Polaris

Polaris PDF Author: Jack McDevitt
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101208317
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Jack McDevitt brings back the daring Alex Benedict from A Talent for War, thrusting him into a far-future tale of mystery and suspense that will lead the prominent antiquities dealer to the truth about an abandoned space yacht called the Polaris.

Polaris

Polaris PDF Author: Jack McDevitt
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101208317
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 484

Get Book Here

Book Description
Jack McDevitt brings back the daring Alex Benedict from A Talent for War, thrusting him into a far-future tale of mystery and suspense that will lead the prominent antiquities dealer to the truth about an abandoned space yacht called the Polaris.

PENTAGON CAPITALISM The Political Economy of War

PENTAGON CAPITALISM The Political Economy of War PDF Author: Seymour Melman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description


Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy

Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy PDF Author: S.M. Amadae
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226016535
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
In Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, S. M. Amadae tells the remarkable story of how rational choice theory rose from obscurity to become the intellectual bulwark of capitalist democracy. Amadae roots Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy in the turbulent post-World War II era, showing how rational choice theory grew out of the RAND Corporation's efforts to develop a "science" of military and policy decisionmaking. But while the first generation of rational choice theorists—William Riker, Kenneth Arrow, and James Buchanan—were committed to constructing a "scientific" approach to social science research, they were also deeply committed to defending American democracy from its Marxist critics. Amadae reveals not only how the ideological battles of the Cold War shaped their ideas but also how those ideas may today be undermining the very notion of individual liberty they were created to defend.

Imperialism and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century

Imperialism and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century PDF Author: Raúl Delgado Wise
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409467341
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
We live in a time of dynamic, but generally regressive regime change-a period in which major political transformations and a rollback of a half-century of legislation are accelerated under conditions of a prolonged and deepening economic crisis and a worldwide offensive against the citizenry and the working class. Written by two of the world’s leading left-wing thinkers, Imperialism and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century takes the form of a number of analytical probes into some of the dynamics of capitalist development and imperialism in contemporary conditions of a system in crisis. It is too early to be definitive about the form that capitalism and imperialism -and socialism-might be or is taking, as we are in but the early stages of a new developmental dynamic, the conditions of which are too complex to anticipate or grasp in thought; they require a closer look and much further study from a critical development and Marxist perspective. The purpose of this book is to advance this process and give some form to this perspective.

Capitalism's Hidden Worlds

Capitalism's Hidden Worlds PDF Author: Kenneth Lipartito
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812296699
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
A dynamic social history of shadow capitalism spanning the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries Observers see free markets, the relentless pursuit of profit, and the unremitting drive to commodify everything as capitalism's defining characteristics. These most visible economic features, however, obscure a range of other less evident, often unmeasured activities that occur on the margins and in the concealed corners of the formal economy. The range of practices in this large and diverse hidden realm encompasses traders in recycled materials and the architects of junk bonds and shadow banking. It includes the black and semi-licit markets that allow wealthy elites to avoid taxes and the unmeasured domestic and emotional labor of homemakers and home care workers. By some estimates, the unmeasured economic activity that occurs within the household, informal market, and underground economy amounts to a substantial portion of all economic activity in the world, as much as 30 percent in some countries. Capitalism's Hidden Worlds sheds new light on this shadowy economic landscape by reexamining how we think about the market. In particular, it scrutinizes the missed connections between the official, visible realm of exchange and the uncounted and invisible sectors that border it. While some hidden markets emerged in opposition to the formal economy, much of the obscured economy described in this volume operates as the other side of the legitimate, state-sanctioned marketplace. A variety of historical actors—from fortune tellers and forgers to tax lawyers and black market consumers—have constructed this unseen world in tandem with the observable public world of transactions. Others, such as feminist development economists and government regulators, have worked to bring the darkened corners of the economy to light. The essays in Capitalism's Hidden Worlds explore how the capitalist marketplace sustains itself, how it acquires legitimacy and even prestige, and how the marginalized and the dispossessed find ways to make ends meet. Contributors: Bruce Baker, Eileen Boris, Eli Cook, Hannah Frydman, James Hollis, Owen Hyman, Anna Kushkova, Christopher McKenna, Kenneth Mouré, Philip Scranton, Bryan Turo.

