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History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)
Anatoly Fomenko Manufacturer: Mithec ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 2913621058 |
Book Description
Customer Reviews:
Calculations are only as good as your numbers.......2007-08-03
Pants on fire?.......2007-07-19
Accepted History & Chronology Must Be Changed. .......2007-04-09
Very Interesting.......2007-03-07
History as Science Fiction.......2007-01-10
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Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America
Arianna Huffington Manufacturer: Three Rivers Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 1400051266 Release Date: 2004-01-27 |
Amazon.com
Arianna Huffington, popular pundit, columnist, and author, is not known for her polite criticisms or her carefully worded complaints. In the course of Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America, the corporate CEOs, accountants, politicians, and lobbyists at who she takes aim receive little relief from their porcine characterization first intimated in the book's title. And while she is full of invective for Enron's Kenneth Lay, Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, Dick Cheney, and others, she backs up her outrage with dollar figures, dates, names, and specific information. The voluminous research is made more digestible by Huffington's direct and often amusing writing style (she characterizes a CEO's process of getting a loan approved by a corporate board as being akin to Tony Soprano getting a loan from Paulie Walnuts). Interspersed between chapters are entertainingly informative sidebars, including quizzes on executives' avarice and games where you match the CEO to his yacht. Occasionally, Huffington's anger gets mired in name-calling, which deflates her points. And while she spends ample time and space outlining the particulars of a flawed power structure, she dedicates little time to offering practical solutions toward remedying the problems. But Huffington is not trying to write a political science textbook or a party platform. As a highly readable indictment of corporate and governmental excess, Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America is highly successful. --John MoeBook Description
Who filled the trough? Who set the table at the banquet of greed? How has it been possible for corporate pigs to gorge themselves on grossly inflated pay packages and heaping helpings of stock options while the average American struggles to make do with their leftovers?Customer Reviews:
Pigs at the Trough.......2007-04-26
I swear, she's got ADD..........2006-11-12
good book.......2006-05-25
Keeping the (other) Elites on the Run. Sorry, Laura. I just had to use it........2006-03-25
Change requires more than anger.......2005-12-06
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Fraud And Corruption: Prevention And Detection
Nigel Iyer , and Martin Samociuk Manufacturer: Gower Publishing Company ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0566086999 |
Customer Reviews:
Foolish.......2007-09-27
fraud and corruption.......2007-05-07
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Corporate Predators: The Hunt for Mega-Profits and the Attack on Democracy
Russell Mokhiber , and Robert Weissman Manufacturer: Common Courage Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 1567511589 |
Book Description
Of the world's biggest 100 economies, 51 are corporations, not countries. As the most powerful institution of our time, the multinational corporation dominates not only global economics, but politics and culture as well. But the mechanisms of corporate control and the details of corporate abuses have remained largely hidden from public perception-until now.In this compelling collection of columns, investigative journalists Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman critique corporate power from a relentlessly human perspective. While mainstream media cheerfully laud big business's record profits, Mokhiber and Weissman ask the real questions-Where is profit coming from? When working Americans' incomes have dropped dramatically since 1980, while salaries of corporate CEOs have risen 500 percent in the same period, is the economy really booming? Whose economy is this, anyway?
From union-busting to food irradiation, from faulty air bags that kill but are left on the market anyway to judges who take bribes, from the IMF to oil companies-wherever corporate crime strikes, Mokhiber and Weissman are there, covering an amazing range of issues, to sound the alarm and call people to action.
Customer Reviews:
collection of recycled newsletter columns, not a real book.......2000-05-02
Mokhiber is the editor of the "Corporate Crime Reporter" and Weissman is the editor of the "Multinational Monitor." The text of the book consists of 60 articles taken from these two periodicals divided into eight sections as follows:
1. Corporate Crime and Violence
2. The Corporate Attack on Democracy
3. The Global Hunt for Mega-Profits
4. Corporation Nation
5. The Big Boys Unite: Merger Mania in the 1990's
6. Commercialism Run Amok
7. Of Sweatshops and Union Busting
8. Do I Have to Arrest You? Corporations and the Law
As a collection of news columns, the book consists of anecdotes with conclusions that tend toward hyperbole, but for the most part are accurate, if a bit emotionalized. Since each article was written for the intended audience of subscribers to the two periodicals (the date is indicated at the beginning of each), they read like they are preaching to the converted. No neoliberal will be convinced of such a statement as:
"Most corporate criminologists agree that corporate crime and violence inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined. That includes killings and deaths."
