Current Book Club Selection:

"ARMED MADHOUSE " the new book by Greg Palast. Palast is a respected journalist (BBC, The Guardian, Harper's) and is also author of the book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy".
Go to the Armed Madhouse Website

LAWLESS WORLD
(America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules--From FDR's Atlantic Charter to George W. Bush's Illegal War) ---- By Philippe Sands
Sands, a British international lawyer and law professor, delivers a cool, reasoned lashing to the Bush administration for leading—and to Tony Blair for colluding with—a "full-scale assault" on the international rule of law, in this richly detailed survey of modern international legal disputes. Since FDR and Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter after WWII, putting in place a rules-based system limiting the use of force, protecting human rights and promoting fair economic liberalization, the world has seen a transformation of international relations, Sands explains, most dramatically marked by Bush's decision to "go it alone." Tracking the current administration's "efforts to rewrite international law into irrelevance," Sands covers the Pinochet case, the creation of the International Criminal Court, U.S. abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the U.S.'s selectively multilateralist policy vis-à-vis global free trade, and the "disgraces" of Guantánamo, Iraq and Abu Ghraib. The author also presents a series of dense but lucidly written legal stories to illustrate how the Bush administration's unilateralism has had egregious consequences for 21st-century efforts to make the world safer, cleaner and more just. (ISBN: 0670034525 Viking Adult)

God's Politics : Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It ----By Jim Wallis
Secular liberals and religious conservatives will find things to both comfort and alarm them in Jim Wallis's God's Politics. That combination is actually reason enough to recommend the book in a time when the national political and theological discourse is dominated by blanket descriptions and shortsightedness. But Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine, offers more than just a book that's hard to categorize. What Wallis sees as the true mission of Christianity--righting social ills, working for peace--is in tune with the values of liberals who so often run screaming from the idea of religion. Meanwhile, in his estimation, religious vocabulary is co-opted by conservatives who use it to polarize. Wallis proposes a new sort of politics, the name of which serves as the title of the book, wherein these disparities are reconciled and progressive causes are paired with spiritual guidance for the betterment of society. Wallis is at his most compelling when he puts this theory into action himself, letting his own beliefs guide him through stinging criticisms of the war in Iraq. In his view, George W. Bush's flaw lies in the assumption that the United States was an unprecedented force of goodness in a fight against enemies characterized as "evil." Indeed, although both the right and left are criticized here, the idea is that the liberals, if they would get religion, are the more redeemable lot. Wallis's line between religion and public policy may be drawn a little differently than most liberals might feel comfortable with, and while he pays some lip service to other faiths most of his prescription for America seems to come from the Bible. Still, for a party having just lost a presidential election where "moral issues" are said to have factored heavily, God's Politics is a sermon worth listening to.
(ISBN: 0060558288 Harper San Francisco)

ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT AGAINST GEORGE W. BUSH by The Center for Constitutional Rights
In ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT AGAINST GEORGE W. BUSH, the experts at one of our nation's leading institutions of constitutional scholarship, the Center for Constitutional Rights, set out the legal arguments for impeachment in a clear, concise, and objective discussion. In four separate articles of impeachment detailing four separate charges –warrantless surveillance, misleading Congress on the reasons for the Iraq war, violating laws against torture, and subverting the Constitution’s separation of powers – it is, say the CCR attorneys, a case of black letter law, with abundant evidence.

ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT AGAINST GEORGE W. BUSH details that evidence, the relevant laws and the legal precedents. It also explains what the Constitution says about impeachment – an informative discussion further illuminated by supplemental material that includes a history of impeachment, explanation of its procedures, and the previous articles of impeachment brought against Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.
ISBN 1-933633-08-5 Melville House Publishing (www.mhpbooks.com)

Confessions Of An Economic Hitman ---- By John Perkins
Perkins spent the 1970s working as an economic planner for an international consulting firm, a job that took him to exotic locales like Indonesia and Panama, helping wealthy corporations exploit developing nations as, he claims, a not entirely unwitting front for the National Security Agency. He says he was trained early in his career by a glamorous older woman as one of many "economic hit men" advancing the cause of corporate hegemony. He also says he has wanted to tell his story for the last two decades, but his shadowy masters have either bought him off or threatened him until now. The story as presented is implausible to say the least, offering so few details that Perkins often seems paranoid, and the simplistic political analysis doesn’t enhance his credibility. Despite the claim that his work left him wracked with guilt, the artless prose is emotionally flat and generally comes across as a personal crisis of conscience blown up to monstrous proportions, casting Perkins as a victim not only of his own neuroses over class and money but of dark forces beyond his control. His claim to have assisted the House of Saud in strengthening its ties to American power brokers may be timely enough to attract some attention, but the yarn he spins is ultimately unconvincing, except perhaps to conspiracy buffs. (ISBN: 0452287081 Plume)

Other Recommended Books to Read:

One Nation Uninsured/Why the U.S. has no National Health Insurance
by Jill Quadagno, published by Oxford University Press.

Insuring National Health Care/The Canadian Experience
by Malcolm G. Taylor, published by the University of North Carolina Press.

Dead On Arrival/ The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth-Century America
by Colin Gordon, published by Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford.

Wasting Away: The Undermining of Canadian Health Care (2nd Edition)
by Pat Armstrong & Hugh Armstrong, published by Oxford University Press.

"WAR MADE EASY - How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death"
--- Norman Soloman (Executive Director, Institute for Public Accuracy)

"If you want to help prevent another war (Iran? Syria?), read WAR MADE EASY now. This is a stop-the-presses book filled with mind-blowing facts about Washington's warmongers who keep the Pentagon budget rising. It would be funny if people wern't dying. WAR MADE EASY exposes the grisly game and offers the information we need to stop it." --- Jim Hightower

"If you don't have fun reading Norman Soloman's WAR MADE EASY, you don't know how to have a good time. This exceptional book will drive our bonkers leaders and their mouthpieces in the US press crazier than they are already. Read one passage each night to your children to protect them from the brain-snatchers and dummy-fication zombies of America's news media of the living dead." --- Greg Palast

"From Vietnam to Iraq (and every war in between), read and learn about the exagerations, outright lies, and good-old-fashioned propaganda used to get average Americans to accept their sons & daughters coming home in plastic body bags, while wrongly believing they died "protecting" the USA." -- V

"The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic"
--- Chalmers Johnson ( A former Republican, and a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine. )

This book tells it all: It shows how we have moved from 1898's Spanish -American War and the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine and how this dubious "sinking" was hyped by our media(even back then) to the current period with all the phony pretexts for wars and secret invasions and covert actions.   Find out why we are manipulated each and every time a President decides to demonize an "enemy"  and how our democratic republic may have already been lost.  Find out why we are losing our middle class safety net, in favor of sending our taxes to the war machine and the military-industrial complex of which Eisenhower warned us against in his farewell address.   Will America be fooled again: Syria, North Korea, etc.??????My guess is yes and after reading this book you will see why the Masters of War are able to keep the pretense going.   Time to get the facts, America.  Review by Ron.

Thin Ice : Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World's Highest Mountains
By Mark Bowen, Henry Holt, 2005