Educating Voters For Rebuilding America

NATIONAL CRISIS IN LEADERSHIP Ten years ago, our nation was on the right road to fiscal stability with four years of surpluses totaling $560 billion. Unfortunately, private and public sector senior executives made serious mistakes during the past decade, resulting in our federal government being on the road to a financial meltdown. This could lead to a long-term and deep economic depression like the 1930s. In Educating Voters for Rebuilding America, Jack Bowsher takes a deep, investigative look into how Americans can turn the country around. To avoid many tax increases being discussed in Washington, DC, Bowsher argues that there must be systemic changes in many areas of our government and in the free enterprise system. Only then will Americans enjoy economic prosperity, higher employment levels, affordable education systems, a balanced budget, a modern, nation-wide energy system, and much more. Bowsher describes how these national goals can be achieved in this decade by implementing the required systemic changes, and also shows how Social Security and Medicare benefits can be affordable in future years. Voters must be educated on the major issues and challenges facing our nation. Only they have the power to end the civil war between our two political parties by electing qualified candidates in the White House and Congress in 2012. Educate yourself today!

An expert on US election law presents an encouraging assessment of current efforts to make our voting system more accessible, reliable, and effective. In contrast to the anxiety surrounding our voting system, with stories about voter suppression and manipulation, there are actually quite a few positive initiatives toward voting rights reform. Professor Joshua A. Douglas, an expert on our electoral system, examines these encouraging developments in this inspiring book about how regular Americans are working to take back their democracy, one community at a time. Told through the narratives of those working on positive voting rights reforms, Douglas includes chapters on expanding voter eligibility, easing voter registration rules, making voting more convenient, enhancing accessibility at the polls, providing voters with more choices, finding ways to comply with voter ID rules, giving redistricting back to the voters, pushing back on big money through local and state efforts, using journalism to make the system more accountable, and improving civics education. At the end, the book includes an appendix that lists organizations all over the country working on these efforts. Unusually accessible for a lay audience and thoroughly researched, this book gives anyone fed up with our current political environment the ideas and tools necessary to affect change in their own communities.

A sobering account of a disenfranchised American working class and important policy solutions to the nation's economic inequalities One of the country's leading scholars on economics and social policy, Isabel Sawhill addresses the enormous divisions in American society--economic, cultural, and political--and what might be done to bridge them. Widening inequality and the loss of jobs to trade and technology has left a significant portion of the American workforce disenfranchised and skeptical of governments and corporations alike. And yet both have a role to play in improving the country for all. Sawhill argues for a policy agenda based on mainstream values, such as family, education, and work. Although many have lost faith in government programs designed to help them, there are still trusted institutions on both the local and the federal level that can deliver better job opportunities and higher wages to those who have been left behind. At the same time, the private sector needs to reexamine how it trains and rewards employees. This book provides a clear-headed and middle-way path to a better-functioning society in which personal responsibility is honored and inclusive capitalism and more broadly shared growth are once more the norm.

This book documents the unique and specific American principles for government. The bedrock principles are presented in Chapter One. John Adams, vice president under George Washington, and second president of the United States: . . . And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, . . . besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable . . . right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers. Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and trustees for the people; and if the cause, the interest and trust, is . . . wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority . . .. And the preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks, is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country. The Tea Party Colonists were objecting to taxes required by the British Parliament because their representatives had not been allowed to participate in tax enforcement decisions. When shipments of tea were in the Boston harbor the crisis came to a head. They liked their tea, but in the early evening of December 16, 1776 about 200 men descended upon the ships and dumped the shipments of tea into the harbor waters. Pre-publication reviews are in the front of the book. . . this is undoubtedly one of the best books ever written on the subject.

A revealing volume that portrays the lives of African Americans in all its variety across the entire 19th century—combining coverage of the pre- and post-Civil War eras. Uniquely inclusive, African Americans in the Nineteenth Century: People and Perspectives offers a wealth of insights into the way African Americans lived and how slave-era experiences affected their lives afterward. Coverage goes beyond well-known figures to focus on the lives of African American men, women, and children across the nation, battling the oppression and prejudice that didn't stop with emancipation while they tried to establish their place as Americans. The book ranges from the African origins of African American communities to coverage of slave communities, female slaves, slave–slave holder relations, and freed persons. Additional chapters look at African Americans in the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow eras. An alphabetically organized "mini-encyclopedia," plus additional information sources round out this eye-opening work of social history.

Completely updated edition of one of the classic works of conservative literature Long before the advent of conservative talk radio and Fox News, Robert Ringer was an outspoken advocate for the cause of freedom and free enterprise. In this classic work–updated for the 21st century–Ringer’s basic premise is that liberty must be given a higher priority than all other objectives. The economic and political calamity that he warned about in the late seventies is now upon us, and his new edition of Restoring the American Dream is sure to resonate with the feelings of today’s angry voters. In his book, Ringer explains that: • The American Dream is not about increased government benefits and government-created “rights,” but, rather, about individualism, self responsibility, and freedom–including the freedom to succeed or fail on one’s own • The barbarians are not at the gates; they are already inside • Ordinary citizens no longer tell their elected officials what to do. Rather, government tells them what to do–and backs it up with force • The desire of people to band together to bring about quick, short term solutions to their problems through government intervention has perpetuated a cycle that has nearly destroyed the American Dream With Washington continuing to expand government power and spending at a record pace, Restoring the American Dream is a voice of sanity in a world gone mad.

“A sweeping look at the history of voting rights in the U.S.”—Vox Who has the right to vote? And who benefits from exclusion? For most of American history, the right to vote has been a privilege restricted by wealth, sex, race, and literacy. Economic qualifications were finally eliminated in the nineteenth century, but the ideal of a white man’s republic persisted long after that. Women and racial minorities had to fight hard and creatively to secure their voice, but voter identification laws, registration requirements, and voter purges continue to prevent millions of American citizens from voting. An award-winning historian and voting right activist, Allan Lichtman gives us the history behind today’s headlines. He shows that political gerrymandering and outrageous attempts at voter suppression have been a fixture of American democracy—but so have efforts to fight back and ensure that every citizen’s voice be heard. “Lichtman uses history to contextualize the fix we’re in today. Each party gropes for advantage by fiddling with the franchise... Growing outrage, he thinks, could ignite demands for change. With luck, this fine history might just help to fan the flame.” —New York Times Book Review “The great value of Lichtman’s book is the way it puts today’s right-wing voter suppression efforts in their historical setting. He identifies the current push as the third crackdown on African-American voting rights in our history.” —Michael Tomasky, New York Review of Books