Download or read book Who Stole the American Dream written by Hedrick Smith and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize winner Hedrick Smith’s new book is an extraordinary achievement, an eye-opening account of how, over the past four decades, the American Dream has been dismantled and we became two Americas. In his bestselling The Russians, Smith took millions of readers inside the Soviet Union. In The Power Game, he took us inside Washington’s corridors of power. Now Smith takes us across America to show how seismic changes, sparked by a sequence of landmark political and economic decisions, have transformed America. As only a veteran reporter can, Smith fits the puzzle together, starting with Lewis Powell’s provocative memo that triggered a political rebellion that dramatically altered the landscape of power from then until today. This is a book full of surprises and revelations—the accidental beginnings of the 401(k) plan, with disastrous economic consequences for many; the major policy changes that began under Jimmy Carter; how the New Economy disrupted America’s engine of shared prosperity, the “virtuous circle” of growth, and how America lost the title of “Land of Opportunity.” Smith documents the transfer of $6 trillion in middle-class wealth from homeowners to banks even before the housing boom went bust, and how the U.S. policy tilt favoring the rich is stunting America’s economic growth. This book is essential reading for all of us who want to understand America today, or why average Americans are struggling to keep afloat. Smith reveals how pivotal laws and policies were altered while the public wasn’t looking, how Congress often ignores public opinion, why moderate politicians got shoved to the sidelines, and how Wall Street often wins politically by hiring over 1,400 former government officials as lobbyists. Smith talks to a wide range of people, telling the stories of Americans high and low. From political leaders such as Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to CEOs such as Al Dunlap, Bob Galvin, and Andy Grove, to heartland Middle Americans such as airline mechanic Pat O’Neill, software systems manager Kristine Serrano, small businessman John Terboss, and subcontractor Eliseo Guardado, Smith puts a human face on how middle-class America and the American Dream have been undermined. This magnificent work of history and reportage is filled with the penetrating insights, provocative discoveries, and the great empathy of a master journalist. Finally, Smith offers ideas for restoring America’s great promise and reclaiming the American Dream. Praise for Who Stole the American Dream? “[A] sweeping, authoritative examination of the last four decades of the American economic experience.”—The Huffington Post “Some fine work has been done in explaining the mess we’re in. . . . But no book goes to the headwaters with the precision, detail and accessibility of Smith.”—The Seattle Times “Sweeping in scope . . . [Smith] posits some steps that could alleviate the problems of the United States.”—USA Today “Brilliant . . . [a] remarkably comprehensive and coherent analysis of and prescriptions for America’s contemporary economic malaise.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Smith enlivens his narrative with portraits of the people caught up in events, humanizing complex subjects often rendered sterile in economic analysis. . . . The human face of the story is inseparable from the history.”—Reuters

Download or read book Who Stole the American Dream written by Hedrick Smith and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize winner Hedrick Smith’s new book is an extraordinary achievement, an eye-opening account of how, over the past four decades, the American Dream has been dismantled and we became two Americas. In his bestselling The Russians, Smith took millions of readers inside the Soviet Union. In The Power Game, he took us inside Washington’s corridors of power. Now Smith takes us across America to show how seismic changes, sparked by a sequence of landmark political and economic decisions, have transformed America. As only a veteran reporter can, Smith fits the puzzle together, starting with Lewis Powell’s provocative memo that triggered a political rebellion that dramatically altered the landscape of power from then until today. This is a book full of surprises and revelations—the accidental beginnings of the 401(k) plan, with disastrous economic consequences for many; the major policy changes that began under Jimmy Carter; how the New Economy disrupted America’s engine of shared prosperity, the “virtuous circle” of growth, and how America lost the title of “Land of Opportunity.” Smith documents the transfer of $6 trillion in middle-class wealth from homeowners to banks even before the housing boom went bust, and how the U.S. policy tilt favoring the rich is stunting America’s economic growth. This book is essential reading for all of us who want to understand America today, or why average Americans are struggling to keep afloat. Smith reveals how pivotal laws and policies were altered while the public wasn’t looking, how Congress often ignores public opinion, why moderate politicians got shoved to the sidelines, and how Wall Street often wins politically by hiring over 1,400 former government officials as lobbyists. Smith talks to a wide range of people, telling the stories of Americans high and low. From political leaders such as Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to CEOs such as Al Dunlap, Bob Galvin, and Andy Grove, to heartland Middle Americans such as airline mechanic Pat O’Neill, software systems manager Kristine Serrano, small businessman John Terboss, and subcontractor Eliseo Guardado, Smith puts a human face on how middle-class America and the American Dream have been undermined. This magnificent work of history and reportage is filled with the penetrating insights, provocative discoveries, and the great empathy of a master journalist. Finally, Smith offers ideas for restoring America’s great promise and reclaiming the American Dream. Praise for Who Stole the American Dream? “[A] sweeping, authoritative examination of the last four decades of the American economic experience.”—The Huffington Post “Some fine work has been done in explaining the mess we’re in. . . . But no book goes to the headwaters with the precision, detail and accessibility of Smith.”—The Seattle Times “Sweeping in scope . . . [Smith] posits some steps that could alleviate the problems of the United States.”—USA Today “Brilliant . . . [a] remarkably comprehensive and coherent analysis of and prescriptions for America’s contemporary economic malaise.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Smith enlivens his narrative with portraits of the people caught up in events, humanizing complex subjects often rendered sterile in economic analysis. . . . The human face of the story is inseparable from the history.”—Reuters

