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

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.

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).

Amazon.com: The Power Of Introverts: Learn To Speak Up Without Raising Volume (9781512205961): Megan Coulter: Books

Many people have missed key opportunities in their life because they failed to see the power of now. Many people in the world fail to live in the now because they prefer to be fear of what they do...

SELF HELP BOOKS

""Well that fucking hurt!", I shouted after awakening. Feeling myself being dragged by two people by my arms and seeing the surrounding area that once was covered in dust. No Walker to be found as my last seen memory had seen, but more importantly, where the hell is Maddie. Still groggy from being smacked in the back of my head with a gun and a bit nervous, though I won't admit that to these men dragging me along this beaten path. Weak, tired and so damn confused " She is going to kill you all.", I say with a delightful smile on my face. Was only then one of the men dragging me responded " You are right Nick, she is going to kill us all, but not just her as she is not the only one of her kind infected, which is why we are taking shelter underground." With him telling me some of what I already knew " So what is your intent with me?" I asked while trying to regain my balance on my weakend knees. Wanting so badly to strike at these men dragging me underground and also wanting to reach for my gun, but realized it had been taken away "Good luck on finding her dip shits and if you were even capable of, you can't harm her." Then the man on the right of me started to become a familiar face as my eye site started to clear up some "Nick, had we retained her while you both came back to the facility, we would have ended her life as her powers she has of destruction is neutral underground of here. Why did you of all people not think of that idiot?" Calling me an idiot just really pisses me off! "Is that you Agent Jarvis?" Son of a bitch! A once close friend of mine and he is the one calling me an idiot. He was fast to acknowledge that it was in fact him and that I was not going to like the questioning session that was going to be taking place. I myself know what that is like as I have witnessed many sessions before in my time working as an agent myself. 'Fuck!', I would say to myself while my heart started to race faster. Having to plan something quickly and trying to decipher

""Well that fucking hurt!", I shouted after awakening. Feeling myself being dragged by two people by my arms and seeing the surrounding area that once was covered in dust. No Walker to be found as my last seen memory had seen, but more importantly, where the hell is Maddie. Still groggy from being smacked in the back of my head with a gun and a bit nervous, though I won't admit that to these men dragging me along this beaten path. Weak, tired and so damn confused " She is going to kill you all.", I say with a delightful smile on my face. Was only then one of the men dragging me responded " You are right Nick, she is going to kill us all, but not just her as she is not the only one of her kind infected, which is why we are taking shelter underground." With him telling me some of what I already knew " So what is your intent with me?" I asked while trying to regain my balance on my weakend knees. Wanting so badly to strike at these men dragging me underground and also wanting to reach for my gun, but realized it had been taken away "Good luck on finding her dip shits and if you were even capable of, you can't harm her." Then the man on the right of me started to become a familiar face as my eye site started to clear up some "Nick, had we retained her while you both came back to the facility, we would have ended her life as her powers she has of destruction is neutral underground of here. Why did you of all people not think of that idiot?" Calling me an idiot just really pisses me off! "Is that you Agent Jarvis?" Son of a bitch! A once close friend of mine and he is the one calling me an idiot. He was fast to acknowledge that it was in fact him and that I was not going to like the questioning session that was going to be taking place. I myself know what that is like as I have witnessed many sessions before in my time working as an agent myself. 'Fuck!', I would say to myself while my heart started to race faster. Having to plan something quickly and trying to decipher

Time isn't what it used to be  TIME is not what it used to be. Once a flowing river whose current we passively monitored, time is now more properly understood as something constructed by the brain and personalised by culture. We have relationships with time; we fight it and manipulate it. Into this arena steps Eva Hoffman with her poetically scientific and austerely titled Time. Hoffman is on an exploration to become intimate with time, motivated by her sense that our interaction with time has changed. Our societies have become obsessed with time and timekeeping, both in the workplace and at home. Jet travel manipulates our experience of day-night cycles and seasons, while biomedical science races to increase our lifespan yet further. At the other end of the spectrum, new technologies adapt our minds to the ever-briefer scales of micro and nano. Hoffman covers a lot of ground, from physics (why time flows in only one direction) to biology (the circadian rhythm and sleep) to neuroscience (how temporality is constructed by the brain). She addresses questions of time and consciousness, including the uniquely human ability to envision large vistas of past or future. Perceived time is illuminated by disease states such as Alzheimer's disease or Korsakoff's syndrome, in which one's time narrative becomes disorganised, and by fantasies and dreams, in which the unconscious brain does not necessarily commit to a temporal narrative at all. Hoffman also investigates individual differences in how people treat time (those who leave parties early versus those who have to be shooed out at the end) as well as cultural differences (communities in which haste amounts to a breach of ethics, for instance). A recurring theme is that the human capacity to manipulate our environment ushers in new complexities to the basic biology of time. For example, while other animals age and die on a strict schedule, humans do everything in their power to control that timing. And the book is full of

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:

Amazon.com: The Power Of Introverts: Learn To Speak Up Without Raising Volume eBook: Megan Coulter: Kindle Store

A story of a powerful and beautiful mage who is torn between the good and evil within herself.

A story of a powerful and beautiful mage who is torn between the good and evil within herself.

Short of money, the inventor Thomas Edison is captivated by the charismatic figure of J.P. Morgan, the world's greatest banker. Accepting Morgan's glittering offer of almost unlimited cash in return for helping the man change the way the world does business, Edison sees himself descend from being the godlike inventor of electric light to being complicit in the invention of the electric chair. Ever more enmeshed in Morgan's personal life, he becomes infatuated by a world of privilege and power, where duty and desire, faith and immorality are thrown into conflict, ultimately threatening his own spiritual and creative survival.

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.

"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

Jeffrey has a natural aptitude for short stories which are stylish, witty and entertaining. His mastery of characterisation and suspense, combined with a gift for the unexpected, jaw-dropping plot twist, show him at the height of his powers and demonstrate why he is one of Britain's bestselling authors. All of Jeffrey's collections of short stories have been top ten bestsellers. Macmillan are proud to announce the publication of a sixth volume of stories in May 2010.

You can feel it. Or maybe you can't. It doesn't matter whether you feel it or not. It's happening. The story of the United States of America as we know it -- not merely as the world's dominant superpower, but as a discrete political, economic, and geographic entity -- is drawing to a close due to a convergence of emerging economic, environmental, and political crises. Nothing lasts forever, empires least of all. And this one, which only began to expand in earnest circa the year 1900, doesn't feel like it has the staying power of ancient Rome. Not at all.

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

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.

As Jeff writes in the introduction, the first part of Age of Greed "is mostly a story of business pioneers who fought government regulation or, through innovation, escaped government oversight," building on fear from punishing inflation in the seventies and a new post-Watergate distrust of government, "all the while diminishing the power of government and reinforcing the changing national attitudes." In the second part, "Once government was no longer a counterweight and a new political ideology cleared their path, financiers led the way... Debts more than innovation and technological progress became the economy's driving force. Financial businesses doubled in size compared to the economy and profits grew still faster. Hundreds of billions of precious American savings were wasted."