Download or read book The Chickenshit Club written by Jesse Eisinger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2018 Excellence in Financial Journalism Award From Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jesse Eisinger, “a fast moving, fly-on-the-wall, disheartening look at the deterioration of the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission…It is a book of superheroes” (San Francisco Review of Books). Why were no bankers put in prison after the financial crisis of 2008? Why do CEOs seem to commit wrongdoing with impunity? The problem goes beyond banks deemed “Too Big to Fail” to almost every large corporation in America—to pharmaceutical companies and auto manufacturers and beyond. The Chickenshit Club—an inside reference to prosecutors too scared of failure and too daunted by legal impediments to do their jobs—explains why in “an absorbing financial history, a monumental work of journalism…a first-rate study of the federal bureaucracy” (Bloomberg Businessweek). Jesse Eisinger begins the story in the 1970s, when the government pioneered the notion that top corporate executives, not just seedy crooks, could commit heinous crimes and go to prison. He brings us to trading desks on Wall Street, to corporate boardrooms and the offices of prosecutors and FBI agents. These revealing looks provide context for the evolution of the Justice Department’s approach to pursuing corporate criminals through the early 2000s and into the Justice Department of today, including the prosecutorial fiascos, corporate lobbying, trial losses, and culture shifts that have stripped the government of the will and ability to prosecute top corporate executives. “Brave and elegant…a fearless reporter…Eisinger’s important and profound book takes no prisoners” (The Washington Post). Exposing one of the most important scandals of our time, The Chickenshit Club provides a clear, detailed explanation as to how our Justice Department has come to avoid, bungle, and mismanage the fight to bring these alleged criminals to justice. “This book is a wakeup call…a chilling read, and a needed one” (NPR.org).

Download or read book The Chickenshit Club written by Jesse Eisinger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Why were no bankers put in prison after the financial crisis of 2008? Why do CEOs seem to commit wrongdoing with impunity? The problem goes beyond banks deemed Too Big to Fail to almost every large corporation in America--to pharmaceutical companies and auto manufacturers and beyond. [This book]--an inside reference to prosecutors too scared of failure and too daunted by legal impediments to do their jobs--explains why"--Amazon.com.

Download or read book Big Dirty Money written by Jennifer Taub and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Blood-boiling…with quippy analysis…Taub proposes straightforward fixes and ways everyday people can get involved in taking white-collar criminals to task.”—San Francisco Chronicle How ordinary Americans suffer when the rich and powerful use tax dodges or break the law to get richer and more powerful—and how we can stop it. There is an elite crime spree happening in America, and the privileged perps are getting away with it. Selling loose cigarettes on a city sidewalk can lead to a choke-hold arrest, and death, if you are not among the top 1%. But if you're rich and commit mail, wire, or bank fraud, embezzle pension funds, lie in court, obstruct justice, bribe a public official, launder money, or cheat on your taxes, you're likely to get off scot-free (or even win an election). When caught and convicted, such as for bribing their kids' way into college, high-class criminals make brief stops in minimum security "Club Fed" camps. Operate the scam from the executive suite of a giant corporation, and you can prosper with impunity. Consider Wells Fargo & Co. Pressured by management, employees at the bank opened more than three million bank and credit card accounts without customer consent, and charged late fees and penalties to account holders. When CEO John Stumpf resigned in "shame," the board of directors granted him a $134 million golden parachute. This is not victimless crime. Big Dirty Money details the scandalously common and concrete ways that ordinary Americans suffer when the well-heeled use white collar crime to gain and sustain wealth, social status, and political influence. Profiteers caused the mortgage meltdown and the prescription opioid crisis, they've evaded taxes and deprived communities of public funds for education, public health, and infrastructure. Taub goes beyond the headlines (of which there is no shortage) to track how we got here (essentially a post-Enron failure of prosecutorial muscle, the growth of "too big to jail" syndrome, and a developing implicit immunity of the upper class) and pose solutions that can help catch and convict offenders.

Download or read book America Compromised written by Lawrence Lessig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-10-22 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of “the Trump era, but not about Trump. . . . but on how incentives across a range of institutions have created corruption” (New York Times Book Review). “There is not a single American awake to the world who is comfortable with the way things are.” So begins Lawrence Lessig's sweeping indictment of modern-day American institutions and the corruption that besets them—from the selling of Congress to special interests to the corporate capture of the academy. And it’s our fault. What Lessig brilliantly shows is that we can’t blame the problems of contemporary American life on bad people, as our discourse all too often tends to do. Rather, he explains, “We have allowed core institutions of America’s economic, social, and political life to become corrupted. Not by evil souls, but by good souls. Not through crime, but through compromise.” Through case studies of Congress, finance, the academy, the media, and the law, Lessig shows how institutions are drawn away from higher purposes and toward money, power, quick rewards—the first steps to corruption. Lessig knows that a charge so broad should not be levied lightly, and that our instinct will be to resist it. So he brings copious detail gleaned from years of research, building a case that is all but incontrovertible: America is on the wrong path. If we don’t acknowledge our own part in that, and act now to change it, we will hand our children a less perfect union than we were given. It will be a long struggle. This book represents the first steps. “A devastating argument that America is racing for the cliff's edge of structural, possibly irreversible tyranny.” —Cory Doctorow

