The Other America: Poverty in the United States


Michael Harrington - 1962
    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.

alchemy of Money: THINK RICH INITIATIVES


Anand S - 2016
    It is important for every person to save for one’s retirement as one can expect to live for twenty years after one retires as life expectancy of an Indian is going up steadily due to lower infant mortality and better medical care. There is a complete absence of social security safety net for most Indians today, even for those working in Government sector, there is no inflation adjusted pension available anymore. I have tried to simplify the advantages and disadvantages involved in investing your savings in various asset classes. I have deliberately left out two of the most popular forms of investment among middle class Indians 1) Life insurance 2) Real estate Let us consider life insurance first most of us confuse insurance as an instrument of savings, it is not. We have this wrong view because of the tax breaks given to income tax assesses by the Central Government. Insurance is a product that mitigates risk and is sold by the rich to the middle class and is always skewed in the favour of the insurer rather than the insured. A substantial portion of the total money invested by you goes towards paying agent’s commission and premium for insuring you for the risk of mortality. The balance left out is invested in government securities and other securities. Hence the amount of money invested out of the total premium paid is less than half paid by the insurer. The return on money invested by the policy holder is less than half of the money he would have earned either in bonds or fixed deposits. A person who needs insurance is a person whose family will need support in the event of his untimely death. Alternately insurance is required for a person who has debt in form of mortgage and does not want to burden his family in the event of his passing. The product which covers these risks is called term insurance. One should not buy insurance to avoid taxes as there is better tax saving tools available. Real estate is also considered as a good investment by several retail investors but nothing can be further from the truth. Nobody makes money by buying plots in the middle of nowhere. The easy availability of mortgages from the nineties and the tax breaks given by the Central Government on housing loans has created an unparalleled boom in the residential market. There is now a painful correction process under way in that sector. The price of land is reflexively connected to availability of money. The lower the cost of money, greater the returns in real estate. Buying plots in the middle of nowhere is similar to buying lottery tickets as investment. Land cannot be liquidated immediately into cash at a short notice to meet urgent requirements. Cost of maintenance and protection of real estate from illegal occupation is prohibitive and time consuming. Verification of title deeds to the property is a complex process and needs sound legal advice. You should have a house to live and another to collect rent as rent is equivalent of inflation adjusted pension. The return on investment generated in the three different asset classes over 25 years would be in the following order 1) Equities 2) Gold and finally 3) Debt instruments. I enjoyed writing this book as a companion volume to my first book. It is my fond hope that you enjoy reading this book.

The Matchgirl: Will this factory girl have her happy ending?


Lynette Rees - 2018
    The girls get treated badly by the management and there is a severe risk to their health. But then a young journalist, Annie Besant, begins asking questions. Will Lottie and the other girls welcome her help, even when it could cost them their jobs - and their livelihoods...? Please note: this edition contains editorial revisions

Dirt Rich: How One Ambitiously Lazy Geek Created Passive Income in Real Estate Without Renters, Renovations, and Rehabs


Mark Podolsky - 2018
    Yet with Mark Podolsky’s tried-and-true technique of raw land investment, you can become Dirt Rich without ever having to battle with a tenant, toilet, or termite. In this step-by-step guide, Mark breaks down his “ultimate subscription model” for creating passive income through the niche of raw land investment. Featuring details on common pitfalls, tips on cultivating an investor’s mind, and advice on working smart instead of hard, this handbook will show you how to obtain a life of fiscal independence, with the flexibility to work where you want, when you want, and with whom you want. Financial freedom is within your reach. It’s time to make your dreams a reality by starting to think dirty.

Tescopoly


Andrew Simms - 2007
    In his analysis, Andrew Simms, director of the acclaimed think-and-do-tank the New Economics Foundation, and in association with tescopoly.org, tackles a subject that none of us can afford to ignore - what supermarkets in general, and Tesco in particular, are doing to the way we think we live our lives.

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America


Elizabeth Hinton - 2016
    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.

The Condition of the Working Class in England


Friedrich Engels - 1845
    It was also Engels's first book, written during his stay in Manchester from 1842 to 1844. Manchester was then at the very heart of the Industrial Revolution and Engels compiled his study from his own observations and detailed contemporary reports. The fluency of his writing, the personal nature of his insights, and his talent for mordant satire combine to make this account of the life of the victims of early industrial change into a classic - a historical study that parallels and complements the fictional works of the time by such writers as Gaskell and Dickens. What Cobbett had done for agricultural poverty in his Rural Rides, Engels did - and more - in this work on the plight of the industrial workers in the England of the early 1840s. This edition includes the prefaces to the English and American editions, and a map of Manchester c.1845.

