An Insider's Memoir

An Insider's Memoir
Author: Gordon Bryant Brown
Publisher: FriesenPress
Total Pages: 508
Release: 2018-05-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1525523287

Do you wonder; • Why is there so much national debt? • Where has the middle class gone? • Why do my kids have less opportunity than I did? If so, this book is for you! • 97% of money is created by the banks, not by governments. • The Federal Reserve is a private bank controlled by private banks. • Adam Smith did not say an invisible hand guides the markets. • Government debt was static until the mid-1970’s and has soared since. • Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan both admitted to fundamental economic errors. • About 1/3 of an average persons’ spending is goes to banks as interest. • Corporations are using treaties to overrule nations and democracy. • The TARP bank bailouts were the biggest theft in history.

Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom

Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom
Author: Rajni Bakshi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2017-09-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 135127810X

Long before the financial meltdown and the red alert on climate change, some far-sighted innovators diagnosed the fatal flaws in an economic system driven by greed and fear. Across the global North and South, diverse people - financial wizards, economists, business people and social activists - have been challenging the "free market" orthodoxy. They seek to recover the virtues of bazaars from the tyranny of a market model that emerged about two centuries ago. This widely praised book is a chronicle of their achievements. From Wall Street icon George Soros and VISA card designer Dee Hock we get an insider critique of the malaise. Creators of community currencies and others, like the father of microfinance, Bangladesh's Muhammad Yunus, explore how money can work differently. The doctrine of self-interest is re-examined by looking more closely at Adam Smith through the eyes of Amartya Sen. Mahatma Gandhi's concept of 'Trusteeship' gathers strength as the socially responsible investing phenomenon challenges the power of capital. Pioneers of the open source and free software movement thrive on cooperation to drive innovation. The Dalai Lama and Ela Bhatt demonstrate that it is possible to compete compassionately and to nurture a more mindful market culture. This sweeping narrative takes you from the ancient Greek agora, Indian choupal, and Native American gift culture, on to present-day Wall Street to illuminate ideas, subversive and prudent, about how the market can serve society rather than being its master. In a world exhausted by dogma, Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom is an open quest for possible futures. This fully updated and revised UK version of the 2009 Vodafone Crossword Book Award winner for non-fiction is a rare and epic narrative about those who have been quietly forging solutions and demonstrating that a more compassionate market culture is both possible and desirable.

The Monfort Plan

The Monfort Plan
Author: Jaime Pozuelo-Monfort
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 506
Release: 2010-03-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0470603968

The Monfort Plan is a five-year, forward looking plan to eradicate extreme poverty from the developing world, and details how microfinance has made a difference to developing countries. This book proposes a new institution based in the developing world with the potential to provide a basic, free, and universal service in the areas of water, sanitation, healthcare, and education to the extreme poor worldwide. The provision will be subject to a certain degree of conditionality in areas ranging from corruption to legal environment. The new institution will be established in a new international territory based within a specific country in Subsaharan Africa and will emerge in 2015. In The Monfort Plan author Jaime Pozuelo-Monfort engineers and designs a solution to lessen the burden of poverty. In order to do so he relies on the social sciences to bring about innovation and forward looking economic policies and financial instruments in the context of a paradigm shift. This book presents a multidisciplinary approach to policymaking that combines a range of fields in the social sciences, looking at the history behind the Marshall Plan, the formation of the European Union, and the Bretton Woods Institutions, in order to determine how a Marshall Plan for Africa-and the creation of New Institutions in the developing world-could work. We live a moment of crisis in which creative policymaking might prove useful when proposing outcomes for a revitalized framework for capitalism to thrive and better serve the world. Walks you through the technicalities of the new architecture of capitalism in a straightforward manner Provides a holistic view of how microfinance combined with the right economic policies and financial instruments could help change the world for the poor Contains sweeping and detailed recommendations on how to build a new capitalist paradigm that helps elevate the poor and improve the human condition Incorporating commentary from some of the top minds in the field of microfinance, this book puts the method of microfinance in perspective.

The Euro and Its Rivals

The Euro and Its Rivals
Author: Gustav Peebles
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2011-06-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0253001412

Gustav Peebles takes an anthropological look at two seemingly separate developments in Europe at the turn of the millennium: the rollout of the euro and the building of new transnational regions such as the Oresund Region, envisioned as a melding of Copenhagen, Denmark, with Malmö, Sweden. Peebles argues that the drive to create such transnational spaces is inseparable from the drive to create a pan-national currency. He studies the practices and rhetoric surrounding the national currencies of Denmark and Sweden, the euro, and several new "local currencies" struggling to come into being. The Euro and Its Rivals provides a deep historical study of the welfare state and the monetary policies and utopian visions that helped to ground it, at the same time shedding new light on the contemporary movement of goods, people, credit, and debt.