The authors provide no non-anecdotal evidence for what might seem an astounding statement, but I have read widely enough to know that it is essentially true, depending on how you define "corporate crime." This assertion is repeated twice elsewhere, indicating little or no editing before assembly here. A few of the articles are followed by a one or two paragraph update bearing on events that happened between original publication and the date this book went to press. There are no footnotes, and scant reference to any sources for their information. I suppose if you have access to Nexus or something similar, you could do a date-limited search (based on when the article was written) to find out more.
It would have been nice if Mokhiber and Weissman had provided an over-arching introductory essay of, say, 20 pages, giving an overview of the problems involving the ever-increasing expansion of corporate behemoths, drawing a relationship between relative power and systemic greed-driven flaunting of the law, and putting into historical context the privatization of profits and socialization of costs. It was lazy and irresponsible of them not to do this, and that is why it gets only three stars.
The book is a quick and fascinating read, but I recommend you check it out from your local library. That's what I did!
Documents Need for Corporate Governance Reform.......2000-02-28
One-star, long-winded review misses the point.......1999-07-22
INTRODUCTION by RALPH NADER.......1999-06-15
In arena after arena -- government, workplace, marketplace, media, environment, education, science, technology-- the dominant players are large corporations. What countervailing forces that our society used to depend upon for some balance are not in retreat against the aggressive expansion of corporate influence far beyond its traditional mercantile boundaries?
The enlarged power that corporations deploy to further increase their revenues and socialize their costs comes from many sources -- old and new. Roughly eighty percent of the money contributed to federal candidates come from business interests. The mobility to export capital has given transnational companies major leverage against local, state and federal officials, not to mention against organized and unorganized labor. The swell of corporate welfare handouts has reached new depths. The contrived complexity of many financial and other services serves to confuse, deplete and daunt consumers who lose significant portions of their income in a manipulative marketplace. Alliances, joint ventures and other complex collaborations between should-be competitors have made a mockery of what is left of antitrust enforcement.
The opportunities to control or defeat governmental attempts for corporate accountability that flow from transcending national jurisdictions into globalized strategies to escape taxation and pit countries and their workers against one another appear to be endless. The autocratic systems of governance called GATT and NAFTA reflect to the smallest detail ways that giant corporations wish to control the world. These firms are on a collision course against democratic processes, and the merging of states and businesses, to the latter's advantage, weakens relentlessly both the restraints of the law and the willingness of legislators to do anything about it.
Taken together, the world is witnessing its subjugation to the large corporate model of economic development, the large corporate model of technology and the large corporate model of culture itself. These accelerating trendlines invite accelerating comprehension and response. History demonstrates that commercialism knows few boundaries that are not externally imposed. All the major religions have warned their adherents against the excesses of commercial value systems, albeit with different languages, images and metaphors.
Specific descriptions of corporate misbehavior do nourish proper generalizations that in turn lead to more just movements and practices. Here, columnists Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman provide a distinct service in Corporate Predators. It is not just the versatility of their writings -- covering bribery, pollution, corporate crime, fraud and abuse, failure of law enforcement, union-busting, the mayhem inflicted by product defects and toxics, the deep gap between the rich and the rest of America, corporate front groups, the media censorship and self-censorship, the profiteering, the pillaging overseas and more-- but it is also the impact on the reader that comes from aggregating evidence. Our country does not collect statistics on corporate crime e way it does on street crime. For it to do so would begin to highlight a little-attended agenda for law enforcement and other corporate reforms. Neither Congress nor the White House and its Justice Department have made any moves over the years to assemble from around the country the abuses of corporations in quantifiable format so as to drive policy.
