Drawing on both her roots in Kentucky and her adventures with Manhattan Coop boards, Where We Stand is a successful black woman's reflection--personal, straight forward, and rigorously honest--on how our dilemmas of class and race are intertwined, and how we can find ways to think beyond them.

    “I’m not a business man; I’m a business, man.” Perhaps no better statement gets at the heart of this turn. Increasingly we’re being forced to think of ourselves in entrepreneurial terms, forced to take more and more responsibility for developing our “human capital.” Furthermore a range of institutions from churches to schools to entire cities have been remade, restructured to in order to perform like businesses. Finally, even political concepts like freedom, and democracy have been significantly altered. As a result we face higher levels of inequality than any other time over the last century. In Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, Lester K. Spence writes the first book length effort to chart the effects of this transformation on African American communities, in an attempt to revitalize the black political imagination. Rather than asking black men and women to “hustle harder” Spence criticizes the act of hustling itself as a tactic used to demobilize and disempower the communities most in need of empowerment.

    Every year, the American government redistributes more than a trillion dollars of that wealth to provide for retirement, health care, and the alleviation of poverty. We still have millions of people without comfortable retirements, without adequate health care, and living in poverty. Only a government can spend so much money so ineffectually. The solution is to give the money to the people. This is the Plan, a radical new approach to social policy that defies any partisan label. Murray suggests eliminating all welfare transfer programs at the federal, state, and local levels and substituting an annual $10,000 cash grant to everyone age twenty-one or older. In Our Hands describes the financial feasibility of the Plan and its effects on retirement, health care, poverty, marriage and family, work, neighborhoods and civil society.

    Economic and political forces are preventing markets from correcting themselves, and we're now living in an unprecedented age of oversupply.Governments and central banks across the developed world have tried every policy tool imaginable, yet our economies remain sluggish or worse. Howdid we get here, and how can advanced nations compete and prosper once more?In this bold call to arms, economic policy expert Daniel Alpert argues that a global labor glut, excess productive capacity, and a rising ocean of cheap capital have kept the economies of the first world, and notably the United States, mired in underemployment and anemic growth.Distracted by a technology boom and a massive debt bubble in the 1990s and early 2000s, advanced nations failed to assess the ultimate impact of the torrent of labor and capital unleashed by formerly socialist economies. After the financial crisis of 2008, the United States and Europe joined an already sclerotic Japan in dire economic straits. Today, as the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and others poach jobs from Western Europe, the United States, and Japan, household incomes in the developed world continue to decline. Many policymakers believe in outdated supplyside economic remedies. They miss the connection between global oversupply and the lack of domestic investment and growth. But Alpert shows how they are intertwined: We cannot understand the housing bubble and the financial crisis without appreciating how the rise of the emerging nations distorted the economies of rich countries. And we can’t chart a path for growth in the developed world without recognizing that many of these distorting forces are still at work.The Age of Oversupply offers a bold, fresh approach to fixing the West’s economic woes through large-scale fiscal stimulus measures, investments in infrastructure, and an aggressive private debt reduction plan. It also delivers a vigorous challenge to proponents of austerity economics.

    But as Garret Keizer illustrates in this probing examination, noise is as much about what we want as about what we seek to avoid. It has been a byproduct of human striving since ancient times even as it has become a significant cause of disease in our own. At heart, noise provides a key for understanding some of our most pressing issues, from social inequality to climate change.In a journey that leads us from the Tanzanian veldt to the streets of New York, Keizer deftly explores the political ramifications of noise, America's central role in a loud world, and the environmental sustainability of a quieter one. The result is a deeply satisfying book—one guaranteed to change how we hear the world, and how we measure our own personal volume within it.