Download or read book Haiti Will Not Perish written by Michael Deibert and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2017-07-15 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world’s first independent black republic, Haiti was forged in the fire of history’s only successful slave revolution. Yet more than two hundred years later, the full promise of that revolution – a free country and a free people – remains unfulfilled. Home for more than a decade to one of the world’s largest UN peacekeeping forces, Haiti's tumultuous political culture – buffeted by coups and armed political partisans – combined with economic inequality and environmental degradation to create immense difficulties even before the devastating 2010 earthquake killed tens of thousands of people. This grim tale, however, is not the whole story. In this moving and detailed history, Michael Deibert, who has spent two decades reporting on Haiti, chronicles the heroic struggles of Haitians to build their longed-for country in the face of overwhelming odds. Based on hundreds of interviews with Haitian political leaders, international diplomats, peasant advocates and gang leaders, as well as ordinary Haitians, Deibert’s book provides a vivid, complex and challenging analysis of Haiti’s recent history.

Download or read book Pandemic Inc written by J. David McSwane and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-03-14 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This startling, vital book deserves our attention.” —San Francisco Chronicle For fans of War Dogs and Bad Blood, an explosive look inside the rush to profit from the COVID-19 pandemic, from the award-winning ProPublica reporter who saw it firsthand. The United States federal government spent over $10 billion on medical protective wear and emergency supplies, yet as COVID-19 swept the nation, life-saving equipment such as masks, gloves, and ventilators was nearly impossible to find. In this brilliant nonfiction thriller, called “revelatory” by The Washington Post, award-winning investigative reporter J. David McSwane takes us behind the scenes to reveal how traders, contractors, and healthcare companies used one of the darkest moments in American history to fill their pockets. Determined to uncover how this was possible, he spent over a year on private jets and in secret warehouses, traveling from California to Chicago to Washington, DC, to interview both the most treacherous of profiteers and the victims of their crimes. Pandemic, Inc. is the story of the fraudster who signed a multi-million-dollar contract with the government to provide lifesaving PPE, and yet never came up with a single mask. The Navy admiral at the helm of the national hunt for additional medical resources. The Department of Health whistleblower who championed masks early on and was silenced by the government and conservative media. And the politician who callously slashed federal emergency funding and gutted the federal PPE stockpile. Winner of the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, McSwane connects the dots between backdoor deals and the spoils systems to provide the definitive account of how this pandemic was so catastrophically mishandled. Shocking and monumental, Pandemic, Inc. exposes a system that is both deeply rigged, and singularly American.

Download or read book Mr Nobody written by Roger Hargreaves and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-06-09 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mr. Nobody is an invisible nobody from nowhere. He thinks he used to be a somebody, but he can't really remember who, what, where, or when. When Mr. Happy finds him crying one day, he decides that he has to help him! But what can he do to help this Nobody become a Somebody?

Download or read book Corporate Crime and Punishment written by John C. Coffee and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study and analysis of lack of enforcement against criminal actions in corporate America and what can be done to fix it. In the early 2000s, federal enforcement efforts sent white collar criminals at Enron and WorldCom to prison. But since the 2008 financial collapse, this famously hasn’t happened. Corporations have been permitted to enter into deferred prosecution agreements and avoid criminal convictions, in part due to a mistaken assumption that leniency would encourage cooperation and because enforcement agencies don’t have the funding or staff to pursue lengthy prosecutions, says distinguished Columbia Law Professor John C. Coffee. “We are moving from a system of justice for organizational crime that mixed carrots and sticks to one that is all carrots and no sticks,” he says. He offers a series of bold proposals for ensuring that corporate malfeasance can once again be punished. For example, he describes incentives that could be offered to both corporate executives to turn in their corporations and to corporations to turn in their executives, allowing prosecutors to play them off against each other. Whistleblowers should be offered cash bounties to come forward because, Coffee writes, “it is easier and cheaper to buy information than seek to discover it in adversarial proceedings.” All federal enforcement agencies should be able to hire outside counsel on a contingency fee basis, which would cost the public nothing and provide access to discovery and litigation expertise the agencies don't have. Through these and other equally controversial ideas, Coffee intends to rebalance the scales of justice. “Professor Coffee’s compelling new approach to holding fraudsters to account is indispensable reading for any lawmaker serious about deterring corporate crime.” —Robert Jackson, professor of Law, New York University, and former commissioner, Securities and Exchange Commission “A great book that more than any other recent volume deftly explains why effective prosecution of corporate senior executives largely collapsed in the post-2007–2009 stock market crash period and why this creates a crisis of underenforcement. No one is Professor Coffee’s equal in tying together causes for the crisis.” —Joel Seligman, author, historian, former law school dean, and president emeritus, University of Rochester

