Group items tagged

Millions of people have a queasy feeling that something is not right in the global economy - but they struggle to put their fingers on what exactly the problem is. Treasure Islands at last tells the real story of where it all went wrong. This is the great untold story of globalisation. Tax havens are not exotic, murky sideshows at the fringes of the world economy: they lie at its centre. Half of world trade flows, at least on paper, through tax havens. Every multinational corporation uses them routinely. The biggest users of tax havens by far are not terrorists, spivs, celebrities or Mafiosi - but banks. Tax havens are the ultimate source of strength for our global elites. Just as European nobles once consolidated their unaccountable powers in fortified castles, to better subjugate and extract tribute from the surrounding peasantry, so financial capital has coalesced in their modern equivalent today: the tax havens. In these fortified nodes of secret, unaccountable political and economic power, financial and criminal interests have come together to capture local political systems and turn the havens into their own private law-making factories, protected against outside interference by the world's most powerful countries - most especially Britain. Treasure Islands will, for the first time, show the blood and guts of just how they do it. Tax havens aren't just about tax. They are about escape - escape from criminal laws, escape from creditors, escape from tax, escape from prudent financial regulation - above all, escape from democratic scrutiny and accountability. Tax havens get rich by taking fees for providing these escape routes. This is their core line of business. It is what they do. These escape routes transform the merely powerful into the untouchable. "Don't tax or regulate us or we will flee offshore!" the financiers cry, and elected politicians around the world crawl on their bellies and capitulate. And so tax havens lead a global race to

I'm genuinely excited today to announce the release of my new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. As of this morning, it is available in bookstores as well as for shipping online. The book focuses on what I began realizing several years ago is the crucial theme tying together most of the topics I write about: America's two-tiered justice system - specifically, the way political and financial elites are now vested with virtually absolute immunity from the rule of law even when they are caught committing egregious crimes, while ordinary Americans are subjected to the world's largest and one of its harshest and most merciless penal states even for trivial offenses. As a result, law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be - the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities - into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality. This is how I described that development in the book:

A collection of fantastic tales by the French writer Marcel Aymé including his most famous story which has been filmed several times. Reminiscent of Borges in many ways he tells tales of men who can pass through solid objects, women who can replicate themselves, about governments who legislate leaps in time or who ration life all presented, in the best magic realism tradition, as the most ordinary things in the world.

There's no doubting the conservative bona fides of Bruce Fein. A high-level Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration in the 1980s and previously a resident scholar with the Heritage Foundation, he is a long-time advocate for uncompromising right-wing political principles. Yet paradoxically, Fein has been, and remains, one of the most eloquent and incisive political voices over the last decade. He was one of the earliest and most emphatic critics of Bush and Cheney's radical abuses of executive power. Two weeks after The New York Times revealed in December, 2005, that Bush had ordered the NSA to illegally eavesdrop on Americans without the warrants required by law, Fein used his column in the right-wing Washington Times to warn that "Mr. Bush has adamantly refused to acknowledge any constitutional limitations on his power to wage war indefinitely"; to scorn as "war powers nonsense" the theories assembled "to defend Mr.

The anti-globalisation movement suffered a dizzying setback on 9/11. Symbolic gatecrashing into the well-guarded meeting places of the super-rich suddenly seemed a much more sinister activity than before. Busting up branches of Starbucks and other Seattle-style antics became anathema in an atmosphere of injured and vindictive patriotism. But Naomi Klein, the combative theorist and publicist of anti-globalisation, was not about to accept such guilt by association. Her reply, The Shock Doctrine, deals with the corporate acquisitiveness that she sees as ravaging the planet and reformulates the ideas of the anti-globalisation and anti-corporate movements for a post-9/11 world. Klein believes she has found the answer to a question that has perplexed many on the left: if every modern American government has been a tool of powerful business interests, what, if anything, makes the Bush administration uniquely odious? Her answer is that the Bush administration draws its political support not from America's corporate class generally, but rather from a particular part of it: 'the sprawling disaster capitalism complex'. She has in mind the companies that reap huge profits from catastrophes, both man-made and natural. They include defence contractors, arms dealers, high-tech security firms, the oil and gas sectors, construction companies, private healthcare firms and so on. Not exactly ambulance-chasers, they are driving the ambulances themselves - for a profit. For the most part, they capitalise on emergencies rather than deliberately bringing them about. But the distinction is not always so clear: the stock price of Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defence contractor, almost tripled between 2003 and 2007 after a former vice president at the firm chaired a committee agitating for war with Iraq. The Iraq war was also 'the single most profitable event' in the history of Halliburton, whose former CEO, who still retains stock options, is Dick Cheney.

