Download or read book Blackshirts and Reds written by Michael Parenti and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2020-09-09 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold and entertaining exploration of the epic struggles of yesterday and today. Blackshirts & Reds explores some of the big issues of our time: fascism, capitalism, communism, revolution, democracy, and ecology. These terms are often bandied about, but seldom explored in the original and exciting way that has become Michael Parenti's trademark. Parenti shows how "rational fascism" renders service to capitalism, how corporate power undermines democracy, and how revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege. He also maps out the external and internal forces that destroyed communism, and the disastrous impact of the "free-market" victory on eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He affirms the relevance of taboo ideologies like Marxism, demonstrating the importance of class analysis in understanding political realities and dealing with the ongoing collision between ecology and global corporatism. Written with lucid and compelling style, this book goes beyond truncated modes of thought, inviting us to entertain iconoclastic views, and to ask why things are as they are. "A penetrating and persuasive writer with an astonishing array of documentation to implement his attacks." —The Catholic Journalist "By portraying the struggle between fascism and Communism in this century as a single conflict, and not a series of discrete encounters, between the insatiable need for new capital on the one hand and the survival of a system under siege on the other, Parenti defines fascism as the weapon of capitalism, not simply an extreme form of it. Fascism is not an aberration, he points out, but a 'rational' and integral component of the system."—Stan Goff, author of Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century Michael Parenti, PhD Yale, is an internationally known author and lecturer. He is one of the nation's leading progressive political analysts. Author of over 275 published articles and twenty books, his writings are published in popular periodicals, scholarly journals, and his op-ed pieces have been in leading newspapers such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. His informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.

Download or read book The Perfect Sound written by Garrett Hongo and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poet’s audio obsession, from collecting his earliest vinyl to his quest for the ideal vacuum tubes. A captivating book that “ingeniously mixes personal memoir with cultural history and offers us an indispensable guide for the search of acoustic truth” (Yunte Huang, author of Charlie Chan). Garrett Hongo’s passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit tube amplifier in their modest tract home in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. But his adult quest begins in the CD-changer era, as he seeks out speakers and amps both powerful and refined enough to honor the top notes of the greatest opera sopranos. In recounting this search, he describes a journey of identity where meaning, fulfillment, and even liberation were often most available to him through music and its astonishingly varied delivery systems. Hongo writes about the sound of surf being his first music as a kid in Hawai‘i, about doo-wop and soul reaching out to him while growing up among Black and Asian classmates in L.A., about Rilke and Joni Mitchell as the twin poets of his adolescence, and about feeling the pulse of John Coltrane’s jazz and the rhythmic chords of Billy Joel’s piano from his car radio while driving the freeways as a young man trying to become a poet. Journeying further, he visits devoted collectors of decades-old audio gear as well as designers of the latest tube equipment, listens to sublime arias performed at La Scala, hears a ghostly lute at the grave of English Romantic poet John Keats in Rome, drinks in wisdom from blues musicians and a diversity of poetic elders while turning his ear toward the memory-rich strains of the music that has shaped him: Hawaiian steel guitar and canefield songs; Bach and the Band; Mingus, Puccini, and Duke Ellington. And in the decades-long process of perfecting his stereo setup, Hongo also discovers his own now-celebrated poetic voice.

Download or read book Against Empire written by Michael Parenti and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richly informed and written in an engaging style, Against Empire exposes the ruthless agenda and hidden costs of the U.S. empire today. Documenting the pretexts and lies used to justify violent intervention and maldevelopment abroad, Parenti shows how the conversion to a global economy is a victory of finance capital over democracy. As much of the world suffers unspeakable misery and the Third-Worldization of the United States accelerates, civil society is impoverished by policies that benefit rich and powerful transnational corporations and the national security state. Hard-won gains made by ordinary people are swept away. “A valuable rebuttal to the drumbeat...from the right.” —New York Times Book Review “Entertainingly written.” —Publishers Weekly “Parenti writes clear, smooth, often provocative prose, has a way of cutting to the heart of complex issues and knows how to tell a story." —Allan Johnson, Author of Human Arrangements Michael Parenti, PhD Yale, is an internationally known author and lecturer. He is one of the nation's leading progressive political analysts. He is the author of over 275 published articles and twenty books. His writings are published in popular periodicals, scholarly journals, and his op-ed pieces have been in leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. His informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.

