For those who don’t know, Humble Bundle is an online seller that offers bundles of digital products for two weeks that are great bargains.
Usually they offer computer game bundles, but sometimes broaden the offerings, and they are offering bundles of digital books on liberal takes on capitalism.
The bundles come in three tiers, each including the ones below it.
For $1 you get four books:
Agenda for a New Economy, This Changes Everything: Occupy and the 99% Movement, The Gift of Anger: Use Passion to Build, Not Destroy, and Corporations are Not People
For $8, you also get:
When Corporations Rule The World, The Reunited States of America: How We Can Bridge the Partisan Divide, Affluenza: How Overconsumption Is Killing Us, Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better, From Crisis to Calling (a book about morality), and Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class by Thom Hartmann.
The top $15 tier also includes:
The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins, How the Poor Can Save Capitalism, Rebalancing Society: Radical Renewal Beyond Left, Right and Center, The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations and the Public, and Change The Story, Change the Future
I’m not familiar with many of the books and can’t review them. I was going to say Thom Hartmann’s “Screwed” as I remember it is a fairly conventional book on economic inequality; good, but probably not a lot you don’t know. But then I checked the book description for a refresher, and maybe it offers more than I recall, an excerpt:
Conservatives didn't intuit the path to persuasive messaging—they learned these techniques. There is no reason why progressives can't learn them too. In Cracking the Code, Hartmann shows you how. Drawing on his background as a psychotherapist and advertising executive as well as a national radio host, he breaks down the science and technology of effective communication so you can apply it to your own efforts to counter right-wing disinformation. It's both an art and a science—as Hartmann explains, political persuasion is as much about biology as ideology, about knowing how the brain processes information and how that influences the way people perceive messages, make decisions, and form a worldview.
The book I was most interested in getting is this volume in John Perkins’ books about Economic Hit Man issues.
If you’re not familiar with them, Perkins says he was an ‘EHM’, which is defined as a person — he was an economist — who sales foreign nations on economic plans that will reward the leaders who approve them, greatly profit the American corporations who push them, and devastate the people of the country that implements them, putting it in great debt to give the US leverage to extract more wealth.
He claims there is an escalation around this agenda — if he can sell the plan to the country or reward its leaders to accept it, great. If not, the “jackals” might be sent in — the CIA, basically, to create pressure on the leader, to overthrow them, even to assassinate them. And if even that is not an option the last resort considered is a military action. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether his stories are literally true or meant to illustrate events, but either way they’re remarkable ways to look at the activities.
Affluenza wasn’t a favorite, but has an interesting message about the excesses of consumption.
The sale ends at the beginning of November.