Con$umed

Con$umed PDF Author: Benjamin R. Barber
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393049619
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
"Offers a vivid portrait of a global economy that overproduces goods and targets children as consumers ... where the primary goal is no longer to manufacture goods but needs." - cover.

Con$umed

Con$umed PDF Author: Benjamin R. Barber
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393049619
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
"Offers a vivid portrait of a global economy that overproduces goods and targets children as consumers ... where the primary goal is no longer to manufacture goods but needs." - cover.

Jihad vs. McWorld

Jihad vs. McWorld PDF Author: Benjamin Barber
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307874443
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Jihad vs. McWorld is a groundbreaking work, an elegant and illuminating analysis of the central conflict of our times: consumerist capitalism versus religious and tribal fundamentalism. These diametrically opposed but strangely intertwined forces are tearing apart--and bringing together--the world as we know it, undermining democracy and the nation-state on which it depends. On the one hand, consumer capitalism on the global level is rapidly dissolving the social and economic barriers between nations, transforming the world's diverse populations into a blandly uniform market. On the other hand, ethnic, religious, and racial hatreds are fragmenting the political landscape into smaller and smaller tribal units. Jihad vs. McWorld is the term that distinguished writer and political scientist Benjamin R. Barber has coined to describe the powerful and paradoxical interdependence of these forces. In this important new book, he explores the alarming repercussions of this potent dialectic for democracy. A work of persuasive originality and penetrating insight, Jihad vs. McWorld holds up a sharp, clear lens to the dangerous chaos of the post-Cold War world. Critics and political leaders have already heralded Benjamin R. Barber's work for its bold vision and moral courage. Jihad vs. McWorld is an essential text for anyone who wants to understand our troubled present and the crisis threatening our future.

Con$umed

Con$umed PDF Author: Benjamin R. Barber
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393330893
Category : Capitalism
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
An examination of the effects of capitalism on American culture and society reveals how consumer capitalism overproduces goods, targets children as consumers, and replaces public goods with private commodities.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole PDF Author: Benjamin R. Barber
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393070395
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
"Powerful and disturbing. No one who cares about the future of our public life can afford to ignore this book." —Jackson Lears A powerful sequel to Benjamin R. Barber's best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld, Consumed offers a vivid portrait of a global economy that overproduces goods and targets children as consumers in a market where there are never enough shoppers—and where the primary goal is no longer to manufacture goods but needs. Disturbing, provocative, and compelling, this book examines phenomena as seemingly disparate as adolescent fashion trends for adults, megachurches, declining voter participation, the privatization of the public sphere, branding, and the rise of online shopping to show how the freedoms of the free market have undermined the freedoms of the deliberative adult citizen. Barber brings together extensive empirical research with an original theoretical framework for understanding our contemporary predicament.

Childhood Under Siege

Childhood Under Siege PDF Author: Joel Bakan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439121222
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Computer game designers craft techniques to titillate children with sex and violence, while social media developers infiltrate and shape children's social and emotional worlds to compel them to spend more and more monetizable time online. America's schools are being transformed into profit centers while children are subjected to increasingly regimented teaching that thwarts curiosity and creativity, numbing the joy of learning. And children's chronic health problems, from asthma to cancer, autism, and birth defects, steadily escalate as thousands of new industrial chemicals are dumped into their environments. Nelson Mandela once sagely remarked that "there can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way it treats its children." The problem today, as Joel Bakan reveals, is that business interests have made protecting children extremely difficult.

Popular Culture

Popular Culture PDF Author: Imre Szeman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119140331
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Popular Culture: A User’s Guide, International Edition ventures beyond the history of pop culture to give readers the vocabulary and tools to address and analyze the contemporary cultural landscape that surrounds them. Moves beyond the history of pop culture to give students the vocabulary and tools to analyze popular culture suitable for the study of popular culture across a range of disciplines, from literary theory and cultural studies to philosophy and sociology Covers a broad range of important topics including the underlying socioeconomic structures that affect media, the politics of pop culture, the role of consumers, subcultures and countercultures, and the construction of social reality Examines the ways in which individuals and societies act as consumers and agents of popular culture

If Mayors Ruled the World

If Mayors Ruled the World PDF Author: Benjamin R. Barber
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030016467X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
"In the face of the most perilous challenges of our time--climate change, terrorism, poverty, and trafficking of drugs, guns, and people--the nations of the world seem paralyzed. The problems are too big for governments to deal with. Benjamin Barber contends that cities, and the mayors who run them, can do and are doing a better job than nations. He cites the unique qualities cities worldwide share: pragmatism, civic trust, participation, indifference to borders and sovereignty, and a democratic penchant for networking, creativity, innovation, and cooperation. He demonstrates how city mayors, singly and jointly, are responding to transnational problems more effectively than nation-states mired in ideological infighting and sovereign rivalries. The book features profiles of a dozen mayors around the world, making a persuasive case that the city is democracy's best hope in a globalizing world, and that great mayors are already proving that this is so"--

