Eco-Political Website - List of Already-Published Books of Interest.
DROPPING OUT, a FREE electronic book in progress (in book proposal form) by Carl E. Person published in the Lawmall website (see various links at bottom of this page) takes Person's experience as an antitrust and civil rights litigator, and corporate, securities, business and intellectual-property lawyer, and as a businessperson and creator of new career fields (including the paralegal and the personal assistant), and his experience in computers and related technology, to design a program for individuals to follow which will enable them to increase their standard of living by changing their workstyle and lifestyle - by moving from the city to a DROPOUT COMMUNITY and developing the community with specific features to empower the individual and his new community to offset the uncontrolled excesses of the locust-like multinational corporations and cooperative elected and appointed governmental officials.
Person's book is like his past creations: Practical, innovative and controversial. The persons who act early can expect to obtain greater benefits from the personal makeover than persons who wait to see what happens.
DROPPING OUT is a how to book for 100,000,000 Americans with a declining standard of living and who can't make ends meet or are working too hard, often underemployed; or with too many jobs, to try to make ends meet. Small business persons and farmers are included within the intended market. The book explains what an individual reader or a small town can do to change the deteriorating situation and truly pull out of the economic slump (while the adversity continues for others), and if enough persons and towns do what is outlined in the book, the problems will tend to correct themselves for the nation as a whole. The book explains how the lowest levels of government can be used in small geographic areas (for all persons within the area) to provide the cooperative means by which individuals and small-town residents can obtain their fair share of the economy and how the evils of economic concentration and globalizing of the economy can be stopped without any help from the United States government.
THE CASE AGAINST FREE TRADE - GATT, NAFTA, and the Globalization of Corporate Power, by Ralph Nader, William Greider, Dick Morris and others (Earth Island Press / North Atlantic Books, © 1993).
NO CONTEST - Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion of Justice in America, by Ralph Nader and Wesley J. Smith (Random House, © 1996) [1. Corporate lawyers - United States. 2. Justice and politics - United States. 3. Law reform - United States.].
EVERYTHING FOR SALE - The Virtues and Limits of Markets, by Robert Kuttner (410 pp., $27.50, Knopf/Twentieth Century Fund Book, © 1997) [1. United States - economic policy 1993--. 2. United States - commercial policy. 3. Industrial policy - U.S. 4. Environmental policy - United States. 5. Full employment policies - United States. 6. Capitalism. 7. Free employment - United States.]. This book was reviewed (front-page, pp. 11-12) in 1/25/97 The New York Times Book Review as a book meant to provide a break-through in economic thought comparable to Galbraith's (© 1958) THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY and Berle's (© 1932) THE MODERN CORPORATION AND PRIVATE PROPERTY. to engender a wholesale change in the way the public things about government's role in the economy. ˙DROPPING OUT would be of interest to the readers of EVERYTHING FOR SALE because it describes how an individual can change government's role at the lowest political level and recreate the role of U.S. government in economic matters down to the lowest political level, to cope with the domination of the U.S. government by multinational corporations and their wealthy shareholders and managers.
ONE WORLD, READY OR NOT - The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, by William Greider (528 pp., $27.50, Simon & Schuster, © 1997). [1. Capitalism. 2. Economic history - 1945 --]. This book was reviewed in the 1/19/97 New York Times Book Review ( page 11, A Rising Tide Sinks All Boats - Worldwide economic integration, William Greider argues, is bringing worldwide disaster; and a full page review in the 1/20/97 edition of Business Week (full page, at page 14 - The Global Economy: A Dreadful Reckoning?... Rather than accept free-flowing capital as beneficial, Greider smells only trouble. But Greider does not come up with any practical or hopeful solutions to the problems raised. The New York Times Review stated that Greider's book has compelling disagnoses followed by lame cures.
ONE WORLD, READY OR NOT is very pessimistic, indicating that unless something is done the country will have serious economic and social problems. His work does not, however, spell out anything which individuals can do to change the situation for themselves, or suggest any practical solutions for the problems which he presents. Greider appears to believe that the offending institutions (e.g., the U.S. government and monopolizing multinational companies) must correct themselves in some fashion, but is not very optimistic about this, because of the lack of incentive for one business (say, IBM) to forego huge profits when its competitors are not obliged by enforceable law to do the same. Greider hopes that Congress will do something, but is not very optimistic about this.
