Books

The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse & Jennifer Mueller. “A damning investigation of dark money by a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
Robert Reich’s book is ultimately an examination of the nature of power. Such an examination easily dispels the demagogic narrative, pulling back the curtain of wealth and power that currently obscures those with both from careful examination of how they secured and perpetuate such privilege. . . For decades, [the market] has been serving fewer and fewer, and the only way to turn the tide back in the favor of the many is for citizens to re-engage and raise our voices.

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again
Robert D. Putnam & Shaylyn Romney Garrett Deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private narcissism—Americans today seem to agree on only one thing: This is the worst of times.

But we’ve been here before. During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today. However as the twentieth century opened, America became—slowly, unevenly, but steadily—more egalitarian, more cooperative, more generous; a society on the upswing, more focused on our responsibilities to one another and less focused on our narrower self-interest.

The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy
Katherine M. Gehl The truth is, the American political system is working exactly how it is designed to work, and it isn’t designed or optimized today to work for us—for ordinary citizens.

Moneyland: The Inside Story of the Crooks and Kleptocrats Who Rule the World
“If you want to know why international crooks and their eminently respectable financial advisors walk tall and only the little people pay taxes, this is the ideal book for you. Every politician and moneyman on the planet should read it, but they won’t because it’s actually about them.” ―John le Carré, author of A Legacy of Spies

An investigative journalist’s deep dive into the corrupt workings of the world’s kleptocrats, by Oliver Bullough.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
We the Corporations chronicles the astonishing story of one of the most successful yet least well-known “civil rights movements” in American history. Hardly oppressed like women and minorities, business corporations, too, have fought since the nation’s earliest days to gain equal rights under the Constitution—and today have nearly all the same rights as ordinary people.

Exposing the historical origins of Citizens United and Hobby Lobby, Adam Winkler explains how those controversial Supreme Court decisions extending free speech and religious liberty to corporations were the capstone of a centuries-long struggle over corporate personhood and constitutional protections for business.

Billionaire Democracy: The Hijacking of the American Political System
This isn’t your America. No matter who the president is.

We’re told that when we vote, when we elect representatives, we’re gaining a voice in government and the policies it implements. But if that’s true, why don’t American politics actually translate our preferences into higher-living standards for the majority of us?

The answer is that, in America, the wealthy few have built a system that works in their favor, while maintaining the illusion of democracy. The reality is that the quality of democracy in the United States is lower than in any other rich democracy, on a par with nations such as Brazil or Turkey.

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.

In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.

Resistance Guide: How to Sustain the Movement to Win
Social movements of the past can teach us how to shape the future. Resistance Guide will equip you with the essential strategies to shift public opinion, change laws and decisions, and elect new leaders. This is a handbook for anyone who wants to understand what makes movements succeed, and how we can use this knowledge to fight for a better America.

Democracy in America?
America faces daunting problems—stagnant wages, high health care costs, neglected schools, deteriorating public services. Yet the government consistently ignores the needs of its citizens, paying attention instead to donors and organized interests. Real issues are held hostage to demagoguery, partisanship beats practicality, and trust in government withers along with the social safety net.

How did we get here? Through decades of dysfunctional government. In Democracy in America? veteran political observers Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens marshal an unprecedented array of evidence to show that while other countries have responded to a rapidly changing economy by helping people who’ve been left behind, the United States has failed to do so. Instead, we have actually exacerbated inequality, enriching corporations and the wealthy while leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves.

Engines of Liberty: How Citizen Movements Succeed
From the national legal director of the ACLU, an essential guidebook for anyone seeking to stand up for fundamental civil liberties and rights.

Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want
Americans are distraught as tightly held economic and political power drowns out their voices and values. Legendary Diet for a Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappé and organizer-scholar Adam Eichen offer a fresh, surprising response to this core crisis. This intergenerational duo opens with an essential truth: It’s not the magnitude of a challenge that crushes the human spirit. It’s feeling powerless—in this case, fearing that to stand up for democracy is futile.

