Other books that might interest you

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  End Unemployment Now - How to...

  Ravi Batra

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  The year 2010 marked when the National Bureau of Economic Research declared an end to the Great Recession. The economy had shed over six million jobs in 2008 and 2009, but few had been recalled to work by 2010. Today, government policies have yet to make a significant dent in unemployment. In End Unemployment Now, Ravi Batra explores why this is the case. He explains how joblessness can be completely eliminated—in just two years, and without the help of our painfully incompetent Congress. The President and the Federal Reserve have the legal authority to generate free-market conditions that will quickly end the specter of unemployment, all without involving Congress.Some examples of how to end unemployment without congressional intrusion:• Creating a bank by the FDIC to compete with banking giants and then charging only 5% interest rates on credit card balances, instead of the standard 10-35% seen today• Banning mergers among large and profitable firms, as such mergers directly cause layoffs and reinforce monopoly capitalism• Aid to small businesses in the form of cheap loans and government contracts, because small firms have been real job creators since 1980, while Big Business has been a job destroyer• Offer retiree bonds to increase the incomes of pensioners who live on savings and whose incomes have been practically destroyed by the collapse of interest rates• Bring oil prices down to $20/barrel, which would lower a gallon of gas to $1.50

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  Battle on the Lomba 1987 - A...

  David Mannall

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  A South African national serviceman recounts becoming a soldier and an ensuing David-and-Goliath face-off against Angolan armed forces in 1987. 
   
  The climactic death-throes of Soviet Communism during the 1980s included a last-gasp attempt at strategic franchise expansion in southern Africa. Channeled through Castro’s Cuba, oil-rich Angolan armed forces (FAPLA) received billions of dollars of advanced weaponry and thousands of armored vehicles. Their intent: to eradicate the US-backed Angolan opposition (UNITA), then push southwards into South Africa’s protectorate SWA/Namibia, ostensibly as liberators. 
   
  1985 saw the first large-scale mechanized offensive in southern African history. Russian Generals planned and oversaw the offensive but didn’t account for the tenacity of UNITA (supported by the South African Defense Forces, SADF) or the rainy season. The ‘85 offensive floundered in the mud, and FAPLA returned to their capital Luanda. The South Africans stood down, confident their “covert” support for UNITA had demonstrated the folly of prosecuting war so far from home against Africa’s military Superpower. However, they were mistaken. Fidel and FAPLA immediately redoubled their efforts, strengthening fifteen battalions with even more Soviet hardware while Russian and Cuban specialists oversaw troop training. 
   
  As Cuban and Angolan fighter pilots honed their skills over the skies of Northern Angola, David Mannall, a normal seventeen-year-old kid completing high school, was preparing for two years of compulsory military service before beginning Tertiary education. Through a series of fateful twists, he found himself leading soldiers in several full-scale armored clashes, including the largest and most decisive battle on African soil since World War II. 
   
  This is a David and Goliath story that has never been truthfully told. The author reveals how Charlie Squadron, comprising just twelve 90mm AFVs crewed by thirty-six national servicemen, as part of the elite sixty-one Mechanized Battalion, engaged and effectively annihilated the giant FAPLA 47th Armored Brigade in one day—3 October 1987. Their 90mm cannons were never designed as tank-killers, but any assurances that it would never be used against heavy armor were left in the classroom during the three-month operation and never more starkly than the decisive “Battle on The Lomba River.” The Communist-backed offensive died that day along with hundreds of opposition fighters. 
   
  47th Brigade survivors abandoned their remaining equipment, eventually joining the 59th Brigade in what became a full-scale retreat of over ten thousand soldiers to Cuito Cuanevale. The myth perpetuated by post-apartheid politicians goes something like this: “The SADF force that destroyed 47th Brigade on 3 October numbered 6,000 men and that all the hard yards were run by the long-suffering UNITA!” The inconvenient truth is that there were just 36 South African boys on the frontline that day, but it is also true to say they would never have achieved such a stunning victory without the support of many more. This is their story.

