Rhondda Records' Top Recommended Books Page
In Robert Graves' autobiography "Good-Bye to All That"
he mentions that, during the war, UK pacifists urged
Siegfried Sassoon to write "something red-hot in
the style of Barbusse's "Under Fire" but he
couldn't do it."
But you CAN READ 'Under Fire'
Barbusse's novel, now!
It's just a few quid.
Michael Hudson, economist:
''I suspect that a new world economic system
is emerging. If it succeeds, the last century –
since the end of World War I and the mess it
left – will seem like a long detour of history,
now returning to what seemed to be... the
basic social ideals of classical economics
– a market free from rent-seeking
landlords, monopolies and
predatory finance.''
The last World War – The
U.S. to move and lose
https://glazev.ru/articles/153-geopolitika/
57452-t-e-last-orld-ar-t-e-u-s-to-move
-and-lose
isn't even a book, it's a
(downloadable) article.
Probably your best introduction
to today's issue... of life
and extinction.
The Cause of Labour IS
the Hope of the World
choices by Susan Rosenthal
Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can
Regain Power and Transform America
by Joe Burns (2011).
Workers’ only real bargaining power is their ability
to stop production and, to do this, workers must
fight as a class. By abandoning these tactics,
unions have lost their ability to defend the
working class. Explains what it will take
to revive the strike and regain lost ground.
Professional Poison: How Professionals
Sabotage Social Movements --- and
Why Workers Should Lead Our Fight
by Susan Rosenthal (2009).
Middle-class professionals dominate
most unions and social movements.
How can working people organize
to challenge them?
Autoworkers Under the Gun: A Shop-Floor
View of the End of the American Dream
by Gregg Shotwell (2011).
Autoworker Gregg Shotwell shows how General
Motors and its junior partner, the United Auto
Workers (UAW) bureaucracy, stole workers’
pensions, slashed wages and shed jobs to
help expand GM's global empire.
The Civil Wars in US Labor
by Steve Early (2011).
Chronicles the corruption, back-stabbing, power-
grabbing, and opportunistic alliances that have
characterized recent turf wars among American
unions. Why did a generation of activists fail to
democratize the unions, and what must we do
differently to avoid repeating that failure?
Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized
Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice
by Bill Fletcher, Jr. & Fernando Gapasin (2008)
Argues that unions must undergo a fundamental
transformation to champion the interests of the
entire working class. Is this possible?
The Lessons of Chile: 1970-1973
by Susan Rosenthal (2010).
Chile showed that a challenge to class inequality
in the medical system is a challenge to the
capitalist system as a whole. Consequently,
any serious movement for reform must
prepare to fight a class war.
Hans Morgenthau's top ten books (in 1976):
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition;
Aristotle’s Politics;
EH Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis;
The Federalist Papers;
Plato’s Symposium;
Pascal’s Pensees;
CN Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture;
Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man;
The Political Writings of Max Weber;
The Collected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche.
__________________________________________________________
'Confessions Of a Hitman' ---
is the Best Book EVER !!!
(and I BET you haven't read it!!!)
The Evil Empire Has The World In A Death Grip
by Paul Craig Roberts
In my archives there is a column or two that
introduces the reader to John Perkins’ important
book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man [EHM].
An EHM is an operative who sells the leadership
of a developing country on an economic plan or
massive development project. He convinces a
country’s government that borrowing large sums
of money from US financial institutions in order
to finance the project, will raise the country’s
living standards. The borrower is assured that
the project will raise Gross Domestic Product
and tax revenues and that these increases
will allow the loan to be repaid.
However, the plan is designed to over-estimate
the benefits so that the indebted country can't
pay the principal & interest. As Perkins’ puts it,
plans are based on “distorted financial analyses,
inflated projections, and rigged accounting,”
and if the deception doesn’t work, “threats
and bribes” are used to close the deal.
The next step in the deception is the appearance
of the International Monetary Fund. The IMF tells
the indebted country that the IMF will save its
credit rating by lending the money with which
to repay the countrhy’s creditors. The IMF loan
is not a form of aid. It merely replaces the
country’s indebtedness to banks, with
indebtedness to the IMF.