Download or read book God and His Demons written by Michael Parenti and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-06-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A noted author and activist brings his critical acumen and rhetorical skills to bear in this polemic against the dark side of religion. Unlike some popular works by stridently outspoken atheists, this is not a blanket condemnation of all believers. Rather the author's focus is the heartless exploitation of faithful followers by those in power, as well as sectarian intolerance, the violence against heretics and nonbelievers, and the reactionary political and economic collusion that has often prevailed between the upper echelons of church and state. Parenti notes the deleterious effects of past theocracies and the threat to our freedoms posed by present-day fundamentalists and theocratic reactionaries. He discusses how socially conscious and egalitarian minded liberal religionists have often been isolated and marginalized by their more conservative (and better financed) coreligionists. Finally, he documents the growing strength of secular freethinkers who are doing battle against the intolerant theocratic usurpers in public life. Historically anchored yet sharply focused on the contemporary scene, this eloquent indictment of religion’s dangers will be welcomed by committed secular laypersons and progressive religionists alike.

Download or read book Contrary Notions written by Michael Parenti and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2007-08 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Internationally acclaimed, award-winning author Michael Parenti is one of America's most astute and engaging political analysts. Parenti's work has enlightened and enlivened readers for many years, covering a wide range of subjects. Here is a rich selection of his most lucid and penetrating writings on real history, political life, empire, wealth, class power, technology, culture, ideology, media, environment, sex, and ethnicity. Also included are a few choice selections drawn from his own life experiences and political awakening. Parenti goes where few political observers dare to tread. Time and again he takes the extra step beyond the parameters of permissible opinion, and time and again he succeeds in carrying the reader with him. The selections herein, that are reprinted from previously published works, have been revised and updated. Other offerings appear here for the very first time. "Radical in the true sense of the word, [Parenti] digs at the roots which...sustain our public consciousness."--Los Angeles Times Book Review "Prominent leftist public intellectual Parenti has built a reputation for himself as a trenchant, yet engaging and accessible, critic of capitalism, imperialism, and other forms of exploitation and violence and this diverse collection of his writings will not disappoint his fans (nor, probably, convince his detractors). Over the course of the collection he takes on the corporate media, intellectual repression in academia, the stolen presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 (not that he's a fan of Al Gore or John Kerry), right wing judicial activism, free-market orthodoxies and mythologies, racism, sexism, homophobia, postmodern attacks on Marxism, the distortions of dominant history, ill-informed demonizations of the Venezuelan political process, his own life, and many other topics."--Book News, Inc. "A prolific author, a charismatic speaker, and a regular guest on radio and television talk shows, Parenti communicates his message in an accessible, provocative, and historically informed style that is unrivaled among fellow progressive activists and thinkers."--Aurora Online Michael Parenti is a critically acclaimed author and an extraordinary public speaker. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University and has taught at a number of colleges and universities, in the United States and abroad. He is the author of twenty books, including Superpariotism , The Assassination of Julius Caesar, Inventing Reality, and Democracy for the Few.

Download or read book Inventing Reality written by Michael Parenti and published by . This book was released on 2022-03-09 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study looks at the role of the print and electronic media in defining "respectable" political discourse in the United States. From a critical perpective, Parenti looks at the economics and politics of "presenting" the news and argues that the media systematically distort the news. This manufactured reality deprives the public of necessary information for effective participation in government. This edition has been updated throughout, and there is coverage of the media's treatment of the US invasion of Panama, the war against Iraq and the collapse of communism. Other titles by Michael Parenti include "Democracy for the Few", "Power and the Powerless", "The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race" and "Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment".

Download or read book The Assassination of Julius Caesar written by Michael Parenti and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2004-03-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parenti presents a story of popular resistance against entrenched power and wealth. As he carefully weighs the evidence in the murder of Caesar, he sketches in the background to the crime with fascinating detail about Roman society.

Download or read book Dirty Truths written by Michael Parenti and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 1996-06 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political essays and poems. In Young People Are Different, he writes: "Hostage in their homes, / kept alive by the telephone / fully animated only when taking flight / in rough formation. / They rebel / so better to submit / to their totalitarian peerage."

Download or read book Essential Works of Lenin written by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four most significant works, also including "The Development of Capitalism in Russia," "Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism," and "The State and Revolution."

Download or read book Seeing Reds written by Charles H. McCormick and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2003-06-29 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During World War I, fear that a network of German spies was operating on American soil justified the rapid growth of federal intelligence agencies. When that threat proved illusory, these agencies, staffed heavily by corporate managers and anti-union private detectives, targeted antiwar and radical labor groups, particularly the Socialist party and the Industrial Workers of the World. Seeing Reds, based largely on case files from the Bureau of Investigation, Military Intelligence Division, and Office of Naval Intelligence, describes this formative period of federal domestic spying in the Pittsburgh region. McCormick traces the activities of L. M. Wendell, a Bureau of Investigation "special employee" who infiltrated the IWW's Pittsburgh recruiting branch and the inner circle of anarchist agitator and lawyer Jacob Margolis. Wendell and other Pittsbugh based agents spied on radical organizations from Erie, Pennsylvania, to Camp Lee, Virginia, intervened in the steel and coal strikes of 1919, and carried out the Palmer raids aimed at mass deportation of members of the Union of Russian Workers and the New Communist Party. McCormick's detailed history uses extensive research to add to our understanding of the security state, cold war ideology, labor and immigration history, and the rise of the authoritarian American Left, as well as the career paths of figures as diverse as J. Edgar Hoover and William Z. Foster.

