Capitalism and Poverty
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
The author of the anti-globalization manifesto No Logo (2000), weighs in with a big, searing indictment of the "free market fundamentalism" promulgated by economist Milton Friedman and his disciples. Klein says that while most people favor mixed economies, laissez-faire capitalists often succeed in implementing their programs after societies have been traumatized by manmade or natural disasters. The effect of these shocks, she says, is comparable to the after-effects suffered by an individual who's been subjected to electroshock therapy: previous memories have been wiped clean and the person -- or the society -- is a blank slate, ready for re-programming by those in authority. As societies begin to recover from their shocks, she says, some people may begin to object to the newly imposed predatory capitalism and the widespread suffering that accompanies it, but then intimidation and violence are typically used to crush such dissent.
Klein spoke with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!; also with Brian Lehrer of WNYC.
*Also available, in abridgment, on Audio CD
The Shock Doctrine ... published September 18, 2007 by Metropolitan Books
Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor
And the Dark Side of the New Global Economy by John Bowe
Slavery is still very much with us. An estimated 12 to 27 million people worldwide are now held in some form of slavery -- although not typically in the pre-U.S. Civil War mode that defines the term for many minds. Twenty-first century slaves are sometimes paid a token wage and could theoretically escape, but by various means they're effectively prevented from doing so. And in an increasingly globalized economy, we're all complicit in perpetuating slavery. The low, low everyday prices we demand often get that way by because "entrepreneurs" have secured the cheapest possible labor. Bowe investigates three instances of slavery on American soil: in Imokalee, Fla.; Tulsa, Ok.; and Saipan (part of a U.S. commonwealth). It becomes clear that modern slavery isn't an aberration, but simply one end of a continuum in which the lives of the economically weak are subjugated to whims of an amoral (at best) global marketplace.
Nobodies ... published September 18, 2007 by Random House
Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business,
Democracy, and Everyday Life by Robert Reich
"Supercapitalism" developed after technologies such as computers and containerization fostered much fiercer market competitiveness than that of the mid-20th century "Not Quite Golden Age" of U.S. oligopolies. So says Clinton labor secretary and UC-Berkeley economics prof Reich. He observes that 50 years ago corporations could afford to be at least somewhat "socially responsible." Now, however, doing so to the detriment of the bottom line is financial suicide, particularly since, as consumers, we're not generally willing to give up Wal-Mart's bargains or Google's investment returns. Reich encourages consumers to remember that they're citizens, too -- not merely bargain- and investment-return seeking automatons. Among the means to having it both ways -- financial benefits and a more equitable society and a healthier planet -- is to decouple health insurance from jobs and corporations, making it available to all citizens. Reich concludes, "The first step, which is often the hardest, is to get our thinking straight."
*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD and mp3 CD
Supercapitalism ... published September 4, 2007 by Knopf
The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America
by Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen
Thirty-seven million Americans live below the poverty line. We know a lot about them because journalists, politicians, think tanks, and social scientists track their lives in great detail. Every time the poverty rate goes up or down, political parties take credit or blame for this important bellwether. [ ¶ ] Yet there is a much larger population of Americans that virtually no one pays attention to: the near poor. Fifty-seven million Americans -- including 21 percent of the nation's children -- live in this nether region above the poverty line but well below a secure station. This "Missing Class" is composed of households earning roughly between $20,000 and $40,000 for a family of four.
In the book's forward, John Edwards observes that near-poor Americans "work in transit, construction, nursing-assistance, cooking, trades, retail and even teaching jobs." Newman and Chen illustrate the Missing Class with vignettes of nine New York City families living in the "near-poor" netherworld, one pink slip or serious illness away from falling below the poverty line.
The Missing Class ... published September 5, 2007 by Beacon Press
Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World by Bill Clinton
First some good news: Clinton recounts many inspirational (if familiar) stories here, such as those of Paul Farmer, Osceola McCarty, Heifer International and Diane Stevens. Some bad news: His presentation is intermittently wonkish and dull, making those sections a slog. And then there's the really ugly news, per Cris Hedges, who pillories Clinton's limousine liberalism, noting (as have others, if less savagely) that it
smacks of the philanthropy-as-publicity that characterized the largesse of the robber barons ... and [that] has become a pastime for our own oligarchic elite. Clinton's call for charity is the equivalent of well-scrubbed prep school students spending a day in a soup kitchen, doling out food to the people whose jobs were outsourced by their mommies and daddies. It does little to alleviate suffering. But it is a balm to the conscience of the oligarchic class that profits handsomely from the impoverishment of the working class, globalization and our anti-democratic corporate state. The rich love to dine out on their own goodness.
