Here’s a recommendation for the erstwhile progressive, a trio of books to get you thinking about the current state of affairs in the world and in particular, the United States. This list will scare you if you’re brave enough to read the books and internalize their messages, taking the unflinching look — which is pretty hard to do, I admit, since we’d like to think that the United States is different, it’s the best country, all of that. That’s how I was raised and what I was taught in school – you probably as well.

Those days are over, if they ever really existed. Here are the books, in no special order, along with my notes/impressions.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century – Thomas Piketty

OK, this is a difficult book if you’re not interested in financial arcana. Much of it is very prosaic, and it doesn’t help that it’s written by someone whose first language is not English, but French. That said, there are a few chapters that are riveting.

I felt a lot of the book was restating the same thing over and over. However, I learned a great deal about the history of capitalism as practiced in the West, and found it fascinating to learn about such obscure things as the Cost Of Living in the 19th Century and the history of inflation, etc. He makes a very persuasive case that the return on capital will always outstrip other forms of income and that will always lead to greater inequality, unless governments manage wealth by taxation policy (that’s his main argument).

I look at it this way – there’s an easy way and then there’s a hard way to fight inequality. The easy way is through modified tax laws, which in the US should take us back to the rates existing in the 1950s and 60s, our most prosperous era. The hard way is to go back to 1789, (see Revolution, French) which I don’t think would be a plus for anyone – for the 1%, surely not, but also not for the 99%.

 

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism – Naomi Klein

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The Shock Doctrine should be required reading for anyone participating in a representative democracy, that’s for sure. Highest Recommendation. It’s a lengthy book, and well worth the trouble.

and perhaps the most shocking of all —

No Place To Hide — Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U.S. Surveillance State — Glenn Greenwald

This is Greenwald’s account of the release of the Snowden NSA files to him and filmmaker Laura Poitras over a series of secret communiques and trips to various corners of the world. (The documentary film of this event/process is called CitizenFour and I highly recommend watching that as well – covers the same territory but obviously the book goes into more depth.)

Basically, your government is spying on you. All of your texts, emails, facebook postings, phone calls and any other kind of electronic communication you make is being logged and compiled. This, at present, is the basic idea of the Snowden revelations — that Americans are being spied upon in the name of “national security.” And not just people the government has probably cause to suspect of something, but all of us.

Critics of Snowden et al. will say that it’s only the metadata being tracked – things like phone numbers but not phone conversations, email headers but not the content of an email message. So the takeaway is that we have nothing to fear from that, that it’s not really spying. Tell me, what kind of picture of you would a good analyst have from knowing what phone numbers call you and that you call, and the content of your email headers? I think it would be a pretty good picture. If you have a mobile with GPS (and don’t we all) then they also track wherever you’ve “checked in” etc. So if they’re interested in finding out more, all they have to do is set a few parameters, and it’s like “24” or Jason Bourne right here and right now.

I was shocked that this is the world we live in now, not some sickening vision of an Orwellian future. It’s the United States of America, 2015. Welcome home. Read and know.