Hacking Politics is a firsthand account of how a ragtag band of activists and technologists overcame a $90 million lobbying machine to defeat the most serious threat to Internet freedom in memory. The book is a revealing look at how Washington works today – and how citizens successfully fought back.

Written by the core Internet figures – video gamers, Tea Partiers, tech titans, lefty activists and ordinary Americans among them – who defeated a pair of special interest bills called SOPA (“Stop Online Piracy Act”) and PIPA (“Protect IP Act”), Hacking Politics provides the first detailed account of the glorious, grand chaos that led to the demise of that legislation and helped foster an Internet-based network of amateur activists.

Included are more than thirty original contributions from across the political spectrum, featuring writing by Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz; Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School; novelist Cory Doctorow; Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA.); Jamie Laurie (of the alt-rock/hip-hop group The Flobots); Ron Paul; Mike Masnick, CEO and founder of Techdirt; Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder and co-director of Fight for the Future; Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit; Nicole Powers of Suicide Girls; Josh Levy, Internet Campaign Director at Free Press, and many more.

David Moon is a Washington-based policy attorney, political consultant and issue advocate. He serves as the program director for the million-member progressive Internet organization Demand Progress. In that capacity, Moon works strategically to help build a political voice for the organization’s issues.

Patrick Ruffini is founder and president at Engage, a leading digital firm in Washington, D.C. During the SOPA fight, he founded “Don’t Censor the Net” to defeat governmental threats to Internet freedom. For more than a decade, Ruffini has been a leader at the intersection of technology and politics. Prior to starting Engage, Ruffini led digital campaigns for the Republican Party, serving as eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee, and as webmaster for the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign.

David Segal was elected to the city council of Providence, R.I. as a Green in 2002, and then won a seat as a Democrat in the Rhode Island state legislature in 2006. While a state representative, Segal pushed numerous progressive initiatives involving the environment, progressive taxation, affordable housing, civil rights and civil liberties. He has written for many publications, among them the New York Times and Boston Globe.  (OR BOOKS)

VIDEO – “Hacking Politics” – How We Defeated SOPA & PIPA

The civil rights movement was also a struggle for economic justice, one that until now has not had its own history. Sharing the Prize demonstrates the significant material gains black southerners made—in improved job opportunities, quality of education, and health care—from the 1960s to the 1970s and beyond. Because black advances did not come at the expense of southern whites, Gavin Wright argues, the civil rights struggle was that rarest of social revolutions: one that benefits both sides.

From the beginning, black activists sought economic justice in addition to full legal rights. The southern bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins were famous acts of civil disobedience, but they were also demands for jobs in the very services being denied blacks. In the period of enforced desegregation following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the wages of southern black workers increased dramatically. Wright’s painstaking documentation of this fact undermines beliefs that government intervention was unnecessary, that discrimination was irrational, and that segregation would gradually disappear once the market was allowed to work. Wright also explains why white southerners defended for so long a system that failed to serve their own best interests.

Sharing the Prize makes clear that the material benefits of the civil rights acts of the 1960s are as significant as the moral ones—an especially timely achievement as these monumental pieces of legislation, and the efficacy of governmental intervention more broadly, face new challenges.

Gavin Wright is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History at Stanford University. (Harvard University Press)

Since the Industrial Revolution, the prosperity of America has depended on the strength of its manufacturing base. America is risking the future of its manufacturing sector, and with it the economic health of the nation and the standard of living of its people. Our competitors understand what’s at stake and are adopting policies to ensure their own success. America must do the same. First, that requires understanding the problem. Then, it requires that a new strategy be deployed, one that re-establishes the sector that made America great: manufacturing. A new era of innovation and technology is unfolding. We need to further encourage the growth of reshoring production back to the United States and investment in new production technologies and products that will transform the global economy.