One of our most innovative, popular thinkers takes on-in exhilarating style-one of our key questions: Where do good ideas come from? With Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson pairs the insight of his bestselling Everything Bad Is Good for You and the dazzling erudition of The Ghost Map and The Invention of Air to address an urgent and universal question: What sparks the flash of brilliance? How does groundbreaking innovation happen? Answering in his infectious, culturally omnivorous style, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to popular culture, Johnson provides the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward. Beginning with Charles Darwin's first encounter with the teeming ecosystem of the coral reef and drawing connections to the intellectual hyperproductivity of modern megacities and to the instant success of YouTube, Johnson shows us that the question we need to ask is, What kind of environment fosters the development of good ideas? His answers are never less than revelatory, convincing, and inspiring as Johnson identifies the seven key principles to the genesis of such ideas, and traces them across time and disciplines. Most exhilarating is Johnson's conclusion that with today's tools and environment, radical innovation is extraordinarily accessible to those who know how to cultivate it. Where Good Ideas Come From is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how to come up with tomorrow's great ideas.

WASHINGTON -- These days, when we think of George W. Bush, we think mostly of what a horrible mess he made of the economy. But his even more tragic legacy is the loss of our moral authority, and the transformation of the United States of America from global champion of human rights into an outlaw nation.

The Magic Of Thinking Big: Achieve Whatever You Dream For [Megan Coulter] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. “The Magic of Thinking Big: Achieve Whatever You Dream For” A great book which covers the basic and most important things that proves that you can achieve whatever you dream for

It is absurdist comedy of the very blackest kind, informed by a love of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Peter Cook and The Goon Show. Featuring the Fibonacci sequence, floors that open up without warning, a powerful laxative, and a duvet that periodically changes colour, 'Verruca Music' charts the narrator's emergence from a state of fearful near-immobility assisted only by entertainments of his own devising. A most usual (and surprisingly accessible and funny) book if you're willing to stick with it.

Melody, an Australian living in Greece, decides she wants it all: to combine who she used to be with who she is now. She's ready to pick up her guitar again and play gigs as well as pursue a chance to further her editorial career while being a wife and mother. Yet nothing is life is ever so simple. Jessica says: I wrote String Bridge because I wanted to break into the women's fiction market and steer it away from the stereotypically glorified woman that is most commonly portrayed today. Not every woman is inspirational to others. Not every woman can leave their comfort zone to better their future. But, so what? Does that mean a less strong-minded woman doesn't have an interesting story to tell? Definitely not.

In some respects this is just another book about growing up. We all have to do it and none of find it easy. Growing up in a small town in America is bad enough but growing up in one of the most beautiful spots in America probably accentuates how ugly the rest of life can get. In these interlinked short stories we get to see one boy's struggles as he tries to understand the world about him and why he isn't always attracted to the beautiful things in his life.

The haunting record of a journey in search of the man-seal legends of the Celts. David Thomson's travels in the Hebrides and the west coast of Ireland brought him into contact with a people whose association with the sea and its fertile lore runs deep. These simple people were gifted with the most ancient storytelling arts. They told of men rescued by seals in stormy seas, of babies suckled by seal-mothers, and of men who took sea-women for wives-stories centuries-old handed down to them by their forefathers. This book seeks to brings these fascinating legends alive

