Through his nightly CNN show, Lou Dobbs Tonight, his syndicated radio program, and his monthly magazine column, Lou Dobbs has become one of America's most visible, popular, and respected voices on business and financial matters.  Now, with "War on the Middle Class," Dobbs takes an impassioned and rousing stance on the all-out class war that is turning the American dream into a nightmare.

The middle class has never been so vulnerable.  Its every feature is under assault by politicians and the lobbyists who court them, big-business corporations that are sending their jobs overseas, and a media that relies on sensationalism instead of facts when reporting the news.  In a sweeping analysis, Dobbs looks at every aspect of the decline of the middle class-from a lack of political representation to America's corrupt health-care system-to demonstrate how the gap between America's newest haves and have-nots is no longer merely financial, but instead includes the erosion of education, employment, government, and community.  Dobbs proposes a series of measures to resolve each issue and incite people, whose future is being mortgaged to benefit a powerful few, to preserve their rights and dreams.  "War on the Middle Class" is provocative, incendiary, and bound to be widely discussed — the perfect book to establish the terms of debate in this year's midterm elections.

Our trade deficit increases by $2 billion a day.  Pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists have such influence in Washington that Medicare, by current law, is not allowed to negotiate lower drug prices.  We import oil on an ever-increasing scale, putting ourselves into dept with the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and other Middle Eastern nations.  With their windfall profits, they continue to buy American assets.  China's booming economy and abundance of cheap labor are threatening our economic survival.  We have mortgaged our fortunes, our principles, and our way of life.

In this comprehensive look at the real, human toll of America's unsound trade policy, Senator Byron Dorgan exposes the myth of "free trade."  Indeed, free trade is not free; it is something that is slowly but surely draining away American prosperity.  Sure, Chinese labor can drive down prices at Wal-Mart; at the same time, however, those saved wages-dollars that would have gone to buy these cheaper goods-are gone.  Too soon, it will all come crashing down.

Major U.S. corporations continue to ship jobs overseas by the millions and, because of their influence in Washington, avoid paying a king's ransom in taxes. Many billions of dollars that these companies fleece from the government and the American people go overwhelmingly to investments in expanding production capabilities overseas.  In short, our government is in the grip of corporate and foreign interests, and the American worker has born the brunt of this culture of corruption.  How can we stem the tide of outsourcing?  Why has the White House done nothing?  Will the middle class survive?

From describing corporate profiteering to calling to action a lethargic, inactive government, Byron Dorgan exposes the truth about the destructive relationship between corporations and Congress and proposes strategies for what can really be done to preserve America's preeminence in the world.

Devoting a book to the necessity of preserving jobs is perhaps a futile endeavor in this age of deregulation and outsourcing, but veteran New York Times business reporter Uchitelle manages to make the case that corporate responsibility should entail more than good accounting and that six (going on seven) successive administrations have failed miserably in protecting the American people from greedy executives, manipulative pension fund managers, leveraged buyouts and plain old bad business practices.  In the process, he says, we've gone from a world where job security, benevolent interventionism and management/worker loyalty were taken for granted to a dysfunctional, narcissistic and callous incarnation of pre-Keynesian capitalism.  The resulting "anxious class" now suffers from a host of frightening ills: downward mobility, loss of self-esteem, transgenerational trauma and income volatility, to name a few.  Uchitelle animates his arguments through careful reporting on the plight of laid-off Stanley Works toolmakers and United Airlines mechanics.  Descriptions of their difficulties are touching and even tragic; they are also, alas, laborious and repetitive.  And Uchitelle's solutions are not entirely convincing: neither forcing companies to abide by a "just cause" clause when they fire someone, for instance, nor doubling the minimum wage are likely to increase employment.  Yet Uchitelle's basic argument-that no American government has taken significant steps to curb "the unwinding of social value" caused by corporate greed — is all too accurate.

One of the hottest, most controversial topics in the news is the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries.  Outsourced jobs are extending well beyond the manufacturing sector to include white-collar professionals, particularly in information technology, financial services, and customer service.  "Outsourcing America" reveals just how much outsourcing is taking place, what its impact is and will be, and what can be done about the loss of jobs.

More than an expose, the book shows how outsourcing is part of the historical economic shifts toward globalism and free trade, and demonstrates the impact of outsourcing on individual lives and communities.  The authors discuss policies that countries like India and China use to attract U.S. industries, and they offer frank recommendations that business and political leaders must consider in order to confront this snowballing crisis — and bring more high-paying jobs back to the U.S.

