American Money

What Went Wrong describes exactly what went wrong with the American economy, how countries around the world have avoided these problems, and what we need to do to get back on the right track.

Between 1865 and 1890, in the aftermath of the Civil War, virtually every important American labor reform organization advocated "cooperation" over "competitive" capitalism and several thousand cooperatives opened for business during this era. The men and women who built cooperatives were practical reformers and they established businesses to stabilize their work lives, families, and communities. Yet they were also utopians - envisioning a world free from conflict where workers would receive the full value of their labor.

While factories across the Midwest shutter their doors, Cleveland-based manufacturer Lincoln Electric has thrived for more than a century. In addition to being profitable and technologically innovative, through good times and bad, the company has fulfilled its unique promise of "guaranteed continuous employment." Workers are viewed as assets—not liabilities.

This groundbreaking study of agriculture's role in the war defies long-held notions that Northern industrialization and urbanization led to clashes between North and South. Huston argues that the ideological chasm between plantation owners in the South and family farmers in the North led to the political eruption of 1854-1856 and the birth of a sectionalized party system.

Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), spent four years traveling the country and asking economists, futurists, labor leaders, CEOs, investment bankers, entrepreneurs, and political leaders to help envision the US economy 25 to 30 years from now. He vividly reports on people who are analyzing and creating this new economy - such as investment banker Steve Berkenfeld; David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell International; and Andy Grove of Intel.

In 2000, after the Tribune Company acquired Times Mirror Corporation, it comprised the most powerful collection of newspapers in the world. How then did Tribune nosedive into bankruptcy and public scandal? In The Deal from Hell, veteran Tribune and Los Angeles Times editor James O'Shea takes us behind the scenes of the decisions that led to disaster in boardrooms and newsrooms from coast to coast, based on access to key players, court testimony, and sworn depositions.

IBM is in serious trouble. Big Blue, as the company is known, tends to rely for its success on magical thinking but that magic ran out a long time ago. The company got in trouble back in the 1990s and had to hire for the first time an outside CEO, Lou Gerstner, to save the day. Gerstner pushed IBM into services with spectacular results but this hurt the company, too. As services have became commoditized IBM could only compete by offshoring the work and quality suffered.

In 1980, Exxon U.S.A., the world's largest corporation, began development of a five-billion-dollar oil shale industry in the pristine Colorado River Valley. Within eighteen months, Exxon had canceled its elaborate Colony project and 2,100 workers were immediately laid off. Boomtown Blues chronicles the social, environmental, and economic havoc created by one of the most expensive boom and bust cycles in the history of the American West.

In A Just and Generous Nation, the eminent historian Harold Holzer and the noted economist Norton Garfinkle present a groundbreaking new account of the beliefs that inspired our 16th president to go to war when the Southern states seceded from the Union. Rather than a commitment to eradicating slavery or a defense of the Union, they argue that Lincoln's guiding principle was the defense of equal economic opportunity.

For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 describes the African American struggle to obtain equal rights in the workplace and organized labor's response to their demands. Award-winning historian Robert H. Zieger asserts that the promise of jobs was similar to the 40-acres-and-a-mule restitution pledged to African Americans during the Reconstruction era. The inconsistencies between rhetoric and action encouraged workers, both men and women, to organize themselves into unions to fight against unfair hiring practices and workplace discrimination.

George Washington: general, statesman...businessman? Most people don't know that Washington was the country's first true entrepreneur, responsible for innovations in several industries. In George Washington, Entrepreneur, John Berlau presents a fresh, surprising take on our forefather's business pursuits. History has depicted Washington as a gifted general and political pragmatist, not an intellectual heavyweight. But he was a serious inventor and inveterate tinkerer and just as intelligent as Jefferson or Franklin.

The coauthor of Desperate Hoodwives, Meesha Mink set out on her own with the street-fiction hit Real Wifeys: On the Grind. The series’ second installment, Get Money, finds Harriet “Luscious” Jordan in serious need of scratch after her hubby Make$ is put behind bars. A natural-born hustler, Luscious jumps into the party-promotion biz and begins pulling in big-time cash. But she can’t let go of a grudge against her old rival Goldie, and it may be her undoing.

Written by a "Working-Class American", this book is for "The Working-Class American" that has never been given an education on how to prepare for their financial future. It does not matter if that future is for retirement, or the future of how taxes will affect us all in the future. A Blueprint and Financial Guide for the Working-Class American simply illustrates the Financial STAR points and guides the listener through a point-by-point process to help navigate them to choices that have been available for decades.

Want to start or grow a business but not getting any traction? Worried that you chose the wrong business idea? Entrepreneurship is a hard game to play, but it doesn't have to be as hard as many people make it out to be. Matthew Paulson outlines the business growth hacking and personal development shortcuts that multimillionaires use to get ahead of the game in Business Growth Day by Day.

The Patrons of Husbandry - or the Grange - is the longest-lived US agricultural society and, since its founding shortly after the Civil War, has had immeasurable influence on social change as enacted by ordinary Americans. The Grange sought to relieve the struggles of small farmers by encouraging collaboration. Pathbreaking for its inclusion of women, the Grange is also well known for its association with Gilded Age laws aimed at curbing the monopoly power of railroads.

The United States is heading toward an unavoidable financial catastrophe that will paralyze the markets and the overall economy in ways never before seen. Some call this impending economic catastrophe a double-dip recession, others a financial armageddon. Regardless of what it's called, it is too late to stop it. Debts, Deficits, and the Demise of the American Economy is a look at how we got here, how the crisis is unfolding, and how it will end with a stock market crash in 2012, if not sooner.

Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots delineates the differences between the British and Portuguese empires as they struggled with revolutionary tumult. It reveals how those differences led to turbulent transnational exchanges between the United States and Brazil as merchants, smugglers, rogue officials, slave traders, and pirates sought to trade outside legal confines.

In The Fix Was On, Murray Rothbard discusses why the United States replaced specie with fiat currency; the early days of American banking after the Revolutionary War; early central banks and the ultimate creation of the Federal Reserve; and how the Federal Reserve causes the boom/bust business cycle.

In desperate moments, lethal measures may be employed. Join a treacherous hunt for the prize of Sorrow's kin, with a puppet master unknown and the puppets slowly unveiled. This quest brings death and despair to all involved and the city of Gary. Panther and her associates search desperately for the kidnapper, leaving corpses, deceit, and falsehoods in their wake. Will they find "He" in time, or will their bloody mission lead to incarceration or doom? Will Sorrow and Malakai put aside their personal issues to save their son? Will Genesis be an ally or an enemy? Will Truth's daughter's ...

A Tale of Two Economies details the ongoing battle between the material and the monetary economies. The good news is that the development of modern technology in our material economy has us on the brink of prosperity. The bad news is that a turf war over the money supply in our monetary economy is destroying our prospects for enjoying this success. Thus, we have rampant inflation and a growing gap between the rich and the poor today.