*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD
Giving ... published September 4, 2007 by Knopf
The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
by Alan Greenspan
Whatever shred of credibility BushCo and the formerly GOP Congress might have retained among moderate Republicans will be further rent by this memoir and prognostication of a Reagan-appointed Fed chief. When Dubya assumed office, Greenspan had visions of enacting the laissez-faire wonderland that might have been had Ford not lost to Carter, so he was stunned by BushCo's abandonment of the "libertarian Republican" frugality that he favors. He's particularly disappointed at Bush's failure to use vetoes to restrain federal spending -- a failure he attributes to Bush's and the Republican Congress' subjugation of the nation's financial wellbeing to their own political interests. Of the GOP's fortunes in 2006 he says, they "swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose." But the unkindest cut of all, from a GOP perspective, must surely be Greenspan's many affinities for Bill Clinton (excepting the Lewinsky affair) and Clinton's disciplined approach to government finance (if not to White House interns).
*Also available on Audio CD: unabridged or abridged.
The Age of Turbulence ... published September 17, 2007 by Penguin Press HC
Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery
edited by Jesse Sage and Liora Kasten
Slavery didn't die with the Civil War. Incredibly, the 21st-century version of that "peculiar institution" is, worldwide, vastly larger in terms of the total numbers of people enslaved than that which fueled the War of Rebellion. Affiliates of the American Anti-Slavery Group offer a moving collection of true stories of former slaves and slave owners. One of this anthology's editors recently wrote,
[M]ore people live in bondage worldwide than ever before. And, as new studies indicate, tens of thousands of these victims are enslaved on our shores, in our cities, even in our own backyards. [ ¶ ] Using a simple but strict definition of slavery -- forced labor for no pay under the threat of violence -- sociologist Dr. Kevin Bales estimates that 27 million people live as slaves worldwide. ... [M]uch of contemporary slavery has become a quasi-industrialized institution: a brutal but efficient and profitable process of entrapment, exploitation, and abandonment. Slaves are lured or abducted from their homes, psychologically and physically intimidated, forced to work in de-humanizing conditions, and then discarded when they are too ill to work.
Enslaved ... published October 31, 2006 by Palgrave Macmillan
Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz
A Nobel Prize-winning economist says, in essence, that globalization must be rescued from neoliberalism or "market fundamentalism," as he calls it. Stiglitz offers practical solutions for problems he chronicled in his influential 2002 bestseller Globalization and Its Discontents. Among his global economic playing field-leveling proposals is the use of green accounting, including taxing greenhouse emissions. Says he,
[G]lobalization can be changed; indeed, it is clear that it will be changed. The question is whether change will be forced upon us by a crisis or result from careful, democratic deliberation and debate. Crisis-driven change risks producing a backlash against globalization, or a haphazard reshaping of it, thus merely setting the stage for more problems later on. [But] taking control of the process holds out the possibility of remaking globalization, so that it at last lives up to its potential and its promise: higher living standards for everyone in the world.
Making Globalization Work ... published September 18, 2006 by W. W. Norton
Field Guide to the U.S. Economy: A Compact And Irreverent Guide To Economic Life in America by Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, et. al.
No less than liberal America's favorite economist, John Kennth Galbraith, remarked that a previous edition of this volume was "[q]uite possibly the best and most certainly the least solemn guide to the dismal science you are likely to encounter." Were he still around to do so, he might add, "and by far the most accessible." The book devotes a page each to over 160 key economic issues (e.g., "Where Federal Dollars Go"; "Unbalanced Trade"; "CEO Pay"), bringing current data to bear in the process of very succinctly explaining and commenting on the issues. Also featured are lots of helpful, easily understood graphs, as well as illustrations by such cartoonists as Tom Tomorrow, Dan Wasserman and Steve Benson. These guides are issued in association with The Center for Popular Economics, "a non-profit collective of political economists based in Amherst, MA," that aims to "demystify the economy and put useful economic tools in the hands of people fighting for social and economic justice."
