On the day after the tragic terrorist attacks of 9/11, newspapers across Europe proclaimed, We Are All Americans in many different languages, crystallizing the solidarity that so many people around the world felt at that time. But in the years since, that beautiful friendship between Americans and Europeans evaporated, leaving in its place a growing resentment so deep that Americans traveled overseas with Canadian flags stitched to their backpacks while Europeans held candlelight vigils for the removal of President George W. Bush. Dell'Orto argues persuasively that the answer to the question of where do we go from here lies in whether non-Americans keep believing in the American dream. Only if that dream continues to be the root of America's power—as this book shows it has been since the United States first stepped onto the international stage—can America not go the way of all other superpowers in history: down and out. Through analysis of thousands of Western European media articles and government publications about the United States, this book, for the first time, shows what the essence of America is to non-Americans and why that matters to Americans in a very practical way—because it sets limits to what the nation can accomplish. Dell'Orto argues persuasively that Europe's United States is the revered concept America—the exceptional dream that the land of (plenty of) opportunity can really exist, that the experiment in democracy can really work for all those who choose to become Americans. This is a great U.S. asset, since it makes America uniquely powerful in Europe's eyes, infinitely mightier than the march of Marines and McDonald's alone would warrant. Herein lie the uniqueness and the urgency of this book. European public opinion shape's Europe's reaction at least as much as U.S. actions do.

“This is the most important, dynamic book on the cancers of monopoly by giant corporations written in our generation.”—from the foreword by Ralph Nader American monopolies dominate, control, and consume most of the energy of our entire economic system; they function the same as cancer does in a body, and, like cancer, they weaken our systems while threatening to crash the entire body economic. American monopolies have also seized massive political power and use it to maintain their obscene profits and CEO salaries while crushing small competitors. But Thom Hartmann, America's #1 progressive radio host, shows we've broken the control of behemoths like these before, and we can do it again. Hartmann takes us from the birth of America as a revolt against monopoly (remember the Boston Tea Party?), to the largely successful efforts of both Presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and other like-minded leaders to restrain corporations' monopolistic urges, to the massive changes in the rules of business starting during the “Reagan Revolution” that have brought us to the cancer stage of capitalism. He shows the damage monopolies have done to so many industries: agriculture, healthcare, the media, and more. Individuals have taken a hit as well: the average American family pays a $5,000 a year “monopoly tax” in the form of higher prices for everything from pharmaceuticals to airfare to household goods and food. But Hartmann also describes commonsense, historically rooted measures we can take—such as revitalizing antitrust regulation, taxing great wealth, and getting money out of politics—to pry control of our country from the tentacles of the monopolists.

Through exciting and vivid imagery, Barnett shares life experiences that can encourage men and women to plug into their relationships with Jesus Christ for more power and energy. Readers discover how seeking the Kingdom means seeking Kingdom-minded solutions for every situation. (July)

Since September 11, 2001, the extensive literature on the United States's image abroad, by popular pundits and academics alike, leaves the reader with a false impression that foreigners' views of America are normally negative and impervious to change. In fact they are complex, emotional, frequently internally contradictory, and often change quickly. Barry A. Sanders corrects this misimpression with a rigorous and insightful textual analysis of the roots of people's views of the United States and what can be done to alter them. According to Sanders, the attitudes a person expresses about the United States consist of two separate components: the person's memory bank of images (informed by American geography, people, philosophy, history, and foreign policy) and a predisposition or bias that influences which images are called forth from memory.Opinion surveys, such as the Pew Global Attitude Survey, only record the spoken result of this twostep process in their tabulation of "favorable" or "unfavorable" comments. They necessarily fail to see the underlying complexity. Examining the biases or predispositions that guide people in selecting among the myriad stored images to express an opinion on a given day, Sanders analyzes both anti-American and pro-American biases but focuses on the former, explaining which criticisms should be heeded when crafting foreign policy and communicating national objectives to friends and foes alike.

