Ralph Nader

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Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (And What We Can Do About It) by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, book value, business cycle, Debian, democratizing finance, desegregation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, global village, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, manufacturing employment, Nash equilibrium, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, the map is not the territory, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Y2K

"Huffman's Foes in Primary Blast National GOP Support."' Arizona Dail)' Sf<lr, Sept. 6, 2006. Brodie, John, and Bob Mack (1990). "Up Close and Personal with Lee Atwater, Homebody: Sf'}', May 1990, 88-89, Budoff, Carrie (2006). "Santorum Calls Casey a 'Thug' in Residency Flap." PhiuuieJphm Daily News, May 20, 2006, Buchanan, Pal, and Ralph Nader (2004). "Ralph Nader: Conservatively Speaking," The American Consen'ative, June 21, 2004. Bueno De Mesquita, Bruce, and Kenneth Shepsle (201)1). "William Harrison Riker, "Washinglon, D,C.: Nalional Academy Press, newton.nap.eclufhtmllbiomems/ wriker,hlm!. Cabrera, Marisa (2006). "Oscars Insight: Proportional Voting System Makes for Wideopen Nomination Pick."'

John • Benjamin Harrison· James Weaver· J. P. Morgan· Henry Clay Frick· Teddy Roosevelt· William Howard Taft· Woodrow Wilson· Eugene Debs· socialism • Wall Street· Ross Perot· Larry King· nude photos· George H. W, Bush· Bill Clinton· Bob Dole· POWs • Vietnamese· Black Panthers· Ed Rollins • FDR • Harry Levine· Ralph Nader· Hiroshima· AI Gore· Lewis Carroll • Tweedledee • Tweedledum • George W. Bush· Michael Moore· John McCain • Karl Rove· Mother Teresa· universal negatives· Tarek Milleron • Cadillac tail Iins • George McGovern· Gore Vidal· Ronald Reagan· the Iifty-Iive-mile-anhour speed limit· Mother Jones· James Carville· "That Bastard" • the devil • Pat Buchanan· Harry Browne· Harry Reid· defective consumer products 4.

In our two-party system, the most familiar form of vote splitting is the spoiler effect. When there is a tight race between the two major candidates, a third-party "spoiler" candidate can take enough votes from one of the from-runners to hand the election to his rival. This happened in the 2000 presidential race, when Green candidate Ralph Nader tipped the balance from AI Gore to George W. Bush in Florida, and thus determined the election. Vote splitting is an invisible hand misguiding the whole electoral process. The consequences are weakened mandates, loss of faith in the democratic process, squandered dollars, and sometimes squandered lives.


pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

On Nader, see Evan Osborne, The Rise of the Anti-Corporate Movement: Corporations and the People Who Hate Them (2007), 59; “The U.S.’s Toughest Customer,” Time, December 12, 1969, 89; Charles McCarry, “A Hectic, Happy, Sleepless, Stormy, Rumpled, Relentless Week on the Road with Ralph Nader,” Life, January 21, 1972, 45; Jack Doyle, “GM & Ralph Nader, 1965–1971,” PopHistoryDig.com, March 31, 2013, available at http://www.pophistorydig.com/?tag=ralph-nader-time-magazine; Barbara Hinkson Craig, Courting Change (2004), 1–32. See Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (1966). 11. Justin Martin, Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon (2002), 57. 12. See Doyle, “GM & Ralph Nader”; “The U.S.’s Toughest Customer,” Time, December 12, 1969, 89. 13. Charles McCarry, Citizen Nader (1972), 29; Doyle, “GM & Ralph Nader” (quoting the Washington Post); McCarry, “Relentless Week,” 91; “Nader’s Zenith,” Washington Post, August 30, 1966, A18. 14.

As constitutional leveragers, corporations have successfully exploited constitutional reforms originally designed for progressive causes, transforming them to serve the ends of capital. The Fourteenth Amendment, for example, was designed to protect the rights of the freedmen, but Conkling and the Southern Pacific Railroad pushed the Supreme Court to use it to protect the rights of corporations. In the 1970s, Ralph Nader won a landmark case on behalf of consumers that established a First Amendment right to advertise—a right that corporations, including tobacco and gaming companies, used to overturn laws designed to help consumers. Yet corporations are also constitutional first movers, and historically have often been innovators at the cutting edge of constitutional litigation.

In a remarkably productive six-year stretch, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Consumer Product Safety Act, along with new regulations establishing safety standards for automobiles, prohibiting dangerous chemicals in children’s products, and strengthening food safety. The laws reflected Americans’ loss of faith in industry. In 1966–1967, over half of Americans reported having “a great deal of confidence” in corporate leaders, but by 1974–1976, that number had dropped precipitously to 20 percent.2 The unquestioned leader of the reform movement was Ralph Nader, a tireless populist advocate for curbing corporate power whom Newsweek magazine featured on its cover dressed as a knight in shining armor. Time magazine called Nader the “nation’s No. 1 consumer guardian,” who had prompted “much U.S. industry to reappraise its responsibilities and, against considerable odds, created a new climate of concern for the consumer among politicians and businessmen.”


The Cigarette: A Political History by Sarah Milov

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, British Empire, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, global supply chain, Herbert Marcuse, imperial preference, Indoor air pollution, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, land tenure, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Journalism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, scientific management, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, Torches of Freedom, trade route, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

Nor were those dangers episodic: just as cancer causing agents were built into the very cigarettes being marketed, the “negative externalities” of mass consumption, whether in the form of highway deaths or polluted rivers, were attracting more scrutiny and drawing a crowd. Ralph Nader’s morally upright shadow threatened to extend the reach of the ruling. “Automakers may now expect the ‘Ralph Nader Hour’ devoted to scaring the bejabbers out of drivers,” opined the Indianapolis News. “What of other ‘hazardous’ products?” asked the irreverent Boston Herald. “Congress has legislated far more stringently as to automobiles than it has legislated as to cigarettes,” the paper observed in reference to the recent passage of the Nader-endorsed Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966.

In a letter to Fortas’s law partner, DOJ lawyer Orrick noted that even though the Justice Department would grant code adherents criminal antitrust immunity, his assurances “shouldn’t be taken to represent a judgment that a code will in fact reduce the health hazards resulting from smoking or lessen the appeal of cigarette advertising to youth.”74 For those publics, there would be no recourse—yet. Advertising the Public Interest By the time the Cigarette Advertising Code went into effect in 1965, Ralph Nader had become a household name. More than any other individual, Nader was responsible for a powerful critique of private interest government as morally corrupt and physically dangerous. “A great problem of contemporary life,” Nader wrote in the preface to Unsafe at Any Speed, the book that made him famous, “is how to control the power of economic interests which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and technology.”

This allegation triggered a series of events that resulted in the president of GM apologizing to Nader and settling with the thirty-one-year-old for invasion of privacy.76 Unsafe at Any Speed rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists. With money from the settlement, Nader founded the Center for the Study of Responsive Law, which produced a series of colorfully titled monographs in 1970 that hammered home the critique of agency capture: The Interstate Commerce Omission, The Chemical Feast, The Vanishing Air.77 Ralph Nader was far from the only young lawyer energized by the prospects of using litigation in service of environmental and consumer advocacy. In 1966, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer named Victor Yannacone sued Suffolk County, Long Island, on behalf of his client—his wife. Yannacone charged that the county’s use of DDT insecticide—“dumping,” in the language of the environmentalists of the 1960s—posed an environmental danger and risk to human health, and advocated for its prohibition.


pages: 306 words: 82,765

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

anti-fragile, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, data science, David Graeber, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, equity premium, fake news, financial independence, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, mental accounting, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, tail risk, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, Yogi Berra

fn4 In fact, those who formalized the theory of rationality, such as the mathematician and game theorist Ken Binmore, more on whom later, insist that there has never been any rigorous and self-consistent theory of “rationality” that puts people in a straitjacket. You will not even find such claims in orthodox neoclassical economics. Most of what we read about the “rational” in the verbalistic literature doesn’t seem to partake of any rigor. fn5 The Ralph Nader to whom I dedicate this book is the Ralph Nader who helped establish the legal mechanism to protect consumers and citizens from predators; less so the Ralph Nader who occasionally makes some calls to regulate. fn6 There is actually an argument in favor of duels: they prevent conflicts from engaging broader sets of people, that is, wars, by confining the problem to those with direct skin in the game.

So these P.R. firms resorted to harassing New York University’s staff by using web-mobs to flood them with emails—which includes overwhelming a defenseless assistant and people who had no idea I worked for the university since I am there only quarter-time. This method—of hitting you where they think it hurts—implies hitting people around you who are more vulnerable than you. General Motors, in the campaign against Ralph Nader (who uncovered flaws in their products), desperate to stop him, resorted to harassing Rose Nader, his mother, calling her at three in the morning—in the days when it was hard to trace a telephone call. Clearly it was meant to make Ralph Nader feel he was guilty of harming his own mother. It turned out that Rose Nader was herself an activist and felt flattered by the calls (at least she was not left out of the battle).

THE BED OF PROCRUSTES (Philosophical Aphorisms) (2010, 2016) ANTIFRAGILE (2012), on how some things like disorder (hence volatility, time, chaos, variability, and stressors) while others don’t, how we can classify things along the lines fragile-robust-antifragile, how we can identify (anti)fragility based on nonlinear response without having to know much about the history of the process (which solves most of the Black Swan problem), and why you are alive if and only if you love (some) volatility. SKIN IN THE GAME (2018), this volume. INCERTO’S TECHNICAL COMPANION, consisting of academic-style papers, miscellaneous notes, and (very) technical remarks and developments. Two men of courage: Ron Paul, a Roman among Greeks; Ralph Nader, Greco-Phoenician saint Book 1 * * * INTRODUCTION This book, while standalone, is a continuation of the Incerto collection, which is a combination of a) practical discussions, b) philosophical tales, and c) scientific and analytical commentary on the problems of randomness, and how to live, eat, sleep, argue, fight, befriend, work, have fun, and make decisions under uncertainty.


Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Kennedy replied that “the person who sold the most books today for Mr. Nader was the Senator from Nebraska.” * * * THE BUMPTIOUS GENTLEMAN FROM NEBRASKA was not, it soon arrived, Ralph Nader’s only harasser. While he was working on Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader had complained to friends that strange men were following him. That an attractive woman approached him, seeking his company. That, the night before his congressional testimony, at the $80-a-month boardinghouse where he rented a room, he got several harassing phone calls. Ralph Nader had always been an odd duck. Now his friends wondered whether he might actually be insane. Then, a journalist discovered that General Motors had hired a detective agency to spy on him.

“The American auto industry” David Halberstam, The Reckoning (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1986), 490. Nader testified Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes, 44; Pertschuk, Revolt Against Regulation, 21. “nut behind the wheel” Pertschuk, Revolt Against Regulation, 41. “second collision” Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed (New York: Dunlop & Grossmans, 1965), Chapter Three. “written almost exclusively” “Statement by Ralph Nader Before the Senate Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization,” Traffic Safety: Examination and Review of Efficiency, Economy, and Coordination of Public and Private Agencies’ Activities and the Role of the Federal Government, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate, Eighty-Ninth Congress, First Session, March 22, 25, and 26, 1965, Part I.

Carter rang up six Green, Bright, Infinite Future, 76. most comprehensive onslaught Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes, 162, 204; George Schwartz, “The Successful Fight Against a Federal Consumer Protection Agency,” MSU Business Topics 27 (Summer 1979), 45–57. Ralph Nader’s hubris Ibid.; Walter Guzzardi Jr., “Business Is Learning How to Win in Washington,” Fortune, March 27, 1978, 36; Ralph Nader, “ ‘Mushy Liberals’ Slide Away,” Philadelphia Daily News, October 3, 1977; ever since 1962 Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes, 28. Publisher Katharine Graham John Judis, The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust (New York: Pantheon, 2000), 168.


pages: 519 words: 155,332

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

In the hands of thousands of Washington lawyers drawn from the new meritocracy, due process came to mean not just that the government couldn’t take away land or freedom at will, but that an Occupational Health and Safety Administration rule protecting workers from a deadly chemical used on the job could be challenged and delayed for more than a decade and end up being hundreds of pages long, filled with clause after clause after clause whose meaning the lawyers could contest. A landmark suit brought by consumer rights activist Ralph Nader gave corporations that owned drugstores a First Amendment right to inform consumers by advertising their prices. However, it morphed into a corporate free speech movement that produced one court decision after another allowing unlimited corporate money to overwhelm democratic elections. Beginning in the 1970s, the First Amendment right to petition the government was deployed to allow businesses to storm Washington with thousands of lobbyists to press their case with members of Congress and their staffs and at regulatory agencies and executive branch departments.

In the 1970s, however, demand for lawyers exploded, the result of legislative and other developments beginning in the 1960s—including corporate mergers and takeovers; a growing interest in tax shelters; new regulations related to consumer products, employment discrimination, worker safety, and the environment; and industry’s determination to fight back against the rise of adversaries like Ralph Nader and environmentalist Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring. In just the 1970s, as the knowledge economy blossomed, the number of lawyers nearly doubled, and then increased by another 50 percent in the 1980s. In terms of dollars generated, by the mid-1980s the legal industry was bigger than steel or textiles, and about the same size as the auto industry.

When Redish’s Harvard professor read the first draft of his senior thesis—arguing, in spite of all Supreme Court doctrine, that corporations should have the same free speech right as people because their arguments, too, contributed to the public dialogue—he told Redish he thought he was crazy. This was 1969, a time when corporations, which were being pilloried by Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson, and others, were not typically grouped with anti-war demonstrators as First Amendment warriors. Still, recalled Redish, the Harvard professor “gave me an A. He thought I had guts.” While working the following year in a prestigious federal appeals court clerkship, Redish turned his Harvard thesis into a law review article.


pages: 497 words: 143,175

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies by Judith Stein

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, desegregation, do well by doing good, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial deregulation, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, intermodal, invisible hand, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-industrial society, post-oil, price mechanism, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yom Kippur War

The new organizations were officially nonpartisan and assumed that they each represented a public interest. One study of eighty-three public interest groups found that 30 percent had no members at all, only lobbyists. Of the rest, 57 percent had no structure that elicited public opinion.11 The best example was the Ralph Nader organization Public Citizen, founded in 1971 to represent the consumer, uncontaminated by special interests. Public interest advocates claimed that public policies affected many who were unrepresented—the people, the consumers, the citizens.12 They fostered the belief that government cannot protect the people but only active citizens, generally wielding a lawsuit and not a ballot.

That no one suggested Muskie demonstrated the provincialism and fatigue surrounding the deliberation.37 When Eagleton, who was not well known, was finally chosen, the matter did not end. That evening, the charade of openness required six other nominations, representing factions of the McGovern coalition. Not even for their own candidate would they discipline their desire. Once control was broken, delegates nominated Jerry Rubin, Ralph Nader, Archie Bunker, Mao Tse-tung, and many others. Ironically, it was the Wallace delegation from Alabama, not the McGovern group from New York, which shifted its votes to make Eagleton the vice presidential candidate. The price for this lengthy indulgence was that McGovern began his acceptance speech at 2:48 a.m.38 Not a good beginning.

Exports began to rise.1 American manufacturers constructed new factories.2 They even gained ground in world markets.3 Closing the book in Vietnam and rekindling economic growth yielded an era of good feelings in 1973. The new president of the Chamber of Commerce, Edward B. Rust, had some nice things to say about that scourge of American capitalism, Ralph Nader. Nader, who first became famous battling mighty General Motors over automobile safety, led numerous investigations documenting corporate misdeeds and government negligence. But now Rust concluded that Nader simply aimed to make “the free-enterprise system work.”4 Irving Kristol, the future scold of 1960S culture, took the various social changes of the decade in stride.


pages: 104 words: 30,990

The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demand response, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Solyndra, stem cell, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Walter Mischel

Yes, the American political system has historically been hostile to third parties. Any serious political observer knows that. We have had many third-party presidential candidates, from Teddy Roosevelt of the Bull Moose Party to Ralph Nader of the Green Party. They don’t win. And to the extent that they change the political landscape, it is often in ways that distort voters’ preferences. Ralph Nader arguably made George W. Bush president in 2000 by taking votes away from Al Gore in Florida. That’s hardly what Nader supporters could have hoped for. Even if a third-party presidential candidate were to catch fire with voters—perhaps even winning a plurality of votes cast—the Electoral College is more hostile still.

The answer is the Centrist Party—a third political party that empowers the middle. The sane, pragmatic majority in America must wrestle the steering wheel of the country away from the extremists on either side. This book is a plan for making it happen. The purpose of the Centrist Party is not to make noise, like Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan did when they ran for president. Nor is it a means for angry people to vent in a semi-organized way, like the Tea Party, which has no major policy accomplishments to speak of and has mostly served to fracture the Republican Party. (New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has called it the “Tea Kettle” movement because it is mostly about letting off steam.)2 The Centrist Party will have a coherent ideology that draws from the best of both traditional political parties.

That is wrong. The system is hostile to third parties emerging from the political fringe—the Green Party, for example. These parties do not win elections because they represent relatively small, deeply ideological segments of the population. In fact, they often have a counterproductive effect. Ralph Nader almost certainly cost Al Gore the election in 2000, the pathetic irony being that the Green Party he was supposedly representing ended up worse off as a result of his campaign. When these fringe parties appear, potential supporters must choose between making noise and making a difference. A Centrist Party is the opposite.


pages: 373 words: 80,248

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Cal Newport, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Glass-Steagall Act, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Naomi Klein, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, power law, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, single-payer health, social intelligence, statistical model, uranium enrichment

It dices disciplines, faculty, students, and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most pressing moral, political, and cultural questions. Those who critique the system itself—people such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Dennis Kucinich, or Ralph Nader—are marginalized and shut out of the mainstream debate. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement, and information systems are the only things that matter. In 1967, Theodor Adorno wrote an essay titled “Education After Auschwitz.”

Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent? There were some who saw it coming. The political philosophers Sheldon S. Wolin, John Ralston Saul, and Andrew Bacevich, writers such as Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, David Korten, and Naomi Klein, and activists such as Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, and Ralph Nader warned us about our march of folly. In the immediate years after the Second World War, a previous generation of social critics recognized the destructive potential of the rising corporate state. Books such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite, William H. White’s The Organization Man, Seymour Mellman’s The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline, Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, and Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History have proved to be prophetic.

These corporations, including the Commission on Presidential Debates (a private organization), determine who gets to speak and what issues candidates can or cannot challenge, from universal, not-for-profit, single-payer health care to Wall Street bailouts to NAFTA. If you do not follow the corporate script, you become as marginal and invisible as Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, or Cynthia McKinney. This is why most Democrats opposed Pennsylvania Democratic House Representative John Murtha’s call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq—something that would dry up profits for companies like Halliburton—and supported continued funding for the war. It is why most voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act.


pages: 614 words: 174,226

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

Powell, one of America’s most prominent corporate lawyers, drafted an alarmist memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in August 1971, warning, “No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.” Powell’s memo was a catalog of woes: Capitalism, he said, was threatened by radicals like Ralph Nader who wanted the federal government to protect consumers. It was threatened by environmentalists, by liberals who favored higher taxes, by college students whose minds were poisoned by radical professors. Students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, had pushed a flaming dumpster into the local Bank of America in February 1970, burning the bank to the ground.

Over the next two decades, Anheuser-Busch built a national network of breweries without making a single acquisition. Meanwhile, Blatz and many other smaller brewers went out of business. In 1960, the top four firms had brewed 27 percent of the beer; by 1980, the top four firms brewed 67 percent.47 And economists pointed out the price of beer had steadily declined. Consumer advocates like Ralph Nader increasingly took the existence of large corporations for granted; rather than trying to break companies apart, they sought to strengthen federal regulation. The rise of the Japanese economy also began to shift public debate. Japan treated industrial conglomerates as a source of strength, not a threat to society and the state.

At a 1974 conference on the economics of regulation, one despairing economist suggested that everyone should bring the same papers to another conference a decade later, and present them again, because there was little prospect anything would change.28 That was not a good prediction. Some on the political left had come to agree with Stigler that Americans might benefit from less regulation. The most influential figure was Ralph Nader, the slender zealot who had emerged as the icon of the nascent consumer movement. Nader had made his reputation campaigning for more health and safety regulation; by the early 1970s, he was also campaigning for less economic regulation, which in his view protected companies at the expense of consumers.


pages: 422 words: 89,770

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

., 431. 24 Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Citadel Press, 1991), 142. 25 Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, 300. 26 Ralph Nader, interview, Washington, DC, March 30, 2010. 27 David Cay Johnston, interview, by phone from Rochester, New York, March 7, 2010. 28 Lewis F. Powell, “Attack on th eAmerican Free Enterprise System,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce, August 23, 1971, http:www.reclaimdemocracy.org/ corporate _acountability/Powell_memo_lewis.html. 29 Ralph Nader, in Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan, Directors, An Unreasonable Man, Submarine Entertainment, 2006. 30 Warren P. Strobel, “Dealt a Setback, Bush Now Faces a Difficult Choice,” Philadelphis Inquirer, February 15, 2003, A01. 31 James Cone, interview, Princeton, New Jersey, January, 16, 2010. 32 Malcolm X, Corey Methodist Church, Cleveland, Ohio, April 3, 1964. 33 See King’s address, “Some Things We Must Do,” given December 5, 1957, on the second anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott. 34 Malcolm X, panel discussion on WNDT-TV, New York, 1963. 35 Martin Luther King, “Guidelines for a Conservative Church,” Sermon given June 5, 1966, at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta. 36 Dean Henderson, interview, Fairfax, Virginia, February 20, 2010.

Zinn knew that if we do not listen to the stories of those without power, those who suffer discrimination and abuse, those who struggle for justice, we are left parroting the manufactured myths that serve the interests of the privileged. Zinn set out to write history, not myth. He found that challenging these myths, even as a historian, turned one into a pariah. The descent of Ralph Nader, from being one of the most respected and powerful public figures in the country to being an outcast, illustrates perhaps better than any other narrative the totality of our corporate coup and the complicity of the liberal class in our disempowerment. Nader’s marginalization was not accidental.

Oftentimes, I would be the lead witness. What was interesting was the novelty. The press gravitates to novelty. They achieved great things. There was collaboration. We provided the newsworthy material. They covered it. The legislation passed. Regulations were issued. Lives were saved. Other civic movements began to flower. “Ralph Nader came along and did serious journalism. That is what his early stuff was, such as Unsafe at Any Speed,” the investigative journalist David Cay Johnston told me:The big books they put out were serious, first-rate journalism. Corporate America was terrified by this. They went to school on Nader. They said, “We see how you do this.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Politico included her in its 2016 list of America’s fifty most influential people, and San Francisco magazine described her as “the most reviled woman in Silicon Valley,” who has “achieved a kind of celebrity unseen in the legal world since Ralph Nader sued General Motors.”36 In person, the diminutive Liss-Riordan resembles anything but a sledgehammer. As the labor lawyer leads me into her office—which is peppered with political memorabilia from her fellow gig economy critic and political ally Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren37—she acknowledges that the digital revolution has made people work more efficiently. “I love what technology can do for us,” she tells me, sounding a lot like Margrethe Vestager. “But it shouldn’t be abused.” The comparison of Shannon Liss-Riordan with Ralph Nader is also useful. You’ll remember that it was Nader’s bestselling 1965 book exposing the fatal flaws in the Chevrolet Corvair, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, that ultimately undermined the global domination of the US car industry.

It was in 1965, of course, that Gordon Moore invented his eponymous law in an article titled “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” first published in a special Electronics magazine issue dedicated to predicting the future.13 But in 1965 there wasn’t much popular interest in technical white papers about integrated circuits. Back then, anyone interested in reading about new technology had bought a book that not only turned out to be the year’s most influential work of nonfiction, but also changed an entire global industry. Written by Ralph Nader, the book was called Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, and just as Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller Silent Spring dramatically raised public consciousness about the dangers of pesticides and toxic chemicals in our foods, so Nader’s 1965 book did the same thing for the deadly dangers of American automobiles.

“In Utopia, everyone is a legal expert,” he tells us about an imaginary society in which law had been radically democratized, “for the laws are very few . . . and they consider the most obvious interpretation of any law to be the fairest.”34 In the real world, however, especially in the United States, there is no shortage of either professional lawyers or complicated laws for them to interpret. Still, given the country’s increasingly dysfunctional political system, this might not be such a bad thing. Historically, crusading lawyers like Ralph Nader have played an important role in reforming Ameri-can capitalism. As the music attorney Chris Castle told me, citing the example of David Lowery’s class action lawsuits against Spotify and Rhapsody, the law may today be our most effective avenue for making entertainment companies accountable. You’ll also recall the central role of the Silicon Valley attorney Gary Reback in the US government’s antitrust trial against Microsoft in the 1990s—a case that eventually enabled the innovation-rich Web 2.0 revolution of Google and Facebook.


pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Time magazine commented that in 1978 the decisive force blocking much of the Carter and liberal agenda was “the startling increase in the influence of special-interest lobbies…. Partly because of this influence, Congress itself is becoming increasingly balky and unmanageable.” Target #1—Ralph Nader Consumer activist Ralph Nader was the first target to feel the potent new challenge of the corporate mutiny against the political status quo. For several years, Nader’s chief ambition, and the primary goal of the consumer movement, was to have Congress create a consumer protection agency that would give average American consumers an advocate within the federal bureaucracy and that would consolidate pro-consumer rule making in one place.

When Speaker O’Neill pushed the Carter consumer agency bill to a vote, most of the newly elected Democrats bolted against party discipline and rejected the bill. The business strategy worked. What the White House and Ralph Nader had expected to be an easy win turned into a disastrous defeat in the House. The idea of a powerful consumer agency was buried for the next three decades. Target #2—Organized Labor Having beaten President Carter and Ralph Nader on their first big showdown, the business forces were ready for a test of strength against a politically more organized and more formidable foe, organized labor. Since the early 1960s, the AFL-CIO labor federation had been itching to roll back the tough anti-union provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959, with little success, and to win more favorable conditions for union organizing.

With slogans calling for “Truth in Lending” and “Truth in Packaging,” consumer advocates demanded more aggressive action by federal watchdog agencies to protect the public from being unfairly exploited by unsafe products and unscrupulous lenders. Quality of life was key. People took U.S. economic growth for granted, and they wanted higher standards, better quality, and greater transparency from industry. More than any other single person, Ralph Nader put middle-class consumer activism on the political map. A public figure of no small ego, Nader knew how to work the press, the public, and politicians. His 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, captured public attention with the charge that America’s Big Three carmakers were responsible for many automobile accidents because they were marketing cars that were mechanically and technically unsafe.


pages: 376 words: 118,542

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, bank run, banking crisis, business cycle, Corn Laws, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, invisible hand, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The question is whether the arrangements that have been recommended or adopted to meet them, to supplement the market, are well devised for that purpose, or whether, as so often happens, the cure may not be worse than the disease. This question is particularly relevant today. A movement launched less than two decades ago by a series of events—the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Senator Estes Kefauver's investigation of the drug industry, and Ralph Nader's attack on the General Motors Corvair as "unsafe at any speed"—has led to a major change in both the extent and the character of government involvement in the marketplace—in the name of protecting the consumer. From the Army Corps of Engineers in 1824 to the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 to the Federal Railroad Administration in 1966, the agencies established by the federal government to regulate or supervise economic activity varied in scope, importance, and purpose, but almost all dealt with a single industry and had well-defined powers with respect to that industry.

Yet the public—or a large part of it—has been persuaded that private enterprises produce shoddy products, that we need ever vigilant government employees to keep business from foisting off unsafe, meretricious products at outrageous prices on ignorant, unsuspecting, vulnerable customers. That public relations campaign has succeeded so well that we are in the process of turning over to the kind of people who bring us our postal service the far more critical task of producing and distributing energy. Ralph Nader's attack on the Corvair, the most dramatic single episode in the campaign to discredit the products of private industry, exemplifies not only the effectiveness of that campaign but also how misleading it has been. Some ten years after Nader castigated the Corvair as unsafe at any speed, one of the agencies that was set up in response to the subsequent public outcry finally got around to testing the Corvair that started the whole thing.