Corporations and American Democracy
Recent Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and other high-profile cases have sparked disagreement about the role of corporations in American democracy. Bringing together scholars of history, law, and political science, Corporations and American Democracy provides essential grounding for today’s policy debates.

Pay-to-Play Politics: How Money Defines the American Democracy
Pay-to-Play Politics examines money and politics from different angles to understand a central paradox of American democracy: why, when the public and politicians decry money as the worst aspect of American politics, are there so few signs of change? Heather Brown

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
Who are the immensely wealthy right-wing ideologues shaping the fate of America today? From the bestselling author of The Dark Side, an electrifying work of investigative journalism that uncovers the agenda of this powerful group.

In her new preface, Jane Mayer discusses the results of the most recent election and Donald Trump’s victory, and how, despite much discussion to the contrary, this was a huge victory for the billionaires who have been pouring money in the American political system.

Taxation Only With Representation
This book is the first comprehensive discussion of corruption in campaign finance from the viewpoint of a political conservative. In this book, Richard Painter discusses how our money driven campaign system undermines the vision of our Founding Fathers and just about every principle that conservatives believe in. Painter then lays out a plan for reform that conservatives, and the Supreme Court, will embrace: defining the government’s right to tax its citizens in a way that will give each citizen a real voice in funding campaigns for elected officials. Forward by John Pudner.

American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper
From the groundbreaking author team behind the bestselling Winner-Take-All Politics, a timely and topical work that examines what’s good for American business and what’s good for Americans—and why those interests are misaligned.

In Winner-Take-All Politics, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson explained how political elites have enabled and propelled plutocracy. Now in American Amnesia, they trace the economic and political history of the United States over the last century and show how a viable mixed economy has long been the dominant engine of America’s prosperity.

Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy
In Captured, U.S. Senator and former federal prosecutor Sheldon Whitehouse offers an eye-opening take on what corporate influence looks like today from the Senate Floor, adding a first-hand perspective to Jane Mayer’s Dark Money.

Americans know something is wrong in their government. Senator Whitehouse combines history, legal scholarship, and personal experiences to provide the first hands-on, comprehensive explanation of what’s gone wrong, exposing multiple avenues through which our government has been infiltrated and disabled by corporate powers. Captured reveals an original oversight by the Founders, and shows how and why corporate power has exploited that vulnerability: to strike fear in elected representatives who don’t “get right” by threatening million-dollar “dark money” election attacks (a threat more effective and less expensive than the actual attack); to stack the judiciary—even the Supreme Court—in “business-friendly” ways; to “capture” the administrative agencies meant to regulate corporate behavior; to undermine the civil jury, the Constitution’s last bastion for ordinary citizens; and to create a corporate “alternate reality” on public health and safety issues like climate change..

Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It
American democracy has become coin operated. Special interest groups increasingly control every level of government. The necessity of raising huge sums of campaign cash has completely changed the character of politics and policy making, determining what elected representatives stand for and how they spend their time. The marriage of great wealth and intense political influence has rendered our country unable to address our most pressing problems, from runaway government spending to climate change to the wealth gap. By Wendell Potter.

When Money Talks: The High Price of “Free” Speech and the Selling of Democracy
Special-interest money is destroying our democratic process. But now that the Citizens United decision has thrown out campaign spending limits as abridgments of free speech, Americans want to know what they can do about it. Derek Cressman gives us the tools, both intellectual and tactical, to fight back.

Breaking Big Money’s Grip on America: Working Together to Revive Our Democracy
This book is an urgent call to all Americans to focus on a critical issue: huge sums of money unjustly influencing US elections and public policy. Some people see the United States as a plutocracy run by and for the very rich. Breaking Big Money’s Grip on America provides convincing evidence to support this view and explores how a nationwide Democracy Movement can overcome Big Money’s control and convert our government into one that serves the needs of the American people. It also demonstrates why breaking Big Money’s grip is critical to solving other crucial issues like gun violence and income inequality. Whether you are a conservative, moderate, liberal, or progressive, your participation is vital for fixing our broken political system.

