Work Is for the People: A Treatise on the -Isms

Work is for the People should be of value to anyone who cares about civil rights, human rights, and the rights of working people and consumers as well as those who believe that government is not automatically evil and incompetent. Despite its strong language, this is not a radical or extremist book. Readers interested in current events, the economy, politics from the local to the international arena, war and peace, and even the place of religion in society need to be conversant with the nature of the various belief systems that drive public discourse in this country and the Western world today.

The style is straightforward and somewhat militant. It redefines the isms to give readers a new and unconventional view of the orthodox arguments in common use now. The book exposes the false definitions used by our contending factions and provides a different set of values for thinkers and describers to use in judging our common beliefs. These values are not new. They come from our Bill of Rights, the freedom amendments passed by the radical Republicans after the Civil War, from the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

According to the author, in a democracy, the system of work is supposed to be designed to benefit the people, not owners and bosses. He attacks the Supreme Court s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, calling it corporatist. He also condemns torture as an atrocity and the indiscriminate wars and sanctions against Iraq as genocidal.

The book is liberal in outlook but it should be of interest to conservatives and libertarians too, if for no other reason than to see what their counterparts believe about them. While it is not strongly partisan, it does call for a fairly regulated capitalism in place of the travesty of the unelected, unregulated, and predatory capitalism we have now.

Dettagli