Fighting Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking

Fighting Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking PDF Author: Genevieve LeBaron
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108904475
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Over the last two decades, fighting modern slavery and human trafficking has become a cause célèbre. Yet large numbers of researchers, non-governmental organizations, trade unions, workers, and others who would seem like natural allies in the fight against modern slavery and trafficking are hugely skeptical of these movements. They object to how the problems are framed, and are skeptical of the “new abolitionist” movement. Why? This book tackles key controversies surrounding the anti-slavery and anti-trafficking movements head on. Champions and skeptics explore the fissures and fault lines that surround efforts to fight modern slavery and human trafficking today. These include: whether efforts to fight modern slavery displace or crowd out support for labor and migrant rights; whether and to what extent efforts to fight modern slavery mask, naturalize, and distract from racial, gendered, and economic inequality; and whether contemporary anti-slavery and anti-trafficking crusaders' use of history are accurate and appropriate.

Capitalism’s Crises

Capitalism’s Crises PDF Author: Vishwas Satgar
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1868149242
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
The contributors to this volume draw on a non-dogmatic Marxist approach to explain the systemic and conjunctural dynamics of crisis inherent in global capitalism. Their analysis asks what is historically specific to capitalism's crises while avoiding catastrophic or defeatist claims. At the same time the volume situates left agency within actual patterns of resistance and class struggle to clarify the potential for transformative change. The cycle of resistance strengthened by the World Socal Forum and transnational activism is now punctuated by the experience of the Arab Spring, the agency of anti-systemic movements, left think tanks, the Occupy Wall Street Movement, labour unions, left parties in Europe such as Syrizia and Podemos and peoples' budgeting in Kerala, India. On the down side, we are witnessing the waning of the Workers Party in Brazil and serious challenges for South Africa's once powerful labour movement and still formative social justice activism. All these developments are assessed in this volume. This is the second volume in the Democratic Marxism series. It elaborates on crucial themes introduced in the first volume, Marxism in the 21st Century: Crisis, Critique and Struggle (edited by Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar).

The Man Who Broke Capitalism

The Man Who Broke Capitalism PDF Author: David Gelles
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 198217644X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
New York Times Bestseller New York Times reporter and “Corner Office” columnist David Gelles reveals legendary GE CEO Jack Welch to be the root of all that’s wrong with capitalism today and offers advice on how we might right those wrongs. In 1981, Jack Welch took over General Electric and quickly rose to fame as the first celebrity CEO. He golfed with presidents, mingled with movie stars, and was idolized for growing GE into the most valuable company in the world. But Welch’s achievements didn’t stem from some greater intelligence or business prowess. Rather, they were the result of a sustained effort to push GE’s stock price ever higher, often at the expense of workers, consumers, and innovation. In this captivating, revelatory book, David Gelles argues that Welch single-handedly ushered in a new, cutthroat era of American capitalism that continues to this day. Gelles chronicles Welch’s campaign to vaporize hundreds of thousands of jobs in a bid to boost profits, eviscerating the country’s manufacturing base and destabilizing the middle class. Welch’s obsession with downsizing—he eliminated 10% of employees every year—fundamentally altered GE and inspired generations of imitators who have employed his strategies at other companies around the globe. In his day, Welch was corporate America’s leading proponent of mergers and acquisitions, using deals to gobble up competitors and giving rise to an economy that is more concentrated and less dynamic. And Welch pioneered the dark arts of “financialization,” transforming GE from an admired industrial manufacturer into what was effectively an unregulated bank. The finance business was hugely profitable in the short term and helped Welch keep GE’s stock price ticking up. But ultimately, financialization undermined GE and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies. Gelles shows how Welch’s celebrated emphasis on increasing shareholder value by any means necessary (layoffs, outsourcing, offshoring, acquisitions, and buybacks, to name but a few tactics) became the norm in American business generally. He demonstrates how that approach has led to the greatest socioeconomic inequality since the Great Depression and harmed many of the very companies that have embraced it. And he shows how a generation of Welch acolytes radically transformed companies like Boeing, Home Depot, Kraft Heinz, and more. Finally, Gelles chronicles the change that is now afoot in corporate America, highlighting companies and leaders who have abandoned Welchism and are proving that it is still possible to excel in the business world without destroying livelihoods, gutting communities, and spurning regulation.

