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To all PBC members and friends: Happy Fourth of July! 

And to mark the day, here’s a sampling of recommended reading for true patriots everywhere!

Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries
By Naomi Wolf
The best-selling author of The End of America lays out a blueprint for the active citizenship.

 The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country 
By William Greider
How America strayed from its founding ideals—and how We the People can bring the nation home.

The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation
By Jonathan Hennessey (Author) and Aaron McConnell (Illustrator)
An information-packed, graphic-novel treatment of pivotal moments in the history of the Constitution.

America America
By  Ethan Canin
A remarkable exploration of how vanity, greatness, and tragedy combine to change history and fate.

A People’s History of the United States
By  Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn’s classic work of populist history, updated for a new generation.

Thomas Paine and the Promise of America
By Harvey Kaye
The best portrait yet of “the greatest radical of a radical age”

Rights of Man and Common Sense
By Thomas Paine
The classic pamphlets that inspired a nation to revolution.

Unruly Americans
By Woody Holton
Average Americans Were the True Framers of the Constitution

Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us

By Alyssa Katz

From Chapter One

Almost Like a Conspiracy

Chicago, 1972

She poured another glass from the vodka bottle. It was approaching three a.m., Indiana time, here on the campus of Notre Dame, a couple of hours drive east from the city where Gale Cincotta had lived her whole life. By day Cincotta was nominally a housewife, a mother of six boys and young men living in Austin, a West Side Chicago neighborhood. But by now she was working full-time and beyond, trying to rescue Austin and surrounding communities from a real estate plague that showed no signs of receding. It was, she would say, “almost like a conspiracy of people deciding that this area was going to go.”

Huddling in the dorm room with an ex-Methodist minister, who was downing Jack Daniel’s himself, Cincotta dragged on a series of Salems, the smoke wafting over her platinum bouffant sprayed out into stiff cascades.

She always brought two bottles to organizing meetings, which often went on long past midnight. One was for herself, and the other to help inspire the other activists—student interns, career community organizers, and neighborhood residents like herself—to keep going. Cincotta used the vodka not to dull the hurt, but to fuel her will to prevail over those responsible for the destruction. Read More

The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right

By David Neiwert

From the Introduction

Unleashing the Demonic

LIBERAL HUNTING PERMIT
No Bag Limit—Tagging Not Required. May be used while under the influence of Alcohol. May be used to Hunt Liberals at Gay Pride Parades, Democrat Conventions, Union Rallys, Handgun Control Meetings, News media Association, Lesbian Luncheons and Hollywood Functions.
MAY HUNT DAY OR NIGHT WITH OR WITHOUT DOGS.
—A bumper sticker available at some conservative Web sites, spotted near a gay-pride parade in San Francisco.

In July of 2008, a graying, mustachioed man from the Knoxville suburb of Powell, Tennessee, sat down and wrote out by hand a four-page manifesto describing his hatred of all things liberal and his belief that “all liberals should be killed.”

When he was done, Jim David Adkisson drove his little Ford Escape to the parking lot of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville. A few days before, the church had attracted media attention for its efforts to open a local coffee shop for gays and lesbians. Leaving the manifesto on the seat of the car, he walked inside the church carrying a guitar case stuffed with a shotgun and 76 rounds of ammunition. Read More

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

By Liaquat Ahamed

From the Introduction

On August 15, 1931, the following press statement was issued: “The Governor of the Bank of England has been indisposed as a result of the exceptional strain to which he has been subjected in recent months. Acting on medical advice he has abandoned all work and has gone abroad for rest and change.” The governor was Montagu Collet Norman, D.S.O.—having repeatedly turned down a title, he was not, as so many people assumed, Sir Montagu Norman or Lord Norman. Nevertheless, he did take great pride in that D.S.O after his name—the Distinguished Service Order, the second highest decoration for bravery by a military officer.

Norman was generally wary of the press and was infamous for the lengths to which he would go to escape prying reporters—traveling under a false identity; skipping off trains; even once, slipping over the side of an ocean vessel by way of a rope ladder in rough seas. On this occasion, however, as he prepared to board the liner Duchess of York for Canada, he was unusually forthcoming. With that talent for understatement that came so naturally to his class and country, he declared to the reporters gathered at dockside, “I feel I want a rest because I have had a very hard time lately. I have not been quite as well as I would like and I think a trip on this fine boat will do me good.”

The fragility of his mental constitution had long been an open secret within financial circles. Few members of the public knew the real truth—that for the last two weeks, as the world financial crisis had reached a crescendo and the European banking system teetered on the edge of collapse, the governor had been incapacitated by a nervous breakdown, brought on by extreme stress. The Bank press release, carried in newspapers from San Francisco to Shanghai, therefore came as a great shock to investors everywhere. Read More

The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works

By Henry Waxman

Introduction

During my thirty-five years in Congress, I’ve been involved in hundreds of hearings. Many were forgettable. A handful have had lasting impact. And one, on April 14, 1994, stands among the great Washington dramas. Like the McCarthy and Watergate hearings, it has assumed a place in popular mythology as a turning point in our national history that lives on in textbooks and Hollywood movies.