DROPPING OUT provides the missing ingredient for Greider (and other writers who see the evils of monopolies and the globalizing economy), by showing a way in which individuals and small towns and villages can make the needed changes for themselves, working in cooperation with each other, and in doing so can start a grassroots program of self-protection/self-improvement (perhaps a modern equivalent of the Farmers' Alliance of the late 1880-1920's, essentially a workable governmental cooperative for a small geographic area and all its residents) to ultimately provide the free-market opposition to the destructive policies of multinational companies and beholden government officials.
SECRETS OF THE TEMPLE - How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, by William Greider (798 pp., paperback, $17.00, Touchstone Book imprint of Simon & Schuster, © 1987). [1. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). 2. Federal Reserve banks. 3. Monetary policy - United States - History - 20th century. 4. Banks and banking - United States - History - 20th century. 5. Finance - United States - History - 20th century.]. This is one of the best books and a must read. The Nation states that the book "may be the most important political book of the decade", revealing how the mysterious Federal Reserve has manipulated the U.S. economy by setting interest rates to favor bankers and bond-owning capitalists at the expense of jobs, small-business, farmers and borrowers; Greider shows how there is no political accountability for the Fed's decisions and how the Fed is dominated by the banking/bond-owning interests to the extreme detriment of most other interests in the U.S. The book is a major eye-opener because it delves into the secrets surrounding the determination of monetary policy, money supply, and their interrelationship with fiscal policy.
LOST RIGHTS - The Destruction of American Liberty, by James Bovard (408 pp., paperback, $14.95, St. Martin's Griffin, © 1994). [1. Civil Rights - United States. 2. Liberty.]. A catalog of abuses by government, including the IRS's master plan to prohibit the nation's self-employed from working for themselves (p. 2: "The Internal Revenue service is carrying out a massive campaign against the self-employed that seeks to force over half of America's independent contractors to abandon their own businesses. * * * And the Supreme Court - the supposed protector of the Bill of Rights - has imposed scant curbs on the capricious power of federal employees."); citizens charged with violating some unknown law or regulation by administrators or politicians hungering for publicity, to prove their "public service"; and describes the bloated excess of government and the plight of Americans beaten into submission by government as it has evolved.
THE SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL - How to Survive and Thrive during the Collapse of the Welfare State, by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg (Simon & Schuster, © 1997) [1. Economic forecasting. 2. 21st Century - forecasts. 3. Computers and civilization. 4. Information Society 1989--. 5. World Politics - forecasting.].
BANISHING BUREAUCRACY - The Five Strategies for Reinventing Government, by David Osborne and Peter Plastrik (397 pp., $25.00, Addison Wesley, © 1997) [1. Administrative agencies - United States. 2. Bureaucracy - United States. 3. Governmental productivity - United States. 4. Customer relations - United States. 5. Entrepreneurship - United States.].
WHEN WORK DISAPPEARS - The World of the Urban Poor, by William Julius Wilson (Knopf, © 1996) [1. Urban poor - United States. 2. Afro-Americans - Employment. 3. Inner cities - United States.].
THE END OF WORK - The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era, by Jeremy Rifkin (Tarcher/Putnam, paperback, © 1995).
WORKING FROM HOME, by Paul and Sarah Edwards (Tarcher/Putnam, paperback, © 1994) [1. Home-based businesses. 2. Self-employment.].
GLOBAL PARADOX - The Bigger the World Economy the More Powerful Its Smaller Players, by John Naisbitt (William Morrow, © 1994) [1. Information Society. 2. Economic forecasting. 3. International economic relationships. 4. Small business. 5. Regionalism.].
POWERSHIFT - Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, by Alvin Toffler (611 pp., paperback, Bantam, $7.99, © 1990).
THE RATING GUIDE TO LIFE IN AMERICA'S SMALL CITIES, by G. Scott Thomas (Promotheus Books, paperback, © 1990).
THE REVOLT OF THE ELITES AND THE BETRAYAL OF DEMOCRACY, by Christopher Lasch (Norton, paperback, © 1995).
A BETTER PLACE TO LIVE - Reshaping the American Suburbs, by Philip Langdon (Harper/Collins, © 1994) [1. Suburbs. 2. United States - planning.].
THE JOBLESS FUTURE, by Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio (Univ. of Minnesota Press, © 1997).
OPPOSING THE SYSTEM, by Charles A. Reich (219 pp., $23.00, Crown, hardcover, © 1995) [1. United States - social conditions - 1980--. 2. United States - politics and government - 1989-- 3. Protest movements - United States.]. Reich is the author of THE GREENING OF AMERICA and has been a Yale Law School professor for 45 years. He explains how the declining state of the economy has been created for the profit of the major corporations, including the monopolistic ones, through a suppression of information needed by private persons to understand what is happening, and with the shared objectives of the major corporations and government, with the major corporations dominating government (and resulting in an economic government) without any responsibility. He points out the need of the public to know the truth about the economy, but has not specific program to help anyone in distress.
