lines, Vanderbilt of New York Central, Thomas A. Scott of the Pennsylvania, Hugh J. Jewett of the Erie, and Garrett of the B&O, met in New York to formalize the pooling arrangement referred to above. In addition they adopted a concerted plan to cut wages, and agreed to insure each other against possible strikes. One of the four would take the lead and if its employees walked out, the other three would subsidize it for its loss of profits. ... p.39
.... Symptomatic of the universal support for the strikers was a declaration, ironically by army officers, meeting in a small Chicago hotel, that the work stoppage was justified and that the Army had been called out solely for strikebreaking, not for maintaining law and order. All officers in attendance, including a colonel, were court-martialed. An equally interesting sign of support for the strike was shown by Chicago’s newsboys, the majority of whom wore white ribbons and indelicately tossed those newspapers hostile to the strike, such as the Tribune, into the sewers. p.105
The name of the deputy who maliciously and with forethought killed a bystander near Pullman, for instance, was known to the authorities, but was never arrested or prosecuted. Police Chief John Brennan of Chicago claimed that in at least one instance deputies fired into a crowd where nothing was amiss. “Innocent men and women were killed by these shots,” he said. p.106
..... It had on its staff as well, thousands of simple workers who were seduced with a few extra pennies an hour to inform on their fellows. ..... A Pinkerton spokesman boasted to LaFollette that his detectives had burrowed so deeply into the union structure that one had risen to vice-president of a national union, fourteen had become presidents of local unions, and thirty-eight local secretaries. Another Pinkerton agent, Lawrence Barker, replying to a question by Senator LaFollette about how effective agents had been, said “very effective, especially in the local to which I belonged. ..... One time at Lansing-Fisher they were almost 100 percent organized. And finally it went down to where, as I said, there were only five officers left.” p.295
____________________________
As you can see when police or military people called out the obvious bias they were fired persecuted as well. There are way too many good excerpts from this book for me to post here, so you're simply going to have to read the whole book!
John Perkins "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" 2004
John Perkins tells the inside story about how he once helped rig economies around the world. He worked with behind the scenes consultants that arranged deals to rig economic system in favor of the most powerful corporations, often working through anonymous consultants, so if something went wrong those in power would have plausible deniability.
This is available free online, with a PDF of the original and another copy of a follow up addition, although that doesn't include much more inside information, since, after he wrote the first edition he no longer had insider status, but examined follow up information later.
https://resistir.info/livros/john_perkins_confessions_of_an_economic_hit_man.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0Rnw1f4pd448jGorjAAF9ghcnAod9ssRV5Sn1IDDPBlXysAJA5cHwLY44
https://archive.org/details/the-new-confessions-of-an-economic-hitman-by-john-perkins
Many of his claims are also supported by several other researchers, including Tom Burgis "The Looting Machine" and Susan Williams "White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa" although they focus mainly on Africa, but Perkins covers activities around the world.
He writes about how economic deals are made that often prop up tyrants, at the expense of the working class around the world, including Indonesia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Panama, Ecuador, Columbia, and other places around the world.
Bailout plans are routinely made for governments which force them into debt and requires that they cut services to their own people, which often leads to civil wars, since it drives people to desperation. When Democratic governments refuse to implement these deals they're often overthrown in coups.
Tom Burgis confirms how many of these economic methods to rig the economy are used in Africa and they ensure that funds are available to extract natural resources, but that the people get nothing in return, except for environmental destruction, which often means their previous sources of food or other necessities are often damaged or destroyed.
Susan Williams also confirms some of this and she reports on how the CIA used the Congo to provide uranium for nuclear weapons and prevented workers from defending their rights or having a safe working environment, while also ensuring they can't make more money then they need to survive and remain destitute.
She also investigates the assassination of of Patrice Lumumba and proves that it was arranged by the CIA, although they arranged allies to actually carry it out. This conclusion is supported by evidence from the Church Committee, despite their weak denial that the evidence is conclusive.
She also provides convincing evidence to show that Kwame Nkrumah was also overthrown in a coup, although he wasn't killed, at least not right away. He died five years after the coup that removed from power from cancer, but even though there's not conclusive evidence, some people suspect the CIA may have been responsible for his illness somehow.
Kwame Nkrumah, "Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism" 1965
Kwame Nkrumah was one of the first researchers to write about what he called Neo-Colonialism, and since then many others have followed suit. He describes how most former Colonial powers never freed themselves from their former colonizers, and how more sophisticated tactics are being used to claim these countries are "free" and "democratic" even though they don't represent the will of their own people.