(Foreword by Lou Dobbs)

The shipment of American jobs to cheap foreign labor markets threatens not only millions of workers and their families, but also the American way of life.  With the pay of corporate CEOs at historical highs and job creation at the lowest level since the Depression, corporate raiders are breaking down our borders in search of the lowest-price labor available anywhere in the world.  For the first time in history, corporations are laying off Americans from well-paying jobs and replacing them with low-paid foreign workers.  A recent study revealed that 14 million American jobs are now at risk of being outsourced overseas.

Make no mistake, Corporate America isn't doing all this alone: Big business and Washington are in cahoots, trading our nation's livelihood for short-term gain and Lou Dobbs's bold new book takes dead aim.  A stirring call to arms and an invaluable prescriptive guide to dealing with the issue, EXPORTING AMERICA tells readers what they can do to save not only their own jobs, but the American dream.

When financial journalist Eamonn Fingleton anticipated the meltdown of the New Economy in the late nineties, his predictions were dismissed by mainstream economic writers as "farfetched."  Now, with the New Economy in ruins and America mired in recession, Fingleton's avowedly contrarian take on mainstream economic thinking is all the more urgent.  Written in clear, lucid prose that renders the complexity of the world economy clear to the general reader, "Unsustainable" is a masterly survey of how the U.S. economy's turn from manufacturing to a more service-based, "postindustrial" economy-based on finance, entertainment, and computer software-has been an unmitigated disaster for working- and middleclass America and threatens the long-term viability of the U.S. economy.  Taking on free market ideologues like Thomas Friedman, Fingelton shows how those who claim that a global service economy is the key to America's salvation are living in a fool's paradise.

Corporations are the dominant force in modern life, surpassing even church and state.  The largest are richer than entire nations, and courts have given these entities more rights than people.  To many Americans, corporate power seems out of control.  According to a Business Week/Harris poll released in September 2000, 82 percent of those surveyed agreed that "business has too much power over too many aspects of our lives."  And the recent revelations of corporate scandal and political influence have only added to such concerns.

Where did this powerful institution come from?  How did it get so much power? In "Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy," author Ted Nace probes the roots of corporate power, finding answers in surprising places.

A key revelation of the book is the wariness of the Founding Fathers toward corporations.  That wariness was shaped by rampant abuses on the part of British corporations such as the Virginia Company, whose ill-treatment killed thousands of women and children on forced-labor tobacco plantations, and the East India Company, whose attempt to monopolize American commodities led to the merchant-led rebellion known as the Boston Tea Party.

Because of such attitudes, the word corporation does not appear once in the United States Constitution.  At the Constitutional Convention, all proposals to include corporations in that document were voted down by delegates.  Corporate attorneys persisted in seeking legal protections for their clients by means of sympathetic court rulings, but until the Civil War such attempts largely failed.

After the Civil War, the tide quickly turned, as lobbyists secured key changes in corporate law and as corporate attorneys won a series of decisions from an increasingly pro-corporate Supreme Court.  Nace recounts the key figures who engineered the "corporate bill of rights," in particular two brilliant strategists: railroad baron Tom Scott and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field. The book explores in depth the bizarre intrigues that resulted in the infamous "corporations are persons" ruling of 1886, and how that ruling affected the subsequent development of Supreme Court doctrine.

Nace charts the growth of corporate power through the Gilded Age, including the bloody repression of organized labor and the rise of social Darwinist thinking among American elites.  He recounts how that expansion came to a halt under the New Deal, as organized labor gained legal protections, social Darwinism fell into disrepute, and Franklin Roosevelt asserted a vision of American society that placed democratic limits on corporate power.  To many observers, it seemed that the corporate Frankenstein had finally been tamed by "countervailing power."

According to Nace, that optimistic view was dashed in the final decades of the twentieth century, as Big Business mounted a remarkable comeback.  The corporate political resurgence began with a 1971 memorandum written by Lewis Powell, Jr., shortly before Powell was appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon.  In the memorandum, Powell urged corporate America to apply its full organizational and strategic resources to politics, a course of action that proved highly successful.

"Gangs of America" describes the expansion of corporate legal empowerment onto the global stage through international agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which boosted the legal powers of corporations to the level of sovereign nations.  The book pays special attention to recent events, including campaign finance reform, the financial scandals of 2002, and the growing movement to redefine the corporation and limit corporate power.

Provocative political commentator Arianna Huffington yanks back the curtain on the unholy alliance of CEOs, politicians, lobbyists, and Wall Street bankers who have shown a brutal disregard for those in the office cubicles and on the factory floors.  As she puts it: "The economic game is not supposed to be rigged like some shady ring toss on a carnival midway."  Yet it has been, allowing corporate crooks to bilk the public out of trillions of dollars, magically making our pensions and 401(k)s disappear and walking away with astronomical payouts and absurdly lavish perks-for-life."  "The media have put their fingers on pieces of the sordid puzzle, but Pigs at the Trough presents the whole ugly picture of what's really going on for the first time - a blistering, wickedly dirty portrait of exactly how and why the worst and the greediest are running American business and government into the ground."  Making the case that our public watchdogs have become little more than obedient lapdogs, unwilling to bite the corporate hand that feeds them, Arianna Huffington turns the spotlight on the tough reforms we must demand from Washington.  We need, she argues, to go way beyond the lame Corporate Responsibility Act if we are to stop the voracious corporate predators from eating away at the very foundations of our democracy.

