4 results for "Technology"

Screwed! how foreign countries are ripping America off and plundering our economy-- and how our leaders help them do it

Morris, Dick
The bestselling authors return with a blistering exposÉ of how America is being ripped off by friends and enemies alike—with the help of our own ruling elites. Our jobs go to China. Foreign aid goes to our enemies. Pakistan uses our money to fund terrorists who attack us. Saudi Arabia, which our soldiers have defended with their lives, funds 90 percent of the world's Islamic fundamentalism. The UN is awash in corruption; its bureaucrats steal the money we give it with total impunity. Fifteen hundred brave American soldiers have died defending the regime in Afghanistan—rated the second-most corrupt in the world! Meanwhile, European bankers and bureaucrats are taking over our economy and preempting our sovereignty. How do they get away with it? By hiring our own political leaders, as soon as they leave office, to lobby for them to rip us off. Former House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt, for example, sits on the board of an American affiliate of a Chinese company that has been denied the right to operate in the United States because it steals our technology. Former House Republican Appropriations Committee chairman Bob Livingstone represented Libya until just before Gaddafi fell. And we have a president who willingly obliges countries that poach on our sovereignty, refusing to stand up for our interests and our jobs as they confiscate half the royalties from our offshore energy, subject our elected leaders to criminal prosecution if they go to war without UN approval, and tell us what kind of land-use policies we should pursue. In Screwed! , bestselling authors Dick Morris and Eileen McGann lay bare the unvarnished facts as never before and suggest real, immediate, and specific steps to stop those who undermine our interests and take away our jobs. In the same vein as their previous crusading books— Catastrophe , Fleeced , and Outrage —Morris and McGann have documented, in great depth and detail, exactly how the United States is getting screwed, and how to stop it. They dig up the facts, name names, point fingers, and suggest concrete solutions—independent of partisan politics.
Broadside Books 2012-05-08 351 pages

Raw deal: how the "Uber economy" and runaway capitalism are screwing American workers

Hill, Steven
"Every day, innovative entrepreneurs pioneer bold economic ideas that change the way we live and work. Companies like Google, Apple, Oracle, Facebook and Twitter aren't the only ones shaping our economic future--there's another trend emerging that will change the ways we work and live. The "sharing economy," or the "collaborative consumption economy," includes companies like TaskRabbit, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Zaarly, and DocVacay who are purveyors of an economic system that revolves around sharing human and physical resources. This new aspect to the economy, Steven Hill argues, is a dead end for U.S. workers, as well as for the national economy. In Raw Deal, Hill shows the "sharing economy" is a new and troubling component to what is an overall bad economy that undermines workers. Vulnerable freelancers and day laborers hire themselves out for ever smaller jobs and amounts of money, and it is only the companies who hire them who reap the big benefits. Hill argues that we must shift the support for American workers to one that is individual-based rather than workplace-based. Countering the onset of the freelance society and the new economy is the new civil rights and labor struggles of our time. This important book answers these questions and provides pragmatic solutions to adapt our economic system to its new realities, launching a new civil rights struggle capable of transforming the freelance society into a stakeholder society"--
St. Martin's Press 2015-10-20 326 pages

America in retreat: the new isolationism and the coming global disorder

Stephens, Bret
"A world in which the leading liberal-democratic nation does not assume its role as world policeman will become a world in which dictatorships contend, or unite, to fill the breach. Americans seeking a return to an isolationist garden of Eden--alone and undisturbed in the world, knowing neither good nor evil--will soon find themselves living within shooting range of global pandemonium." --From the Introduction In a brilliant book that will elevate foreign policy in the national conversation, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Bret Stephens makes a powerful case for American intervention abroad. In December 2011 the last American soldier left Iraq. "We're leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq," boasted President Obama. He was proved devastatingly wrong less than three years later as jihadists seized the Iraqi city of Mosul. The event cast another dark shadow over the future of global order--a shadow, which, Bret Stephens argues, we ignore at our peril. America in Retreat identifies a profound crisis on the global horizon. As Americans seek to withdraw from the world to tend to domestic problems, America's adversaries spy opportunity. Vladimir Putin's ambitions to restore the glory of the czarist empire go effectively unchecked, as do China's attempts to expand its maritime claims in the South China Sea, as do Iran's efforts to develop nuclear capabilities. Civil war in Syria displaces millions throughout the Middle East while turbocharging the forces of radical Islam. Long-time allies such as Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, doubting the credibility of American security guarantees, are tempted to freelance their foreign policy, irrespective of U.S. interests. Deploying his characteristic stylistic flair and intellectual prowess, Stephens argues for American reengagement abroad. He explains how military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan was the right course of action, foolishly executed. He traces the intellectual continuity between anti-interventionist statesmen such as Henry Wallace and Robert Taft in the late 1940s and Barack Obama and Rand Paul today. And he makes an unapologetic case for Pax Americana, "a world in which English is the default language of business, diplomacy, tourism, and technology; in which markets are global, capital is mobile, and trade is increasingly free; in which values of openness and tolerance are, when not the norm, often the aspiration." In a terrifying chapter imagining the world of 2019, Stephens shows what could lie in store if Americans continue on their current course. Yet we are not doomed to this future. Stephens makes a passionate rejoinder to those who argue that America is in decline, a process that is often beyond the reach of political cures. Instead, we are in retreat--the result of faulty, but reversible, policy choices. By embracing its historic responsibility as the world's policeman, America can safeguard not only greater peace in the world but also greater prosperity at home. At once lively and sobering, America in Retreat offers trenchant analysis of the gravest threat to global order, from a rising star of political commentary.
Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 2015 269 pages

Too much magic: wishful thinking, technology, and the fate of the nation

Kunstler, James Howard
""Too Much Magic" is what Kunstler sees in the bright visions of a future world dreamed up by optimistic souls who believe technology will solve all our problems. In Too Much Magic, Kunstler articulates a number of issues relating to the unsustainability of our high-energy lifestyle, including: The pernicious cult of "Happy Motoring" and our desire to preserve an ailing and backwards automotive industry at all costs; The upcoming demise of suburbia and the mass migration and demographic shifts that will ensue; The inadequacy of both renewable energy sources and alternative fossil fuels such as biodiesel, tar sands, and shale oil and gas to make up the energy shortfall when our conventional sources of fuel dry; The effect of the continuing increase in global population even after resource shortfalls of oil and fossil fuels become acute; How the diminishing returns of technology collide with hypercomplexity to scuttle our wishes for an easy way out of our epochal predicaments. With vision and clarity of thought, and an antic, comic spirit, Kunstler argues that the time for magical thinking and hoping for miracles is over, and the time to begin preparing for the long emergency has begun."--Jacket.
Atlantic Monthly Press 2012 245 pages