Back to Full Employment (Boston Review Books) [Hardcover]

August 16, 2012 by

Back to Full Employment (Boston Review Books) [Hardcover]

Publication Date: June 29, 2012 | Series: Boston Review Books

Full employment used to be an explicit goal of economic policy in most of the industrialized world. Some countries even achieved it. In Back to Full Employment, economist Robert Pollin argues that the United States–today faced with its highest level of unemployment since the Great Depression–should put full employment back on the agenda.

There are good reasons to seek full employment, Pollin writes. Full employment will help individuals, families, and the economy as a whole, while promoting equality and social stability. Equally important, creating a full-employment economy can be joined effectively with two other fundamental policy aims: ending our dependence on fossil fuels and creating an economy powered by clean energy.

Explaining views on full employment in macroeconomic theory from Marx to Keynes to Friedman, Pollin argues that the policy was abandoned in the United States in the 1970s for the wrong reasons, and he shows how it can be achieved today despite the serious challenges of inflation and globalization. Pollin believes the biggest obstacle to creating a full-employment economy is politics. Putting an end to the prevailing neoliberal opposition to full employment will require nothing less than an epoch-defining reallocation of political power away from the interests of big business and Wall Street and toward the middle class, working people, and the poor, while mounting a strong defense of the environment. In the end, achieving full employment will be a matter of political will: Can the United States make having a decent job a fundamental right?

Hardcover: 112 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press (June 29, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0262017571
ISBN-13: 978-0262017572

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Filed Under: Books, Economic Policy, Economy, Social Justice, United States Tagged With: , ,

Michael Hudson: THE BUBBLE AND BEYOND

August 11, 2012 by

Strongly recommended for anyone who wants to understand the economic crisis of predatory casino finance.

The editor

THE BUBBLE AND BEYOND [Paperback]

Publication Date: July 1, 2012

THE BUBBLE AND BEYOND describes how the fabulous expansive forces of industrial capitalism have been subverted by a predatory finance capitalism. What the FED hailed as “The Great Moderation” has left the middle class to take on a lifetime of bank debt to obtain access to housing, education to get a job, an auto to drive to it, and simply to maintain living standards that wages and salaries no longer support. What has derailed the economy is the take-over of academic economics and politics by the financial sector in order to censor criticism and misrepresent statistics so as to give the impression that the economy can “borrow its way out of debt.” The reality is that income used to pay down today’s debt overhead is not available to be spent on goods and services.

Paperback: 504 pages
Publisher: ISLET (July 1, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 3981484207
ISBN-13: 978-3981484205

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Filed Under: Books, Economic Crisis, Economic Policy, Finance, Inequality Tagged With: , ,

Book: Alan Fogelquist, Politics and Economic Policy in Yugoslavia, 1918-1929

July 27, 2011 by

Politics and Economic Policy in Yugoslavia, 1918-1929

By Alan Fogelquist

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Paperback, 502 pages

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This study, based on the author’s doctoral dissertation at UCLA, examines Yugoslav economic policy from 1918 to 1929, how it was made, and how it was affected by political developments of the time. It studies the activities of Yugoslavia’s regional political and business elites, political groups, and corporations, their reactions to Yugoslav economic policy and their efforts to influence it. The study contains a detailed analysis of party politics and the manner in which the political process affected economic policy. The study uncovers and explains relationships between state, elite, class, national-confessional groups, and territorial regions in the determination of social and economic policy in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later renamed Yugoslavia, and the relationship between these groups and the Yugoslav state.

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Product Details

ISBN
978-1-257-94299-2

Copyright
Alan F. Fogelquist, Ph.D (Standard Copyright License)

Publisher
Global Geopolitics Net

Published
July 27, 2011

Language
English

Pages
502

Binding
Perfect-bound Paperback

Interior Ink
Black & white

Dimensions (inches)
6.0 wide × 9.0 tall


Filed Under: Books, Economic Policy, Economy, Europe, History, Politics Tagged With:

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present [Hardcover]

July 7, 2011 by

Amazon.com: Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present (9781400041718): Jeff Madrick: Books

 

Jeff Madrick (Author)