This was written over 50 years ago, and is no longer protected by the copyright laws of his time; but changes in the laws have been made to extend them, which would never have happened under his rule; but this book is still available free, as it should be.
https://ia801005.us.archive.org/23/items/NeoColonialismTheLastStageOfImperialism1966/1966%20-%20Neo-Colonialism_%20The%20Last%20Stage%20of%20Imperialism%20-%20Kwame%20Nkrumah.pdf
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nkrumah/neo-colonialism/index.htm
Kwame Nkrumah described tactics that were used in the early sixties, and are still being used today. Like other supporters of various forms of Socialism or Communism, he claims that Capitalism or Neo-Colonialism will eventually cause it's own destruction, but that this may be a long term threat, not a short term one.
Supporters of Capitalism have claimed that the collapse of the Soviet Union and decline of Socialist countries around the world have proven these predictions wrong; however, their claims may be based on a selective look at the facts and there may be significant evidence to show that Kwame Nkrumah was right all along, but this evidence isn't discussed by traditional media.
There's no doubt that it's already been devastating for most of the third world, even if those living comfortably in the Western world decline to check more reliable sources for history or current events than traditional media. Those living in the Third World see first hand what the damage is, although their leaders try to blame other sources besides a corrupt economic system.
He rightfully claimed, at the time, that European countries were still trying to hold onto traditional Colonialism, citing many examples where they were still openly occupying many countries at the time, including Rhodesia and other African countries, but said this was less politically correct than Neo-Colonialism, which pretends to allow countries to rule themselves.
In Neo-Colonialism a puppet government is still allowed to take control, sometimes after coups overthrowing Democratic governments, like the Congo which was taken over by Mobutu Sese Seko with the support of the CIA after Patrice Lumumba was overthrown and assassinated.
Loans or "aid" money was often provided to help these countries, claiming it was charity, but they routinely came with strings attached. Countries were required to buy certain products at high prices, without providing much if any help to their own people, and tyrants loyal to western corporations, like Mobutu, routinely were allowed to get a share of the money, looting their own country. When corruption or other atrocities was exposed they were routinely blamed on the local leaders, like Mobutu, without acknowledging the fact that the resources of the country were being looted by foreign powers, the people were getting no benefits from the loans, yet they were being stuck with the debt.
As I said, many people living comfortably in the Western World may not see the evidence that this is leading to the inevitable destruction of this ideology, but these countries are being left destitute, far worse off than they were with tribal rule or local control that addressed the needs of their people, and they're on the verge of collapse. The longer real reform to help the people is put off, the worse it will be for the people in the Third World and more difficult it will be to repair the damage, including environmental damage.
This will eventually expand so that the environmental damage or other social problems expand to a growing portion of the world and eventually even destroying a growing number of people in developed countries.
Many people in our own abandoned inner cities already see the result of this, and the worse it gets the more difficult it will be for the establishment to ignore it.
This is part of a series of reviews I've made for books MSM doesn't advertise, because they expose the fraud of the rich.
https://zacherydtaylor.blogspot.com/2023/09/msm-doesnt-promote-books-exposing-wall.html
Here are some excerpts from this book, or you could just read it from scratch in the link above, most of Kwame Nkrumah's other books are also available free online.
Neo-colonialism, like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries. The temporary success of this policy can be seen in the ever widening gap between the richer and the poorer nations of the world. But the internal contradictions and conflicts of neo-colonialism make it certain that it cannot endure as a permanent world policy. How it should be brought to an end is a problem that should be studied, above all, by the developed nations of the world, because it is they who will feel the full impact of the ultimate failure. The longer it continues the more certain it is that its inevitable collapse will destroy the social system of which they have made it a foundation. ....
In the first place, the rulers of neo-colonial States derive their authority to govern, not from the will of the people, but from the support which they obtain from their neo-colonialist masters. They have therefore little interest in developing education, strengthening the bargaining power of their workers employed by expatriate firms, or indeed of taking any step which would challenge the colonial pattern of commerce and industry, which it is the object of neo-colonialism to preserve. ‘Aid’, therefore, to a neo-colonial State is merely a revolving credit, paid by the neo-colonial master, passing through the neo-colonial State and returning to the neo-colonial master in the form of increased profits. ....
Once multilateral aid begins the neo-colonialist masters are faced by the hostility of the vested interests in their own country. Their manufacturers naturally object to any attempt to raise the price of the raw materials which they obtain from the neo-colonialist territory in question, or to the establishment there of manufacturing industries which might compete directly or indirectly with their own exports to the territory. Even education is suspect as likely to produce a student movement and it is, of course, true that in many less developed countries the students have been in the vanguard of the fight against neo-colonialism.
In the end the situation arises that the only type of aid which the neo-colonialist masters consider as safe is ‘military aid’.
Once a neo-colonialist territory is brought to such a state of economic chaos and misery that revolt actually breaks out then, and only then, is there no limit to the generosity of the neo-colonial overlord, provided, of course, that the funds supplied are utilised exclusively for military purposes.
