Kirjahaku

With the Supreme Court decision that overturned an election and handed George W. Bush the presidency, Jack Random adjusted his focus from fiction to political commentaries. The first volume of the Jazzman Chronicles was an indictment of the two-party system, a system designed to serve the elite by negating the power of the people. It is a system paid for and controlled by corporate interests. It offers the appearance of choice but when both parties collect contributions from the same corrupt well, what choice do we really have? In the succeeding years, American democracy has become even more endangered with legislators conspiring to disenfranchise minorities and a Supreme Court defined by corporate bias. Meantime, confronted by the unspeakable tragedy of September 11, 2001, America committed its soldiers to the long and unwinnable wars of Afghanistan and Iraq. As the president attested, it was the day everything changed. For dissidents like Jack Random it meant that all other issues had to yield to a single cause: opposing the wars. The second volume (The War Chronicles) was issued before the invasion of Afghanistan and before Shock and Awe hit Baghdad and place America on a permanent war setting. With the expressed purpose of stopping the wars before they happened, he methodically destroys the Bush administration's case for war. War would dominate American politics for the next decade but Random found his voice on a wide range of issues and a platform on the worldwide web. This collection includes a small sample of his political writings, gathered under the following headings: I. CORE PRINCIPLES: An indictment of the major party system. II. THE WAR CHRONICLES: The case against war in Iraq and Afghanistan. III. THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT: The continuing struggle to end the wars. IV. ECONOMICS: An attack on deregulation, free trade, austerity policies and anti-labor measures. V. SUPREME INJUSTICE: The perpetual train wreck of a corporate court. VI. EDUCATION: The drive to privatize public education. VII. MEDIA & PROPAGANDA: An indictment of the corporate media. VIII.THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE: Environmental and manmade disasters become commonplace while our preparedness lags behind. IX. IMMIGRATION & DISCRIMINATION: The myth of equality and the racism underlying the anti-immigrant movement. X. ON DEMOCRACY: The erosion of democracy and how to restore it. Taken together, the Jazzman Chronicles represent a contemporary history of American politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

In this third and final installment of the Chess Series billionaires William Bates and Solana Rothschild are determined to enact a real world chess match with the ultimate goal of taking down Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. They recruit chess master Garry Kasparov as consultant and prepare the board by placing agents with critical agencies and organizations: Interpol, the International Court of Justice, Russian intelligence, European financial institutions, the Bank of Cypress, Deutsche Bank and the Russian mob. Chief Inspector Jean Mogherini of Interpol emerges as the protagonist of the story. His grim determination, deductive intuition and investigative skill leads a team of attorneys, rebels, mobsters, detectives, assassins, spies and hackers on a path that will ultimately reveal the truth beneath the truth. The question is: Will Vladimir Putin survive the onslaught or will he have his bloody revenge? Pawns to Players offers a poignant metaphor for today's political and economic realities: There are forces at play that control our daily lives beyond our reckoning. From Chapter 21: It was more than chess now. It was real. It was life. It was as if all those conspiracy theories about the elite controlling the masses like a puppet master had been transformed into flesh and blood reality. Men like Putin and Medvedev loved to control the lives and fortunes of ordinary men and women. Now it was their turn to be manipulated and controlled. Now it was their turn to wonder why the gods had turned against them. Little did they suspect that forces greater than themselves were operating in the field of play. Hopefully they would never know.

Life Songs is a collection of over three hundred poems reflecting the author's outlook, philosophy and values as an artist, a writer, a poet and a human being. They are personal poems. They are mirrors to the world through the lens of poetry. They do not aspire (as the writer's other works have) to change the reader's heart or mind. They simply reflect the poet's reality over his decades of existence. These poems contain a great affection and empathy for others within and without the poet's life. As he states in the introduction: "For though I despise cruelty and injustice I have always believed that humans are in their essence good and kind. It is only when the indignities of life alter the fundamentals of the self that humans tend to do heartless things." Life Songs also reflect the poet's great love of nature and an overriding respect for art and artists. "Poetry has long been like a secret love for which I never had enough time." In this work, after decades devoted to plays, novels and political essays, Jack Random made the time in the hope that readers may find in it some joy and inspiration.