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  Wall Street's War on Workers -...

  Les Leopold

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  Layoffs upend people’s lives, cause enormous stress, and lead to debilitating personal debt. The societal harm caused by mass layoffs has been known for decades. Yet, we do little to stop them. Why? Why do we allow whole communities to be destroyed by corporate decision-makers? Why do we consider mass layoffs a natural, baked-in feature of modern financialized capitalism? In Wall Street’s War on Workers, Les Leopold, co-founder of the Labor Institute, provides a clear lens with which we can see how healthy corporations in the United States have used mass layoffs and stock buybacks to enrich shareholders at the expense of employees. With detailed research and concise language, Leopold explains why mass layoffs occur and how our current laws and regulations allow companies to turn these layoffs into short-term financial gains. Original and insightful, Wall Street’s War on Workers places US labor practices in the broader context of our social and political life, examining the impact financial strip-mining and legalized looting are having on party politics, destroying the integrity of democratic institutions. Leopold expertly lays out how the proliferation of opioids coupled with Wall Street’s destruction of jobs in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin have led to widespread mass layoff fatalism. Democrats have unarguably lost the longstanding support of millions of urban and rural workers, and Leopold points out how party leaders have been wrong about the assumption that the white working class is becoming less progressive and motivated to abandon the Democratic Party by reactionary positions on divisive social issues. With deep analyses, stark examples, and surprisingly simple proactive steps forward, Leopold also asserts that: - Surviving and thriving in a competitive global economy does not require mass layoffs. - A new virulent, financialized version of American capitalism is policy driven. - To end mass layoffs, Wall Street’s domination of our economy must end. - The accepted “wisdom” about white working-class populism is wrong. - Ending stock buybacks and changing corporate officers’ pay structures could eliminate mass layoffs. - Mass layoffs are not the result of inevitable economic “laws” or new technologies like artificial intelligence. Both groundbreaking and urgent, Wall Street’s War on Workers not only offers solutions that could halt mass layoffs but also offers new hope for workers everywhere.

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  Rethinking Incarceration -...

  Dominique DuBois Gilliard

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  The United States has 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of the world's incarcerated. We have more people locked up in jails, prisons, and detention centers than any other country in the history of the world. There are more jails and prisons than degree-granting colleges and universities, and in many places more people live behind bars than on college campuses. Mass incarceration has become a lucrative industry, and the criminal justice system is plagued with bias and unjust practices. And the church has unwittingly contributed to these problems. In Rethinking Incarceration Dominique Gilliard explores the history and foundation of mass incarceration, examining Christianity's role in its evolution and expansion. He assesses our nation’s ethic of meritocratic justice in light of Scripture and exposes the theologies that embolden mass incarceration. Gilliard then shows how Christians can pursue justice that restores and reconciles, offering creative solutions and highlighting innovative interventions. God's justice is ultimately restorative, not just punitive. Discover how Christians can participate in the restoration and redemption of the incarceration system.

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  The Lakotas and the Black Hills

  Jeff Ostler

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  In this enthralling narrative, professor and award-winning author Jeffrey Ostler recounts the Lakota Sioux’s loss of their spiritual homeland and their remarkable legal battle to regain it. Moving easily from battlefields to reservations to Supreme Court chambers, Ostler captures the strength that bore the Lakotas through the worst times and kept alive the  dream of reclaiming their cherished lands.

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  Oneness vs the 1% - Shattering...

  Vandana Shiva, Kartikey Shiva

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  With a new epilogue about Bill Gates’s global agenda and how we can resist the billionaires’ war on life
   
  Widespread poverty and malnutrition, an alarming refugee crisis, social unrest, and economic polarization have become our lived reality as the top 1% of the world’s seven-billion-plus population pushes the planet—and all its people—to the social and ecological brink.
   
  In Oneness vs. the 1%, Vandana Shiva takes on the Billionaires Club of Gates, Buffet, and Zuckerberg, as well as other modern empires whose blindness to the rights of people, and to the destructive impact of their construct of linear progress, have wrought havoc across the world. Their single-minded pursuit of profit has undemocratically enforced uniformity and monocultures, division and separation, monopolies and external control—over finance, food, energy, information, healthcare, and even relationships.
   
  Basing her analysis on explosive, little-known facts, Shiva exposes the 1%’s model of philanthrocapitalism, which is about deploying unaccountable money to bypass democratic structures, derail diversity, and impose totalitarian ideas based on One Science, One Agriculture, and One History. She calls for the “resurgence of real knowledge, real intelligence, real wealth, real work, real well-being,” so that people can reclaim their right to: Live Free. Think Free. Breathe Free. Eat Free.

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  Future Histories - What Ada...

  Lizzy O'Shea

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  When we talk about technology we always talk about tomorrow and the future - which makes it hard to figure out how to even get there. In Future Histories, public interest lawyer and digital specialist Lizzie O'Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and progressive social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O'Shea constructs a "usable past" that can help us determine our digital future.
   
  What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources - like the internet - in common? How can Frantz Fanon's theories of anti-colonial self-determination help us build a digital world in which everyone can participate equally? Can debates over equal digital access be helped by American revolutionary Tom Paine's theories of democratic, economic redistribution? What can indigenous land struggles teach us about stewarding our digital climate? And, how is Elon Musk not a future visionary but a steampunk throwback to Victorian-era technological utopians?
   
  In engaging, sparkling prose, O'Shea shows us how very human our understanding of technology is, and how when we draw on the resources of the past, we can see the potential for struggle, for liberation, for art, and poetry in our technological present.

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  Rights of Man

  Thomas Paine

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  Rights of Man presents an impassioned defense of the Enlightenment principles of freedom and equality that Thomas Paine believed would soon sweep the world. He boldly claimed, "From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen, not to be extinguished. Without consuming...it winds its progress from nation to nation." Though many more sophisticated thinkers argued for the same principles and many people died in the attempt to realize them, no one was better able than Paine to articulate them in a way that fired the hopes and dreams of the common man and actually stirred him to revolutionary political action.

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