This book is therefore an attempt to examine neo-colonialism not only in its African context and its relation to African unity, but in world perspective. Neo-colonialism is by no means exclusively an African question. Long before it was practised on any large scale in Africa it was an established system in other parts of the world. Nowhere has it proved successful, either in raising living standards or in ultimately benefiting countries which have indulged in it. ....
AFRICA is a paradox which illustrates and highlights neo-colonialism. Her earth is rich, yet the products that come from above and below her soil continue to enrich, not Africans predominantly, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa’s impoverishment. ....
Generally speaking, in spite of the exploration costs, which are written off for tax purposes anyway and many times covered by eventual profits, mining has proved a very profitable venture for foreign capital investment in Africa. Its benefits for the Africans on the other hand, despite all the frothy talk to the contrary, have been negligible. ......
The overall value of the policy to France was that in return for guaranteed markets and prices for colonial primary products, such as coffee, cocoa, groundnuts, bananas and cotton, the African States had to import from France fixed quantities of certain goods, such as machinery, textiles, sugar and flour, which were then uncompetitive in price or surplus in Europe, and in addition the States were forced to limit their imports from countries outside the franc zone. While this scheme made nonsense of any plan for inter-African trade it was a period highly profitable to France. ......
If Portugal controls these colonies now it is only because of the military strength which she derives through her NATO alliance. Portugal is however not a member of NATO because of any military assistance which she could render the alliance but because this is a convenient way by which Portuguese territory can be made available to the forces of other members of the alliance. .....
John J. Mearsheimer and. Stephen M. Walt "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" 2007
This is part of of a series of book reviews of exceptional books that get almost no promotion from traditional media or are forgotten after a short period of time, even though they continue to be important indefinitely.
This is especially important with the increase of conflict, that they're now calling a War in the Occupied Territories, especially Gaza, although it obviously doesn't discuss the current conflict, but it does provide an important historical context which is almost completely absent from traditional media. Fortunately it's available free online:
https://bamdadi.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/the-israel-lobby-and-us-foreign-policy-bamdadi-dot-com.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0BNgbRIwPiTKYUdvfQCE83eNb9tHkgXnuyZTJZLekKPXjN8ZrBOttuIQo
One of the authors is Jewish, and he's among many Jewish critics of Zionism who provides a much more accurate history of the establishment of Israel and oppression of the Palestinians, but critics of Israel get almost no media coverage.
They write about how Israel has gained power since World War II and how they've had many wealthy supporters enabling them to gain political power, and occasionally how they use political connections, including AIPAC, to suppress legitimate criticism, and obtain favorable media from most of the traditional press, often getting critics of Israel fired or marginalized so they can't get their views across to the public.
The truth is that Israel has been stealing land from Palestinians for over seventy years, and oppressing them creating an apartheid state, and even though high profile Zionists support this and provide a distorted version of history, there are a lot of good Jewish people that have never wanted to oppress innocent people and steal their land.
The Jewish people were originally forced out of Israel almost two thousand years ago by the Romans. Since then they were persecuted by many people, including both Romans and Protestants, and at time, I'm sure Muslims, but to the best of my knowledge most Muslims were much more tolerant of Jews before World War II and the establishment of Israel.
And of course, they were victims of the Nazis which were their most extreme persecutors, but this wasn't the fault of the Palestinians living there at the time, and instead of fighting their persecutors they took land from Palestinians who were a much easier target, and used propaganda to demonize them and blame their own victims, like what was previously done to them.
When many Jews said "Never Again!" they meant never again to anyone, possibly because they recognized that we can't live in peace unless we learn how to get along.
Unfortunately more extreme Jews seem to have meant "next time we'll be the aggressors" which guarantees a permanent state of conflict and means the descendants of the victims have become the perpetrators.
They rightfully claim that this book isn't a conspiracy theory, since a conspiracy theory is by definition a theory about things done in secret, often without conclusive evidence, and they have credible evidence for their claims. However many past conspiracies have been exposed and proven to be true, so we shouldn't assume all conspiracy theories are false without checking facts. Also, even though they have credible evidence for their claims, they do report about how leading Israelis conduct their activities in secret, which is by definition a conspiracy, although they don't speculate about secret activities without credible evidence.
Like other good Jewish sources, they quickly debunk "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" which never made any sense, since if they had all the political power this irrational conspiracy theory attributes to them they would have stopped their own persecution long before the Holocaust and prevented it from escalating so the Holocaust would never have happened in the first place.
This is a much more credible history of Israel than traditional media provides and explains why MSM is so biased and unreliable on this issue.
As I said this is part of a series of reviews of good books that get little or no attention, for the rest see the following article:
https://zacherydtaylor.blogspot.com/2023/09/msm-doesnt-promote-books-exposing-wall.html
When ever possible I've been providing excerpts or free online copies, partly because the publishers are taking the vast majority of money from book sales and the writers who copyright is supposed to protect only get 10-12% of print books or 25% of Kindles.