How that power will be used and for what purposes depends far more on the people who are in the best position to get control of that power and what their purposes are than on the aims and objectives of the initial sponsors of the intervention. The Interstate Commerce Commission, dating from 1887, was the first agency established largely through a political crusade led by self-proclaimed representatives of the consumer—the Ralph Naders of the day. It has gone through several life cycles and has been exhaustively studied and analyzed. It provides an excellent example to illustrate the natural history of government intervention in the marketplace. The Food and Drug Administration, initially established in 1906 in response to the outcry that followed Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle, which exposed unsanitary conditions in the Chicago slaughtering and meat-packing houses, has also gone through several life cycles.


pages: 229 words: 67,869

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

4chan, Adam Curtis, AltaVista, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Clive Stafford Smith, cognitive dissonance, Desert Island Discs, different worldview, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, gentrification, Google Hangouts, Hacker News, illegal immigration, Jon Ronson, Menlo Park, PageRank, Ralph Nader, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, urban planning, WikiLeaks

What Max meant was that by the early 1990s he had become a campaigner to reform car safety laws, forcing manufacturers to carry out crash tests. ‘And when you think of what they did to Ralph Nader …’ * Ralph Nader. In 1961 a young man called Frederick Condon crashed his car. Back then sharp edges and no seat belts were considered stylish in car interiors. But the sharp edges turned Frederick Condon into a paraplegic. And so his friend - the lawyer Ralph Nader - began to lobby for mandatory seat-belt laws. Which was why General Motors hired prostitutes to follow him into stores - a Safeway supermarket and a pharmacy - to seduce and discredit him.

The incident proved to him, and later to Max, that the car industry was not above trying to shame its opponents into silence in its battle against safety do-gooders, and that people in high places were prepared to ingeniously deploy shaming as a means of moneymaking and social control. Maybe we only notice it happening when it’s done too audaciously or poorly, as it had been with Ralph Nader. * One Sunday morning in the spring of 2008 a PR man telephoned Max to ask him if he’d seen the News of the World. ‘He said, “There’s a big story about you.” So I went to the news stand.’ And as Max stared at the grainy photographs that millions of Britons were simultaneously staring at - a naked Max being bent over and spanked by women in German uniform - a line from Othello came into his head: I have lost my reputation.


pages: 384 words: 122,874

Swindled: the dark history of food fraud, from poisoned candy to counterfeit coffee by Bee Wilson

air freight, Corn Laws, food miles, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Louis Pasteur, new economy, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair

While the flavourists were happily composing their ersatz music, campaigners both in Britain and the United States had begun to rebel against the manipulation. Ralph Nader and the Chemical Feast In 1973, a witty food industry executive coined a new term: “Naderphobia,” named after the attorney and consumer activist Ralph Nader. The symptoms of the illness were a heightened sensitivity and an abandonment of normal behaviour among otherwise happygo-lucky businesspeople; in other words, a terror in the face of the damage that consumer activists could do to the food industry.136 Plenty of manufacturers were suffering from this malaise. Ralph Nader’s main target, famously, was the automobile industry. From 1965 onwards, Nader had attacked General Motors for producing cars that were “unsafe at any speed.”

In the process, the simple pleasures of good food may be forgotten. A more consumer-led approach has been to counter adulteration with information in the form of publicity and labelling. The press has always played a role in exposing food fraud, which has been heightened at various times through the work of muckrakers, from Upton Sinclair to Ralph Nader. In addition, we now have whole dictionaries of information about food at our disposal in the form of labelling. The right kind of publicity has been extremely effective in curbing the swindlers. After The Jungle, the meatpackers did clean up their act (though not to the extent that Sinclair wished).

Mitchell, John, Treatise on the Falsifications of Food and the Chemical Means Em ployed to Detect Them (London: Hippolyte Baillière, 1848). Monckton, H. A., A History of English Ale and Beer (London: Bodley Head, 1966). Murphy, Kevin C., “Pure Food, the Press and the Poison Squad: Evaluating Coverage of Harvey W. Wiley’s Hygienic Table,” 2001,” http://www.kevincmurphy.com, accessed September 2006. Nader, Ralph, The Ralph Nader Reader (London: Seven Stories Press, 2000). Nelson, Robert, L., “The Price of Bread: Poverty, Purchasing Power and the Victorian Labourer’s Standard of Living,” modified 25 December 2005, http://www .victorianweb.org. Nestle, Marion, Food Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). ———, What to Eat (New York: North Point Press, 2006).


pages: 306 words: 78,893

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

We First Worlders have to be very careful here, since the initial European rise to wealth depended largely on the colonies, and while we can argue about the exact contribution of neocolonialism to the maintenance of First World privilege, it's certainly greater than zero. It's embarrassing to hear Ralph Nader and his associated fair-trade campaigners describe NAFTA and the World Trade Organization as threats to U.S. sovereignty, echoing the rhetoric of Pat Buchanan. Washington has abused the sovereignty of scores of nations over the decades, while refrising to observe decisions of global bodies Hke the World Court.

Export-oriented development has offered very Uttle in the way of real economic and social development for the poor countries who've been offered no other outlet. But does that mean trade itself is bad? At a debate at Seattle's Town Hall during WTO week 1999, then—Undersecretary of Commerce for International Affairs David Aaron asked Ralph Nader how a consumer advocate could support restricting trade, since that would restrict choice and drive up prices. Nader had a hard time coming up with a good answer, sputtering and saying at one point that restricting trade would promote national self-sufficiency. Why national self-sufficiency is such a worthy goal he didn't say, but it seems Hke a retentive and unfriendly goal.

Esprit took ten years to pay off the back wages the government ordered them to pay (Udesky 1994). The IFG's kickoff conference's opening plenary, held in New York's Riverside Church, assembled a long night's worth of speakers—Maude Barlow (of the Council of Canadians), John Cavanagh (Institute for Pohcy Studies), Barbara Dudley (Greenpeace), David Korten (author), Ralph Nader (who needs no parenthetical ID), Carl Pope (Sierra Club), andVandana Shiva (Third World Network). The MC was adman Jerry Mander, who believes that TV, which he hates, will soon implode of its own contradictions. Mander was on the board of El Bosque and is the globalization program director for Tompkins' Foundation for Deep Ecology (FDE), whose funding was acknowledged, along with that of the Goldsmith Foundation.


Propaganda and the Public Mind by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, deindustrialization, digital divide, European colonialism, experimental subject, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, interchangeable parts, language acquisition, liberation theology, Martin Wolf, one-state solution, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, Washington Consensus

So it’s probably more important to vote for a representative to Congress than for president and similarly down the line. Public pressures are usually greater at the lower end, although private pressures are also greater at the lower end, so it’s a mixed story. Ralph Nader has announced his candidacy for the presidency on the Green Party ticket. Would that be something that would attract you? It’s a very tricky issue. You have to try to calculate extremely unpredictable and kind of low-order choices. A vote for Ralph Nader is going to be a protest vote. Everybody knows that. Is it advanta­geous to do that or to vote for a marginally better candidate who has a chance to win? The New Party had come up with a very sound proposal for running fusion candidates.

I can sort of conjure up something that might have been going on in their editorial offices, but your guess is as good as mine. The term anarchist has always had a very weird meaning in elite circles. For example, there was a small article in the Boston Globe the other day about how all these anarchists are organizing these protests.10 Who are the anarchists? Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen, labor organizations, and others. There will be some people around who will call themselves anarchists, whatever that means. But from the elite point of view, you want to focus on something that you can denounce in some fashion as irrational. That’s the analogue to Thomas Friedman calling them flat-earthers.

If we’re serious, we know we could be wrong. Anyone who’s too confident about their beliefs on topics like this is in serious trouble. So where there are differences of opinion, there may well be reason for self-questioning, too. You just make your choices. There’s no formula for it. So you wouldn’t subscribe to the criticisms of Ralph Nader for joining with Pat Buchanan in opposing the WTO or the China trade bill? I wouldn’t. If it was being on the same platform, what do you mean joining with him? Rhetorically... That’s irrelevant. That’s a point that Trotsky made years ago when he was accused of being a fascist because he was criticizing Stalinism in the same terms that the fascists were.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

This New Left revolt against excessive regulation is apparent in Paul Goodman’s cri de coeur, Growing Up Absurd; in the 1962 Port Huron Statement that defined the early goals of the New Left; in the rhetoric that Mario Savio used to frame the ambitions of Berkeley’s 1964 Free Speech movement, an early moment of New Left mass protest; in the early cybernetics movement that inspired the likes of Stewart Brand and Steve Jobs to associate the creation of the personal computer with the quest for individual freedom; and in the determination of Ralph Nader and his political allies to “free” the consumer from repressive corporate and government elites. Freeing the individual and his or her consciousness from the grip of large, stultifying institutions; privileging disruption over order; celebrating cosmopolitanism—and multiculturalism—and the unexpected sorts of mixing and hybridities that emerge under these regimes: All of these beliefs, each of which marinated for years in the political and culture milieux inspired by the New Left, furthered neoliberal aspirations and helped to make it into a hegemonic ideological force.9 Emphasizing the influence of classical liberalism on neoliberalism (and showing how the emancipatory elements of the former resurfaced in the latter) is one way in which this book’s account of neoliberalism is distinctive.

Unlike economist Alan Greenspan, who began a long public career as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Gerald Ford, he did not grow up entranced by the novels of Ayn Rand. But Carter did have a muse of his own who filled his ears with thoughts about the need to rethink the relationship between government and the economy. This muse was left-leaning. His name was Ralph Nader. Nader and Carter had first met in the 1960s when Nader gained national visibility with his attack on automobile manufacturers for their indifference to the safety of the cars they were selling. Carter had been attempting unsuccessfully to implement Nader-like policies of consumer protection in the state of Georgia.

Part of it dated back to the 1960s, when Great Society and New Left activists alike had tilted against the statism of the New Deal order. Both the attacks by Community Action Programs on big city machines and the New Left’s antipathy to bureaucracy (private and public) had encouraged Democratic Party interest in market-based social policies.40 Ralph Nader and his supporters had embraced the “capture thesis” developed by political scientists, the phrase referring to corporate interests “capturing” the very government agencies meant to regulate their behavior. Rather than battling to free government regulatory bodies from corporate control, many Naderites chose to focus instead on enhancing “consumer sovereignty.”


pages: 1,157 words: 379,558

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris by Richard Kluger

air freight, Albert Einstein, book value, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, family office, feminist movement, full employment, ghettoisation, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, junk bonds, medical malpractice, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, power law, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, trade route, transaction costs, traveling salesman, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty

Northern liberals partial to government efforts to ameliorate pressing social problems found themselves susceptible to tobacco-state congressmen willing to trade off their votes on measures they would ordinarily oppose but were dear to liberal hearts—like urban renewal funding—in return for keeping government regulators away from the cigarette business. As consumer advocate Ralph Nader commented, “Any group of really cohesive congressmen can have disproportionate power like the tobacco bloc … [and become] a proverbial battering ram, saying in effect to their colleagues, ‘This is our particular bailiwick, and if you ever want us to defer to you someday, you’d better go along with us on this issue.’”

As a frequent public speaker and expert witness before Congress, he had a gift for dramatizing the antismoking case and made telling use of props of his own devising, like an ashtray he distributed to congressional offices that was topped by a plastic model of a pair of human lungs, one of which turned black when it had absorbed enough cigarette smoke. But ASH served in large part as a vehicle for Banzhaf, and his unwillingness to share the spotlight and build an organization would ultimately keep him from becoming what he liked to bill himself as in the early days of the antismoking movement—“the Ralph Nader of the cigarette industry.” IV AMERICAN TOBACCO, then ranking second in sales in its industry, and last-place Philip Morris faced different challenges in the late ’Sixties. American, under its new president, ex-salesman Barney Walker, vowed to reverse a seven-year slippage in market share by dramatically altering its product mix, which was 90 percent in unfiltered brands when Walker took over in 1963.

In regular contact for several years with staff members at the National Clearinghouse on Smoking and Health and its director, Daniel Horn, Pertschuk was determined that the cigarette makers would not escape serious regulation as they had four years earlier. His hand was notably strengthened by the rising recognition in Congress that legislation backing consumer interests was becoming good politics, as Magnuson’s rejuvenated career and the emergence of Ralph Nader as a serious and widely admired independent consumer advocate were demonstrating. To slow the momentum of the pro-industry bill due from the House Committee, Pertschuk worked behind the scenes to introduce a telling piece of testimony that had fallen into his lap and argued for congressional intervention in television advertising.


pages: 486 words: 139,713

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, climate change refugee, colonial rule, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jones Act, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Tragedy of the Commons, white flight, white picket fence

So I owe my sincerest thanks to Kate Andrews, Fran Aramaki, Patricia Atkinson, Russell Baillie, Gill Baron, Marcy Bidney, Kenny Brown, Patricia Calhoun, Brett Chapman, Stephen Corry, Robert Cottrell, Robin Darwall-Smith, Uri Davis, Philip Deloria, Chris Dillon, Trent Duffy, Judge Caren Fox, David Freese, Donna Fujii, Charles Geisler, Peter Godwin, Jan deGraeve, Jenny Hansell, Robert Horneyold-Strickland, Jamie Howard, Wilson Isaac, Kristen Iversen, Ian Jack, Kirk Johnson, Miranda Johnson, Judy Joseph, Moira Kelly, Mariia Kravchenko, Barbara Lauriat, David Lazan, Robert Lee, Michael Levien, Rebecca Long, J T Moore, Willy van der Most, Ralph Nader, David Neiwert, Henk Pruntel, Hugh Raven, Wendy Reid, Jeanne Ryckmans, Salman Abu Sitta, Steve Small, Jim Smith, Jonathan Steffert, Joanna Storie, Mick Strack, Melanie Sturm, Toni Tack, Iain Thornber, Neal Ulevich, Paul Vercoe, Juliet Walker, Maggie Wells, Michael Wigan, Rick Wilcox, Michael Williams, Angus Winchester (not my son, though by coincidence I have one of that very name), and the indefatigable Rupert Winchester, who kindly helps me with all my books, and most assuredly is my son.

The Treaty of Waitangi. Wellington. Bridget Williams Books. 2017. Baker, Alan R. and Gideon Biger (eds.). Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective: Essays on the Meanings of Some Places in the Past. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1992. Berkman, Richard L. and W. Kip Viscusi. Damming the West: Ralph Nader’s Study Group Report on the Bureau of Reclamation. New York. Grossman. 1973. Berry, Wendell. The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural. Berkeley, CA. Counterpoint. 1981. Bowes, John P. Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal. Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 2016.

Kairuri: The Measurer of Land. Petone, New Zealand. Highgate. 1988. Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Boston. Houghton Mifflin. 2006. Fairlie, Simon et al. (eds.). The Land. Bridport, Dorset. March 2006–present. Fellmeth, Robert C. Politics of Land: Ralph Nader’s Study Group Report on Land Use in California. New York. Grossman. 1973. Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. London. Allen Lane. 2013. Ferrari, Marco, et al. A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change. New York. Columbia Books on Architecture. 2018. Foreman, Grant.


pages: 273 words: 34,920

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values by Sharon Beder

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, junk bonds, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Powell Memorandum, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, spread of share-ownership, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Torches of Freedom, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, young professional

.’; • engaging in specially selected court cases to support business interests; • mobilizing stockholders, perhaps through establishment of a national organization with enough corporate backing – ’muscle’ – to be influential, and utilizing shareholder reports and magazines ‘far more effectively as educational media’ aimed at enlisting their political support; • attacking critics of the system, such as Ralph Nader and Herbert Marcuse, and penalizing those who oppose free enterprise. Powell’s memorandum was circulated to members but the Chamber of Commerce decided it was unwilling to take the lead in such a campaign. Although the memo was confidential, it was leaked to the media and publicized when Powell was appointed by President Richard Nixon to the Supreme Court, as evidence of his inability to be objective.

He claims his book is ‘making its way onto both liberal and conservative agendas, as well as the platforms of think tanks, philanthropic foundations, environmental groups, and international banks, among many other organizations’. Gates’ second book, Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street from Wall Street – a Populist Vision for the 21st Century (2000), makes a similar argument, and has been endorsed by people as diverse as Klaus Schwab, president of the World Economic Forum, and consumer rights’ advocate Ralph Nader.67 The European Commission is also keen to encourage shareholder democracy, and to this end is seeking to harmonize corporate government codes in Europe to make it easier for lay people to invest. Frits Bolkestein, European commissioner for the internal market, said in 2002: ‘I want to have a European market in shares, a shareholder democracy, one share one vote.’

Board members are then beholden to the CEO for their positions.37 Increasingly, companies have adopted staggered boards, with only one-third of the seats filled each year, so that any organized opposition amongst shareholders cannot control the board after a single vote. 198 FREE MARKET MISSIONARIES When it comes to election of the board of directors, any shareholder wishing to propose alternative candidates has to pay the expense of mailing proxy forms and campaign literature to many thousands of shareholders. In contrast, company management can use company funds to hire firms that specialize in contacting shareholders personally and persuading them to send in their proxies for a particular result. Ralph Nader and Joel Seligman noted in 1983: ‘company insiders have so totally dominated the proxy machinery that corporate elections have come to resemble the Soviet Union’s “communist ballot,” on which only one slate of candidates appears’.38 The people nominated by CEOs for board membership tend to be senior executives of other companies (sometimes retired), many with only nominal shareholdings in the company themselves.39 Lewis Braham writes in Business Week: Americans like to believe we have shareholder democracy.


pages: 278 words: 82,069

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, William Greider

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Exxon Valdez, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, It's morning again in America, John Meriwether, junk bonds, kremlinology, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, payday loans, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

Stiglitiz 191 View from Asia by Walden Bello 196 Born-Again Democracy by William Greider 199 The Suicide Solution by Barbara Ehrenreich 207 The Great Depression II by Nicholas von Hoffman 210 We’re All Minskyites Now by Robert Pollin 213 The Bailout: Bush’s Final Pillage by Naomi Klein 217 Part Four: The Road to Recovery How to Fix Our Broken Economy by Jeffrey Madrick 225 Ending Plutocracy: A 12-Step Program by Sarah Anderson and Sam Pizzigati 234 Trust but Verify by James K. Galbraith and William K. Black 244 King George and Comrade Paulson by Ralph Nader 247 A Big Government Bailout by Howard Zinn 249 Water the Roots by Rev. Jesse L. Jackson 253 America Needs a New New Deal by Katrina vanden Heuvel and Eric Schlosser 255 What Do We Want? An Emergency Town Hall Featuring William Greider, Francis Fox Piven, Doug Henwood, Arun Gupta and Naomi Klein.

Paul Krugman’s essays have the snappy smartness his followers have come to expect, but for me the best interpretations of the marketplace and the so-called New Economy come from Robert Pollin, a University of Massachusetts professor of economics, who for one thing helps strip the populist mask from Bill Clinton; Doug Henwood, whose tart humor keeps one awake even when he discusses Wagnerian topics, as in the chapter on globalization, where he calls Ralph Nader “a special case, a man who seems proud of his (locally produced) hair shirt”; Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize–winning economist who writes with admirable candor about the sellouts of some of his colleagues in the Clinton years; and Roger Lowenstein, a master (as I first learned from his book When Genius Failed) at making our financial pi-rates as interesting as those who sailed with Long John Silver.

He has also been honored by TransAfrica Forum, was a recipient of the prestigious Anisfield Wolf Award, and served as editor for The Best American Short Stories of 2003. Bobbi Murray lives in Los Angeles and writes frequently on economic justice issues. She has written for The Nation, Los Angeles Magazine, the LA Times, LA Weekly, AlterNet and others. Ralph Nader, the longtime consumer advocate, was an independent candidate for president in 2008. He has been named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential Americans in the Twentieth Century. Garrett Ordower is an investigative journalist based in New York. His work has appeared in The Nation, Chicago’s Daily Herald and the Beacon News.


pages: 472 words: 80,835

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World by David Kerrigan

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, commoditize, computer vision, congestion charging, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Ford Model T, future of work, General Motors Futurama, hype cycle, invention of the wheel, Just-in-time delivery, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Marchetti’s constant, Mars Rover, megacity, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nash equilibrium, New Urbanism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Sam Peltzman, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, warehouse robotics, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In 1896 there were only four cars registered in all the United States. Two of them collided with each other in St. Louis. Although the high death toll from widespread car ownership had been the norm decades, it was really the 1960s that saw the first concerted efforts towards improving safety. Ralph Nader’s seminal book, “Unsafe at Any Speed”, exposed the lack of interest in safety matters among major automobile manufacturers. Bridget Driscoll (1851–17 August 1896) has the unenviable position in history of being the first pedestrian victim of an automobile collision in Great Britain. Driscoll was struck by an automobile belonging to the Anglo-French Motor Carriage Company that was giving demonstration rides.

However, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents estimate over half a million people had since been killed on UK roads by 2010. “For over half a century, the automobile has brought death, injury and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.” Page 1, Unsafe at Any Speed [149] Published in November 1965, the first sentence of this landmark book from attorney Ralph Nader did not mince words. The rest of the book continued in the same vein decrying the gap between existing design and attainable safety and the auto industry’s ignoring of the moral imperative to keep people safer. Some 50 years after the widespread emergence of cars, the spotlight was now placed for the first time on the role of Government in defining safety standards in the automotive industry. 1966 saw the US congress pass the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Act and created the National Highway Traffic Safety Authority (NHTSA) under the auspices of the Department of Transport (DoT).

D=NHTSA-2016-0090-1115 [124] https://www.mckinsey.de/files/automotive_revolution_perspective_towards_2030.pdf [125] http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/SELFDRIVING-SUPPLIERS/010040KW194/index.html [126] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-merging-tech-and-cars/ [127] http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/09/ford-aims-for-self-driving-car-with-no-gas-pedal-no-steering-wheel-in-5-years-ceo-says.html [128] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-10/ford-investing-1-billion-in-ex-google-uber-engineers-startup [129] https://medium.com/@ford/building-fords-next-generation-autonomous-development-vehicle-82a6160a7965#.uojw6ib99 [130] http://fortune.com/self-driving-cars-silicon-valley-detroit/ [131] http://mashable.com/2015/10/22/cadillac-autonomous-driving/#WKolOgN4hgqS [132] http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/16/rolls-royce-ditches-the-chauffeur-in-this-futuristic-concept-car.html [133] https://www.slideshare.net/Altimeter/the-race-to-2021-the-state-of-autonomous-vehicles-and-a-whos-who-of-industry-drivers [134] https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverwyman/2017/05/17/google-racks-up-more-patents-than-most-automakers-on-connected-and-self-driving-cars/#15cf3e8041ef [135] http://www.theicct.org/blogs/staff/second-million-electric-vehicles [136] http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics [137] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812013 [138] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812348 [139] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/opinion/a-public-health-crisis-that-we-can-fix.html [140] http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/12-month-estimates.pdf [141] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm [142] http://newsroom.aaa.com/2016/07/nearly-80-percent-of-drivers-express-significant-anger-aggression-or-road-rage/ [143] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate [144] http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2011/07/27/how-many-times-will-you-crash-your-car/ [145] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/traffic-fatalities-sharply-2015 [146] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jensen/2016/10/05/going-from-35092-to-zero-a-plan-to-end-roadway-fatalities-auto-makers-are-invited-to-join/#64ed5a294cb8 [147] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812319 [148] http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/intersection/ [149] Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed, November 1965 [150] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/new-nhtsa-study-shows-motor-vehicle-crashes-have-871-billion-economic-and-societal [151] http://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/2011_AAA_CrashvCongUpd.pdf [152] Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation, Edward Humes, 2016 [153] https://theforum.sph.harvard.edu/events/asleep-at-the-wheel/ [154] http://bit.ly/1PQM6Gu [155] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/science/its-no-accident-advocates-want-to-speak-of-car-crashes-instead.html?


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

As Zukin put it, planners are “a relatively powerless group compared to developers who build, and banks and insurance companies who finance the building that rips out a city’s heart.”29 Jacobs supported efforts to “unslum” urban communities and the very aesthetic she prized of “small blocks, cobblestone streets, mixed-uses, local character” has been adopted as “the gentrifiers’ ideal.”30 Greenwich Village may have been maintained for people like Jacobs, but the failure of campaigns against urban highways to contend with larger economic forces did not stop the suburban trend, and eventually caused the working class to be forced out of downtown neighborhoods by rising prices, robbing them of the very cultural diversity Jacobs sought to preserve. While Jacobs’s campaign in New York City was successful, most of the highways proposed elsewhere in the United States were built as planned. Around the same time as people were trying to stifle highway projects, Ralph Nader was also gaining attention as a consumer advocate with a focus on the automobile. In his 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader exposed the automotive industry’s disregard for safety, which included ignoring clear safety hazards, investing more in vehicle styling than safety features, and efforts to blame drivers for harms that could have been avoided through better practices on the part of the automakers.

There have been a growing number of incidents involving Autopilot—some of which, tragically, have even taken lives—and instead of addressing the concerns with the system or taking additional safety precautions, Musk has pushed forward, even allowing Tesla drivers to use beta software versions on public roads, placing other drivers and pedestrians at risk. In a sensible world, regulators would have acted to put the brakes on Tesla’s deployment of a driving system that is not ready to be used by the public. But only now, after years of crashes and vocal demands for action by a growing chorus of people, including safety advocate Ralph Nader, does it appear that the technology will finally undergo regulatory scrutiny. As of April 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) had opened twenty-eight investigations into Tesla vehicle crashes—twenty-four of which were still active—and the NTSB had opened nine investigations of its own.24 In those crashes, Autopilot-enabled Tesla vehicles slammed into transport trucks, fire engines, police cars, trees, medians, and more, killing and injuring their passengers in the process.

In challenging this reality, we cannot simply focus on the technology—though we must have solid critiques of how it works and who it serves as we try to halt its deployment. We must also consider how the need for capital accumulation is driving the change, and how even if we regulate some technologies and stop others, the direction of travel will continue toward tech’s vision of the city. Think back to Jane Jacobs and Ralph Nader. Jacobs and those inspired by her work stopped some freeways from being built, while Nader and his allies undoubtedly made cars safer, saving many lives in the process. But the expansion of suburbs and the growth of automobile dependence continued with harmful consequences. We need cities that are built for their residents, that improve their quality of life, and that consider their needs instead of opening the floodgates to technologies and gimmicks thought up by billionaires who have a very different experience of the city than most people.


The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics by Rod Hill, Anthony Myatt

American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biodiversity loss, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, electricity market, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, failed state, financial innovation, full employment, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, positional goods, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, publication bias, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, sugar pill, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, union organizing, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

Think, for example, of the investments some companies make in a reputation for quality, or those that offer real guarantees and warranties to distinguish their higher-quality products from those of competitors. None of these commonplace features of the business world has a place in the textbook world of perfect information. In the United States, Ralph Nader has spent a lifetime improving the odds for consumers through organizing citizen and consumer groups and pressing Questions for your professor: Isn’t incomplete and asymmetric information an important problem for consumers? Does the default assumption in the textbook of complete and perfect information divert attention away from these problems?

‘Think tanks’ funded by corporations and foundations established by the very wealthy churn out policy papers guaranteed to reach the desired conclusions; they provide talking heads for television and op-eds for the newspapers.10 Capital cities swarm with business lobbyists. In Washington, a city Ralph Nader refers to as ‘corporate occupied territory’, registered lobbyists outnumber members of Congress by sixty-five to one and spend $200 million a month to advance their clients’ interests (Moyers 2006). The recent battle over healthcare reform in the United States saw the industry (largely health insurance and pharmaceutical corporations) employ six lobbyists for every member of Congress, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to block competition from public health insurance and other reforms.

Some spending 158 Questions for your professor: Do consumption externalities exist? If so, why doesn’t the textbook mention them? Air pollution ‘Unfortunately, the will of our elected officials to curb air pollution and the in­ difference of corporate polluters to the silent cumulative violence they inflict on our people through air pollution persists.’ Ralph Nader (2004b: 168) The burning of fossil fuels creates carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons and fine particulate matter. Breathing these invisible pollutants and other pollutants that form from them (such as ozone) damages the interior of the lungs and directly influences respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses and lung cancers (Davis 2002: 70).


pages: 1,009 words: 329,520

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, Donald Trump, East Village, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, interest rate swap, intermodal, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short squeeze, SoftBank, stock buybacks, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

Felix was proud to be solely an adviser whose wisdom was sought out internationally for cogent, insightful advice on mergers and acquisitions: nothing more, nothing less--and not a trace of apology for not being the top underwriter of junk bonds (a product he railed against) or equity offerings. No frustration with not being a private-equity investor. The Big Boys, a 1986 book by Ralph Nader and William Taylor, referred to Felix as "the interstitial man," someone who gets in the middle of things. Raymond Troubh, a former Lazard partner, was one of many people quoted by Nader and Taylor about Felix. "Felix is enveloping the world," Troubh confided. "He is sort of the Henry Kissinger of the financial arena.

While those watching the developments closely had no idea that Nixon had personally intervened, questions began to be raised almost immediately about what had really transpired to get McLaren and Kleindienst to change course so radically and to agree to a settlement that allowed ITT to keep the Hartford. Then, on August 23, Justice filed the antitrust settlement documents in court, beginning a mandatory thirty-day public review period. Reuben Robertson, a brilliant young lawyer who had been working with Ralph Nader from the start to block the ITT-Hartford merger, wrote McLaren on September 21 objecting to the antitrust settlement: "We wish to object most strongly to the veil of secrecy that has been drawn over the Antitrust Division since announcement of the decree, which has made full evaluation of the settlement...a virtual impossibility."

