As historian Jay Feldman describes in his brilliantly researched and artfully written new book, Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America, there have indeed been a great many things wrong with this country specifically with respect to government attacks on civil liberties. Feldman pulls together a jaw-dropping historical catalogue of 20th Century examples where the United States government not only trampled the Bill of Rights, but did so while whipping up class warfare, xenophobic hysteria, and political mob violence, all on the pretext that war or the threat of war necessitated the abrogation of liberty.

David Swanson is a prominent anti-war activist who served as press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign and as a communications coordinator for ACORN. He is perhaps best known for his sustained efforts to promote awareness of the Downing Street memo, the secret note of a July 23, 2002 meeting of British government officials that revealed that the Bush Administration’s plans to invade and occupy Iraq had been cast at least ten months before the actual invasion and that Washington was striving to piece together a legal pretext for the invasion—“intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” in its remarkable words. Although the Bush Administration and the Blair Administration both scrambled to deny the obvious import of the memo, it remains a highly damning document which could in fact figure in a prosecution of the war’s promoters on a war-of-aggression theory, if such a prosecution were ever to be mounted.

Whenever the rewards for an action – profits, reproductive success, whatever – depend upon the relative performance of individuals within a group the problem of a divergence between the interests of individuals and the interest of the larger society is likely to be present. The book gives example after example of this “arms race” for positional goods, and details the waste of resources that this causes.

Perhaps we should begin with an offering from Goldman Sachs he covered closely, the Abacus deal, for which Goldman was fined. Mr. Cohan, please explain whether you believe Goldman was guilty of unethical or illegal activity in the sale of Abacus. Ultimately, I hope we get your views on why there have been no convictions, and why.

I encourage readers to purchase two copies of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism – one for themselves and one as a Christmas present for their right wing uncle. That uncle might well stay with Skocpol and Williamson’s highly readable and well-crafted study to the end without throwing it down in anger – something I can’t say with much confidence about my book with DiMaggio.

In the summer of 2011, 14 million Americans were unemployed and 16% of the country was officially poor. Student loan debt eclipsed credit card with over $1 trillion outstanding. One in five mortgages was underwater. Our leaders said the economy was recovering from the recession caused by the financial crisis, but their soothing pronouncements seemed to mock the evidence of our senses. On September 17, a group of activists converged on a small concrete plaza in lower Manhattan, determined to Occupy Wall Street.

Fondly nostalgic without ever descending into weepy misty water-colored memories, Lucking Out is populated with a who’s who of the 70′s culture explosion when a new breed of critics reinvented the rules, rock and roll collapsed inward upon itself and reemerged angry and raw, and porn stuck its head out from behind the peepshow curtains and found out that the time was right to come out and play with the non-raincoat crowd.

Beginning with the literary force of nature that was Norman Mailer whose letter of recommendation put Wolcott on the road to what should have been perdition, we also encounter Mailer’s bête noire Gore Vidal, Alfred Kazin, Groucho Marx (describing Marilyn Monroe as having “square tits”), Clay Felker, Robert Christgau ( the “self-proclaimed, scepter-wielding Dean of American Rock Critics” working the kitchen like June Cleaver while wearing only a pair of red sheer bikini underwear), Ellen Willis, Paulene Kael (whose presence permeates almost every page and to whom an entire section is devoted), Lucian Truscott IV, Joan Didion (wickedly eviscerated and hung out to dry by Kael), William and Wallace Shawn, Al Goldstein, Ed Asner, James Toback, Harold Brodkey, Andrew Sarris (whose entourage played the Sharks to Kael’s Paulette-Jets in a critics dance of death), David Lynch, Suzanne Farrell, Alene Croce, George Balanchine, Gelsey (“A name that falls in the mind’s ear like a sprig of mint”) Kirkland, Ugly George (a paleolithic Joe Francis armed with a shoulder-mounted camera and a perpetual hard-on), Tom Verlaine, John Cale, David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, The Ramones, Lester Bangs, and of course, Patti Smith.

What could possibly make a human being torture another human being?

That’s a question that, as a young boy, I recall asking my grandparents—Holocaust survivors—after they described to me in vivid detail the torture they and other members of my extended family were subjected to by the Nazis during World War II.

It’s a question I returned to earlier this year when I had the opportunity to interview a veteran of the US Army Reserves who was torn up about the torture he says he witnessed and participated in against some “war on terror” detainees while serving as a guard at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility. [That guard, Pfc. Albert Melise, has since been barred from reenlistment for speaking to me.]

Just last week, the 34-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation Development (OECD) released the results of its most recent study of the health care systems in the 40 counties considered to be “developed.” It came as no surprise to see that the U.S. health care system—if we can even call it a system—is still by far the most expensive on the planet.

We spend two-and-a-half times more on health care per person than the OECD average.

After reading Dr. John Geyman’s latest book, Breaking Point—How the Primary Care Crisis Endangers the Lives of Americans, I now understand why and how we have sunk so low.

A president elected in reaction to the economic and political environment. A president hated on the left for lack of bold action and accused by the right of being a socialist. A president who appears to struggle with any sort of confrontation within his own Administration and who appears to have continuing issues with quality of staffers. A president accused of promoting class warfare and ‘uncertainty’. A president with a justice on the Supreme Court who opposes him named Roberts. A president with a wife who is, to many, as controversial as he is. A president and an Administration during a time when bold decisive action is required, but who seem to suffer from chronic timidity.

Obama or Roosevelt? Both?