Suggested Reading

Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man, By John Perkins

Over the years, Americans have heard that people in other countries do not like America, but Americans can’t figure out why that is so. After all, America represents all that is good and right in the world. America just wants to give other countries the gift of its democratic ideals and spread freedom, right?

That’s what politicians and the corporate media would have you believe. But the truth is quite different. John Perkins, who spent years as an economic hit man, tells what is really involved in U.S. foreign policy. Once you read this book, you’ll understand why people around the world hate America, and you’ll realize that said hatred is often justified. It will also shed new light on what is involved in the American empire.

God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World by Cullen Murphy

Established by the Catholic church in 1231, the Inquisition was designed to make people adhere to the teachings of the church and make them toe the official church-approved version of Catholicism. And if Cullen Murphy’s book God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World stuck to describing the 700-year history of the Inquisition, it might only hold interest for historians who wish to explore how the church functioned as a medieval political power.

Instead, Murphy’s larger purpose is to show how large organizations filled with small-minded bureaucrats can terrorize a population when they have willing foot soldiers to do their bidding. The Inquisition, as Murphy sees it, was just a taste of what big governments would later accomplish when they set their minds to trying control both how people behave and how they think.

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis by James Rickards

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is a riverboat gambler who has embarked on the greatest economic gamble in the history of world finance. But unlike the gambler who can squander only his own fortune, Bernanke’s gamble has created a worldwide crisis. Through quantitative easing, the Fed has declared currency war on the world.

In Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis, Rickards discusses how nations have purposely debased their currencies both to benefit themselves and hurt others. He posits that there have been three currency wars just since 1900, and we are currently engaged in the third one. The first, Rickards writes, lasted from 1921 to 1936. The second was from 1967 to 1987. The one happening now began in 2010.

Jerusalem, The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

After reading the amazing history contained in Jerusalem, The Biography, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, I couldn’t help but be thankful that our Founding Fathers established a country that allows all citizens the rights to their own religious beliefs and keeps government out of it. (At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.) As a lesson about what happens when governments and religion become intertwined, Jerusalem, though, is a cautionary tale. Because the saga of conflict told in Jerusalem not only sheds light on an astounding history of warfare among countries, empires, ethnic groups and civilizations, it demonstrates what happens when militaristic religious leaders decide to rid the Earth of their rivals. The result is a kind of never-ending ethnic cleansing.

The fact that Jerusalem is the center of the spiritual world for so many people seems to make politics there frighteningly complex and deadly. Consequently, if you have any interest in understanding why the area in and around Jerusalem is such a contentious piece of real estate, Jerusalem explicates, in exquisite historical detail, the thousands of years of fighting over a piece of ground that so many people want to possess. Sometimes, the details supplied by Montefiore are a bit overwhelming. But the historical tidbits, footnotes, archeological gossip and descriptions of what we know or think we know about what historical figures did to each other in this part of the planet are never less than fascinating and illuminating.

FDR Goes To War: How Expanded Executive Power, Spiraling National Debt, And Restricted Civil Liberties Shaped Wartime America by Burton W. Folsom Jr. and Anita Folsom

For more than 60 years, government indoctrination centers conveniently misnamed “public schools,” mainstream “historians” and a compliant media have pushed the notion that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies and his actions as a “wartime” President saw America through the Great Depression and won World War II.

But the stark truth is FDR prolonged the Depression, his policies left the United States woefully unprepared for a war he was itching to join and he centralized government and assumed unConstitutional — even dictatorial — executive powers more than any other previous President.

Gift Suggestions For The Lover Of Liberty

What is the best way to acquire knowledge? I believe the best and only way is to read, read and read some more. If you have a liberty-lover in your circle of relatives or friends and you’re looking for a gift idea, I have a few for you.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire by H.W. Crocker III

Empires and colonialism, particularly the British Empire, get a bum rap from historians according to the cover of the book The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the British Empire by H.W. Crocker III. Well, maybe, maybe not. Depends on the empire. The Roman Empire accomplished some very impressive achievements that no one can deny. On the other hand, the empire established by the marauding conquests of Attila the Hun, not so much.

Omar Bradley: General At War by Jim DeFelice

Casual students of World War II may be familiar with names like Marshall, Eisenhower and Patton — maybe even Montgomery — and the roles they played in the European theater of the war. But only the more ardent history buffs have probably ever heard more than a passing mention of Gen. Omar Bradley.

The view most hold of Bradley probably comes from his portrayal by Karl Malden in the 1970 movie “Patton” with George C. Scott in the title role. In it, Malden was typically seen as Patton’s underling, even after Bradley was promoted over Patton as allied forces moved into Sicily.

But such portrayals, and in fact most histories of World War II, don’t do Bradley justice. He was far more involved than most realize in the planning and execution of the war as the battlefield moved from Africa and into Europe, especially the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Jim DeFelice seeks to burnish Bradley’s image in his new book, Omar Bradley: General At War.

Don’t Let The Kids Drink The Kool-Aid by Marybeth Hicks

Maybe you can’t tell a book by its cover, but the jacket of Don’t Let The Kids Drink The Kool-Aid by Marybeth Hicks doesn’t inspire much confidence. On the front jacket, just beneath the book’s title, a youngster lies on a hardwood floor, chin in hands, elbows on floor, contentedly absorbed in watching a Presidential speech on television. And you have to wonder what alternative universe gave birth to that image.

The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch

It’s an old political axiom that to win a national election a candidate has to target the independents. Each candidate is guaranteed a certain percentage of votes from his political party’s faithful, but it’s the remainder of the voting public that swings the election to one candidate or the other.

Increasingly, the independents, often inaccurately called by the media moguls and political pundits “moderates,” are feeling more and more disaffected. In recent national elections they have swung back and forth as they sought the candidate that would best fulfill their hopes and dreams. Increasingly, they are disappointed and feeling disaffected that it seems that no matter which way they vote, they continue to get what they got before. More and more, they are looking for a new way.

And they have come to realize, as the inside jacket cover of The Declaration of Independents puts it: “We are held hostage to an eighteenth-century system, dominated by two nineteenth-century political parties whose ever-more-polarized rhetoric masks a mutual interest in maintaining a stranglehold on power.”

In The Declaration of Independents, Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason.tv, and Matt Welch, editor of Reason magazine, point out a third way.