If by late 1974 Felix had begun the process of public rehabilitation, it was equally true that there was hardly a government entity that had not investigated, or itself been the subject of an investigation into, Felix's and Lazard's role in ITT's acquisition of the Hartford. The insurance commissioner of Connecticut had ruled twice. The federal courts in Connecticut had ruled repeatedly on the matter of ITT and antitrust. The state courts in Connecticut had ruled on Ralph Nader's lawsuits. The House of Representatives had conducted hearings into boxes of purloined ITT documents. The Senate Judiciary Committee had dredged up the whole sordid affair as part of the Kleindienst confirmation hearings. The Justice Department had settled antitrust claims against ITT after intervention from Nixon, Kleindienst, and Felix.


pages: 309 words: 95,495

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe by Greg Ip

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, air freight, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double helix, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global supply chain, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, savings glut, scientific management, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, value at risk, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

The federal government had begun to assert its oversight over the economy and the environment during the Progressive Era, and in the 1960s, that oversight expanded significantly, most noticeably onto the highways. The catalyst was the publication in 1965 of Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile by Ralph Nader. Nader had worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the Department of Labor, and his book exposed how the auto manufacturing industry had knowingly built dangerous features into their cars, such as chrome on the dashboard that reflected sun into drivers’ eyes and hood ornaments that were unnecessarily dangerous to pedestrians.

When the FAA studied the proposal, it concluded that the measure would prevent five aviation deaths over a decade. But raising the cost of a flight would prompt many families to drive rather than fly, causing an additional eighty-two road deaths. One congressman took the FAA to task for its “ghoulish cost/benefit ratio.” So did Ralph Nader. The FAA’s decision, he and a coauthor wrote, “protects theoretical children driving in cars at the expense of real flesh-and-blood infants whose safety is unquestionably compromised when flown as a lap-baby.” To date, the FAA has remained steadfast in its refusal to require child seats, even while recommending that parents use them.

Grossman, “Effects and Costs of Requiring Child-restraint Systems for Young Children Traveling on Commercial Airplanes,” Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine 157 (2003): 969–974. 40 in an editorial: http://rds.epi-ucsf.org/ticr/syllabus/courses/4/2012/11/29/Lecture/readings/airplane%20seats%20editorial%20101303.pdf. David Bishai, “Hearts and Minds and Child Restraints on Airplanes,” Archives of Pediatric Adoleschent Medicine 157 (2003): 953–954. 41 The FAA’s decision: Ralph Nader and Wesley Smith, Collision Course: The Truth about Airline Safety (Blue Ridge Summit, Pa.: TAB, 1994). 42 added travel time: Steven A. Morrison and Clifford Winston, “Delayed! U.S. Aviation Infrastructure Policy at a Crossroads,” in Aviation Infrastructure Performance: A Study in Comparative Political Economy, Clifford Winston and Gines de Rus, eds.


The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert H. Frank

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deliberate practice, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gary Kildall, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, smart grid, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy

When a federal agency proposes a regulation of this sort, the public and other affected parties have an interval of time, usually sixty days, to comment on it. Shortly after the CAB announced its proposal, a passionate brief was filed by the Aviation Consumer Action Project (ACAP), a group founded by Ralph Nader in Washington, D.C. ACAP’s ostensible mission is to protect airline passengers from being exploited by air carriers. In its filing, it objected that if the CAB adopted its proposal, the burden of waiting for the next available flight would fall disproportionately on the poor. As in other arenas, ACAP feared, the rich would be empowered to buy their way out of the hassles of life, while the poor were forced to endure them.

With careful attention to design details, virtually every public policy decision that does not reflect what people are willing to pay for the alternatives at issue can be transformed to produce a better outcome for everyone involved. Those who resist such changes would do well to imagine themselves in the role of Ralph Nader waving a court injunction that would block a low-income passenger from volunteering to accept compensation for agreeing to take a later flight. Why Efficient Policies Are Often Impossible without Income Transfers Conservatives, through their opposition to income transfers, have been an even bigger obstacle to the adoption of efficient public policies.

On the contrary, they understand that when valuable resources, such as the air we breathe, are free, people tend to use them inefficiently. This tax actually makes it possible for you to purchase more of the things you value. If libertarian antitax rhetoric had blocked implementation of this tax, it would have been like Ralph Nader’s Aviation Consumer Action Project having succeeded in its effort to block airlines from offering compensation to volunteers who relinquished their seats on overbooked flights. As discussed in chapter 7, using the price system to allocate scarce resources makes the economic pie larger, whether the resources in question are seats on an overbooked flight or air currents with limited capacity to disperse SO2.


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Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges, Joe Sacco

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, dumpster diving, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, food desert, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban decay, wage slave, white flight, women in the workforce

And though many a conservative think-tanker could try to punch holes in its arguments no one can remain unmoved or unsettled by its brilliantly documented reportage from the precipice of a society that prefers to turn a blind eye to its nightmarish underside.” —The Times (Saturday Review) “[B]rilliant combination of prose and graphic comics.” —Ralph Nader “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is as moving a portrait of poverty and as compelling a call to action as Michael Harrington’s ‘The Other America,’ published in 1962.” —Boston Globe “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is a gripping and thoroughly researched polemic.” —Grantland “[A] growling indictment of corporate America.”

They got a four-day permit in the fall of 2011 and used the time to create an infrastructure—a medic tent, a kitchen, a legal station, and a media center—that would be there if the permit was not extended. The National Park Service did grant them an extended permit, but finally ordered the encampment shut down at the end of January 2012. “We do have a grand strategy,” says Zeese, who was the spokesman for Ralph Nader’s 2004 presidential campaign. “Nonviolent movements shift power by attacking the columns that hold the power structure in place. Those columns are the military, police, media, business, workers, youth, faith groups, NGOs, and civil servants. Every time we deal with the police, we have that in mind.

Anton also transcribed many hours of transcriptions, as did Chris Hohmuth and my son Thomas. Robert Scheer, who sets the gold standard for journalism and commentary, and Zuade Kaufmann, who publishes the Web magazine Truthdig, where I write a weekly column, along with the talented editor Tom Caswell, give me a weekly outlet and unqualified support. I would like to thank Ralph Nader, who knows more about corporate power and has been fighting corporations longer and more effectively than any other American, for his wisdom and friendship, along with Kevin Zeese, Margaret Flowers, Steve Kinzer, Peter Scheer, Kasia Anderson, Ann and Walter Pincus, Maria-Christina Keller, Lauren B.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

In consequence, the political and economic landscape of the United States looked very different by the 1970s than in the early decades of the twentieth century. Gone was the overwhelming political and economic clout of mega-businesses, such as the Carnegie Steel Company and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Emblematic of these changes was the consumer protection activism led by Ralph Nader, whose book Unsafe at Any Speed, published in 1965, was a manifesto for keeping corporations accountable. In this instance, activism focused on automobile manufacturers, although Nader’s target was all misbehaviors by business, especially big business. Several iconic government regulations resulted from consumer activism.

Take it one step further, and you get “trickle-down economics,” a term identified today with President Ronald Reagan’s economic policies in the 1980s, including the idea of cutting taxes on the very rich: when the rich face lower taxes, they will invest more, increasing productivity and benefiting everybody in society. Applying this perspective to regulation leads to conclusions that are diametrically opposed to the ideas that energized Ralph Nader and other consumer activists. According to this free-market view, if the market economy is working well, regulation is at best unnecessary. If incumbent firms are marketing unsafe or low-quality products, consumers will be upset, and this creates an opportunity for other companies or new entrants to offer better alternatives, to which consumers will enthusiastically switch.

The previous decades had witnessed stinging criticisms of government regulations and more voices in favor of the market mechanism. Nevertheless, the impact of the Friedman doctrine is hard to exaggerate. At one fell swoop, it crystallized a new vision in which big businesses that made money were heroes, not the villains that Ralph Nader and his allies painted them as. It also gave business executives a clear mandate: raise profits. The doctrine also received support from a different angle. Another economist, Michael Jensen, argued that managers of publicly listed corporations were not sufficiently committed to their shareholders and were instead pursuing projects that glorified themselves or built wasteful empires.


pages: 142 words: 47,993

The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell

Alan Greenspan, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, financial independence, Michael Milken, Oklahoma City bombing, Ralph Nader, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, slashdot, stem cell, Upton Sinclair, white picket fence

The litany closed like an old-fashioned oration. Thus saith the talk show host, “I believe I have voted for both Democrats and Republicans. Am I either one? Absolutely not. Ladies and gentlemen, I am an American.” At which point, I, in my living room, clapped. One of the items on the Green Party candidate Ralph Nader’s platform is election day voter registration. Theoretically, I support anything that increases voter turnout. On the other hand, what’s easier than filling out a card with your address on it four weeks before the election? Christ, this thing’s been going on for over a year now. Who are these lazy idiots who can’t pay attention more than five minutes before they cast their votes?

., into national public life but, after many months of car pools, walking, and court fights against bus segregation, got the separate but equal doctrine declared illegal once and for all. It’s not just people on the right like Katherine Harris and Ted Nugent who seem especially silly being likened to Parks. I first cringed at this analogy trend at the lefty Ralph Nader’s October 2000 campaign rally in Madison Square Garden. Ever sit in a coliseum full of people who think they’re heroes? I was surrounded by thousands of well-meaning, well-fed white kids who loved it when the filmmaker Michael Moore told them they should, like Rosa Parks, stand up to power, by which I think he meant vote for Nader so he could qualify for federal matching funds.


pages: 391 words: 22,799

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton

affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, estate planning, eternal september, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invisible hand, liberation theology, longitudinal study, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, price anchoring, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, walkable city, Washington Consensus, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Works Progress Administration

In 1973, Oklahoma Christian College (now University) had commissioned a Gallup poll on the political orientation of college students. The results con�firmed their worst fears. 151 TO SERVE GOD AND WAL - �M ART Asked to rank professional fields by their ethical standards, students placed businessmen near the bottom. Consumer activist Ralph Nader won the honors in individual esteem, and the United Nations in the institutional category; the Republican Party and the CIA were last. Almost half favored nationalizing the oil industry. Moreover, while one-�third of€ freshmen in the survey iden�ti�fied themselves as leftists, more than half of seniors did so.

Increased scrutiny and new regulatory agencies—the Environmental Protection Agency, the 181 TO SERVE GOD AND WAL - Â�M ART Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission—meant that in the span of a few short years, the nation now speciÂ�fied standards for evÂ�ery stage of the life cycle of consumer goods, from the effluÂ�ents released in their production to their packaging to the highways they moved over and the credit available for purchasing them.33 Ralph Nader troubled the sleep of many executives with proposals like the 1976 manifesto Taming the Giant Corporation, which advocated an employee bill of rights and community involvement in corporate decision-Â�making. Though Nader’s initiatives lacked the activist muscle to present a real threat, they kept the legislative alternatives to laissez-Â�faire in sight.34 The free-Â�market economist Milton Friedman visited Harding College in the winter of 1973 to ask urgently “Can we halt Leviathan?”

And though Wal-Â�Mart and its fellow serÂ�vice providers quickly realized SIFE’s potential for recruiting, screening, and training new employees, the orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tion first entered corporate funding streams through PR departments concerned with speÂ�cific image issues. Accordingly, SIFE addressed not Karl Marx or Rosa Luxemburg but Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader, and it did so in the idiom of Christian free enterprise. With Shewmaker chairing the SIFE board and the energetic Rohrs at€the helm, the orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tion kept SIFE’s potential in front of its friends. Missouri governor John Ashcroft, a member of Leaders of the Ozarks, proclaimed a statewide “Free Enterprise Week,” as did his Arkansas counterpart, Bill Clinton.41 In 1985, the Leaders hosted an “Ozarks 201 TO SERVE GOD AND WAL - Â�M ART Against Government Waste” fundraiser for SIFE featuring chemical magnate J.


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Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

See, for example, Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American 105 Inger 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 106 L. Sto l e Women (New York: Doubleday, 1994), first published by Crown Publishers in 1991; Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women (New York: Doubleday, 1994), first published by William Morrow in 1991. See, for example, Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1965); Ralph Nader, ed., The Consumer and Corporate Accountability (New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Atlanta: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). For an excellent discussion of the rise of commercial mass media, see Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).

By focusing on advertising’s excesses rather than its lacking consumer information, this form of criticism posed, and still poses, a threat to Madison Avenue that is very limited by comparison with the challenges mounted during the 1930s. Nevertheless, the 1960s witnessed a partial rebirth of the consumer movement. Unlike their 1930s counterparts, however, the new consumer advocates did not make advertising their primary focus. Led by Ralph Nader, the new movement was mostly concerned with faulty production practices, including manufacturers’ negligent attitudes toward consumers’ safety.60 When Nader finally attempted to establish an Institute for the Study of Commercialism in the 1990s, he was frequently hampered by a lack of funding. The advertising industry, on the other hand, experienced no such setbacks.


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

45 they had begun to distance themselves from big business. In 2000, Al Gore ran one of the most populist campaigns in memory—“the people against the powerful”—in which he vowed to institute tougher regulations on business and to preserve the Clinton administration’s tax hikes on the rich, despite a large budget surplus. Ralph Nader dismissed the differences between Bush and Gore as negligible—“Tweedle Dee versus Tweedle Dum”—when in fact the two candidates could hardly have been more stark in how their policies would affect the bank accounts of the super-wealthy. Bush proposed record tax cuts for the rich, while Gore opposed these cuts as an upward redistribution of wealth.

Mott never forgot his roots, though, and took pride in driving a Volkswagen, not a G.M.-made car. Mott also once gave $1,000 to a neighborhood group in Detroit that was battling G.M. to stop the construction of a new auto plant. Mott was about as good a rich friend as liberal activists could hope for, and when he died in 2008, Ralph Nader—the former G.M. nemesis and a frequent beneficiary of Mott’s largesse—commented that Mott “was about the most versatile, imaginative philanthropist of his time.” What Nader admired most about Mott was that he was a “pioneer,” willing to take on issues that the big foundations c12.indd 263 5/11/10 6:28:18 AM 264 fortunes of change weren’t yet ready to touch, in this way pushing the envelope of liberal philanthropy.3 George Pillsbury was another key figure in the wealthy liberal circles of this era.

Schervish, “Why the $41 Trillion Wealth Transfer Estimate Is Still Valid: A Review of Challenges and Questions,” Journal of Gift Planning 7, no. 1 (January 2003): 11–15, 47–50. 2. Adam Bernstein, “Flamboyant Philanthropist and GM Heir Stewart Mott,” Washington Post, June 14, 2008, B6. bnotes.indd 305 5/11/10 6:29:37 AM 306 notes to pages 264–288 3. “Ralph Nader’s Statement on Stewart Mott and Tim Russert,” PR Newswire, June 13, 2008. 4. Susan Ostrander, Money for Change: Social Movement Philanthropy at Haymarket (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 9. Conclusion: A Benign Plutocracy? 1. Victoria McGrane, “Durbin Goes after Bankers . . . Again,” Politico, May 13, 2009. 2.


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How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

The main effect has been to decrease unionized labor. Put a lot of unskilled labor into the workplace, make conditions so awful that people will take virtually any job, maybe throw in some public subsidy to keep them working, and you can drive down wages. It’s a good way to make everybody suffer. Ralph Nader calls the Republicans and the Democrats “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” There’s never been much of a difference between the two business parties, but over the years, what differences there were have been disappearing. In my view, the last liberal president was Richard Nixon. Since him, there’ve been nothing but conservatives (or what are called “conservatives”).

I’m not a great tactician, and maybe this is a good way to stir people up, but I think it would be better for them to think through the issues and figure out the truth. Then they’ll stir themselves up. Crime: in the suites vs. in the streets The media pays a lot of attention to crime in the streets, which the FBI estimates costs about $4 billion a year. The Multinational Monitor estimates that white-collar crime—what Ralph Nader calls “crime in the suites”—costs about $200 billion a year. That generally gets ignored. Although crime in the US is high by the standards of comparable societies, there’s only one major domain in which it’s really off the map—murders with guns. But that’s because of the gun culture. The overall crime rate hasn’t changed much for a long time.

A large part of that is advertising, which is tax-deductible, so we all pay for the privilege of being manipulated and controlled. And of course that’s only one aspect of the campaign to “regiment the public mind.” Legal barriers against class-based solidarity actions by working people are another device to fragment the general population that are not found in other industrial democracies. In 1996, Ralph Nader ran for president on the Green Party ticket, and both the Labor Party and the Alliance held founding conventions. The New Party has been running candidates and winning elections. What do you think of all this? Allowing new options to enter the political system is—in general—a good idea. I think the right way to do it might be the New Party strategy of targeting winnable local elections, backing fusion candidates and—crucially—relating such electoral efforts to ongoing organizing and activism.


pages: 257 words: 64,763

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street by Robert Scheer

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, California energy crisis, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, do well by doing good, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mega-rich, mortgage debt, new economy, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics

Aside from William Safire’s columns and a small number in a similar vein, including mine in the Los Angeles Times, a review of the contemporary media finds little in the way of serious discussion of possible objections to the legislation. Safire, the Times’ conservative columnist who had worked for Richard Nixon and was not normally considered a Ralph Nader type, nevertheless understood the threat of corporate power run amok. Among the few to sound the alarm, he raised his voice alongside that of Nader, pointing out that a major positive consequence of the New Deal regulations was that commercial banks had been prevented from gambling with depositors’ savings, which were insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, created by Glass-Steagall.

Jackson continued to receive lucrative contributions from Weill for his enterprises, and Weill achieved the moral beard as an “enlightened” capitalist. But Weill also got something more important to the bottom line: Jackson as a shill for the radical deregulation of the financial industry. Of course, Jackson was not the only progressive to weigh in on banking deregulation. Its biggest critic was legendary citizen activist Ralph Nader, a DC veteran not easily snowed by anyone, including Jackson. Nader continued to sound the alarm, as did a host of community-based groups working against discrimination in housing. But what Jackson’s endorsement of the bill accomplished was to provide the Clinton administration with cover, especially from members of the Congressional Black Caucus.


pages: 414 words: 121,243

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way by Nick Cohen

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, centre right, critical race theory, DeepMind, disinformation, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, kremlinology, liberal world order, light touch regulation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sensible shoes, the scientific method, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

If America seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to both Al Gore and Ralph Nader. These are harsh judgments but we live in harsh times. A harsh judge of my former editor would have noted that al-Qaeda declared war on the United States when Bill Clinton was its President and Al Gore its Vice-President, and that Islamism was the sworn enemy of the human rights that robust campaigner for the underdog, Ralph Nader, had spent his life defending. Michael Moore deserved credit for realizing that the dead of New York included people who did vote for Al Gore and Ralph Nader, but then he went and spoilt it all by bellowing: ‘If someone did this to get back at Bush, they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT vote for him!


pages: 637 words: 128,673

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, illegal immigration, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, mass incarceration, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, new economy, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, single-payer health, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen

Instead, electoral democracy was subverted in the 2000 election by Republican elites assisted by toadying conservative appointees on the Supreme Court; by a code of near silence on the part of the mass media; and by a supine opposition party. The opposition failed to alert the citizenry to the threat posed by the display of managed democracy in Florida and its less publicized equivalents elsewhere in the nation; instead Democrats blamed Ralph Nader. The events heartened the apologists for Superpower who have set about to discredit democratic elections, reducing their status from a first principle to a strategy and, in effect, justifying machinations (sic) that engineered a coronation rather than an election. vi Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.

The historical role of third parties has been to force the major parties to cherry-pick third party proposals, typically those of a democratic or social democratic tendency. The 2004 presidential election marked the tragicomic playing out of the ineffectualness of third parties: the Democrats employed every dirty trick possible to discourage Ralph Nader from merely gaining a place on the presidential ballot for November 2004. At the same time the Republicans were deploying resources to enable Nader, their severest critic, to secure a place on the ballot. The episode, in its absurdity, shed a sharp light on how the two major parties connive to create as many obstacles as possible—in the form of requirements—for discouraging genuine alternatives to the established parties and their policies.

When they did not caricature, they virtually erased the attempts of third parties to present the electorate with alternative policies and candidates; even Howard Dean, a conventional candidate though an unwelcome one to the party establishment, was pilloried as an extremist and ridiculed as “out of control.”3 The perfect illustration of a rigidly controlled system at which both parties connive was the so-called presidential debates of 2004. In a fog of vacuous answers to insipid questions the public was treated as props, passive guests rather than citizen-participants. One might reasonably wonder what educational character those debates might have had if, say, Ralph Nader had been allowed to press Bush on issues of corporate power, or Dennis Kucinich had confronted Bush on the likely consequences of his proposals for reforming the Social Security system, or Howard Dean had been present to pursue the issue of a calamitous war and the justification for killing thousands of Iraqis while reducing large parts of their society to rubble.


pages: 56 words: 17,340

Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda by Noam Chomsky

British Empire, declining real wages, disinformation, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker

ABOUT SEVEN STORIES PRESS SEVEN STORIES PRESS is an independent book publisher based in New York City, with distribution throughout the United States, Canada, England, and Australia. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Octavia E. Butler, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Gary Null, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Our books appear in hardcover, paperback, pamphlet, and e-book formats, in English and in Spanish. We believe publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights wherever we can.


pages: 255 words: 75,172

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

The strike wave from 1967 to 1976 was the biggest since the immediate postwar years. In 1970 alone there were thirty-four major work stoppages, each involving more than 10,000 workers.26 But labor wasn’t the only thorn in business’s side. The consumer movement had achieved new regulations around health and safety, with Ralph Nader’s Raiders focused on breaking corporations of their nasty habit of making profits at the expense of public safety and well-being. The environmental movement blamed the problems of pollution directly on negligent and careless factories, effectively advancing a major new federal law to control that pollution, the Clean Air Act of 1963, followed with expanded authority in 1970.

The major planks of the Working Families Party are investments in public goods such as debt-free college tuition and child care, racial equity, and climate change with the understanding that providing a decent standard of living for working people must go beyond wages. At this point it will be helpful to outline how the WFP functions as a third party that doesn’t siphon votes away from the Democrats, like Ralph Nader did in the 2000 election. The WFP strategy concentrates on Democratic primaries at both the state and city level. Federal races remain prohibitively expensive for the WFP to engage in, though its leaders are trying to figure out how to break through the money barriers. Their candidates run as Democrats with endorsements from the WFP.


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

George Bush picked Dick Cheney, who had served as White House chief of staff, congressman, secretary of defense, and president of a Texas-based oil company, as his running mate. Al Gore chose Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a person of almost unmatched personal integrity and independence. The third-party candidates were Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan, who together were heirs to the Ross Perot legacy of reforms since 1992. Many political observers believed, in advance of the race, that Gore and Nader were competing for the same voters, and that Buchanan voters would hurt Bush. The general election campaign officially began after the party conventions, and could be divided into three phases, in retrospect.15 The first division was from August 18 to September 27, when Al Gore enjoyed a popular lead, capitalizing on the strong economy and a host of favorable domestic issues.

The general election campaign officially began after the party conventions, and could be divided into three phases, in retrospect.15 The first division was from August 18 to September 27, when Al Gore enjoyed a popular lead, capitalizing on the strong economy and a host of favorable domestic issues. For example, Gore was able to win over environmental groups, who flirted for a time with Ralph Nader but gave the Democrats their support in the end. His average support in the polls for this period was 52 percent, but in late September the two candidates were running neck and neck. The second period was from September 28 to October 17, when George Bush capitalized on the national debates to showcase his ‘‘compassionate conservative’’ themes and personal appeal.

Bright weather oversaw a turnout of over 100 million voters. For the first time in more than a century, the winner of the presidential election remained unknown a full day after the polls closed, and then another day, and then another. Gore won the popular vote by a narrow margin of 48.4 percent to 47.9 percent for Bush. Ralph Nader finished in third place, with 2.7 percent, while Pat Buchanan trailed with 0.4 percent. The Democrats won 9/11 209 nineteen of the top thirty media markets, while Republicans took ten, and the two shared one market. Both candidates claimed triumph without really declaring victory. The problem was the electoral vote.


pages: 538 words: 138,544

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

It doesn’t matter if the technology involved in making the product is horribly polluting or unsafe to workers. Any country—driven by its corporate interests—can challenge a law in another country by claiming it’s a “trade barrier.” Such disputes are decided by three-person arbitration panels that meet in secret and are not screened for conflicts of interest.114 In the late 1990s, I worked in Ralph Nader’s office in Washington, D.C. One of my colleagues there, Rob Weissman, a Harvard-trained lawyer and leading critic of the WTO, used to chide me for my obsession with factories and dumps, urging me to join those fighting the WTO instead of, or more accurately in addition to, working on garbage. He pointed out that every law that I worked tirelessly to strengthen, and every victory against a dirty production process could get wiped out, or rendered illegal, by the WTO.

First and foremost, Patrick Bond at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa, who read through this manuscript and provided invaluable critiques and comments throughout. Additionally, Maude Barlow, John Cavanagh, Gopal Dayaneni, Ellen Dorsey, Anwar Fazal, Tom Goldtooth, Paul Hawken, Van Jones, Rita Lustgarten, Jerry Mander, Donella Meadows, Peter Montague, Ralph Nader, Bobby Peek, Meena Raman, Mark Randazzo, Katie Redford, John Richard, Satinath Sarangi, and Robert Weissman. I am forever grateful that my first real job was with an organization whose default response was “let’s do it” rather than “but that might not work.” Jim Vallette, Heather Spalding, Kenny Bruno, Connie Murtagh, Jim Puckett, Marcelo Furtado, Von Hernandez, Veronica Odriozola, Kevin Stairs, Dave Rapaport, Peter Bahouth, and others in Greenpeace’s Toxic Trade Team taught me how a handful of people, whose sense of possibility far outweighed a sense of limitations could tackle a problem as sinister and widespread as international waste trafficking.

When as a college student in New York City she saw her beloved trees turned to wastepaper and packaging, she followed them to the world’s largest dump, and found her calling. After a stint doing graduate work at Cornell University in upstate New York, she spent nearly two decades tracking international waste trafficking and fighting incineration around the world, first as an employee of Greenpeace International from 1988–1996. She later worked in Ralph Nader’s Washington office for Essential Action, and then for the Global Alliance for Incineration Alternatives (GAIA), Health Care Without Harm and The Sustainability Funders. In 2007 she created The Story of Stuff, a video that summarized her learnings from two decades on the international trail of waste.


pages: 840 words: 202,245

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

.: American Enterprise Institute, 1994), pp. 141–42; author interview with Paul McCracken, June 2004. 24 IF CONSUMERS EXPECTED PRICES TO RISE: Frank Levy and Peter Temin, “Inequality and Institutions in the 20th Century,” MIT Working Paper 07–17, May 1, 2007. 25 MANUFACTURING AND SERVICE GIANTS: Stein, Presidential Economics, pp. 159–60. 26 “AS CHIPS FLOATING”: Ibid., p. 141. 27 “NOW I AM A KEYNESIAN”: Stein, Fiscal Revolution in America, p. 548. 28 YET NIXON ATTACKED MANY OF JOHNSON’S PROGRAMS: Arthur J. Blaustein, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, February 22, 2008, p. A22. 29 AS RALPH NADER SAID: Ralph Nader, Meet the Press, NBC News, February 24, 2008. 30 WHEN THEY WERE LIFTED AFTER THE KOREAN WAR: Hugh Rockoff, A History of Wages and Price Controls in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 114. 31 NIXON WANTED TO RESPOND STRONGLY: Stein, Presidential Economics, p. 162. 32 “I REALLY LOVED THE GUY”: Author interview, Arthur Laffer, March 2004. 33 HE REPORTED TO VOLCKER: Author interview, Murray Weidenbaum, July 19, 2004. 34 “WE PUSHED CONTROLS STRONGLY”: Ibid. 35 BOTH STEIN AND SHULTZ: Stein, Presidential Economics, p. 163. 36 INVESTORS ON WALL STREET: The new agreement also allowed a wider range of fluctuation around the fixed value of the currency than under the Bretton Woods agreement.

Yet Nixon attacked many of Johnson’s programs for the poor, among them Head Start and the Job Corps, fanning the racial fires with the accusation of “welfare dependency.” But Nixon felt he had to maintain good graces with a nation that was still on balance in favor of progressive social programs. As Ralph Nader said years later, he was the last president to be afraid of liberals. In 1970, Nixon supported and signed legislation that created the two powerful new regulatory agencies—the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The next year, he signed legislation to establish the Consumer Product Safety Commission, another of the Washington agencies least liked in the business community, and soon after he signed a bill to index Social Security benefits to rapidly rising consumer prices.

