Banana Republicans

Sheldon Rampton was the American editor of PR Watch, and is the author of several books that criticize the public relations industry and what he sees as other forms of corporate and government propaganda. Rampton was born in Long Beach, California. At the age of three, his family moved to Las... Vegas, Nevada, where his father worked as a musician. Raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , he spent two years in Japan as a Latter-day Saint missionary from 1976 to 1978. Upon returning to the United States, however, he left the LDS Church, influenced in part by Mormon feminist Sonia Johnson. As an undergraduate student at Princeton University, Rampton studied writing under Joyce Carol Oates, E. L. Doctorow and John McPhee. Upon graduation in 1982, Rampton worked as a newspaper reporter before becoming a peace activist.
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John Stauber is an American writer and political activist who has co-authored five books about propaganda by governments, private interests and the PR industry. They include one book about how industry manipulates science , one about the history and current scope of the public relations industry ,... and one about mad cow disease , which predicted the surfacing of the disease within the United States. In July 2003 Stauber and Sheldon Rampton wrote Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, which argued that the Bush administration deceived the American public into supporting the war. In 2004, the two co-authored Banana Republicans, which argued that the Republican Party is turning the U.S. into a one-party state. The book argues that the far-right and its functionaries in the media, lobbying establishment and electoral system are undermining dissent and squelching pluralistic politics in the United States. In 2006 the two wrote The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq, which builds upon the arguments they posited in Weapons of Mass Deception.
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