George Soros applies his experience in the world of finance to explain what is happening in the collapsing global economy. The Russian economy has collapsed leading to inflation and economic hardship; scores of Japanese banks are in ruin; the once-booming economies of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have imploded; and even in Europe and America, the markets lurch violently, wiping out gains each week. Soros dissects the crisis and economic theory, revealing how theoretical assumptions have combined with human behaviour to lead to today's calamities. He shows how unquestioning faith in market forces causes blindness to crucial instabilites, and how those instabilities have chain-reacted to cause the economic crisis which, he argues, still has the potential to get much worse. Soros offers solutions to this global meltdown.

"This book looks at the role illegality or undocumentedness plays in our society and economy. It shows how the status was created, and how and why people, especially Mexicans and Central Americans, have been assigned this status. The first three chapters look at the histories of social exclusion. One looks specifically at the Mexican and Guatemalan contexts to understand why such large numbers of people from these countries enter the United States without documents, and how those who do so understand their own motivations. Two chapters focus on the role of illegality in the economy. Undocumented people tend to work in three different kinds of jobs: jobs that have been historically marginalized, like those in agriculture; jobs that have been downgraded from well-paid, unionized work to low-wage labor, like meatpacking; and newly booming job categories that underlie post-war consumerist prosperity like landscaping and childcare work. One chapter looks at children and families, focusing especially on the experiences of undocumented youth and youth with undocumented parents, and at the leadership role that undocumented youth have taken in the undocumented rights movement. One looks at the dizzying complexity of status to point out that virtually nobody really understand what "illegal" means. It looks at the detention system and the interests behind it. Finally, the last chapter explores the different "solutions" to the problem of undocumentedness that have been proposed and implemented over time, and shows why they have failed. Undocumentedness is deeply imbedded in global and national political and economic systems, and the concept itself must be understood and challenged in order to create a more just system. "--

With his classics of social commentary "The Geography of Nowhere and "Home from Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler has established himself as one of the great commentators on American space and place. Now, with "The Long Emergency, he offers a shocking vision of a post-oil future. The last two hundred years have seen the greatest explosion of progress and wealth in the history of mankind. But the oil age is at an end. The depletion of nonrenewable fossil fuels is about to radically change life as we know it, and much sooner than we think. As a result of artificially cheap fossil-fuel energy we have developed global models of industry, commerce, food production, and finance that will collapse. "The Long Emergency tells us just what to expect after we pass the tipping point of global peak oil production and the honeymoon of affordable energy is over, preparing us for economic, political, and social changes of an unimaginable scale. Are we laboring under a Jiminy Cricket syndrome when we tell ourselves that alternative means of energy are just a few years away? Even once they are developed, will they ever be able to sustain us in the way that fossil fuels once did? What will happen when our current plagues of global warming, epidemic disease, and overpopulation collide to exacerbate the end of the oil age? Will the new global economy be able to persevere, or will we be forced to revert to the more agrarian, localized economy we once knew? Could corporations like Wal-Mart and McDonald's, built on the premise of cheap transportation, become a thing of the past? Will the misguided experiment of suburbia--considered a birthright and a reality by millions of Americans--collapse when the car culturebecomes obsolete? Riveting and authoritative. "The Long Emergency is a devastating indictment that brings new urgency and accessibility to the critical issues that will shape our future, and that we can no longer afford to ignore. It is bound to become a classic of social science.

The term ‘collateral damage' has recently been added to the vocabulary of military forces to refer to the unintended consequences of armed interventions, consequences that are unplanned but nevertheless damaging and often very costly in human and personal terms. But collateral damage is not unique to the world of armed intervention - it is also one of the most salient and striking dimensions of contemporary social inequality. The inflammable mixture of growing social inequality and the rising volume of human suffering marginalized as ‘collateral' is becoming one of most cataclysmic problems of our time. For the political class, poverty is commonly seen as a problem of law and order - a matter of how to deal with individuals, such as unemployed youths, who fall foul of the law. But treating poverty as a criminal problem obscures the social roots of inequality, which lie in the combination of a consumerist life philosophy propagated and instilled by a consumer-oriented economy, on the one hand, and the rapid shrinking of life chances available to the poor, on the other. In our contemporary, liquid-modern world, the poor are the collateral damage of a profit-driven, consumer-oriented society - ‘aliens inside' who are deprived of the rights enjoyed by other members of the social order. In this new book Zygmunt Bauman - one of the most original and influential social thinkers of our time - examines the selective affinity between the growth of social inequality and the rise in the volume of ‘collateral damage' and considers its implications and its costs.

