40 results for "Business"

America's bitter pill: money, politics, backroom deals, and the fight to fix our broken healthcare

Brill, Steven
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “A tour de force . . . a comprehensive and suitably furious guide to the political landscape of American healthcare . . . persuasive, shocking.” — The New York Times America’s Bitter Pill is Steven Brill’s acclaimed book on how the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was written, how it is being implemented, and, most important, how it is changing—and failing to change—the rampant abuses in the healthcare industry. It’s a fly-on-the-wall account of the titanic fight to pass a 961-page law aimed at fixing America’s largest, most dysfunctional industry. It’s a penetrating chronicle of how the profiteering that Brill first identified in his trailblazing Time magazine cover story continues, despite Obamacare. And it is the first complete, inside account of how President Obama persevered to push through the law, but then failed to deal with the staff incompetence and turf wars that crippled its implementation. But by chance America’s Bitter Pill ends up being much more—because as Brill was completing this book, he had to undergo urgent open-heart surgery. Thus, this also becomes the story of how one patient who thinks he knows everything about healthcare “policy” rethinks it from a hospital gurney—and combines that insight with his brilliant reporting. The result: a surprising new vision of how we can fix American healthcare so that it stops draining the bank accounts of our families and our businesses, and the federal treasury. Praise for America’s Bitter Pill “An energetic, picaresque, narrative explanation of much of what has happened in the last seven years of health policy . . . [Brill] has pulled off something extraordinary.” —The New York Times Book Review “A thunderous indictment of what Brill refers to as the ‘toxicity of our profiteer-dominated healthcare system.’ ” — Los Angeles Times “A sweeping and spirited new book [that] chronicles the surprisingly juicy tale of reform.” — The Daily Beast “One of the most important books of our time.” —Walter Isaacson “Superb . . . Brill has achieved the seemingly impossible—written an exciting book about the American health system.” — The New York Review of Books
Random House 2015-08-18 528 pages

The Laundromat (Previously published as SECRECY WORLD) Inside the Panama Papers, Illicit Money Networks, and the Global Elite

Jake Bernstein
* * * Previously published as Secrecy World * * * The Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture from Director Steven Soderbergh, Starring Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, and Antonio Banderas Two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter takes us inside the world revealed by the Panama Papers, a landscape of illicit money, political corruption, and fraud on a global scale. A hidden circulatory system flows beneath the surface of global finance, carrying trillions of dollars from drug trafficking, tax evasion, bribery, and other illegal enterprises. This network masks the identities of the individuals who benefit from these activities, aided by bankers, lawyers, and auditors who get paid to look the other way. In The Laundromat , two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Jake Bernstein explores this shadow economy and how it evolved, drawing on millions of leaked documents from the files of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca—a trove now known as the Panama Papers—as well as other journalistic and government investigations. Bernstein shows how shell companies operate, how they allow the superwealthy and celebrities to escape taxes, and how they provide cover for illicit activities on a massive scale by crime bosses and corrupt politicians across the globe. Bernstein traveled to the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and within the United States to uncover how these strands fit together—who is involved, how they operate, and the real-world impact. He recounts how Mossack Fonseca was exposed and what lies ahead for the corporations, banks, law firms, individuals, and governments that are implicated. The Laundromat offers a disturbing and sobering view of how the world really works and raises critical questions about financial and legal institutions we may once have trusted.
Picador 2019-10-15 368 pages

Structuring Venture Capital, Private Equity, and Entrepreneurial Transactions

Jack S. Levin,Martin D. Ginsburg,Donald E. Rocap
Structuring Venture Capital Private Equity and Entrepreneurial Transactions Now, you can minimize your clients' tax liability and avoid legal pitfalls, As well as maximize returns on successful transactions and be prepared for all of the potential benefits. Here at last is one-step-at-a-time, start-to-finish structural guidance For The following common business transactions: Venture capital financing New business start-ups Brains-and-money deals Growth-equity investments Leveraged and management buyouts Industry consolidations Troubled company workouts and reorganizations Going public Selling a business Forming a private equity fund Guided by Levin's dynamic, transaction-by-transaction approach, you'll make the tax, legal, and economic structuring consequences of every deal benefit your client every time. in this extraordinary hands-on resource by the most sought-after authority in the field, you'll see exactly how to: Distribute the tax burden in your client's favor Maximize returns on successful transactions Control future rights to exit a profitable investment...and turn every transaction into a winning venture! Structuring Venture Capital is also available in: CD-ROM format A combination of CD-ROM plus print
Aspen Pub. 2001 1028 pages

