Plunder of the Commons

Author: Guy Standing
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241396336
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
'One of the most important books I've read in years' Brian Eno We are losing the commons. Austerity and neoliberal policies have depleted our shared wealth; our national utilities have been sold off to foreign conglomerates, social housing is almost non-existent, our parks are cordoned off for private events and our national art galleries are sponsored by banks and oil companies. This plunder deprives us all of our common rights, recognized as far back as the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest of 1217, to share fairly and equitably in our public wealth. Guy Standing leads us through a new appraisal of the commons, stemming from the medieval concept of common land reserved in ancient law from marauding barons, to his modern reappraisal of the resources we all hold in common - a brilliant new synthesis that crystallises quite how much public wealth has been redirected to the 1% in recent decades through the state-approved exploitation of everything from our land to our state housing, health and benefit systems, to our justice system, schools, newspapers and even the air we breathe. Plunder of the Commons proposes a charter for a new form of commoning, of remembering, guarding and sharing that which belongs to us all, to slash inequality and soothe our current political instability.

Silent Theft

Author: David Bollier
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415944823
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
This text exposes the audacious attempts of companies to appropriate medical breakthroughs, public airwaves, outer space, state research, and even the DNA of plants and animals. It is an attempt to develop a new ethos of commonwealth in the face of a market ethic that knows no bounds.

Think Like a Commoner

Author: David Bollier
Publisher: New Society Publishers
ISBN: 0865717680
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
A new world based on fairness, participation, accountability is closer than you think…if you learn to think like a commoner

Basic Income

Author: Guy Standing
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030023418X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Book Description
Shouldn’t everyone receive a stake in society's wealth? Could we create a fairer world by guaranteeing income to all? What would this mean for our health, wealth, and happiness? Basic income is a revolutionary idea that guarantees regular, unconditional cash transfers from the government to all citizens. It is an acknowledgement that everyone plays a part in generating the wealth currently enjoyed by only a few and would rectify the recent breakdown in income distribution. Political parties across the world are now adopting this innovative policy and the idea generates headlines every day. Guy Standing has been at the forefront of thought surrounding basic income for the past thirty years, and in this book he covers in authoritative detail its effects on the economy, poverty, work, and labor; dissects and disproves the standard arguments against basic income; explains what we can learn from pilots across the world; and illustrates exactly why basic income has now become such an urgent necessity.

The Privatization of Everything

Author: Donald Cohen
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620976625
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
The book the American Prospect calls “an essential resource for future reformers on how not to govern,” by America’s leading defender of the public interest and a bestselling historian “An essential read for those who want to fight the assault on public goods and the commons.” —Naomi Klein A sweeping exposé of the ways in which private interests strip public goods of their power and diminish democracy, the hardcover edition of The Privatization of Everything elicited a wide spectrum of praise: Kirkus Reviews hailed it as “a strong, economics-based argument for restoring the boundaries between public goods and private gains,” Literary Hub featured the book on a Best Nonfiction list, calling it “a far-reaching, comprehensible, and necessary book,” and Publishers Weekly dubbed it a “persuasive takedown of the idea that the private sector knows best.” From Diane Ravitch (“an important new book about the dangers of privatization”) to Heather McGhee (“a well-researched call to action”), the rave reviews mirror the expansive nature of the book itself, covering the impact of privatization on every aspect of our lives, from water and trash collection to the justice system and the military. Cohen and Mikaelian also demonstrate how citizens can—and are—wresting back what is ours: A Montana city took back its water infrastructure after finding that they could do it better and cheaper. Colorado towns fought back well-funded campaigns to preserve telecom monopolies and hamstring public broadband. A motivated lawyer fought all the way to the Supreme Court after the state of Georgia erected privatized paywalls around its legal code. “Enlightening and sobering” (Rosanne Cash), The Privatization of Everything connects the dots across a wide range of issues and offers what Cash calls “a progressive voice with a firm eye on justice [that] can carefully parse out complex issues for those of us who take pride in citizenship.”