Field Guide to the U.S. Economy ... published August 1, 2006 by The New Press
The Health of Nations: Why Inequality Is
Harmful to Your Health by Ichiro Kawachi and Bruce P. Kennedy
Originally issued four years ago, this indispensable guide to worldwide inequalities of wealth and health bears another look, particularly since the authors (who were both Harvard epidemiologists when they initially collaborated) are now offering a revised and updated edition in paperback. Kawachi and Kennedy show that the widening gulfs between rich and poor are not merely unjust, they're also monstrously destructive to our physical and civic health. And they conclude that the strain of capitalism now dominant in America (and by extension, in much of the world) "is much more virulent, as well as more ruthless and volatile compared with the more controlled and regulated capitalism of the 1950s and 1960s." The authors draw on a great deal of well-chosen and compelling evidence in support of their claims, but none more powerful than that of Stephen Bezruchka's Health Olympics.
The Health of Nations ... published August 1, 2006 by New Press
Body Hunters: How the Drug Industry
Tests Its Products On the World's Poorest Patients by Sonia Shah
Shah (Crude: The Story of Oil) looks at Big Pharma's increasing reliance on drug testing that often fails to help and sometimes harms the impoverished test subjects. Rather than testing on Americans drugs that will be bought by Americans, the companies go body hunting in the global South -- in nations such as India and Zambia. The issue's especially tough to address because it tends to be subtle. Big Pharma's not necessarily so diabolical as to knowingly foist dangerous substances on poor people; the problem is more one of monopolizing scarce resources. Doctors and nurses who are employed testing, say, new erectile dysfunction medications are prevented from caring for fellow citizens suffering from treatable diseases. Shah also shows that the tests are often for medicines that will be unavailable where they're being tested, and that some companies have even given critically ill babies placebos.
Body Hunters ... published July 1, 2006 by New Press
The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses
Are Beating the Global Competition by Michael H. Shuman
Rather than running out to Wal-Mart every time we think we need something, we should do what we can to develop and support community-based businesses, says Shuman. He notes that while Wal-Mart's the world's largest corporation, the average pay of one of its sales clerks in $8.50. This isn't, however, just another anti Wal-Mart polemic. Says the author,
What the Small-Mart Revolution is for is more important than what it's against. The Small-Mart Revolution aims to improve the prosperity of every community, here and abroad, by maximizing opportunities for locally owned businesses. And since "place-based" businesses already make up more than half of a typical community's economy, the Small-Mart Revolution, for the most part, means knowing what we already know how to do pretty well. In that sense, it's not terribly radical. But sometimes it's the subtle changes in our lives, in our buying and investing habits, in our business practices, and in our public policies that are hardest to realize.
The Small-Mart Revolution ... published June 28, 2006 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers
The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind
The U.S. Racial Wealth Divide by Meizhu Lui, et. al.
Five co-authors (black, Latino, Native, Asian and white), all affiliated with UFE, say uneven distribution of American wealth has more to do with skin color than with real or imagined "merit." White folks often make their money the old fashioned way -- they inherit it -- while many brown people choose their parents less profitably. What's more, U.S. laws and practices have been overwhelmingly slanted in favor of white wealth accumulation and against that of brown people. Last year, UFE noted the most egregious example thereof:
For centuries, vast private wealth was created from a human rights disaster: the African slave trade. While this is an uncomfortable topic that most white Americans would just as well put under "file closed," slavery left a legacy that is still very much with us today. African Americans ... whether descended from slaves or not, still suffer from the accumulated effects of the historical social and economic exclusion of their people, and the barriers to wealth creation that persist. If, as a society, we truly believe in equal opportunity for all, then we cannot claim there is a fair race being run when some people have not even approached the starting line.
The Color of Wealth ... published June 1, 2006 by The New Press
Changing the Face of Hunger by Tony Hall
Former U.S. Rep. Tony Hall (D-Dayton) has been an effective consensus builder on behalf of the world's hungry. Journals he kept while serving in the House form the basis for his book (co-authored with a former Dayton Daily News reporter), which recalls, among other things, his visits to countries in which he watched dozens of people die of hunger before his eyes, and his 1993 protest fast in the House. Says Hall,
I believe that good nations, great nations, are evaluated by what they do for other people, especially poor people -- their own people in their own country and people outside. We have a lot, and we should give a lot.