(Publisher: Crown Publishing Group)

Nationally syndicated columnist Huffington's greatest dilemma while writing this scathing indictment of the corporate and political culture that brought the "new economy" '90s crashing down must have been how to choose among the plethora of examples of greed, corruption, hypocrisy and political manipulation.  So unsavory are the CEO villains, so unfathomable is their greed and monstrously callous is their disregard for the thousands of employees who lost jobs and savings because of them, that even the most worldly activist and most cynical political observers will be shocked by what they read here.  And Huffington's indictment of the corporate culture of greed, one that she believes undermines democracy, goes far beyond the high-flying corporate figures featured in congressional investigations.  Among her accusations are that U.S. drug companies allowed the African AIDS epidemic to rage in the interests of corporate profits, and that President Bush is a conspirator in the corporate disregard of the interests of the American public.  This is a powerful book, brimming with wit and sulphurous satire that connects the dots among politicians, lobbyists and corporations, and demonstrates their destructive effect on the well-being of average Americans. She may well be on her way to achieving her goal of convincing readers "to join forces to storm the control room of the S.S. America."

(Publishers Weekly)

Wealth inequity, corporate welfare, and industrial pollution are the symptoms of our sickened economy, Marjorie Kelly suggests.  The underlying illness is shareholder primacy.  In this book, she shows that the corporate drive to maximize shareholder profits at any cost is not only out of step with democratic and free-market principles, but is detrimental to the long-term health of individual companies and the economy as a whole.  Kelly, the cofounder and editor of the national journal "Business Ethics", offers a far-reaching solution to rebuild corporations in a way that serves all.  "The Divine Right of Capital" is a radical critique of the corporate economy, newly updated with information on Enron and other business scandals.

A leading economic journalist explains why Washington's responses to globalization have created a global worker surplus that undermines both American workers and those in developing nations.

With the end of the 1990s economic boom, "The Race to the Bottom" deftly explores how the United States has entered a no-win global competition in which the countries with the lowest wages, weakest workplace safety laws, and toughest repression of unions win investment from the U.S. and Europe.  Tonelson analyzes how the entry of such population giants as China, India, and Mexico into the global market has accelerated the erosion of wages and labor standards around the world.  And he describes how an ever-larger share of this low-wage competition is hitting not just sectors like apparel and toys, but also many of America's highest wage industries like aerospace and software.  Tonelson explains why the re-education and retraining programs touted by many political leaders offer little but false hopes to most U.S. workers as he outlines the real decisions Washington needs to make to ensure long-term prosperity for the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Roger Simmermaker does a very good job of showing why "consumer patriotism" is so important in improving our economy.  He not only presents a well thought out and easy to read discussion, but also lists an enormous variety of products — giving details on which country they are made, and whether or not the company that makes them is a U.S. or foreign owned company.  This is important information for all of us to know so that we can make well informed purchases. For example, some of the best automobile tires in the world are made in the U.S. by U.S. owned companies such as Cooper, Goodyear, and Kelly.  However, most people don't realize that Michelin, General, BF Goodrich, Bridgestone, Firestone, Dunlop, Pirelli, Toyo and Uniroyal are all made by foreign companies, often in foreign countries.  What does this mean?  When you buy the american made products you keep american families employed.  When you buy foreign made products, you send your money off to some foreign country, adding to our trade deficit, putting americans out of work, and decreasing the amount of tax dollars available to the federal government and the states.  Every American who wants a strong U.S. economy and good jobs available for their families and friends needs to read this book before making any more purchases.

Job training has long been promoted as a central policy response to poverty and unemployment.  Both Democrats and Republicans have trumpeted training as the answer to everything from welfare to NAFTA.  "The Job Training Charade" provides a comprehensive critique showing that training has been a near-total failure.  Even more dramatically, the book shows how politicians have ignored repeated reports of the program's failure, and have kept funding a policy they know cannot work.

Gordon Lafer first examines the economic assumptions and track record of training policy.  He goes on to provide a political analysis of why job training has remained so popular despite widespread evidence of its economic failure.  The author concludes that job training functions less as an economic prescription aimed at solving poverty than as a political strategy aimed at managing the popular response to economic distress.

"The Job Training Charade" is a landmark book showing how a bipartisan consensus may coalesce behind a phantom policy that serves political needs while ignoring economic realities.