War on Woke Why the New McCarthyism Is More Dangerous Than the Old

Alan Dershowitz
In War on Woke: Why the New McCarthyism Is More Dangerous Than the Old, Alan Dershowitz—#1 New York Times bestselling author and one of America’s most respected legal scholars—warns of the danger to the future of civil liberties and equality in America. Alan Dershowitz has been called “one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America” by Politico and “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights” by Newsweek . War on Woke exposes new McCarthyite tendencies and tactics of academia, the media, and the business community, especially high tech, that promote closed-minded intolerance. Dershowitz explains that the new woke McCarthyism challenges the basic tenets of the classic liberal (in the traditional sense) state: Freedom of expression; due process; presumption of innocence, right to counsel, equal application of the law; tolerance and respect for differing viewpoints, and that these bedrock principles are rejected by McCarthyite extremists on both the hard left and the hard right. Analyzing the impact of this new woke McCarthyism through the relentless attempts to “get” Trump, the attention on the Bidens, and even its international manifestation relative to anti-Semitism, Israel, and the world, Dershowitz investigates the role of media and asks whether the US Supreme Court can constrain this growing threat as new woke McCarthyism becomes mainstream Americanism—especially as the current generation of students and young professionals become our political, media, business, educational, religious, and “influencer” leaders.
Hot Books 2024-03-19 240 pages

True Crimes and Misdemeanors The Investigation of Donald Trump

Jeffrey Toobin
From CNN chief legal analyst and bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin, a real-life legal thriller about the prosecutors and congressional investigators pursuing the truth about Donald Trump's complicity in several crimes--and why they failed. Donald Trump's campaign chairman went to jail. So did his personal lawyer. His long-time political consigliere was convicted of serious federal crimes, and his national security advisor pled guilty to others. Several Russian spies were indicted in absentia. Career intelligence agents and military officers were alarmed enough by the president's actions that they alerted senior government officials and ignited the impeachment process. Yet despite all this, a years-long inquiry led by special counsel Robert Mueller, and the third impeachment of a president in American history, Donald Trump survived to run for re-election. Why? Jeffrey Toobin's highly entertaining definitive account of the Mueller investigation and the impeachment of the president takes readers behind the scenes of the epic legal and political struggle to call Trump to account for his misdeeds. With his superb storytelling and analytic skills Toobin recounts all the mind-boggling twists and turns in the case--Trump's son met with a Russian operative promising Kremlin support! Trump paid a porn star $130,000 to hush up an affair! Rudy Giuliani and a pair of shady Ukrainian-American businessmen got the Justice Department to look at Russian-created conspiracy theories! Toobin shows how Trump's canny lawyers used Mueller's famous integrity against him, and how Trump's bullying and bluster cowed Republican legislators into ignoring the clear evidence of the impeachment hearings. Based on dozens of interviews with prosecutors in Mueller's office, Trump's legal team, Congressional investigators, White House staffers, and several of the key players, including some who are now in prison, True Crimes and Misdemeanors is a revelatory narrative that makes sense of the seemingly endless chaos of the Trump years. Filled with never-before-reported details of the high-stakes legal battles and political machinations, the book weaves a tale of a rogue president guilty of historic misconduct, and how he got away with it.
Diversified Publishing 2020-09 816 pages

Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control

Medea Benjamin
The CIA chief, Leon Panetta, calls drones the ‘only game in town’. The figures bear him out. Between 2004 and 2012, the US reportedly conducted over 350 drone strikes in Pakistan, killing between 2,600 and 3,400 people. Drone strikes have killed more than 200 children alone in Pakistan and Yemen. In 2000, the Americans had fewer than fifty aerial drones; ten years later, it had a fleet of nearly 7,500, and the US Air Force now trains more drone ‘pilots’ than bomber and fighter pilots combined. Drones are already a $ 5 billion business in the US alone. American activist Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of the peace group CODEPINK and the international human rights organization Global Exchange, provides the first extensive analysis of who is producing the drones, where they are being used, who controls these unmanned places, and what are the legal and moral implications of their use. Benjamin also looks at what activists, lawyers, and scientists across the globe are doing to ground these weapons.
Daily Star Books 2013 241 pages

