Corporate Politics

Employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and public policy - sometimes in coercive ways. Using a diverse array of evidence, including national surveys of workers and employers, as well as in-depth interviews with top corporate managers, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez's Politics at Work explains why mobilization of workers has become an appealing corporate political strategy in recent decades.

In this groundbreaking treatise, best-selling author and economist Ravi Batra identifies the roadblocks to world economic prosperity and what we need to do to overcome them. Batra takes on falling minimum wages, corporate scandals, rocketing oil prices, and many of the other crises facing the world economy. He offers an expansive, optimistic vision of how the international community can address them and bring about something historically unprecedented: true global economic prosperity.

We hear it every day: government spending is out of control. Yet, despite all the rhetoric coming out of Washington about the need to cut spending, we continue to go deeper and deeper into debt. If we're serious about restoring America to fiscal health, we must do something about government spending, not just talk about it. So argues U.S. Senator Mike Lee in his new book, The Freedom Agenda.

In Spying on Democracy, National Lawyers Guild executive director Heidi Boghosian documents the disturbing increase in surveillance of ordinary citizens and the danger it poses to our privacy, our civil liberties, and the future of democracy itself. Boghosian reveals how technology is being used to categorize and monitor people based on their associations, their movements, their purchases, and their perceived political beliefs.

Every politically sentient American knows that Congress has been dominated by special interests, and many people do not remember a time when Congress legislated in the public interest. In the 1960's and 70's, however, lobbyists were aggressive but were countered by progressive senators and representatives, as several books have documented. What has remained untold is the major behind-the-scenes contribution of entrepreneurial Congressional staff, who planted the seeds of public interest bills in their bosses' minds and maneuvered to counteract the influence of lobbyists.

En México, la corrupción de las grandes empresas es igual o peor que la de los gobernantes: algunas corporaciones no sólo mueven toneladas de dinero para burlar la ley, sino que lo hacen con total impunidad. Prácticamente nadie investiga o castiga a las transnacionales que reparten sobornos. Este libro—ganador del Premio de Periodismo Javier Valdez Cárdenas 2019—rompe el círculo vicioso de silencio y simulación y les pone nombre y apellido a las compañías señaladas por malas prácticas, explica los esquemas de la transa y las razones de la impunidad desatada.

Provocative political commentator Arianna Huffington yanks back the curtain on the unholy alliance of CEOs, politicians, lobbyists, and Wall Street bankers who have shown a brutal disregard for those in office cubicles and on factory floors.

The rise of unions is having a deep impact on the workers of America, and this brutally honest exposé serves as a warning to concerned Americans for what’s to come if this continues. SHADOWBOSSES reads like an organized crime novel, but it's actually a true story of how labor unions are...

Lloyd Constantine began his career in legal services, representing impoverished clients in civil rights and constitutional cases. Decades later, he would make headlines for representing retailers and consumers against a cartel that undermined one of the fundamental tenets of commerce in America: competition. A man who thrives on competition himself, Constantine now gives us the insider's story on the biggest antitrust lawsuit in history - a case that pitted his small firm against financial-industry giants Visa and MasterCard, along with Clifford-Chance, the largest law firm in the world.

The independence of the Federal Reserve is considered a cornerstone of its identity, crucial for keeping monetary policy decisions free of electoral politics. But do we really understand what is meant by "Federal Reserve independence"? Using scores of examples from the Fed's rich history, The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve shows that much common wisdom about the nation's central bank is inaccurate.

Control of the country is up for grabs - and Republicans have been rigging the game in their favor. Twenty-two states have passed restrictions on voting. Ruthless gerrymandering has given the GOP a long-term grip on Congress. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has eviscerated campaign finance laws, boosting candidates backed by big money. It would be worrying enough if these were just schemes for partisan advantage. But the reality is even more disturbing.

In a sweeping narrative about the people and the politics behind the budget, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter David Wessel looks at the 2011 fiscal year (which ended September 30) to see where all the money was actually spent, and why the budget process has grown wildly out of control.

Uwe Reinhardt was a towering figure and moral conscience of health care policy in the United States and beyond. Famously bipartisan, he advised presidents and Congress on health reform and originated central features of the Affordable Care Act. In Priced Out, Reinhardt offers an engaging and enlightening account of today's US health care system, explaining why it costs so much more and delivers so much less than the systems of every other advanced country, why this situation is morally indefensible, and how we might improve it.

Like most people, before author Donato Alfredano gets caught up in the system, he's hardly given the issue of prison a thought. But his unanticipated arrest at JFK Airport on a charge of official misconduct was a reality check that would forever change his views on incarceration, and on a larger scale, life.

Goldstene uses a biographical approach to focus on key figures along a spectrum of political belief as they struggled to reconcile the inherent contradictions of equal opportunity. The Struggle for America's Promise includes such figures as Booker T. Washington, Samuel Gompers, Edward Bellamy, and Emma Goldman, who were more willing to step beyond the boundaries of the discourse about opportunity and question economic competition itself.

Over the last 40 years our choices have narrowed, our opportunities have shrunk, and our lives have become governed by a handful of very large and very powerful corporations. Today, practically everything we buy, everywhere we shop, and every service we secure comes from a heavily concentrated market. This is a world where four major banks control most of our money, four airlines shuttle most of us around the country, and four major cell phone providers connect most of our communications.

FTSE is an account of how a small start-up created by the Financial Times and the London Stock Exchange launched in the mid 1980s to provide financial information, became a world leader and one of the UK's most trusted and famous brands. It chronicles how the FTSE 100 was born and details the ferocious deal-making that followed over 35 years of market boom and bust. It provides a ringside seat on some of the biggest deals and biggest personalities in business and global politics.

In this expert insider's account of the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s, William Black lays bare the strategies that corrupt CEOs and CFOs - in collusion with those who have regulatory oversight of their industries - use to defraud companies for their personal gain.

AlterNet editor Joshua Holland demolishes the Right's biggest and most outrageous myths about the economy. Taxes kill growth. Labor unions hurt their members. Government regulation destroys jobs. These are just a few of the biggest lies in the web of misinformation spun by conservatives and the chamber of commerce. Holland's book dissects each malicious fiction to show how the Right is just plain wrong on the economy, wrong on jobs, wrong on the deficit, wrong on taxes, wrong on trade.

The food system is broken, but there is a revolution underway to fix it. Bite Back presents an urgent call to action and a vision for disrupting corporate power in the food system, a vision shared with countless organizers and advocates worldwide.