Dreams are secret messages from your soul, as well as from the realm of spirit. They can be your greatest tool for profoundly understanding your life, yet few people recognize how to access this tremendous source of guidance and wisdom. Best-selling author Denise Linn calls upon her native heritage and her knowledge of diverse cultures to present little-known information about the world of dreams. In this fascinating book, she brings you simple ways to utilize your nocturnal travels for spiritual transformation. Denise herself has journeyed into the space between two worlds through a near-death experience and has brought back invaluable perceptions that she shares within these pages. This comprehensive work uncovers the power of dreams, enabling you to remember your dreams and recognize their meaning, hear personal messages from the spirit realm, develop the skill of astral projection, heal yourself and your loved ones, meet your guides and angels, explore past lives, and learn how to have prophetic dreams. There’s also a complete dream dictionary featuring the most prevalent dream symbols and how to interpret them!

In this celebration of contemporary American fiction, Kathryn Hume explores how estrangement from America has shaped the fiction of a literary generation, which she calls the Generation of the Lost Dream. In breaking down the divisions among standard categories of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender, Hume identifies shared core concerns, values, and techniques among seemingly disparate and unconnected writers including T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ralph Ellison, Russell Banks, Gloria Naylor, Tim O'Brien, Maxine Hong Kingston, Walker Percy, N. Scott Momaday, John Updike, Toni Morrison, William Kennedy, Julia Alvarez, Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Don DeLillo. Hume explores fictional treatments of the slippage in the immigrant experience between America's promise and its reality. She exposes the political link between contemporary stories of lost innocence and liberalism's inadequacies. She also invites us to look at the literary challenge to scientific materialism in various searches for a spiritual dimension in life. The expansive future promised by the American Dream has been replaced, Hume finds, by a sense of tarnished morality and a melancholy loss of faith in America's exceptionalism. American Dream, American Nightmare examines the differing critiques of America embedded in nearly a hundred novels and points to the source for recovery that appeals to many of the authors.

"The bestselling author of Bowling Alone offers [an] ... examination of the American Dream in crisis--how and why opportunities for upward mobility are diminishing, jeopardizing the prospects of an ever larger segment of Americans"--

Use your birthdate to discover your personology.

American Journalism and International Relations argues that the American press' disengagement from world affairs has critical repercussions for American foreign policy. Giovanna Dell'Orto shows that discourses created, circulated, and maintained through the media mold opinions about the world and shape foreign policy parameters. This book is a history of U.S. foreign correspondence from the 1840s to the present, relying on more than 2,000 news articles and twenty major world events, from the 1848 European revolutions to the Mumbai terror attacks in 2008. Americans' perceptions of other nations, combined with pervasive and enduring understandings of the United States' role in global politics, act as constraints on policies. Dell'Orto finds that reductive media discourse (as seen during the 1967 War in the Middle East or Afghanistan in the 1980s) has a negative effect on policy, whereas correspondence grounded in events (such as during the Japanese attack on Shanghai in the 1930s or the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991) fosters effective leadership and realistic assessments.

Political parties and elections are increasingly political theatre, with real power hidden behind a smokescreen of propaganda, carefully manipulated cultural and religious wars, and voting rituals. But there is another kind of hidden power in America: the grassroots social movements working for progressive change. If the Democratic Party can ally with these movements, America can be returned to its people. Derber sees American history as a succession of regimes, each spanning several administrations. Since the end of the Civil War, regimes of hidden power, in which corporate interests control both parties behind the scenes, have alternated with more open, inclusive and democratic regimes. Derber details how and why these hidden power systems finally collapsed and what determined the types of regimes that succeeded them. Hidden Power reveals how the current regime, possibly the most corporate in history, has maintained power by intensifying the red/blue culture wars, supporting religious extremists, exploiting terrorism fears, and manipulating the electoral process. Will this latest corporate regime be replaced by one that is more progressive? Or it could turn even further right and yield to something even worse, a uniquely American form of fascism? The best hope for positive change lies in an alliance between the Democratic Party and the grass roots progressive movements that, Derber shows, have always been the catalysts for change. Hidden Power concludes with an impassioned argument for why this would be in the Democrats' best interests, as well as the country's, and a detailed program for exactly how to go about it. Thoughtful, eloquent, and compelling, Hidden Power offers real hope for restoring genuine democracy to America.