Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy

Lisa Dodson

From Powells.com: Here is a book that tells the real story of the countless unsung heroes who bend or break the rules to help those millions of Americans with impossible schedules, paychecks, and lives. Whether it is a nurse choosing to treat an uninsured child, a supervisor deciding to overlook infractions, or a restaurant manager sneaking food to a worker's children, middle-class Americans are secretly refusing to be complicit in a fundamentally unfair system that puts a decent life beyond the reach of the working poor.

In a national tale of a kind of economic disobedience — told in whispers to Lisa Dodson over the course of eight years of research across the country — hundreds of supervisors, teachers, and health care professionals describe intentional acts of defiance that together tell the story of a quiet revolt, of a moral underground that has grown in response to an immoral economy.

Restoring the American Dream by Thomas Kochan

From Powells.com: Many American families have not prospered in the new;"knowledge economy." The layoffs, restructurings, and wage and benefit cuts that have followed the short-lived boom of the 1990s threaten our deeply held values of justice, fairness, family, and work. These values,and not those superficial ones political pollsters ask about,are the foundation of the American dream of good jobs, fair pay, and opportunities for all. In this call to action for families, business, labor, and government, Thomas Kochan outlines ways in which we can empower working families to earn a good living by doing satisfying work while still having time for family and community life.

Plunder and Blunder: the Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy by Dean Baker

From Powells.com: For the second time this decade, the US economy is sinking into a recession due to the collapse of a financial bubble. The most recent calamity is likely to produce a downturn deeper and longer than the stock market crash of 2001. Dean Baker argues not only that competent economists should have recognized the developing housing bubble, but also that policy makers and the media cheerfully neglected those economists who did predict danger. Baker doesnt engage in 20-20 hindsight, but documents the fundamental policy changes since 1980 that destabilized the economy and eroded the broad prosperity of the post-war period. His expert analysis explains the outcomes clearly so we can prevent similar financial disasters in the future.

Common Wealth: Economics For a Crowded Planet By Jeffrey Sachs

From Powells.com: Rather than a grim manifesto on the world's problems, Jeffrey Sachs offers readers what he calls the four key goals of a global society — prosperity for all, the end of extreme poverty, stabilization of the global population, and environmental sustainability — and gives real economic data on how we can achieve these goals.

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time By Jeffrey Sachs

From Powells.com: Marrying vivid eyewitness storytelling to his laserlike analysis, Jeffrey Sachs sets the stage by drawing a vivid conceptual map of the world economy and the different categories into which countries fall. Then, in a tour de force of elegance and compression, he explains why, over the past two hundred years, wealth has diverged across the planet in the manner that it has and why the poorest nations have been so markedly unable to escape the cruel vortex of poverty. He concludes by drawing on everything he has learned to offer an integrated set of solutions to the interwoven economic, political, environmental, and social problems that most frequently hold societies back. In the end, he leaves readers with an understanding, not of how daunting the world's problems are, but how solvable they are — and why making the effort is a matter both of moral obligation and strategic self-interest.

Up from Wall Street: The Responsible Investment Alternative by Thomas Croft

From Powell's Books: In 2008 we watched as trillions of dollars vanished before our eyes, enveloped in the crash and burn of Wall Street's bottom line. As working Americans and retirees awake from the aftermath, we're searching for answers and alternatives to the reckless loans and dicey short-term bets that ravaged our savings and retirement assets. Up From Wall Street: The Responsible Investment Alternative makes the case that there are strategic and socially responsible investment paths that have the capacity to rebuild our economy and infrastructure, reinvigorate our cities, and create the highly-anticipated green jobs of the future. Through real-life stories and case studies, Thomas Croft illustrates how the responsible investment of savings assets, pensions, insurance funds, and other trusts can generate positive social, economic, and environmental benefits - along with financial returns. Included in the book is A Field Guide to Responsible Capital, which contains descriptions of investment funds that are together managing over $30 billion and provides a detailed analysis of some of the firms and projects in which they invest. Anyone with an interest in making sure their savings are put to work in a manner that strengthens our economy must read this volume. -Dr. Tessa Hebb, author of No Small Change: Pension Funds and Corporate Engagement Up From Wall Street offers a path towards, and real life examples of, investments in private equity and real estate that create value for investors by producing sustainable wealth for businesses, their employees, and communities alike. -David Wood, Director, The Institute for Responsible Investment This study captures a rising wave of progressive investment activity that will define the 'prudent investor' standard for all investors in the future. -Kirsten Snow Spalding, California Director, Ceres I hope that ... many of the people who pushed for change in Washington, D.C. across America and our neighbors to the North will read this book. -Richard L. Trumka, Secretary-Treasurer, AFL-CIO Thomas Croft is an international expert on innovative capital strategies and jobs-oriented economic revitalization policies. He serves as Director of the Heartland Network and Executive Director of the Steel Valley Authority and has authored or commissioned vital new perspectives on alternative pension investment strategies and a fair economy

The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too by James K. Galbraith

In this riveting book, Galbraith first dissects the stale remains of Reaganism and shows how Bush and company had no choice except to dump them into the trash. He then explores the true nature of the Bush regime: a "corporate republic," bringing the methods and mentality of big business to public life; a coalition of lobbies, doing the bidding of clients in the oil, mining, military, pharmaceutical, agribusiness, insurance, and media industries; and a predator state, intent not on reducing government but rather on diverting public cash into private hands. In plain English, the Republican Party has been hijacked by political leaders who long since stopped caring if reality conformed to their message.

This Could Be the State of Something Big by Manuel Pastor, Chris Benner, and Martha Matsouka

From Cornell Press: Often lost in the gloom and doom about American politics is a striking and sometimes underanalyzed phenomenon: the resurgence of progressive politics and movements at a local level. Across the country, urban coalitions, including labor, faith groups, and community-based organizations, have come together to support living wage laws and fight for transit policies that can move the needle on issues of working poverty. Just as striking as the rise of this progressive resurgence has been its reception among unlikely allies. To see this change and its possibilities requires that we recognize a new thread running through many local efforts: a perspective and politics that emphasizes “regional equity.”

Stairacses or Treadmills?: Labor Market Intermediaries and Economic Opportunity By Chris Benner, Laure Leete and Manuel Pastor

From Amazon.com: Globalization, technological change, and deregulation have made the American marketplace increasingly competitive in recent decades, but for many workers this "new economy" has entailed heightened job insecurity, lower wages, and scarcer benefits. As the job market has grown more volatile, a variety of labor market intermediaries--organizations that help job seekers find employment--have sprung up, from private temporary agencies to government "One-Stop Career Centers." Staircases or Treadmills? is the first comprehensive study documenting the prevalence of all types of labor market intermediaries and investigating how these intermediaries affect workers' employment opportunities.

Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy By Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks

From Powells.com: The New Apollo Energy Project is poised to revolutionize the production of energy and thereby save our planet. The nation that built the world's most powerful rockets, its most advanced computers, and its most sophisticated life support systems is ready to create the world's most powerful solar energy systems, its most advanced wind energy turbines, and its most sophisticated hybrid cars. This will result in nothing less than a second American Revolution. Who are the innovators who have built a contraption that can turn the energy of a simple wave off the Oregon coast into burnt toast in Idaho? Who are the scientists in Massachusetts who have invented a battery that now runs your hand drill and will soon run your car? Readers will meet them all in this book. They will learn how the new energy economy will grow, the research that is required, and the legislation that must be passed to make the vision a reality.