Review

 “Jeff Madrick has written one of those rare, wonderful books that allow us to understand a huge and important historical development that we may not have realized was a coherent and coordinated series of events. Madrick’s account of Alan Greenspan’s ideologically-driven mistakes alone is worth the price of admission, but it is but one course in a feast of wonderful reporting and writing. If you want to know what has happened to your country, read this book.”
            -Robert G. Kaiser, author of So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government
 
“Jeff Madrick’s devastating biography of greed is rife with carefully documented cautionary tales of the rich, greedy and unregulated, which collectively constitute the definitive answer to Milton Friedmanesque laissez faire economics.”
            -Victor Navasky, author of Kennedy Justice
 
“Honore de Balzac wrote long ago that behind every great fortune lies a great crime.  Now in Jeff Madrick’s important new book, Age of Greed, we are introduced to some of the best and brightest moneychangers in the murky world of high finance.”
-Gay Talese, author of A Writer’s Life
 
“Who’s responsible for the laying waste of our economy—making the rich far richer and everyone else economically insecure? Madrick does more than name names. He tells us who did what and how they did it—the ideologues, demagogues, corporate titans, and crooks. A wonderfully insightful but deeply troubling account of the movers and shakers who toppled America.”
-Robert B. Reich, author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future
 
“The economic disaster of 2008 was not an accident of God but a man-made event. In writing about the financiers, bankers, brokers, free-market philosophers, hedge fund managers and government officials who together engineered the fundamental and profound, almost revolutionary shift in the American economy that culminated in the events of 2008, Jeff Madrick provides his readers with a new and startling account of recent economic history. The individual chapters are riveting but the genius of this book is that Madrick’s whole is even greater than the sum of its manificent parts. This is a book that bears reading by everyone with an interest in the American economy and the American future.”
-David Nasaw, author of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst
 
“Ideas and policies, like people, have parents and grandparents and in Age of Greed we learn of the men (and they are all men) whose ideas and actions begat three decades with almost no income growth for the vast majority, mountains of debt and fabulous riches for themselves and their peers. Jeff Madrick provides a powerful story of the damage done to our nation by hubris, delusions and lust for money.”
-David Cay Johnston, author of Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)
 

Product Description

A vividly told history of how greed bred America’s economic ills over the last forty years, and of the men most responsible for them.

As Jeff Madrick makes clear in a narrative at once sweeping, fast-paced, and incisive, the single-minded pursuit of huge personal wealth has been on the rise in the United States since the 1970s, led by a few individuals who have argued that self-interest guides society more effectively than community concerns. These stewards of American capitalism have insisted on the central and essential place of accumulated wealth through the booms, busts, and recessions of the last half century, giving rise to our current woes.

In telling the stories of these politicians, economists, and financiers who declared a moral battle for freedom but instead gave rise to an age of greed, Madrick traces the lineage of some of our nation’s most pressing economic problems. He begins with Walter Wriston, head of what would become Citicorp, who led the battle against government regulation. He examines the ideas of economist Milton Friedman, who created the plan for an anti-Rooseveltian America; the politically expedient decisions of Richard Nixon that fueled inflation; the philosophy of Alan Greenspan, on whose libertarian ideology a house of cards was built on Wall Street; and the actions of Sandy Weill, who constructed the largest financial institution in the world, which would have gone bankrupt in 2008 without a federal bailout of $45 billion. Significant figures including Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Jack Welch, and Ronald Reagan play key roles as well.

Intense economic inequity and instability is the story of our age, and Jeff Madrick tells it with style, clarity, and an unerring command of his subject.

  • Hardcover: 480 pages
  • Publisher: Knopf (May 31, 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1400041716
  • ISBN-13: 978-1400041718

For more information and reivews visit the Amazon.com page for this work.

 

 


 


Filed Under: Books, Economic Policy, Economy, History, United States

Amazon.com: The Betrayal of American Prosperity: Free Market Delusions, America’s Decline, and How We Must Compete in the Post-Dollar Era: Clyde Prestowitz: Books