    This Grand Lie turns the entire understanding of Islam upside down. The Muslims who kill for Islam know that our ruling elite are lying to us about Islam.At the very start of the book two things are asked of the reader:if the reader is a Muslim, then he is asked to put the book down so that understanding his own religion better does not turn him into a killer;any other reader is asked to just turn to the first pages of the Koran presented in the second half of the book; if within 5 minutes s/he is not convinced that Islam is a religion of war obsessed with the subjugation of non-Muslims, then that reader is asked to to return to the first half of the book and read that until they are convinced that what is presented in this book was mainstream scholarly opinion in the West before 9/11. One of the ways in which Islam protects itself from non-Muslims is that the normal Koran is encrypted. McLoughlin & Robinson decrypt the Koran. But they know that most people do not want to spend months or years learning the ins and outs of Islam. Most people just want to be left alone to get on with their lives. Yet when terrorism in the name of Islam abounds and the state is systematically deceiving your children, then we all owe a duty to our relatives, our society and our civilisation to know, without any doubt at all, that our ruling elite are systematically lying to us about Islam, the religion of war and terrorism.McLoughlin & Robinson explain the concept of "abrogation" and prove how fundamental this concept is to Islam. They show that any of the verses which our lying leaders pluck out to claim that Islam is a religion of peace has either been garbled or is a verse that has been cancelled.The ordinary man or woman cannot rely on Muslims to tell us the truth (because to Muslims Islam is the only truth and Islam authorizes Muslims to employ deception, for example as Taqiyya or Kitman). We cannot rely on writers, clergy, journalists or academics - because they are either in hock to Muslim donors, or because they are Leftists who are allied to Islam, or because such people are simply too scared of Muslims killing them if they speak the truth. You don't have to believe McLoughlin and Robinson's claims. The book has over 600 references, which link to the work of other acknowledged authorities on Islam (Western scholars, mainstream translators of the Koran, Muslim and ex-Muslim experts). The book shows you what those who went before us in our own society were saying about Islam. For centuries they were warning the West about Islam. And all their warnings have been concealed by the Quisling elite who have sold your descendants into slavery or civil war. It really is that serious.Those shallow ideologues who dismiss Mohammed's Koran because it is not written by Muslims are missing a vital principle: our society doesn't demand that only Nazis explain Mein Kampf, or that only Communists can criticise Marx, Stalin, etc. If there were Christian terrorists whom the Pope would not denounce, then it is the explanations of non-Christians who would be favoured. Our society regards those who are not proponents of an ideology as more credible and more objective critics of an ideology than those who are already indoctrinated by that ideology. As McLoughlin & Robinson show in the first 100 pages, it is precisely this demand that only Muslims can have an opinion on Islam (as idiotic as saying "only Nazis can speak about Nazism") which has allowed Muslims to fool the electorate in countries across the West. If the people of the West had not been deceived by the Quisling ruling elite, every country would have already elected parties who would have kept Islam outside the borders of our nations.

    Ninan addresses a range of contemporary questions as only he can—looking at why the economy lost steam, the emerging trends in politics, the Chinese shadow over India, and the relationship between the state and the citizen. He asks whether manufacturing can be made a success story, what is the size of the neo-middle class, who really is the aam aadmi, and if it is possible to put an end to extreme poverty now. And, finally—what are the fears that should keep us awake at night?This wide-ranging book is an attempt to understand, through data and analyses, where India stands today, why it has emerged the way it has, and what the next ten years might bring. For anyone interested in India and its future, this is essential and enlightening reading.

    Better to have hostile identities framed by democracy than democrats indifferent to identity.In a vigorous, insightful challenge to the left and right alike, Natan Sharansky, as he has proved repeatedly, is at the leading edge of the issues that frame our times.

    The divide between the global economy’s winners and losers in today’s France has replaced the old left‑right split, leaving many on “the periphery.”As Guilluy shows, there is no unified French economy, and those cut off from the country’s new economic citadels suffer disproportionately on both economic and social fronts. In Guilluy’s analysis, the lip service paid to the idea of an “open society” in France is a smoke screen meant to hide the emergence of a closed society, walled off for the benefit of the upper classes. The ruling classes in France are reaching a dangerous stage, he argues; without the stability of a growing economy, the hope for those excluded from growth is extinguished, undermining the legitimacy of a multicultural nation.

    This book makes clear that, for better or worse, these schools now define the standards of youthful accomplishment in American culture more generally.

    How did the “land of the free” become the home of the world’s largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America’s prison problem originated with the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society at the height of the civil rights era.Johnson’s War on Poverty policies sought to foster equality and economic opportunity. But these initiatives were also rooted in widely shared assumptions about African Americans’ role in urban disorder, which prompted Johnson to call for a simultaneous War on Crime. The 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act empowered the national government to take a direct role in militarizing local police. Federal anticrime funding soon incentivized social service providers to ally with police departments, courts, and prisons. Under Richard Nixon and his successors, welfare programs fell by the wayside while investment in policing and punishment expanded. Anticipating future crime, policymakers urged states to build new prisons and introduced law enforcement measures into urban schools and public housing, turning neighborhoods into targets of police surveillance.By the 1980s, crime control and incarceration dominated national responses to poverty and inequality. The initiatives of that decade were less a sharp departure than the full realization of the punitive transformation of urban policy implemented by Republicans and Democrats alike since the 1960s.