ReMaking America is the second volume on manufacturing policy edited by Richard McCormack. The first, Manufacturing a Better Future for America, came on the heels of the worst decade for manufacturing in our nation’s history. It set the stage for an unprecedented focus on Made in America. ReMaking America unveils a new story: one of hope. With the right policies, the authors argue, manufacturing may see a new dawn in America along with the wealth and growth opportunities needed to keep the American Dream alive.

Scott Paul, Carl Pope, Harold Meyerson (authors) - The Alliance for American Manufacturing is a non-profit, non-partisan partnership formed in 2007 by some of America’s leading manufacturers and the United Steelworkers to explore common solutions to challenging public policy topics such as job creation, infrastructure investment, international trade, and global competitiveness. We believe that an innovative and growing manufacturing base is vital to America’s economic and national security, as well as to providing good jobs for future generations. AAM achieves its mission through research, public education, advocacy, strategic communications, and coalition building around the issues that matter most to America’s manufacturing sector. (AmericanManufacturing.org)

In Goliath, New York Times bestselling author Max Blumenthal takes us on a journey through the badlands and high roads of Israel-Palestine, painting a startling portrait of Israeli society under the siege of increasingly authoritarian politics as the occupation of the Palestinians deepens.

Beginning with the national elections carried out during Israel’s war on Gaza in 2008-09, which brought into power the country’s most right-wing government to date, Blumenthal tells the story of Israel in the wake of the collapse of the Oslo peace process.

As Blumenthal reveals, Israel has become a country where right-wing leaders like Avigdor Lieberman and Bibi Netanyahu are sacrificing democracy on the altar of their power politics; where the loyal opposition largely and passively stands aside and watches the organized assault on civil liberties; where state-funded Orthodox rabbis publish books that provide instructions on how and when to kill Gentiles; where half of Jewish youth declare their refusal to sit in a classroom with an Arab; and where mob violence targets Palestinians and African asylum seekers scapegoated by leading government officials as “demographic threats.”

Immersing himself like few other journalists inside the world of hardline political leaders and movements, Blumenthal interviews the demagogues and divas in their homes, in the Knesset, and in the watering holes where their young acolytes hang out, and speaks with those political leaders behind the organized assault on civil liberties. As his journey deepens, he painstakingly reports on the occupied Palestinians challenging schemes of demographic separation through unarmed protest. He talks at length to the leaders and youth of Palestinian society inside Israel now targeted by security service dragnets and legislation suppressing their speech, and provides in-depth reporting on the small band of Jewish Israeli dissidents who have shaken off a conformist mindset that permeates the media, schools, and the military.

Through his far-ranging travels, Blumenthal illuminates the present by uncovering the ghosts of the past—the histories of Palestinian neighborhoods and villages now gone and forgotten; how that history has set the stage for the current crisis of Israeli society; and how the Holocaust has been turned into justification for occupation.

A brave and unflinching account of the real facts on the ground, Goliath is an unprecedented and compelling work of journalism.

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author whose articles and video documentaries have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, The Nation, The Guardian, The Independent Film Channel, The Huffington Post, Salon.com, Al Jazeera English and many other publications. His book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party, was a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller. He blogs at maxblumenthal.com

Drawing on never-before-published original source detail, the epic story of two of the most consequential, and largely forgotten, moments in Supreme Court history.

For two hundred years, the constitutionality of capital punishment had been axiomatic. But in 1962, Justice Arthur Goldberg and his clerk Alan Dershowitz dared to suggest otherwise, launching an underfunded band of civil rights attorneys on a quixotic crusade. In 1972, in a most unlikely victory, the Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s death penalty law in Furman v. Georgia. Though the decision had sharply divided the justices, nearly everyone, including the justices themselves, believed Furman would mean the end of executions in America.

Instead, states responded with a swift and decisive showing of support for capital punishment. As anxiety about crime rose and public approval of the Supreme Court declined, the stage was set in 1976 for Gregg v. Georgia, in which the Court dramatically reversed direction.

A Wild Justice is an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at the Court, the justices, and the political complexities of one of the most racially charged and morally vexing issues of our time.