To repay the IMF, the country has to accept an
austerity plan and agree to sell national assets
to private investors. Austerity means cuts in
social pensions, social services, employment
and wages, and the budget savings are used to
repay the IMF. Privatization means selling oil,
mineral and public infrastructure in order to
repay the IMF. The deal usually imposes an
agreement to vote with the US in the UN
and to accept US military bases.
Occasionally a country’s leader refuses the plan
or the austerity and privatization. If bribes don’t
work, the US sends in the jackels — assassins
who remove the obstacle to the looting process.
Perkins’ book caused a sensation. It showed that the
United States’ attitude of helpfulness toward poorer
countries was only a pretext for schemes to loot the
countries. Perkins’ book sold more than a million
copies and stayed on the New York Times best-
seller list for 73 weeks.
Now the book has been reissued with the addition
of 14 new chapters, & a 30-page listing of Hit Man
activity during the years 2004-2015.
http://www.amazon.com/New-Confessions-Economic-
Hit-Man/dp/1626566747/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF
8&qid=1456080628&sr=1-1&keywords=J...
Perkins shows that despite his revelations, the situation
is worse than ever and has spread into the West itself.
The populations of Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain,
Italy, and the United States itself, are now being
looted by Hit Man activity.
Perkins’ book shows that the US is “exceptional” only in
the unbridled violence it applies to others who get in its
way. One of the new chapters tells the story of France-
Albert Rene, president of Seychelles, who threatened to
reveal the illegal and inhumane eviction of the residents of
Diego Garcia by Britain and Washington so that the island
could be converted into an air base from which Washington
could bomb noncompliant countries in the Middle East,
Asia, and Africa. Washington sent in a team of jackels to
murder the president of Seychelles, but the assassins were
foiled. All but one were captured, tried and sentenced to
execution or prison, but a multi-million dollar bribe to Rene
freed them. Rene got the message and became compliant.
In the original print of his book, Perkins tells the stories
of how jackals arranged airplane crashes to get rid of
Panama’s non-compliant president, Omar Torrijos, and
Ecuador’s non-compliant president, Jaime Roldos. When
Rafael Correa became president of Ecuador, he refused to
pay some of the illigitimate debts that had been piled on
Ecuador, closed the United States’ largest military base in
Latin America, forced the renegotiation of exploitative oil
contracts, ordered the central bank to use funds deposited
in US banks for domestic projects, and consistently
opposed Washington’s hegemonic control over Latin
America.
Correa had marked himself for overthrow or assassination.
However, Washington had just overthrown, in a military
coup, the democratically elected Honduran president,
Manuel Zelaya, whose policies favored the people of
Honduras over those of foreign interests. Concerned
that 2 military coups in succession against reformist
presidents would be noticed, to get rid of Correa the
CIA turned to the Ecuadoran police. Led by a graduate
of Washington’s School of the Americas, the police
moved to overthrow Correa --- but were overpowered
by the Ecuadoran military. However, Correa got
the message.
He reversed his policies toward American oil companies
and announced that he would auction off huge blocks of
Eucador’s rain forests to the oil companies. He closed
down, Fundacion Pachamama, an organization with
which a reformed Perkins was associated that worked
to preserve Ecuador’s rain forests and its indigenous
populations.
Western banks backed up by the World Bank are even
worse looters than the oil and timber companies. Perkins
writes: “Over the past three decades, sixty of the world’s
poorest countries have paid $550 billion in principal and
interest on loans of $540 billion --- yet they still owe a
whopping $523 billion on those same loans. The cost of
servicing that debt is more than these countries spend on
health or education and is twenty times the amount they
receive annually in foreign aid. In addition, World Bank
projects have brought untold suffering to some of the
planet’s poorest people. In the past ten years alone,
such projects have forced an estimated 3.4 million
people out of their homes; the governments in
these countries have beaten, tortured, and
killed opporents of World Bank projects.”
Perkins describes how Boeing plundered Washington state
taxpayers. Using lobbyists, bribes, and blackmail threats
to move production facilities to another state, Boeing
succeeded in having the Washington state legislature give
the corporation a tax break that diverted $8.7 billion into
Boeings’ coffers from health care, education and other
social services. The massive subsidies legislated for
the benefit of corporations are another form of rent
extraction and Hit Man activity.
