Awesome cover art behind Manny: Elizabeth Di Nunzio

If you’re reading this, you’re likely already familiar with Emanuel Jalonschi.  Of course, you know him as Manny or Reverend Manny.  He is tapped in and reaching out like the rest of us.  When he’s not laboring at his keyboard and following the principles of his social conscience via social networking and new media blogging, he’s laboring at his keyboard and following the principles of his social conscience for a living.

Well, you’ll be relieved to know in his spare time, he writes.  In his new book, Hustlers and the Idiot Swarm: A Working Class Rant for a Doomed Civilization, Manny wrestles with paradox and unpacks the oh-so retarded narrative dominating political discourse.

How could 60% of us want less government spending, 60% of us want less government regulation, while at the same time 83% of us are insistent that the government do more to create jobs (by investing in the economy)?

In 21st century newspeak: WTF?” –Hustlers and the Idiot Swarm p.14

We live in an America where 61% people live paycheck to paycheck.  Lack of regulation helped cripple our economy.  Congress is set to debate spending, and spending is fucking controversial!  Spending is exactly how to create jobs which puts cash in hands and the money goes back into the economy.  The middle class is disappearing.  A vote against our own middle class interests is a vote for our own demise.

Power brokers throw their money behind politicians most willing to let business and industry exploit the working class and the land we live in.   Industry and the people who profit owe America nothing in return.  It wasn’t always this way.  It’s ice-water-in-your-pants sort of irony that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower presided over the highest tax rate in American history:

“…the homes and neighborhoods of those republican suburbanites who most oppose redistribution of wealth in our time would not exist had it not been for a vast redistribution of wealth over half a century earlier by both Democrats and Republicans. –Hustlers and the Idiot Swarm p. 40

Yet we all live and now decline and fall by the idiot discourse.

Nowadays, what one “politically feels” about religion, abortion, or the right to stockpile arms aren’t actual issues of “freedom”–they’re philosophical tear gas thrown between us so we don’t recognize our very common values and problems.  –Hustlers and the Idiot Swarm p. 82

Manny tackles the loudmouth religious fucks who equate the poor, the sick, and the afflicted with pure evil.   The gospel meme from the right: God dealt them their lot because they aren’t as worthy as the rest of us.  Who knows it better than a war-worn veteran?  When they leave for a fight, they’re heroes.  When they come, if they come home, they’re fucked, underfunded, under-treated, left by the wayside and maligned when they join the ranks of the homeless.  The same people who vote for military action won’t fund a goddamn dime of veteran care.

Who votes for this insanity?

“In an honest democracy, Halliburton, Koch Industries, Amstel-Coors and the Mellon family would represent but a tiny numerical voting body. Using the resources they’ve accumulated from of our labor, however, they’ve successfully colonized their opinion into the majority opinion by dominating the production of what passes for ‘information’.”  –Hustlers and the Idiot Swarm p.155

It’s hard to gauge how much to say.  Hustlers and the Idiot Swarm is a little book with monumental concerns, actually a philosophical but unpretentious survey of what’s going wrong and why and what we all stand to lose.

Oh. And here’s the Hustlers and the Idiot Swarm rejected cover:

The Rejected Cover

See how I protected you from tween idol Justin Bieber with a strategic placement of Snoop Dogg? I rule.