Other People's Money and How The Bankers Use It

Louis D. Brandeis
Louis D. Brandeis was a Supreme Court Justice and a patriot. He wrote "Other People's Money and How Bankers Use It" to warn the American people about the greedy bankers that control the United States and drive us into financial ruin. The book attacked the use of investment funds to promote the consolidation of various industries under the control of a small number of corporations, which Brandeis alleged were working in concert to prevent competition. Brandeis harshly criticized investment bankers who controlled large amounts of money deposited in their banks by middle-class people. The heads of these banks, Brandeis pointed out, routinely sat on the boards of railroad companies and large industrial manufacturers of various products, and routinely directed the resources of their banks to promote the interests of their own companies. These companies, in turn, sought to maintain control of their industries by crushing small businesses and stamping out innovators who developed better products to compete against them. Brandeis supported his contentions with a discussion of the actual dollar amounts--in millions of dollars--controlled by specific banks, industries, and industrialists such as J. P. Morgan, noting that these interests had recently acquired a far larger proportion of American wealth than corporate entities had ever had before. He extensively cited testimony from a Congressional investigation performed by the Pujo Committee, named after Louisiana Representative Arsène Pujo, into self-serving and monopolistic business dealing. Chapter V of the book ("What Publicity Can Do") contains in its opening section a well-known line that has frequently been cited in support of regulation through disclosure obligations: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman."
Brian Westland 1914 108 pages

Gold Standard How to Rock the World and Run an Empire

Kym Gold
The cofounder of True Religion Brand Jeans, Kym Gold uses her story to serve up a firm dose of life and career lessons that helped her build a multimillion-dollar fashion brand from the ground up. Kym Gold’s mantra, “never settle for a no; always look for a yes,” is what led her to co-create True Religion Brand Jeans, a major retail clothing company that sold for close to a billion dollars in 2013. In Gold Standard, Kym finally gives her side of the story of how the once fledgling jeans company that nobody wanted, went on to become a giant revolutionizing player in the fashion industry. As a woman in the boys’ club world of the fickle fashion business, Kym armed herself and became one of True Religion’s majority shareholders and their lead female clothing designer. On Valentine’s Day in 2007, she was served divorce papers by her then husband and had her company ripped from under her—all within an hour. Since then, she has reestablished her place in the industry and catapulted herself into the coveted 1 percent of the richest Americans. In Gold Standard , Kym’s savvy business and fashion branding experience of thirty years gives a behind-the-scenes look into the always changing fashion industry. It also mixes in her compelling personal journey, including her marriage to Mark Burnett before he became TV's biggest mega producer, a compassionate view for women of the pressures of balancing a career, finances, and family. Kym motivates readers to throw the gold gloves on and put up a fight.
Skyhorse 2021-05-18 216 pages

The Allocation of Health Care Resources: An Ethical Evaluation of the 'QALY' Approach

McKie, John,Singer, Peter,Richardson, Jeff
The competition for limited health care resources is intensifying. We urgently need an acceptable method for deciding how they should be allocated. But the goods that health care produces are of very different kinds. Health care can extend the lives of children and of older people. It can make it possible for a person to walk, when without health care that person would be permanently bedridden; and it can reduce the pain and distress of people who are terminally ill. How can we possibly decide which of these - and many more - diverse achievements of health care are more deserving than others? We need a common unit by which we might be able to measure these very different goods. The Quality-Adjusted Life Year, or QALY, is the most developed proposal for such a unit of measure. In this book a distinguished team of ethicists and economists defend the core of the QALY proposal: that health care resources should be used so as to produce more years of life, of the highest possible quality. This leads to a discussion of such fundamental questions as whether all lives are of equal value, whether health care should be allocated on the basis of need and whether the QALY approach incorporates an adequate account of fairness or justice. The result is the most thorough account yet of the ethical issues raised by the use of the QALY as a basis for allocating health care resources.
Routledge 2020-06-30 168 pages

The Greedy Hand How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and what to Do about it

Amity Shlaes
Ever since Colonial times, Americans have been bedeviled by high taxes that seem to return little of material value to citizens. Taking a page from Thomas Paine's "Greedy Hand" manifesto, Amity Shlaes has written a provocative and fascinating book exposing the inequities of our present tax system, and offers concrete, coherent solutions to simplify our lives. Today, taxes make up more than a third of our economy, the highest level in peacetime history. We truly live in the land Paine foresaw when he warned of government "thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry." This book is a cultural examination of the way taxes influence our behavior, and how they force us into an arbitrary system that punishes families and individual enterprise. Shlaes shows how so-called tax breaks do little to help families and how married women are unfairly taxed more. She uncovers the problems that engage and enrage us, proving that Social Security issues and school inadequacies are at heart tax problems. And she charts a course out of the madness of tax oppression, offering a number of solutions that will give each of us a fairer, simpler system. With compassion for Americans and their dreams, Shlaes makes the best case yet for rethinking our tax code.
Harcourt, Incorporated 2000 256 pages

A Program for Monetary Stability

Milton Friedman
2014 Reprint of 1959 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. The organization of the book is simple and logical, the style extremely lucid and readable. In proposing measures of reform, the author e examines the current money and credit structure to see how it works, examines the role that government should play, and what criteria should guide the use of powers granted the monetary authorities. An essay and a powerful theoretical statement from an economist who would go on to dominate his field for the next thirty years.
Martino Publishing 2014-07-29 126 pages