Unfortunately, though Hall's deeply admirable for his work relating to hunger, it's impossible to overlook the fact that his born-again Christianity also leads him horribly astray on women's and gay rights issues. It's apt, therefore, that his book's subtitled, "The Story of How Liberals, Conservatives, Republicans, Democrats, and People of Faith are Joining Forces in a New Movement to Help the Hungry, the Poor, and the Oppressed."
Changing the Face of Hunger ... published April 4, 2006 by W Publishing Group
The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly
An NYU economics prof writes about two tragedies: the existential lot of the world's poor; and the fact that after a half-century of Western aid totaling to $2.3 trillion, many millions of poor people still want for such life-saving materials as $4 mosquito nets. The author maintains that the failure of Western aid is largely a function of well-intentioned hubris. "Planners," he says, concoct grand schemes to fix the whole world all at once and thereby fail to understand and ameliorate the particular problems of specific people. Then, when Planners fail, they simply dream up new grandiose designs -- and fail again. Easterly prefers a piecemeal approach: that of "Searchers," who are constantly on the lookout for concrete, results-based solutions to local needs. The book's intentionally provocative and bombastic as one might expect from a writer who last year did a hatchet job on a book by one of the world's most renowned and respected poverty-fighting economists, Jeffery Sachs.
The White Man's Burden ... published March 16, 2006 by The Penguin Press HC
Planet of Slums by Mike Davis
The author of last fall's provocative and incisive avian flu tome The Monster at Our Door (which Davis has called a "spinoff" of Planet of Slums) says that potentially pandemic bird flu is but one byproduct of global slumification -- and that H5N1 is a harbinger of other catastrophic woes now incubating in vast slums gripped by squalor and misery so profound as to exceed most Americans' darkest imaginings. Says Davis,
There may be more than a quarter of a million slums on earth. The five great metropolises of South Asia (Karachi, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Dhaka) alone contain about 15,000 distinct slum communities with a total population of more than 20 million.
So observed the self-described "Marxist-Environmentalist" in a distillation of Planet of Slums that appeared in the New Left Review two years ago. Unsurprisingly, Davis says that the explosion of the incidence and size of slums is no accident, but a function of the policies of the IMF, the World Bank, and the White House.
Planet of Slums ... published March 1, 2006 by Verso
The Bully of Bentonville by Anthony Bianco
Authored by the veteran Business Week journalist who wrote that magazine's 2003 cover story on Wal-Mart, this may be the most comprehensive and professionally reported of the burgeoning crop of Wal-Mart indictments to date. (Other recent offerings: Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, available both as a movie on DVD and as a paperback.)
The recent avalanche of materials proving exhaustively that Wal-Mart is one of the most rapacious and profoundly evil institutions on earth is apparently starting to register with ordinary Americans. "By Wal-Mart's own estimate, 40 percent of Americans either are skeptical of the company or hate it outright." After a few hours with this book, anyone who hadn't been crystal-clear about why, will be. Those who can't wait for their copies of The Bully of Bentonville to arrive are advised to take Bianco's tip and check out Wal-Mart Watch. And remember: friends don't let friends shop at Wal-Mart.
The Bully of Bentonville ... published February 14, 2006 by Currency
The Global Class War by Jeff Faux
"A new cross-border elite, beyond democracy's reach, controls the game board," says one of the founders of the Economic Policy Institute. Faux shows how institutions such as the WTO and agreements such as NAFTA protect the "rights" of those whom he calls "corporate investors" or "The Party of Davos" while they simultaneously trample many of the legitimate rights of the vast majority of the world's citizens.
Faux is highly critical of both Republicans and Democrats, having said elsewhere said that both parties have embraced "the so-called neoliberal model, in which supranational rules liberate the private corporate investor from the constraint of democratic public values."
Also germane to the discussion of neoliberalism and its deification of the marketplace is David Harvey's erudite A Brief History of Neoliberalism, published last September.
The Global Class War ... first published January 11, 2006 by Wiley
Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century
by Jeffry A. Frieden
A Harvard economist explains the nuts and bolts of late-19th and early 20th-century globalization, the abrupt shift to other approaches in the mid-20th century, and the recent trend back toward globalization. Frieden evenhandedly represents both antiglobalization and "free market" arguments, finds significant merit in both, and advocates a middle way. He concludes,
The challenge of global capitalism in the twenty-first century is to combine international integration with politically responsive, socially responsible government. ... [I]deologues of many stripes -- pro- and antiglobalization, progressives and conservatives, marketeers and pamphleteers -- argue that this combination is impossible or undesirable. But theory and history indicate that it is possible for globalization to coexist with policies committed to social advance. It remains for governments and people to put the possible into practice.