Investment bankers did not fail to notice that Wriston’s commercial bank was effectively underwriting its own loans. Wriston now had a foot in the door once slammed shut by the Glass-Steagall legislation of the New Deal that separated underwriting from commercial banking. Burns continually raised red flags about the adequacy of Wriston’s bank capital, and Wriston kept fending him off. Ralph Nader, the consumer critic, complained about the number of bankers in general, including at First National City, who sat on the boards of the companies to which their banks lent money, as well as how few women and African Americans worked for them. Wright Patman, the Democratic head of the House Banking Committee, an old-fashioned populist, was particularly concerned about the growing power of banks, especially since they now managed so much pension fund money, again investing in the very companies to which they lent.


pages: 284 words: 85,643

What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, banking crisis, clean water, collective bargaining, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, full employment, General Motors Futurama, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, mass immigration, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

A savvy postmovement do-gooder stayed away from that left-over left. At Occidental College, Obama pushed divestment from South Africa (I’d done the same in Madison); at Columbia, he pushed a nuclear freeze (I covered the antinuclear movement). Obama had a brief, frustrating post-Columbia stint at Ralph Nader’s New York Public Interest Group (where I once interned, working to encourage recycling by supporting New York’s Communist “bottle bill”). Obama went into community organizing, I went into community journalism. Trying to be effective in the Reagan years, we mostly had small dreams. Republicans under Reagan had the big dreams, especially the dream of a united country whose citizens could move into the future together.

After he left office, President Clinton called it the worst Supreme Court decision since the deeply racist Dred Scott ruling, which the Fourteenth Amendment effectively reversed. Weak Democrats and street-fighting Republicans helped make Bush president, but so did the ideologically rigid left. Proclaiming no difference between Bush and Gore, prominent lefties from Michael Moore to Susan Sarandon, Barbara Ehrenreich to Cornel West campaigned for Ralph Nader in 2000. Even without a hand recount, Gore would have won Florida if he’d gotten one one-hundredth of Nader’s ninety-five thousand votes there. The out-of-touch American left helped elect Richard Nixon in 1968 and George W. Bush in 2000. My father would have been screaming. Yes, DLC Democrats took over the party, but the left barely bothered to fight for it.


pages: 75 words: 22,220

Occupy by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, Martin Wolf, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, too big to fail, union organizing

We also thank the community of people whose solidarity, work, input and ideas helped make this effort a reality: Mumia Abu-Jamal Michael Albert Daniel Alonso Anthony Arnove Dario Azzellini David Barsamian Elizabeth Bell Lori Berenson R. Black Heidi Boghosian Bob Contant Angela Davis Lawrence Ferlinghetti Johanna Fernandez Alex Fradkin Gambrinus Frances Goldin Arun Gupta Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri Stuart Leonard Ramsey Kanaan Eliot Katz Ralph Nader Joe Nevins Adriana Provenzano Karla Quiñonez-Ruggiero John Richard Stanley Rogouski Leonardo Ruggiero Julie Schaper Marina Sitrin Anthony Spirito Beverly Stohl George Ygarza McNally Jackson Books, NY Bluestockings Bookstore, NY St.


pages: 566 words: 151,193

Diet for a New America by John Robbins

Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, clean water, disinformation, Flynn Effect, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, ocean acidification, placebo effect, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Review

Through their advertising and especially through the “educational” materials that they distribute and that get taught through our public schools, these industries persuade us of dietary requirements that are inaccurate and promote dietary habits that shorten our lives. In his exposé of their corrupt and corrupting practices, John Robbins stands in the fine American tradition of courageous whistle-blowers, like Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson. In this case, it is both ironic and strangely fitting that the message comes from—or through—the scion of America’s largest ice cream company. A major contribution of Diet for a New America is the welcome news it brings that we need far less protein than we thought we did. Many of us who turned from meat protein in an effort to live more lightly on the earth believed we should compensate by eating an equal amount of dairy and vegetable protein and by combining grains and legumes to produce it.

Boyle, Malignant Neglect, 59, 62; Plague on Our Children, NOVA; J. Culhane, “PCBs: The Poisons That Won’t Go Away,” Reader’s Digest, December 1980, 113, 115; Council on Environmental Quality, Toxic Chemicals and Public Protection, report to the president by the Toxic Substances Strategy Committee, Washington, DC (1980), 3; Ralph Nader et al., Who’s Poisoning America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1981), 177; “Pesticides Found in Wild Polar Bears,” Animals’ Agenda (September 1985). 73. Culhane, “PCBs: The Poisons.” 74. Regenstein, America the Poisoned, 293. 75. Plague on Our Children, NOVA. 76. Ibid. 77. B. Richards, “Drop in Sperm Count Is Attributed to Toxic Environment,” Washington Post, September 12, 1979; J.

See articles by Grzech and Warbelow in note 60. 100. L. Cavalieri, “Carcinogens and the Value of Life,” New York Times, July 20, 1980; Regenstein, America the Poisoned, 232. 101. Boyle, Malignant Neglect, 196–98. 102. David Pimentel, “Pesticides…,” BioScience 27 (March 1977); James Turner, A Chemical Feast: The Ralph Nader Study Group Report on Food Protection and the Food and Drug Administration (New York: Grossman, 1970); David Pimentel, “Realities of a Pesticide Ban,” Environment (March 1973). 103. Regenstein, America the Poisoned, 275. 104. “Infant Abnormalities Linked to PCB Contaminated Fish,” Vegetarian Times (November 1984): 8. 105.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Second, Pigovian taxes raise revenue for the government, which could be used to compensate those harmed by the pollution (or for any other purpose). They’re a win-win. Taxes of this type are popular across the political spectrum and among people in many fields; members of the “Pigou Club,” a group of advocates identified by economist Gregory Mankiw, include both Alan Greenspan and Ralph Nader.37 By improving measurement and metering, the technologies of the second machine age make Pigovian taxes more feasible. Consider traffic congestion. Each of us imposes a cost on all other drivers when we join an already overcrowded highway and further slow traffic. At peak hours, traffic on Interstate 405 in Los Angeles crawls at fourteen miles per hour, more than quadrupling what should be an eight-minute drive.

Nick Leiber, “Canada Launches a Startup Visa to Lure Entrepreneurs,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 11, 2013, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-11/canada-launches-a-startup-visa-to-lure-entrepreneurs. 37. Greg Mankiw, “Rogoff Joins the Pigou Club,” Greg Mankiw’s Blog, September 16, 2006, http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/09/rogoff-joins-pigou-club.html; Ralph Nader and Toby Heaps, “We Need a Global Carbon Tax,” Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122826696217574539.html. 38. P. A. Diamond and E. Saez, “The Case for a Progressive Tax: From Basic Research to Policy Recommendations,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 25, no. 4 (2011): 165–90. 39.


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The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Industrial and Corporate Change 22, no. 4. Forthcoming. Lazonick, W. and O. Tulum. 2011. ‘US Biopharmaceutical Finance and the Sustainability of the Biotech Business Model’. Research Policy 40, no. 9 (November): 1170–87. Lee, A. 2012. ‘Ralph Nader to Apple CEO Using Texas’ Tax Dollars: “Stand on Your Own Two $100 billion Feet”’. AlterNet, 6 April. Available online at http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/877674/ralph_nader_to_apple_ceo_using_texas’_tax_dollars%3A_’stand_on_your_own_two_$100_billion_feet’/ (accessed 22 January 2013). Lent A. and M. Lockwood. 2010. ‘Creative Destruction: Placing Innovation at the Heart of Progressive Economics’.


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Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", big-box store, Donald Davies, Drosophila, epigenetics, hydroponic farming, Internet Archive, means of production, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine

But starting that decade, we began to have other feelings about processed food when critics began questioning other aspects of its nature. We started to worry about the way the industry was engineering its products for taste, texture, and color at the expense of purity and wholesomeness. Our worrier in chief at that time, Ralph Nader, made the cover of Time magazine with a string of hot dogs in 1969 when he turned his consumer activism toward food, focusing initially on processed meat. In an earlier essay, he had evoked the work of the slaughterhouse muckraker Upton Sinclair and the environmentalist Rachel Carson in raising new alarms about processed food.

Victor Schwartz, a food industry attorney, was called on to paint a grim picture of the legal landscape that restaurants now faced. He said the fact that Judge Sweet used more than one hundred pages to write his opinions on Bradley’s case was indicative of an activist judiciary in which “some other judge, some other place, at some other time can let cases through. Ralph Nader has called the double cheeseburger a weapon of mass destruction. This is the prelude to try to get courts to change laws.” For its voice at the hearing, the National Restaurant Association chose to be represented by the owner of seven quick-service restaurants in Alabama, rather than a big fast-food chain.


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The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

The next year, Powell turned the speech into a memo that made its way to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the influential lobbying group that represents the interests of corporate America. Again, Powell warned of the looming threats to American business, including the environmental movement, support for new social welfare programs, and the consumer advocate Ralph Nader. “Business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is late,” Powell wrote. It was a rallying cry for the rich, an exhortation for those with power to preserve it at all costs. And rather than just sounding the alarm, the Powell memo proposed a plan of action. Business should rapidly seek to bolster its influence in politics, academia, the media, and the legal world.

He was pugnacious and unrepentant, exhibiting the Type A bombast he had learned from Welch decades before. The parallels were impossible to ignore, even to the families of the victims. One of the passengers on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 was Samya Stumo, a bright, idealistic twenty-four-year-old from Massachusetts. Samya’s parents were Michael Stumo and Nadia Milleron, and Nadia’s uncle was Ralph Nader, the longtime consumer rights advocate who for years had railed against the airline industry and the FAA. After the second crash, Nadia and Michael emerged as de facto organizers for the victims’ families and dedicated themselves to holding Boeing accountable. Both grew well versed in the technical details of the Max and MCAS.


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Rework by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

call centre, Clayton Christensen, Dean Kamen, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, fixed-gear, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, Y Combinator

He made it look easy, but it wasn’t easy work. Thank you, Matt. We also want to thank our families, our customers, and everyone at 37signals. And here’s a list of some of the people we know, and don’t know, who have inspired us in one way or another: Frank Lloyd Wright Seth Godin Warren Buffett Jamie Larson Clayton Christensen Ralph Nader Jim Coudal Benjamin Franklin Ernest Kim Jeff Bezos Scott Heiferman Antoni Gaudi Carlos Segura Larry David Steve Jobs Dean Kamen Bill Maher Thomas Jefferson Mies van der Rohe Ricardo Semler Christopher Alexander James Dyson Kent Beck Thomas Paine Gerald Weinberg Kathy Sierra Julia Child Marc Hedlund Nicholas Karavites Michael Jordan Richard Bird Jeffrey Zeldman Dieter Rams Judith Sheindlin Ron Paul Timothy Ferriss Copyright © 2010 by 37signals, LLC.


Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander

Alistair Cooke, commoditize, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, full employment, Future Shock, Herbert Marcuse, invention of agriculture, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, placebo effect, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics

However, because it owed its whole life to the media, exist- ing nowhere else, the SLA was subject to cancellation at any time, and it was cancelled most thoroughly, like a series with slipping ratings getting the ax. Less radical elements did not suffer the SLA's dramatic demise, but the cycle of fast rise/ fast fall was similar for many. Ralph Nader bloomed in the media and then became tiresome. The ecology movement, fitting the holocaust model of TV news, burst upon the scene and then declined. Water- gate excited expectations of government reform, but then it was old news. Once the U.S. was out of Vietnam, the once hot antiwar 32 WAR TO CONTROL THE UNITY MACHINE movement was off the tube.

Also naturally, the American population develops more of a feeling for products and a life-style suitable to business than it does for a sensitive, subtle and beautiful way of mind that theoretically offers an alternative. The more people sit inside their television experi- ence, the more fixed they become in the hard-edged reality that the medium can convey. + "'+ In 1973 I helped organize an all-day press conference in Washington, D.C., hosted by Ralph Nader on behalf of In- digena, an organization devoted to creating a pan-Indian movement in the Western Hemisphere. Indigena gives par- ticular attention to the struggle of South American Indians, who are presently suffering a fate previously visited upon the tribes of our own Great Plains and elsewhere.


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Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives by Catherine Lutz, Anne Lutz Fernandez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, car-free, carbon footprint, collateralized debt obligation, congestion pricing, failed state, feminist movement, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, inventory management, Lewis Mumford, market design, market fundamentalism, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Zipcar

Cars were originally introduced without seat belts, and even when they became available as options in the 1950s, they were widely suspect: back then, one older woman told us, her mother became very wary of a young man she was dating because he had seat belts installed in his coupe: “‘Why,’ she asked, ‘does he need them? Is he a crazy driver?’” Influential research done in the 1960s by Detroit doctor Clair Straith and engineer Hugh DeHaven shifted the focus by pointing out that vehicle reengineering—softening rigid dashboards, eliminating sharp buttons, and adding restraining belts—would save lives. Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), the consumer rights movement more generally, and what one historian calls “the smoldering dissatisfaction with Detroit’s marketing and design policies,” including rampant dealer fraud, “banded into a ‘perfect storm’ of regulatory reform in the early 1960s.”22 Americans thereafter would come to rely on car engineers to keep them safe; they expected scientists to make it, as crazy as it sounds, “safe to crash.”

Wolfgang Sachs, For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 138. U.S. automakers for many years successfully argued that the problem of car crashes should be seen as one of driver error or incompetence: educating drivers was the solution. Consumer protection advocate Ralph Nader’s breakthrough was to challenge this corporate thinking, and to call for their reeducation and for progress through improved car design. Lemelson-MIT Program, “The 2009 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index,” http://web.mit.edu/ invent/n-pressreleases/n-press–09index.html “The Problem with Biofuels,” Washington Post, February 27, 2008.


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Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

Provide hourly wage parity and protection of promotions and pro-rated benefits for part-time workers. FALLING BEHIND THE REST OF THE WORLD Asked about the longer-vacations idea, a staff person for presidential candidate George W. Bush, said, “That sounds great. We need that here.” But of the candidates themselves, only Ralph Nader actually endorsed the idea. On July 2, 2004, during an appearance on PBS’s Now with Bill Moyers, Republican pollster and strategist Frank Luntz observed that a majority of “swing” voters were working women with young children. Luntz said his focus groups revealed that “lack of free time” is the number-one issue with these voters.

By 2001, the Dutch plants were taking 90 percent of all end-of-life vehicles and recyling 86 percent of the materials from them. The plants, which are cheap and low-tech, employ many workers and take any cars. The disassembly tax is part of the Dutch National Environmental Policy Plan (or “Green Plan") and is being extended to include many other consumer goods.5 STOPPING CHILD ABUSE Consumer advocate Ralph Nader has called the recent upsurge in marketing targeting children a form of “corporate child abuse.” It’s as if marketers have set out knowingly to infect our children with affluenza by spreading the virus everywhere kids congregate. It’s time to protect our kids. At a minimum, we can keep commercialism out of our schools, starting with Channel One.


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Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

Comments like these triggered an avalanche of anti-press complaints, this time not from flyover country (where hatred of the “elite” press was already considered a given) but from urban, left-leaning intellectuals, aka the media’s home crowd. An example was Ralph Nader, who focused on the entire system of commercial media. Nader said that campaign coverage had devolved into a profit bonanza in which media firms “cash in and give candidates a free ride.” The former third-party candidate also noted that the constant attention paid to people like Trump excluded other voices, including “leading citizens who could criticize the process.” (Like, presumably, Ralph Nader, although he had a point). I remember watching Nader’s comments with interest, having just returned from covering Trump’s nomination-sealing win in the Indiana primary.


Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe by Noam Chomsky, Laray Polk

Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, energy security, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Kwajalein Atoll, language acquisition, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, nuclear ambiguity, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Martha Long, Luis Negrón, Hwang Sok-yong, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including Subhankar Banerjee, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Gary Null, Greg Palast, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Alice Walker, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can.


pages: 274 words: 93,758

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller, Stanley B Resor Professor Of Economics Robert J Shiller

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Brooks, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equity premium, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, greed is good, income per capita, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, loss aversion, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publication bias, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave

Relative to all previous history, people in developed countries are doing remarkably well. Women in more than fifty countries, and men in eleven, have life expectancies of eighty years or more.1 Modern cars may have their problems and their recalls, but they now always have seatbelts; with rare exception cars are no longer—as Ralph Nader opined 50 years ago—“unsafe at any speed.”2 Remarkably, as of February 2013, there had not been a single commercial airline fatality in the United States for four years.3 Not only did the planes themselves have a perfect record; so too did the pilots and the mechanics who keep them in the air. With such records for safety and product quality, the questions arise: Is it purely the market system that brought us this success?

Chapter Eleven: The Resistance and Its Heroes 1. For 2013. World Bank, “Life Expectancy at Birth, Male (Years)” and “Life Expectancy at Birth, Female (Years),” accessed March 29, 2015, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.MA.IN/countries and http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.FE.IN/countries. 2. Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (New York: Grossman, 1965). 3. Jad Mouawad and Christopher Drew, “Airline Industry at Its Safest since the Dawn of the Jet Age,” New York Times, February 11, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/business/2012-was-the-safest-year-for-airlines-globally-since-1945.html?


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Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, call centre, chief data officer, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, flag carrier, Future Shock, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, knowledge worker, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, performance metric, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, éminence grise

The following Saturday, ever fit, he climbed onto his bicycle for the Boeing Century Challenge, a 105-mile race through spectacular orchards and vineyards in the mountains surrounding Lake Chelan, carved from glaciers in central Washington. About fifty from Boeing joined him. He finished twenty-sixth out of twelve hundred riders. 12 Blood Money Samya Stumo came from a family that had an unusually good grasp of how power is wielded in Washington. Her mother, Nadia Milleron, is the niece of Ralph Nader, the lawyer, former Green Party presidential candidate, and famed consumer crusader. His bestselling 1965 exposé of the automobile industry, Unsafe at Any Speed, led to seat-belt laws. The book had enraged General Motors and made the Chevrolet Corvair—the car whose steering wheel tended to impale its driver in crashes—infamous.

Elwell told Muilenburg: Tangel, Sider, and Pasztor, “ ‘We’ve Been Humbled.’ ” The following Saturday: “In Conversation with Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg,” Aspen Ideas Festival, June 27, 2019. Boeing Century Challenge, June 22, 2019, race results here: https://runsignup.com. 12. BLOOD MONEY “You and your team”: Ralph Nader, “Boeing Mismanagers Forfeit Your Pay and Resign: An Open Letter to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg,” April 26, 2019, https://nader.org. In late June, they held: A video of the event at the American Museum of Tort Law is available at “Samya Stumo Memorial June 22nd, 2019,” https://www.youtube.com.


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Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Air France Flight 447, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-fragile, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discrete time, double entry bookkeeping, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, fail fast, financial engineering, financial independence, Flash crash, flying shuttle, Gary Taubes, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, high net worth, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, meta-analysis, microbiome, money market fund, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, selection bias, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

These asymmetries are particularly severe when it comes to small-probability extreme events, that is, Black Swans—as these are the most misunderstood and their exposure is easiest to hide. Fat Tony has two heuristics. First, never get on a plane if the pilot is not on board. Second, make sure there is also a copilot. The first heuristic addresses the asymmetry in rewards and punishment, or transfer of fragility between individuals. Ralph Nader has a simple rule: people voting for war need to have at least one descendant (child or grandchild) exposed to combat. For the Romans, engineers needed to spend some time under the bridge they built—something that should be required of financial engineers today. The English went further and had the families of the engineers spend time with them under the bridge after it was built.

But I thought that the fellow was heroic, for, should the candidate win, his own taxes would increase by a considerable amount. A year later I discovered that the client was being investigated for his involvement in a very large scheme to be shielded from taxes. He wanted to be sure that others paid more taxes. I developed a friendship over the past few years with the activist Ralph Nader and saw contrasting attributes. Aside from an astonishing amount of personal courage and total indifference toward smear campaigns, he exhibits absolutely no divorce between what he preaches and his lifestyle, none. Just like saints who have soul in their game. The man is a secular saint. Soul in the Game There is a class of people who escape bureaucrato-journalistic “tawk”: those who have more than their skin in the game.

It is like a voluntary cap (it would prevent people from using public office as a credential-building temporary accommodation, then going to Wall Street to earn several million dollars). This would get priestly people into office. Just as Cleon was reviled, in the modern world, there seems to be an inverse agency problem for those who do the right thing: you pay for your service to the public with smear campaigns and harassment. The activist and advocate Ralph Nader suffered numerous smear campaigns as the auto industry went after him. THE ETHICAL AND THE LEGAL I felt ashamed not having exposed the following scam for a long time. (As I said, if you see fraud …) Let us call it the Alan Blinder problem. The story is as follows. At Davos, during a private coffee conversation that I thought aimed at saving the world from, among other things, moral hazard and agency problems, I was interrupted by Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, who tried to sell me a peculiar investment product that aims at legally hoodwinking taxpayers.


9-11 by Noam Chomsky

Berlin Wall, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including the Boston Women’s Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Gary Null, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can. For additional information, visit www.sevenstories.com.


pages: 406 words: 115,719

The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes

Albert Einstein, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, epigenetics, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Gary Taubes, Isaac Newton, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, the new new thing, the scientific method, Works Progress Administration

MaGoo, Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear, Sugar Bear and Linus the Lionhearted, the Flintstones, Rocky and Bullwinkle—but give them entire Saturday-morning television shows dedicated to the task of doing so. These companies would spend enormous sums marketing each cereal—six hundred million dollars total in a single year by the late 1960s, when the consumer advocate Ralph Nader took on the industry. Each new cereal that succeeded would spawn a rush of imitators, while the industry, by the 1960s, was now openly advertising the candylike nature of the products: “It tastes like maple sugar candy,” Marky Maypo’s father said of Maypo in 1956, to entice his son to eat it; Cocoa Krispies were advertised as tasting “like a chocolate milk shake, only crunchy.”

The FDA administrators had originally hoped to ban cyclamates for use in soft drinks and other foods, but to sustain their use for diabetics and obese individuals who needed to watch their calorie consumption or whose doctors suggested they avoid sugar. The pressure from food activists concerned about chemical carcinogens prevented even that compromise. (Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, for instance, argued that the FDA should regard “one of its primary missions as being a cancer-prevention agency.”) In October 1970, the FDA banned all use of cyclamates. Two years later, when John Hickson left the International Sugar Research Foundation to work for the Cigar Research Council, he was described in a confidential tobacco-industry memo as a “supreme scientific politician who had been successful in condemning cyclamates, on behalf of the Sugar Research [Foundation], on somewhat shaky evidence which he had been able to conjure out of Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.”


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Three weeks after the DOJ lowered the boom, consumer advocate Ralph Nader hosted a Washington conference to address the Microsoft menace. It was hardly a populist uprising—organizers charged $1,000 a head to “help support Nader’s future investigations into the high-tech industry”—but it drew in an eclectic crowd. Gary Reback was on the program, pointing out the flattering entries about Gates in Microsoft’s online encyclopedia, Encarta. Netscape lawyer Roberta Katz warned that Microsoft was boxing competitors out of its new online shopping center. Ralph Nader’s star had been fading, but the fight against Bill Gates gave him a way to reclaim his old mantle as America’s #1 fighter for the little guy.

The 1970 annual meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery, the ACM—usually a days-long geek’s paradise of technical papers—devoted the entire program to “how computers can help men solve problems of the cities, health, environment, government, education, the poor, the handicapped and society at large.” Consumer crusader Ralph Nader was a keynote speaker. The Nixon Administration’s short-lived Technology Opportunities Program reflected the prevailing mood, asking industry to submit its suggestions for how computer and communications technologies could solve social problems.29 This played out in popular culture as well.


pages: 127 words: 51,083

The Oil Age Is Over: What to Expect as the World Runs Out of Cheap Oil, 2005-2050 by Matt Savinar

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, clean water, disinformation, Easter island, energy security, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, invisible hand, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, post-oil, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Rosa Parks, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Y2K

Now that oil production is set to permanently decline, the only way to maintain a highly centralized financial system is with a drastically reduced population. 60 Part V: Peak Oil and US Political/Social Issues “The only difference between Bush and Gore is the velocity with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock at the door.” -Ralph Nader, 2000 election. “George W. Bush is not the problem and John Kerry is not the solution.” -Matt Savinar, 2004 61 The Oil Age is Over 59. Who do you think is more at fault for this situation? Bush or Clinton? Rush Limbaugh and his "ditto heads" or Michael Moore and his French-loving Hollywood buddies?


pages: 602 words: 120,848

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer-And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Paul Pierson, Jacob S. Hacker

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business climate, business cycle, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, desegregation, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, invisible hand, John Bogle, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, moral hazard, Nate Silver, new economy, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Before the policy winds shifted in the ’60s, business had seen little need to mobilize anything more than a network of trade associations. It relied mostly on personal contacts, and the main role of lobbyists in Washington was to troll for government contracts and tax breaks. The explosion of policy activism, and rise of public interest groups like those affiliated with Ralph Nader, created a fundamental challenge. And as the 1970s progressed, the problems seemed to be getting worse. Powell wrote in 1971, but even after Nixon swept to a landslide reelection the following year, the legislative tide continued to come in. With Watergate leading to Nixon’s humiliating resignation and a spectacular Democratic victory in 1974, the situation grew even more dire.

When Jimmy Carter’s election gave Democrats unified control of Washington, the first action item was a bill to establish a new Office of Consumer Representation. The agency would have consolidated consumer issues in a single place and given consumers an organized advocate in rule-making activities throughout the federal bureaucracy. For Ralph Nader and his public interest allies, it would represent the culmination of their remarkable success in expanding federal regulatory protections for citizens whose interests had failed to find organized representation in Washington before the late 1960s. There was every reason for confidence: Polls showed that voters backed the idea of such an agency 2–1.


pages: 482 words: 122,497

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, disinformation, edge city, financial deregulation, full employment, George Gilder, guest worker program, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, P = NP, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the scientific method, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty

The answer is clearest in the case of the USAF: Foundations like these allowed the Reagan youth to pursue hefty contributions from the real powers of Republicandom—corporations, which prefer to donate to tax-exempt organizations. It was through his not-for-profit that Abramoff seems to have discovered the profitable side of politics. The occasion for this discovery was the College Republicans’ ongoing war with Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), student activist outfits that were funded at most colleges by “activity fees” all students were required to pay (unless they checked a box on a form).23 This was the point on which the CRs challenged them, insisting on campus after campus that it was “sinful and tyrannical” to compel students to fund an obviously political organization.24 Like other Nader groups, the student PIRGs were something of a pain in the neck to business, always agitating for container deposit laws and other environmental causes, and at some point it apparently occurred to Abramoff or Norquist that defunding and thus killing PIRG chapters was a service for which the targeted businesses ought to be paying.

In a 1986 interview, one USAF spokesman described how his young charges were to attract investments from business interests. “Listen, [PIRGs are] involved in all these campaigns to increase regulation against business,” the young conservative was to say. He or she was urged to mention Nader: “You say Ralph Nader’s name and any educated businessman will take interest.” Norquist himself was more specific, pointing to the PIRGs’ bottle-bill campaign as an example. “We say: ‘We’re fighting PIRGs and you know that they go after you bottlers all the time, and try to get nickel-a-bottle [deposit] laws passed. And we’re going to go after 20 PIRG fights this year . . . and you have an interest in this, or you ought to.’”25 Thus did the young entrepreneurs of the USAF get out there and sell themselves as political hit men.


pages: 147 words: 45,890

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert B. Reich

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, business cycle, carbon tax, declining real wages, delayed gratification, Doha Development Round, endowment effect, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, job automation, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, We are all Keynesians now, World Values Survey

He tried again in 1996, charging that members of America’s establishment “hear the shouts of the peasants from over the hill.… All the peasants are coming with pitchforks.” It was a memorable phrase, but it didn’t get Buchanan any farther. By then, a strong economic recovery had becalmed Buchanan’s pitchforked peasants. In 2000, Ralph Nader ran for president as the Green Party candidate, assailing the power of “greedy” and “rapacious” corporations. He lost, of course, but some believe he got enough support to tip Florida, and therefore the electoral college and the presidency, to George W. Bush. To be sure, prolonged economic stress could open the door to demagogues who prey on public anxieties in order to gain power.


pages: 385 words: 133,839

The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink by Michael Blanding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, Internet Archive, laissez-faire capitalism, market design, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine

CSPI was founded in 1971, one of the first of the many “public interest” groups that proliferated in a period that business historian David Vogel calls the last of the “three major political waves of challenge to busi­ ness that has taken place in the United States in [the twentieth] century” (the first two being the Progressive Era and the strong push by organized labor in the post-Depression 1930s). Groups such as the Sierra Club, Common Cause, and Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen used any means pos­ sible to curb the power of big business at a time when public support for corporations was at a low ebb. In CSPI’s case, the group has held vocal press conferences, slapped complaints against companies with government agencies, and even threat­ ened lawsuits in its usually successful attempts to remove what it sees as deceptive advertising and nutrition labeling for food.