Evan J. Mandery is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. A former capital defense attorney, he is the author of five previous books. (W.W. Norton & Company)

Until the watershed leak of top-secret documents by Edward Snowden to the Guardian UK and the Washington Post, most Americans did not realize the extent to which our government is actively acquiring personal information from telecommunications companies and other corporations. As made startlingly clear, the National Security Agency (NSA) has collected information on every phone call Americans have made over the past seven years. In that same time, the NSA and the FBI have gained the ability to access emails, photos, audio and video chats, and additional content from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, YouTube, Skype, Apple, and others, allegedly in order to track foreign targets.

In Spying on Democracy, National Lawyers Guild Executive Director Heidi Boghosian documents the disturbing increase in surveillance of ordinary citizens and the danger it poses to our privacy, our civil liberties, and to the future of democracy itself. Boghosian reveals how technology is being used to categorize and monitor people based on their associations, their movements, their purchases, and their perceived political beliefs. She shows how corporations and government intelligence agencies mine data from sources as diverse as surveillance cameras and unmanned drones to iris scans and medical records, while combing websites, email, phone records and social media for resale to third parties, including U.S. intelligence agencies.

The ACLU’s Michael German says of the examples shown in Boghosian’s book, “this unrestrained spying is inevitably used to suppress the most essential tools of democracy: the press, political activists, civil rights advocates and conscientious insiders who blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance and government abuse.” Boghosian adds, “If the trend is permitted to continue, we will soon live in a society where nothing is confidential, no information is really secure, and our civil liberties are under constant surveillance and control.” Spying on Democracy is a timely, invaluable, and accessible primer for anyone concerned with protecting privacy, freedom, and the U.S. Constitution.

Heidi Boghosian is the Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild, a progressive Bar Association established in 1937. She co-hosts the weekly civil liberties radio program, “Law and Disorder,” which airs on Pacifica’s WBAI in New York and on over 50 national affiliate stations around the country.  She also holds an MS from Boston University College of Communication and a BA from Brown University. She is admitted to practice law in Connecticut, New York, the Southern District of New York, and the U.S. Supreme Court. (City Lights Booksellers and Publishers)

The story of America, as told to us by the political establishment, is not unlike scripture that attempts to explain our circumstances in a manner that must be accepted as gospel. The truth is that America has been hijacked by powerful special corporate interests whose paths toward profit are lubricated by political accomplices complicit in a scheme that suppresses opportunity and freedom among the masses. Our state of denial has caused us to drift far from the nation we believe ourselves to be while holding tightly to an image of the nation we wish to be.

Such is the state of our disunion. Welcome to The Great American Disconnect.

Our laws equate corporations with people. Our government favors progress at any cost over preservation at every cost. We use food to make fuel while children go hungry, vilify climate science and freely refer to environmentalism as a form of Nazism—as if protecting that which gives life to the planet is somehow evil. We claim to honor our soldiers but where is the honor in deploying them just to protect our oil interests? We attack corporate subsidies for renewable energy while protecting tax breaks and loopholes for large fossil fuel companies. An aging middle class population, which for years paid into the Social Security and Medicare systems, believes such programs should be abolished for future generations. Fiscal conservatives call for more deregulation—the most liberal and irresponsible of economic beliefs— a strategy that nearly led to the collapse of the entire economic system.

In 1929 the American economy collapsed under its own weight; the result of hubris, greed and the belief that progress was a fundamental and irreversible aspect of capitalism. The primary distinction between then and now is that today’s American economic system isn’t collapsing from the top down; it’s rotting from the inside out. This is what happens when an organism is beset by disease.

The Great American Disconnect explores the democratic creation myth and attempts to verbalize the malaise that has taken hold of our political system.

Jed Morey is the publisher of the Long Island Press, LI’s Cultural Arts and Investigative News Journal. Morey received his undergraduate degree from Skidmore College and a Masters in Business Administration from Hofstra University. He serves on the board of the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center in Nassau County, as well as the President’s Council of Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Long Island. Additionally, Morey authors a column for the Long Island Press. (AmericanDisconnect.com)

The Honorable Damon J. Keith was appointed to the federal bench in 1967 and has served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit since 1977, where he has been an eloquent defender of civil and constitutional rights and a vigorous enforcer of civil rights law. In Crusader for Justice: Federal Judge Damon J. Keith, author Trevor W. Coleman presents the first ever biography of native Detroiter Judge Keith, surveying his education, important influences, major cases, and professional and personal commitments. Along the way, Coleman consults a host of Keith’s notable friends and colleagues, including former White House deputy counsel John Dean, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and industrialist Edsel Ford II for this candid and comprehensive volume.

Coleman traces Keith’s early life, from his public school days in Detroit to his time serving in the segregated U.S. army and his law school years at Howard University at the dawn of the Civil Rights era. He reveals how Keith’s passion for racial and social justice informed his career, as he became co-chairman of Michigan’s first Civil Rights Commission and negotiated the politics of his appointment to the federal judiciary. Coleman goes on to detail Keith’s most famous cases, including the Pontiac Busing and Hamtramck Housing cases, the 1977 Detroit Police affirmative action case, the so-called Keith Case (United States v. U.S. District Court), and the Detroit Free Press v. Ashcroft case in 2002. He also traces Keith’s personal commitment to mentoring young black lawyers, provides a candid look behind the scenes at the dynamics and politics of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and even discusses some of Keith’s difficult relationships, for instance with the Detroit NAACP and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Judge Keith’s forty-five years on the bench offer a unique viewpoint on a tumultuous era of American and legal history. Readers interested in Civil Rights-era law, politics, and personalities will appreciate the portrait of Keith’s fortitude and conviction in Crusader for Justice.

Damon J. Keith was born in Detroit, Michigan, on July 4, 1922. He is a graduate of West Virginia State College (B.A. 1943), Howard University Law School (J.D. 1949) and Wayne State University Law School (LL.M. 1956). In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Keith to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, where he ultimately served as chief judge. He was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 1977. As a member of the federal judiciary, Judge Keith has been a courageous defender of constitutional rights, giving real meaning to the promise of “equal justice under law.” Judge Keith is the recipient of numerous awards, most notably, the NAACP’s highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, and the Edward J. Devitt Distinguished Service to Justice Award, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a member of the federal judiciary.

Trevor W. Coleman is a national award-winning journalist, who has been an editorial writer, and columnist for the Detroit Free Press. He was chief speechwriter for former Michigan governor Jennifer M. Granholm and director of communications for the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. He is a graduate of The Ohio State University and father of two college students, Sydnie and Trevor II. (Wayne State University Press)

At the onset of the Great Recession, as house prices sank and joblessness soared, many commentators concluded that the economic convictions behind the disaster would now be consigned to history. And yet, in the harsh light of a new day, we’ve awoken to a second nightmare more ghastly than the first: a political class still blaming government intervention, a global drive for austerity, stagflation, and an international sovereign debt crisis.

Philip Mirowski finds an apt comparison to this situation in classic studies of cognitive dissonance. He concludes that neoliberal thought has become so pervasive that any countervailing evidence serves only to further convince disciples of its ultimate truth. Once neoliberalism became a Theory of Everything, providing a revolutionary account of self, knowledge, information, markets, and government, it could no longer be falsified by anything as trifling as data from the “real” economy.

In this sharp, witty and deeply informed account, Mirowski—taking no prisoners in his pursuit of “zombie” economists— surveys the wreckage of what passes for economic thought, finally providing the basis for an anti-neoliberal assessment of the current crisis and our future prospects.