Download or read book Full Spectrum Disorder written by Stan Goff and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2004-02-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goff’s career as an NCO in the Special Forces (Delta Force, US Rangers, Special Ops) took him from the invasions of Panama, Grenada and Haiti, to the training grounds of the Colombian Army (ostensibly in drug interdiction), to a semester as a West Point lecturer, to Mogadishu at the time of the operation immortalized in Black Hawk Down. Unlike the typical soldier’s memoir, Goff does not in machismo or heart-searching. He draws lessons from his past, lessons about foreign policy, lessons about the police-actions designed to create stable environments for US corporations in the Western Hemisphere, lessons about how the days of the American Imperium are numbered. The books covers such subjects as: the slow collapse in Armed Forces morale due to the ongoing reductions in health and pension benefits; the continual overestimation of the ability of technology to work in hostile terrain; the moral in the story of Odoacer, the Germanic mercenary who turned against his Roman employers and sacked Rome in AD 476; new American Empire ignorance of the lessons of history; the failure of "intelligence" as a result of racist stereotyping of countries unwilling to submit to US hegemony.

Download or read book Washington Bullets written by Vijay Prashad and published by Digital on Demand. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Washington Bullets is written in the best traditions of Marxist journalism and history-writing. It is a book of fluent and readable stories, full of detail about US imperialism, but never letting the minutiae obscure the larger political point. The book contains essays on acts of US imperialism, from the 1953 Iran coup to the 2019 ousting of Evo Morales in Bolivia. Despite all this, Washington Bullets is a book about possibilities, about hope, about genuine heroes. Washington Bullets is a book infused with this madness, the madness that dares to invent the future.

Download or read book Blacks Reds and Russians written by Joy Gleason Carew and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most compelling, yet little known stories of race relations in the twentieth century is the account of blacks who chose to leave the United States to be involved in the Soviet Experiment in the 1920s and 1930s. In Blacks, Reds, and Russians, Joy Gleason Carew offers insight into the political strategies that often underlie relationships between different peoples and countries. Interviews with the descendents of figures such as Paul Robeson and Oliver Golden offer rare personal insights into the story of a group of emigrants who, confronted by the daunting challenges of making a life for themselves in a racist United States, found unprecedented opportunities in communist Russia.

Download or read book The People s Republic of Walmart written by Leigh Phillips and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are multi-national corporations like Walmart and Amazon laying the groundwork for international socialism? For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us? An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.

Download or read book Face of Imperialism written by Michael Parenti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between US economic and military power is not often considered within mainstream commentary. Similarly the connection between US military interventions overseas and US domestic problems is rarely considered in any detail. In this brilliant new book, Michael Parenti reveals the true face of US imperialism. He documents how it promotes unjust policies across the globe including expropriation of natural resources, privatisation, debt burdens and suppression of democratic movements. He then demonstrates how this feeds into deteriorating living standards in the US itself, leading to increased poverty, decaying infrastructure and impending ecological disaster. The Face of Imperialism redefines empire and imperialism and connects the crisis in the US with its military escapades across the world.

Download or read book Speech Matters written by Seana Valentine Shiffrin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To understand one another as individuals and to fulfill the moral duties that require such understanding, we must communicate with each other. We must also maintain protected channels that render reliable communication possible, a demand that, Seana Shiffrin argues, yields a prohibition against lying and requires protection for free speech. This book makes a distinctive philosophical argument for the wrong of the lie and provides an original account of its difference from the wrong of deception. Drawing on legal as well as philosophical arguments, the book defends a series of notable claims—that you may not lie about everything to the "murderer at the door," that you have reasons to keep promises offered under duress, that lies are not protected by free speech, that police subvert their mission when they lie to suspects, and that scholars undermine their goals when they lie to research subjects. Many philosophers start to craft moral exceptions to demands for sincerity and fidelity when they confront wrongdoers, the pressures of non-ideal circumstances, or the achievement of morally substantial ends. But Shiffrin consistently resists this sort of exceptionalism, arguing that maintaining a strong basis for trust and reliable communication through practices of sincerity, fidelity, and respecting free speech is an essential aspect of ensuring the conditions for moral progress, including our rehabilitation of and moral reconciliation with wrongdoers.

Download or read book The Terrorism Trap written by Michael Parenti and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2002-02 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative and eloquent analysis of September 11 and it's aftermath.