Category Archives: Books

Dark Money-How a secretive group of billionaires is trying to buy political control in the US (Jane Mayer):

Behind the street theater was some of the countries wealthiest businessmen who had painstakingly been trying to build up the “counter-establishment” since the 1970s and now saw the publics unrest as an amazing opportunity to at long last mobilise popular support for their own agendas.

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Beef, Bible and Bullets – Brazil in the Age of Bolsonaro (Richard Lapper):

A 1983 holiday expedition with fellow officers to a garimpo (an informal gold mine) in Bahia led to criticism from his superiors, who claimed they were concerned by his “excessive economic and financial ambition”. –
“A military court judgement earned him a fourteen-day prison sentence. A year later, he found himself in even hotter water. In a piece published in October 1987, Veja named him [Bolsonaro} as one of the ringleaders in a plot to bomb military installations: armed action designed to lend force to his group’s trade-union style demands. The attack never took place and the military court found him not guilty. But in practice the affair meant his days in the army were numbered. In December 1988 Bolsonaro quietly transferred to the reserve and started a new career.

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Green is the New Red – An insider’s account of a social movement under siege (Will Potter):

The most disgraceful periods in history were arrived at slowly, methodically, with an infinite number of decisions being made, every day, by real people. There is no going to sleep one night in a democracy and waking up the next morning to police roundups. There is no “tipping point,” there are many points, and at each of them we have a choice – do we continue down this path, because it has not yet affected us personally, or do we intervene?” – Will Potter

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Survival of the Richest – escape fantasies of the tech billionaires (Douglas Rushkoff):

The capacity that digital companies have for abstracted, exponential growth has allowed them to amass political and economic power unheard of even in the time of the Gilded Age robber barons. Numerous studies have concluded that economic elites now enjoy substantially more impact on government policy, while “citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

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Murdoch’s Politics – How one man’s thirst for power shapes our world (David McKnight):

“Rupert Murdoch and Fox News are fiercely dedicated to a political project that will eliminate trade unions, abolish and/or commercialise public education, increase economic inequality and the power of billionaires and big business, ignore and aggravate the environmental crisis that threatens human existence, promote endless wars and militarism, governance for the rich, a corrupt judicial system, and elections that go to the highest (and anonymous) bidders. Above all, Murdoch champions the elimination of independent journalism. All the institutions that make for a credible modern democracy are in his crosshairs.

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Dark Commerce – How a new illicit economy is threatening our future (Louise I. Shelley):

Yikes. Prepare to be unsettled & alarmed. This is an urgent & weltering assessment & tally by Professor of Public Policy & director (& founder) of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, Prof Louise Shelley. An advanced veteran on the subject & a skilled scribe, we are delivered a withering & disturbing stream of highly accurate warnings & acute details concerning illicit trade, smuggling, organised crime & a wide diversity of corruption in its many forms & appliances.

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