Global Capitalism ... published January 9, 2006 by W. W. Norton
Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences ed. James Lardner, David Smith
A collection of writings by such heavyweights as Bill Moyers, Barbara Ehrenreich, Robert Kuttner and an assortment of other academics and activists explore the growing gulfs between the very rich and the rest of America with an eye to the damage that such disparities have done and are doing to our republic. Say Miles Rapaport and David A. Smith, for example,
High-income Americans are dependable voters, and, as the American Political Science Association report cited by Charles Lewis shows, are likely to participate in other, more active forms of political participation as well. In fact, high-income Americans vote almost as consistently as the high-income citizens of other countries. What sets the U.S. apart are its very low voter turnout rates for middle- and low-income citizens. That problem, in turn, can be traced to an array of policies and procedural barriers that affect them disproportionately. [ ¶ ] In other words, our political system has been infected and disabled by the same pervasive inequality that disfigures our economy.
Inequality Matters ... published January 9, 2006 by New Press
Fair Trade for All by Joseph Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton
A Nobel Prizewinning World Bank chief economist and author of the acclaimed Globalization and Its Discontents (2002) teams with a research officer with the London School of Economics to suggest that wealthy Western nations -- especially the United States -- stop pursuing policies that exacerbate the plight of developing countries. Trade policies should, they say, help developing nations help themselves.
Of particular interest to the duo is agricultural trade. They contend that the International Monetary Fund and Western governments have structured international trade so that developing countries are actively prevented from producing their way into prosperity -- while already rich capitalists and nations profit from the inequities.
Stiglitz was one of the most important and respected economists associated with the Clinton administration, and he's widely esteemed for what many see as a strong commitment to social justice. Although he writes extensively for general audiences, much of the material he covers is inherently eye-glazing for the uninitiated, so here's a modest initiation: an article (pdf file) relating to his tenure at and departure from the World Bank; an index of his syndicated columns; and an interview with colorful lefty journalist Greg Palast.
Fair Trade for All ... published January 5, 2006 by Oxford University Press
Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism
edited by Nelson Lichtenstein
Twelve essays from a variety of distinguished scholars analyze Wal-Mart from diverse perspectives. Has its revolving-door, low-wage, meager-benefit model taken the place of GM's lifetime-job, good-wage, solid-benefits tradition as a basic template for 21st-century capitalism? Maybe. But then again ... maybe not:
Wal-Mart faces legal challenges on a variety of fronts, from the exploitation of illegal immigrants and the violation of child labor laws to discrimination against its female employees. If successful, these suits will have a material impact on Wal-Mart's labor costs, bringing them somewhat closer to those of its competitors. Perhaps even more important, Wal-Mart's labor policies are coming under attack from a wide variety of elected officials, as well as unionists and academics, who argue that the company's ability to pay such low wages is possible only because state and federal tax, welfare, and health care programs subsidize the living standards of Wal-Mart's employees far more than those of other U.S. workers.
Wal-Mart ... published January 5, 2006 by New Press
The End of Poverty by Jeffrey D. Sachs
"[M]ore than eight million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive. Our generation can choose to end that extreme poverty by ... 2025." So writes economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and in 2004 one of Time Magazine's 100 "world's most influential people." Sachs illustrates the kinds of extreme deprivation that beset the roughly 1 billion people surviving on $1 per day or less, and in the process makes the case that such widespread poverty poses a direct threat to U.S. security interests. Nevertheless, American spending to eradicate that poverty amounts to "just 15 cents on every $100 of U.S. gross national product, or GNP" -- about 3 percent of what America spends on its military. Sachs endorses a global pact between rich and poor countries under which rich democracies would deliver seven-tenths of 1 percent (as opposed to today's two-tenths) of their GNPs in direct aid for up to 20 years, provided that recipient countries use the resources as intended, rather than to enable militarism or the enrichment of despots.
