Kalleberg’s solution requires rethinking the social contract, a tough sell in individualistic America. He refers to the European concept of “flexicurity,” which seeks to combine employer flexibility with worker security. Doing so requires rethinking the relationship between public and private. The essential elements of such a model require universal, affordable, portable health insurance which ideally should be separated from employment. It also requires a more secure and portable pension system, more generous unemployment insurance, and greater opportunities to acquire new skills and education over the course of a lifetime. If employment is more transient and employers invest little in their workers, then a revitalized social safety net needs to fill in the gaps.

One might note that the high point of American power (absolute as opposed to relative, after the collapse of the USSR) coincides with peak of oil production in the US, and that the sudden rise in American pathologies coincides fairly closely with the oil crises of the 70s and early 80s, for example. Hustling, eternal growth, works when cheap energy is readily available, when more, more, more is possible, and when growth is choked, the hustlers, rather than growing the pie, turn on each other in a vicious “war of all against all”.

Crude Awakening explains the growing pains and tribulations of a new state coming of age in the modern era – a state of wilderness, and Sourdoughs, thousands of years of Native culture, fishermen, prospectors and pioneers, brilliant minds and brave souls writing their own Constitution. In some ways comparable to the spirit of newness, hope and optimism of Philadelphia in the 1830s, Alaska’s coming out party had a darker and more raucous side.

This book is a fast and easy read so you will absorb a ton of well-researched factual knowledge without losing your horse, crawling through the desert, or emptying your canteen. It’s a fun, easy way to learn and understand a whole lot of important information that banksters would prefer you never know and delivered in a way that exposes the hypocrisy of many of the proposed “cures” for our current economic woes. It really is a terrific learning tool and delivers information in a form that even Members of Congress should be able to understand.

In July 2010, as Washington Post journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin were getting ready to publish the first article in their Top Secret America series, they got an unusual request from the office of the United States’ intelligence director: Please don’t publish a key part of your research.

How is it that Americans—consumers of the most media in the world—remain so misinformed about so many fundamental issues? How much does this phenomenon relate to the content offered by the news media? How much of mass media’s content is related to the political structures such as ownership, the law, and the organizations’ own goals? News for All The People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media examines this issue within two contexts – history and race.

Empire of Death is a comprehensive examination of the history of the Ossuaries and Charnel Houses in the European tradition. The bone houses, used for storage and decorative effects, present the living with the opportunity to confront or commune with death and the dead. Author, Art Historian and Photographer Paul Koudounaris’ central consideration in Empire of Death is the changing relations between the living and the dead as evinced in the treatment of bones and human bodies in these forms of monumental architecture.

Koudounaris’ meticulous research is shown in both vivid and remarkably sumptuous photography.

The United States was founded on the principle that no individual is above the law. We are, as John Adams said, “a nation of laws, not men.” But that principle is under assault, as Glenn Greenwald explains in his powerful new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.

Bunch tells the story of the bridge through the eyes of several vividly drawn characters: A 19-year-old veteran street protester with working class roots and a genius for escaping arrest; a 69-year-old retired lawyer who showed up on impulse after being moved by a play about the final day of Martin Luther King’s life; a painfully shy theater tech who found the movement online; a self-styled branding expert/saxophonist; and a 24-year-old Jewish immigrant from the former Soviet Union, drowning in student debt.

Professor Joseph McCartin, one of the nation’s leading scholars on the decline of the strike, has written the definitive account of the PATCO strike. In Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers and the Strike that Changed America, McCartin details two decades of struggle by this group of often militant Federal employees culminating in the failed 1981 strike. Collision Course is a well written, meticulously researched, and detailed account of the PATCO strike.