    This anniversary edition includes Michael Harrington’s essays on poverty in the 1970s and ’80s as well as a new introduction by Harrington’s biographer, Maurice Isserman. This illuminating, profoundly moving classic is still all too relevant for today’s America.When Michael Harrington’s masterpiece, The Other America, was first published in 1962, it was hailed as an explosive work and became a galvanizing force for the war on poverty. Harrington shed light on the lives of the poor—from farm to city—and the social forces that relegated them to their difficult situations. He was determined to make poverty in the United States visible and his observations and analyses have had a profound effect on our country, radically changing how we view the poor and the policies we employ to help them.

    Analysing various case studies of innovation-led growth, it describes the opposite situation, whereby the private sector only becomes bold enough to invest after the courageous State has made the high-risk investments.The volume argues that in the history of modern capitalism, the State has generated economic activity that would not otherwise have happened, and has actively opened up new technologies and markets that private investors can later move into. Far from the often heard criticisms of the State potentially 'crowding out' private investments, the State makes them happen, shaping and creating markets, not only 'fixing' them. Ignoring this reality only serves ideological ends, and hurts effective policymaking.This book examines case studies ranging from the advent of the Internet to the emergence of the biotechnology and nanotechnology industries. In particular, the volume debunks the myth that Silicon Valley was created by entrepreneurial venture capital. A key chapter focuses on the State investments behind Apple's success, and reveals that every major technology behind the iPhone owes its source to public funds. Thus, while entrepreneurial individuals like Steve Jobs are needed, their success is nearly impossible without their ability to ride the wave of State investments. And if Europe wants its own Googles, it needs more State action, not less.Two forward-looking chapters focus on the emergence of the next big thing after the internet: the 'green revolution'. Both solar and wind technology are currently being led by State spending, whether through the US ARPA-E programme or the Chinese and Brazilian State investment banks. The discussion refreshingly moves beyond the usual division between proponents of austerity vs. the proponents of fiscal stimulus. It argues that State investments not only help kick-start growth during periods of recession, but that they also, even in boom periods, lead to productive investments in radical new technologies which later foster decades of growth.The book ends with a fundamental question: if the State is so important to investments in high-risk innovation, why does it capture so little direct return?

    It sounds crazy, but it has become one of the most influential and hotly debated policy ideas of our time. Futurists, radicals, libertarians, socialists, union representatives, feminists, conservatives, Bernie supporters, development economists, child-care workers, welfare recipients, and politicians from India to Finland to Canada to Mexico--all are talking about UBI.In this sparkling and provocative book, economics writer Annie Lowrey looks at the global UBI movement. She travels to Kenya to see how a UBI is lifting the poorest people on earth out of destitution, India to see how inefficient government programs are failing the poor, South Korea to interrogate UBI's intellectual pedigree, and Silicon Valley to meet the tech titans financing UBI pilots in expectation of a world with advanced artificial intelligence and little need for human labor.Lowrey examines the potential of such a sweeping policy and the challenges the movement faces, among them contradictory aims, uncomfortable costs, and, most powerfully, the entrenched belief that no one should get something for nothing. She shows how this arcane policy offers not only a potential answer for our most intractable economic and social problems, but also a better foundation for our society in this age of turbulence and marvels.

    . . . A tonic and eye-opener for anyone who wants a politics that works."-Jane Mansbridge, Adams Professor, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University"America Beyond Capitalism comes at a critical time in our history-when we all know our system isn't working but we are not sure what can be done about it. This book takes us outside the confines of orthodox thinking, imagines a new way of living together, and then brings that vision back into reality with a set of eminently practical ideas that promise a truly democratic society."-Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States"Succeeds brilliantly in taking the Jeffersonian spirit into the last bastion of privilege in America, offering workable solutions for making the American economy one that is truly of, by, and for the people."-Jeremy Rifkin, author of The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream"The kind of careful, well-researched, and practical alternative progressives have been seeking. And it's more-visionary, hopeful, even inspirational. I highly recommend it."-Juliet Schor, author of The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need"A compelling and convincing story of the future."-William Greider, author of The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy