Meet the One Percent: Peter Phillips’ Giants: The Global Power Elite by Marc Eliot Stein

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Dandelion Salad

Republished with permission from David Swanson at World Beyond War

by Marc Eliot Stein
World Beyond War, Aug. 25, 2018
August 26, 2018

Peter Phillips, professor of Political Sociology at Sonoma State University and media researcher for Project Censored and Media Freedom Foundation, presented a summary of his groundbreaking new book Giants: The Global Power Elite last week at Fordham University’s campus in Manhattan. This was an information-packed session that explained the unique purpose of this new book: exposing to public view the private workings of the influential investment partnerships, global councils, think tanks, consortiums and other non-governmental organizations that translate the agenda of the wealthy one-percent into policy plans and proposals that the most powerful governments in the world can act on.

Silicon Valley Will Not Save You from the Surveillance State by David Swanson

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by David Swanson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Let’s Try Democracy
July 6, 2018

There was something quite odd about the very welcome news that some Google employees were objecting to a military contract, namely all the other Google military contracts. My sense of the oddness of this was heightened by reading Yasha Levine’s new book, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.

Chris Hedges and Seymour Hersh: A Quest For Truth + The World According to Seymour Hersh by David Swanson

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Dandelion Salad

Updated: July 2, 2018

with Chris Hedges

RT America on June 30, 2018

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, Seymour M. Hersh discusses the quest for truth with host, Chris Hedges.

Why Are the Poor Patriotic? by David Swanson

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by David Swanson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Let’s Try Democracy, June 15, 2018
June 20, 2018

We should be very grateful to Francesco Duina for his new book, Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country. He begins with the following dilemma. The poor in the United States are in many ways worse off than in other wealthy countries, but they are more patriotic than are the poor in those other countries and even more patriotic than are wealthier people in their own country. Their country is (among wealthy countries) tops in inequality, and bottoms in social support, and yet they overwhelmingly believe that the United States is “fundamentally better than other countries.” Why?

David Swanson: How American Exceptionalism Is Exploited to Justify War + How Suzy Hansen Lost Her U.S. Exceptionalism

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by David Swanson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Let’s Try Democracy
May 10, 2018

TheRealNews on May 9, 2018

Writer and activist David Swanson discusses his new book Curing Exceptionalism, with TRNN’s Ben Norton, exploring how American nationalism and the myth of US superiority is used to justify hyper-militarism and capitalist oppression.

Dandelions and Plunder Monkeys by System Humanity

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

by System Humanity
Guest Writer, Dandelion Salad
crossposted at System Humanity, April 16, 2018
April 18, 2018

What a good read I said to myself when I had finished The Dandelion Insurrection by Rivera Sun. And unusual. A delicious story with nourishing political content spiced with distinctive characters and served on beautiful prose. Love, adventure, struggle and thrills. What’s not to like? For an old grassroots political fox such as myself I wasn’t about to allow the sweetness of the fiction seduce my perception of bitter realities.

The Crucifixion of the Black Messiah by Greg Maybury

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by Greg Maybury
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Pox Amerikana
April 4, 2018

On this the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, a soon-to-be-published book provides us the most comprehensive account of this event, the shock of which reverberated across America and the world. More than that, the anniversary gives us all ample reason to reflect on the man and his impact, and where America is at present in the context of the main pursuits to which he devoted his life: racial equality, justice, liberty, truth, freedom, and peace. Oh, and a slice of the American Dream. Australian writer Greg Maybury reports.

The Roots of Resistance: An Intense Journey Into The Vibrant Complexity Of Nonviolent Change by Tom Atlee

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Sent to Dandelion Salad by Rivera Sun

by Tom Atlee
March 17, 2018

Rivera Sun always gifts us with usefully creative fiction in the face of daunting challenges to future generations, to current society, to marginalized communities, and to all of us as citizens of our planet. Her Roots of Resistance – the second novel of her Dandelion Trilogy – offers an inspiring story to help guide love-based strategic change efforts during what promises to be a very messy transition to a better world. The novel imagines deeply human responses to our civilizational predicament and to the challenges we (especially as change agents) will face as we try to put such responses into practice.