"Stanley Swanson-Breed of a Werewolf" I've lived an extraordinary life to say the least. I started out in journalism and found myself located in Kansas City, KS working for the largest output of the newspaper known as the Kansas City Star. Born in 1974 and currently living in Stull, KS is where I have ended up and have retired at a young age of almost forty years old. I retired because I happen to be paralyzed from the waist down as a drunk person who ran a red light had t-boned me while on my motorcycle on my way home from work. That happened only a few years ago. I am not here to write about my life, but let me introduce myself. My name is Kain Edward. There were many things I wrote about in my time as a journalist, but found the most intriguing to me was that of paranormal existence, sightings, vampires and werewolves. Something I found I could exaggerate in my mind freely and always wanted to believe in them. During my life as a young boy, I loved anything to do with 'mythology' or those creatures that had certain powers. I grew up watching a lot of movies that involved Vampires and Werewolves and I believe that is why I had grown to be so time consumed in the research of such. One thing that always stood out to me was the fact that there never really ever seemed like there was a book or movie that gave great details of 'Werewolves', which would become more fascinating to me as I began to lose a slight interest in Vampires. "Surely there has to be more to Werewolves then just being some hideous beast that kills humans?" I would say to myself many times over. I had to do a lot of traveling and research as one might imagine. I had spoken to so many people from all parts of the world that claimed to have seen such subjects of interest or heard of someone who had. It only grew my interest that much more. Unfortunately, nothing ever turned out as a positive result as I often ran into dead ends. I soon became a laughing stock to co-workers and even

Evoking adventure made possible by the railroad, steamship, and automobile, and before adventure was accelerated beyond recognition by the jet airliner, these 50 National Geographic articles hail from the 1890s to the 1950s. Simon Winchester's introduction rues the haste travel has acquired, while the commentary of editor Jenkins ( Off the Map: Bicycling across Siberia, 1992) introduces the author and the genesis of his or her odyssey. Theodore Roosevelt's postpresidency safari kicks off the geographical organization--Africa, South America, and so forth--and also typifies Jenkins' editorial preferences for the lost worlds of imperialism, still-unexplored regions of earth and sea, and peoples untouched by modernity. Some of Jenkins' selections may be oft-anthologized classics by Roy Chapman Andrews, Richard Byrd, and Edmund Hillary, but most are not frequently reprinted. Collectively, Jenkins' grouping captures imagination-firing details in non-Western settings, such as capture by Mongolian bandits. Suiting the armchair as well as they did as long as a century ago, these articles will be popular indeed. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

I consider Robert Heinlein's most fascinating novel to be his prescriptive utopia Beyond This Horizon. (A prescriptive utopia is where an author "prescribes" what he or she believes a better civilization would look like.) While Heinlein did opine, extensively, about society in many books, from Starship Troopers to Glory Road, it is in Beyond This Horizon (BTH) that you'll find him clearly stating This Is The Way Things Ought To Be. And it turns out to be a fascinating, surprisingly nuanced view of our potential future.

The GRE is the test that has been taken by millions and millions of college graduates hoping to move to higher education in recent decades. The name stands for Graduate Record Examination, but most people call it simply the ERM for short. This test is administered in the Thompson Prometric testing centers across America, and can also be taken in many colleges and universities

English internet learning provides you with the ability to customize the pace and lessons plans. There are a lot of courses to choose from, most of them are free and provide excellent tutoring for the new and start learner.

One of the most original and provocative books of the past decade is "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt (Rowman & Littlefield). "A critical look at salaried professionals," says the cover, "and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives." Its theme is postmodern America, but also applies to Britain, where the corporate state has bred a new class of Americanized manager to run the private and public sectors: the banks, the main parties, corporations, important committees, the BBC.

If, as Lessig conclusively demonstrates, Congress is indifferent to the will of the people and to democratic debate - because it has been captured by monied interests to whose interests it exclusively attends - then the people lose the ability to affect what government does in any realm. It doesn't make much difference which problem you believe is most pressing: this is the dynamic that lies at the heart of it. Inaction on climate issues is due to the power of polluters and energy companies; the power of the private health insurance industry blocks fundamental health-care reform; endless war and civil liberties abuses are sustained by the power of the surveillance and National Security State industries; and a failure to achieve real Wall Street reform is due to the fact that, as Sen. Dick Durbin amazingly acknowledged about the institution in which he serves, "the banks frankly own the place." Without finding an effective way to address that overarching problem, the only recourse for citizens becomes either passive acceptance of their powerlessness (i.e., apathy and withdrawal) or disruption and unrest fomented outside of the electoral system (the driving ethos of OccupyWallStreet).

Steven Pinker is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, the author of several magnificent books about the human mind, and one of the most influential scientists on earth. He is also my friend, an occasional mentor, and an advisor to my nonprofit foundation, Project Reason.Steve's new book is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Reviewing it for the New York Times Book Review, the philosopher Peter Singer called it "a supremely important book." I have no doubt that it is, and I very much look forward to reading it. In the meantime, Steve was kind enough to help produce a written interview for this blog.