"This book shows that science is not enough to reverse climate catastrophe: we need put social, racial, and economic justice front and center, radically redistribute, and abandon the global growth economy"--

Jacque Fresco envisions a global civilization in which science and technology are applied with human and environmental concern to secure, protect, and encourage a more humane world for all people. This book offers a possible way out of our recurring cycles of boom and recession, famine, poverty, a declining environment, and territorial conflicts where peace is merely the interval between wars. It outlines an attainable, humane social design of the near future where human rights are no longer paper proclamations but a way of life. The Best That Money Can't Buy is a challenge to all people to work toward a society in which all of the world's resources become the common heritage of all of the earth's people. It is accompanied by 70 color photos of Fresco's original designs, which illuminate the fulfilling lifestyle of a global, resource-based economy.

In 1946, the World Health Organization defined health as: "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." Until now, no one has defined this third dimension to health, or described strategies to deliver it. This ground-breaking book is the first to do so. Twenty-five years after the arrival of the Internet, we are drowning in data and deadlines; we can never have imagined that our daily intake of information and achieving a healthy balance in our personal and professional lives could feel so complex and so unhealthy. In recent years, organizations have come a long way towards promoting health literacy (on obesity, smoking, diet, and exercise) and some way in acknowledging mental health issues. But acknowledging the challenges of the Internet and social media on employee and workplace health is the social element, and most have not yet begun to offer solutions around either better information and knowledge management, or developing better and more sustaining relationships. The challenges, threats, and opportunities of a "perma-connected" global economy and society could not be greater-and they will only increase. This is the first book to define what social health means in both society and the modern workplace. Here, Julia Hobsbawm argues that developing social health will help employees become more efficiently engaged with each other and their work, and help employers to create workplaces that support social health and thus greater productivity.

"James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, which sold approximately 36K copies, returns with a new book exploring the looming collapse of the techno-industrial economy, featuring profiles of individuals who have drastically altered their lives due to financial difficulties"--

Is global capitalism on its last legs? Is the era of American leadership over? Has the West begun a decline into a new Dark Age? Does American civilization deserve to survive? These are the unnerving questions raised by the Great Crash of 2009. This book presents a radically new answer, insisting that global society has only begun to realize its full potential. Author HowardBloom argues that there's a hidden mandate beneath the surface of capitalism: "It's struggling to whisper and rumble its message to you and me. That hidden imperative can lift us from economic crisis, can make us a leader in the next-generation economy, and can dramatically upgrade our ability to empower our fellow human beings." Bloom sees crisis as opportunity, opportunity for the whole human race.In more than eighty short, fast chapters, insights appear suddenly, like the quick bursts of flashbulbs, taking the reader on a sweeping tour of human history, from the Stone Age to the present. Every chapter conveys a radically new way to see the astonishing mechanism we call "Western Civilization." Bloom marvels at how humans have turned toxic waste into food and fuel, trash into treasure, and garbage into gold. He shows how we've produced material miracles based on immaterial things-passion, persistence, and fantasy. He shows that what many regard as the end is just the beginning. The beginning of something you've never before imagined. The author explains why the secret to capitalism's next great leap does not lie in new financial tricks, but in tapping things right under our noses in radically new ways-that is, tapping our imagination, our desire to feel useful, our desire to help others, and our desire to be recognized for contributing to the welfare of humanity. The key to next-generation capitalism lies in a big-picture view that's utterly unlike anything you've previously perceived. A big-picture view that will startle you. A big-picture view with which you can ignite the world, get a new handle on your life, and help transform society. This brilliant, inspirational work of daring ideas and breathtaking research offers more than hope. It offers unseen levels of understanding. Understanding that can literally redefine what it means to be a human being.

Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the way Ottomans used their clocks conformed to the inner logic of their own temporal culture. However, this began to change rather dramatically during the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire was increasingly assimilated into the European-dominated global economy and the project of modern state building began to gather momentum. In Reading Clocks, Alla Turca , Avner Wishnitzer unravels the complexity of Ottoman temporal culture and for the first time tells the story of its transformation. He explains that in their attempt to attain better surveillance capabilities and higher levels of regularity and efficiency, various organs of the reforming Ottoman state developed elaborate temporal constructs in which clocks played an increasingly important role. As the reform movement spread beyond the government apparatus, emerging groups of officers, bureaucrats, and urban professionals incorporated novel time-related ideas, values, and behaviors into their self-consciously “modern” outlook and lifestyle. Acculturated in the highly regimented environment of schools and barracks, they came to identify efficiency and temporal regularity with progress and the former temporal patterns with the old political order. Drawing on a wealth of archival and literary sources, Wishnitzer’s original and highly important work presents the shifting culture of time as an arena in which Ottoman social groups competed for legitimacy and a medium through which the very concept of modernity was defined. Reading Clocks, Alla Turca breaks new ground in the study of the Middle East and presents us with a new understanding of the relationship between time and modernity.