Perkins has a guilty conscience and still suffers from
his role as a Hit Man for the evil empire, which has now
turned to the plunder of American citizens. He has done
everything he can to make amends, but he reports that
the system of exploitation has multiplied many times
and is now so commonplace that it no longer has to
be hidden. Perkins writes:
“A major change is that this EHM system, today,
is also at work in the United States and other
economically developed countries. It is every-
where. And there are many more variations
on each of these tools. There are hundreds of
thousands more EHMs spread around the world.
They have created a truly global empire.
They are working in the open as well as in
the shadows. This system has become so
widely and deeply entrenched that it is the
normal way of doing business and there-
fore, is not alarming to most people.”
People have been so badly plundered by jobs offshoring
and indebtedness that consumer demand cannot support
profits. Consequently, capitalism has turned to exploiting
the West itself. Faced with rising resistance, the EHM
system has armed itself with “the PATRIOT Act, the
militarization of police forces, a vast array of new
surveillance technologies, the infiltration & sabotage
of the Occupy movement, & the dramatic expansion
of privatized prisons.” The democratic process has been
subverted by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling
and other court decisions, by corporate-funded political
action committees, and by organizations such as the
American Legislative Exchange Council --- financed
by the One Percent.
Cadres of lawyers, lobbyists, and strategists are hired to
legalize corruption, and presstitutes work overtime to
convince gullible Americans that elections are real
and represent the workings of democracy.
In a February 19, 2016 article in OpEdNews, Matt Peppe
reports that the American colony of Puerto Rico is being
driven into the ground in order to satisfy foreign creditors.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Puerto-Ricans-Suffer-
as-Cr-by-Matt-Peppe-160219-676.html
The airport has been privatized, and the main highways
have been privatized --- in a 40-year lease owned by a
consortium formed by a Goldman Sachs infrastructure
investment fund. Puerto Ricans now pay private
corporations for the use of infrastructure that tax
dollars built. Recently, Puerto Rico’s sales tax was
raised by 64% to 11.5%. A sales tax increase is
equivalent to a rise in inflation, and results in
a decline in real incomes.
Today the only difference between capitalism and
gangsterism, is that capitalism has succeeded in
legalizing its gangsterism and, thus, can strike
a harder bargain, than can the Mafia.
Perkins shows that the evil empire has
the world in the grip of a “death economy.”
He concludes that “we need a revolution” in order
“to bury the death economy & birth the life economy.”
Don’t look to politicians, neoliberal economists,
and presstitutes, for any help.
Dear Friends,
Many of you will be interested in a very special book
I've taken great pleasure in reviewing for Tintean,
the journal of the Australian Irish Heritage network:
A Practical Guide to Irish Spirituality, by Lora O’Brien
http://tintean.org.au/2016/04/06/a-
virtual-reality-tour-of-ancient-ireland/
With fond regards,
Maireid
--
Links:
Music:
Maireid.com
Multimedia Production:
LyrebirdMedia.com
Arts Action:
GlobalArtsCollective.org
Music Journal:
AlternateMusicPress.com
YouTube Lyrebird Channel:
http://www.youtube.com/lyrebirdchannel
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/maireid.sullivan
The invasion of Iraq was a crime and casts a blood slur on
the UK Labour party --- until it recognises its responsibility.
Just published by Clarity Press is the
heavily documented Genocide in Iraq
by Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Tarik Al-Ani.
This contains all the proof the Labour party
needs, to press for Blair and Bush's trials
--- and cleanse its soul.
Every aspect of the operation to
manipulate and dumb down people
in the West has been exposed,
but if you combine that with:
"The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America"
by Charlotte Iserbyt,
"Propaganda"
by Edward Bernays,
and the global hypnosis effect of television
on the World population, as explained by
Jerry Minder in
"Four arguments for the elimination of TV"...
the scope of it will be clear for everybody
on the planet.
If you believe that there is a free press,
I invite you to read the aforementioned
books, and you will never say that again.
The recent death, at 76, of former US middleweight boxing
contender, Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, reminds the world of
the courageous and tenacious struggle this black man
waged to overturn his wrongful conviction and
imprisonment for murder in 1966.
It reminds us also, that - in the US - despite a
black president having been "in power" for
two terms, nothing changed.
Though whites and blacks commit drugs offenses
at a comparable rate, African Americans are 37%
of the people arrested for drugs offenses, while
making up 13% of the population;
The police stop and search blacks and Latinos
far more frequently than whites;
Once arrested, blacks are far more likely to be held
in prison awaiting trial than their white counterparts.