Download or read book WHO STOLE THE AMERICAN DREAM 2 The Book Your Boss Doesn t Want You to Read written by Burke Hedges and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is your Dream going to college & getting a degree? How many college grads find work in their chosen fields today? How many are doing that same work 10 years later... or even 5 years later? Likely one out of hundred. Is your Dream getting a good JOB? Working for living? Can you get a job where you can earn what you are worth... where you will become financially independent... and find fulfillment... and gain freedom... trading your time for money? BURKE HEDGES -- Have you ever been made fun of...ridiculed...and abused...until finally there came a time when you said, "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!" Well, I came to that point in my life. I'm mad as hell--and I'm not going to take it anymore! So I wrote this book to tell you the truth...to tell you what your real chances are today to make it in conventional businesses that are closing their doors every day--and laying off people by the thousands! I finally decided that someone needs to tell the truth about how the average person could succeed in an industry that is revolutionizing the way the world does business...how you could be your own boss and earn anywhere from part-time income to an absolute fortune in an unconventional business called Network Marketing. Is Network Marketing a scam?...A scheme?...Or the American Dream? You deserve to know the truth. The whole truth. And nothing but the truth! Read this book...and you be the judge!

Download or read book America Who Stole the Dream written by Donald L. Barlett and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. This book was released on 1996-06-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book about the plight of the middle class--what is happening to them and why.

Download or read book Who Stole the American Dream II written by Burke Hedges and published by I N T I Pub & Resource Books Incorporated. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains why Network Marketing is Entre Preneurship for The New Millenium.

Download or read book The American Dream written by Jim Cullen and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first "narrative history" traces the thread that binds the dreams and aspirations of most Americans together, exploring shared history and sacred texts--the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence--in search of the origins of these ideas.

Download or read book American Dream written by Jason DeParle and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-08-30 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this definitive work, two-time Pulitzer finalist Jason DeParle, author of A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves, cuts between the mean streets of Milwaukee and the corridors of Washington to produce a masterpiece of literary journalism. At the heart of the story are three cousins whose different lives follow similar trajectories. Leaving welfare, Angie puts her heart in her work. Jewell bets on an imprisoned man. Opal guards a tragic secret that threatens her kids and her life. DeParle traces their family history back six generations to slavery and weaves poor people, politicians, reformers, and rogues into a spellbinding epic. With a vivid sense of humanity, DeParle demonstrates that although we live in a country where anyone can make it, generation after generation some families don’t. To read American Dream is to understand why.

Download or read book Requiem for the American Dream written by Noam Chomsky and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! In his first major book on the subject of income inequality, Noam Chomsky skewers the fundamental tenets of neoliberalism and casts a clear, cold, patient eye on the economic facts of life. What are the ten principles of concentration of wealth and power at work in America today? They're simple enough: reduce democracy, shape ideology, redesign the economy, shift the burden onto the poor and middle classes, attack the solidarity of the people, let special interests run the regulators, engineer election results, use fear and the power of the state to keep the rabble in line, manufacture consent, marginalize the population. In Requiem for the American Dream, Chomsky devotes a chapter to each of these ten principles, and adds readings from some of the core texts that have influenced his thinking to bolster his argument. To create Requiem for the American Dream, Chomsky and his editors, the filmmakers Peter Hutchison, Kelly Nyks, and Jared P. Scott, spent countless hours together over the course of five years, from 2011 to 2016. After the release of the film version, Chomsky and the editors returned to the many hours of tape and transcript and created a document that included three times as much text as was used in the film. The book that has resulted is nonetheless arguably the most succinct and tightly woven of Chomsky's long career, a beautiful vessel--including old-fashioned ligatures in the typeface--in which to carry Chomsky's bold and uncompromising vision, his perspective on the economic reality and its impact on our political and moral well-being as a nation. "During the Great Depression, which I'm old enough to remember, it was bad–much worse subjectively than today. But there was a sense that we'll get out of this somehow, an expectation that things were going to get better . . ." —from Requiem for the American Dream

Download or read book American Dreams written by Studs Terkel and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cross-section of Americans--from an embittered Miss America to Arnold Schwarzenegger, from Jesse Helms to a KKK member, from businessmen and Brahmins to activists and immigrants--speak of their hopes, expectations, and disappointments

Download or read book American Dreams written by Larry R. Juchartz and published by Addison-Wesley Longman. This book was released on 2009 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Dreams explores the evolution and multiple meanings of "the American Dream," inviting students to consider how the concept has changed over time, which groups have--and have not--been included in the dream, and how rhetoric has enabled the dreams of a few to be shared by millions.