It's a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes


Jeffrey Tucker - 2011
    Meanwhile, the public sector is systematically wrecking the physical world in sneaky and petty ways that really do matter. Jeffrey Tucker, in this follow-up to his Bourbon for Breakfast, draws detailed attention to both. He points out that the products of digital capitalism are amazing, astounding, beyond belief-more outrageously advanced than anything the makers of the Jetsons could even imagine. With this tiny box in hand, we can do a real-time video chat with anyone on the planet and pay nothing more than my usual service fee. This means that anyone on the planet can do business with and be friends with any other person on the globe. The borders, the limits, the barriers-they are all being blasted away. The pace of change is mind-boggling. The world is being reinvented in our lifetimes, every day. Email has only been mainstream for 15 years or so, and young people now regard it as a dated form of communication used only for the most formal correspondence. Today young people are brief instant messaging through social media, but that's only for now, and who knows what next year will bring. Oddly, hardly anyone seems to care, and even fewer care about the institutional force that makes all this possible, which is the market economy. Instead, we just adjust to the new reality. We even hear of the grave problem of "miracle fatigue"-too much great stuff, too often. Truly, this new world seems to have arrived without much fanfare at all. And why? It has something to do with the nature of the human mind, Tucker argues, which does not and This book will inspire love for free markets - and loathing of government.

The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation


Michael Perelman - 2000
    But, in the great texts of that discourse, these writers downplayed a crucial requirement for capitalism’s creation: For it to succeed, peasants would have to abandon their self-sufficient lifestyle and go to work for wages in a factory. Why would they willingly do this? Clearly, they did not go willingly. As Michael Perelman shows, they were forced into the factories with the active support of the same economists who were making theoretical claims for capitalism as a self-correcting mechanism that thrived without needing government intervention. Directly contradicting the laissez-faire principles they claimed to espouse, these men advocated government policies that deprived the peasantry of the means for self-provision in order to coerce these small farmers into wage labor. To show how Adam Smith and the other classical economists appear to have deliberately obscured the nature of the control of labor and how policies attacking the economic independence of the rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster primitive accumulation, Perelman examines diaries, letters, and the more practical writings of the classical economists. He argues that these private and practical writings reveal the real intentions and goals of classical political economy—to separate a rural peasantry from their access to land. This rereading of the history of classical political economy sheds important light on the rise of capitalism to its present state of world dominance. Historians of political economy and Marxist thought will find that this book broadens their understanding of how capitalism took hold in the industrial age.

Progress and Poverty


Henry George - 1879
    Published in 1879, it was admired and advocated by great minds such as Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Leo Tolstoy and Sun Yat-sen in China.

A Crown of Thorns: The Governors of the RBI


T.C.A. Srinivasa Raghavan - 2016
    The participants in the controversy which raged during June–July this year forgot that as many four previous governors of the RBI have had their terms cut short. The recent debate has to be seen in this context. This volume focuses on all the governors of the RBI since 1935 and describes how almost all of them had problems with the government. It is inherent in the tasks they are charged with. It also shows how, after 1957, when Jawaharlal Nehru accepted the resignation of Benegal Rama Rau after the latter’s quarrel with the finance minister, T. T. Krishnamachari, the RBI virtually became a department of the finance ministry. Its claims to independence have been revived only after 2002, when financial sector reform changed the structure of a large part of the financial economy. The book ends with advice to future governors about what they should remember: they are the servants of the sovereign, not independent Wu-li masters. They have to manage the government, not fight it. Theirs, as a former governor sensibly pointed out, is a circumscribed independence, the perimeters of which are defined by the government.

Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America


Charles H. Ferguson - 2012
    In Predator Nation, Ferguson exposes the networks of academic, government, and congressional influence--in all recent administrations, including Obama's--that prepared the path to conquest. He reveals how once-revered figures like Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers have become mere courtiers to the elite. And based on many newly released court filings, he details the extent of the crimes--there is no other word--committed in the frenzied chase for storied wealth that marked the 2000s. And, finally, he lays out a brief plan of action for how we might take it back.

A Year of Living Generously: Dispatches From The Front Lines Of Philanthropy


Lawrence Scanlan - 2010
    Vincent de Paul Society and Canadian Crossroads.Drawing from first-hand experiences -- serving in a soup kitchen at "Vinnie's," the St. Vincent de Paul drop-in centre in Kingston, ON, to building houses for Habitat for Humanity in post-Katrina New Orleans, to teaching at a women's radio station in Senegal for Canadian Crossroads -- Scanlan tests the ideas and theories on global aid and charity and makes a compelling case for greater commitment and real connection, in the form of on-the-ground volunteer work, from us all.The result is an engaging yet informative primer for today's volunteers, young and old, who are looking to make a meaningful contribution.

Wealth and Poverty


George Gilder - 1981
    In this acclaimed work, Gilder offers an illuminating discussion of how to increase wealth and curtail poverty, arguing that most welfare programs only serve to keep the poor in poverty as victims of welfare dependency.

To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia


Michael Parenti - 2001
    Drawing on a wide range of unpublished material and observations gathered from his visit to Yugoslavia in 1999, Michael Parenti challenges mainstream media coverage of the war and uncovers hidden agendas behind the Western talk of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and democracy.