War, Evil and the End of History


Bernard-Henri Lévy - 2001
    In Sri Lanka, he conducts a clandestine interview with a terrified young woman escaped from a suicide-bomber training camp . . . he journeys, blindfolded, into the Colombian jungle to interview a psychotic drug lord who considers himself the successor to Che Guevara and fronts a bloodthirsty "guerilla" army . . . Lévy surreptitiously observes the nameless slaves working the diamond mines that fund an endless war in Angola . . . airdrops into a rebel stronghold in the blockaded Nuba mountains of the Sudan . . . and reports on the ongoing carnage in Burundi between Hutus and Tutsis. But Lévy is more than just a journalist: as France's leading philosopher, he follows the reports with a series of intensely personal and probing "reflections" considering how, in an enlightened, cultured, and well-informed society, these wars have acquired such a perverse "non-meaning." He considers war literature from Stendhal, Hemingway, Proust and others, and issues an excoriating response to those who have glorified it. He reconsiders his own background as a student revolutionary in Paris in May 1968, and as a 22-year-old war reporter in Bangladesh. And, in one of the book's most moving passages, he recounts his travels with Ahmad Massoud, the anti-Taliban Afghan leader assassinated hours before the September 11 attacks. Already a huge bestseller in Europe, WAR, EVIL, AND THE END OF HISTORY is the work of a scintillating intellect at the height of its powers. Bernard-Henri Lévy's previous book foresaw today's headlines about Pakistan's secret trading of nuclear technology and the nexus of terrorist groups behind the murder of Daniel Pearl. WAR, EVIL, AND THE END OF HISTORY is his brilliant foray into the next danger zones.

Currency


L. Todd Wood - 2011
    Currency, combines multiple historical strands that converge on the number one issue of our time, the geographic location of economic and military power in the 21st century. Economic Thriller! An incredible story of power, romance, revenge and international finance spanning three centuries. The issues could not be more timely!"Currency combines history, finance, romance and action into a timely and entertaining read on a subject that has serious economic and national security implications. My wife and I both enjoyed reading it." Hon. David M. Walker Former U.S. Comptroller General.In Currency, Wood has pulled off a first novel that captures the reader with a page-turning adventure, while it addresses head-on the most pressing and intense global economic, military and political issues of our very challenging current times.Wood's real world experience on both Wall Street and at the center of the US Military Special Operations world, combine with his love of history and command of current global issues, to create a story that is as intense and gripping as it is timely.Currency weaves the historical adventures of our US Founding Fathers who built the country's early economic structure, with current day hero Connor Murray. Connor unexpectedly finds himself thrust into a world shaped as much by greed, betrayal and violence as it by heroism, loyalty, love and the quest for personal peace.Fate forces Murray to navigate events that play out on the world stage. The United States' current economic weakness collides with its international rival's very real drive for economic, political and military influence. This collision produces an intense drama and adventure that is as scary as it is possible amidst the world's current state of affairs and balance of power.If you love a good adventure story on both the personal and international level - Currency is a must read. If you're concerned about how the United State's current economic challenges could play out for the country in a very real way - Currency is a must read. And if you want to be an early reader of a new author who has tremendous promise - Currency is definitely a must read.

The Little Book of Currency Trading: How to Make Big Profits in the World of Forex


Kathy Lien - 2010
    Now, hundreds of thousands of traders and investors around the world can participate in this profitable field.Written by forex expert Kathy Lien, The Little Book of Currency Trading will show you how to effectively invest and trade in today's biggest market. Page by page, she describes the multitude of opportunities possible in the forex market, from short-term price swings to long-term trends, and details practical products that can help you achieve success, such as currency-based ETFs.Explains the forces that drive currencies and provides strategies to profit from them Reveals how you can use various currencies to reduce risk and take advantage of global trends Examines financial vehicles that can help you make money without having to monitor the market every day The Little Book of Currency Trading opens the world of currency trading and investing to anyone interested in entering this dynamic arena.

The Moneychangers


Upton Sinclair - 1908
    Ultimately thousands of jobs are lost, throwing the world into financial chaos. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

Indian Share Market For Beginners


Vipin Kats - 2013
    The book explains in easy manner the various investing avenues that you have, the advantages and disadvantages of each. It gives the overall picture of the Indian market.Here are some of the topics that are covered in the book:• Finding and choosing a broker - Online vs traditional broker• How to invest, how much to invest and investment goals• The difference between mutual funds, index funds, and ETFs• How to make your first tradeQuick and easy to read, this will help you start trading and gives you that basic knowlegde that is required before you select a stock to trade

