Hi Ray. Sorry for the delayed reply.
This is a long post, as I greatly enjoy sharing influences on one's "view of the world", and would like to share some of my influences. Ray, I'd be interested if any of these books or authors are familiar to you.
Yes, I really enjoyed Stiglitz's "Globalization and its Discontents". I am familiar with the work of Lori Wallach (I'm a big Lori Wallach fan) and Arundhati Roy. Somewhat less familiar with John Cavanagh.
Books of this nature that have a home on my bookshelf in this area fall into 3 broad categories:
History
Some of my favorites include:
1 - "King Leopold's Ghost" by Adam Hochschild
2 - "The Assassination of Lumumba" by Ludo De Witte
3 - "The Graves are not yet Full - Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa" by Bill Berkeley
4 - Any of Ryszard Kapuscinski's books which are wonderful - for example "The Shadow of the Sun" and "The Soccer War"
5 - "Open Veins of Latin America", and any other book by Eduardo Galeano
6 - "Our Own Backyard - The Unites States in Central America, 1977-1992", by William M. LeoGrande
7 - "A Lexicon of Terror - Argentina and the Legacies of Torture", by Marguerite Feitlowitz
8 - "A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers", by Lawrence Weschler
9 - "Guatemala - Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny", by Jean-Marie Simon
10 - "Bitter Fruit - The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala", by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer ; also by Kinzer, "All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror" - a book I have on my shelf, have not read, but have heard very good things about
11 - "Coffee and Power - Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America", by Jeffery M. Paige
12 - "The United States in Honduras, 1980-1981 - An Ambassador's Memoir", by Jack R. Binns
13 - Robert Fisk's extraordinary "Pity the Nation - The Abduction of Lebanon"
14 - Any of Noam Chomsky's books, beginning with "Manufacturing Consent"
15 - Ahmed Rashid's "Taliban"
16 - "No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam", by Geneive Abdo
17 - "Warriars of the Prophet - the Struggle for Islam", by Mark Huband
18 - "The Great Game - the Struggle for Empire in Central Asia", by Peter Hopkirk
19 - "Failed Crusade - America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia", by Stephen F. Cohen
20 - "Sales of the Century - Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism", by Chrystia Freeland
21 - "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy - Lord and Peasant and the Making of the Modern World", a classic by Barrington Moore, Jr.
Conclusion: Something's pretty systematically f*cked in our world. And it's planned ... and its systemic. The same patterns repeat themselves again and again, often involving the exact same, or very similar players, and for sure involving a consistency of motivation - i.e "power".
It is in this light that more conventional history and diplomatic analysis of the variety of Zibignew Brezinski, Samuel Huntington, Henry Kissinger, A.J.P. Taylor, or even Middle East historian Bernard Lewis can be placed in their proper context IMO. Soviet historian Richard Pipes to my mind is more "dis-history" (along the lines of "disinformation" that "history" IMO. ;)
"Deep Politics"
A term coined by ex-Canadian diplomat and current Professor of English at University of California, Berkley, Peter Dale Scott. OK, the patterns of history reveal consistent and systemic f*ckupedness, what's up with that? In whose "interests" is this chaos and suffering being orchestrated? Some of my favorite books:
1 - "Tragedy and Hope: The History of the World in Our Time", by Carroll Quigley. A book without peer. If I could recommend one book in this post, this would be it.
2 - "The Shadows of Power: The Council of Foreign Relations and the American Decline", by James Perloff
3 - Any of Antony C. Sutton's books, especially "America's Secret Establishment: And Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones".
4 - C. Wright Mill's pioneering "The Power Elite"
5 - "In God's Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I", by David Yallop
6 - "Rule by Secrecy" by Jim Marrs
7 - "Deep Politics and the Death of JFK", by Peter Dale Scott
8 - "Barry and the Boys' - the CIA, the Mob, and America's Secret History", by Daniel Hopsicker - a classic!
9 - "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade", by Alfred W. McCoy - an earlier classic. Suppressed by the CIA
10 - "Whiteout - The CIA, Drugs, and The Press", from CounterPunch proprietors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
11 - "The Immaculate Deception: The Bush Crime Family Exposed", by Russell S. Bowen
12 - "The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: the unreported stores", by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
13 - "Killing Hope", by William Blum
14 - "Taking the Risk out of Democracy - Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty", by Alex Carey
15 - "Into the Buzzsaw - Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press", edited by Kristina Borjesson
16 - "The Creature from Jekyll Island - A Second Look at the Federal Reserve", a classic by G. Edward Griffin
Society and Globalization
Yikes, this is really bad! So what can an individual citizen do to become more informed and take responsibility for making the world a better place?
1 - "The Zinn Reader - Writings on Disobedience and Democracy", by Howard Zinn
2 - "The Zapatista Reader" - edited by Tom Hayden
3 - "When Corporations Rule the World" by David C. Korten
4 - "One World Ready or Not - the Manic Logic of Global Capitalism", by William Greider
5 - "No Logo - Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies", by Naomi Klein
6 - "Globalization and its Discontents", by Joseph Stigliz
7 - "The Globalization of Poverty - Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms", by Michel Chossudovsky
8 - "The Future in the Balance - Essays on Globalization and Resistance", by Walden Bello
9 - "Upside Down - A Primer on the Looking-Glass World", by Eduardo Galeano
Miscellaneous
Finally, the impact of post-modern thought in decontructing textual narratives should not be underestimated IMO. To my understanding, this influence did not really hit North American campuses until the early 1990's. Some of my favorite influences include: Edward Said, Frederic Jameson, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derida.
I especially enjoyed Frederic Jameson's "The Political Unconsciousness - Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act". |