A Nation of Wimps

A Nation of Wimps PDF Author: Hara Estroff Marano
Publisher: Broadway
ISBN: 9780767924030
Category : Child rearing
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Wake up, America: We’re raising a nation of wimps. Hara Marano, editor-at-large and the former editor-in-chief ofPsychology Today, has been watching a disturbing trend: kids are growing up to be wimps. They can’t make their own decisions, cope with anxiety, or handle difficult emotions without going off the deep end. Teens lack leadership skills. College students engage in deadly binge drinking. Graduates can’t even negotiate their own salaries without bringing mom or dad in for a consult. Why? Because hothouse parents raise teacup children—brittle and breakable, instead of strong and resilient. This crisis threatens to destroy the fabric of our society, to undermine both our democracy and economy. Without future leaders or daring innovators, where will we go? So what can be done? kids would play in the street until their mothers hailed them for supper, and unless a child was called into the principal’s office, parents and teachers met only at organized conferences. Nowadays, parents are involved in every aspect of their children’s lives—even going so far as using technology to monitor what their kids eat for lunch at school and accompanying their grown children on job interviews. What is going on? Hothouse parenting has hit the mainstream—with disastrous effects. Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the lumps and bumps out of life for their children, but the net effect of parental hyperconcern and scrutiny is to make kids more fragile. When the real world isn’t the discomfort-free zone kids are accustomed to, they break down in myriad ways. Why is it that those who want only the best for their kids wind up bringing out the worst in them? There is a mental health crisis on college campuses these days, with alarming numbers of students engaging in self-destructive behaviors like binge drinking and cutting or disconnecting through depression. A Nation of Wimpsis the first book to connect the dots between overparenting and the social crisis of the young. Psychology expert Hara Marano reveals how parental overinvolvement hinders a child’s development socially, emotionally, and neurologically. Children become overreactive to stress because they were never free to discover what makes them happy in the first place. Through countless hours of painstaking research and interviews, Hara Marano focuses on the whys and how of this crisis and then turns to what we can do about it in this thought-provoking and groundbreaking book.

Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy

Fear's Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy PDF Author: Benjamin R. Barber
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393070417
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
"Fear's Empire lays the foundation for a principled opposition based on America's truest and best values."--Senator Gary Hart The author of Jihad vs. McWorld analyzes how American foreign policy has gone wrongand how it could go right. In this hard-hitting but pragmatic new critique of the Bush administration's foreign policy, Benjamin R. Barber exposes in detail the folly of an agenda of preventive war, placing it in the context of two hundred years of American strategic doctrine (including the recent history of deterrence and containment). He shows how chosen "rogue states" have been made to stand in for terrorists too difficult to locate and destroy, and how the United States continues to support dictatorship in nations it regards as friends, while still believing we can impose democracy on vanquished enemies at the barrel of a gun. Barber argues for an America that promotes cooperation, multilateralism, international law, and pooled sovereignty. For as law and citizenship alone secure liberty within nations, law and citizenship alone can secure liberty among them, freeing them from fear.

Strictly Right

Strictly Right PDF Author: Linda Bridges
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0471758175
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
An affectionate portrait of the man who started it all "With this graceful homage to Bill Buckley, two people who have known the pleasure of his company as friends and colleagues place him where he incontestably belongs--at the center of the conservative political movement that moved the center of American politics to the right." --George F. Will, Newsweek "Strictly Right paints an intimate and penetrating portrait of the elegant and multifaceted figure who has helped to add a new dimension to the American political canvas." --Henry A. Kissinger "Bill and I and others have been good friends for almost sixty years and I thought I knew of his life as well as anyone, but Linda and John have brought the events together in a magnificent story that surpasses all that we have absorbed. If you like and admire Bill, you must read this. If you don't, read it anyway--it will be good for you." --Evan G. Galbraith, former Ambassador to France and Chairman of National Review "Linda Bridges and John Coyne evoke the true old times, when every morning brought a noble chance, and every chance brought out William F. Buckley Jr., ready to write, speak, question, provoke, tease, or praise, in print, in person, or on the tube, as required. All honor to him, and to the authors who capture him in these pages." --Richard Brookhiser, author of What Would the Founders Do?: Our Questions, Their Answers