Basic Economics for Students and Non-Students Alike


Jerry Wyant - 2013
    Graphs are not included, but both the graphs and the concepts behind them are explained; only basic math is included, and you can even skim over the math and still come away with an understanding of the concepts; statistics is not included at all.BASIC ECONOMICS FOR STUDENTS AND NON-STUDENTS ALIKE is an easy way to learn concepts relating to economics and the economy. It is a product of thousands of hours spent online, teaching basic concepts in economics to hundreds of students worldwide over the course of the past several years. From back and forth communications, I have discovered the explanations for the concepts that students find easiest to understand, as well as the areas that most often get misunderstood and under-emphasized.I have worked with students located throughout the United States and from many different countries, on six different continents; students from many different school systems with different points of emphasis; students with different levels of knowledge, different backgrounds, and different levels of interest in the subject. I have received numerous comments and testimonials regarding the teaching methods that I incorporate in BASIC ECONOMICS FOR STUDENTS AND NON-STUDENTS ALIKE.The subject matter included in BASIC ECONOMICS FOR STUDENTS AND NON-STUDENTS ALIKE comes from a compilation of many different textbooks at the introductory and intermediate levels. My goal was to include every subject in economics that normally will be found in an introductory level textbook of economics, microeconomics, or macroeconomics. Since different school systems, different classroom instructors, and different textbooks cover a slightly different combination of topics, BASIC ECONOMICS FOR STUDENTS AND NON-STUDENTS ALIKE is a little more comprehensive than most single introductory textbooks of economics. Some of the topics will be found in introductory classes in some schools, but in intermediate-level classes in other schools.

Small is Possible: Life in a Local Economy


Lyle Estill - 2008
    Estill is a legitimate source on the subject: he co-founded Piedmont Biofuels, a biodiesel co-op that went from backyard operation into an industrial plant in a few short years. The characters in Estill's world are both entertaining and endearing. Many of them show a flinty defiance, positioning themselves as courageous Daniels against the Goliaths of corporate greed and globalization. Readers interested in academic arguments for local economies can find other books on the subject, but if they want a compelling story about noble atempts to walk the talk, Small is Possible delivers. - Brian Baughan, Sustainablog"In an age of increasing globalization, it is hopeful to be reminded that there are still communities where transactions are handled in handshakes rather than receipts. Estill takes us on a loving stroll through his North Carolina neighborhood and shows us how small-scale sustainability - feeding, fueling, and financing locally - is both possible and preferable." - Book Notes, Orion MagazineOne of my favorite ideas in this book is the idea of open source. Once you let go of this idea that everything must be copyrighted, everything must be owned and protected in order to make money, you become free. Open source ideas quickly foster a more open community, a more open and honest society. A gropu of people or organizaitons all start working toward a common goal rather than all working against one another. Beautiful, isn't it?Another beautiful idea is that a community needs a variety of people and businesses to thrive. And that as you begin living locally- and begin working toward a healthy community - people and businesses find their niches. And when you find your own niche within the local economy, your own happiness rises. Your sense of well-being increases when you realize your positive and necessary contribution to society.As we go further into debt and economic security throughout the world, nurturing our small, local, sustainable businesses and infrastructure will become increasingly important. I recommend this book.Reviewed by Melinda on The Blogging BookwormIn an era when incomprehensibly complex issues like Peak Oil and climate change dominate headlines, practical solutions at a local level can seem somehow inadequate.In response, Lyle Estill’s Small is Possible introduces us to “hometown security,” with this chronicle of a community-powered response to resource depletion in a fickle global economy. True stories, springing from the soils of Chatham County, North Carolina, offer a positive counterbalance to the bleakness of our age.This is the story of how one small southern US town found actual solutions to actual problems. Unwilling to rely on the government and wary of large corporations, these residents discovered it is possible for a community to feed itself, fuel itself, heal itself, and govern itself.This book is filled with newspaper columns, blog entries, letters, and essays that have appeared on the margins of small-town economies. Tough subjects are handled with humor and finesse. Compelling stories of successful small businesses, from the grocery co-op to the biodiesel co-op, describe a town and its people on a genuine quest for sustainability.Everyone interested in sustainability, local economy, small business, and whole foods will be inspired by the success stories in this book.Lyle Estill is “Vice President of Stuff ” at Piedmont Biofuels, and has won numerous awards for his work in the biodiesel business. He is the author of Biodiesel Power and lives in Moncure, North Carolina.

Financial Institutions And Markets


Jeff Madura - 1989
    This title can help you understand why financial markets exist, how financial institutions serve those markets, and the various services those institutions offer.