On that morning, in a hearing room of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the CEOs of the nation’s seven largest tobacco companies assembled for the first time to testify before Congress. I had summoned them there in my capacity as chairman of the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment to answer questions about the $61 billion industry they controlled and the 440,000 people who died every year as a result of its products. It was a showdown that had been years in the making.

The life of a congressman is often one of painstaking process. You endure the daily grind of committee meetings, markups, and hearings in order to build the foundation that all great legislation requires—from landmark measures like the New Deal, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, to major new initiatives like climate change legislation and universal health care that could soon be enacted. You persevere so that those who abuse the public trust will be held to account. But mostly you do it for the rare and fleeting occasions when your actions might improve the lives of millions of your fellow Americans. Read More

When I Forgot

By Elina Hirvonen

1

Why I’m happy

I’m happy because I have a steam engine (that works).

I’m happy because I have Daddy Mommy Sister Grandma and got a Stiiga sled for Christmas.

I’m happy because I’m in the science club and when I grow up I’m going to be an inventor and win the Nobel Prize.

I’m happy because I get to live my whole life in free and independent Finland and because my Heavenly Father loves me and takes care of me. Read More

In State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, 50 of America’s foremost writers (see below) present original pieces of reportage and memoir that capture the 50 states as they are today. All of which is great and well worth reading. Tucked in the back of the book, though, is something almost as compelling — thirty pages of tables ranking the states on an eclectic but revealing range of measures, such as divorce rate, alcohol consumption, temperature (high and low), voter participation, crime, and even number of roller coasters per capita. Starting today we’ll bring you the top tens from various of these lists, with sources. First up, topically enough, are the ten states with the highest percentage of people lacking health insurance

Percentage of population without health insurance

1. Texas  (24)
2. New Mexico  (22)
3. Florida  (21)
4. Arizona  (20)
5. Louisiana  (20)
6. Mississippi  (19)
7. California (19)
8. Oklahoma (19)
9. Nevada  (18)
10. Arkansas  (18)

Source: Urban Institute and Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. Estimates based on the Census Bureau’s March 2006 and 2007 Current Population Survey. (PDF)

See State by State’s authors after the jump.

Read More

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its annual data on how we the people spend our day. Working, mostly. But we also cook, mow the lawn, and pick little Andrew up from soccer practice so he can play Guitar Hero. Below are some of the survey’s more interesting findings.

• Among full-time workers, men worked longer than women—8.3 versus 7.7 hours.
• On an average day, 20 percent of men did housework—such as cleaning or doing laundry—compared with 50 percent of women.
• Of those who engaged in leisure activities, men spent more time in these activities (5.7 hours) than did women (5.1) hours.
• Watching TV was the leisure activity that occupied the most time, accounting for about half of the leisure time, on average, for both men and women.
• Socializing, such as visiting with friends, was the next most common leisure activity, accounting for about three-quarters of an hour per day for both sexes.
• Employed adults living in households with no children under 18 engaged in leisure activities for 4.5 hours per day, nearly an hour more than employed adults living with a child under age 6.
• On an average weekday, among adults living in households with children under 6, women spent 1.2 hours providing physical care, such as bathing or feeding a child. By contrast, men spent 0.4 hour (25 minutes) providing physical care.
• Adults living in households with children under 6 spent an average of 2.0 hours per day providing primary childcare, such as reading or talking to their children.
• Adults living in households where the youngest child was between the ages of 6 and 17 spent less than half as much time (0.8 hours) providing primary childcare.
• Individuals ages 15 to 19 read for an average of 0.2 hour (10 minutes) per weekend day while spending 1.0 hour playing games or using a computer for leisure.
• Individuals age 75 and over averaged 1.2 hours of reading per weekend day and 0.3 hour (17 minutes) playing games or using a computer for leisure.

Check out this new video from ThinkProgress in which PBC board chair Gov. Howard Dean sits down with TP’s Faiz Shakir and Igor Volsky to discuss the book they wrote together, Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform. We’re excited to announce today that Gov. Dean’s book is also PBC’s main selection for July, bundled with Jonathan Cohn’s excellent Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis — and the People Who Pay the Price. As regular readers of this blog know, the bottom line of Howard Dean’s Prescription is that real healthcare reform–reform that delivers quality, affordable, accessible healthcare to all Americans–has to give Americans a choice between public and private insurance.

Buy Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare ReformSick at Progressive Book Club today!

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

This is the latest in a series of posts about Richard Hofstadter’s classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Read previous entries here.

In “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter puts Joseph McCarthy and the 50’s red scare into the context of American history. Far from being an aberration, Hofstadter argued, McCarthy was part of a long line of American paranoids, from Puritan preachers to 19th-century nativists. These paranoids also appear in popular culture. Below, General Jack D. Ripper unmasks an insidious Communist plot in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove:

Part I: Communist Fluid Sappers

Part II: Precious Bodily Fluids