Many authors have supported the Internet Archive when they make books available free, but recently I encountered one good author that felt he wasn't getting his fair share, with good reason.
When possible, if you get their free books and there's a way to fund the author, especially if it's a struggling one, to continue their work it may be a good idea to donate directly to them, if they have an online collection process, so the publisher don't get the majority of it. In this case, the authors seem fairly well off. In the long run we need a new way to finance research protecting the authors and consumers, more than the middlemen, who now have the most power.
Ilan Pappe "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" 2006 This is another exceptional book which tells the truth about how Israel has been stealing land and persecuting Palestinians since World War II. Like other books critical of Israel, or other powerful interests, it gets almost no promotion in traditional media, and they avoid mentioning it at all, because it's difficult if not impossible to refute his claims.
This is available free online.
https://yplus.ps/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Pappe-Ilan-The-Ethnic-Cleansing-of-Palestine.pdf
Ilan Pappe doesn't quite use the term genocide, but Ethnic Cleansing is a small step away from that. He reports on the forgotten or hidden history of how Israel has been stealing land and turning Palestinians into refugees for decades, including The Nakba, which Israel tries to deny or censor with their rewritten version of history.
Most people that are aware of The Nakba refer to it as the forced expulsion of about 700,000 Palestinians, and killing of a few thousand of them. A few months ago an Israeli tried to bring this subject up at a Jewish gathering and she was widely booed, and ostracized from the crowd which tried to ostracize her.
Some people consider the Nakba to be an ongoing oppression of the Palestinians that continues to this day, including Ilan Pappe according to the following article.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-nakba-destroyed-twelve-months-gone-on-75-years
In some cases, like John J. Mearsheimer and. Stephen M. Walt and other good researchers, he documents statements from supporters of Israel who admitted to some of their wrong doing at times, but these are buried by traditional media and Israel. For example he writes the following about Golda Meir:
"When Golda Meir, one of the senior Zionist leaders, visited Haifa a few days later, she at first found it hard to suppress a feeling of horror when she entered homes where cooked food still stood on the tables, children had left toys and books on the floor, and life appeared to have frozen in an instant. Meir had come to Palestine from the US, where her family had fled in the wake of pogroms in Russia, and the sights she witnessed that day reminded her of the worst stories her family had told her about the Russian brutality against Jews decades earlier. 20 But this apparently left no lasting mark on her or her associates’ determination to continue with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine."
He also writes the following about denial of the Nakba:
"The PLO, or any other group taking up the Palestinian cause, had to confront two manifestations of denial. The first was the denial exercised by the international peace brokers as they consistently sidelined, if not altogether eliminated, the Palestinian cause and concerns from any future peace arrangement. The second was the categorical refusal of the Israelis to acknowledge the Nakba and their absolute unwillingness to be held accountable, legally and morally, for the ethnic cleansing they committed in 1948."
"The Nakba and the refugee issues have been consistently excluded from the peace agenda, and to understand this we must assess how deep the level of denial of the crimes committed in 1948 remains today in Israel and associate it with the existence of a genuinely felt fear on the one hand, and a deeply rooted form of anti-Arab racism on the other, both heavily manipulated."
This is a much more credible version of history than mainstream media, and adds to the evidence to show we need to get our news from diverse sources so we hear both sides, which many of us were taught as kids. But we thought that was what we were getting, or at least I did, for decades I thought mainstream media was reasonably credible most of the time. But now the more I hear from alternative sources, the more I realize mainstream media was never as reliable as I thought, and the clearer it is that many of the conflicts I could never make sense of, like Israel and Vietnam, thirty years ago, didn't make sense because traditional media wasn't telling the whole story and often lied about what they did report.
Once I read alternative sources things make much more sense, but it's clear that neither our government or our media has ever supported peace or Democracy, instead they support control by the wealthy and propaganda to keep the masses in their place, often using divide and rule tactics to accomplish this.
Ilan Pappe also wrote "The Biggest Prison on Earth" and co-authored "Gaza in Crisis" with Noam Chomsky.
It's important to understand the true history of this conflict when considering the escalating of it in recent days. This was inevitible considering the damage done by Israel and denial of the truth, not that I support attacks against civilians from either side; but tehre's more mitigating circumstances for the Palestinians, and the media is covering up the atrocities from Israel.
For what it's worth, here's another shorter article on the subject from the International Committee of the Red Cross:
https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/assets/files/other/israel.pdf
[When] the Jew goes to the testament school, they teach them that the Old Testament says, “The Jews entered Bethlehem and killed everyone.” The Jews entered Jericho and killed everyone and the same in Jerusalem and Hebron. They believe that killing Palestinians is a holy thing, and they even don’t apply the ten commandments except to Jews. (FG, returnees, Gaza)
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