May 28, 2011 by

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

High profile Washington economist Prestowitz (Three Billion New Capitalists) finds hope in the present economic collapse, which he believes will spur abandonment (however reluctantly) of “Laissez Faire Gobalization.” As a campaign advisor to President Obama and a principal trade negotiator for Reagan, Prestowitz has repeatedly warned against disregarding foreign competition (“thinking of the United States as number one”) as the U.S. suffers “a rapid erosion of its productive base.” Overreliance upon capital markets that were actually “a corrupt, over-leveraged, house of cards” has shifted the global balance of power to Japan, China and Europe, regions with protectionist policies that the U.S. has failed to counter. The genesis of this downhill slide can be found in Cold War principles-low taxes, deregulation, privatization-necessitated by the times, but which have become enshrined at the expense of the New Deal “private sector-government partnership” that led to America’s 20th century prosperity. An important contribution to the political debate, Prestowitz’s volume suggests a number of solutions-abolishing the dividend tax, imposing a value-added tax, incentivizing foreign investment in the U.S., and doubling federal support of innovative technologies-all likely to prove controversial on both sides of the political divide.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Has the economic vitality of the U.S. eroded so much that it cannot compete effectively against China, India, and other fast-growing economies? Prestowitz, consultant and former U.S. trade negotiator, thinks so, and he explains why in this challenging description of America’s fall from world leadership. Included among his reasons are the decline of the dollar, which has been the world’s main currency for carrying out international transactions; the “decisive shift in the global balance of power—away from the United States and toward East Asia and Europe . . . Brazil, India, Russia and Saudi Arabia”; and the scores of products and technologies against which the U.S. cannot compete. Prestowitz offers suggestions for restoring competitiveness, including instituting tax reform to increase government revenue; substantially revaluing “ a number of managed currencies versus the dollar and the euro over the next two to three years”; and reforming the World Trade Organization. All will not agree with the author, but his arguments are compelling. –Mary Whaley
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details

* Hardcover: 352 pages
* Publisher: Free Press (May 11, 2010)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 1439119791

Amazon.com: The Betrayal of American Prosperity: Free Market Delusions, America’s Decline, and How We Must Compete in the Post-Dollar Era: Clyde Prestowitz: Books.


Filed Under: Books, Economic Policy, Economy, Trade

Amazon.com: Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People: Jon Jeter: Books

April 28, 2011 by

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In an eloquent, no-holds-barred indictment of globalization, Jeter, former Washington Post bureau chief for southern Africa, weaves the narratives of prostitutes in Buenos Aires and cab drivers in Brazil, tomato sellers in Zambia and an upwardly mobile black woman in Chicago into an analysis of how globalization and free trade have transformed many of the world’s manufacturing hubs into global flea markets. There are true moments of heartbreak, particularly when Jeter shows how globalization has slowed progress in postapartheid South Africa and mingles with racism in Brazil, where employers and the state target poor black women for forced sterilization for the putative sake of a larger work force. The ghetto is in its ascendancy, he writes, challenging free trade orthodoxy and its ability to reduce poverty with examples of nations like Chile which have rethought their attitudes toward globalization and are moving toward new strength and independence. Jeter’s stinging criticisms are a catalyst for a truthful and painful discussion about who a global economy helps and who it destroys. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
This moving account of what poverty looks like in Mexico, Malawi, and Johannesburg (among other sites) by a former Washington Post bureau chief gently sings with the indignity of it all. By personalizing the struggle for survival around the globe (and based on seven years of interviews), whether it’s an Argentine prostitute or a Zambian tomato seller, Jeter dramatically paints the pictures of the “have nots,” pointing to political machinations, economic greed, failed governmental policies, and the deconstruction of the family framework as contributing causes to famine, disease, and crime. Readers will recognize many contemporary portraits, including that of Illinois Congressman Bobby Rush, now far from his roots as a Black Panther “power to the people,” and that of Chicago Afro-American Sonia, who cannot find a comparable mate. Yet he also profiles two countries—Chile and Venezuela—that have bucked the system and invested in manufacturing and exports, with no small reduction of the world’s chasm between wealthy and dirt-poor. An impassioned storyteller, Jeter wisely refrains from polemics and preachifying, gaining a powerful voice that, one hopes, will not be ignored. –Barbara Jacobs
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details

* Hardcover: 256 pages
* Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (May 11, 2009)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0393065073
* ASIN: B004JZWSTS

For more information and reader reviews, visit the link below.

Amazon.com: Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People: Jon Jeter: Books.


Filed Under: Books, Economic Crisis, Economic Policy, Inequality, Social Justice

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (9781568584348): Robert Scheer: Books

April 4, 2011 by

An accute study of the last thirty years of America’s scandalously regressive economic policy and the power of special interest lobbying that has underminded democracy. The complicity of leading Democratic and Republican party politicians in the outright pillage of Mainstreet America is documented. This book is long on important facts.

