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Free Trade Doesn't Work What Should Replace It and Why
by: Ian Fletcher
Description:
If you already know free trade is a mistake, but don't know how to prove it or what to do about it, this book is for you. If you still think free trade is good for America (or the rest of world), you're in for a big surprise...
This is a book aimed at both ordinary concerned citizens and people with a bit of sophistication about economics. It is a systematic examination of why free trade is slowly bleeding America's economy to death and what can be done about it. It explains in detail why the standard economic arguments free traders use all the time are false, and what kind of economic ideas - well within the grasp of the average American - justify protectionism instead.
It looks at the breakdown of specific industries and how we can rebuild them and bring millions of high-paying jobs back to this country. It examines what's wrong with NAFTA, CAFTA, the WTO, and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. It explains why free trade is bad not just for America, but for poor foreign nations, too.
Unlike many past critiques of free trade, it is economically-literate and takes free markets seriously (while exploring their limitations); it also explains New Trade Theory, the hot new area of economics that critiques free trade.
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Manufacturing A Better Future for America
by: Alliance for American Manufacturing
Description:
There has never been a more critical time to rebuild the foundation of America's economy. President Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have both stressed the need to produce goods in America again. Doing so would create more jobs, reduce harmful global trade imbalances, and strengthen the American economy. But it is easier said than done.
Manufacturing in America is in serious decline, with 40,000 factory closures and more than five million jobs lost over the last decade alone. How can the United States industrial sector be revived?
The Alliance for American Manufacturing-- an innovative partnership of the United Steelworkers union and leading U.S. manufacturers-- asked some of the brightest minds in America for their ideas. 'Manufacturing a Better Future for America' details the challenges and opportunities the country faces at this critical time: trade policy, skills and training, research and development, national security, supply chains, new technology, and globalization.
If you want to understand the sector that is most vital to America's economic renewal, you must read this book.
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Tongue Fu!
by: Sam Horn
How to Deflect, Disarm, and Defuse Any Verbal Conflict
Description:
Tongue Fu! is a handbook for verbal self-defense that provides dozens of real-life, constructive alternatives to giving a tongue lashing or to being tongue-tied. Tongue Fu! is destined to be a classic!"--Jack Canfield, co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul.
The purpose of Kung Fu, the Chinese art of self-defense, is to fend off physical attacks. According to professional speaker and consultant Sam Horn, the purpose of Tongue Fu, a spoken form of self-defense, is to guard against psychological attacks.
Dealing with difficult people is a part of everyday life. However, by focusing on real-life responses to verbal challenges instead of theories and platitudes, the author has delivered a convenient handbook for the mental martial art of verbal self-protection.
Divided into four sections, the book offers techniques and skills for responding thoughtfully in conflicts, expressing honest feelings and goals, seeking cooperation in difficult situations, and living a life of value during trying times. Each of the 30 chapters offers examples that demonstrate the expected goals and acquired skills in action.
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Three Billion New Capitalists
by Clyde Prestowitz
The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East
Description:
From one of our shrewdest economic trend-spotters, a wake-up call that prosperity is about to shift from the West to the East, and what we can do before it's too late.
By the beginning of this century it was already commonplace to speak of the U.S. as a "hyperpower," to talk of its military, political, and economic clout as unprecedented in world history, and to assume that American dominance would continue at least throughout our lifetimes. It is conventional wisdom that America will have no serious rivals for at least a generation. But the American position is far more fragile and ephemeral than much of the world believes.
Clyde Prestowitz shows the powerful yet barely visible trends that are threatening to end the six-hundred-year run of Western domination of the world.
The trends include America's increasingly unsustainable trade deficits; the equally unsustainable (and dangerous) buildup of massive dollar reserves in places like Japan and China; the end of America's position as the world's premier center for invention and technological innovation; the sudden entrance of 2.5 billion people in India and China into the world's skilled job market; the role of the World Wide Web in permitting many formerly localized jobs to be done anywhere in the world; and the demographic meltdown of Europe, Japan, Russia, and, in later decades, even China. Three Billion New Capitalists is a clear-eyed and profoundly unsettling look at America's and the world's economic future, from an author with a history of predicting the important trends long before they become apparent to others.
Find this book at Amazon. |
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The Disposable American
by Peter Uchitelle
Layoffs and Their Consequences
Description:
An eye-opening account of layoffs in America—their questionable necessity, their overuse, and their devastating impact on individuals at all income levels. Yet despite all this, they are accelerating.