So, description -- accurate, representational description -- must now suffice. As the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter (Mokhiber)and the editor of the Multinational Monitor (Weissman), the authors know well the difference between anecdotes that are illustrative and that are idiosyncratic. This volume of their weekly columns carries the evidence that illustrates patterns of continuing corporate derelictions, not lonely deviations from a more congenial norm.
The authors' experience over the years with the impact of disclosures has led them to the conclusion that the facts must be linked to civic engagement and democratic activity for change. If disclosure produced its own dynamic imperatives for change, the recurrent exposure of corporate abuses in such mainstream publications as the Wall Street Journal, Business Week and some national television programs like Sixty Minutes would have caused these changes. Such, unfortunately has not been the case. The linkages between knowledge and action have not been sufficient. But readers of Common Courage Press published books tend towards citizen activism. They want to know because they want to do. Some may even agree with the ancient Chinese saying that "To know and not to do is not to know."
So, go forward readers who wish to be leaders in the advancement of justice -- what Daniel Webster once called "the great work of men on Earth"-- and savor the writings that will motivate more and more women and men to band together in organizations that build a more just democracy.
Ralph Nader, 1999
Refuting irrational, profit driven pseudo-science.......1999-05-01
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Economics of Crime: Theory and Practice
Daryl A. Hellman , and Neil O. Alper Manufacturer: Pearson Custom Publishing ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items: ASIN: 0536106614 |
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Big Money Crime: Fraud and Politics in the Savings and Loan Crisis
Kitty Calavita , Henry N. Pontell , and Robert Tillman Manufacturer: University of California Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover Similar Items:
ASIN: 0520208560 |
Book Description
At a cost of $500 billion to American taxpayers, the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s was the worst financial crisis of the twentieth century as well as a crime unparalleled in American history. Yet the vast majority of its perpetrators will never be prosecuted, and those who were have received minimal sentences. In the first in-depth scrutiny of the ways and means of this disaster, this groundbreaking book comes to disturbing conclusions about the deliberate nature of this financial fraud, the political collusion involved, and the leniency of the criminal justice system in dealing with these "Gucci-clad white-collar criminals."Customer Reviews:
The truth hurts.......2006-02-22
What everyone missed but payed for........1999-09-30
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Corporate Crime (Law and Society Series)
Marshall B. Clinard Manufacturer: Free Press ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items:
ASIN: 0029058805 |
Book Description
"The very best single piece of research ever completed in the field of white collar crime. A mind-boggling accomplishment".--Dr. Gilbert Geis, past president American Society of Criminologists.
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Dirty Business: Exploring Corporate Misconduct: Analysis and Cases
Maurice Punch Manufacturer: Sage Publications Ltd ProductGroup: Book Binding: Hardcover ASIN: 0803976038 |
Book Description
Organizational misbehavior and crime have been neglected in the social sciences and business studies in particular. Material in this area is fragmentary, overly slanted to narrow external views--such as those of legal control and public policy. Dirty Business rectifies these imbalances by providing a broad sociological analysis of topics related to work, organizations, and management, together with major European case studies. This book draws on primary and secondary sources, years of teaching and interacting with managers, experiences in courses on crisis and disaster management, and insights from standard business ethics in practice. Part I critically examines the existing literature and dominant perspectives on organizational misbehavior and crime; Part II then presents 10 major cases that illustrate the analysis of the book; and Part III offers a new organizational perspective. Providing in-depth analysis of business deviance--its causes, effects, and possible solutions--blended with a rich collection of international case material, Dirty Business will be valuable reading for practitioners, students, and academics in management, organization studies, sociology, and criminology.
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Economics and Crime: Theory and Practice
Neil Alper Manufacturer: Prentice Hall ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback Similar Items: ASIN: 0536613583 |
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The Economics of Corruption and Bureaucratic Inefficiency in Weak States: Theory and Evidence (Kollektive Entscheidungen, Wirtschaftspolitik Und Offentliche Finanzen, 12)
Luis Gerardo Gonzalez Morales , and Luis Gerardo Gonzalez Morales Manufacturer: Peter Lang Publishing ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback ASIN: 0820464554 |
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