The Communist


Paul Kengor - 2012
    . . . As one who believes in freedom and democracy for all, I honor the Red nation.” —FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS, 1947 In his memoir, Barack Obama omits the full name of his mentor, simply calling him “Frank.” Now, the truth is out: Never has a figure as deeply troubling and controversial as Frank Marshall Davis had such an impact on the development of an American president. Although other radical influences on Obama, from Jeremiah Wright to Bill Ayers, have been scrutinized, the public knows little about Davis, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, cited by the Associated Press as an “important influence” on Obama, one whom he “looked to” not merely for “advice on living” but as a “father” figure. While the Left has willingly dismissed Davis (with good reason), here are the indisputable, eye-opening facts: Frank Marshall Davis was a pro-Soviet, pro–Red China communist. His Communist Party USA card number, revealed in FBI files, was CP #47544. He was a prototype of the loyal Soviet patriot, so radical that the FBI placed him on the federal government’s Security Index. In the early 1950s, Davis opposed U.S. attempts to slow Stalin and Mao. He favored Red Army takeovers of Central and Eastern Europe, and communist control in Korea and Vietnam. Dutifully serving the cause, he edited and wrote for communist newspapers in both Chicago and Honolulu, courting contributors who were Soviet agents. In the 1970s, amid this dangerous political theater, Frank Marshall Davis came into Barack Obama’s life. Aided by access to explosive declassified FBI files, Soviet archives, and Davis’s original newspaper columns, Paul Kengor explores how Obama sought out Davis and how Davis found in Obama an impressionable young man, one susceptible to Davis’s worldview that opposed American policy and traditional values while praising communist regimes. Kengor sees remnants of this worldview in Obama’s early life and even, ultimately, his presidency. Kengor charts with definitive accuracy the progression of Davis’s communist ideas from Chicago to Hawaii. He explores how certain elements of the Obama administration’s agenda reflect Davis’s columns advocating wealth redistribution, government stimulus for “public works projects,” taxpayer-funding of universal health care, and nationalizing General Motors. Davis’s writings excoriated the “tentacles of big business,” blasted Wall Street and “greedy” millionaires, lambasted GOP tax cuts that “spare the rich,” attacked “excess profits” and oil companies, and perceived the Catholic Church as an obstacle to his vision for the state—all the while echoing Davis’s often repeated mantra for transformational and fundamental “change.” And yet, The Communist is not unsympathetic to Davis, revealing him as something of a victim, an African- American who suffered devastating racial persecution in the Jim Crow era, steering this justly angered young man on a misguided political track. That Davis supported violent and heartless communist regimes over his own country is impossible to defend. That he was a source of inspiration to President Barack Obama is impossible to ignore. Is Obama working to fulfill the dreams of Frank Marshall Davis? That question has been impossible to answer, since Davis’s writings and relationship with Obama have either been deliberately obscured or dismissed as irrelevant. With Paul Kengor’s The Communist, Americans can finally weigh the evidence and decide for themselves. *** There were hundreds of thousands of American communists like Frank who agitated throughout the twentieth century. They chose the wrong side of history, a horrendously bloody side that left a wake of more than 100 million corpses from the streets of the Bolshevik Revolution to the base of the Berlin Wall—double the combined dead of the century’s two world wars. And they never apologized. Quite the contrary, they cursed their accusers for daring to charge (correctly) that they were communists whose ideology threatened the American way and the greater world and all of humanity. They took their denials to the grave, and still today their liberal/progressive dupes continue to conceal their crimes and curse their accusers for them. We need hundreds and thousands of more books on American communists like Frank, so we can finally start to get this history right— and, more so, learn its vital lessons. To fail to do so is a great historical injustice. We especially need to flesh out these lessons, which are morality tales in the truest sense of the word, when we find the rarest case of a man like “Frank” managing to influence someone as influential as the current president of the United States of America—the leader of the free world and driver of the mightiest political/economic engine in history. Such figures cannot be ignored. The people who influence our presidents matter. —from The Communist: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor

Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak


Kenneth S. Deffeyes - 2005
    Smalley, University Professor, Rice University, and 1996 Nobel laureateWith world oil production about to peak and inexorably head toward steep decline, what fuels are available to meet rising global energy demands? That question, once thought to address a fairly remote contingency, has become ever more urgent, as a spate of books has drawn increased public attention to the imminent exhaustion of the economically vital world oil reserves. Kenneth S. Deffeyes, a geologist who was among the first to warn of the coming oil crisis, now takes the next logical step and turns his attention to the earth's supply of potential replacement fuels. In Beyond Oil, he traces out their likely production futures, with special reference to that of oil, utilizing the same analytic tools developed by his former colleague, the pioneering petroleum-supply authority M. King Hubbert."The bad news in this book is made bearable by the author's witty, conversational writing style. If my college econ textbooks had been written this way, I might have learned economics." —Rupert Cutler, The Roanoke Times

