Greg Palast digs deep to unearth the ugly facts that few reporters working anywhere in the world today have the courage or ability to cover. From East Timor to Waco, Karachi to Santiago, he has exposed some of the most egregious cases of political corruption, corporate fraud, and financial manipulation, globally. His uncanny investigative skills as well as his acerbic wit and no-holds-barred style have made him an anathema among magnates on four continents and a living legend among his colleagues and his devoted readership, worldwide. This exciting new collection brings together some of Palast's most powerful and influential writing of the past decade. His columns in the Observer have a cult following and he made headline news when he went undercover for the Observer to break open the 'Lobbygate' scandal of corruption inside the Blair Cabinet. Included here are his reports on that story, which earned him the distinction of being the first journalist ever to be personally attacked on the floor of Parliament by a prime minister; his celebrated Washington Post exposé on Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris's stealing of the presidential election in Florida, which made him "a legend and a hero on the Internet" (Alan Colmes / Fox Radio) when it ran in Salon.com; and recent stories on George W. Bush's pay-offs to corporate cronies, and the business-created 'energy crisis.' Also included in this volume are new and previously unpublished material, television transcripts, photographs, and letters.

Rising inequality of income and power, along with the recent convulsions in the finance sector, have made the search for alternatives to unbridled capitalism more urgent than ever. Yet there has been a global retreat by the Left: on the assumption that liberal capitalism is the only game in town, political theorists tend to dismiss as utopian any attempt to rethink our social and economic relations. As Fredric Jameson first argued, it is now easier for us to imagine the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism. Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias is a comprehensive assault on the quietism of contemporary social theory. Building on a lifetime’s work analyzing the class system in the developed world, as well as exploring the problem of the transition to a socialist alternative, Wright has now completed a systematic reconstruction of the core values and feasible goals for Left theorists and political actors. Envisioning Real Utopias aims to put the social back into socialism, laying the foundations for a set of concrete, emancipatory alternatives to the capitalist system. Characteristically rigorous and engaging, this will become a landmark of social thought for the twenty-first century.