How the Right Wing is Turning America into a One Party State
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
London: Robinson, 2004, p/back, £7.99
This is well written, detailed and documented. The authors describe how American business funds the American right and how that right operates: its think-tanks, its propaganda outfits, its hired hack journalists, its PR firms; and how it commissions and disseminates phoney research, runs smear campaigns and psy-ops, gerrymanders electoral districts, and steals elections. There are fairly detailed studies of the campaigns against Clinton and of the Florida election-theft, but this is a thick skim made by experts: a detailed account would run to thousands of pages.
This network’s enemies are anybody who isn’t them; and its members are prepared to go to almost any lengths to ensure that they succeed. (It must be a reasonable bet, for example, that Michael Moore is going to have an ‘accident’ of some kind.) Highly recommended but not exactly uplifting reading.