Corpalism


Arun D. Ellis - 2012
    He works in Re-Locations and his job is to send other ordinary people, when unable to pay those debts, to sink estates north of the M4.He gives no thought to what will happen to them once there; although some part of him knows they'll be forced to eke out a brutal existence, far from family and friends, thrown away by society and left to rot.That is until, one day, he is late for work once too often and is sacked. Immediately all his lifelong debts become payable and, unable to discharge them, he is himself relocated, condemned to spend the rest of his days in a 'Boro sink. When he arrives, he is housed in a run down flat and assigned to sanitation duties. Unwittingly he attracts the attention of the power structure within the estate and soon finds himself enmeshed in violent intrigue.But Terry is not all he seems. Why is he there? Who does he really work for? Aftermath Extrapolated from a storyline in 'Corpalism' and 'Wise Eyed Open'.She was a rising star in the Independent movement; a group of revolutionary entrepreneurs, business men and women, professionals and everyday workers who came together to change the political landscape forever.They are Friday night regulars down the Dog and Duck but this night, the night before an horrific terrorist attack, will be their last together.She is trapped in a world of darkness, she hears but cannot see, she understands but cannot communicate, she feels each second of her life as it drags by but cannot end it. How will she survive and can anyone help her?From Democracy to Dictatorship A group of entrepreneurs, business men and women, professionals and everyday workers have come together under the leadership of Colin Carpenter to form the Independents, a political group with no party affiliation, no loyalty to the elites or their lobbyists. If individually elected, they would be free to vote on each bill as they saw fit. As a new force in British politics the Independents find themselves on a headlong collision course with the Establishment and Sir Phillip Blackmore, Head of British Intelligence. How far will the Independents be allowed to go before the elites fight back?

Viva the Entrepreneur: Founding, Scaling, and Raising Venture Capital in Latin America


Brian Requarth
    He shows how to manage your own psychology and your operations, be it working with co-founders, building a culture, or managing a board of directors. Brian also reveals the secrets of scaling a business and best practices for raising venture capital in Latin America. You will develop an understanding of the most critical parts of an investor term sheet, and gain perspective into the inner workings of the venture capital game.

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Volume II


Adam Smith - 1776
    In it Smith analyzes the major elements of political economy, from market pricing and the division of labor to monetary, tax, trade, and other government policies that affect economic behavior. Throughout he offers seminal arguments for free trade, free markets, and limited government.Criticizing mercantilists who sought to use the state to increase their nations’ supply of precious metals, Smith points out that a nation’s wealth should be measured by the well-being of its people. Prosperity in turn requires voluntary exchange of goods in a peaceful, well-ordered market. How to establish and maintain such markets? For Smith the answer lay in man’s social instincts, which government may encourage by upholding social standards of decency, honesty, and virtue, but which government undermines when it unduly interferes with the intrinsically private functions of production and exchange.

The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America


Nick Gillespie - 2011
    Everywhere, that is, except in our politics. There we are held hostage to an eighteenth century system, dominated by two political parties whose ever-more-polarized rhetorical positions mask a mutual interest in maintaining a stranglehold on power.The Declaration of Independents is a compelling and extremely entertaining manifesto on behalf of a system better suited to the future--one structured by the essential libertarian principles of free minds and free markets. Gillespie and Welch profile libertarian innovators, identify the villains propping up the ancien regime, and take aim at do-something government policies that hurt most of those they claim to protect. Their vision will resonate with a wide swath of frustrated citizens and young voters, born after the Cold War's end, to whom old tribal allegiances, prejudices, and hang-ups about everything from hearing a foreign language on the street to gay marriage to drug use simply do not make sense.

Shakedown Socialism: Unions, Pitchforks, Collective Greed, The Fallacy of Economic Equality, and other Optical Illusions of "Redistributive Justice"


Oleg Atbashian - 2010
    Atbashian explains why Socialism cannot work. He exposes the injustice of "Collective Greed" and shows why Economic Equality is a fraud. The book is an eye-opener as the author illustrates his points with examples drawn from his life in the Soviet Union before 1994 and more recent events in the USA. "Oleg Atbashian has written a timely warning for Americans about the collectivists among us and their plans for the future. I hope everyone reads this book." -- David Horowitz, Author of One Party Classroom (2009) "In his brilliant, witty, and wonderfully illustrated Shakedown Socialism, Oleg Atbashian -- who grew up in the Soviet Union, shows what is happening in Obama's America today, and explains why it is putting us on the road to ruin. Shakedown Socialism is an enlightening, sobering, and wonderfully clear explanation of why statism kills -- and thus also of why and how Barack Obama is killing the American economy. This book shows why Obama's statist economic policies are a looming disaster for America and for the spirit of the free human individual." -- Pamela Geller, author, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War On America "Brightly written and filled with entertaining and illuminating illustrations, Oleg Atbashian's Shakedown Socialism is a clear and eye-opening guide to exactly what is wrong with socialism and state control of the means of production, and how it kills both the economy and human initiative. Shakedown Socialism is an essential and inspiring guide to the virtues of the free market." -- Robert Spencer, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad