Forum Post: Suggestion for the Education and Empowerment Committee

I don't know if you guys do something like this already, but I wanted to suggest that maybe one thing you can do to help educate and inform people is to have public readings of relevant books at certain times during the day.

One book in particular that might be relevant for everyone to read/hear is "The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy" by Joshua Holland. Perhaps you can have two people read a chapter a day over a loud speaker. It would really illuminate some of the issues Occupy Wall Street is trying to address.

The book "Made to Break" by Giles Slade might be a good one. It's pretty technical and perhaps somewhat boring, but it tells the history of how consumerism was basically an invention of private industry.

"Prosperity Without Growth" by Tim Jackson is another book that's pretty technical and it has lots of charts and graphs so it would probably be difficult to read, but it analyzes in great depth how the model of our modern economy is essentially broken and unsustainable.

Since a lot of people are not or don't feel well-informed about history and politics, you might read an American history book or a book about the history of American politics. "The Intellectual Devotional: American History" by David S. Kidder and Noah Oppenheim provides a broad overview of American history and the pages on "Politics and Leadership" and "Rights and Reforms" might be good for people to hear. They actually have an audio book version you could probably just play certain sections of.

Finally, a fiction book that may be good to have read might be "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn. It might be a little too abstract for the protests, but it would probably be more interesting to read than the more technical books. It's basically about a man who finds a mentor who guides him into understanding the meaning of our culture and what it means to "save the world". Daniel Quinn wrote several other books with the same theme and one called "Beyond Civilization", but Beyond Civilization is actually like an FAQ book summarizing his other works.