Shooting Polaris

Shooting Polaris PDF Author: John Hales
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826264956
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Shooting Polaris is John Hales’s fascinating and far-reaching account of working as a government surveyor in the southern Utah desert. In it, he describes his search for a place in the natural world, beginning with an afternoon spent tracking down a lost crew member who cracked up on the job and concluding with his supervising a group of at-risk teenagers on a backpacking trip in the Escalante wilderness. In between, he depicts a range of experiences in and outside nature, including hostile barroom encounters between surveyors and tourists, weekends spent climbing Navajo Mountain and floating what remains of Glen Canyon, and late-night arguments concerning the meaning and purpose of nature with the eccentric polygamist who ran the town in which the surveyors parked their bunk trailers. Although this work is autobiographical, Shooting Polaris is so much more. It is a reflection on man’s relationship to nature and work, American history and the movement into the West, the desire to impose order and the contrary impulse for unmediated experience, the idealistic legacy of the sixties, the influence of the Mormon Church, and the often-antagonistic relationship of American capitalism to sound ecological management. Along the way, Hales introduces engaging characters and reveals the art, science, and history of surveying, an endeavor that turns out to be surprisingly profound.

Highest Stage Of The Development Of Capitalism In The United States And Its Effects On The American Family, Volume III, Book II, 1960 To 1980

Highest Stage Of The Development Of Capitalism In The United States And Its Effects On The American Family, Volume III, Book II, 1960 To 1980 PDF Author: Lionel D. Lyles
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1663260222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 491

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Book Description
For 10,000 years before any European immigrants arrived on the North American Continent, Native American Indians engaged in a communal lifestyle. From 1600 to 1791, American Colonists established a thriving home production economy, and having ownership of their tools, or means of production, they produced everything they needed to survive. They were self-reliant, and the American Colonists sold their excess goods to merchants, who resold them for a profit. By 1791, the merchants were able to start the first textile factories as a result, which brought an abrupt end to the home production economy, and the beginning of American Capitalism. Former independent colonists were now forced into the textile factory, and the first wage contract appeared in America. The wage contract also set in motion a contradiction between the capitalist owners of the means of production and the new American Working Class. The wage contract allowed the owners of working class labor, and the instruments of production, to evolve into an American Ruling Class, and the producers of all commodities and wealth became the American Working Class People wage-workers class. Because of their divergent interests, the two classes formed a class contradiction, and the latter became known as the capitalist American Ruling Class Opposite and the American Working Class Opposite (People) wage-workers. This development occurred mainly in the northern factory economy, while in the South, uncompensated African Slave Labor was dominant, which was owned by an American Slaveholding Class. By 1860, the contradiction between the capitalist American Ruling Class Opposite owner of the wage labor system came into a head-on contradiction with uncompensated African Slave Labor, and a bloody Civil War was fought to determine which type of means of production would prevail and dominate during the 20th Century? The South was defeated, and the wage contract system became nationalized. Therefore, throughout the twentieth Century, including the beginning of the new Millennium, the capitalist American Ruling Class Opposite expropriated the labor’s product of the American Working Class Opposite (People) wage-workers, which resulted in this class accumulation of multiple-billions of dollars of Surplus-Value, and simultaneously this loss translated into the American Working Class Opposite (People) wage-workers’ increasing alienation, estrangement, loss self-identity, self-expression, and freedom.