In some parts of New York, blacks are 33% more
likely to be detained awaiting felony trials
than whites;
A 2009 report by the Sentencing Project found
that two-thirds of the people in the US with life
sentences are non-white. In New York, it is 83%.
Dr RUBIN CARTER's TOP TEN BOOKS (plus one!)
In Search of the Miraculous,
by P.D. Ouspensky
What Has Happened to Mankind,
by J. Krishnamurti
Man's Search For Meaning,
by Victor Frankl
The Old and the New Testament
The Bhagavad Gita
Autobiography of Malcolm X,
with Alex Haley
Manchild in the Promised Land,
by Claude Brown
Black Boy,
by Richard Wright
Native Son,
by Richard Wright
Makes Me Wanna Holler,
by Nathan McCall
and, finally, his own book:
Eye of the Hurricane:
My Path From Darkness to Freedom,
by Dr. Rubin Carter with Ken Klonsky,
foreword by Nelson Mandela, 2011.
Rubin considers 'Eye of the Hurricane'
to be his last will and testament.
Please visit the website here:
rubinthehurricanecarter.com
"You see, there are two flames burning in the
human heart all the time. The flame of anger
against injustice, and the flame of hope that
you can build a better world. And my job...
is going round and fanning both flames...
because people need encouragement.
Everyone needs encouragement,
if you're going to do the best you can."
TONY BENN's TOP TEN BOOKS
1) The Bible
2) Das Kapital by Karl Marx
3) The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
4) Common Sense by Tom Paine
5) Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
6) Religion & the Rise of Capitalism by RH Tawney
7) In Place of Fear by Nye Bevan
8) The Making of the English Working Class by E P Thompson
9) Parliamentary Socialism by Ralph Miliband
10) The World Turned upside Down by Christopher Hill
TO GO TO EITHER TONY's BLOG SITE
OR THE "BENNITES" UNOFFICIAL SITE
PLEASE PRESS THE LINK(S) BELOW:
TONY's BLOG SITE
THE BENNITES
BRUCE KENT's TOP TEN BOOKS
Top Ten Non Fiction Books:
1 The Periodic table
by Primo Levi
2 The Withered Garland
by Peter Johnson (Wartime Bomber Pilot)
3 The Psalms (especially Psalm 8)
The Bible
4 The Long Loneliness
by Dorothy Day (Catholic Worker founder)
5 In Solitary Witness
by Gordon Zahn (the Franz Jagerstatter story)
6 The Fourfold Vision
by Dr. Sherwood Taylor (Four roads to knowledge)
7 Praise of Folly
by Desiderus Erasmus
8 The United Nations Charter (especially the Preface)
9 Edmund Campion S.J.(Jesuit priest and martyr)
by Evelyn Waugh
10 Double Harness
by Robin Tanner (Quaker educationalist and artist)
-----------------------------------
Top 10 Fiction Books
1 The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
2 A Suitable Boy
by Vikran Seth
3 South Riding
by Winifred Holtby
4 Black Beauty
by Anna Sewell
5 A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens
6 Wind in the Willows
by Kenneth Grahame
7 The Towers of Trebizond
by Rose Macauley
8 Put Out More Flags
by Evelyn Waugh
9 The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
10 Sarum
by Edward Rutherford
William Wall, Poet
(a mighty man!)
Email kirwall@eircom.net www.williamwall.eu
WILLIAM WALL's TOP TWENTY (PLUS) BOOKS !