The book explains how, in the mid-1970s, the first major layoffs, initiated as a limited response to the inroads of foreign competition, spread and multiplied, in time destroying the notion of job security and the dignity of work.
Uchitelle makes clear the ways in which layoffs are counterproductive, rarely promoting efficiency or profitability in the long term. He explains how our acquiescence encourages wasteful mergers, outsourcing, the shifting of production abroad, the loss of union protection, and wage stagnation. He argues against our ongoing public policy—inaugurated by Ronald Reagan and embraced by every president since—of subsidizing retraining for jobs that, in fact, do not exist. He breaks new ground in documenting the failure of these policies and in describing the significant psychological damage that the trauma of a layoff invariably inflicts, even on those soon reemployed.
While recognizing that in today’s global economy some layoffs must occur, the author passionately argues that government must step in with policies that encourage companies to restrict layoffs and must generate jobs to supplement the present shortfall.There are specific recommendations for achieving these goals and persuasive arguments that workers, business, and the nation will benefit as a result.
An urgent, essential book that tells for the first time the story of our long and gradual surrender to layoffs.
Find this book at Amazon. |
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The Three Faces of Chinese Power
by David M. Lampton
Might, Money, and Minds
Description:
Clear, comprehensive, and well-balanced, this unique assessment takes the measure of what is arguably the most important geopolitical change in today's world: the growth of China's power. In the only book on the subject to be based on extensive interviews with elite political leaders, diplomats, and others in China, the United States and countries on China's periphery, David M. Lanpton investigates the military, economic and intellectual dimensions of China's growing influence.
His account provides a fresh perspective from which to assess China--how its strengths are changing, where vulnerabilities and uncertainties lie, and how the rest of the world, not least the United States, should view it. Lampton gives a valuable historical framework by discussing how the Chinese have thought about state power for over 2,500 years, and he asks how they are thinking about the future use of power through instruments such as their space program. He also provides broad suggestions for policy toward China in light of the 2008 elections in the United States and China's hosting of the Olympic Games, in a book that is essential reading for understanding one of the most significant developments of the twenty-first century.
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War on the Middle Class
by Lou Dobbs
How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and
HOW TO FIGHT BACK
Description:
Prominent CNN host and commentator Lou Dobbs unleashes his manifesto on the vanishing American dream
The middle class has never been so vulnerable. Its every feature is under assault by politicians and the lobbyists who court them, big-business corporations that are sending their jobs overseas, and a media that relies on sensationalism instead of facts when reporting the news.
In a sweeping analysis, Dobbs looks at every aspect of the decline of the middle class--from a lack of political representation to America's corrupt health-care system--to demonstrate how the gap between America's newest haves and have-nots is no longer merely financial, but instead includes the erosion of education, employment, government, and community.
Dobbs proposes a series of measures to resolve each issue and incite people, whose future is being mortgaged to benefit a powerful few, to preserve their rights and dreams.
Find this book at Amazon. |
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Truck Stop Politics
by Tom Mullikin
Understanding the Emerging Force of Working Class America
Description:
Nearly 5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost in the United States since 1998. And yet, politicians in Washington still pay little more than lip service to the issues threatening the domestic manufacturing sector, while working class communities wither on the vine. Policymakers proclaim the booming service industry as the panacea for displaced manufacturing workers, who struggle to adapt their skills to these lower paying service jobs. The stress of unemployment and the need for multiple incomes eats at the core of American life - the family.
Truck Stop Politics examines the key voting block in America that keeps resurfacing with different names - Roosevelt Democrats, Hardhats, Reagan Democrats, and Red-state Republicans - and looks at how the working class is coming to terms with the 21st century realities of globalization.
But in a Washington obsessed with maintaining power, it is the multinationals that have the ears of America's decisionmakers, who turn a blind eye to the unfair and illegal trade practices that accommodate the flow of goods from foreign nations. And as the 2006 mid-term elections showed, working Americans are fed up. They want a chance to show that the age-old American values of hard work, ingenuity, and dedication can still allow us to outcompete anyone in the world. And they perceive a political class in D.C. that prefers the values of manipulation, distortion, and spin.