Philip Mirowski is a historian and philosopher of economic thought at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. His many previous books include Machine Dreams and More Heat than Light, and he appeared in Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary The Trap. (Verso Books)

Chris Beck played high school football. He bought a motorcycle, much to his mother’s dismay, at age 17. He grew up to become a U.S. Navy SEAL, serving our country for twenty years on thirteen deployments, including seven combat deployments, and ultimately earned a Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. To everyone who saw him, he was a hero. A warrior. A man.

But underneath his burly beard, Chris had a secret, one that had been buried deep inside his heart since he was a little boy—one as hidden as the panty hose in the back of his drawer. He was transgender, and the woman inside needed to get out.

This is the journey of a girl in a man’s body and her road to self-actualization as a woman amidst the PTSD of war, family rejection and our society’s strict gender rules and perceptions. It is about a fight to be free inside one’s own body, a fight that requires the strength of a Warrior Princess.

Kristin’s story of boy to woman explores the tangled emotions of the transgender experience and opens up a new dialogue about being male or female: Is gender merely between your legs or is it something much bigger?

Kristin Beck, formerly Chris Beck, served twenty years as a U.S. Navy SEAL, going out on thirteen deployments—seven of them in combat. Chris Beck was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star with Valor. Upon retirement Kristin served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Science & Technology Office and continues to serve in a consultant capacity to the U.S. Special Warfare Operations. Kristin is also the founder of Healing Grounds, a newly formed nonprofit community service organization focused on providing landscape assistance and psychosocial support via a nursery and a calming gardening experience for returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Kristin recently “came out” transgender and supports the LGBT community.

Anne Speckhard, Ph.D. is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical School and author of Talking to Terrorists and Fetal Abduction. (AnneSpeckhard.com)  (Amazon)

Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book The Other America, chronicling the lives of people excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance. Today, it is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and the new working poor— the tens of millions of people whose lives are shaped by financial insecurity, and who are paying the price for a fractured economy and an ever more dysfunctional political system. In The American Way of Poverty, Sasha Abramsky brings the effects of economic inequality out of the shadows, shining a light on this national travesty and, ultimately, suggesting ways for moving toward a fairer and more equitable social contract. For Abramsky, poverty is not a tragedy— it is a scandal, with all-too-tangible consequences. Rather than simply telling the reader that poverty has become the scourge of the new century and that inequality in America is worse than it has been since the 1920s, he delves into the stories of the people around the country who are struggling to survive, and describes the shattered lives behind the often overwhelming poverty statistics. Then, exploring everything from housing policy to wage protections and affordable higher education, Abramsky offers pragmatic and imaginative reforms that, taken as a whole, amount to a blueprint for a reinvigorated War on Poverty and a reimagined sense of community. From the implementation of a financial transaction tax, to the establishment of publicly owned state banks, The American Way of Poverty charts a course for putting the country back on a more economically just footing. Abramsky brings a powerful indignation and viable solutions to the topic of poverty in America.

Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. His work has appeared in the Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York magazine, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. Originally from England and a graduate of Oxford University, he has since adopted his mother’s homeland of America and now lives in Sacramento, CA with his wife, daughter and son. He has a master’s degree from Columbia University School of Journalism. In 2000 he was awarded a Soros Society, Crime, and Communities Media Fellowship, and he is currently a Senior Fellow at the New York City-based Demos think tank. (Nation Books / Perseus )

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered an historic speech on mental illness and retardation. He described sweeping new programs to replace “the shabby treatment of the many millions of the mentally disabled in custodial institutions” with treatment in community mental health centers. This movement, later referred to as “deinstitutionalization,” continues to impact mental health care. Though he never publicly acknowledged it, the program was a tribute to Kennedy’s sister Rosemary, who was born mildly retarded and developed a schizophrenia-like illness. Terrified she’d become pregnant, Joseph Kennedy arranged for his daughter to receive a lobotomy, which was a disaster and left her severely retarded.