DOWNSIZE THIS!, by Michael Moore (278 pp., $21.00, Crown, hardcover, © 1996). Moore satirizes downsizing and thereby criticizes major corporations and their policy of mergers and firings. Moore became famous for putting on film, in Roger and Me, Moore's efforts in getting Roger Smith, president of General Motors, to explain why he was closing down GM plants in Flint, Michigan. Moore is critical in his satirical way with a variety of issues which my book, and the other books I describe, deal with.
Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, a series of 3 books (something to think about for my work, to expand it into 2 or more books, possibly):
A. AMERICA: WHAT WENT WRONG? (bestseller with 16 printings, 235 pp., $6.95, paperback, Andrews and McMeel, K.C., Mo. © 1992), with subject index entries: 1. United States - economic conditions - 1981-- 2. United States - economic policy- 1981--.
B. AMERICA: WHO REALLY PAYS THE TAXES? (376 pp. $9.95, paperback, Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, © 1994).
C. AMERICA: WHO STOLE THE DREAM? (241 pp. $9.95, paperback, Andrews & McMeel, K.C., Mo., © 1996), with the following subject index entries: 1. Income distribution - United States. 2. Middle class - United States. 3. United States - economic policy 1981-1993. and 4. United States - economic conditions - 1981--.
This book is an important work in describing the causes and effects of globalization and the deterioration of the U.S. economy and job base. The authors cover: foreign trade and imports (free trade), immigration, taxes (inequality), deregulation, antitrust enforcement, mergers and layoffs, self employment (which the author doesn't make too clear), retraining and the rise of influence peddlers. The authors tell the problem but have no solutions for the individual reader to implement (other than an occasional example of what someone did when faced with an economic crisis). The authors got more than 30,000 letters in response to their first and second books. The first book was published simultaneously in the Philadelphia Inquirer (where the authors worked as investigative reporters).
WHO WILL TELL THE PEOPLE - The Betrayal of American Democracy, by William Greider (464 pp., $25.00, hardcover, Simon & Schuster, © 1992 [1. Political participation - United States. 2. Democracy - United States. 3. Representative government and representation - United States. 4. Pressure groups - United States. 5. Political corruption - United States. 6. United States - politics and government - 1989--]. Greider wrote in 1992 (3 years before Reich) pretty much the same thing, an explanation of how democracy is going down hill, and the reasons for it, and attributed some of his idea to Reich's earlier works. He believes that rehabilitating democracy will require citizens to devote themselves first to challenge the status quo, disrupting the existing contours of power and opening the way for renewal ... and then building something new that creates the institutional basis for politics as a shared enterprise. (p. 410). However, he he does not presume to know exactly how or where the insurgency begins (p. 411).
WHEN CORPORATIONS RULE THE WORLD, by James C. Korten (374 pp., $19.95, paperback, Kumarian Press/Berrett-Koehler Publishers, © 1995). [1. Corporations - political aspects. 2. Industries - environmental aspects. 3. Industrialization - social aspects. 4. Big business. 5. Power (social sciences). 6. Business and politics. 7. Internatiional business enterprises. 8. International economic relations. 9. Sustainable development.] Korten, a former Harvard Business School professor and person experienced in foreign trade of the type being promoted by U.S. government policy, has written about the effects of foreign trade as it is carried out and other factors which have enabled major corporations to assume control of the economy, and the adverse effect it is having on middle class Americans. He suggested various constitutional and legislative changes which are needed, and my own book idea was based on my efforts in constructing a model community through self help, and without constitutional change or legislation, which would implement as much as possible the conditions which Korten wanted to have occur. My book idea came about naturally, as a how to book to help persons badly hurt by the economy to change their way of living to improve their economic position (and for some, undoubtedly and hopefully, becoming members of the economic elite, the upper 1%) by playing the game under a new set of rules, and using their newly achieved wealth and power to help correct various evils in the U.S. political process and government.
THE MYTH OF FREE TRADE - The Pooring of America, originally published as THE POORING OF AMERICA, by Dr. Ravi Batra (274 pp., $12.00, paperback, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, © 1993) [1. Free trade - United States. 2. United States - foreign economic relations.].
THE GREAT AMERICAN DECEPTION - What Politicians Won't Tell You About Our Economy and Your Future, by Ravi Batra (278 pp., $24.95, Wiley, © 1996) [1. Tariff - United States. 2. Free trade - United States. 3. Budget deficits - United States. 4. Balance of trade - United States. 5. Income tax - United States.].