Find this book at Amazon. |
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100 Million Unneccessary Returns
by Michael J. Graetz
A Simple, Fair, and Competitive Tax Plan for the United States
Description:
To most Americans, the United States tax code has become a vast and confounding puzzle. In 1940, the instructions to the form 1040 were about four pages long. Today, they have ballooned to more than a hundred pages, and the form itself contains more than 10 schedules and 20 worksheets. The complete tax code totals about 2.8 million words, about four times the length of "War and Peace".
In this intriguing book, Michael Graetz maintains that our tax code has become a tangle of loopholes, paperwork, and inconsistencies, a massive social programme that fails tests of simplicity and fairness. More importantly, our tax system has failed to keep pace with the changing economy, creating burdens and wastes of resources that weigh our nation down.
Graetz offers a solution. Imagine a world in which most Americans pay no income tax at all, and those who do enjoy a far simpler tax process; all this without decreasing government revenues or removing key incentives for employer-sponsored health care plans and pensions.
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Steeling America's Future
by Dan DiMicco
A CEO's Call to Arms: Saving manufacturing through free trade
Description:
Dan DiMicco is Chairman, President, and CEO of Nucor Corporation, the world's largest recycler and the largest U.S. steel producer. He has emerged as a national leader in the movement to create a comprehensive agenda to restore strength and growth to American manufacturing. He has spearheaded a series of town hall meetings across the county to broaden awareness and spur political action to implement reform to international trade and domestic areas such as the American regulatory, legal, and health care systems. DiMicco continues to be a forceful advocate for returning manufacturing industries to a position of prominence in the American economic system.
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The Great Risk Shift
by Jacob S. Hacker
The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back
Description:
Given what's happening on Wall Street right now, you are probably feeling at risk. The stories in the headlines are all about the financial crisis at the very top--among the big banks and Wall Street firms, the hedge funds and financial insurers--but The Great Risk Shift is about the slow-moving financial crisis that has crept into the lives of the rest of us as risk has moved from the broad shoulders of government and corporations onto the backs of American workers and their families.
Our jobs, our health care, our family finances, and our pension plans are all less secure--and the reason is pretty much the same across all these areas. We've seen major changes in our economy, yet little response from our corporate and political leaders. Indeed, the big response is--you guessed it--to shift more risk onto us.
We need to "get mad" and then "get even." The Great Risk Shift is an expose, a call to arms, and handbook for how we can get back to the basic idea that once made our middle-class strong: people who work hard and do right by their families should have a basic foundation of financial security to be able to confidently reach for the American Dream.
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High Wire
by Peter Gosselin
The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families
Description:
If Americans are so prosperous, why do we feel so insecure? The U.S. economy is wrapping up twenty-five years of some of the strongest, smoothest growth in its history--a performance so sweet economists have given it a name: "the Great Moderation." So why have so many of us, even those making hundreds of thousands of dollars, arrived at the new century with a gnawing sense that events are moving against our families and ourselves? The easy answer is that we're suffering a case of needless anxiety. But the easy answer is wrong.
Drawing on interviews with hundreds of Americans and new statistics he developed, Peter Gosselin traces a quarter-century shift of economic risk from the broad shoulders of business and government to the backs of working people. It is a shift that has shaken the pillars of most families' lives--stable jobs, solid benefits, government protections. The change doesn't mean one can't prosper. But it does mean the benefits of growth come at greater peril and your financial fall will be steeper if you stumble. This threat to working Americans' security--and what to do about it--is a pressing concern to economists, policy-makers, and everyone who works for a living.
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Bad Money
by Kevin Phillips
Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism
Description:
The bestselling author reveals how the U.S. financial sector has hijacked our economy and put America's global future at risk. In Bad Money, Phillips describes the consequences of our misguided economic policies, our mounting debt, our collapsing housing market, our threatened oil, and the end of American domination of world markets. America's current challenges (and failures) run striking parallels to the decline of previous leading world economic powers--especially the Dutch and British. Global overreach, worn-out politics, excessive debt, and exhausted energy regimes are all chilling signals that the United States is crumbling as the world superpower.
"Bad money" refers to a new phenomenon in wayward megafinance--the emergence of a U.S. economy that is globally dependent and dominated by hubris-driven financial services. Also 'bad' are the risk miscalculations and strategic abuses of new multitrillion-dollar products such as asset-backed securities and the lure of buccaneering vehicles like hedge funds. Finally, the U.S. dollar has been turned into bad money as it has weakened and become vulnerable to the world's other currencies. In all these ways, 'bad' finance has failed the American people and pointed U.S. capitalism toward a global crisis.
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