Reader's Choice

If you're tired of the flood of rightwing books that portray President Obama as a third-worlder, closet Muslim,a post-American President who wants us weak because of some ideology borrowed from Saul Alinsky,the hero of the teabaggers, I have just the book for you. If you are a leftist, you might even agree with the author. Fidel Castro enters into the Obama book fad with his small book of essays, "Obama and the Empire" (Ocean Books, 2011 (first book of the New Year)). Fidel says that after the white males of the United States screwed up so badly and capitalism went into a global crisis,the powerbrokers needed to find someone who did not match the usual profile of the white male patriarch in order to salvage the political-economic system. In a racist society, such a man was found in Barack Obama, who could then be used to deceive the world and restore America's fading prestige. Castro claims it was a cruel joke to play on those who struggled in the African-American liberation struggle--which normal people call the civil rights movement. Castro gets in his usual jibes and pet themes in the book. He says that Barack Obama received the Nobel prize for having won the presidential election in a racist society--which is true-- but then nominates Evo Morales for the Prize. He criticizes Obama's relationship with the new generation of anti-Castro Cubans and blasts the virtual annexation of Colombia by the United States. And Castro comes through on the issue of climate change and uses this theme to taunt the industrialized countries. Probably Bill Ayers would agree.

If you endured the revisionist history of the Pilgrims put out by Fox News over Thanksgiving--that the Pilgrims abandoned socialism for capitalism in order to survive, you might treat yourself to a superb new history of the Pilgrims by British author Nick Bunker (Knopf). "Making Haste from Babylon:the Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World" explores extensive new materials discovered in England and New England to draw a new portrait of the Pilgrims' religious and political experiment and the creation of a little new empire in New England based on the extensive trading of beaver pelts to England. Beaver pelts were considered the equivalent of the gold in El Dorado and assisted the Pilgrims' rise in political fortunes. As for John Winthrop's "City on the Hill", he warned that the greatest threat to it was Greed, something true today and then.

If you have read the extensive critiques of coal mining and listened to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s environmentalism,the counter-intuitive response is James Fallows' "Why the Future of Clean Energy is Dirty Coal: It's the only way to stop Global Warming."(Atlantic, December 2010). Fallows examines the joint U.S.-China Clean Coal Project led by our Energy Secretary Stephen Chu. The project is due to open its first plant in China next year and then come to the States in 2014. Stephen Chu said this past week that the advances by China in the area of alternative energy should be this generation's "Sputnik" moment. Fat chance that our political system will seize the moment. That's why the stimulus package had billions in seed money for these clean energy sources. Fallows' article is fascinating how international cooperation works away from the media limelight. The China-U.S.team has been working constantly for several years and have developed a productive working method and a sense of camaraderie among the participants.

Steven Weber and Bruce Jentleson believe the United States must develop new approaches to engage the world and can not rely on hegemony. Free-market capitaism, hegemony, Western culture, peace and democracy--the ideas that shaped world politics in the twentieth century have lost a great deal of their strength and political and cultural authority is now more contested and power more diffuse than ever. The United States must now see itself as competing in the world of ideas instead of waging a war of ideas. Now ideas and influence are the critical currency, even more than military might. Weber and Jentleson have written a small but dense book "The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas" (Harvard, 2010).

Continuing his excellent writing on torture, Scott Horton in Harper's analyzes the Wikileaks Cable dated February 6, 2007, which covers the American efforts to stop Germany from indicting CIA officers who renditioned and tortured a German citizen and green grocer Khaled El-Masri, who was mistaken as an Al Qaeda agent from the Hamburg cell. El-Masri was travelling by bus to Skopje, Macedona to visit his family. He was seized by the CIA and protested he was innocent of anything. He was beaten, stripped naked, shot full of drugs, given an enema and put into a diaper and sent to the CIA "snake pit" in Afghanistan where they conducted harsh interrogation. Despite the insistence of Washington on El-Masri's guilt, CIA on the ground were convinced he was the wrong man and that he had been right all along. Deciding that he knew too much he was held incommunicado. Later he was bundled up and left off alone miles from his Macedonian home. After walking to the village where his wife and family were supposed to be , he found out from neighbors that they thought he had abandoned them so they moved to Lebanon. Horton deals with Condi Rice and Jeff Ballinger's attempt to get the Germans off the case of persecuting the CIA agents. What's clear from the exchange was that the decision to seize El-Masri was made in Washington and probably by Condi Rice herself.

Following that up is Horton's interpretation of the Wikileaks Cable that showed that the Obama Administration and former Bush officials interferred with the Spanish courts so that they didn't bring war crimes charges against Bush, Cheney, Richard Addington,Yoo and others for condoning torture. Revelations of this interference have fueled outrage among the American Left. It was bad enough, they reasoned, that Obama just wanted to move forward and not look back but here he's interferring with another country's judicial system, perverting both their justice system and our own.