Download or read book Doing Justice written by Preet Bharara and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *A New York Times Bestseller* An important overview of the way our justice system works, and why the rule of law is essential to our survival as a society—from the one-time federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, and host of the Doing Justice podcast. Preet Bharara has spent much of his life examining our legal system, pushing to make it better, and prosecuting those looking to subvert it. Bharara believes in our system and knows it must be protected, but to do so, he argues, we must also acknowledge and allow for flaws both in our justice system and in human nature. Bharara uses the many illustrative anecdotes and case histories from his storied, formidable career—the successes as well as the failures—to shed light on the realities of the legal system and the consequences of taking action. Inspiring and inspiringly written, Doing Justice gives us hope that rational and objective fact-based thinking, combined with compassion, can help us achieve truth and justice in our daily lives. Sometimes poignant and sometimes controversial, Bharara's expose is a thought-provoking, entertaining book about the need to find the humanity in our legal system as well as in our society.

Download or read book Break Em Up written by Zephyr Teachout and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[We need] a grassroots, bottom-up movement that understands the challenge in front of us, and then organizes against monopoly power in communities across this country. This book is a blueprint for that organizing. In these pages, you will learn how monopolies and oligopolies have taken over almost every aspect of American life, and you will also learn about what can be done to stop that trend before it is too late." —From the foreword by Bernie Sanders. A passionate attack on the monopolies that are throttling American democracy. Every facet of American life is being overtaken by big platform monopolists like Facebook, Google, and Bayer (which has merged with the former agricultural giant Monsanto), resulting in a greater concentration of wealth and power than we've seen since the Gilded Age. They are evolving into political entities that often have more influence than the actual government, bending state and federal legislatures to their will and even creating arbitration courts that circumvent the US justice system. How can we recover our freedom from these giants? Anti-corruption scholar and activist Zephyr Teachout has the answer: Break 'Em Up. This book is a clarion call for liberals and leftists looking to find a common cause. Teachout makes a compelling case that monopolies are the root cause of many of the issues that today's progressives care about; they drive economic inequality, harm the planet, limit the political power of average citizens, and historically-disenfranchised groups bear the brunt of their shameful and irresponsible business practices. In order to build a better future, we must eradicate monopolies from the private sector and create new safeguards that prevent new ones from seizing power. Through her expert analysis of monopolies in several sectors and their impact on courts, journalism, inequality, and politics, Teachout offers a concrete path toward thwarting these enemies of working Americans and reclaiming our democracy before it’s too late.

Download or read book Ellen Foster Oprah s Book Club written by Kaye Gibbons and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2012-10-17 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Filled with lively humor, compassion, and intimacy." —Alice Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review "When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy." With that opening sentence we enter the childhood world of one of the most appealing young heroines in contemporary fiction. Her courage, her humor, and her wisdom are unforgettable as she tells her own story with stunning honesty and insight. An Oprah Book Club selection, this powerful novel has become an American classic. Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation's Citation for Fiction.

Download or read book Memenomics written by Said Dawlabani and published by SelectBooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term “vMEME” (the superscript “v” is for “value”) refers to a core value system expressed through a culture’s memes, i.e., its ideas, habits, and cultural preferences and practices that spread from person to person. In MEMEnomics Said E. Dawlabani reframes our economic history and the future of capitalism through the unique prism of a culture’s value systems. Focusing on the long-term effects of economic policies on society, he expands psychologist Clare W. Graves’ concepts of the hierarchical nature of human development and the theories of value systems of Beck and Cowan’s Spiral Dynamics. He presents our economic history in terms of the hierarchy of five of the eight value-systems or vMEMEs of human existence that we can now identify. These new value preferences emerge as people interact with their environment to solve the problems of their “life conditions.”

