Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Rediscovering Republicanism -...

  John Nantz

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  When well-designed institutions function properly, people thrive. Few institutions have been more ingeniously designed than the U.S. federal government via the Constitution in 1787. This auspicious beginning more than two centuries ago helps explain why the U.S. remains a magnet for opportunity seekers, students, entrepreneurs, dissidents, and persecuted believers.Yet for decades now, America’s federal government has been underperforming. Social Security and Medicare face looming insolvency. The federal government’s “war on poverty” has failed to “end poverty” and arguably made it worse. In 2012, the United States Postal Service lost more money than the nation spent on the State Department, and Amtrak has lost money every year since being created in 1971. How can an enduring institution, so thoughtfully crafted, now produce such poor results?The federal government has grown so much because it serves a new and different vision, American Progressivism. American Progressives believed that democratically elected, public-minded federal politicians and employees could use federal programs to solve the nation’s greatest problems in a way no other American institution could. This idea justified the federal government’s massive expansion: today, the federal government runs over 1,500 programs and employs over 5% of the U.S. workforce.Yet federal results do not match Progressive expectations. Three key problems – “windfall politics”, “the government surcharge”, and “complexity failure” – overlooked by American Progressives explain the federal government’s consistent failures. American Progressive’s rosy-eyed view of human nature and political institutions have not been borne out by the evidence.In an era of substantial political fermentation and debate, rediscovering and re-applying American Republicanism represents the best path forward for the United States. The federal government should retain many necessary responsibilities but turn over those where it has failed.

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  Scorpions for Breakfast - My...

  Jan Brewer

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  Sometime after dark on March 27, 2010, Arizona rancher Robert Krentz was found dead next to his four-wheeler on the grounds of his ranch on the Arizona-Mexico border. Krentz and his dog, Blue, had been missing since that morning. They were last heard from when he radioed his brother to say that he’d found an illegal alien on the property and was going to offer him assistance. The man Krentz encountered that day shot and killed him and his dog, without warning, before escaping to Mexico. It’s difficult to overstate the impact of Krentz’s death, which turned the issue of Arizona’s unsecured border—a crisis that the federal government had repeatedly ignored—into a national concern. As Arizona sheriff Larry Dever said in his testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, “We cannot sit by while our citizens are terrorized, robbed, and murdered by ruthless and desperate people who enter our country illegally.” This momentum helped pass SB 1070, a bill that authorizes local law enforcement under certain conditions to question persons reasonably suspected of being illegal aliens, which Governor Jan Brewer and the state legislature had been working on for months. With the passage of this controversial bill, the state of Arizona became ground zero in the impassioned debate over illegal immigration. The Democrats and the media went into overdrive, denouncing the state and its governor as racists and Nazis.Governor Brewer, a lifelong Arizona resident with deep ties to the community, was first elected to the Arizona House of Representatives in 1982, and hasn’t lost an election since. As a state official, she watched with increasing dismay as illegal immigration exploded across Arizona’s border, and noticed the devastating effect it was having on the state. Causing an escalation in violence, an influx of drugs, and prisons and hospitals to fill to overflowing, this problem was not only wreaking havoc on the moral fabric of the community but placing an even greater strain on Arizona’s beleaguered health, educational, and social welfare networks. Growing frustrated with the failure of the federal government to respond to her pleas for assistance, Governor Brewer led the state to action. Scorpions for Breakfast is Brewer’s commonsense account of her fight to secure our nation’s border in the face of persistent federal inaction. Her book is vital reading for all Americans interested in the real change that can happen when local leaders take the initiative to preserve our country and our laws.

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  Economyths - How the Science of...

  David Orrell

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  From the inability of wealth to make us happier, to our catastrophic blindness to the credit crunch, "Economyths" reveals ten ways in which economics has failed us all. Forecasters predicted a prosperous year in 2008 for financial markets - in one influential survey the average prediction was for an eleven per cent gain. But by the end of the year, the Standard and Poor's 500 index - a key economic barometer - was down 38 per cent, and major economies were plunging into recession. Even the Queen asked - Why did no one see it coming? An even bigger casualty was the credibility of economics, which for decades has claimed that the economy is a rational, stable, efficient machine, governed by well-understood laws. Mathematician David Orrell traces the history of this idea from its roots in ancient Greece to the financial centres of London and New York, shows how it is mistaken, and proposes new alternatives. "Economyths" explains how the economy is the result of complex and unpredictable processes; how risk models go astray; why the economy is not rational or fair; why no woman (until 2009) had ever won the Nobel Prize for economics; why financial crashes are less Black Swans than part of the landscape; and, finally, how new ideas in mathematics, psychology, and environmentalism are helping to reinvent economics.

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  Border and Rule - Global...

  Harsha Walia, Robin D.G. Kelley,...

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  Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of the conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change that are generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, and racist nationalist rule.Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial ideology. Further, she compellingly details how Fortress Europe and White Australia are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and how racial violence is escalating deadly nationalism in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere.

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  Foxtrot in Kandahar - A Memoir...

  Duane Evans

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  Kandahar. The ancient desert crossroads and, as of fall of 2001, ground zero for the Taliban and al-Qa'ida in southern Afghanistan. In the northern part of the country, the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance (the Afghan organization opposed to the Taliban regime) has made progress on the battlefield, but in the south, the country is still under the Taliban's bloody hold and al-Qa'ida continues to operate there. With no "Southern Alliance" for the US to support, a new strategy is needed if victory is to be achieved. Veteran CIA officer Duane Evans is dispatched to Pakistan to "get something going in the South." Foxtrot in Kandahar is his story. 
  Evans's unexpected journey from the pristine halls of Langley to the badlands of southern Afghanistan began within hours after watching the horrors of 9/11 unfold during a chance visit to FBI Headquarters. It was then he decided to begin a personal and relentless quest to become part of the US response against al-Qa'ida. Evans's gripping memoir tracks his efforts to join one of CIA's elite teams bound for Afghanistan, a journey that eventually takes him to the front lines in Pakistan, first as part of the advanced element of CIA's Echo team supporting Hamid Karzai, and finally as leader of the under-resourced and often overlooked Foxtrot team.

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  Counterrevolution - The Crusade...

  Stephen Steinberg

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  In Black Reconstruction W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, "The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery." His words echo across the decades as the civil rights revolution, marked by the passage of landmark civil rights laws in the '60s, has seen those gains steadily and systematically whittled away. As history testifies, revolution nearly always triggers its antithesis: counterrevolution. In this book, Steinberg provides an analysis of this backlash, tracing the reverse flow of history that has led to the current national reckoning on race.Steinberg puts counterrevolution into historical and theoretical perspective, exploring the "victim-blaming" and "colorblind" discourses that emerged in the post-segregation era and undermined progress toward racial equality, and led to the gutting of affirmative action. This book reflects Steinberg's long career as a critical race scholar, culminating with his assessment of our current moment and the possibilities for political transformation.

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