THE DOWNSIZING OF AMERICA, by The New York Times (356 pp., $14.00, paperback, Times Books/Random House, © 1996). This work was the result of various reporters at The New York Times and was supported in part by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which seeks to stimulate new thinking about the role of the corporation in American society and about the changing relationship between work and families [acknowledgments].
THE NEW WORLD ORDER, by Pat Robertson (bestseller 500,000+ copies, 318 pp., $5.99, paperback, World Publishing, © 1991) [1. World politics - 1989--. 2. Civilization, modern - 1950--.]. Relevant quote from the back cover, A compelling assessment of the imminent dangers looming on the world's horizon ... shines light on the invisible hand shaping U.S. government policies.
WHY AMERICANS HATE POLITICS, by E. J. Dionne, Jr. (448 pp., $12.00, paperback, Touchstone Book imprint of Simon & Schuster, © 1991). Explains how and why Americans are deserting the political system; how politicians are framing issues with false choices making it impossible to solve the nation's problems. Predictably, 8 years later, nothing has changed for the better.
FARMERS' AND FARM WORKERS' MOVEMENTS - Social Protest in American Agriculture, by Patrick H. Mooney and Theo J. Majka (260 pp., paperback, Twayne/Maxwell-Macmillan, © 1995) [1. Trade unions - agricultural laborers - United States - history. 2. Trade unions - United States - political activity - history. 3. Agricultural laborers - United States - political activity - history. 4. Farmers - United States - political activity - history. 5. National Farmers Organization (United States.) - history. 6. United Farm Workers of America - history. 7. Labor movement - United States - history. 8. Social Movements - United States - history.] This book traces the history of farmers' movements (and cooperative successes) from 1868 (The Grange), through the Farmers' Alliances and Granger Movement, and provides historical proof of the validity of the thesis and underlying justification described in DROPPING OUT. The solution of farmers who sought justice against monopolies, creditors, high interest rates, globalized business interests, co-opted state and federal governmental agencies was grass roots organization at the lowest political level, where the individual farmer could be heard and could affect government action. This parallel suggests a major market among farmers (many of whom have more income from non-farm pursuits in small towns) as well as farmer organizations and institutions (such as libraries, land-grant, agricultural colleges and churches).
WHY GOVERNMENT DOESN'T WORK, by Harry Browne, Libertarian Candidate for President (245 pp., $19.95, St. Martin's, © 1995). [1. Federal government - United States. 2. Decentralization in government - United States. 3. Libertarianism - United States. 4. United States - politics and government - 1993--]. The back cover states: How making government much smaller will enhance the lives of everyday Americans and that the book offers a realistic plan to get federal government smaller. DROPPING OUT forgets about the U.S. government and uses the small government at the town level to achieve the desired smaller government.
MELTDOWN ON MAIN STREET - Why Small Business Is Leading the Revolution Against Big Business, by Richard Lesher, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (214 pp., $22.95, Dutton, © 1996). This book is an attack on bureaucratic government excesses which cripple small business, appealing to the same market as DROPPING OUT.
THE POPULIST MOVEMENT - A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America, by Lawrence Goodwyn (349 pp., paperback, Oxford, $10.95, © 1978), an abridgement of Goodwyn's 1976 classic DEMOCRATIC PROMISE: The Populist Movement in America (the definitive study of American Populism). The back cover states that the agrarian revolt was the largest and most intense mass democratic movement in American history [with] ... profound impact in our own times.
HARVEST OF RAGE - Why Oklahoma City Is Only the Beginning, by Joel Dyer (292 pp., hardcover, WestviewPress, division of HarperCollins Publishers, $24, 1997), explains how the failure of government to enforce antitrust law against the monopolies and provide any remedies for the farmers and others hurt by the Federal Reserve Board's interest policies is resulting in increased violence (expected to culminate between the present and the year 2000), as the only perceived remedy by the persons feeling economically and unjustifiably oppressed by their government.
WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS, by Lewis H. Lapham (230 pp., hardcover, Verso, an imprint of New Left Books, New York, NY, $22.00, 1997), is a series of 25 short monographs by the author explaining how the U.S. is governed by the Fortune 500 companies as a permanent government, and how every 4 years a provisional or temporary government is installed which provides the needed appearance of government without the ability, inclination or fortitude to do more than take the public's money and (to a great extent) turn it over to the Fortune 500. This lack of concern for the governed never lasts, and can only result in its own downfall, says author Lapham, and the faster the concentration of capital the faster one can expect the breakup of the system as it is today.
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Carl E. Person, Director, LawMall, carlpers@lawmall.com