Publisher: Phoemixx Classics Ebooks
Civil Disobedience Henry David Thoreau - In Civil Disobedience Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice.
In The Populist Temptation, the eminent economic historian Barry Eichengreen focuses on the global resurgence of populism today and places it in a deep context. Alternating between the present and earlier populist waves from modern history, he argues that populists tend to thrive most in the wake of economic downturns, when it is easy to convince the masses of elite malfeasance. Yet while there is more than a grain of truth that bankers, financiers, and "bought" politicians are responsible for the mess, populists' own solutions tend to be simplistic and economically counterproductive. There is no one solution to addressing the concerns that populists raise, but Eichengreen argues that there is an obvious place to start: shoring up and improving the welfare state so that it is better able to act as a buffer for those who suffer most during economic slumps. For example, America's patchwork welfare state was not well equipped to deal with the economic fallout that attended globalization and the decline of manufacturing in America, and that played no small part in Trump's victory. Lucidly explaining both the appeals and dangers of populism across history, this book is a must-listen for anyone seeking to understand not just the populist phenomenon, but more generally the lasting political fallout that follows in the wake of major economic crises.Show book
From the New York Times bestselling author of Washington’s Spies, the thrilling story of the Confederate spy who came to Britain to turn the tide of the Civil War—and the Union agent resolved to stop him. In 1861, soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, two secret agents—one a Confederate, the other his Union rival—were dispatched to neutral Britain, each entrusted with a vital mission. The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was to acquire a cutting-edge clandestine fleet intended to break President Lincoln’s blockade of Confederate ports, sink Northern merchant vessels, and drown the U.S. Navy’s mightiest ships at sea. The profits from gunrunning and smuggling cotton—Dixie’s notorious “white gold”—would finance the scheme. Opposing him was Thomas Dudley, a resolute Quaker lawyer and abolitionist. He was determined to stop Bulloch by any means necessary in a spy-versus-spy game of move and countermove, gambit and sacrifice, intrigue and betrayal. If Dudley failed, Britain would ally with the South and imperil a Northern victory. The battleground was the Dickensian port of Liverpool, whose dockyards built more ships each year than the rest of the world combined, whose warehouses stored more cotton than anywhere else on earth, and whose merchant princes, said one observer, were “addicted to Southern proclivities, foreign slave trade, and domestic bribery.” From master of historical espionage Alexander Rose, The Lion and the Fox is the astonishing, untold tale of two implacable foes and their twilight struggle for the highest stakes. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.Show book
The power of hashtag activism became clear in 2011, when #IranElection served as an organizing tool for Iranians protesting a disputed election and offered a global audience a front-row seat to a nascent revolution. Since then, activists have used a variety of hashtags to advocate, mobilize, and communicate. In this book, Sarah Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles explore how and why Twitter has become an important platform for historically disenfranchised populations, including Black Americans, women, and transgender people.The authors describe how such hashtags as #MeToo, #SurvivorPrivilege, and #WhyIStayed have challenged the conventional understanding of gendered violence; examine the voices and narratives of Black feminism enabled by #FastTailedGirls, #YouOKSis, and #SayHerName; and explore the creation and use of #GirlsLikeUs, a network of transgender women. They investigate the digital signatures of the "new civil rights movement"—the online activism, storytelling, and strategy-building that set the stage for #BlackLivesMatter—and recount the spread of racial justice hashtags after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and other high-profile incidents of killings by police. Finally, they consider hashtags created by allies, including #AllMenCan and #CrimingWhileWhite.Show book
When Jim DeMint wrote Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America's Slide into Socialism in 2009, he believed an energized and informed America could put the brakes on the 'progressive' bus driven by big government backers. What couldn't be foreseen was the devastating effect Barack Obama would have on our Constitutional Republic in eight years. Since then, an embedded force of anti-Constitutionalists in every branch of the federal government have worked virulently to crush any attempt to reorient the United States to its founding principles. In Saving America from Socialism, the facts about socialism are the same, but after eight years of President Obama and high-profile socialists leading the Democratic Party, we now have a clearer picture of how socialism will impact our prosperity, freedoms, and rights. America has never been more divided about what it means to be an American, and this division is a key goal straight from the Socialist playbook. We must have a new strategy for uniting and rescuing our nation from the inevitable decline from Socialist policies. This book is your playbook to save America from socialism. Thankfully, Obama's replacement-Donald Trump-has provided a clear contrast between the results of socialism versus freedom.Show book
As a leading political journalist and newspaper editor, Hartley had the best seat in the house for the unfolding drama of the new South Africa, as well as privileged access to many key players, including Nelson Mandela himself. Admirably concise but rich in detail, drawing on a wide spectrum of interviews, documents and experiences, Ragged Glory offers a bracingly critical look back at the achievements and the failures of two turbulent decades, during which South Africa took its place at the table of free nations but lost something of its moral authority. On a cold Highveld morning in May 1994, Nelson Mandela took the oath of office to become South Africa's first democratically elected president. A new era had begun. The promise of those heady days of political transition soon gave way to a more sober view on the magnitude of the challenges facing the new government. Under Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, the country grappled with the restructuring of the state, massive inequality and poverty, rising crime, battles over economic policy, the arms deal, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the BEE era, the cancer of political corruption and the rise of a new and predatory political elite. With the removal of Mbeki, followed by the interregnum of Kgalema Motlanthe, the stage was set for the coming to power of the controversial Jacob Zuma. All of these are key threads in Ray Hartley's rich and complex narrative history of the democratic era.Show book
The author of Crude Politics and Infiltration offers an analysis of public policy’s role in the 2008 financial crisis. You may not realize it, but you helped pay for a $10 million, fourteen-month government “investigation” of the housing collapse. Only your $10 million didn’t buy much, and it certainly didn’t buy truth; any hope of that went out the window on day one. The congressionally appointed panel—made up primarily of anti-market, historic revisionists—managed to shift the blame away from Washington and onto mortgage lenders and “greedy” Wall Street executives, while protecting the real culprits at the core of the crisis: POLITICIANS LIKE THEMSELVES. It’s not about Democrat or Republican, left or right, black or white. It’s about the usual suspects—money and power and the people who use government to manipulate them for private advantage. The Great American Bank Robbery maps out in detail exactly how Washington social engineers and their accomplices reshaped banking regulations and housing policies and gutted time-tested underwriting standards that led to the worst financial calamity since the 1930s, one that has robbed American households of $14 trillion in net worth. And they’re not done yet . . .Show book