“The corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest re­ gardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others,” he writes. That’s not to say that corporations can’t do good, however, so long as their efforts align with their profit motive. The second wave of corporate social responsibility began in the 1970s, when, faced with challenges from consumer advocates like Ralph Nader (and CSPI’s Michael Jacobson), corporations realized that investing in social causes could serve as a kind of insurance against criticism. It was in this era that Coke’s Paul Austin pursued his “halo effect” with hydroponic shrimp farms, desalinization plants, and soybean beverages that he argued could help earn goodwill in the developing world at the same time they helped make Coke’s vision of global harmony a reality.


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

Strategic Behavior in Politics ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• George Bush took Florida by 537 votes and was therefore declared the winner in the November 2000 presidential election. Some 2.7% of voters preferred Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, to AI Gore, but a majority of those who supported Nader also preferred Gore to Bush. If some Nader supporters had cast their votes for Gore, then Ralph Nader would not have become president-but no one could reasonably have expected that he would. What could have been expected, and would have happened, is that AI Gore would have won Florida, and New Hampshire, and been inaugurated in January 2001 as president of the United States.


pages: 461 words: 128,421

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

But as he made the transition from scholar to media star in the 1960s, Friedman took on the responsibility of presenting his Chicago colleagues’ ideas to the still largely hostile outside world. In 1970 he explained in the pages of the New York Times Magazine the Chicago view of the role of corporations in American life. The news peg was the rise of “Campaign GM,” a movement led by consumer activist Ralph Nader to place three representatives of “the public interest” on the giant automaker’s board of directors. Nader would push this theme throughout the 1970s, arguing that, because corporations had been created by government action, they ought to be held to high standards of civic responsibility. Friedman had a different take.

But the leniency of our laws places management and shareholders at a distinct disadvantage in coming to grips with the enemy.”29 How shareholders could be placed at a disadvantage by people who wanted to pay a premium for their shares was something of a mystery, but the threat to management was real, and corporate managers maintained a strong lobbying presence in Washington. Most critics of corporate America, meanwhile, came from the political left—people such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Ralph Nader—and weren’t keen to embrace Wall Street raiders. That left the field to Henry Manne, a 1952 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School. He had been through the usual conversion experience there, arriving with plans to become a labor union lawyer and emerging three years later a “confirmed free marketer.”


pages: 407 words: 135,242

The Streets Were Paved With Gold by Ken Auletta

benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, business logic, clean water, collective bargaining, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working-age population

Yet Goldin—after waiting two days to let the dust from the SEC charges settle (and candidate Beame take all the heat)—summoned the press to his office in the Municipal Building to release 448 pages of his SEC testimony and a collection of press releases, newspaper reports and other items. “On more than 50 major occasions,” he declared, “in increasingly grave and urgent language, I warned the public about the city’s worsening fiscal condition and budget practices. To say I did not disclose the city’s fiscal condition is like saying Ralph Nader did not warn consumers about unsafe cars because people continued to get killed in auto crashes, or Gen. Billy Mitchell did not warn the Navy about air power.” And, finally, city officials didn’t understand why the SEC berated them for failing to heed the admonitions of bankers that the credit market would close.

“Many of the methods by which governments have contrived to assure merit employment and protect the service against past abuses,” declared these long time advocates of civil service, “have also served to exclude many well-qualified persons, severely limit the flexibility of responsible public officials, and curtail the overall effectiveness of the public service.” Consumer advocate Ralph Nader lent his voice as well. In the introduction to The Spoiled System by Robert Vaughn, Nader wrote of the civil service as if it were a basic consumer issue: “These vested interests include the security of tenure, the security of inevitable promotion, the security of habit, the security of sloth, and the unfettered right to stifle dissent within the ranks and block evaluation of performance from outside, whether by the public or by other governmental bodies.”


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Getting to Canada had been relatively easy: head east and then north. Other challenges he was facing were more complicated. He was casting about for what to do with his life. Brand fantasized that perhaps he could reconstitute himself as a “private statesman” or public intellectual like Buckminster Fuller, Ralph Nader, or David Brower. But how? Robert Frank had been Brand’s guide for understanding where photography was heading. Earlier, Frank had told him that he had stopped being a photographer because “I noticed that when I made an exposure my eyes closed.” He confided in Brand that he believed that photography was stopping him from seeing the world.

It had been tempered by the 2008 recession, but there had still been forecasts of a doubling of nuclear power by 2035 worldwide.[23] After Fukushima, however, countries in both Asia and Europe backed away, while in the United States the low cost of natural gas undercut any meaningful new investment in nuclear energy. Brand has remained unmoved. He repeated over and over again that the climate situation hadn’t changed and that made nuclear energy necessary. During the summer of 2011, he agreed to debate Winona LaDuke, a well-known environmentalist and Ralph Nader’s Green Party vice presidential candidate in both 1996 and 2000. The debate was to be held in July at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, literally the home court of the “romantic” environmental movement that Brand had condemned in Whole Earth Discipline. Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll teased him, writing in an email: “Oh man, are you in for it now.


pages: 1,351 words: 404,177

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cognitive dissonance, company town, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, European colonialism, false flag, full employment, Future Shock, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, systematic bias, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, walking around money, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog

“We had a lot of success with that”: Maureen Dowd, “Hey, What’s That Sound?” NYT, August, 20, 2005. McGovern returned to his hometown: Greene, Running, 39. In between stops he worked: Mailer, St. George and the Godfather, 101. Muskie didn’t merely decline: Miroff, Liberals’ Moment, 97. Even Ralph Nader, the consumer: Ralph Nader, Crashing the Party: How to Tell the Truth and Still Run for President (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 37. They unveiled him: Greene, Running, 45–46. The day before, on August 7: Thompson, Fear and Loathing, 374. “Come January,” the glad-handing: Greene, Running, 39. In other news, Arthur Bremer’s: “Bremer Guilty in Shooting of Wallace, Gets 63 Years,” NYT, August 5, 1972.

He proposed $100 million to cure cancer, a universal health-insurance program, quoted T. S. Eliot—“Clean the air! Clean the sky! Wash the wind!”—in proposing a program “to end the plunder of America’s natural heritage.” That, at least, was the public transcript. He put it a little differently to two Ford executives in the Oval Office: Ralph Nader and the environmentalists, he said, would rather “go back and live like a bunch of damned animals…. What they’re interested in is destroying the system.” In a strategy meeting for the ’72 election, he proposed either sabotaging passage of the welfare plan—or passing it and letting the actual implementation die after passage, getting credit for caring, without doing anything at all.

Their boss, Robert Bennett, the article explained, was tied to the Nixon reelection campaign as chairman of some of its seventy-five dummy “committees” (such as “Supporters of the American Dream”) through which organizations such as the Associated Milk Producers had donated $325,000, which, Bernstein reported, “led to a suit filed by Ralph Nader’s Public Citizens, Inc., which charged that the Nixon administration raise[d] government milk support prices as a pay-off for the donations.” That afternoon the president held his twenty-fourth news conference. It had been postponed from Monday so it wouldn’t look as if he was responding to the break-in.


Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, American ideology, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate personhood, David Brooks, discovery of DNA, double helix, drone strike, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, land reform, language acquisition, Martin Wolf, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, single-payer health, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tobin tax, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

It’s quite interesting reading, not only for the content but also because of the style, which is pretty typical of business literature and of totalitarian culture in general. It reads a little like NSC-68.10 The whole society is crumbling, everything is being lost. The universities are being taken over by followers of Herbert Marcuse. The media and the government have been taken over by the Left. Ralph Nader is destroying the private economy, and so on. Businessmen are the most persecuted element in the society, but we don’t have to accept it, Powell said. We don’t have to let these crazy people destroy everything. We have the wealth. We’re the trustees of the universities. We’re the people who own the media.


The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, business logic, Cass Sunstein, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, IBM and the Holocaust, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, new economy, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl

In a series of brilliantly diabolical schemes, whose sinister character is best captured by Enron insiders' nicknames for them-"Death Star," "Get Shorty," Page 101 THE CORPORATION 101 and "Fat Boy"-the company helped manufacture an artificial energy shortage that drove the price of electricity, and consequently its profits , sky high. Thirty-eight blackouts plagued California over the six months after the Commodity Futures Modernization Act was signed by the president. Up until that point, and from the beginning of the energy crisis in May 2000, only one blackout had occurred. As Ralph Nader's Public Citizen organization concluded, "Phil Gramm's commodities deregulation law allowed Enron to control electricity in California, pocket billions in extra revenues and force millions of California residents to go hundreds of hours without electricity and pay outrageous prices." On June 19, 2001, the crisis was brought to an end when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission imposed strict price controls on California's electricity markets.


pages: 182 words: 55,234

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

The paper’s blogs, for instance, published regular pieces by Sanders sympathizers such as Katrina vanden Heuvel and the cartoonist Tom Toles. (The blogs also featured the efforts of a few really persistent Clinton haters.) The Sunday Outlook section once featured a pro-Sanders essay by none other than Ralph Nader, a demon figure for many of the paper’s commentators. But readers of the Post’s editorial pages had to wait until May 26 to see a really full-throated essay supporting Sanders’s legislative proposals. Penned by Jeffrey Sachs, the eminent economist and professor at Columbia University, it insisted that virtually all the previous debate on the subject had been irrelevant, because standard economic models did not take into account the sort of large-scale reforms that Sanders was advocating.


pages: 162 words: 51,978

Sleepwalk With Me: And Other Painfully True Stories by Mike Birbiglia

index card, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, telemarketer, traveling salesman

We don’t even need to interview him. He sounds completely qualified.” So Lisa and I go on the Scrambler. And from the moment I sit down in the Scrambler and they latch on the bar seat belt, I know I’m going to throw up for sure. The bar seat belt is not a reassuring piece of safety equipment. That is not a Ralph Nader–approved device. I don’t think the bar seat belt has ever saved anyone’s life, though it has probably pinned someone’s esophagus to the pavement in a Scrambler accident, ensuring that the Scrambler victim won’t ever talk about the Scrambler accident. So they latch the bar seat belt shut and I think, This is bad.


The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

On the overclass right, such institutions were denounced by libertarian economists as “crony capitalism” and by conservative constitutional lawyers in the United States as infringements on the supposed quasi-royalist “unitary power” of the president. On the overclass left, many of the same structures were demonized by public interest progressives like Ralph Nader whose constituency consisted of affluent and educated reformers.1 The political scientist Theodore Lowi coined the term “interest group liberalism” for New Deal arrangements as an insult.2 By 1986, a bipartisan consensus among American intellectuals and policy makers held that inherited democratic pluralist institutions were both corrupt and inefficient.


pages: 188 words: 54,942

Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control by Medea Benjamin

air gap, airport security, autonomous vehicles, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, drone strike, friendly fire, illegal immigration, Jeff Hawkins, Khyber Pass, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, nuremberg principles, performance metric, private military company, Ralph Nader, WikiLeaks

“The escalation in surveillance they ensure is substantial, and the effect they have on the culture of personal privacy—having the state employ hovering, high-tech, stealth video cameras that invade homes and other private spaces—is simply creepy.”151 Equally creepy is the possibility that drone technology is not just coming back to the US by way of local law enforcement agencies desperate for new, Department of Homeland Security-funded gadgets. Soon, the technology could be brought back to the homeland whether US policymakers like it or not. As Ralph Nader observed in a column published in the fall of 2011, drone technology is “becoming so dominant and so beyond any restraining framework of law or ethics that its use by the US government around the world may invite a horrific blowback.”152 Two days after the piece was published, a twenty-six-year-old man from Massachusetts, Rezwan Ferdaus, was arrested and accused of plotting to attack the Pentagon and US Capitol with small drone aircraft filled with explosives.153The plan he delivered to undercover agents involved using three remote-controlled planes, similar to military drones, guided by GPS equipment.


pages: 409 words: 145,128

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter D. Norton

clean water, Frederick Winslow Taylor, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, General Motors Futurama, invisible hand, jitney, new economy, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, scientific management, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal

Carruthers, “Automobile Accidents to Children,” Safety Engineering 49 (May 1925), 189–193 (189); “The Murderous Motor,” New Republic 47 (July 7, 1926), 189–190 (189); “The War after the War” (editorial), Detroit Free Press, August 23, 1927, 6; “The Motor More Deadly Than War,” Literary Digest 94 (August 27, 1927), 12. Notes to Chapter 1 269 14. For a brief review of the historical scholarship on auto safety in America, see introduction. Ralph Nader and Joel W. Eastman have concentrated attention on vehicle design, extending a critique of safety in the 1960s back to the 1920s; see Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (Grossman, 1965); Eastman, Styling vs. Safety: The American Automobile Industry and the Development of Automotive Safety, 1900–1966 (University Press of America, 1984).

Clark), “The White Line Isn’t Enough,” Saturday Evening Post 210 (March 26, 1938), 12–13, 32, 37, 39, 41 (12). 42. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Government Printing Office, 1975), part 2, 719. 43. In this development, Ralph Nader played the role of a latter-day J. C. Furnas, with greater long-term success. See Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (Grossman, 1965). 44. For a study of MADD, including a brief history of its origins, see Craig Reinarman, “The Social Construction of an Alcohol Problem: The Case of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and Social Control in the 1980s,” Theory and Society 17 (Jan. 1988), 91–120.


pages: 577 words: 149,554

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey by Michael Huemer

Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Phillip Zimbardo, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Stanford prison experiment, systematic bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

‘A Scale for Identifying “Stockholm Syndrome” Reactions in Young Dating Women: Factor Structure, Reliability and Validity’, Violence and Victims 10: 3–22. Graham, Dee, Edna Rawlings, and Roberta Rigsby. 1994. Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives. New York: New York University Press. Green, Leslie. 1988. The Authority of the State. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Green, Mark J. (ed.). 1973. The Monopoly Makers: Ralph Nader’s Study Group Report on Regulation and Competition. New York: Grossman. Gross, Samuel R., Kristen Jacoby, Daniel J. Matheson, Nicholas Montgomery, and Sujata Patil. 2005. ‘Exonerations in the United States 1989 through 2003’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 95: 523–60. Grossman, Dave. 1995.

Murray, Charles. 1984. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980. New York: Basic Books. Murray, Charles, and Christopher Jencks. 1985. ‘“Losing Ground”: An Exchange’, New York Review of Books 32, 16 (October 24): 55–6. Nader, Ralph. 1973. ‘Introduction’. Pp. ix–xv in The Monopoly Makers: Ralph Nader’s Study Group Report on Regulation and Competition, ed. Mark J. Green. New York: Grossman. Nagel, Thomas. 1991. Equality and Partiality. New York: Oxford University Press. ——. 1995. ‘Nozick: Libertarianism without Foundations’. Pp. 137–49 in Other Minds: Critical Essays 1969–1994. New York: Oxford University Press.


pages: 399 words: 155,913

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law by Timothy Sandefur

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, housing crisis, independent contractor, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, minimum wage unemployment, positional goods, price stability, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, Robert Bork, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wealth creators

The semipublic nature of premodern corporations thus left a legacy that lives to the present day.70 The second way in which the antiquated model of the corporation persists is in the oft-heard description of corporations as “creatures of the state.” This description usually accompanies proposals for government control over corporations; in the 1970s, it even inspired Ralph Nader and colleagues to call for a federal corporations law that would take the regulation of corporate entities out of the hands of the states.71 They argued that corporations were created by government permission and therefore owed a “responsibility” to the general public, which would take the form of government control over corporate decisionmaking.

Illinois, 94 U.S. (4 Otto) 113, 148–49 (1876) (Field, J., dissenting). 70. Timothy Sandefur, “A Gleeful Obituary for Poletown Neighborhood Council v. Detroit,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 28 (2005): 654–60; and Timothy Sandefur, “Mine and Thine Distinct: What Kelo Says about Our Path,” Chapman Law Review 10 (2006): 15–34. 71. Ralph Nader, Mark Green, and Joel Seligman, Taming the Giant Corporation (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976). 72. Hessen, In Defense of the Corporation. See also Robert Hessen, “A New Concept of Corporations: A Contractual and Private Property Model,” Hastings Law Journal 30 (1979): 1327–50. 73. Hessen, In Defense of the Corporation, p. 17. 74.


pages: 205 words: 18,208

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

In exploring these matters, weʼll see that some vituperative shouting matches are based on simple misunderstandings, whereas other disagreements appear so fundamental that compromise of any sort may be anathema to either side. THE ACCOUNTABILITY MATRIX “No man is so fond of freedom himself that he would not chuse to subject the will of some individuals of society to his own.” OLIVER GOLDSMITH, THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD In 1996 the famed muckraker and consumer advocate Ralph Nader was the presidential candidate of Californiaʼs Green Party. At one point, after lecturing earnestly about the need to hold corporate officials accountable for every nefarious transaction and scheme, Nader was asked why he refused to publish his own financial records, as all other candidates had done.

By demanding that officials be scrutinized every bit as much as they scrutinize us. Two millennia ago Juvenal posed the riddle, “Who shall watch the watchman?” There is just one answer. We all will. Going back to the accountability matrix, one can take almost any contemporary privacy issue and see people choosing different boxes, depending on their point of view. As Ralph Nader vividly illustrated, any effort either to restrict or open up a data spigot is judged good or evil subjectively. When we enhance our own “privacy,” this may be seen by others as a sneaky attempt to keep them in the dark, a conspiratorial veil that might conceal threats to their liberty. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than on the Internet, where the semi-official dogma is openness and liberty, but where unpopular opinions are often greeted with vicious attacks and masked retribution.


pages: 498 words: 145,708

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

This can be undermined if they are seen as simply shilling for a different ‘anti-corporate’ brand.”74 Lasn is certainly aware of the dangers of faux resistance. He notes in Culture Jam how “a lot of people who think they’re rebelling aren’t,” and derides those leftist activists who “have been reduced to the level of little kids throwing snowballs at passing cars.” He has unkind things to say about reformers like Ralph Nader and the Public Interest Research Groups network (PIRG) he helped found, as well as about former Harper’s Magazine editor Lewis Lapham.75 Yet throwing a “nice” brand of Blackspot sneakers at world bad-boy brand leader Nike does not seem much different than throwing snowballs at passing cars. Indeed if Blackspot ever won an unlikely victory, it would be a victory of superior marketing that the marketing industry would no doubt ape and steal for its own purposes.

Their seven signature proposals for curbing corruption, reigning in the political influence of business, confronting monopolies, and dealing with corporate crime all point to a renewal of popular sovereignty rather than to marketplace solutions based on innovation or creative destruction.30 Consumer advocate Ralph Nader also turns to government for enforcement of the consumer standards he continues to promote. Breaking the vicious cycle from within remains a daunting task. Media and cultural studies programs as well as the arts themselves, while formidable potential adversaries of monopolistic market practices, have largely been subordinated to those same market forces, making real autonomy difficult.


pages: 651 words: 161,270

Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism by Sharon Beder

American Legislative Exchange Council, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, business climate, centre right, clean water, corporate governance, Exxon Valdez, Gary Taubes, global village, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, laissez-faire capitalism, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two and twenty, urban planning

For this reason we find the same revolving door pattern between public relations and lobbying firms and government as we found between think-tanks and government in Chapter Five. When the Republicans lost office in 1992 there was a mass movement of government officials to the lobbying and PR firms. Ralph Nader’s group, Congress Watch, tracked 300 of them: over half moved to Washington DC lobbying and PR firms.64 The door swings both ways, and former lobbyists often become part of government, where they have a unique opportunity to help their former clients. Hill & Knowlton’s lobbying efforts are aided by its employment of former government officials who have good access to government.

For example, the car industry is a big advertiser in the New York Times, and “Times publisher and CEO Arthur Sulzberger admitted that he leaned on his editors to present the auto industry’s position because it ‘would affect advertising’.”40 The group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has told how Forbes magazine, anxious to attract and maintain insurance company advertising (which in 1990 made up seven per cent of its advertising income), criticized personal injury lawyers for winning money off “outnumbered” insurance companies and attempted to bring Ralph Nader, a thorn in the side of the insurance industry, into disrepute.41 Corporations can also use sponsorship, a more indirect form of advertising, to influence the content of the media. The US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio are heavily dependent on corporate sponsors for their broadcasting because their government funding is insufficient.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

Respectable opinion seemed to have turned against big business so quickly and so hard. An exposé of the dangers of synthetic pesticides, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, had become a number-one bestseller for months and introduced the idea of “the environment” to millions of Americans, which led directly to the creation of the EPA. There was young Ralph Nader, the tenacious lawyer-investigator-activist out of Harvard Law School, whose own damning exposé of corporate irresponsibility, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, became a bestseller in 1966 and by the end of the year inspired a new federal regulatory bureaucracy to improve car safety.

To make fundamental and permanent change, they also needed to cultivate power in the other, largely unelected branch of government, the judiciary. They needed to colonize the legal community and reframe the law itself to make sure they kept getting their way. Instead of litigation almost entirely being used against them by antitrust enforcers and class-action troublemakers and environmentalists and Ralph Naders, they needed to reshape fundamental American legal understandings—to make it a toolbox they could use to accumulate more power and wealth for big business and the rich over the long run. People these days throw around the phrase fundamental structural change a lot, but what the right did in the legal domain was exactly that, breathtakingly so.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Asked about the growing importance of outside earnings, Boston attorney Francis H. Burr, a member of the Harvard Corporation, was quoted as saying, “a lot of people are concerned and so are we.”1 If that was true, although it seems unlikely, they certainly didn’t do anything about it. In the late 1980s, the Ralph Nader–sponsored Harvard Watch found that academics held 202 board seats in the country’s 200 largest companies, nearly four times their representation in 1969. Professors and universities had become beholden to corporations, the group argued, and had lost their capacity for dispassionate analysis. At the time, full professors made about $100,000 a year at HBS, but they made multiples of that by consulting.

Or Larry Summers, who upon being appointed Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary in 1999 received congratulations from Enron chairman Kenneth Lay, to which Summers responded, “I’ll keep my eye on power deregulation and energy-market infrastructure issues.” When Bush was elected, Summers left to become president of Harvard. When asked for his reaction to the HarvardWatch report, consumer advocate Ralph Nader said it was simply the “latest chapter in the long-running story of the hijacking of Harvard University’s name and reputation by corporate interests.”20 But those are stories for another book. Jeff Skilling holds the record for the most mortifying corner-office behavior by a graduate of HBS, at least that we know of, save for some that George W.

Third, and crucially, the long list of people who both shared their thoughts and gave me their time during the researching of the book. Anyone who is quoted herein has my gratitude, but I need to single out a few, including J. C. Spender, Henry Mintzberg, Casey Gerald, Walter Kiechel, Kevin Mellyn, Miriam Datskovsky, and Ralph Nader. As usual, for anyone I spoke to, I hope the results seem worth the time spent. Fourth, the people who kept me sane over the past few years when things could just as easily have gone the other way: Luke Froude, Pablo Galarza, Adam Masry, Gilda Riccardi, Lauren Wells, Tara McIndoo, and Laura Jones.


Interventions by Noam Chomsky

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Monroe Doctrine, no-fly zone, nuremberg principles, old-boy network, Ralph Nader, Thorstein Veblen, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, éminence grise

In the United States, the Greens are concerned with long-term development of an electoral alternative of a kind that has succeeded in countries with a more functional democracy than here. But the Greens lack the support in the corporate sector that is necessary to compete in U.S. elections, just as someone who manufactures cars at home lacks the resources to compete with General Motors. Ralph Nader has used the (rather artificial) glare of electoral politics to raise important issues not on the corporate agenda of either major party. But he’s seen as a spoiler, fronting for Bush (hardly Nader’s intention), which discredits him and the excellent organizations that he has founded. Beyond the alternative candidates is the immediate real-world issue of Bush versus Kerry.


pages: 204 words: 61,491

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, Jeff Riggenbach Ph.

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, classic study, disinformation, global village, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Lewis Mumford, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the medium is the message

So did the star of the Watergate Hearings, Senator Sam Ervin. Former President Gerald Ford joined with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for brief roles on “Dynasty.” Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis appeared on “St. Elsewhere.” Speaker of the House Tip O‘Neill did a stint on “Cheers.” Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, George McGovern and Mayor Edward Koch hosted “Saturday Night Live.” Koch also played the role of a fight manager in a made-for-television movie starring James Cagney. Mrs. Nancy Reagan appeared on “Diff’rent Strokes.” Would anyone be surprised if Gary Hart turned up on “Hill Street Blues”? Or if Geraldine Ferraro played a small role as a Queens housewife in a Francis Coppola film?


pages: 254 words: 61,387

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

Nothing Friedman had shared before caught the attention of the business community quite like his 1970 op-ed in the New York Times that made the case for financial maximization. At the time, the United States was mired in Vietnam. Young men were losing their lives in the war. New movements like Ralph Nader’s consumer safety advocacy were demanding companies be held accountable to the public interest. What more could America’s companies do for the greater good? Milton Friedman wrote in the New York Times that this movement had it all wrong. To say that a company owes anything to society is absurd, he suggested.


pages: 558 words: 168,179

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

So in the spring of 1971, Powell, who was then sixty-three, had watched with growing agitation as student radicals, antiwar demonstrators, black power militants, and much of the liberal intellectual elite turned against what they saw as the depravity of corporate America. Powell believed American capitalism was facing a crisis. All summer long, he clipped magazine and newspaper articles documenting the political threat. He was particularly preoccupied with Ralph Nader, the young Harvard Law School graduate whom Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor, had hired to investigate auto safety hazards. Nader’s 1965 exposé on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, accused the auto industry of putting profits ahead of safety, triggering the American consumer movement and undermining Americans’ faith in business.

Less than a decade later, in 1984, he set out to launch a private political sales force. On paper, it was yet another Koch-funded conservative nonprofit group fighting for less government. It called itself Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). From the outside, it looked like an authentic political group, created by a groundswell of concerned citizens, much like Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Groups, which had sprung up all over the country. According to the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, however, it was in fact a new kind of weapon in the arsenal of several of America’s biggest businesses—a fake populist movement secretly manufactured by corporate sponsors—not grass roots, but “Astroturf,” as such synthetic groups came to be known.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Waiting in the wings were hundreds of experts who had been studying just how destructive the twentieth century had been to the planet that we inhabit. Environmentalists mounted one of the most successful political movements in history. In 1962 Michael Harrington in his The Other America: Poverty in the United States reminded the public that not everyone was prospering. Three years later Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed took on America’s automakers; its subtitle delivers the message: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile. Their words seemed even more prophetic with the multiple blows of an oil crisis, rising unemployment, and an inflation rate spiraling upward. A younger generation took up the causes of the degrading environment, product safety, and the persisting plight of the poor and made them their own.

If one bought a million-dollar house with a down payment of $100,000 and turned around and sold it for $1.1 million in a rising real estate market, he or she could recover the down payment plus another $100,000, doubling the initial investment. Leveraging is possible when you gain title to some object with a partial payment of it. To be successful, there must be an appreciation of value. Real estate prices in the United States enjoyed such a rise, nearly doubling between 2000 and 2006. Aptly called casino capitalism by Ralph Nader, mortgages showed the way toward securitizing any form of credit from automobile payments to credit cards. Wanting to keep the good times going, financial institutions began issuing mortgages to people with risky credit records or insufficient income to make their payments. Banks and savings and loan companies lured customers with low down or no down payment offers.


pages: 208 words: 69,863

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

airport security, Bob Geldof, City Beautiful movement, company town, David Sedaris, desegregation, Frank Gehry, gun show loophole, Ida Tarbell, Lewis Mumford, Oklahoma City bombing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine, white picket fence

As a Democrat who voted for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, an election suspiciously tipped to tragic Republican victory because of a handful of contested ballots in the state of Florida, I, for one, would never dream of complaining about the votes siphoned in that state by my fellow liberal Ralph Nader, who convinced citizens whose hopes for the country differ little from my own to vote for him, even though had those votes gone to Gore, perhaps those citizens might have spent their free time in the years to come more pleasurably pursuing leisure activities, such as researching the sacrifice of Family Garfield, instead of attending rallies and protests against wars they find objectionable, not to mention the money saved on aspirin alone considering they’ll have to pop a couple every time they read the newspaper, wondering if the tap water with which they wash down the pills is safe enough to drink considering the corporate polluter lobbyists now employed at the EPA.


pages: 274 words: 63,679

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, car-free, congestion pricing, COVID-19, crossover SUV, desegregation, Donald Trump, Elaine Herzberg, gentrification, global pandemic, high-speed rail, invention of air conditioning, Lyft, megacity, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, wikimedia commons

Finally, late in 2019, the NHTSA announced that it would be updating its five-star rating system to “consider new technologies tied to the safety of pedestrians and other vulnerable road users such as cyclists.”43 Exactly what is in the new rule will not be known until it is released, but according to the NHTSA news release, it seems that the agency will limit its ratings to whether or not cars include partially automated features like automatic emergency braking or automatic pedestrian detection. The NHTSA will likely stop short of evaluating how different body designs and different vehicle styles affect pedestrian safety. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, after Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, these kinds of improvements—passive safety features, features that protect someone from devastating injury even in the event of a crash—were added to the interior of cars. Additions like airbags, seat belts, and padded dashboards all help absorb the impact of the blow when someone seated inside a car is in a crash.


pages: 926 words: 312,419

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do by Studs Terkel

activist lawyer, business cycle, call centre, card file, cuban missile crisis, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, job satisfaction, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, strikebreaker, traveling salesman, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero day

The only thing that would require a salesman is the price. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people are price-conscious. That’s all they care about. You could sell ‘em a bag of potatoes if the price was right. You could sell ’em a 1948 Chevy if the price was right. How do you feel about Ralph Nader? Pardon me? How do you feel about Ralph Nader? We could do without him. He’s taken the choice away from the people. He doesn’t give them the choice of having head restraints or belts. Or having emission control systems. He took that choice away. Carbon monoxide, all that poisonous stuff, leave that to the manufacturers that know such things and what it would cost to build all that new equipment.

