Money talks

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Lindsay Mark Lewis

"In 1992, when Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush, political fundraising was considered an afterthought. Their campaigns spent $192 million--combined! In contrast, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent over $7 billion to beat one another in 2012--36 times more than that spent just 20 years before. How is it that politics has become so focused on the almighty dollar and the cost of political campaigns so expensive? Lindsay Mark Lewis is arguably the person best able to answer those questions--the notorious political fundraiser renowned for his willingness to do almost anything to get the next political dollar in the war chest. He was part of the new political mob responsible for the excessive influence of money on campaigns. Co-authored with writer and political analyst Jim Arkedis, Political Mercenaries is a fascinating look into how American politics, to contradict former Speaker Tip O'Neill, is now all national money. This book emerges at a time when millions of Americans are more skeptical than ever about politicians on both sides of the aisle and how they obtain the money that funds their campaigns"--

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David Petechuk

Examines the issues surrounding campaign finance and fundraising in politics, highlighting the effects of political action committees.

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Nat Hentoff

For years now, Nat Hentoff has been the best-known lay guardian of the magnificent spirit and letter of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. His principled advocacy of free expression for all seems to be needed more than ever today, at a time of appalling assaults on expression not only by traditional opponents on the political right - those offended by what they consider obscene or radical or otherwise taboo - but also from the left - radical feminists calling for the suppression of pornography, members of minorities banning language they consider psychologically damaging, and various other proponents of so-called political correctness. These more recently minted censors are now to be found within such former bastions of free speech as the universities and even the American Civil Liberties Union. This urgently important book is not a mere collection of legal cases; neither is it a history of free expression or a polemic from either left or right. It is rather a wide-ranging report on - and analysis of - the many kinds of conflicts throughout our country between the illusion that this is a land of unfettered free speech and the reality when that illusion is acted upon. It is a book of many stories - of the continuing efforts to deprive students of Mark Twain's masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, and of attempts to deprive other students of the right not to read books that offend them; of the well-intentioned rulings that result in speech codes and loyalty oaths; of the wide-spread lack of understanding, over the years, of such basic concepts as the marketplace of ideas and of the overriding value of untrammeled speech. Free Speech for Me - But Not for Thee is a book about fear, duplicity, some courage, a lot of hypocrisy, and a good deal of irony. It is a book of dramatic confrontations, of people acting, for better or for worse, on one of the most important of our domestic battlefields. And above all, it presents hopeful, practical suggestions for ways toward saving perhaps the most fragile of our cherished freedoms.

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Athanasios Moulakis

Simone Weil and the Politics of Self-Denial delivers what no other book on Weil has - a comprehensive study of her political thought. In this examination of the development of her thought, Athanasios Moulakis offers a philosophical understanding of politics that reaches beyond current affairs and ideological advocacy. Simone Weil - philosopher, activist, mystic - unites a profound reflection on the human condition with a consistent and courageous existential and intellectual honesty manifest in the moving testimony of her life and her death. Moulakis examines Weil's political thought as an integral part of a lived philosophy, in which analysis and doctrine are inseparable from the articulation of an intensely personal, ultimately religious experience. Because it is impossible to distinguish Weil's life from her thought, her writings cannot be understood properly without linking them to her life and character. By situating Weil's political thought within the context of the intellectual climate of her time, Moulakis connects it also to her epistemology, her cosmology, and her personal experience. Weil has been categorized a number of ways: as a saint and a near convert to Roman Catholicism, as a social critic, or as an analytic philosopher. Moulakis examines all aspects of Weil's thought in the indissoluble unity in which she lived them. This thorough investigation pursues the particular intellectual affiliations and the social and political experiential stimuli of Weil's work while simultaneously teasing out the timeless themes that her own timely analysis was intended to reveal.