Reddit mentions of What Uncle Sam Really Wants (The Real Story Series)

Noam Chomsky is the author of Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, and countless others.

Naomi Wolf is the author of The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, and others.

Chris Hedges is the author of "Someone You Love: Coming to a Gulag Near You", The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress, Death of the Liberal Class, and others

Daniel Ellsberg @ http://www.ellsberg.net/articles

Cornel West @ http://www.cornelwest.com/

Birgitta Jónsdóttir's website & twitter

Alexa O'Brien's website & twitter

Kai Wargalla's twitter account.

Tangerine Bolen @ RevolutionTruth; website & twitter

If you suspect that you're not getting the whole story from television, I'd suggest picking up Noam Chomsky. He literally wrote the book, Manufacturing Consent, on the propaganda model for analyzing the media. Maybe start with The Common Good or What Uncle Sam Really Wants. That last one was one of the catalysts that started my own ideological transformation around your age that led me to becoming a conscientious objector and leaving the USMC.

Admittedly, Chomsky is a leftist intellectual, a self described supporter of anarcho syndicalism and libertarian socialism, but then, a lot of thinking people gravitate to leftism. Einstein wrote a letter entitled, Why I am a Socialist-

>'The oligarchy of private capital cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organised political society. The members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties financed or influenced by private capitalists. Moreover, private capitalists control the main sources of information (press, radio, education).'

• Albert Einstein
  
  The majority of scientists, who are generally analytically gifted people, and whose daily job is essentially to understand and describe the nature of reality, are also political leftists. So maybe there is something to this very wide body of thought.
  
  At any rate, I think that you'll be hard pressed to make yourself more informed by watching TV. I second the notion others have proposed of reading up on history, and offer Howard Zinn's [A People's History of the United States] (http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-P-S/dp/0061965588/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342240464&sr=1-1&keywords=a+people%27s+history+of+the+united+states) as a counterbalance to some sanitized versions of history.
  
  Anyways good luck! Happy to answer any questions you might have!
  

You should read Noam Chomsky, one of the smartest person still alive. He's a linguistic teacher at MIT, but he really knows what's going on in the world so he writes a lot of political essays. One of them is called What Uncle Sam Really Wants and pretty much sums up what you were talking about. He also has amazing interviews on youtube, go check him out, you won't regret it ;-)

What Uncle Sam Really Wants by Noam Chomsky

As I said, he has a large body of work, so no, not everything. But I have read books in the areas of his opinion which interested me most, specifically Manufacturing Consent (only portions, I'll admit, and authors who shared the views, such as Democracy Now book) How the World Works and his What Uncle Sam Really Wants, which is the one that is relevant for him arguing that the US is morally equivalent to the various opposing sides in the Vietnam War. And the strain of his thought I consider particularly offensive.

edit: sorry double post (deleted). checked, but was still missing