Download or read book The Hidden History of Monopolies written by Thom Hartmann and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is the most important, dynamic book on the cancers of monopoly by giant corporations written in our generation.”—from the foreword by Ralph Nader American monopolies dominate, control, and consume most of the energy of our entire economic system; they function the same as cancer does in a body, and, like cancer, they weaken our systems while threatening to crash the entire body economic. American monopolies have also seized massive political power and use it to maintain their obscene profits and CEO salaries while crushing small competitors. But Thom Hartmann, America's #1 progressive radio host, shows we've broken the control of behemoths like these before, and we can do it again. Hartmann takes us from the birth of America as a revolt against monopoly (remember the Boston Tea Party?), to the largely successful efforts of both Presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and other like-minded leaders to restrain corporations' monopolistic urges, to the massive changes in the rules of business starting during the “Reagan Revolution” that have brought us to the cancer stage of capitalism. He shows the damage monopolies have done to so many industries: agriculture, healthcare, the media, and more. Individuals have taken a hit as well: the average American family pays a $5,000 a year “monopoly tax” in the form of higher prices for everything from pharmaceuticals to airfare to household goods and food. But Hartmann also describes commonsense, historically rooted measures we can take—such as revitalizing antitrust regulation, taxing great wealth, and getting money out of politics—to pry control of our country from the tentacles of the monopolists.

Download or read book The Feather Thief written by Kirk Wallace Johnson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As heard on NPR's This American Life “Absorbing . . . Though it's non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air “One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever.” —Christian Science Monitor A rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief. On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man's destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.

Download or read book Finding the American Dream written by Eugene Gold and published by Cranberry Press, LLC. This book was released on 2023-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-made millionaire Eugene Gold shares the lessons he learned as a Russian immigrant chasing the American dream. He explains how he did all the right things and still ended up struggling to make ends meet. But he didn't give up. He kept searching and eventually discovered a new roadmap to achieving the American Dream. You can do the same by: -Harnessing your passion -Experimenting with reasonable risk -Organizing and running your life like a business -Optimizing your life with the Time/Money Multiplier Formula. Finding the American Dream will show you how.

Download or read book Another Big Lie written by Tim Pagliara and published by Forbesbooks. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his book, Another Big Lie, author Tim Pagliara details the decade-long fight over the government's role in regulating a safe and sound mortgage market. At the heart of the story is the contrarian bet investors made to buy Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--government sponsored entities, GSEs--securities in the heat of the mortgage crisis in late 2008. This is the story of how a select group of GSE investors exposed the government's theft of billions of dollars from the American dream of homeownership. Madison opined in the Federalist papers that "If Men were Angels" we wouldn't need government. And yet, in Another Big Lie, Pagliara examines what happens when all three branches of government--executive, legislative, and judicial--fail, exposing the truth about the housing market, a corrupt legislative process in the Senate, and the various attempts that tried and failed to blame the financial crisis on the GSEs.

Download or read book America What Went Wrong written by Donald L. Barlett and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. This book was released on 1992 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Articles and graphics describe economic conditions since the 1980s and their effect on the nation.

Download or read book The Third Coast written by Thomas L. Dyja and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s 2013 Heartland Prize A critically acclaimed history of Chicago at mid-century, featuring many of the incredible personalities that shaped American culture Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop in Chicago, and this flow of people and commodities made it the crucible for American culture and innovation. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America—from Chess Records to Playboy, McDonald’s to the University of Chicago. Populated with an incredible cast of characters, including Mahalia Jackson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Sun Ra, Simone de Beauvoir, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Turkel, and Mayor Richard J. Daley, The Third Coast recalls the prominence of the Windy City in all its grandeur.

Download or read book Power Game written by Hedrick Smith and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2012-11-07 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Washington, D.C. The one city that affects all our lives. The one city where the game has only one name: Power. Hedrick Smith, the Pulitzer Prize-winning ex-Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, takes us inside the beltway to show who wields the most power—and for what ends. The Power Game explains how some members of Congress have built personal fortunes on PAC money, how Michael Deaver was just the tip of the influence-peddling iceberg, how “dissidents” in the Pentagon work to keep the generals honest, how insiders and “leakers” use the Times and The Washington Post and their personal bulletin boards. Congressional staffers more powerful than their bosses, media advisors more powerful than the media, money that not only talks but intimidated and threatens. That’s Washington. That’s The Power Game. Praise for Power Game “The Power Game may be the most sweeping and in many ways the most impressive portrait of the culture of the federal government to appear in a single work in many decades. . . . Knowledgeable and informative.”—The New York Times Book Review “There are oodles of good yarns in this book about the nature of power and the eccentricities that accompany it. . . . Delightfully fresh . . . [Hedrick] Smith is a superb writer.”—The Washington Post “Not only the inside stuff, but the insightful stuff—an original view of the power playing.”—William Safire