The broiler farmer invests somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand dollars in two chicken houses. They hold up to seven thousand baby chicks. The packing company puts the chicks in and supplies the feed and medicine. At the end of eight weeks they’re four and a half pounds. The companies pick ‘em up and pay you for ’em. Ralph Nader’s been after them. It’s almost white slavery. The farmer invests and the company can say, ‘This is a lousy lot, we’re not gonna pay you the full price.’ But you’re still putting in twelve hours a day.” 85 Clyde Ellis, a former congressman from Arkansas, recalls, “I wanted to be at my parents’ house when electricity came.


pages: 246 words: 116

Tyler Cowen-Discover Your Inner Economist Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist-Plume (2008) by Unknown

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Andrei Shleifer, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, cross-subsidies, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, George Santayana, haute cuisine, low interest rates, market clearing, microcredit, money market fund, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Don't send a check through the mail at all. Stuff some more cash in your pocket next time you are in Calcutta-or perhaps Cancun-and give it away on the street. Even without the tax break, we can do more good for the world this way. The more devious lesson is that we can subvert the nonprofits we do not like. Are you offended by Ralph Nader, or perhaps you think PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) goes too far? Does the Republican or Democratic National Committee make you angry? Run up their costs of operation. Choose one nonprofit you do not like and send them twenty bucks. Once is enough. Mention that you are thinking of putting them in your will, or perhaps let it drop that you play at the local polo club or own a yacht.


pages: 279 words: 76,796

The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives by Lisa Servon

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, do well by doing good, employer provided health coverage, financial exclusion, financial independence, financial innovation, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, precariat, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, We are the 99%, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

Dodd-Frank mandated the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in 2011 in order to “make markets for consumer financial products and services work for Americans.” Elizabeth Warren had conceived of this idea in 2007, before the crisis. A Harvard Law School professor at the time, she wrote an article titled “Unsafe at Any Rate,” a reference to Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed. Warren argued for a government consumer-financial-protection agency akin to the Consumer Product Safety Commission created under President Nixon in 1972. To make her point, she likened credit cards and mortgages to toasters and microwaves: It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house.


pages: 252 words: 72,473

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Bernie Madoff, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carried interest, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, data science, disinformation, electronic logging device, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, Internet of things, late fees, low interest rates, machine readable, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sharpe ratio, statistical model, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor

—Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother and co-editor of Boing Boing “Many algorithms are slaves to the inequalities of power and prejudice. If you don’t want these algorithms to become your masters, read Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil to deconstruct the latest growing tyranny of an arrogant establishment.” —Ralph Nader, author of Unsafe at Any Speed “Next time you hear someone gushing uncritically about the wonders of Big Data, show them Weapons of Math Destruction. It’ll be salutary.” —Felix Salmon, Fusion “From getting a job to finding a spouse, predictive algorithms are silently shaping and controlling our destinies.


pages: 281 words: 78,317

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, British Empire, citizen journalism, cosmological constant, dark matter, data science, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, George Santayana, Gerolamo Cardano, ghettoisation, Golden age of television, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, obamacare, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Y2K

Bush is seen dancing with balloons and Gore is captured in a conga line, and then RATM jams econo in a wood-paneled studio (to a song that is, in retrospect, propulsive and committed, taken from an album I probably underrated). We get a supercut of newsmakers in quick succession—Sonny Bono, Ken Starr, the pope, Bill Clinton—with the ingrained implication that they are all complicit in some big-money boondoggle, and that all politicians and parties are fundamentally interchangeable. It ended with a message from Ralph Nader. Part of the reason I appreciated this video was that I agreed with it. The other part was that the message seemed so self-evidently true that I couldn’t believe a group as politically impractical as Rage Against the Machine was the band making it (“Tom Morello is finally embracing pragmatism,” I pragmatically assumed).


pages: 282 words: 26,931

The Five-Year Party: How Colleges Have Given Up on Educating Your Child and What You Can Do About It by Craig Brandon

Bernie Madoff, call centre, corporate raider, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, impulse control, new economy, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader

“By the time that great ‘new car smell’ wears off, so does the joy of owning the car.”182 Alan Michael Collinge, founder of the political action committee Student Loan Justice and author of The Student Loan Scam, has shown how predatory lenders teamed with Congress and party school administrators to set up one of the largest loan sharking operations in American history, worth $90 billion as of 2008. 183 Instead of encouraging graduates to pay off their loans as soon as possible, as credit counselors advise, predatory lenders encourage graduates to default so they can load on fees and penalties that can double or even triple the amount to be paid back. Ralph Nader, commenting on the problem in 2006, said, “the corporate lawyers who conceived this self-enriching system ought to get the nation’s top prize for shameless perversity.” 184 Collinge’s website has drawn student loan horror stories from all over the country. Britt Napoli, for example, originally borrowed $30,000 to attend graduate school.


pages: 269 words: 77,042

Sex, Lies, and Pharmaceuticals: How Drug Companies Plan to Profit From Female Sexual Dysfunction by Ray Moynihan, Barbara Mintzes

business intelligence, clean water, meta-analysis, moral panic, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, placebo effect, profit motive, Ralph Nader, systematic bias

She argued that any decision about approving the testosterone patch should be postponed until larger, longer studies were done—a theme echoed by others opposing approval. In his three-minute address to the committee, high-profile health advocate Dr Sid Wolfe also focused on safety issues. Wolfe was from Public Citizen, the Washington DC–based consumer watchdog that Ralph Nader helped to set up, specialising in medical matters and drug safety. He referred to scientific evidence suggesting that testosterone use could increase a woman’s risk of both heart disease and breast cancer, and urged the committee not to approve the patch. Dr Wolfe, who had been sitting next to Tiefer throughout the hearings, ended his short presentation by saying that a large proportion of women with decreased desire could respond positively to counselling.


pages: 249 words: 77,027

Glock: The Rise of America's Gun by Paul M. Barrett

airport security, forensic accounting, hiring and firing, interchangeable parts, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

Under traditional American injury law, the intervention of a third party—the curious child who foolishly shoots a friend, the convenience-store robber who attacks a clerk—was thought to break the chain of liability between the victim and the manufacturer. But since the 1960s, some US judges and law professors had been expanding theories of liability to give injury victims a better chance of finding a defendant with deep pockets. The consumer-protection movement led by Ralph Nader reinforced this trend and helped turn up new evidence that manufacturers often knew more than they liked to admit about hazards associated with their products. Rising crime rates in the 1970s and 1980s added a sense of urgency to the gun-control movement and prompted some activists to turn their attention to the courts, as well as the legislature, as a venue where they might rein in companies that make and sell firearms.


pages: 249 words: 73,731

Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business by Bob Lutz

An Inconvenient Truth, corporate governance, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, flex fuel, Ford Model T, medical malpractice, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, scientific management, shareholder value, Steve Jobs, Toyota Production System, transfer pricing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, value engineering

Sure, some voiced concern and resentment, and best-selling books, like Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers and John Keats’s The Insolent Chariots, reflected a small but growing nucleus of concern over whether all this arrogant opulence and the ever-shorter fashion cycle were really of benefit to society. But these books were written by intellectual elitists . . . so who cared what they said? One incident that caused GM lasting harm was a 1965 book by a young lawyer and consumer advocate by the name of Ralph Nader. Unsafe at Any Speed accused the Corvair, different from other American cars with its rear-engine design, of being inherently unstable and accident-prone. Nader’s work gained huge notoriety and effectively shut down Corvair sales in the mid-1960s. Unaccustomed to being dented by a lone ideologue, GM hired investigators to delve into Nader’s personal life, seeking any salacious information that would silence him.


pages: 283 words: 81,163

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas J. Dilorenzo

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, California energy crisis, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, electricity market, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Hessen, Robert. In Defense of the Corporation. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1979. Hessen shatters the myth that “big business” is necessarily bad for society, showing how businesses grow by satisfying large numbers of consumers. He also destroys the anticapitalist arguments of such gadflies as Ralph Nader. Heyne, Paul. The Economic Way of Thinking. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. One of the very best contemporary introductory economics textbooks. Higgs, Robert. “Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed after the War.” Independent Review, Spring 1997, 561–90.


pages: 321 words: 85,267

Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, American ideology, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, car-free, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, congestion pricing, desegregation, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, operational security, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

dk In our “highly evolved” regulatory system, this process is most often accomplished through expensive lawsuits, as documented in The Death of Common Sense. In light of this situation, a number of not-for-profit organizations have arisen over the years—the National Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen—capable of throwing legal firepower at otherwise unresolvable problems. As of yet, there is no such advocate for the built environment. But the sophisticated legal strategies that have succeeded in attacking air pollution and corporate negligence are also available to activists concerned similarly about their cities.


pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Without the disclosures, only the hackers who took the effort to reverse engineer the patches would have been able to launch the attacks, but there would have been less public awareness of the problems. Mudge and Wysopal, who wrote many of the advisories, became the most visible and articulate explainers of the researchers’ side. “I wanted the L0pht to be Consumer Reports and Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader,” Mudge said. “That was my vision.” Despite his youth, the group took Christien along for hangout sessions at New Hack City, home to the cDc servers. Mudge impressed him while playing quarters by rolling the coins off his nose before they bounced into a beer glass. As an MIT junior, Christien took a class on social issues in computing that turned out to be mostly about security.


The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life by Steven E. Landsburg

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, business cycle, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, first-price auction, German hyperinflation, Golden Gate Park, information asymmetry, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, low interest rates, means of production, price discrimination, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, statistical model, the scientific method, Unsafe at Any Speed

Virtually all economists agreed that if the price were allowed to rise freely, people would buy less gasoline. Many noneconomists believed otherwise. The economists were right: When price controls were lifted, the lines disappeared. The economist's faith in the power of incentives serves him well, and he trusts it as a guide in unfamiliar territory. In 1965, Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, a book calling attention to various design elements that made cars more dangerous than necessary. The federal government soon responded with a wide range of automobile safety legislation, mandating the use of seat belts, padded dashboards, collapsible steering columns, dual braking systems, and penetration-resistant windshields.


pages: 290 words: 85,847

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

“It is now possible to drive across the face of the nation without feeling you’ve been anywhere or that you’ve done anything,” he wrote. But his claim that Americans had finally fallen out of love with the automobile turned out to be incorrect. Car sales, and the economy, rebounded later in the year. The anti-car books in the 1960s, most famously Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (1965), focused on safety problems, and the industry’s failure to address them. Rather than calling for the end of the car, though, these books (with titles including Highway Homicide and Licensed to Kill) took for granted the central place of the automobile in modern life and demanded action to make it safer.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

NAOMI KLEIN1 Twenty years ago, I began In Defence of Global Capitalism with a chapter about how the world was improving faster than ever. I attacked the popular perception that the world was getting worse, more dangerous and unfair, and that the poor were getting poorer. In 1999, the World Bank claimed that ‘world poverty has increased and growth prospects have dimmed for developing countries’. The famous American activist Ralph Nader declared: ‘The essence of globalization is a subordination of human rights, environmental rights, democracy rights to the imperatives of global trade and investment.’ Or as Sweden’s archbishop summarized the state of the world: ‘our journey leads straight to hell’.2 In contrast, I talked about the strangely unheralded progress that I saw in poor countries that had begun to liberalize their economies, which now had better incomes, agricultural production, nutrition, health, vaccination and education.


pages: 306 words: 82,909

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

Some states enforce very early filing deadlines that penalize candidates who enter the race late, or rules that make it harder to get on the ballot if you’re not a Democrat or Republican. Forty-four states have “sore loser” laws that prevent the loser of a primary election from running in the general election as an independent candidate. This isn’t to say it never happens. After seeing how Ralph Nader affected the 2000 election, Republican operatives around the country tried to take advantage of Green Party candidates to siphon Democratic votes. In Seattle, an eighteen-year-old former Nader volunteer named Young Han contemplated running in the 2002 state legislature race. A “Mr. Shore” helped Han organize a campaign announcement and also donated to the campaign.


pages: 340 words: 92,904

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

I was just as articulate as Benjamin. “Huh?” I replied. (I wasn’t a very smooth talker.) Was that even a field? Brian told me MIT had been studying traffic and maybe that’d suit me. I did have an interest in traffic safety after my friend’s brakes failed on his ’55 Chevy and we crashed into a tollbooth. I had read Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed. So I investigated graduate programs in the study of traffic and transportation and discovered them hidden away in the departments of civil engineering. I applied to a few schools and was accepted by MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. The choice wasn’t especially difficult: Penn offered me a full fellowship, plus a stipend of $75 a week.


pages: 295 words: 89,280

The Narcissist Next Door by Jeffrey Kluger

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Columbine, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, impulse control, Jony Ive, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, theory of mind, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, twin studies, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

It doesn’t even require wealth to go on that “Vote for me or at least pay attention to me” ride. Did anybody believe Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich had any chance at all of ever taking the oath of office—did they even believe it themselves?—or was it just the naked craving to be on the presidential stage? In 2000, Ralph Nader ran quixotically for president on the Green Party ticket, winning 2.8 million votes nationwide—and 97,488 of them in Florida, the large majority of which surely came out of Al Gore’s hide. That Florida haul would have been more than enough to overcome the paper-thin 537 votes by which Gore lost the state to George W.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

A young management consultant, Peter Drucker, doubted that a company could forecast its ability to meet such obligations decades into the future.6 In the 1950s and early 1960s, the immense profitability of GM and favorable economics supported the schemes. In the late 1960s, GM's profitability declined. With car ownership having reached very high levels, the market was saturated. In 1965, Ralph Nader's bestselling Unsafe at Any Speed drew unwelcome attention to the auto industry's safety issues, mechanical defects, and quality problems, placing additional pressure on earnings. Then came the oil shocks of the 1970s and an increased demand for compact, fuel-efficient vehicles, which US car makers had shunned in favor of ever larger, more powerful dream machines.


pages: 300 words: 65,976

The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong by Barry Glassner

Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Gary Taubes, haute cuisine, Helicobacter pylori, income inequality, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, placebo effect, profit motive, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Saturday Night Live, stem cell, sugar pill, twin studies, urban sprawl, working poor

His answer was not what I expected. “I don’t eat meat, so I wouldn’t. If it were an irradiated veggie burger I wouldn’t care,” he said, breaking ranks with his comrades not only in the organic movement, but in the consumer-advocacy movement as well. Public Citizen, the consumer organization founded by Ralph Nader and usually a close ally of the CSPI, has been a vocal opponent of the new technology. Citing decades-old studies while ignoring numerous others that contradict their claim, Public Citizen contends that irradiated foods cause cancer and other health problems. Jacobson disagrees. “I think the health risks are pretty minor,” he told me.


pages: 304 words: 87,702

The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life by Pam Grout

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, global village, Golden Gate Park, if you build it, they will come, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Because IONS’ programs are so diverse and because the visiting organization leading a workshop or retreat determines the price, the cost of instruction varies. HOW TO GET IN TOUCH Institute of Noetic Sciences, 101 San Antonio Road, Petaluma, CA 94952, 707-775-3500, www.noetic.org. CLOSE UP FOUNDATION learn the legislative process WASHINGTON, D.C. There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship. —Ralph Nader 64 | Most people think of politics as a spectator sport, something to watch from the sidelines. It never occurs to them that developing an informed option about government policy is at least as important as whether their football team wins on Sunday. But the Close Up Foundation is out to change all that.


pages: 312 words: 91,835

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Voting participation increases monotonically with income level. See Demos for the 2008 elections, available at http://www.demos.org/data-byte/voter-turnout-income-2008-us-presidential-election (data from US Census Bureau). 35. See also Kraus, Davidai, and Nussbaum (2015). 36. There are of course exceptions: had Ralph Nader not run as the third party candidate in 2000, it is unlikely that George W. Bush would have been elected. 37. It is remarkable that although Bartels finds that the responsiveness income gradient is steeper for Republican senators than for Democratic senators, the difference between the two is small.


pages: 384 words: 89,250

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

More and more, ad men began talking of the desirability of creating ‘psychological obsolescence.’”22 With the enormous success of The Hidden Persuaders, Packard found himself launched on a kind of career that was barely recognized in his own time. A strange combination of social critic, pop psychologist, and quasi–public intellectual, Packard hastily constructed books that would prefigu e popular works by Rachel Carson, Betty Friedan, John Kenneth Galbraith, Jules Henry, Christopher Lasch, Marshall McLuhan, and Ralph Nader. Packard was the firs writer to catch this wave. In just three years, he produced three nonfi tion bestsellers in a row, a feat no other American writer has equaled, before or since. The Status Seekers (1959) was a groundbreaking examination of America’s social and organizational dynamics, and The Waste Makers (1960) was a highly critical book-length study of planned obsolescence in contemporary American culture.


pages: 284 words: 92,387

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

Bretton Woods, British Empire, company town, corporate personhood, David Graeber, deindustrialization, dumpster diving, East Village, feminist movement, financial innovation, George Gilder, John Markoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, Lao Tzu, late fees, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, planetary scale, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, working poor

g This began to change somewhat when the presidential election campaign began to kick into gear, because of the lack of specific legislative issues and the specter of a Republican victory, but also, I suspect, because so many progressives stopped following electoral politics entirely. h In Illinois, to cite a typical example, 54 percent of voters over thirty turned out in 2010, but only 23 percent of those under thirty. i I heard this trick done endlessly with Ralph Nader: during campaigns, there is almost no discussion or even description of his positions, but merely warnings that a vote for Nader is a vote for the Republican candidate. Afterward, his positions are treated as if they represented the opinions of 2.7 percent of the American public (the percentage of the popular vote he received in 2000).


pages: 342 words: 94,762

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

I am especially grateful for conversations with Bill Ackman, Julian Alexander, Michael Ashner, Lanny Breuer, Yaron Brook, Jeff Campbell, Dana Carney, Kathy Casey, Walker Clark, Simon Copleston, Jeff Critchfield, Patrick Daniels, Hernando de Soto, Sanford DeVoe, Gurpreet Dhaliwal, Andrew Dittmer, Jesse Eisinger, Anne Erni, Allen Farrell, Jerome Fons, Mary Fricker, Koji Fukumura, Maria Gavrilovic, Gordon Gerson, Jonathan Glater, Francesco Guerrera, Scott Harrison, Margaret Heffernan, Sheena Iyengar, James Jacoby, Rob Jafek, Roy Katzovicz, Adam Kolber, Eric Kolchinsky, Unni Krishnan, Steve Kroft, Stephen Labaton, Irene LaCota, Vice Chancellor Travis Laster, Angel Lau, Donald Lawrence, Joe Lonsdale, Angel Lopez, John Lovi, Jeff Madrick, Peter McLeod, Ralph Nader, Chuck O’Kelley, André Perold, Stephen Porges, Ernesto Reuben, Christine Richard, Darren Robbins, John Rogers, Jennifer Schenker, Todd Simkin, Robert P. Smith, Yves Smith, Mark Snell, Michael Solender, Judge Stanley Sporkin, Joseph Stiglitz, Richard Thaler, David Westbrook, and David Viniar. I was able to test-drive some of the ideas in this book in two speeches during October 2011, at the Seattle University School of Law’s Berle Center Corporate Governance Colloquium and the French-American Foundation’s Young Leaders program.


Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent by Robert F. Barsky

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, centre right, feminist movement, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, information retrieval, language acquisition, machine translation, means of production, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Norman Mailer, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strong AI, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, theory of mind, Yom Kippur War

Noble, like Chomsky, is, as well, an activist and social file:///D|/export3/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll@bookid=9296&filename=page_142.html [4/16/2007 3:20:55 PM] Document Page 143 critic who assists rank-and-file groups in several industries in their struggle with new technologies. He was the cofounder, with Ralph Nader, of the National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest. In 1984, he was fired by MIT "for his ideas and his actions in support of those ideas." He subsequently "brought a suit against MIT to obtain and make public the documentary record of his political firing and on the basis of this record the American Historical Association subsequently condemned MIT for the firing" (Noble, Progress 165).


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

You could argue that China has one of the few national governments where many leaders have relevant higher degrees, but complicating factors are at work there—not least the conspicuous lack of the democratic principles that were hardwired into the OTA. In any event, Sagan was fingering a worrying gap in governance that the agency later worked hard to address. Unease about the dark sides of new technology had been powerfully expressed by critics such as Rachel Carson, who wrote books like Silent Spring, and the consumer activist Ralph Nader. Launched around the time of the 1972 UN environment conference in Stockholm, the OTA eventually would carry out some 750 studies on various aspects of science and technology, ranging across such areas as energy, environment, health, and national security. So where would you turn these days to find such deep insight into emerging science and technology?


Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, food desert, high-speed rail, Housing First, illegal immigration, Internet of things, mandatory minimum, millennium bug, move fast and break things, Nick Bostrom, payday loans, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, subscription business, systems thinking, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

They transformed their dining room into a war room, with the table covered with the names of the lawmakers and pediatricians they wanted to reach. On the weekends, Bob Sanders would call them in their home districts to make his case. Opponents of Sanders’s bill argued that it encroached on the freedom of parents. “This is a Ralph Nader kind of bill that would take the parents’ rights away from them,” said State Representative Roscoe Pickering. “I don’t want poor people to have to buy these expensive seats.” Looking back on the time, Pat Sanders remembers reading a letter written by a parent who complained, “I have the right to send my child in a rocket to the Moon.”


pages: 277 words: 91,698

SAM: One Robot, a Dozen Engineers, and the Race to Revolutionize the Way We Build by Jonathan Waldman

Burning Man, computer vision, Ford paid five dollars a day, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Hyperloop, industrial robot, information security, James Webb Space Telescope, job automation, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, off grid, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, union organizing, Yogi Berra

Then, in 1971, by proclamation, Nixon suspended the prevailing-wage law. A few days later, he announced a wage-stabilizing plan. The Business Roundtable called the move “politically courageous”—without mentioning its self-interest. An official from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce tried to put it in context. “If Ralph Nader and his co-workers … really want to protect consumers from exploitation, they could do no better than train their big guns on the wage monopoly in our nation’s biggest industry.” The irony, of course, was who had those big guns and who had the monopolies. A month later, Nixon established the Construction Industry Stabilization Committee, which limited wage increases to 6 percent.


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

Only two members of Congress were sharply vocal in their criticism of the program. California Democrat Representative Henry Waxman and his New Jersey colleague Andrew Maguire denounced the program as a “rip-off” that was guaranteed to generate profits for vaccine manufacturers. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader accused the government’s health establishment of crying wolf, wasting taxpayer dollars. Recognizing Ford’s position, some members of Congress decided to exploit the President’s absolute support of the flu campaign by attaching a long list of liberal riders to the immunization bill, adding $1.8 billion worth of social service spending and environmental protection funds to a bill they knew Ford could not possibly veto.

By New Year’s Eve the reported number of cases had soared to 526; of these, 257 had received flu shots. Though CDC officials tried to argue that, like the three Pittsburgh cardiac arrest cases, these Guillain-Barré episodes might represent a normal background rate of the syndrome, the American people—and their politicians —were appalled. Ralph Nader and his consumer action group called for Sencer’s immediate resignation. In congressional hearings during December, Senator Edward Kennedy declared the Swine Flu campaign dead. The CDC continued to downplay the association between the vaccine and the syndrome, though agency insiders had already concluded that the Guillain-Barré rate among those vaccinated against Swine Flu was at least four times that in the unvaccinated population.

On October 8 the CDC hastily published the results of a small Utah TSS study that seemed to further implicate Rely.20 The study compared the tampon use patterns of 29 Utah women who developed TSS during 1979–80 with the behavior of 91 age-matched females who did not have TSS. Sixty percent of the TSS cases involved use of Rely, compared with a Rely use rate among controls of only 23 percent. Ralph Nader’s Health Research Group in Washington, D.C., was not happy. The public advocacy organization, and its lead physician, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, were convinced that the federal government was dragging its feet with the tampon industry, putting the female public at peril. Wolfe attacked part of the message contained in the FDA/Procter & Gamble ads: namely, the statement that “tampons do not cause TSS.”


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

National poll on Leap: majority of Liberals, NDPs, Greens; 20 percent of Conservatives EKOS Politics, “Wise Crowds and the Future,” EKOSPolitics.com, April 26, 2016, http://www.ekospolitics.com/​index.php/​2016/​04/​wise-crowds-and-the-future/. Utopia—Back by Popular Demand Alicia Garza: “whether it be Occupy Wall Street…” “Inauguration 2017 Special Coverage w/ Angela Davis, Naomi Klein, Ralph Nader & More,” transcript of live video coverage, Democracy Now!, January 20, 2017, https://www.democracynow.org/​live/​inauguration_2017_live_coverage. Vision for Black Lives: “We reject false solutions…” The Movement for Black Lives, “Platform,” The Movement for Black Lives website, accessed April 19, 2017, https://policy.m4bl.org/​platform/.


Lessons-Learned-in-Software-Testing-A-Context-Driven-Approach by Anson-QA

anti-pattern, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, finite state, framing effect, full employment, independent contractor, information retrieval, job automation, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, side project, Silicon Valley, statistical model, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, web application

We strongly favor laws that hold developers, including development companies, accountable for bad work. All three of us have actively opposed the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act because it protects software developers and vendors from liability for their defective products. Kaner's book on software consumer protection, Bad Software, was reviewed by Ralph Nader as "a how-to-book for consumer protection in the Information Age" (Kaner and Pels 1998, back cover). We don't oppose the licensing of software engineers because we think that malpractice suits are a bad idea in principle. Under the right circumstances, malpractice suits are excellent tools for policing the competence of a profession.


Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

You might find this odd — for a futurist — but my vehicles of choice are an old bicycle, an old pair of legs, and a 36-year-old Porsche. Automotive and Transport 14 April 2047 Hi Winks Do you remember when the Terminator got married? He drove off in one of those retro 2030s Tata/Infosys Morris Minors. Well, I’ve just bought the new 2037 Ralph Nader model! Check it out… it’s got a self-diagnosing engine-management system, four-wheel drive (it has a pancake motor inside each wheel), and 10,000-mile ceramic batteries. I bought it off Mississippi.com for a song. It’s obviously got self-drive, collision avoidance, and heads-up display, but the best bit is the color.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

From time to time populist, socialist, and, more recently, the Green Party win local elections, and independents, such as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, win election to Congress. Nationwide, some third parties have made a difference in presidential elections. In 1912 Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party split the Republican vote and elected Woodrow Wilson. In 1992, Ross Perot drained votes from George H. W. Bush to give the election to Bill Clinton. And in 2000, Ralph Nader took enough votes away from Al Gore to trigger the events that led to the Supreme Court giving the election of George W. Bush. But each of these episodes was unique and built around a charismatic individual. And each soon faded. The first reason for the failure of third parties is that in the states, where election rules are set, the major parties have collaborated in setting up substantial procedural roadblocks to third-party success.


pages: 412 words: 96,251

Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climategate, collapse of Lehman Brothers, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, immigration reform, microaggression, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, obamacare, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, source of truth, systems thinking

Those people had to register, they had to remember where their polling place was, they had to take time out of their day to go cast a ballot. America isn’t like Australia, where voting is compulsory. We make it both optional and, in many places, difficult, so a winning campaign needs not just supporters but motivated supporters. In 2000, Bush ran as “a uniter, not a divider.” One reason Ralph Nader’s third-party candidacy attracted so much support was that he convinced many Americans that the choice between Bush and Gore was a choice between “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” History proved Nader profoundly wrong about that, but the message worked because Bush and Gore were running to win over the persuadable middle, and that meant sanding off their ideological rough edges.


pages: 341 words: 98,954

Owning the Sun by Alexander Zaitchik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Trump, energy transition, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Potemkin village, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, The Chicago School, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

He also revived Kefauver’s mission to reduce the terms and scope of drug monopolies, and proposed a law to require the prescribing of generic drugs over their branded versions. Nelson and the cause of patent reform entered the 1970s with a new ally at their side: the national consumer rights movement. The face of this movement was a young lawyer named Ralph Nader, famous for challenging the automobile industry with the public safety argument described in his 1965 exposé, Unsafe at Any Speed.31 The industry’s recent success in loosening the Kennedy patent policy at HEW, meanwhile, was a limited one. The Nixon administration adopted a relatively hard line on antitrust similar to its Democratic predecessors.


