Recommended Media

The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – And What it Will Take to Win it Back by Jeff Faux (2006). Faux, founder of the Economic Policy Institute, critiques both Democrats and Republicans forprotecting transnational corporations “while abandoning the rest of us to an unregulated, and therefore brutal and merciless, global market.” Faux describes how free trade and globalization have encouraged businesses to become nationless enterprises detached from the economic well-being of any single country, to the detriment of all but transnational elites.

Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You with the Bill by David Cay Johnston (2008). Johnston examines the collusion and unfairness in corporate business as well as the highly paid lobbyists working in Congress, state legislatures, county commissions, city councils and government regulatory agencies.

Jacked: “Conservatives” are Picking your Pocket (Whether You Voted For Them or Not) (2006) and Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America by Nomi Prins (2006). After fifteen years as an executive at Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers, Prins walked away in 2002 out of disgust with corporate corruption. In Jacked she examines the Bush administration’s financial chicanery and in Other People’s Money, she shows how corporate fraud resulted from deregulation that trashed the rules of responsible corporate behavior begging the question, “are we in for a repeat
performance?”

The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed Over Industry by Lawrence E. Mitchell (2008). Mitchell identifies the moment in American history when the stock market became the driver of the American economy. He shows how the birth of the giant modern corporation spurred the rise of the stock market and how, by the dawn of the 1920s, the stock market left behind its business
origins to become the very reason for the creation of business itself.

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The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems by Van Jones (2009). Illustrates link between struggle to restore the environment and the need to revive the US economy.

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The Squandering of America by Robert Kuttner (2008) In resurgent free market ideology, many of the policies, institutions and regulations of the New Deal have been abandoned in favor of a more business-friendly orientation. Kuttner argues that these changes have further enriched the already wealthy at the expense of America’s lower and middle classes, exacerbating inequality and systematically weakening the economy.

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Up from Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America by Michael Lind (1997). This former rising star of the right reveals what he believes to be the disturbing truth about the hidden economic agenda of the conservative elite.

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The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy by David Brock (2004). This former conservative journalist mounts a systematic assault on the right-wing media juggernaut of think tanks, publishers, talk radio shows, Web sites and cable networks.

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When I’m Sixty-Four: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them by Teresa Ghilarducci (2008). Labor economist and nationally recognized expert in retirement security who investigates the loss of pensions on older Americans and proposes a comprehensive system of reform. [http://teresaghilarducci.org/]

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The Small-Mart Revolution: How local businesses are beating the global competition by Michael Shuman (2006). Visionary thesis that locally owned businesses are more beneficial to their communities than massive chains like Wal-Mart.

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Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution by Marjorie Kelly (Due out June 2012 from Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco). In an economy buffeted by a financial hurricane and long economic downturn, and facing looming ecological challenges, what kind of economy can possibly come next? As we enter a new era of limits, alternative ownership designs can usher in a new era of fairness, sustainability, and community. Emerging ownership alternatives called “generative” are contrasted with old school “extractive” ownership methods. The overwhelming evidence is that “generative” examples create fair and just outcomes, benefit the many rather than the few, and enable an enduring human presence on a flourishing Earth.

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Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing by Amy Cortese (2011). Cortese takes us inside the local investing movement, where solutions to some of the nation’s most pressing problems are taking shape. She profiles the people and communities who are putting their money to work in their own backyards and taking control of their destinies and explores innovative investment strategies, from community capital and crowd funding to local stock exchanges. By investing in local businesses, rather than faceless conglomerates, investors can earn profits while building healthy, self-reliant communities.

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Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution by Paul Hawken (10th Anniversary Edition 2010). New edition of the classic book about applying market principles to all sources of material value, most importantly natural resources. Not only does it show the vast array of ecologically smart options available to businesses, it argues that it is possible for society and industry to adopt them.

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Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben (2008). Drawing the phrase “deep economy” from the expression “deep ecology,” a term environmentalists use to signify new ways of thinking about the environment, McKibben suggests we need to explore new economic ideas. Rather then promoting accelerated cycles of economic expansion—a mindset that has brought the world to the brink of environmental disaster—we should concentrate on creating localized economies: community-scale power systems instead of huge centralized power plants; cohousing communities instead of sprawling suburbs.

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The End of Growth: Adapting to our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg (2011). A landmark book that says we have reached a fundamental turning point in our economic history: ever-expanding GDP of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable natural limits. The converging limits of resource depletion, environmental impacts, and crushing levels of debt will force us to re-invent money, commerce, and economic theories during this transition.

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Small is Beautiful, 25th Anniversary edition: Economics as if People Mattered: 25 years later with commentaries by E.F. Schumacher (2000). Schumacher was an internationally influential economic thinker, statistician and economist in Britain, serving as Chief Economic Advisor to the UK National Coal Board for two decades. His ideas became popularized in much of the English-speaking world during the 1970s. He is best known for his critique of Western economies and his proposals for human-scale, decentralized and appropriate technologies.

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When Corporations Rule the World by David Korten (2001). In an incredible transfer of wealth, powerful oligarchies of corporate and financial elites are impoverishing humanity and putting its future at risk, corrupting governments and sacrificing democracy to global corporate rule.

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The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism by John Clifton “Jack” Bogle (2005). Bogle, founder and retired CEO of The Vanguard Group, tells what is wrong with corporate America and what should be done years before the financial meltdown.

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The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy by William Greider (2004). American journalist who explores the basis and history of the corporation and how people can influence further development of it.

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The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (2010) and Boomerang (2011) by Michael Lewis.Companion books, the first of which focuses around a handful of investors who were aghast at how the dangers of the subprime mortgage market were being ignored by bank executives and government regulators, and who used their prescience to make a fortune betting against the stability of the system. The second book provides a guided tour through some of the disparate places hard hit by the fiscal tsunami of 2008, like Greece, Iceland and Ireland, tracing how very different people for very different reasons gorged on the cheap credit available in the prelude to that disaster.

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Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves (2009) by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Chronicles the events of the 2008 financial crisis and the collapse of Lehman Brothers from the point of view of Wall Street CEOs and US government regulators.