Why is the Atlantic slowly filling with crude petroleum, threatening a millions-of-years-old ecological balance? Why did traders at prominent banks take high-risk gambles with the money entrusted to them by hundreds of thousands of clients around the world, expanding and leveraging their investments to the point that failure led to a global financial crisis that left millions of people jobless and hundreds of cities economically devastated? Why would the world's most powerful military spend ten years fighting an enemy that presents no direct threat to secure resources for corporations? The culprit in all cases is neoliberal ideology—the belief in the supremacy of "free" markets to drive and govern human affairs. And in the years since the initial publication of Noam Chomsky's Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, the bitter vines of neoliberalism have only twisted themselves further into the world economy, obliterating the public’s voice in public affairs and substituting the bottom line in place of people’s basic obligation to care for one another as ends in themselves. In Profit Over People, Chomsky reveals the roots of the present crisis, tracing the history of neoliberalism through an incisive analysis of free trade agreements of the 1990s, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund—and describes the movements of resistance to the increasing interference by the private sector in global affairs. In the years since the initial publication of Profit Over People, the stakes have only risen. Now more than ever, Profit Over People is one of the key texts explaining how the crisis facing us operates—and how, through Chomsky’s analysis of resistance, we may find an escape from the closing net.

The Myth of the Liberal Media contends that the mainstream media are parts of a market system and that their performance is shaped primarily by proprietor/owner and advertiser interests. Using a propaganda model, it is argued that the commercial media protect and propagandize for the corporate system. Case studies of major media institutions―the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer―are supplemented by detailed analyses of "word tricks and propaganda" and the media's treatment of topics such as Third World elections, the Persian Gulf War, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the fall of Suharto, and corporate junk science.

Samuel Brittan has been one of the Financial Times' leading columnists for nearly thirty years. He has also advised numerous Chancellors of the Exchequer on economic policy. Against the Flow collects the most important of these writings from the last three decades. Brittan has established a reputation for elegance of expression, trenchant analysis and tremendous range of reference. All three qualities are powerfully apparent in this collection, as he ranges over the arms trade and US military (which he opposes); the expansion of free markets and a basic income for all (which he supports), as wall as the war on terror, The book also includes his pungent portraits of some heroes and villans, including Keynes, Milton Friedman & Taken together the pieces in Against the Flow amount to a robust defence of classic liberalism.

Essays offer a liberal perspective on the economy, government policy, free trade, feminism, the auto industry, the presidency, citizenship and poverty