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Taleb, who said Paul was the only candidate he trusted in the race, appeared and gave a brief speech. “Who wouldn’t want to debate monetary policy in the house where J. Lo once slept?” quipped a local columnist about the event. Taleb’s and Spitznagel’s support for Paul—to whom Taleb would dedicate a later book, Skin in the Game, alongside his political polar opposite, Ralph Nader—came largely from their shared disdain for the Fed and other forms of government intervention. Paul, of course, didn’t win the Republican nomination, which went to Mitt Romney. Not only was Spitznagel convinced the Fed was doing irreparable harm to the economy by keeping monetary policy exceedingly loose, he was deeply concerned about government bureaucrats tampering with the system’s complex levers.


pages: 850 words: 254,117

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, air freight, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, bank run, barriers to entry, big-box store, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, fixed income, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, late fees, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, payday loans, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, Tyler Cowen, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now

One of the few leading contemporary economists to bother answering protectionist arguments has been internationally renowned economist Jagdish Bhagwati, who agreed to a public debate against Ralph Nader. Here was his experience: Faced with the critics of free trade, economists have generally reacted with contempt and indifference, refusing to get into the public arena to engage the critics in battle. I was in a public debate with Ralph Nader on the campus of Cornell University a couple of years ago. The debate was in the evening, and in the afternoon I gave a technical talk on free trade to the graduate students of economics.


pages: 343 words: 102,846

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Martha Long, Luis Negrón, Hwang Sok-yong, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including Subhankar Banerjee, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Gary Null, Greg Palast, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Alice Walker, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can.


pages: 431 words: 107,868

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future by Levi Tillemann

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, car-free, carbon footprint, clean tech, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, gigafactory, global value chain, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, manufacturing employment, market design, megacity, Nixon shock, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, RFID, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, smart cities, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In total, the auto industry built some 4,131,000 engines (including 450,000 aircraft engines and 170,000 marine engines), 5.9 million guns, and 27,000 aircraft for the war effort—crushing the Axis against the anvil of U.S. industrial might and establishing the military prerequisites for a new Pax Americana during the latter half of the twentieth century. After World War II, the market for automobiles roared and it fueled the astounding growth of America’s suburbs. But in 1965, Ralph Nader put the brakes on this unfettered expansion when he published the book Unsafe at Any Speed, which caused a sensation in its treatment of the dangers of modern cars. This as much as anything symbolized the beginning of an arms race between auto producers and regulators—in safety, efficiency, emissions, and quality—that continues to this day.


pages: 375 words: 105,067

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry by Helaine Olen

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, game design, greed is good, high net worth, impulse control, income inequality, index fund, John Bogle, Kevin Roose, London Whale, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, too big to fail, transaction costs, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, éminence grise

As for Porter’s written work, the once feisty and fearless creator of the personal finance genre was now putting her name on fuddy-duddy articles about budgeting secrets, and was more than once caught publishing corporate press releases under her own name. Her practical money management tips were no longer unique. Moreover, the nature of what we wanted from a public personal finance guru was changing, too. The consumer movement, which burst into prominence with Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, his 1965 exposé of the automobile industry, began to shove personal finance in a new direction, one that questioned the powers that be more than Porter had done in years. There was an irony here. Porter’s ever-increasing wealth and rapaciousness ultimately left her cut off, unable to connect with the concerns of all too many of us, a pattern we would see repeat with other personal finance gurus over the years.


pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

Brent and Stephen Lunden, “Much Ado About Very Little: The Benefits and Costs of School-Based Commercial Activities,” Leadership and Policy in Schools 8, no. 3 (July 2009): 307–36, doi.org/10.1080/15700760802488619. 21.  Ed Winter quoted in Pat Wechsler, “This Lesson Is Brought to You By …,” Business Week, June 30, 1997, 68. 22.  Joel Babbit quoted in Ralph Nader, Children First: A Parent’s Guide to Fighting Corporate Predators (Washington, DC: Children First, 1996), 64. 23.  Consumers Union of the United States, Captive Kids: A Report on Commercial Pressures on Kids at School (Yonkers, NY: Consumers Union Education Services, 1995). 24.  Helen G. Dixon et al., “The Effects of Television Advertisements for Junk Food Versus Nutritious Food on Children’s Food Attitudes and Preferences,” Social Science and Medicine 65, no. 7 (October 2007): 1311–23. 25.  


pages: 347 words: 112,727

Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Anton Chekhov, computer age, David Brooks, digital map, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Golden Gate Park, index card, Isaac Newton, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, pez dispenser, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

I’m indebted to many fine librarians and archivists, among them Alexia MacClain and Jim Roan of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries; Sue Beates of the Drake Well Museum in Titusville, Pennsylvania; Linda Cheresnowski of the Barbara Morgan Harvey Center for the Study of Oil Heritage at the Charles Suhr Library at Clarion University in Oil City, Pennsylvania; Carol Worster of the Gas Technology Institute; Theo Long of the Biscayne Nature Center; Roger Smith of Florida’s Bureau of Archaeological Research; Sarah Martin and Steve Jebson of the UK Met Office; Hilda Kaune of the Institute of Materials, Minerals, and Mining in London, UK; William Davis of the Center for Legislative Archives at the National Archives; and the interlibrary loan staff at University of Colorado. Thanks to Lynda Sather, Katie Pesznecker, Kate Dugan, and Michelle Egan of the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company; to Cheryl Irwin of the DOD; to Alysa Reich of NACE. Immense gratitude to Ed Drummond, Stephen Rutherford, David Moffitt, Howard EnDean, Jr., Ralph Nader, Stuart Eynon, and others for scraping through old memories. Bigger thanks to Alyssha Eve Csük, Bhaskar Neogi, Dan Dunmire, and Ed Laperle for letting me follow you around and ask a lot of dumb questions. For believing in a new guy and sharpening my proposal, utmost thanks to Richard Morris, at Janklow & Nesbit.


pages: 369 words: 121,161

Alistair Cooke's America by Alistair Cooke

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, double entry bookkeeping, Ford Model T, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, interchangeable parts, joint-stock company, Maui Hawaii, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

By the early 1970s moral indifference seemed to have overcome the two ancient political parties, and the people’s trust in them – and in such subsidiary bodies of the Establishment as the armed forces, the bankers, the churches, and even the doctors – was reported in national polls and surveys to be very little. It was left to such knights of the consumer as Ralph Nader and his followers to nag on our behalf or, in many places, to do-it-yourself watchdogs to swab up with their pocket handkerchiefs the ocean of social decay. There is, for instance, in Los Angeles a Mrs Ellen Harris, who posts herself by the telephone in her bedroom in the hope of becoming the terror of the city fathers.


pages: 309 words: 114,984

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

And that physicians have been complaining about the ceaseless need to feed the medical record for more than a century? They’d be right. The physician-patient relationship has long been under siege from forces as diverse as the declining obeisance to experts (a phenomenon that can be traced more to Vietnam, Ralph Nader, and Google than to anything in healthcare), the influence of third-party payers, and malpractice lawsuits. In fact, two books chronicling the withering of the relationship—Edward Shorter’s Doctors and Their Patients: A Social History and David Rothman’s Strangers at the Bedside—were both published in 1991, when Sergey and Larry were freshmen in college and electronic health records were futuristic fantasies.


pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

The kinds of people first-rank liberal politicians and thinkers had previously championed now had to content themselves with lobbying, out of public view, to protect their interests. The national liberal conversation had become primarily concerned with the rights of consumers. National consumers’ organizations date back to the 1930s, but they took off as a liberal force in the 1960s; the best-known consumer advocate was Ralph Nader, who became famous by attacking the most powerful corporation, General Motors, for not attending to the safety of its cars. Consumer-oriented liberalism wanted to offer people not just safety but also choice and low prices. In 1975 the country’s leading liberal politician, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, held hearings meant to expose the unfairness of airline regulation.


pages: 404 words: 115,108

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

The campaign “got everybody in the same room together, all working to solve a problem of democracy.” That multiplied the energy. And it helped everyone see how the solution they were fighting for was a solution that would help everyone. Weirdly, RCV actually solves two problems that might at first seem very different. The first is the problem Ralph Nader came to represent—that the system was forcing people to pick “the lesser of two evils,” and that it was crowding out less mainstream candidates for fear that they might spoil the result for everyone else. But the second problem is the LePage problem—elected officials who don’t actually represent the majority.


pages: 386 words: 113,709

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

You go fast into a corner (I use the term “fast” in a purely subjective way), lift off the throttle to get a little forward weight transfer while simultaneously jerking the steering wheel, and the rear steps out. Now you’re steering into the slide and feeling like an action hero at twenty miles per hour. The quirky handling that results when you combine a rear-mounted engine with a swing axle is what led Ralph Nader to famously proclaim the Corvair “unsafe at any speed.” What he didn’t mention is that such a car is also “fun at every speed.” My sweetest teenage memories are of driving up to the posh Claremont Resort, whose white tower shines resplendent over Berkeley, and honing my skills in a sloppy slalom through the parking lot amidst the Jaguars and Mercedes.


pages: 407 words: 113,198

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, food miles, Ford Model T, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hive mind, independent contractor, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Kanban, low skilled workers, Mason jar, obamacare, off grid, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, supply-chain management, Toyota Production System, transatlantic slave trade, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

By the 1970s, trucking became the favorite scruffy but loveable blue-collar profession. Hence the slew of corny hit movies—from Smokey and the Bandit, Convoy, and Breaker! Breaker!—that would flop instantly today if released in any format except for horror. This golden era was anticompetitive, inefficient, and opposed across the political spectrum from Ralph Nader to Ronald Reagan, but it provided a stable, respectable income for the individual trucker. Then, literally overnight, with the scrawl of President Carter’s pen, everything shifted. Trucking underwent a radical course correction, deregulating in extremis if you were a driver. Carriers multiplied, authorities fell from the regulatory sky, nonunionized workers flooded the market, and the price of transport dropped by 20 percent in just the first few years.


pages: 412 words: 115,048

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

“For the first time,” writes law professor Adam Winkler, the Supreme Court held that “corporations have the right to freedom of speech and of the press.”155 A key turning point resulted from, of all things, a push by Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group founded by the anti-corporate activist Ralph Nader. In Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens’ Consumer Council (1976), it challenged a ban on the advertising of drug prices, which prevented patients from finding bargains without going from pharmacy to pharmacy. Nader’s group argued that the ban impeded the flow of important information to consumers.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Transcript, “Special Event: George W. Bush Addresses Rally in Appleton, Wisconsin,” Oct. 28, 2000, http://archives.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0010/28/se.02.html. 2. Tom Streeter notes that “it seems plausible that the ‘Gore said he invented the Internet’ quip did at least as much damage to Gore’s final vote count as Ralph Nader.” See Thomas Streeter, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 114–15. 3. Transcript, “Vice President Gore on CNN’s Late Edition,” Mar. 9, 1999, www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/09/president.2000/transcript.gore/index.html. 4.


pages: 397 words: 121,211

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray

affirmative action, assortative mating, blue-collar work, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, gentrification, George Gilder, Haight Ashbury, happiness index / gross national happiness, helicopter parent, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, new economy, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Silicon Valley, sparse data, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Tipper Gore, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working-age population, young professional

Other movements that would have sweeping impact on American society were already nascent in 1963. Early in the year, Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique, seen now as the opening salvo of the feminist movement. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had appeared in 1962 and become a New York Times best seller, setting off public interest that would lead to the environmental movement. Ralph Nader had written his first attack on the auto industry in the Nation, and two years later would found the consumer advocate movement with Unsafe at Any Speed. The cultural landscape of the Sixties was already taking shape in 1963. Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”—all theme songs for what we think of as the Sixties—had been released six months before Kennedy died.


pages: 654 words: 120,154

The Firm by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset light, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, book value, borderless world, collective bargaining, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, family office, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, vertical integration, young professional

The firm dominated the era of the MBA—the late 1980s and early 1990s—when all any business student wanted to do was get a job in consulting or banking. Nicholas Lemann wrote in the New Yorker in 1999 that McKinsey had effectively encapsulated the zeitgeist of the moment, much as the CIA had done in the 1950s, the Peace Corps in the 1960s, Ralph Nader in the 1970s, and First Boston in the 1980s.2 But that was thirteen years ago. Today, the crème de la crème flock to younger, more vibrant companies, in both entry-level and much higher positions. The brightest students tend to not want to work for large companies anymore, and McKinsey is a large company.


pages: 464 words: 121,983

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe by Antony Loewenstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, British Empire, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, do well by doing good, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, private military company, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, Scramble for Africa, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, the medium is the message, trade liberalization, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, work culture

In 1995, the corporation—known as the “Big Australian,” due to its former status as a domestic steel producer—helped draft a bill in the PNG parliament that invalidated the right of PNG citizens who were negatively affected by the polluting Ok Tedi mine in PNG’s Western Province to seek legal redress in court. Multinational Monitor magazine—a nonprofit publication founded by US political activist Ralph Nader in 1980 to document the global economy—highlighted what was going on: In August 1995, BHP drafted legislation for the PNG Parliament that subjected anyone who sued BHP to fines of up to $75,000. Even more remarkably, the bill also applied the same fines to anyone who attempted to challenge the constitutional validity of the proposed law in PNG courts.


pages: 461 words: 125,845

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

Mudge began to court the media, finding curious reporters first in local trade publications and then later in Wired, The Washington Post, and the BBC. They sold T-shirts, attracted groupies, and proudly called themselves “media whores.” Taking cues from Mudge’s hero Abbie Hoffman and consumer protection icon Ralph Nader, the L0pht provocatively placed the onus for security blowups not on evil hacker bogeymen, but on the IBMs, Oracles, Microsofts, and Sun Microsystems of the world, chiding them for not building safer tools for customers. “Companies were saying their products were secure, with no proof at all. So we ripped them apart,” says Mudge with a tinge of excitement.


pages: 425 words: 122,223

Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, debt deflation, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, law of one price, linear programming, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, martingale, means of production, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, Thales and the olive presses, the market place, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

This heading, in letters an inch high, appeared over a full-page advertisement in the financial section of The New York Times on June 25, 1990. In only slightly smaller type, the ad continued: “The speculators and their political friends ruined the S&L industry. Now they have the power to ruin the stock market.” This ad was not paid for by Ralph Nader or by one of the groups usually associated with attacking the rich and powerful. It was placed by a respected brokerage firm that is a full-fledged member of the Wall Street establishment. Just a few months later, Michael Milken, who had earned $25,000 in 1970 and $500 million in 1989, wrote to Judge Kimba Wood that “I never dreamed I could do anything that would result in being a felon.”


pages: 423 words: 129,831

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, big-box store, blue-collar work, congestion pricing, Donner party, edge city, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, Ralph Nader, side project, smart transportation, Southern State Parkway, streetcar suburb, traveling salesman, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen

In "The American Way of Death," published in the New York Review of Books in April 1966, Mumford reprised his attack on "that religion for whose evidences of power and glory the American people, with eyes devoutly closed, are prepared to sacrifice some 59,000 lives every year, and to maim, often irreparably, some three million more." Most of the article, a review of Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, was a diatribe against the automobile itself, which "could have made an invaluable contribution in creating a regional distribution of population" but instead accounted for some of the greatest crises facing city and countryside alike—"the nightmare of the air becoming toxic with poisonous exhausts, including the highly lethal carbon monoxide; of the water supply polluted with deadly lead from gasoline exhausts already half way to the danger point even in the Arctic wastes; the nightmare of diurnal mass commutation by car... ."


pages: 538 words: 121,670

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, carbon tax, carried interest, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, invisible hand, jimmy wales, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, place-making, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

For the best mapping of the complexities, see the work of Anthony Corrado, especially The New Campaign Finance Sourcebook (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2005) (with Thomas E. Mann, Daniel R. Ortiz, and Trevor Potter). 13. Brooks, Corruption in American Politics and Life, 99. Chapter 18. Strategy 2 1. This idea was suggested to me by Matt Gonzalez, Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential candidate. Chapter 19. Strategy 3 1. Jake Tapper and Sunlen Miller, “President Obama’s $8 Billion Earmark Rerun: Lesson Not Learned?” ABCNews, Political Punch (Dec. 15, 2010), available at link #227. 2. Speech of Governor Buddy Roemer, Harvard University, March 24, 2011. 3.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

What would such an event look like? That depends on the time frame. Some observers have noted parallels between today’s Internet+ and the pre-1970s automobile industry. Free from regulation, manufacturers were building and selling unsafe cars, and people were dying. It was the 1965 publication of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed that spurred the government into action, resulting in a slew of safety laws covering seat belts, headrests, and so on. A slew of Internet+ related fatalities could cause a similar regulatory flurry. On the other hand, companies have been killing people via the environment for decades.


pages: 531 words: 125,069

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

AltaVista, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, hygiene hypothesis, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microaggression, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, Wayback Machine

The Rise of Safetyism In the twentieth century, the word “safety” generally meant physical safety. A great triumph of the late part of that century was that the United States became physically safer for children. As a result of class action lawsuits, efforts by investigative journalists and consumer advocates (such as Ralph Nader and his exposé of the auto industry, Unsafe at Any Speed), and common sense, dangerous products and practices became less prevalent. Between 1978 and 1985, all fifty states passed laws making the use of car seats mandatory for children. Homes and day care centers were childproofed;choking hazards and sharp objects were removed.


pages: 484 words: 131,168

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop, Robert G. Cushing

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, big-box store, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, union organizing, War on Poverty, white flight, World Values Survey

We bought a house on one of those smiley-face streets, a shady neighborhood of dog walkers, Jane Jacobs-approved front porches, bright paint, bowling-ball yard art, and YOU KEEP BELIEVING; WE'LL KEEP EVOLVING bumper stickers. In 2000, George W. Bush, then the governor of Texas, took 60 percent of the state's vote. But in our patch of Austin, Bush came in third, behind both Al Gore and Ralph Nader. Four years later, eight out of ten of our neighbors voted for John Kerry. Our neighborhood is one of the friendliest I've encountered. It is in some ways more like the rural Texas town where we lived for a time, publishing the weekly newspaper, than a community on the edge of the central city.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

“In its place we are entering a period of consequences.”36 As America enters its own period of consequences, we need to sound the alarm as well. Before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, most Americans had only the faintest inkling that big agricultural companies were poisoning the environment. Before Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, most consumers were only vaguely aware that Americans were dying at appalling rates in automobile accidents. But once Americans were awakened to the danger, they were able to focus on the problem and craft creative solutions. The time has come to open our eyes fully to the threat we face from autocracies like Russia and China in cyberspace—a danger that some Americans may sense but few truly understand.


Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

—become as superfluous as those they serve, and can therefore be limited or dispensed with entirely. Some, it is true, are still needed, notably prisons, a service that must in fact be extended, to deal with useless people. As care for the mentally ill declines, prisons become “surrogate mental hospitals,” a study of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen observes. The psychiatrist who led the research observes that “there were far fewer psychotic people in jail 100 years ago than we have today,” as we revert to practices reformed in the 19th century. Almost 30 percent of jails detain mentally ill people without criminal charges.


pages: 542 words: 132,010

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner

Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Doomsday Clock, feminist movement, haute couture, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Linda problem, mandatory minimum, medical residency, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, the long tail, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Y2K, young professional

The tone of the widely watched episode was angry and accusatory, with much of the blame focused on the FDA. That broke the dam. Stories linking implants with disease—with headlines like “Toxic Breasts” and “Ticking Time Bombs”—flooded the media. A congressional hearing was held. Advocacy groups—including Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen—made implants a top target. Feminists—who considered breast augmentation to be “sexual mutilation,” in the words of best-selling writer Naomi Wolf—attacked implants as a symbol of all that was wrong with modern society. Under intense pressure, the FDA told manufacturers in early 1992 that they had ninety days to provide evidence that implants were safe.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Bureau of Labor Statistics, All Employees: Government: Federal, Except U.S. Postal Service [CES9091100001], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091100001. Accessed Jan. 24, 2019). 10.This was the case before auto safety legislation, as documented by Ralph Nader in his classic book, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (New York: Pocket Books, 1965). 11.A president who claims an unfettered right to pardon himself and those who serve him is a president who claims unbridled authoritarian power, to be reined in by the single ultimate check provided by the Constitution, impeachment; and with such solid support among his own party (removing a president from office requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate), and with such overbearing confidence that he could claim that he could “shoot somebody” on Fifth Avenue and still not lose his loyal voters, he seems to have little to fear from that quarter. 12.Many important ones have received little notice: a simple change that removes the deference previously given to one’s own physician in disability proceedings may result in large numbers being denied disability payments. 13.According to OECD data, in 2017, US real GDP per capita grew somewhat slower than the average of the OECD, but in 2018 it was somewhat greater. 14.In Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy, my coauthors and I describe globalization and technology as the large underlying global forces that then get translated through the rules that structure our economy into our daily experiences, including those that lead to inequality and exclusion.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

And nobody subjects them to the sort of hard-headed analysis that they apply to companies (they seem to have as much of a vested interest in producing outrage as Coca-Cola has in producing fizzy drinks). The entire world of NGOs has a Potemkin-like quality: slither-sized organizations are forever issuing reports and referring to other slither-sized organizations. When Ralph Nader decided to swap the Potemkin world of pressure groups for electoral politics in 2000, he won only 3 percent of the vote, enough to put George W. Bush in the White House but not enough to prove that he had any popular legitimacy. And what about the claim that companies can do well by doing good?


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

Similarly, industrial companies such as General Electric and General Motors would not risk sullying their brand names by distributing faulty or unsafe products. “The consumer is protected from being exploited by one seller by the existence of another seller from whom he can buy and who is eager to sell to him. Alternative sources of supply protect the consumer far more effectively than all the Ralph Naders of the world.” If Friedman had been known solely as a defender of big business, and a proponent of monetarism, he wouldn’t have exercised as much influence as he did. But he cleverly wrapped his proposals to emasculate government programs and cut taxes in the language of rugged American individualism.


pages: 411 words: 136,413

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, Peter Schwartz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, cuban missile crisis, haute cuisine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Plato's cave, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, source of truth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Its essence is precisely to bypass all the ideas underlying liberty and to jump directly to the assertion that the use of force is wrong. But if there is no why, there can be no what. If Libertarianism announces that it need not offer any reason for its belief in liberty, then it cannot even state what it means by the term “liberty.” Everyone from Karl Marx to Ralph Nader can then say that he is fundamentally in favor of liberty, and there is no objective means of disputing him. Why shouldn’t anarchism be regarded as the implementation of genuine freedom? Why not describe libel and counterfeiting as actions fully consistent with individual rights? Why can’t Moscow be said to be pursuing a foreign policy of worldwide liberation?


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Along with big commercial institutions, he cleverly brought together diverse interest groups, such as smaller banks that wanted to grow, mortgage brokers that wanted to expand into other areas of finance, and individuals who wanted to access higher-yielding investments, not to mention ensure that they could get the mortgages they needed. Even the Consumer Federation of America and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader were persuaded that repealing Regulation Q would be a good thing. The Gray Panthers, a group advocating for retirees, filed a suit arguing that Regulation Q discriminated against small-time savers.52 There were of course concerns that without the cap on rates and limits on how much credit could flow around freely, unexpected shifts in the economic climate could ruin livelihoods.


pages: 450 words: 134,152

The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T by Steve Coll

Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, cross-subsidies, George Santayana, Marshall McLuhan, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, union organizing, vertical integration

But the nostalgia also had a utility in the present: back in his home state of Michigan, Hart found that voters were easily excited in the early 1970s by talk of a “consumer revolution,” and that voters of all kinds were suspicious of the mammoth corporations that dominated the nation’s economic landscape. The country’s liberal middle class could not stomach the methods of students and counterculture radicals who bombed banks and rallied against the “corporate state” during the late 1960s and early 1970s. But when Ralph Nader announced that American cars were unsafe because Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers cared about profits first and people second, voters proved decisively that they shared Nader’s cynicism about big business. The public’s disaffection with large companies reflected the tenor of the times: it was half utopian, half populist, as suggested in the title of the best-selling economic treatise Small Is Beautiful.


pages: 444 words: 128,701

The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business by Christopher Leonard

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, commoditize, estate planning, facts on the ground, invisible hand, longitudinal study, mortgage debt, payday loans, price discovery process, price stability, Ralph Nader, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Farm-state politicians and activists were berating the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton to take action. The urgency of the issue was stoked by the upcoming presidential election. The Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore, faced a growing challenge from the longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Nader was unequivocal in his opposition to industrial meat production and the rise of factory farms. Clinton’s administration needed to look like it was doing something about it. In this increasingly tense environment, Eric Tabor was given a rare public chance to be the good guy. Iowa had gone further than any other state in combating the rise of corporate agribusiness, and Tabor was invited to the Kansas City forum to outline what Iowa regulators were doing.


The Unicorn's Secret by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, card file, East Village, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, index card, John Markoff, Marshall McLuhan, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog

In the back of one of those hay wagons was Ira Einhorn, mingling with the fully costumed cast of the Broadway show Hair. By the time the caravan reached the birthplace of the United States, there were thousands of people crowding the Independence Mall north of the Liberty Bell, listening to Alan Watts, Ralph Nader, and Senator Hugh Scott. Ira took the stage with the Hair contingent, and when the singers broke into an impassioned, extended rendition of “Let the Sun Shine,” the Unicorn leaned into the microphone and bleated out the words with them. Earth Day itself, April 22, was cold but clear. The Belmont Plateau area in Fairmount Park, overlooking the Philadelphia skyline two miles away, began filling with people.


Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

It hired lobbyists, filed lawsuits, and frightened local parents about the shipment of used fuel rods. 83 Club lawyers were secretive about their work. “We’re going to maintain our lawsuit and certain other plans that cannot be disclosed right now,” one told Ohio’s Evening Review in 1971.84 The Sierra Club was joined by a charismatic and aggressive young attorney named Ralph Nader, who had won the public’s trust in the mid-1960s, and become a household name, after criticizing the safety of American cars. It is hard to overstate his influence in turning the public against nuclear energy. “A nuclear accident could wipe out Cleveland,” Nader told an Ohio newspaper in 1974, “and the survivors would envy the dead.”85 Antinuclear groups publicized a report written by a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, which claimed 400,000 infants had died from radioactive fallout from weapons testing.86 Nader and other antinuclear activists claimed that nuclear was far worse for the environment than fossil fuels.


pages: 426 words: 136,925

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

By the early 1970s, the rise of the Great Society and the proliferation of federal agencies and regulations—which continued under President Nixon with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—was causing alarm in the business world. Its fear of being overmatched by the likes of Ralph Nader, made famous by his auto-safety assault on carmakers, was crystallized in a 1971 memo by Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer in Virginia who would later be appointed to the Supreme Court. “The American economic system is under broad attack,” Powell wrote. “Business must learn the lesson … that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.”


pages: 570 words: 158,139

Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism by Elizabeth Becker

airport security, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, BRICs, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, global village, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Masdar, Murano, Venice glass, open borders, out of africa, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, statistical model, sustainable-tourism, the market place, union organizing, urban renewal, wage slave, young professional, éminence grise

Hotels, resorts and tour operators are willing to pay companies to certify they are on the side of the angels, that visitors on vacation know they are not destroying the environment, or playing on a golf course that had been home to poor peasants a year earlier. • • • This drive for certification and sustainable tourism grew out of the environmental movement. The leaders of the ecotourism, or sustainable tourism, movement are not the fire-breathing types. There is no one like Ralph Nader, who stubbornly forced the government to demand safety features in the automobile industry. The tourism reformers are professors, writers and tour operators who wield ideas, gently. They write, lead groups, give awards and, when asked, will help a country, a community or a hotel figure out responsible tourism.