Madison’s Music: On Reading the First Amendment
It turns out that everything you learned about the First Amendment is wrong. For too long, we’ve been treating small, isolated snippets of the text as infallible gospel without looking at the masterpiece of the whole. Legal luminary Burt Neuborne argues that the structure of the First Amendment as well as of the entire Bill of Rights was more intentional than most people realize, beginning with the internal freedom of conscience and working outward to freedom of expression and finally freedom of public association. This design, Neuborne argues, was not to protect discrete individual rights—such as the rights of corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections—but to guarantee that the process of democracy continues without disenfranchisement, oppression, or injustice.

Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United
When Louis XVI presented Benjamin Franklin with a snuff box encrusted with diamonds and inset with the King’s portrait, the gift troubled Americans: it threatened to “corrupt” Franklin by clouding his judgment or altering his attitude toward the French in subtle psychological ways. This broad understanding of political corruption―rooted in ideals of civic virtue―was a driving force at the Constitutional Convention. By Zephyr Teachout.

Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets
Best-selling author Peter Schweizer conducts a bombshell investigation which reveals how Washington really works: politicians extort money from us, then use it to buy each other’s votes and line their own pockets.

Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America
Fresh from the first $10 billion election campaign, two award-winning authors, John Nichols and Robert McChesney, show how unbridled campaign spending defines our politics and, failing a dramatic intervention, signals the end of our democracy.

Corporations Are Not People
Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It by Jeffrey Clements.

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress–and a Plan to Stop It
In an era when special interests funnel huge amounts of money into our government-driven by shifts in campaign-finance rules and brought to new levels by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission-trust in our government has reached an all-time low. More than ever before, Americans believe that money buys results in Congress, and that business interests wield control over our legislature. By Lawrence Lessig.

The Betrayal of the American Dream
America’s unique prosperity is based on its creation of a middle class. Incredibly, however, for more than thirty years, government and big business in America have conspired to roll back the American dream. What was once accessible to a wide swath of the population is increasingly open only to a privileged few. The story of how the American middle class has been systematically impoverished and its prospects thwarted in favor of a new ruling elite is at the heart of this extraordinarily timely and revealing book, by Donald Barlett and James Steele.

Greedy Bastards
How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters, and Other Vampires from Sucking America Dry by Dylan Ratigan.

So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government
In So Damn Much Money, veteran Washington Post editor and correspondent Robert Kaiser gives a detailed account of how the boom in political lobbying since the 1970s has shaped American politics by empowering special interests, undermining effective legislation, and discouraging the country’s best citizens from serving in office.

Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism
Democracy is struggling in America–by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms “inverted totalitarianism”?

Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class – And What We Can Do about It
Nationally syndicated radio host and bestselling author Thom Hartmann exposes the covert war conservatives, and corporations are waging against America’s middle class…a war that’s reducing the rest of us to a politically impotent working poor. This book asks: How did this happen? Who’s benefiting? And how can we stop it?

Gangs of America
The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy by Ted Nace. The corporation has become the core institution of the modern world. Designed to seek profit and power, it has pursued both with endless tenacity, steadily bending the framework of law and even challenging the sovereign status of the state.

Unequal Protection
The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights by Thom Hartmann.

The Elite Consensus: When Corporations Wield the Constitution
Financial and business corporations throw millions of dollars at think tanks, lobbyists and universities, exploiting writers and artists galore. Their assignment? To twist words, gnarl symbols, sell lies, whip people into line. The Elite Consensus fingers the American Enterprise Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Chamber of Commerce, the Heritage Foundation, and many other “educational” corporations, which men of property have unleashed on this planet. The author shows how these corporate con artists teach us our history, elect our representatives, write our laws, define ideas and frame public policy debates. By George Draffan.

Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy
A book of History and Strategy by Dean Ritz (POCLAD).

When Corporations Rule the World
This second edition updates the reader on the deepening human crisis of the global economy. The gap between rich and poor continues to grow, and people continue to exploit the planet. David Korten writes of the new global citizens’ movement of activism in response to corporate globalization, and of civil society groups’ efforts to restructure global economic governance. He transitions from a critical analysis of the new world order to an optimistic focus on the role of spirit and culture in a “civilized” society.