The World I Dream of

The World I Dream of
Author: Curt Butz
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2010
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1846943159

Dreaming humanity's future. There is nothing like the dream to create the future. Victor Hugo. Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so you shall become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil. James Allen. What is it we, as a human race, desire in the world? What dreams do we have to shape our future? Over 100 artists, activists, authors, educators, speakers, environmentalists, scientists, young entrepreneurs, visionaries, and Elders were asked for the following: A written description of your perfect world, or your dream world. This can be one sentence or many pages; a poem or researched essay. Your dream world can be as fantastic and marvelous as you want it to be. There are no rules, no right or wrong descriptions, only the world of your imagination and the world of your dreams.

Transformative Ecological Economics

Transformative Ecological Economics
Author: Ove Jakobsen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2017-04-21
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351794019

This volume develops a synthesized interpretation of ecological economics integrating different levels; (economic) system, (business) practice and the (economic) actor. It discusses how changes on a systems level are connected to changes in practise and development of individual consciousness. Transformative Ecological Economics delves into the insight and knowledge from different sources of inspiration (Thermodynamics, Darwinism, Anthroposophy and Buddhism) as well as into an integrated story describing and illustrating the core ideas, principles and values which characterize a utopian society anchored in ecological economics.

Occupy Money

Occupy Money
Author: Margrit Kennedy
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2012-09-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1550925245

A visionary case for a new monetary system that is interest-free, just and stable As a medium of exchange, money is one of the most ingenious inventions of mankind, as it facilitates the trade of goods and services and allows for specialization and the division of labor. However, compound interest and inflation have caused our monetary system to balloon to the point where bailing out banks, large corporations, and even entire countries will not prevent a complete breakdown of the global economy-unless we change the system in fundamental ways. It's time for a grassroots movement to knock conventional money off its pedestal and replace it with a fresh paradigm that puts people before profits. A guide not only for the 99% but also for the 1%, Occupy Money demonstrates that the creation of a stable and sustainable monetary system will reflect real wealth rather than the smoke and mirrors of speculative profit, thus providing an alternative to the Age of Austerity. This vision can be realized through such creative initiatives as: Establishing time banks and complementary currencies geared to specific services such as health and education Eliminating interest through interest-free loans and "demurrage", which rewards currency circulation Re-localizing economies through regional currencies. For many years financial insiders have hidden economic truths by describing them in arcane terms that no layperson can understand. Occupy Money uses clear, simple and concise language to explain how money will serve people instead of people serving money, and in doing so it issues a challenge to the very foundations of conventional economic doctrine.

An Anthropology of Money

An Anthropology of Money
Author: Tim Di Muzio
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2017-03-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315453444

An Anthropology of Money: A Critical Introduction shows how our present monetary system was imposed by elites and how they benefit from it. The book poses the question: how, by looking at different forms of money, can we appreciate that they have different effects? The authors demonstrate how modern money requires perpetual growth, an increase in inequality, environmental devastation, increasing commoditization, and, consequently, the perpetual consumption of ever more stuff. These are not intrinsic features of money, but, rather, of debt-money. This text shows that, through studying money in other cultures, we can have money that better serves the broader goals of society.

Fixing the System

Fixing the System
Author: Adrian Kuzminski
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2008-06-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1441166653

In the current climate of dissatisfaction with "democratic" Western political and economic systems, this is a timely book that demonstrates a true political Third Way. Populism is distinguished from other political movements by its insistence on two things conspicuously missing from modern systems of political economy: genuine democracy based on local citizen assemblies, and the widespread distribution among the population of privately-owned economic capital. Fixing the System offers a comprehensive historical account of populism, revealing the consistent and distinct history of populism since ancient times. Adrian Kuzminski demonstrates that populism is a tradition of practice as well as thought, ranging from ancient city states to the frontier communities of colonial america-all places where widely distributed private property and democratic decision-making combined to foster material prosperity and cultural innovation. In calling for a wide distribution of both property and democracy, populism opposes the political and economic system found today in the united states and other Western countries, where property remains highly concentrated in private hands and where representatives chosen in impersonal mass elections frustrate democracy by serving private monied interests rather than the public good. As Kuzminski demonstrates, as one of very few systematic alternatives to today's political and economic system, populism, offers a pragmatic program for fundamental social change that deserves wide and serious consideration. Populism is a genuine "third way" in politics, a middle path between the extremes of corporate anarchy and collective authoritarianism. As America takes stock of her current situation and looks toward the future in the 2008 election year, Fixing the System offers a trenchant and timely study of this deep-rooted movement.