The Corruption of Capitalism

Author: Guy Standing
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
ISBN: 1785901117
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
Politicians, financiers and bureaucrats claim to believe in free competitive markets, yet they have built the most unfree market system ever created. In this Gilded Age, income is funnelled to the owners of property – financial, physical and intellectual – at the expense of society. Wages stagnate as labour markets are transformed by outsourcing, automation and the on-demand economy, generating more rental income while broadening the precariat. Now fully updated with an introduction examining the systemic issues exposed by Brexit and Covid-19, The Corruption of Capitalism argues that rentier capitalism is fostering revolt and presents a new income distribution system that would achieve the extinction of the rentier while encouraging sustainable growth.

Plunder Squad

Author: Richard Stark
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226772918
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
“Hearing the click behind him, Parker threw his glass straight back over his right shoulder, and dove off his chair to the left.” When a job looks like amateur hour, Parker walks away. But even a squad of seasoned professionals can’t guarantee against human error in a high-risk scam. Can an art dealer with issues unload a truck of paintings with Parker’s aid? Or will the heist end up too much of a human interest story, as luck runs out before Parker can get in on the score?

The Public Domain

Author: James Boyle
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781979963077
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
In this insightful book you will discover the range wars of the new information age, which is today's battles dealing with intellectual property. Intellectual property rights marks the ground rules for information in today's society, including today's policies that are unbalanced and unspupported by any evidence. The public domain is vital to innovation as well as culture in the realm of material that is protected by property rights.

Stop, Thief!

Author: Peter Linebaugh
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1604869011
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Book Description
In this majestic tour de force, celebrated historian Peter Linebaugh takes aim at the thieves of land, the polluters of the seas, the ravagers of the forests, the despoilers of rivers, and the removers of mountaintops. Scarcely a society has existed on the face of the earth that has not had commoning at its heart. “Neither the state nor the market,” say the planetary commoners. These essays kindle the embers of memory to ignite our future commons. From Thomas Paine to the Luddites, from Karl Marx—who concluded his great study of capitalism with the enclosure of commons—to the practical dreamer William Morris—who made communism into a verb and advocated communizing industry and agriculture—to the 20th-century communist historian E.P. Thompson, Linebaugh brings to life the vital commonist tradition. He traces the red thread from the great revolt of commoners in 1381 to the enclosures of Ireland, and the American commons, where European immigrants who had been expelled from their commons met the immense commons of the native peoples and the underground African-American urban commons. Illuminating these struggles in this indispensable collection, Linebaugh reignites the ancient cry, “STOP, THIEF!”

Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich

Author: Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022673983X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Book Description
A “thought-provoking” one-volume distillation of the author’s powerful trilogy in praise of the middle class’s role in creating a better, and richer, world (Library Journal). The economist and historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has been best known recently for her Bourgeois Era trilogy, a vigorous defense, unrivaled in scope, of commercially tested betterment. Its massive volumes, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality, solve Adam Smith’s puzzle of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, and of the moral sentiments of modernity. The world got rich, she argues, not chiefly by material causes but by an idea and a sentiment, a new admiration for the middle class and its egalitarian liberalism. For readers looking for a distillation of McCloskey’s magisterial work, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich is what you’ve been waiting for. In this lively volume, McCloskey and the economist and journalist Art Carden bring together the trilogy’s key ideas and its most provocative arguments. The rise of the west, and now the rest, is the story of the rise of ordinary people to a dignity and liberty inspiring them to have a go. The outcome was an explosion of innovation after 1800, and a rise of real income by an astounding 3,000 percent. The Great Enrichment, well beyond the conventional Industrial Revolution, did not, McCloskey and Carden show, come from the usual suspects, capital accumulation or class struggle. It came from the idea of economic liberty in Holland and the Anglosphere, then Sweden and Japan, then Italy and Israel and China and India, an idea that bids fair in the next few generations to raise up the wretched of the earth. The original shift to liberalism arose from 1517 to 1789 from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, upending ancient hierarchies. McCloskey and Carden contend further that liberalism and “innovism” made us better humans as well as richer ones. Not matter but ideas. Not corruption but improvement. Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich draws in entertaining fashion on history, economics, literature, philosophy, and popular culture, from growth theory to the Simpsons. It is the perfect introduction for a broad audience to McCloskey’s influential explanation of how we got rich. At a time when confidence in the economic system is under challenge, this book mounts an optimistic and persuasive defense of liberal innovism, and of the modern world it has wrought. Praise for the Bourgeois Era Trilogy “A contender for the great book of our age.” —The Times, Book of the Week “Persuasive . . . richly detailed and erudite.” —Financial Times