Government Systems

Blackout Wars is about the historically unprecedented threat to our electronic civilization from its dependence on the electric power grid. In a nationwide blackout lasting months or years, the entire population of the US could be at risk. There would be no food. No water. Communications, transportation, industry, business, and finance - all of the critical infrastructures that support modern civilization would be paralyzed. Threats to the electric power grid are posed by cyber-attack, sabotage, a geomagnetic super-storm, and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from the high-altitude detonation of a nuclear weapon.

Al Franken reveals the alarming story of how Bush (barely) beat Kerry with his campaign of "fear, smear, and queers", and then claimed a nonexistent mandate; Republicans decided that Terri Schiavo would make "a great political issue"; Conservatives sought to undermine Social Security by using a strategy borrowed from...Vladimir Lenin; and more.

Our trial courts conduct hardly any trials, our correctional systems do not correct, and the rise of mandated arbitration has ushered in a shadowy system of privatized "justice". Meanwhile, our legislators can't even follow their own rules for making rules while the rule of law mutates into a perpetual state of emergency. The legal system is becoming an incomprehensible farce. How did this happen? In The Nonsense Factory, Bruce Cannon Gibney shows that over the past 70 years, the legal system has dangerously confused quantity with quality and might with legitimacy.

A compelling new set of interviews on our changing and turbulent times with Noam Chomsky, one of the world's foremost thinkers...

In this new collection of conversations, conducted from 2010 to 2012, Noam Chomsky explores the most immediate and urgent concerns: the future of democracy in the Arab world, the implications of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the European financial crisis, the breakdown of American mainstream political institutions, and the rise of the Occupy movement. As always, Chomsky presents his ideas vividly and accessibly, with uncompromising principle and clarifying insight.

The US tax code is a total write-off. Overstuffed with loopholes and special interest provisions, it works for no one - except tax lawyers, accountants, and corporations, that is - certainly not me and you. Not for the first time, we have to tear it up and start over. That happened in 1922, and again in 1954, and again in 1986. There's a pattern here; we reach this point every 32 years. Which means the next complete re-write of the tax code is due in 2018. Can we write a new tax code that is fair and simple? In fact, we can.

Americans in the twenty-first century are becoming increasingly untethered from both reality and the essential principles and traditions that have shaped the nation’s historic success. A big part of why America isn’t working is because far too many Americans neither know nor care how it’s supposed to work.

Two centuries ago, London school reformer Joseph Lancaster swept into New York City to revolutionize its public schools. In Mr. Lancaster's System, Adam Laats tells the story of how this abusive, scheming reformer fooled the world into believing his system could provide free high-quality education for poor children. The system never worked as promised, but thanks to real work done by students, teachers, and families, Lancaster's failed reforms eventually led to the creation of the modern public school system.

The world is primed for radical changes in government where each of us has an equal voice and all are held accountable. In Architecture of a Technodemocracy, Hanania provides a detailed blueprint on how to leverage current government processes, communications systems, and blockchain security to take the next step in the evolution of human government. By harnessing technology that already exists, we can nonviolently reshape our respective governments.

E. Fuller Torrey's audiobook provides an inside perspective on the birth of the federal mental health program. On staff at the National Institute of Mental Health when the program was being developed and implemented, Torrey draws on his own first-hand account of the creation and launch of the program, extensive research, one-on-one interviews with people involved, and recently unearthed audiotapes of interviews with major figures involved in the legislation. As such, this book provides historical material previously unavailable to the public.

The first part of contemporary Russian Banking History, covering last 25 years. The collapse of the Soviet Union: from crisis at the end of the 80s to the dashing 90s in the mirror of the history of commercial banks in Russia.

In the multibillion-dollar business of American medicine, doctors are often portrayed as culprits—opportunistic millionaires who prey on the misfortune of their hapless patients and drive up the cost of health care. But often they are the real victims of a system designed to increase profits for the insurance companies, shady businessmen, and Big Government.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Daniel W. Drezner, like so many others, looked at the smoking ruins of the global economy and wondered why global economic governance structure had failed so spectacularly, and what could be done to reform them in the future. But then a funny thing happened. As he surveyed their actions in the wake of the crash, he realized that the evidence pointed to the exact opposite conclusion: global economic governance had succeeded.

Recent elections in the advanced Western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges - from both the left and the right. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. In Anti-System Politics, Jonathan Hopkin traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the post-war model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s.

19 Jahre saß Marco Bülow im Bundestag. Offen und eindringlich berichtet er in seinem neuen Buch von seinen konkreten Erfahrungen im Parlament und zeigt ...

For NK, life has been anything but a walk in the park. When NK Yahushua set out with her friend and her dog for a sunset hike in LA’s famous Griffith Park, she set out toward her own demise. Before the night was over, NK would be racially profiled by a park ranger, arrested without cause, and falsely imprisoned miles away from her Los Feliz home. And that would only be the beginning.

A wake-up call for middle class Americans who feel trapped in a post-crisis economic slump, The Unfair Trade is a riveting exposé of the vast global financial system whose flaws are the source of our economic malaise. Our livelihoods are now beholden to the workings of its imbalances and inequities. The trillions of dollars that make up the flow of international finance - money often steered away from people who deserve it most - have not just undermined the lives of working and middle class Americans.

In The Shadow System, award-winning journalist Sylvia A. Harvey follows the fears, challenges, and small victories of three families struggling to live within the confines of a brutal system. In Florida, a young father tries to maintain a relationship with his daughter despite a sentence of life without parole. In Kentucky, where the opioid epidemic has led to the increased incarceration of women, many of whom are white, one mother fights for custody of her children.

Global crises such as rising economic inequality, volatile financial markets, and devastating climate change illustrate the defects of a global economic order controlled largely by transnational corporations, wealthy states, and other elites. As the impacts of such crises have intensified, they have generated a new wave of protests extending from the countries of the Middle East and North Africa throughout Europe, North America, and elsewhere.

Resting on a convincing body of evidence that violence is not a necessary component of conflict among states and between states and non-state actors, World Beyond War asserts that war itself can be ended. We humans have lived without war for most of our existence and most people live without war most of the time. Warfare arose about 10,000 years ago (only five percent of our existence as Homo Sapiens) and spawned a vicious cycle as peoples, fearing attack by militarized states, found it necessary to imitate them.

Toxic Water, Toxic System exposes the consequences of a seemingly anonymous authoritarian state willing to maintain white supremacy at any cost—including poisoning an entire city and shutting off water to thousands of people. Weaving together narratives of frontline activists along with archival data, Michael Mascarenhas provides a powerful exploration of the political alliances and bureaucratic mechanisms that uphold inequality.