From Publishers Weekly
Following Ronald Reagan’ s obsession with the radical deregulation of financial markets through its apotheosis under the Clinton administration to Obama’ s reform efforts–which rely, oddly enough, on Clinton cronies to clean up (and profit from) the mess they made–Scheer (The Pornography of Power) proves that, when it comes to the ruling sway of money power, Democrats and Republicans, Wall Street and Washington make very agreeable bedfellows. Scheer names names (Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Alan Greenspan), while praising those who sounded the alarm and underscoring the foreseeable results of putting Wall Street in the driver’ s seat. What grew in this regulatory vacuum, Scheer shows, was a global casino, a mind-bendingly enormous and arcane system of gambling on new financial products worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. By 2007, when the house of cards collapsed, Wall Street alone understood what it had wrought while its government partners remained clueless.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Coziness between Wall Street and Washington, D.C., from as far back as the Reagan administration, set up the nation for a deliberate swindle that nearly brought down the U.S. economy, argues Scheer, a veteran journalist and editor of TruthDig.com. Drawing from investigative reporting, memoirs, and news accounts, Scheer traces the building crisis through the Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and even Obama administrations, taking aim at three myths: that the financial markets are logical and self-correcting, that excesses only hurt speculators and not the general public, and that government regulation stands in the way of effective free enterprise. Instead, he presents a portrait of financial and political skulduggery by several influential players, notably Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Phil Gramm, and heroic efforts by a few regulators to stop it. Scheer explains in accessible detail the expanding derivatives markets, loosening of regulations on financial activities, and the subprime mortgage market, with much of the abuse aided and abetted by a handful of influential men. He highlights Rubin’s machinations within government to grant expanded powers to Enron and Citigroup, then later joining Citigroup to benefit from the changes that he helped to engineer. Scheer is also critical of the business press that championed deregulation and asked few questions as iconic figures sat atop failure after failure, many of them now engaged in “reforming” the system. A scathing, penetrating look at the unsavory links between American finance and politics. –Vanessa Bush

Book Details:

  • Paperback: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Nation Books (September 7, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 9781568584348
  • ISBN-13: 978-1568584348

    • For further information and reader reviews follow the link below:

    Amazon.com: The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (9781568584348): Robert Scheer: Books.


    Filed Under: Books, Economic Policy, Economy, History, Politics, United States

    Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories (9781931859431): lavaca collective, Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis: Books

    March 24, 2011 by

    Product Description

    The worker-run factories of Argentina offer an inspirational example of a struggle for social change that has achieved a real victory against corporate globalization.

    Lavaca is an Argentine editorial and activist collective. Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and author of No Logo.Avi Lewis is an author and filmmaker. Klein and Lewis co-produced The Take, a film about Argentina’s occupied factories.

    About the Author

    lavaca is an editorial and activist collective, formed in 2001 in Buenos Aires, with the aim of chronicling, sharing the experiences of, and building solidarity with, social movements in Argentina and beyond. Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and author of the international best seller No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. In 2004, she released The Take, a film about Argentina’s occupied factories, co-produced with director Avi Lewis. Avi Lewis is an author and filmmaker, who’s most recent project was The Take, a film about Argentina’s occupied factories, co-produced with collaborator Naomi Klein.

    Book Information

  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Haymarket Books (May 1, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1931859434
  • ISBN-13: 978-1931859431

    • For more information and reader reviews visit the links below:

    Amazon.com: Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories (9781931859431): lavaca collective, Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis: Books.


    Filed Under: Books, Economic Crisis, Economy, History, Latin America, Social Justice Tagged With: , ,

    Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (9780470186381): Barry C. Lynn: Books

    March 20, 2011 by

    Review
    “Sometimes the evidence of economic disaster is right in front of your eyes, but you can’t see how all the pieces fit together. Then a book comes along to explain things, and suddenly everything meshes. Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction is that kind of a book.” (huffingtonpost.com, February 11, 2010)

    Product Description
    “A manifesto for our times.”-Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal

    Barry C. Lynn, one of the most original and surprising students of the American economy, paints a genuinely alarming picture: most of our public debates about globalization, competitiveness, creative destruction, and risky finance are nothing more than a cover for the widespread consolidation of power in nearly every imaginable sector of the American economy.

