Politics -

Last updated 04-25-2026

We are living through a very interesting time when US Hegemony is being contested. This section will have a narrow focus on reviews of books that I have found useful in understanding these changes.

Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic – Reconstruction 1860-1920, 2024. Ms. Sinha expands her coverage to the ratification of female suffrage in 1920 because during the earlier period of reconstruction there had been a debate on whether to prioritize Black male suffrage, or women’s suffrage. This allows her to also show how the expansion of federal forces to protect African American rights, was later used to finish the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans which was completed by 1890. The expansion of rights is always contested by those who benefited from their restriction.

The end of WW I was a period very active in worker organizing. This history is not taught in American public schools. Clara Mattei, Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, 2022
https://www.claramattei.com/books/the-capital-order

Laurence H. Shoup, Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2019, 2015. https://monthlyreview.org/product/wall-streets-think-tank/ The wealthy are very well organized. They do not march. Instead they fund think tanks, academic institutes, and lobbyists . They supply candidates to our duopoly parties. Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Linda Thomas-Greenfield were all members of the CFR. All Biden needed to do was read the teleprompter. The corresponding top level think tank for the GOP is the Heritage Foundation.

Our National Accounts (GDP) show every insurance premium, fender bender, and illness as positives, but these are really only transfer payments, not new production. In the 1950s, the financial sector made less than 10% of corporate profits. By 2015 this number represented upwards of 30%. (page 267) Mehrsa Baradaran, The Quiet Coup, Neoliberalism and the Looting of America, 2024. The author is a professor of law UC, Irvine, specializing in banking law. Just as the financial sector has expanded, so has the legal profession expanded to create new forms of property rights for the financial sector.

Katharina Pistor, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, 2019. Katharina Pistor is Associate Professor of Law, Columbia Law School.

Richard Beck, Homeland – the War on Terror in American Life, 2024. Quoting review from my public library catalog: “For twenty years after September 11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. With all of the military violence occurring overseas even as the threat of sudden mass death permeated life at home, Americans found themselves living in two worlds at the same time. In one of them, soldiers fought overseas so that nothing at home would have to change at all. In the other, life in the United States took on all kinds of unfamiliar shapes, changing people’s sense of themselves, their neighbors, and the strangers they sat next to on airplanes. In Homeland, Richard Beck delivers a gripping exploration of how much the war changed life in the United States and explains why there is no going back. Though much has been made of the damage that Donald Trump did to the American political system, Beck argues that it was the war on terror that made Trump’s presidency possible, fueling and exacerbating a series of crises that all came to a head with his rise to power. Homeland brilliantly isolates and explores four key issues: the militarism that swept through American politics and culture; the racism and xenophobia that boiled over in much of the country; an economic crisis that, Beck convincingly argues, connects the endurance of the war on terror to at least the end of the Second World War; and a lack of accountability that produced our ‘impunity culture’ – the government-wide inability or refusal to face consequences that has transformed how the U.S. government relates to the people it governs. To see American life through the lens of Homeland’s sweeping argument is to understand the roots of our current condition. In its startling analysis of how the war on terror hollowed out the very idea of citizenship in the United States, Beck gives the most compelling explanation yet offered for the ongoing disintegration of America’s social, political, and cultural fabric.” —

I have been reading Columbia University professor of Anthropology, Claudio Lomnitz’s memoir, Nuestra América, 2021. His maternal grandfather was born in 1904 in Nova Sulitza in a district of Hotin, Bessarabia. His house was on the Russian side of the main street that divided Bessarabia (Russian Empire) from Bukovina (Austro-Hungarian Empire). This predates the Russian October 1917 revolution. While prerevolutionary Russia discriminated against Jews, the post revolutionary government sought initially to protect all ethnic minorities and had some ideas about creating ethic homelands so that each could thrive. We learn a lot of history as his grandparents migrate to Peru following WW I. Palestine was not the favored destination for most professional Jews at that time. Rich Jews in Britain did not want a mass migration of poor Eastern Jews to Britain. Britain did not want Communist Jews to challenge the elite owners of the means of production. Oil was discovered in Persia. The beginnings of the Zionist movement had much in common with similar movements of German youth for a lifestyle of vigorous outdoor sports and manual labor, but of course these groups diverged when the Nazis came to power. Palestine was on a trading route so there were cities in which different groups lived peacefully, but agriculture required a lot of work to drain swamps, or to irrigate so this was not initially attractive to Jewish professionals who preferred to move to the US and following Hitler’s defeat back to Europe where they could practice their established professions.

In South America, colonial elites saw Jews as Europeans like themselves and welcomed them to expand the colonial population and displace or exploit the indigenous population.

The author applies the tools of anthropology to understand the choices each generation of his ancestors made according to their ages when they became challenged by traumatic national events. Parents chose to hide information that would be anxiety producing in their young children.

“According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Justice, approximately 90% to 93% of child sexual abuse victims know their abuser.” Keep this in mind when reading Virginia Roberts Giuffre (1983-2025), Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, 2025. She was first abused by her father and a male friend of her father’s. Her father worked for Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
I was impressed by the first half of the book. I recommend first reading

Reviewed here: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1995-98170-000

Epstein is reportedly deceased. Ghislaine Maxwell, 63, is serving a 20-year sentence. This does not protect the majority of victims who are abused by family members they trust or coaches, religious leaders, teachers, or friends of their parents. While Epstein’s estate should provide help for his victims, the more interesting part of the Epstein story is political. What impact did his network have in manipulating powerful decision makers? Giuffre names some names, but they did not have these kinds of discussions with her so she can not help us with this.

Jonathan , Hubris, the American Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine, 2024,2025, Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University. Back cover has an endorsement by Jeffrey Sachs. Interesting documentation of history of US decision making. Since its publication date, it is looking more like Putin will prevail with the terms dictated on the battlefield.