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  The Fight to Vote

  Michael Waldman

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  In The Second Amendment, Michael Waldman traces the ongoing argument on gun rights from the Bill of Rights to the current day. Now, in The Fight to Vote, Waldman takes a succinct and comprehensive look at an even more crucial struggle: the past and present effort to define and defend government based on "the consent of the governed." From the writing of the Constitution, and at every step along the way, as Americans sought the right, others have fought to stop them. The Fight to Vote, meticulously researched and thoroughly compelling, recounts the entire story, from the Founders' debates to gerrymandering and voter ID laws.

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  Our Divided Political Heart -...

  Jr. E. J. Dionne

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  Our Divided Political Heart will be the must-listen book of the 2012 election campaign. Offering an incisive analysis of how hyper-individualism is poisoning the nation's political atmosphere, E. J. Dionne Jr., argues that Americans can't agree on who we are because we can't agree on who we've been, or what it is, philosophically and spiritually, that makes us Americans. Dionne takes on the Tea Party's distortions of American history and shows that the true American tradition points not to radical individualism, but to a balance between our love of individualism and our devotion to community.Dionne offers both a fascinating tour of American history—from the Founding Fathers to Clay and Lincoln and on to the Populists, the Progressives, and the New Dealers—and also an analysis of our current politics that shatters conventional wisdom. The true American idea, far from endorsing government inaction or indifference, has always viewed the federal government as an active and constructive partner with the rest of society in promoting prosperity, opportunity, and American greatness.The ability of the American system to self-correct is its greatest asset, and Dionne challenges progressives to embrace the American story. Our fractious but productive past offers us the resources both to rediscover the idea of progress and to put an end to our fears of decline. Our Divided Political Heart will be required listening for all who seek a path out of our current impasse.

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  The 2016 Contenders: Mike Huckabee

  Post The Washington, Steve Hendrix

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  Presidential candidates are a breed apart, often propelled by traits that have shaped their careers and have deep roots in personal histories.  Often their greatest strength can turn at supernova speed into their greatest weakness. The exact qualities that set them apart from the field trip them up eventually over the long haul of a presidential campaign.  It was as a lifelong broadcaster that Mike Huckabee, the onetime “pastor on TV,” perfected the conservative amiability that helped him win the Iowa caucuses in 2008 and could again set him apart from an increasingly crowded field of Republicans. But in the GOP of 2016, when the sharp edge plays better than the soft smile, Huckabee enters the race facing a key question: Will the same “I’m not mad at anybody” on-air vibe that fueled his rise make him a non-starter for mad-as-hell early Republican voters?  In this series of eBooks, The Washington Post is exploring in-depth all these key characteristics of the leading presidential contenders, the very characteristics that could help make one of them the country’s next commander in chief—or forever sink their presidential ambitions.

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  The Freedoms We Lost - Consent...

  Barbara Clark Smith

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  A brilliant and original examination of American freedom as it existed before the Revolution, from the Smithsonian’s curator of social history.   The American Revolution is widely understood—by schoolchildren and citizens alike—as having ushered in “freedom” as we know it, a freedom that places voting at the center of American democracy. In a sharp break from this view, historian Barbara Clark Smith charts the largely unknown territory of the unique freedoms enjoyed by colonial American subjects of the British king—that is, American freedom before the Revolution. The Freedoms We Lost recovers a world of common people regularly serving on juries, joining crowds that enforced (or opposed) the king’s edicts, and supplying community enforcement of laws in an era when there were no professional police.  The Freedoms We Lost challenges the unquestioned assumption that the American patriots simply introduced freedom where the king had once reigned. Rather, Smith shows that they relied on colonial-era traditions of political participation to drive the Revolution forward—and eventually, betrayed these same traditions as leading patriots gravitated toward “monied men” and elites who would limit the role of common men in the new democracy. By the end of the 1780s, she shows, Americans discovered that forms of participation once proper to subjects of Britain were inappropriate—even impermissible—to citizens of the United States.   In a narrative that counters nearly every textbook account of America’s founding era, The Freedoms We Lost challenges us to think about what it means to be free.

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