Toxic Capitalism

Toxic Capitalism
Author: Gilbert van Kerckhove
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2012
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1477219064

Gilbert has written the book we all wish we could write. It offers a very concise description of the world's economic, environmental, social, and governmental problems, but more importantly, it tells us what we can do about them now, before it is too late. The book is jam-packed with interesting data, much of which is from China the new epicenter of toxic capitalism. Although it can be used as a great reference, it is not merely an academic tome. It has an armchair feel and is a terrifi c read. Bravo! Frank T. Gallo, Ph.D., Chief Leadership Consultant, Aon Hewitt Greater China, and the author of Business Leadership in China

Revenge Capitalism

Revenge Capitalism
Author: Max Haiven
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Capitalism
ISBN: 9780745340562

Capitalism has become a system of economic revenge, meted out against oppressed populations around the globe.

Toxic Capitalism

Toxic Capitalism
Author: Frank Pearce
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 631
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429640382

Originally published in 1998. While there is a growing academic literature on corporate crime, much of this focuses upon variants of economic or financial crimes; there is a relative absence of studies of safety, health and/or environmental crimes. This is curious given that recent years have witnessed a resurgence in popular, academic and indeed state attention to questions related to environmental degradation and human safety. Certainly in the latter context there is some recognition that environmental degradation must be understood partly in terms of environmental crimes by corporations. Moreover, recent experience in both the US and the UK attests to the fact that there is no ineluctable trend towards safer and healthier workplaces, as deregulatory movements have resulted in increased risks for most workers and, this text argues, an increased opportunity for, and incidence of, safety crimes. At the centre of environmental, safety and health isses lie the chemicals industries. These industries are of strategic importance to national economies, while also having almost unique hazard and risk potential and it is for these reasons that these are the focus of this text. Any understanding of the nature of these types of corporate crimes, and thus any recognition of the potential for their more effective regulation, requires an analysis that is grounded in more general sociological concerns and in political economy. For this reason, this text emphasises the need for understandings of the nature of contemporary and emergent forms of corporate organisation, of their place in contemporary economies, and of the relationships between these forms and state formations.

Toxic Debt

Toxic Debt
Author: Josiah Rector
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2022-02-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469665778

From the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, environmentally unregulated industrial capitalism produced outsized environmental risks for poor and working-class Detroiters, made all the worse for African Americans by housing and job discrimination. Then as the auto industry abandoned Detroit, the banking and real estate industries turned those risks into disasters with predatory loans to African American homebuyers, and to an increasingly indebted city government. Following years of cuts in welfare assistance to poor families and a devastating subprime mortgage meltdown, the state of Michigan used municipal debt to justify suspending democracy in majority-Black cities. In Detroit and Flint, austerity policies imposed under emergency financial management deprived hundreds of thousands of people of clean water, with lethal consequences that most recently exacerbated the spread of COVID-19. Toxic Debt is not only a book about racism, capitalism, and the making of these environmental disasters. It is also a history of Detroit's environmental justice movement, which emerged from over a century of battles over public health in the city and involved radical auto workers, ecofeminists, and working-class women fighting for clean water. Linking the histories of urban political economy, the environment, and social movements, Toxic Debt lucidly narrates the story of debt, environmental disaster, and resistance in Detroit.

Plastic Capitalism

Plastic Capitalism
Author: Amanda Boetzkes
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2019-03-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262039338

An argument for the centrality of the visual culture of waste—as seen in works by international contemporary artists—to the study of our ecological condition. Ecological crisis has driven contemporary artists to engage with waste in its most non-biodegradable forms: plastics, e-waste, toxic waste, garbage hermetically sealed in landfills. In this provocative and original book, Amanda Boetzkes links the increasing visualization of waste in contemporary art to the rise of the global oil economy and the emergence of ecological thinking. Often, when art is analyzed in relation to the political, scientific, or ecological climate, it is considered merely illustrative. Boetzkes argues that art is constitutive of an ecological consciousness, not simply an extension of it. The visual culture of waste is central to the study of the ecological condition. Boetzkes examines a series of works by an international roster of celebrated artists, including Thomas Hirschhorn, Francis Alÿs, Song Dong, Tara Donovan, Agnès Varda, Gabriel Orozco, and Mel Chin, among others, mapping waste art from its modernist origins to the development of a new waste imaginary generated by contemporary artists. Boetzkes argues that these artists do not offer a predictable or facile critique of consumer culture. Bearing this in mind, she explores the ambivalent relationship between waste (both aestheticized and reviled) and a global economic regime that curbs energy expenditure while promoting profitable forms of resource consumption.

Capitalism Takes Command

Capitalism Takes Command
Author: Michael Zakim
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2012-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226451097

Most scholarship on nineteenth-century America’s transformation into a market society has focused on consumption, romanticized visions of workers, and analysis of firms and factories. Building on but moving past these studies, Capitalism Takes Command presents a history of family farming, general incorporation laws, mortgage payments, inheritance practices, office systems, and risk management—an inventory of the means by which capitalism became America’s new revolutionary tradition. This multidisciplinary collection of essays argues not only that capitalism reached far beyond the purview of the economy, but also that the revolution was not confined to the destruction of an agrarian past. As business ceaselessly revised its own practices, a new demographic of private bankers, insurance brokers, investors in securities, and start-up manufacturers, among many others, assumed center stage, displacing older elites and forms of property. Explaining how capital became an “ism” and how business became a political philosophy, Capitalism Takes Command brings the economy back into American social and cultural history.

Toxic Masculinity, Casino Capitalism, and America's Favorite Card Game

Toxic Masculinity, Casino Capitalism, and America's Favorite Card Game
Author: Andrew Manno
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2021-03-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9783030402624

Poker is a centuries-old American game. Why has it become so popular in the twenty-first century? What does current interest in the game tell us about ourselves and some of our most pressing social issues? In this timely and thought-provoking book, Andrew Manno offers important insights into the intersection of gaming, gender, and capitalism that illuminate how the shift to a casino capitalist economy—combined with a culture of toxic masculinity—impacts workers and how it has led to the rise of populism in the United States that manifested in the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

Capitalism's Toxic Assumptions

Capitalism's Toxic Assumptions
Author: Eve Poole
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2015-03-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1472916808

In Science, no-one believes the earth is flat any more. Economists, on the other hand, haven't budged from their original worldview. Market Capitalism depends on seven big ideas: competition, the 'invisible hand', utility, agency theory, pricing, shareholder value, and limited liability. These served the world well in the past, but over the years they have become cancerous, and are slowly killing the system as a whole. Eve Poole argues that if you zoom in on any of these firm foundations, they start to blur and wobble. Here she offers alternative views for a healthier system. And looking at them together, it becomes clear why we're so stuck. The capitalist system masquerades as a machine programmed by experts, with only Economists and Governments qualified to tinker with it. But the market is just a mass of messages about supply and demand. The rich world shapes the market in its image, because it has more 'votes'. So if we want to change the way things are, we don't need to wait for the experts, we can start now. In each chapter, Poole shows how quiet action by consumers, investors, employees and employers can make big changes, by shifting behaviours and adjusting the way financial 'votes' are cast in the market.

Woke Capitalism

Woke Capitalism
Author: Carl Rhodes
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2022-11-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1529211670

This book delves into the corporate takeover of public morality, or ‘woke capitalism’. Discussing the political causes that it has adopted, and the social causes that it has not, it argues that this extension of capitalism has negative implications for democracy’s future.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Author: Shoshana Zuboff
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 683
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1610395700

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.