    Cornered strips the camouflage from the secret world of twenty-first-century monopolies-neofeudalist empires whose sheer size, vast resources, and immense political power enable the people who control to direct virtually every major industry in America in an increasingly authoritarian manner. Lynn reveals how these massive juggernauts, which would have been illegal just thirty years ago, came into being, how they have destroyed or devoured their competition, and how they collude with one another to maintain their power and create the illusion of open, competitive markets.

    A confluence of small government zealotry and misguided efficient market theories has lead to a complete dismantling of government oversight of industry. Has that brought us the promised economic utopia? Just the opposite. For decades, the dominant elite has used the federal government to all but encourage companies to buy one another up, outsource all their production, and make their profits by leveraging their complete power over the market itself. Lynn makes clear it will take more than a lawsuit or two to overthrow America’s corporatist oligarchy and restore a model of capitalism that protects our rights as property holders and citizens, and the independence of our Republic.

    * Details how regular citizens can join together to beat the great powers, and how to do so by relearning the real history and language of our democratic republic.
    * Includes stories of real people and real industries that show how monopolies threaten independent businesses, squelch innovation, degrade the quality and safety of products, destabilize vital industrial and financial systems, and destroy the fabric of democracy
    * Explores monopoly power across a wide array of industries, including appliances, auto parts, beer, eyeglasses, medical supplies, pet food, surfboards, vitamins, and more.
    * Demonstrates how the drive for “always lower prices” makes your job disappear, puts your small business out of business, and turns dreams of entrepreneurial success into impossible fantasies

    Lynn is that rarest of creatures, a journalist whose theoretical writings are taken very seriously by the top policymakers and economic thinkers in Washington and around the world. His work has been compared already to John Kenneth Galbraith and Peter Drucker. The Washington Post called Lynn’s last book-on globalization-”Tom Friedman for grownups.” Cornered is essential reading for anyone who cares about America and its future.

  • Hardcover: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Wiley (January 7, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0470186380
  • ISBN-13: 978-0470186381

    • For information on how to buy this book follow the link below:

    Amazon.com: Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (9780470186381): Barry C. Lynn: Books.


    Filed Under: Books, Economic Policy, Economy, Politics, United States

    Amazon.com: The Crisis of Neoliberalism (9780674049888): Gérard Duménil, Dominique Lévy: Books

    March 16, 2011 by

    Review
    This original and rigorous political-economic discussion of neoliberal global capitalism shows how deep the roots of the current crisis are and how stubbornly resistant it will be to conventional policy remedies.
    –Duncan K. Foley, author ofAdam’s Fallacy (New School for Social Research )

    An ambitious and original treatment of the ongoing global economic crisis. Duménil and Lévy provide both an in-depth statistical and historical narrative and an overarching analytical framework.
    –Thomas R. Michl, author of Capitalists, Workers, and Fiscal Policy (Colgate University )

    The Crisis of Neoliberalism is an insightful account of the factors that have led to the economic downturn. As Duménil and Lévy make clear, the economy cannot just return to its pre-crisis path.
    –Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research
    Product Description

    This book examines “the great contraction” of 2007–2010 within the context of the neoliberal globalization that began in the early 1980s. This new phase of capitalism greatly enriched the top 5 percent of Americans, including capitalists and financial managers, but at a significant cost to the country as a whole. Declining domestic investment in manufacturing, unsustainable household debt, rising dependence on imports and financing, and the growth of a fragile and unwieldy global financial structure threaten the strength of the dollar. Unless these trends are reversed, the authors predict, the U.S. economy will face sharp decline.

    Summarizing a large amount of troubling data, the authors show that manufacturing has declined from 40 percent of GDP to under 10 percent in thirty years. Since consumption drives the American economy and since manufactured goods comprise the largest share of consumer purchases, clearly we will not be able to sustain the accumulating trade deficits.

    Rather than blame individuals, such as Greenspan or Bernanke, the authors focus on larger forces. Repairing the breach in our economy will require limits on free trade and the free international movement of capital; policies aimed at improving education, research, and infrastructure; reindustrialization; and the taxation of higher incomes.

    Amazon.com: The Crisis of Neoliberalism (9780674049888): Gérard Duménil, Dominique Lévy: Books.


    Filed Under: Books, Economic Crisis, Economy Tagged With:
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