The End of Poverty ... first published December 30, 2005 by Penguin
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism by John C. Bogle
A self-described "lifelong Republican" and one of the mutual fund industry's leading lights since the '70s calls on ordinary citizens to flex their financial muscle in restoring democracy to U.S. capitalism -- to create a "fiduciary society." He critiques the "remarkable erosion that has taken place over the past two decades in the conduct and values of our business leaders, our investment bankers, and our money managers."
Bogle founded the Vanguard Group in 1974, providing small investors an opportunity to invest in index funds. He transformed Vanguard from a broker-sold (i.e., commission-driven) fund to a direct-sale, no-commission entity that precluded what he calls "agents" from skimming the profits of "owners" -- fund investors, many of them citizens of limited means putting their money into retirement plans. In Battle he's still arguing the same kinds of principles, and they're refreshing departures from the corporate kleptocracy supported and enabled by BushCo. If Bogle doesn't watch out, he might give neoliberalism a good an incrementally better name.
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism ... first pub'd Nov. 1, 2005 by Yale University Press
The Fox in the Henhouse by Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich
With the verve and passion of polished speakers at a political rally, the wife/husband team of Elizabeth Minnich and Si Kahn deliver a rousing polemic against privatization -- the practice of turning over vital public resources and services to big corporations. How serious is the problem? "We believe not only that privatization is a threat but that it is the threat to democratic commitments to the public good."
The authors scorn the PR campaigns of mega-companies that inevitably jettison their self-proclaimed commitments to the public good the second profits are jeopardized, and in which well-meaning managers exercise their consciences only at the risk of career suicide. Minnich and Kahn declare,
We do not want [corporate] favors -- we need rights. We do not want public relations campaigns -- we want openness, public responsibility, and strong referees to hold the players to the rules we make democratically. We do not need a privatized world, we need a strong and accountable public sector. We do not need government by corporations, we need government by the people. We do not need an unfettered private profit culture, we need the public good.
The Fox in the Henhouse ... published October 10, 2005 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Gangster Capitalism by Michael Woodiwiss
A British historian specializing in the study of American organized crime since 1865 shows that while FDR aimed to police capitalism's rapacious excesses, the last 60 years have seen a steady dilution of the definition of corporate criminality so as to legitimize global capitalist gangsterism. America permits -- thereby encouraging -- "entrepreneurs" to exploit, rob, and destroy with impunity. Concludes Woodiwiss,
Increasingly we face a choice between a return to the principles and high ideals of progressive reform on the one hand and the destruction of democracy and freedom in the name of "free markets" on the other. It is time to decide whether Franklin D. Roosevelt or George W. Bush best represents our global future -- a future of endless war and increasingly shameless fraud or of hope and real if incomplete respite for the wretched of the world.
While Woodiwiss is obviously highly critical of Republican administrations (especially Nixon's) in these regards, he also calls to account the neoliberals who've made a mockery of the party of Roosevelt.
Gangster Capitalism ... published October 10, 2005 by Carroll & Graf
Is the American Dream Killing You? by Paul Stiles
"Unbridled capitalism now represents the gravest threat to our nation and the world." A surprising statement, coming as it does from one who's been an NSA intelligence officer, a Merrill Lynch bond trader, and an Internet entrepreneur. Stiles explores the pathologies of what he calls marketism, the secular religion that regards "free markets" as the final word on pretty much everything.
The author says that America's "hypermarket" -- in which citizens now serve the Market, rather than the other way around -- has spawned a society in which the most fundamental human bonds have been obliterated, resulting in a hyper-competitive war of all against all. Says he,
Instead of encouraging moderate capitalism, we have treated the Market as a virtually unlimited good. We have extolled "the wisdom of the marketplace," encouraged people to "let the market decide," and sought to spread this laissez-faire philosophy around the globe, as if it were an aspect of democracy. Implicit in this approach is the idea that the "free market" is somehow exempt from the laws of nature, in which all principles become an evil when pursued to excess.
Is the American Dream Killing You? ... first published September 27, 2005 by Collins
Shortchanged by Howard Karger
Karger's research and exposition go to the core of capitalism and the "American Way of Life." He shows how various industries dedicated to screwing the financially insecure prey not only on the unquestionably poor, but also on the middle-class "functionally poor" (together, half of this country's citizens) who work hard, are reasonably well-paid, and don't spend extravagantly. The scope of the predators' legal criminality must be measured in trillions of dollars; it's basic to the American economy.
Shortchanged ... published September 9, 2005 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers
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