Fifty years after Kennedy’s speech, E. Fuller Torrey’s book provides an inside perspective on the birth of the federal mental health program. On staff at the National Institute of Mental Health when the program was being developed and implemented, Torrey draws on his own first-hand account of the creation and launch of the program, extensive research, one-on-one interviews with people involved, and recently unearthed audiotapes of interviews with major figures involved in the legislation. As such, this book provides historical material previously unavailable to the public. Torrey examines the Kennedys’ involvement in the policy, the role of major players, the responsibility of the state versus the federal government in caring for the mentally ill, the political maneuverings required to pass the legislation, and how closing institutions resulted not in better care – as was the aim – but in underfunded programs, neglect, and higher rates of community violence. Many now wonder why public mental illness services are so ineffective. At least one-third of the homeless are seriously mentally ill, jails and prisons are grossly overcrowded, largely because the seriously mentally ill constitute 20 percent of prisoners, and public facilities are overrun by untreated individuals. As Torrey argues, it is imperative to understand how we got here in order to move forward towards providing better care for the most vulnerable.

E. Fuller Torrey is Executive Director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Chevy Chase, MD, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, and Professor of Psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. (Oxford University Press)

The first in-depth look at the burgeoning legal cannabis industry and how the “new green economy” is shaping our country

The nation’s economy is in trouble, but there’s one cash crop that has the potential to turn it around: cannabis (also known as marijuana and hemp). According to Time, the legal medicinal cannabis economy already generates $200 million annually in taxable proceeds from a mere two hundred thousand registered medical users in just fourteen states. But, thanks to Nixon and the War on Drugs, cannabis is still synonymous with heroin on the federal level even though it has won mainstream acceptance nationwide.

ABC News reports that underground cannabis’s $35.8 billion annual revenues already exceed the combined value of corn ($23.3 billion) and wheat ($7.5 billion). Considering the economic impact of Prohibition—and its repeal—Too High to Fail isn’t a commune-dweller’s utopian rant, it’s an objectively (if humorously) reported account of how one plant can drastically change the shape of our country, culturally, politically, and economically.

Too High to Fail covers everything from a brief history of hemp to an insider’s perspective on a growing season in Mendocino County, where cannabis drives 80 percent of the economy (to the tune of $6 billion annually). Investigative journalist Doug Fine follows one plant from seed to patient in the first American county to fully legalize and regulate cannabis farming. He profiles an issue of critical importance to lawmakers, media pundits, and ordinary Americans—whether or not they inhale. It’s a wild ride that includes swooping helicopters, college tuitions paid with cash, cannabis-friendly sheriffs, and never-before-gained access to the world of the emerging legitimate, taxpaying “ganjaprenneur.”

Doug Fine is the author of two previous books, Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Man and Farewell, My Subaru (a Boston Globe bestseller). He has reported for The Washington Post, Wired, Salon, High Times, Outside, NPR, and U.S. News & World Report. He currently lives in New Mexico, where he relocated his family to research this book. (Penguin Books)

Thank You, Anarchy is an up-close, inside account of Occupy Wall Street’s first year in New York City, written by one of the first reporters to cover the phenomenon. Nathan Schneider chronicles the origins and explosive development of the Occupy movement through the eyes of the organizers who tried to give shape to an uprising always just beyond their control. Capturing the voices, encounters, and beliefs that powered the movement, Schneider brings to life the General Assembly meetings, the chaotic marches, the split-second decisions, and the moments of doubt as Occupy swelled from a hashtag online into a global phenomenon.

A compelling study of the spirit that drove this watershed movement, Thank You, Anarchy vividly documents how the Occupy experience opened new social and political possibilities and registered a chilling indictment of the status quo. It was the movement’s most radical impulses, this account shows, that shook millions out of a failed tedium and into imagining, and fighting for, a better kind of future.

Nathan Schneider is the author of God in Proof: The Story of a Search, from the Ancients to the Internet (UC Press). He wrote about Occupy Wall Street for Harper’s, The Nation, The New York Times, and Boston Review, among other publications. He is an editor of the websites Waging Nonviolence and Killing the Buddha.  (University of California Press)