(in no particular order)
King Lear
by Shakespeare
The Trial and Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
The Inferno
by Dante
Ulysses
by James Joyce
Waiting for Godot
by Samuel Beckett
The Waste Land
by TS Eliot
At Swim Two Birds and The Third Policeman
by Flann O'Brien
The Barracks and That They May Face the Rising Sun
by John McGahern
Pedro Paramo
by Juan Rulfo
100 years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Communist Manifesto
by Marx and Engels
Empire
by M Hardt and A Negri
Collected Fiction
by Jorge Luis Borges
The Arcades Project
by Walter Benjamin
Famine
by Liam O'Flaherty
The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
Austerlitz
by WG Sebald
The Tin Drum
by Gunther Grass
To The Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
How Green Was My Valley
by Richard Llewellyn
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz' Top Ten Books
Fiction top ten:
1. American Woman
by Susan Choi
2. A Person of Interest
by Susan Choi
3. Disgrace
by J.M. Coetzee
4. Tree of Smoke
by Denis Johnson
5. Almanac of the Dead
by Leslie Marmon Silko
6. The Knight, Death, and the Devil
by Ella Leffland
7. Blonde
by Joyce Carol Oates
8. Cloudsplitter
by Russell Banks
9. Four Hands: A Novel
by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
10. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
by Michael Ondaatje
Non-fiction top ten:
1. The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
2. About My Life and the Kept Woman: A Memoir
by John Rechy
3. One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race
by Scott Malcomson
4. Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View
by Howard Adams
5. The First Way of War: American War Making
on the Frontier, 1607-1814
by John Grenier
6. Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
7. Guevara, Also Known As Che
by Paco Ignacio Taiblo II
8. Get Up: A 12 Step Guide to Recovery
for Misfits, Freaks, and Weirdos
by Bucky Sinister
9. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who
Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War and Seeded Civil Rights
by David S. Reynolds
10. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier
in 20th Century America
by Richard Slotkin
John Stanton has, for the last 17 months,
written on the US Army's Human Terrain System.
Nearly 100 sources, and 47 articles...
John's articles led to changes in the program.
JOHN STANTON's TOP TEN BOOKS:
1. 2666 by Roberto Bolano
2. Imperial by William Vollman
3. Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman
4. Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
5. The Fall by Albert Camus
6. One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse
7. The Island of Crimea by Vasily Aksyonov
8. Death on the Installment Plan by L.F. Celine
9. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by F. Nietzsche
10. A Short History of Decay by E.M. Cioran
10(b)The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu
CAGE INNOYE’S TOP TEN BOOKS
(WHICH INFLUENCED HIS DEVELOPMENT)
Andre Breton, Surrealist Manifesto, not a book,
but a statement, first piece ever read that I
really liked. After taking science and math
classes in college this was a WMD.
Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, it blew my mind
the first time I read it, I have since critiqued
the framework but still it has truths within. It
caused me to turn toward the study of economics.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral mind, also blew my
mind and still does, if you are a right brain
person this book is intriguing.
Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels, powerful ideas,
explained well, very influential upon me.
Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson, here is a
worldview that seems quite obvious today
Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci, a very
interesting analysis of politics, culture and power
Buddhist Logic, Volume 1, Theodor Stcherbatsky,
very informative, I learned much from it about
Eastern philosophy, but also the general issues
of all philosophy which were mirrored in India.
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, the concept
of myth was revolutionary to me and I learned
that personal myth supersedes all, and
incorporates all science and theory as just
a chapter within it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit,
a very fascinating thesis that unites ‘everything’
into one system, intellectually impressive.
Understanding the I Ching, Hellmut and Richard
Wilhelm, the world’s first philosophy piece and
it still holds up, many profound perceptions.
JAMES COCKCROFT's TOP BOOKS
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie
Emma Goldman’s Autobiography
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Chekhov, Collected Short Stories
Walt Whitman, Collected Poems
Malcolm X Speaks
Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man
The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels
The Speeches of Fidel Castro
Che Guevara’s Essay on Man and Socialism
(in almost any collection of his writings)
STAN GOFF's TOP TEN BOOKS
"After Christendom,"
by Stanley Hauerwas
"Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale,"
by Maria Mies
"The Rivers North of the Future,"
by Ivan Illich, with David Cayley
"Bonds of Love,"
by Jessica Benjamin
"The Politics of Jesus,"
by John Howard Yoder
"The Sexual Contract,"
by Carole Pateman
"The Alchemy of Race and Rights,"
by Patricia Williams
"The Power of the Machine,"
by Alf Hornborg
"Money, Sex, and Power,"
by Nancy CM Hartsock
"Unbearable Weight,"
by Susan Bordo
STEPHEN LENDMAN SAYS:
I'll share one crucially important one
- Ellen Brown's Web of Debt -
absolutely required reading.
To understand the depth of the problem in
the US, read this book free online:
"The Iron Curtain Over America"
by Col. John Beaty.
Again, it's free online.
STILL HERE !!!
Some of the South Wales Miners'
huge library is still available on line...
at Swansea university:
http://www.swan.ac.uk/lis/historicalcollections/swml/
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