Compiled by Dick Bennett https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2025/06/omni-climate-memo-mondays-235-june-16.html
Diana B. Henriques. The Old Guard, the New Deal, and FDR’s Fight to Regulate American Capitalism.
Richardson. Democracy Awakening.
ACLU.
What Did You Do?
Diana B. Henriques. Taming the Street: The Old Guard, the New Deal, and FDR’s Fight to Regulate American Capitalism. Random House, 2023. 464.
Publisher’s description:
WINNER OF THE SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • A BLOOMBERG BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR.
With deep reporting and vivid storytelling, Diana B. Henriques takes readers back to a time when America’s financial landscape was a jungle ruled by the titans of vast wealth, largely unrestrained by government. Taming the Street describes how President Franklin D. Roosevelt battled to regulate Wall Street in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression. His deeply personal campaign to tame the Street is one of the great untold dramas in American history.
Heather Cox Richardson. Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Penguin RandomHouse, 2023. Paperback 2024 includes a new Afterword by the author.
Praise
The Washington Post‘s “50 Best NonFiction Books of 2023”
Kirkus Review’s ”2023 Best NonFiction Books of the Year”
“[Democracy Awakening] is the most lucid just-so story for Trump’s rise I’ve ever heard. It’s magisterial.” –Virginia Heffernan, Washington Post
“Necessary U.S. history … an excellent primer for anyone who needs the important facts of the last 150 years of American history – and how they got us to the sorry place we inhabit today.” –Guardian US
“Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening is an important addition to the burgeoning literature and scholarship on what I have characterized as America’s Third Reconstruction…she is at her best simply telling us the story of how we came to be living on the brink of ending our nearly 250-year democratic experiment.” –Peniel Joseph, Democracy
The American Civil Liberties Union/ACLU is a bastion against fascism. It advances equity in all aspects of our society, from anti-racism to the criminal justice system. The ACLU employs a staff of attorneys engaged in lawsuits to protect our rights to vote and have our vote counted, to resist all barriers to voting, to learn by defending the First Amendment’s stand against censorship, and by promoting the free dissemination of ideas. It has Affiliates in every state; the AR Affil. was established mainly by LR and Fayetteville citizens, including me. You ask, What Can I Do against the Trump oligarchy? Join the ACLU, national and state. Contact Holly Dickson, ACLU of Arkansas, 904 West 2nd Street, Little Rock, AR 72201
Here’s the latest on ACLU corralling Trump and Musk. 2-21-25 –DickHow the ACLU is responding to DOGE’s invasion of privacy.
Dick, in just the past week, over 140,000 ACLU supporters like you have written their members of Congress to condemn DOGE’s unrestricted, unaccountable violation of our privacy – here’s what you need to know: The Trump administration has granted the so-called Department of Government Efficiency unprecedented access to information about our finances, health records, and social security data – which DOGE is reportedly feeding to AI to outsource decisions about devastating funding cuts.
That’s why our community is fighting back at every level: We’ve filed over 40 FOIA requests demanding accountability and transparency from DOGE, while pushing those in power to stop this privacy violation – and that’s just the start.
What Did You Do?
I[ am reprinting the following two days after the NO KINGS demonstration June 14, 2025, all around the US, the one in Fayetteville two blocks long shoulder to shoulder. –D]
From hieroglyphic stairway by Drew Dellinger
What Did You Do?
it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?
surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once
you
knew?
(Reprinted from Facing the Anthropocene by Ian Angus.)