China has swallowed our jobs. Social security is going bankrupt. Radical Islamic terrorists threaten our safety. Our planet is on the brink of environmental disaster. Meanwhile, politicians pound their chests in ideological wars that enrich lobbyists and special interest groups at the expense of the American voter.If America today is at a crossroads, it is the millennial generation – long ridiculed as selfish egotists and narcissistic Twitter drones – that will face the momentous t...

A SCATHING LOOK AT THE STANDARD-BEARERS OF LIBERAL POLITICS—A BOOK THAT ASKS: WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH DEMOCRATS?“Thoroughly entertaining . . . Frank delights in skewering the sacred cows of coastal liberalism. . . . A serious political critique.”—The New York Times Book Review (front page)Now with a new afterword, The New York Times bestselling author Thomas Frank’s powerful analysis offers the best diagnosis to dat...

The crisis of the progressive movement is so evident that nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of its basic assumptions is required. Today's progressives now work for professional organizations more comfortable with the inside game in Washington DC (and capitols throughout the West), where they are outmatched and outspent by corporate interests. Labor unions now focus on the narrowest possible understanding of the interests of their members, and membership continues to decline in loc...

The symptoms of the crisis of the U.S. media are well-known-a decline in hard news, the growth of info-tainment and advertorials, staff cuts and concentration of ownership, increasing conformity of viewpoint and suppression of genuine debate. McChesney's new book, The Problem of the Media, gets to the roots of this crisis, explains it, and points a way forward for the growing media reform movement.Moving consistently from critique to action, the book explores the po...

Celebrants and skeptics alike have produced valuable analyses of the Internet's effect on us and our world, oscillating between utopian bliss and dystopian hell. But according to Robert W. McChesney, arguments on both sides fail to address the relationship between economic power and the digital world.McChesney's award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy skewered the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one. In Digital Disconnect

An inside look at the secretive world of elite philanthropists--and how they're quietly wielding ever more power to shape American life in ways both good and bad.While media attention focuses on famous philanthropists such as Bill Gates and Charles Koch, thousands of donors are at work below the radar promoting a wide range of causes. David Callahan charts the rise of these new power players and the ways they are converting the fortunes of a second Gilded Age into ...

The stories behind the inequality crisis—a forty-year investigation by In These TimesWith heart-wrenching reporting and incisive analysis, In These Times magazine has charted a staggering rise in inequality and the fall of the American middle class. Here, in a selection from four decades of articles by investigative reporters and progressive thinkers, is the story of our age. It is a tale of shockingly successful corporate takeovers stretching fro...

A 2012 ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEARMany of the United States' most innovative entrepreneurs have been immigrants, from Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, and Charles Pfizer to Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla, and Elon Musk. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies and one-quarter of all new small businesses were founded by immigrants, generating trillions of dollars annually, employing millions of workers, and helping establish the United States as the most entre...

Our Media, Not Theirs! The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media examines how the current media system in the United States undermines democracy, and what we can do to change it. McChesney and Nichols begin by detailing how the media system has come to be dominated by a handful of transnational conglomerates that use their immense political and economic power to saturate the population with commercial messages. Further, the authors provide an analysis of the burgeoning media reform a...

A bipartisan self-help guide to political activism for citizens wanting to improve the world around them—with real-life examples and practical tips—from one of Seattle’s most celebrated leadersFrom post-inauguration rallies to #NoDAPL and the Black Lives Matter movement to the global Women’s March on Washington, the people are exercising their power through protest and community organizing in a way that hasn’t been seen in years. For those looking to organize for t...

Political campaigns today are won or lost in the so-called ground war--the strategic deployment of teams of staffers, volunteers, and paid part-timers who work the phones and canvass block by block, house by house, voter by voter. Ground Wars provides an in-depth ethnographic portrait of two such campaigns, New Jersey Democrat Linda Stender's and that of Democratic Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut, who both ran for Congress in 2008.Rasmus Kleis Nielsen examines how Ame...

At any given moment, there are hundreds of campaigns under way that seek to persuade citizens or decision makers to think, act, or vote in a certain way. But what separates campaigns that win from those that don’t?This book shows how to combine old-school people power with new digital tools and data to win campaigns today. It explores the traditions and practices of organizing and how to marry these with digital communication tools to scale up campaigns and win. Over a dozen case s...