Beyond the Endless Soap Opera and Superficial Coverage of the Reigning Media-Politics Culture by Paul Street

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by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
January 26, 2018

With the news cycle taken over by the latest madness emerging from the mouth or Twitter feed of the childish “orange one” in the White House, could we step back from the circus to reflect like adults on the social and historical forces that produced the clown presidency? Haymarket Books’ new collection of essays by leading left political analysts, US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality, is required reading for anyone interested in such reflections on Donald Trump.

Rivera Sun’s The Roots of Resistance, reviewed by Guadamour

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by Guadamour
Writer, Dandelion Salad
January 20, 2018

The Roots Of Resistance (Rising Sun Press 2017) is the second book in the Dandelion Insurrection trilogy by Rivera Sun. The first book deals with how a non-violent revolution in the United States is able to topple an extremely corrupt corporate controlled federal government, and this book details problems entailed in implementing its policies which are aimed at benefiting the general public.

When a Nuclear War Planner Confesses by David Swanson + Daniel Ellsberg Reveals He was a Nuclear War Planner

Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Watch the video below

by David Swanson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Let’s Try Democracy
December 7, 2017

Daniel Ellsberg’s new book is The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. I’ve known the author for years, I’m prouder than ever to say. We have done speaking events and media interviews together. We’ve been arrested together protesting wars. We’ve publicly debated electoral politics. We’ve privately debated the justness of World War II. (Dan approves of U.S. entry into World War II, and it seems into the war on Korea as well, though he has nothing but condemnation for the bombing of civilians that made up so much of what the U.S. did in those wars.) I’ve valued his opinion and he has rather inexplicably asked for mine on all sorts of questions. But this book has just taught me a great deal I had not known about Daniel Ellsberg and about the world.

The Not-Radical “Socialist” From Vermont by Paul Street

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by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street, Oct. 23, 2017
Previously published at Counterpunch, Oct. 20, 2017
October 29, 2017

Time as a Democracy and Socialist Movement Issue

Working-class and pro-working-class socialists and left anarchists have long fought for shorter working hours (with no reductions in pay) for some very good radically democratic reasons. It isn’t just that workers’ everyday lives and collective marketplace and workplace bargaining power are enhanced when they are freed from the scourge of over-work and when working hours are spread more evenly across the workforce. Beyond these real and meaningful gains, rank-and-file socialists and left anarchists have long supported decent working hours so that workers can have enough time to develop tastes and build knowledge and organizations to fight for a world beyond the rule of capitalism, the profit- and accumulation-addicted system that, in Karl Marx’s famous 1848 words, “resolve[s] personal worth into exchange value” and “le[aves] no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’”

From Great Wars, Come Great Consequences by Greg Maybury

by Greg Maybury
Guest Writer, Dandelion Salad
Pox Amerikana, Sept. 19, 2017
September 21, 2017

…[In] such trying games of conquest, results might never be expected to take shape quickly…Imperial stratagems are protracted affairs. The captains of world aggression measure their achievements…on a timescale whose unit is the generation. It’s within such a frame that the incubation of Nazism should be gauged: it was a long and elaborate plan to eliminate the possibility of German hegemony over the continent. And the stewards of the empire took their time.’ — Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Created the Third Reich, Guido Preparata (© 2006)

Pull Down That Statue of the U.S. Constitution by David Swanson

Image by Brad Dougherty via Flickr

with David Swanson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Let’s Try Democracy
September 17, 2017

Nobody, not racist warmakers, not imaginary non-racist warmakers, not founding fathers, not radical protesters should be made into a deity, larger than life, in marble or bronze, on horseback or otherwise. Nobody is that flawless, and nobody’s story so withstands the test of time. We need human-sized statues and memorials of whole movements.

Obama: A Hollow Man Filled With Ruling Class Ideas by Paul Street + Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama and the Limitations of Liberal Criticism

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by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street, June 6, 2017
June 8, 2017

A “Hollow” Man Who Was “Unwilling to Fight the Good Fight”

What on Earth motivated the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and law professor David J. Garrow to write an incredibly detailed 1078-page (1460 pages with endnotes and index included) biography of Barack Obama from conception through election to the White House? Not any great personal affinity for Obama on Garrow’s part, that’s for sure. Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama is no hagiography. On the last page of this remarkable tome, Garrow describes Obama at the end of his distinctly non-transformative and “failed presidency” as a man who had long ago had become a “vessel [that] was hollow at its core.”