In this book Ralph Gomory and William Baumol adapt classical trade models to the modern world economy.  Trade today is dominated by manufactured goods, rapidly moving technology, and huge firms that benefit from economies of scale.  This is very different from the largely agricultural world in which the classical theories originated.  Gomory and Baumol show that the new and significant conflicts resulting from international trade are inherent in modern economies. Today improvement in one country's productive capabilities is often attainable only at the expense of another country's general welfare.  The authors describe why and when this is so and why, in a modern free-trade environment, a country might have a vital stake in the competitive strength of its industries.

"When Corporations Rule the World" explains how economic globalization has concentrated the power to govern in global corporations and financial markets and detached them from accountability to the human interest.  It documents the devastating human and environmental consequences of the successful efforts of these corporations to reconstruct values and institutions everywhere on the planet to serve their own narrow ends.  It also reveals why and how millions of people are acting to reclaim their political and economic power from these elitist forces and presents a policy agenda for restoring democracy and rooting economic power in people and communities.

A great political debate is emerging over the many unexpected and profound consequences of the rush toward the global economy and its effects on jobs, human rights, cultural diversity, democracy, and the natural world.  The world's political and corporate leaders are restructuring the planet's economic and political arrangements in ways that directly affect humans and the environment more than anything since the Industrial Revolution.  New, giant globalizing institutions such as the World Trade Organization, GATT, and the World Bank, created with scant public debate or scrutiny, have moved real power away from citizen democracies and nation states to global corporate bureaucracies, with grave results.

"The Case Against the Global Economy" is the first comprehensive point-by-point analysis of the new global economy, its premise and its full social and ecological implications.  The work gathers 43 leading economic, agricultural, cultural, and environmental experts who charge that free trade and economic globalization are producing exactly the opposite results from what has been promised.  In the end, it is clear that we need to reverse course, turning away from globalization toward a revitalized democracy, local self-sufficiency, and ecological health.

"To discover who rules, follow the gold."  This is the argument of "Golden Rule," a provocative, pungent history of modern American politics.  Although the role big money plays in defining political outcomes has long been obvious to ordinary Americans, most pundits and scholars have virtually dismissed this assumption.  Even in light of skyrocketing campaign costs, the belief that major financial interests primarily determine who parties nominate and where they stand on the issues — that, in effect, Democrats and Republicans are merely the left and right wings of the "Property Party" — has been ignored by most political scientists.  Offering evidence ranging from the nineteenth century to the 1994 mid-term elections, "Golden Rule" shows that voters are "right on the money."

Thomas Ferguson breaks completely with traditional voter centered accounts of party politics.  In its place he outlines an "investment approach," in which powerful investors, not unorganized voters, dominate campaigns and elections. Because businesses "invest" in political parties and their candidates, changes in industrial structures — between large firms and sectors — can alter the agenda of party politics and the shape of public policy.

Americans can no longer be shocked by the discovery that information directly affecting their personal freedom is withheld from news media to protect persons with governmental influence.  But it still comes as a shocking revelation that in 1933 there was an actual attempt to make a fascist puppet of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Now, more than forty years later, the public still remains ignorant of the story behind "The Plot to Seize the White House."

The fact that the plot was a failure and our present government is still a democracy, is directly attributable to Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of the most remarkable generals in American history.  A veteran of 35 years in the Marine Corps and twice a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Butler finally decided that "war is a racket!"  His reputation for patriotism, integrity, and dedication to democracy, coupled with his proclivity to speak the truth as he saw it irrespective of official policy, made him a seemingly perfect front for the men who hated Roosevelt.  They were people with a determination, if it were impossible to replace the president, to manipulate him through the person of an American Mussolini.  Their short-sightedness prevented their realizing that Butler was obviously the wrong choice for the job.

Jules Archer quotes testimony from the McCormack-Dickstein House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings (including testimony that was subsequently censored from public record) that details how Butler was approached by representatives of the arch-conservative American Liberty League; how they tried to persuade him to lead an army of veterans in demonstration against Roosevelt's silver standard; how Butler quickly concluded that the silver standard controversy was being used as a subterfuge to lead American veterans against Washington for truly sinister purposes; and how this hero, patriot, and Republican democrat, upon uncovering the full dimensions of the conspiracy, determined to go to Washington and blow it wide open.

John L. Spivak, a reporter assigned to cover the committee hearings, calls the story "one of the most fantastic plots in American history...  What was behind the plot was shrouded in a silence which has not been broken to this day. Even a generation later, those who are still alive and know all the facts have kept their silence so well that the conspiracy is not even a footnote in American histories.  It would be regrettable if historians neglected this episode and future generations of Americans never learned of it."