Download or read book The Black Book written by James Patterson and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "thrilling" #1 New York Times and USA Today bestseller (Karin Slaughter): when three bodies are found in a Chicago bedroom, a black book goes missing . . . and the city has never been more dangerous. Billy Harney was born to be a cop. As the son of Chicago's chief of detectives with a twin sister on the force, Billy plays it by the book. Teaming up with his adrenaline-junkie partner, Detective Kate Fenton, there's nothing he wouldn't sacrifice for his job. Enter Amy Lentini, a hard-charging assistant attorney hell-bent on making a name for herself who suspects Billy isn't the cop he claims to be. They're about to be linked by more than their careers. A horrifying murder leads investigators to an unexpected address-an exclusive brothel that caters to Chicago's most powerful citizens. There's plenty of incriminating evidence on the scene, but what matters most is what's missing: the madam's black book. Now with shock waves rippling through the city's elite, everyone's desperate to find it. As Chicago's elite scramble to get their hands on the elusive black book, no one's motives can be trusted. An ingenious, inventive thriller about power, corruption, and the secrets that can destroy a city, The Black Book is James Patterson at his page-turning best.

Download or read book The New Sultan written by Soner Çaǧaptay and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In a world of rising tensions between Russia and the United States, the Middle East and Europe, Sunnis and Shiites, Islamism and liberalism, Turkey is at the epicentre. And at the heart of Turkey is its right-wing populist president, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an. Since 2002, Erdo?an has consolidated his hold on domestic politics while using military and diplomatic means to solidify Turkey as a regional power. His crackdown has been brutal and consistent - scores of journalists arrested, academics officially banned from leaving the country, university deans fired and many of the highest-ranking military officers arrested. In some senses, the nefarious and failed 2016 coup has given Erdo?an the licence to make good on his repeated promise to bring order and stability under a 'strongman'. Here, leading Turkish expert Soner Cagaptay will look at Erdo?an's roots in Turkish history, what he believes in and how he has cemented his rule, as well as what this means for the world. The book will also unpick the 'threats' Erdogan has worked to combat - from the liberal Turks to the Gulen movement, from coup plotters to Kurdish nationalists - all of which have culminated in the crisis of modern Turkey."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Download or read book Kochland written by Christopher Leonard and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 * WINNER OF THE J ANTHONY LUKAS WORK-IN-PROGRESS AWARD * FINANCIAL TIMES’ BEST BOOKS OF 2019 * NPR FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2019 * FINALIST FOR THE FINACIAL TIMES/MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF 2019 * KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOKS OF 2019 * SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOKS OF 2019 “Superb…Among the best books ever written about an American corporation.” —Bryan Burrough, The New York Times Book Review Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail, Christopher Leonard’s Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America. The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and US Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that’s because the billionaire Koch brothers have wanted it that way. For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He’s a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These strategies made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates. But there’s another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read this book. Seven years in the making, Kochland “is a dazzling feat of investigative reporting and epic narrative writing, a tour de force that takes the reader deep inside the rise of a vastly powerful family corporation that has come to influence American workers, markets, elections, and the very ideas debated in our public square. Leonard’s work is fair and meticulous, even as it reveals the Kochs as industrial Citizens Kane of our time” (Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Private Empire).

Download or read book Capital Offenses Business Crime and Punishment in America s Corporate Age written by Samuel W. Buell and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the lead prosecutor on the Enron investigation, an eye-opening examination of the explosion of American white-collar crime. If “corporations are people too,” why isn’t anyone in jail? A serious defect in a GM car causes accidents; Enron scams investors out of their money; banks bet on the housing market crash and win. In the race to maximize profits, corporations can behave in ways that are morally outrageous but technically legal. In Capital Offenses, Samuel Buell draws on the unique pairing of his expertise as a Duke University law professor and his personal experience leading the investigation into Enron—the biggest white-collar crime case in U.S. history—to present an in-depth examination of business crime today At the heart of it sits the limited liability corporation, simultaneously the bedrock of American prosperity and the reason that white-collar crime is difficult to prosecute—a brilliant legal innovation that, in its modern form, can seem impossible to regulate or even manage. By shielding employees from legal responsibility, the corporation encourages the risk-taking that drives economic growth. But its special legal status and its ever-expanding scale place daunting barriers in the way of federal and local investigators. Detailing the complex legal frameworks that govern both corporations and the people who carry out their missions, Buell shows that deciphering business crime is rarely black or white. In lucid, thought-provoking prose, he illuminates the depths of the legal issues at stake—delving into fraudulent practices like Ponzi schemes, bad accounting, insider trading, and the art of “loopholing”—showing how every major case and each problem of law further exposes the ambivalence and instability at the core of America’s relationship with its corporations. An expert in criminal law, Buell masterfully examines the limits of too permissive or overzealous prosecution of business crimes. Capital Offenses invites us to take a fresh look at our legal framework and learn how it can be used to effectively discipline corporations for wrongdoing, without dismantling the corporation.

Download or read book The Road written by Cormac McCarthy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle). • From the bestselling author of The Passenger A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.