Uncommon Sense

Richard A. Posner
On December 5, 2004, the still-developing blogosphere took one of its biggest steps toward mainstream credibility, as Nobel Prize - winning economist Gary S. Becker and renowned jurist and legal scholar Richard A. Posner announced the formation of the Becker-Posner Blog. In no time, the blog had established a wide readership and reputation as a reliable source of lively, thought-provoking commentary on current events, its pithy and profound weekly essays highlighting the value of economic reasoning when applied to unexpected topics. Uncommon Sense gathers the most important and innovative entries from the blog, arranged by topic, along with updates and even reconsiderations when subsequent events have shed new light on a question. Whether it's Posner making the economic case for the legalization of gay marriage, Becker arguing in favor of the sale of human organs for transplant, or even the pair of scholars vigorously disagreeing about the utility of collective punishment, the writing is always clear, the interplay energetic, and the resulting discussion deeply informed and intellectually substantial. To have a single thinker of the stature of a Becker or Posner addressing questions of this nature would make for fascinating reading; to have both, writing and responding to each other, is an exceptionally rare treat. With Uncommon Sense, they invite the adventurous reader to join them on a whirlwind intellectual journey. All they ask is that you leave your preconceptions behind.
ReadHowYouWant.com 2010-10-19 600 pages

Firms, contracts, and financial structure

Hart, Oliver D.
This book provides a framework for thinking about economic institutions such as firms. The basic idea is that institutions arise in situations where people write incomplete contracts and where the allocation of power or control is therefore important. Power and control are not standard concepts in economic theory. The book begins by pointing out that traditional approaches cannot explain on the one hand why all transactions do not take place in one huge firm and on the other hand why firms matter at all. An incomplete contracting or property rights approach is then developed. It is argued that this approach can throw light on the boundaries of firms and on the meaning of asset ownership. In the remainder of the book, incomplete contracting ideas are applied to understand firms' financial decisions, in particular, the nature of debt and equity (why equity has votes and creditors have foreclosure rights); the capital structure decisions of public companies; bankruptcy procedure; and the allocation of voting rights across a company's shares. The book is written in a fairly non-technical style and includes many examples. It is aimed at advanced undergraduate and graduate students, academic and business economists, and lawyers, as well as those with an interest in corporate finance, privatization and regulation, and the transition from socialism to capitalism. Little background knowledge is required, since the concepts are developed as the book progresses and the existing literature is fully reviewed.
Clarendon Press 1995-12-07 228 pages

The Federal Mafia How it Illegally Imposes and Unlawfully Collects Income Taxes

Irwin A. Schiff
From the back of theA book that will convince you that organized crime in America begins with The Federal Government!Discover for yourself- No law requires you to file income tax returns- No law requires you to pay income taxes- No law requires you to have income taxes withheld from your pay, and how you can legally put a stop to such practices- No law requires you to keep books and records for income tax purposes- No law requires you to show your Social Security number to an bank or stockbroker--not even your employer- No law authorizes criminal prosecutions of alleged income tax "crimes" and why all such prosecutions are illegal- No law authorizes you to be audited by the IRS- No law authorizes employers or financial institutions to withhold income taxes from wages, interest or dividends- No law authorizes the IRS to seize any property (including wages, bank accounts, homes and automobiles) in payment of income taxes, and why all such seizures are illegalCompletely documented with 55 internal Revenue Code Sections, 8 Treasury Department Regulations, 23 Startling Government Admissions Reproduced In Their Original Form, 32 Court Exhibits and Much, Much More!
Freedom Press 1990 288 pages

The reproach of hunger: food, justice, and money in the twenty-first century

Rieff, David
"In a groundbreaking book based on six years of reporting, leading expert on humanitarian aid and development David Rieff offers a review of whether the end of extreme poverty and widespread hunger are within our reach. Some of the most brilliant scientists, world politicians, and development experts agree that the eradication of hunger is an essential task for the new millennium. Yet in the last decade, the prices of wheat, soy and rice have soared. This has condemned the hundreds of millions of the world's population who live on less than one dollar per day to a state of hunger and insecurity. Rieff searches for the causes of this food security crisis, as well as what lies behind the failures to respond to disaster: failures to address climate change, poor governance, and misguided optimism. Rieff cautions against the increased privatization of aid, as well as the interventions of celebrity campaigners, whose business-led solutions rob development of political urgency. He dismisses the idle hope of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that food scarcity can be solved by technological innovation alone. The path ahead, Rieff reminds us, demands we rethink the fundamental causes of the world's grotesque inequalities and understand that what is at stake is a political challenge we are failing to confront".
Simon & Schuster 2015-10-06 402 pages