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Connally even proposed a federal come-and-get-it fund for all large and failing companies. Even such a staunch conservative as columnist Patrick Buchanan, a former Nixon speechwriter, demanded government action on behalf of the afflicted automotive firm. “This is a time for Republicans to rise above principle,” he wrote, and “leave Ralph Nader to mouth the moth-eaten clichés from Republican conventions of generations ago.” Buchanan went so far as to quote the dubious findings of the Congressional Budget Office, which predicted “the permanent loss of a quarter of a million jobs” if Chrysler melted down.1 The country was moving toward a system like Great Britain’s in the seventies.


pages: 586 words: 159,901

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Jensen did, however, helpfully list some forces he viewed as obstacles to economic progress: "striking Eastern Air Lines GOVERNANCE pilots, Pittston Coal miners, [and] New York Telephone employees, who seem perfectly content to destroy or damage their employer's organization while attempting to serve their own interests. Ralph Nader's consumer activist organization is another example." (It's a nice irony that public employee pension funds were used to smash some of Jensen's impediments to progress.) The only subclass of Jensen's society to have a claim on corporations, it's clear, are shareholders; workers (managers among them) and consumers serve only at the owners' pleasure.


pages: 641 words: 153,921

Eon by Greg Bear

dematerialisation, Future Shock, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Ralph Nader, urban renewal

As she did so, she asked for explanations of several other things any Stoner would have taken for granted. That triggered an elementary, synopsized history of the Stone, and of the time between the Death and the construction of the Thistledown. She was more than a little shocked to discover that the Gentle Nader was, in fact, Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and independent investigator who had made a big stir in the 1960s and 1970s. He was still alive, back on Earth–her Earth, her time—but in the library records his name was always used reverently. He was always “Gentle Nader’ or “the Good Man.” Those who took his namethe Naderites—were a powerful political force, and had been for centuries.


pages: 532 words: 155,470

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

To concentrate on riddance as the primary purpose, negatively to put taboos and penalties on automobiles as children might say, “Cars, cars, go away,” would be a policy not only doomed to defeat but rightly doomed to defeat.105 it is clear that bike advocates did not always heed the last part of Jacobs’s advice, but there was also a much stronger case to be made for taking a more pronounced stance against urban driving in the 1970s, particularly when one considers the roughly five hundred thousand people killed in traffic (in the United States alone) between the publication of Jacobs’s first book and the beginning of the following decade. and while some bike activists were intent to pursue a more radical agenda or at the very least one sympathetic to illich’s systemic critiques of technology and capitalism, their general approach to politics was more in tune with the civic engagement of people like John Dewey or ralph nader than the dropout paradigm bemoaned by critics of the counterculture and the aT movement. These organizations formed through the collaboration of smaller activist groups and volunteers and solidified themselves through persistent organizing and the involvement of public officials. Charlie McCorkell notes the importance of this synthesis in creating momentum for bicycle advocacy: i always liked the big parades.


pages: 468 words: 150,206

The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World by John Robbins

Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, clean water, complexity theory, do well by doing good, double helix, Exxon Valdez, food miles, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, profit motive, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, telemarketer

Box 2260, Boulder, CO 80306; 800-3572211; www.citizens.org; citizens4health@gmail.com Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine Promotes preventive medicine, encourages higher standards for ethics and effectiveness in research, advocates broader access to medical services, offers Vegetarian Starter Kit and numerous publications including Goocl Medicine, a quarterly magazine. 5100 Wisconsin Ave., NW Ste. 400, Washington, DC 20016; 202-686-2210; www.pcrm.org; pcrm@pcrm.org Public Citizen Founded by Ralph Nader, fights for safer drugs and medical devices, cleaner energy sources and environment, fair trade, and a more open and democratic government. 1600 20th St., NW1 Washington, D.C. 20009; 202-588-1000; www.citizen.org; member@citizen.org Safe Tables Our Priority (STOP) Supports victims of food-borne illness, provides public education on the dangers in food, and does policy advocacy for safe food and public health. 3149 Dundee Road, #276, Northbrook, IL 60062; 800-350STOP; www.safetables.org Our Fellow Creatures Animal Place Sanctuary Provides homes for animals rescued from slaughter and educates the public about factory farms. 17314 McCourtney Ave., Grass Valley, CA 95949; 530-477-1757; www.animalplace.org; info@animalplace.org Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association Works on a variety of animal protection issues, particularly those that focus on veterinary medical ethics.


pages: 736 words: 147,021

Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety by Marion Nestle

Asilomar, biofilm, butterfly effect, clean water, confounding variable, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, illegal immigration, out of africa, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, software patent, Upton Sinclair

It contained provisions to (1) eliminate rules for pathogen testing, (2) postpone seafood inspection, (3) repeal the Delaney clause in the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (which precluded use of carcinogenic food additives), (4) permit use of some carcinogenic pesticides, and (5) privatize approvals of food additives. Such blatantly consumer-unfriendly legislation was ripe for satire, and figure 7 presents one such pointed commentary, in this case, from political cartoonist Garry Trudeau. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader observed that the Dole bill represented nothing less than a “big business takeover of the U.S. government in its health and safety responsibilities.” Nevertheless, after contentious debate, the Senate passed various amendments to the Dole bill as part of the Republicans’ Contract with America. As if to soften the bill’s evident purpose, one such amendment expressed “the sense of the Senate that nothing in the bill is intended to delay the timely promulgation of any regulations that would meet a human health or safety threat.”10 Mr.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

MOTOR VEHICLE SALES BY ORIGIN 1931 – 2011 They weren’t even very good at doing what they regarded as their core business, devoting far too little attention to the bread and butter of the industry, reliability and safety. A striking number of these “ocean liners of the road” ran into technological icebergs as they cruised down Eisenhower’s highways and left their passengers stranded by the side of the road. Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) became a bestseller because it diagnosed a national catastrophe. In the 1950s and 1960s, more than 2.5 million Americans were killed in car accidents, and several millions injured. Detroit also devoted far too little attention to fuel efficiency: even after the first oil shock of 1973–74, it continued to produce giant gas-guzzlers, on the assumption that high fuel prices were simply a passing peculiarity, and the world would soon return to the Elysian days of the 1950s.


pages: 653 words: 155,847

Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, California gold rush, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Copley Medal, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dmitri Mendeleev, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, Ted Nordhaus, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Vanguard fund, working poor, young professional

If the healthy-worker effect applied, then the radiation workers’ reduced mortality was all the more remarkable.26 Fear of radiation and misunderstanding of its effects were powerful drivers of antinuclear sentiment. Activists encouraged this response over the years with claims that a meltdown would destroy an area “the size of Pennsylvania” (Ralph Nader) or that “nearly a million” had died from Chernobyl fallout (Helen Caldicott, the Australian physician).27 Bolstering the claims of extremists, the United States in the 1950s adopted a flawed model of radiation exposure that made radiation safety seemingly impossible to guarantee. How that standard emerged is a sorry tale of scientific ineptitude if not actual misconduct and of good intentions gone bad.


pages: 629 words: 142,393

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Taking the generativity-informed view of what constitutes a network, though, we can conceptualize a variety of methods by which PCs might compensate for this difficulty of mastery, only some of which require centralized control and education. For example, users might be able to choose from an array of proxies—not just Microsoft, but also Ralph Nader, or a public interest organization, or a group of computer scientists, or StopBadware– for guidance on how best to configure their PCs. For the Herdict program described earlier, the ambition is for third parties to contribute their own dashboard gauges—allowing users of Herdict to draw from a market of advisers, each of whom can draw from some combination of the herd’s data and their own expertise to give users advice.


pages: 496 words: 154,363

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

I found GoTo's auction-based results almost unusable. A significant number of their advertisers bid high for popular, but irrelevant, search terms just to lock in the top position on as many searches as possible. Even when the top result was not pure spam, the whole approach seemed misleading. Ralph Nader agreed. Nader's group Commercial Alert filed a deceptive-advertising complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in July 2001 to stop the practice of "inserting advertisements in search engine results without clear and conspicuous disclosure that the ads are ads [which] may mislead search engine users to believe that search results are based on relevancy alone, not marketing ploys


pages: 462 words: 151,805

Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson by Corey Seymour, Johnny Depp, Jann S. Wenner

Bonfire of the Vanities, buy low sell high, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Mason jar, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, Y2K

He believed that they were statespersons, and there was a small handful of others, but beyond that, whether it was Reagan or Bush or Clinton, he was bipartisan in his disdain for presidential power. He was a libertarian. He preferred to vote for a third-party candidate as a throwaway vote—he voted for Dick Gregory in ’68 and Ralph Nader in 2000. He felt that the politics of both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party were worthless. He formed a friendship late in his life with Jesse Ventura when he was running for governor of Minnesota, and he liked the idea of Kinky Friedman running for governor of Texas. He would always be behind outsider candidates.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Drivers in the world’s big cities lose almost $1,000 a year through being stuck in traffic jams.42 Indeed, our love affair with the car has soured a bit since the 1950s, which many motor enthusiasts regard as a golden age. Back then, fuel was cheap and American car designers indulged their imaginations, creating monster vehicles with grilles that looked like shark’s teeth and tailfins that resembled rockets. In the subsequent decades, the drawbacks of our enthusiasm for cars began to be revealed. In 1965, Ralph Nader published Unsafe at any Speed, a book that detailed the poor safety records of many cars, which at the time lacked seat belts, airbags and other features later regarded as standard. In 1967, the British introduced a legal limit for drivers’ alcohol consumption; US states followed suit in the late 1970s.


pages: 530 words: 147,851

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

On the other, he did it in what was arguably the most demagogic, crude, fear-mongering fashion possible.’12 He also somewhat blurred the line between political news and tabloid TV, which critical conservatives saw as further dumbing down, and yet without him neither George W. Bush nor Trump would have won. Limbaugh and others had already set the tone on radio and in books, ‘treating not just Democrats but country-club Gerald Ford Republicans . . . as though they were flag-burning hippies and dangerous radicals,’ while on the Left Ralph Nader and Michael Moore were attacking ‘Right-wing’ Democrats like Gore or Clinton.13 America’s increasingly hyper-individual society was opening up a gap in politics. Today just under half of ‘Consistent conservatives’ in the US cite Fox as their main source of information about politics.14 Those with consistently liberal views rely on a far wider range of news outlets, including the New York Times, and most trust PBS, NPR and the BBC.


pages: 484 words: 155,401

Solitary by Albert Woodfox

airport security, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, full employment, income inequality, index card, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, means of production, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, side project

King, Tory Pegram, Chuck Blitz, Gordon Roddick, and several other members of our advisory board, including Barry Scheck, the cofounder of the Innocence Project; Denny LeBoeuf, a Louisiana death penalty defense attorney who was directing the ACLU’s efforts in Guantánamo at the time; Joan Claybrook, the founding executive director of Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen; Ira Glasser, the former executive director of the ACLU’s national office; Ira Arlook of Fenton Communications; Webb Hubbell, President Bill Clinton’s associate attorney general and former chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court; the actor and anti–death penalty activist Mike Farrell; and Gordon’s close friend and colleague Ben Cohen from Ben & Jerry’s, met with as many legislators and other potential national advocates as they could.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

Chong points out that, in the 1960s, people were hesitant to impose liability on automobile manufacturers for unsafe vehicles. In a court ruling on whether General Motors was negligent for not including widespread safety features in a 1961 station wagon, the court rejected the claim because a “manufacturer is not under a duty to make his automobile accident-proof or foolproof.” But in 1966, a year after Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, in which he charged car companies with resisting safety improvements, Congress passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, refocusing automobile safety on the vehicle, rather than the driver. Today, similar concerns are expressed about software liability: tech is too important to our society to be slowed down, yada yada yada.


pages: 1,213 words: 376,284

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Article 49 of the Consumer Rights Law set the amount of compensation at double the purchase price. Spotting a fake became a lucrative enterprise. From being a small trader in Beijing, Wang Hai rose to media celebrity by exposing a string of fake Sony earphones and counterfeit designer bags. By 1998, he had a dozen fake-busters working for him. But China’s answer to Ralph Nader did not take on corrupt institutions, nor did he become a political maverick. Instead, he became the darling of the state. Communist leaders invited him along to meet US President Clinton, celebrating him as a new kind of communist hero who showed it was possible to work for the good of society and make money at the same time.106 The regime’s watchdog is the China Consumer Association (Zhongguo Xiaofeizhe Xiehui).

Anwar Fazal, the IOCU’s Asian regional president, went so far as to drop choice off the list of consumer rights altogether.94 The South left its mark on the IOCU’s increasingly ambitious programme. Its 1978 Charter put poverty relief and the environment at the heart of consumer protection. The right to consume was balanced by the social and ecological responsibilities that came with it. Such appeals were not without their crusaders in the rich North. Ralph Nader, who shot to fame in the United States in the late 1960s with his exposures of exploding cars and corporate abuse, campaigned for a shift from conspicuous to conscientious consumption. The UN’s Guidelines on Consumer Protection (1985) were proof consumers had arrived in the corridors of international politics.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In 1993, early in the history of the World Wide Web, Carl was helping Sun Microsystems give a demonstration of the capabilities of the Internet to the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance. After the demonstration, Subcommittee Chairman Representative Edward J. Markey (now a US senator from Massachusetts) told Carl that his subcommittee also had oversight of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Jamie Love, who worked with Ralph Nader on Internet matters, had been sending petitions to the subcommittee asking why SEC filings weren’t available online. The initial reaction from the SEC, Representative Markey told Carl, was that the data wasn’t on the Internet because making it available was technically impossible, and, as Carl wrote in his colorful history of the event, “even if the data were available the only people interested in SEC filings were Wall Street Fatcats and they didn’t really need subsidized access to data they were willing to pay for.”


pages: 615 words: 168,775

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

“Patents are intended to ensure that technological discoveries are not kept secret,” he liked to say. As for the concern about public funding: there was an established process, called an institutional patent agreement, which allowed a university to petition for rights to an invention that had received public funding.14 Some people objected to those agreements—Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen organization filed unsuccessful civil actions against them in 1973 and 1974—but Reimers believed that the agreements were essential. Universities would be less inclined to pursue applied research, he said, “if the government would march in to take back any patent with significant commercial potential.”15 Reimers also explained that a patent application would cost Cohen no money and that Stanford had a good record of receiving the rights for which it petitioned.16 “Why don’t we proceed and let this all sort itself out?”


pages: 589 words: 167,680

The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism by Steve Kornacki

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, computer age, David Brooks, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Future Shock, illegal immigration, immigration reform, junk bonds, low interest rates, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, power law, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

Any factor could credibly be singled out as the difference maker. Democrats called it a stolen election, accusing the five Supreme Court justices who ended the recount—all of them Republicans—of doing Bush’s bidding, and casting suspicion on Florida’s top election official, Republican Katherine Harris. Their fingers also pointed at Ralph Nader, the consumer activist who ran as the left-wing Green Party’s candidate and gobbled up almost three million votes nationally—and ninety-seven thousand in Florida. It was at least as plausible, though, that the third-party candidate who damaged Gore the most was Pat Buchanan. The culprit was the bizarre “butterfly ballot” used in Palm Beach County.


Lonely Planet Nicaragua (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Alex Egerton, Greg Benchwick

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Day of the Dead, land reform, liberation theology, Multics, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, traveling salesman

These factories provide much-needed work (Nicaragua’s underemployment rate runs at around 46%), but critics say the maquilladoras are no real solution – they set up in Free Trade Zones (Nicaragua has four), which aren’t bound by Nicaraguan law, so they don’t pay minimum wage or respect workers’ rights. When exported, goods don’t incur export duty, so Nicaragua ends up earning very little. It’s a process that workers’ rights and environmental activist Ralph Nader calls ‘the race to the bottom,’ where poor countries end up competing to see who can offer the most favorable deal to investor nations. Population With 6.1 million people spread across 130,000 sq km, Nicaragua is the second-least densely populated country in Central America after Belize.


pages: 477 words: 165,458

Of a Fire on the Moon by Norman Mailer

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, card file, centre right, data acquisition, Eratosthenes, Gene Kranz, invention of gunpowder, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Perfectionists could have spent six months recovering from those fifty mishaps, but this was October 1968, this was the year in which the war in Vietnam became a debauch, and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been killed, and Lyndon Johnson abdicated, this was the year in which the colleges showed open signs of revolution and corporation executives for munition firms were barred from campuses, it was a year in which industry was still recovering from the shock that General Motors had put private detectives on Ralph Nader. (Didn’t General Motors understand how modest and uneventful were the private lives of savage writers?) So NASA had barreled ahead, NASA had pushed for results as if the very nerve of endeavor in the nation depended on their effort, depended on doing it before ’69 was out (what a joke for the sophistications of Jack Kennedy that men would first kiss the moon in ’69).


pages: 541 words: 173,676

Generations: the Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

POPULATION IN 2021) 78.1% White 8.2% Black 8.1% Hispanic 4.8% Asian, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander 0.8% Native American Parents: Greatest or Lost Children: Gen X and Boomers Grandchildren: Millennials and Gen Z MOST POPULAR FIRST NAMES Boys Robert John William James Charles Richard Girls Mary Dorothy Shirley Betty Barbara Patricia Linda Carol FAMOUS MEMBERS (BIRTH YEAR) Actors, Comedians, Filmmakers Johnny Carson (1925) Paul Newman (1925) Rock Hudson (1925) Lenny Bruce (1925) Marilyn Monroe (1927) Sidney Poitier (1927) Shirley Temple (1928) Audrey Hepburn (1929) Grace Kelly (1929) Bob Newhart (1929) Clint Eastwood (1930) Elizabeth Taylor (1932) Carol Burnett (1933) Joan Rivers (1933) Woody Allen (1935) Mary Tyler Moore (1936) Robert Redford (1936) Burt Reynolds (1936) Alan Alda (1936) Dick Cavett (1936) Dennis Hopper (1936) Jane Fonda (1937) Jack Nicholson (1937) George Carlin (1937) Dustin Hoffman (1937) Evel Knievel (1938) Sherman Hemsley (1938) Tommy Chong (1938) Lee Majors (1939) Richard Pryor (1940) Annette Funicello (1942) Harrison Ford (1942) Chevy Chase (1943) George Lucas (1944) Goldie Hawn (1945) Loni Anderson (1945) Mia Farrow (1945) Henry Winkler (1945) Steve Martin (1945) Musicians and Artists Chuck Berry (1926) Tom Lehrer (1927) Andy Warhol (1928) Jasper Johns (1930) Yoko Ono (1933) Elvis Presley (1935) Bob Dylan (1941) Joan Baez (1941) Aretha Franklin (1942) Barbara Streisand (1942) Jerry Garcia (1942) Jimi Hendrix (1942) Barry Manilow (1943) John Denver (1943) Joni Mitchell (1943) Janis Joplin (1943) Diana Ross (1944) Entrepreneurs and businesspeople Warren Buffett (1930) Andy Grove (1936) Ted Turner (1938) Politicians, Judges, and Activists Robert F. Kennedy (1925) Cesar Chavez (1927) Walter Mondale (1928) Martin Luther King Jr. (1929) Sandra Day O’Connor (1930) Ted Kennedy (1932) Diane Feinstein (1933) Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933) Gloria Steinem (1934) Ralph Nader (1934) Geraldine Ferraro (1935) John McCain (1936) Antonin Scalia (1936) Madeleine Albright (1937) Colin Powell (1937) Nancy Pelosi (1940) Dick Cheney (1941) Jesse Jackson (1941) Bernie Sanders (1941) Joe Biden (1942) Mitch McConnell (1942) John Kerry (1943) Angela Davis (1944) Athletes and Sports Figures Arnold Palmer (1929) Mickey Mantle (1931) Roberto Clemente (1934) Wilt Chamberlain (1936) Jack Nicklaus (1940) Muhammad Ali (1942) Arthur Ashe (1943) Joe Namath (1943) Billie Jean King (1943) Journalists, Authors, and People in the News Harper Lee (1926) Hugh Hefner (1926) Erma Bombeck (1927) Maya Angelou (1928) Barbara Walters (1929) Neil Armstrong (1930) Tom Wolfe (1930) Toni Morrison (1931) Dan Rather (1931) Susan Sontag (1933) Philip Roth (1933) Joan Didion (1934) Charles Kuralt (1934) Carl Sagan (1934) Phil Donahue (1935) Ken Kesey (1935) Judy Blume (1938) Peter Jennings (1938) Joyce Carol Oates (1938) Jerry Rubin (1938) Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1939) Tom Brokaw (1940) Anthony Fauci (1940) Sue Grafton (1940) Ted Koppel (1940) Ed Bradley (1941) Nora Ephron (1941) Martha Stewart (1941) Michael Crichton (1942) Erica Jong (1942) John Irving (1942) Bob Woodward (1943) Carl Bernstein (1944) The Equality Revolution Trait: Pioneers in Civil Rights Imagine hopping into a time machine and stopping at two different times, just seven years apart: 1963 and 1970.


pages: 684 words: 188,584

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

In the 1970s, the AEC was split into the Department of Energy, which promotes and develops, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose mission is clear. Japan’s government did not make these changes. Additionally, the United States has a history of civilians and journalists questioning and criticizing state policies. Both Robert Oppenheimer and consumer advocate Ralph Nader, among others, warned of the dangers of civilian nuclear power plants at the industry’s very birth. “The Atomic Energy Commission was licensing unsafe reactors operating near major metropolitan areas, and they clearly were aware of this lack of safety,” Nader said. “The press wasn’t critical. The Congress bought into the Atomic Energy Commission party line.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Their model was Richard Gere: “Hi, I’m Richard Gere and I’m speaking for the entire world.”17 Bear Stearn’s Ace Greenburg donated $1 million to a hospital so that homeless men had access to free Viagra.18 George Soros supported free markets and democratic initiatives in Eastern Europe. Of course, hedge funds were beneficiaries from the opening up of these economies. Veteran campaigner Ralph Nader’s book, Only the Super Rich Can Save Us, urged billionaires to use their wealth to clean up America in a form of practical utopianism. Warren Buffett has indicated that he will leave 85 percent of his multibillion-dollar fortune to charity to be managed by his friend Bill Gates. One blogger urged everybody to go and get rich, so they could help more people.


pages: 613 words: 181,605

Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees by Patrick Dillon, Carl M. Cannon

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collective bargaining, Columbine, company town, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, desegregation, energy security, estate planning, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, index fund, John Markoff, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, margin call, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, power law, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, the High Line, the market place, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

The second was a bundle of more than 150 reference letters from a wide array of allies, opponents, friends, and family members, including his former wife Star, and former clients. Federal and state judges who had heard his cases were among the petitioners for lenience, as were public officials such as U.S. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan and political activist Ralph Nader. University presidents and law professors submitted letters, including one by Mary Crossley, dean of the University of Pittsburgh Law School, Lerach’s alma mater. Citing previous lectures Lerach had delivered to Pitt law students, she had made the judge an offer: “Given Mr. Lerach’s extensive experience as a litigator, he would be able to offer students valuable real world illustrations of how major litigations are conceived and the interplay of substantive law with procedural rules,” she wrote on December 21, 2007.


pages: 645 words: 190,680

The Taking of Getty Oil: Pennzoil, Texaco, and the Takeover Battle That Made History by Steve Coll

business cycle, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, financial innovation, interchangeable parts, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, jitney, North Sea oil, power law, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, stock buybacks

More particularly, it pushed John McKinley and Al DeCrane into the eager arms of thirty-six year old Bruce Wasserstein, cohead of First Boston’s aggressive merger division, and a Wunderkind even amid the precocity of modern Wall Street. On the face of it, they were poorly matched. In background, personal style, and business philosophy, Wasserstein had little in common with the staid, disciplined leaders of Texaco’s corporate empire. Far from being a combat veteran or military academy graduate, he had worked for Ralph Nader during the 1960s and dabbled in journalism and antipoverty work. His suits were wrinkled, he was overweight, and he was unrestrainedly verbose. Raised in Brooklyn in an intellectual, prosperous, and socially ascendant Jewish family, Wasserstein was above all else a prodigy. He matriculated at the University of Michigan at age sixteen and entered Harvard Law School at nineteen.


pages: 823 words: 206,070

The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, active measures, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, book value, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, continuous integration, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, dark matter, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, guest worker program, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, oil shock, precariat, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, union organizing, vertical integration, very high income, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

At the beginning of the 1980s they held and guaranteed some $85 billion in mortgage assets, equivalent to 7 percent of the mortgage market; by 2002, this had grown to $3.7 trillion, equivalent to almost 45 percent of the total mortgage market; by 2007, the total had reached $5.3 trillion, although it was a slightly smaller proportion of the total mortgage market since so many others had gotten into the game. As Ralph Nader put it, referring especially to the tax deduction allowed on mortgage-interest payments, Fannie and Freddie “swiftly and skillfully managed to pick up the roughshod tactics of the private corporate world and at the same time cling tightly to the federal government’s deepest and most lucrative welfare troughs.”23 Above all, given the implicit guarantee the federal government gave to GSE securities, financial markets regarded them as virtually as safe as Treasury securities while yielding a higher return—no small consideration at a time when interest rates on Treasuries were effectively negative.


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Parsons, The Rule of Empires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 170, 194, 201–202. 13 John Gillespie and David Zweig, Money for Nothing (New York: Free Press, 2010), 20–24 and Jan Edwards, “Challenging Corporate Personhood,” Multinational Monitor, November 2002. 14 Amrit Dhillon, “Fresh Brew,” Sydney Morning Herald, June 5, 2010. 15 Ralph Nader, The Nader Reader, Feb. 21, 2000, speech. 16 R. Jeffrey Smith, “DeLay Trial a Window Into Influence,” Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2010. 17 Justin Fox, “What the Founding Fathers Really Thought about Corporations,” HBR Blog Network, Harvard Business Review, e-mail exchange between Justin Fox and Brian Murphy, April 1, 2010, http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2010/04/what-the-founding-fathers-real.html 18 John Kay, “Beware the Bailout Kings and Backbench Barons,” Financial Times, May 20, 2009. 19 Luke Mitchell, “Understanding Obamacare,” Harper’s Magazine, December 2009. 20 Hedrick Smith, Who Stole the American Dream (New York: Random House, 2012). 21 Charles Morris, “A Recession Can Clear the Air,” Washington Post, Nov. 16, 2008. 22 Northeast Public Power Association (NEPPA), “Deregulation Continues to Impact Retail Electric Prices in Region,” NEPPA News Line, vol. 43, no. 12, December 2007.


pages: 726 words: 210,048

Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger, Thomas Petzinger Jr.

airline deregulation, Boeing 747, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, cross-subsidies, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, feminist movement, index card, junk bonds, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, revenue passenger mile, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Predators' Ball, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, yield management, zero-sum game

For eight days, spread over the months of February and March 1975, a parade of witnesses came forth, carefully arranged by Breyer and Bakes to cast the regulators and the industry as evildoers. Proponents of deregulation generally got the chance to make their case first, putting the beneficiaries of the status quo on the defensive. Ralph Nader, an ardent deregulation advocate, was sworn in to lend his populist imprimatur to the cause. Ford administration officials were carefully chosen to make sure they personally favored and fully understood deregulation, even if their agencies had taken no official position. Among the academic theorists, Alfred Kahn of Cornell was chosen to testify because of his rapier intellect.


Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, gentrification, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, Howard Zinn, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, wage slave, women in the workforce

MAN: Could you mention some specific organizations that we could try to link up with and network with, which are doing a good job of working on these problems? Well, a lot of organizations are involved, from a lot of different points of view. For example, at one level—which is important, though of course superficial—Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen is involved [the group works primarily on consumer issues]. That’s important, like I say, but not really touching the basic structure of power. Beyond that, if the American labor movement ever recovers the insights that ordinary working people had a hundred years ago, then it will be working on them too.


pages: 518 words: 170,126

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco by Chester W. Hartman, Sarah Carnochan

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, benefit corporation, big-box store, business climate, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, John Markoff, Loma Prieta earthquake, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, young professional

While they could raise only forty-two thousand dollars, they were able to effectively use the Federal Communications Commission’s (since discarded) “fairness doctrine” (a technique profitably used earlier in the Proposition U and Proposition R campaigns) to persuade television and radio stations to give them free air time, in about a 1:4 ratio to the time the realty interests had bought. The group used most of its money to produce some extremely clever and sophisticated thirty-second spots, featuring such icons of integrity as Henry Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Ralph Nader, which hit squarely on the issue of voter fraud. The result was a 65 to 35 percent rout of the proposition. The next state-level move by real estate interests was another attempt to have the California legislature pass a law limiting local rent control efforts, imposing restrictions similar to those the state’s voters had just rejected.


pages: 712 words: 212,334

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

always be closing, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, Laura Poitras, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical residency, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, tech billionaire, TED Talk, tontine, Upton Sinclair

In his Medical Tribune column, “One Man & Medicine,” he served up an idiosyncratic miscellany of righteous polemics against things that he hated (cigarettes, FDA regulation, “lay” journalism written by nondoctors) and name-droppy journal entries about his life and travels. He devoted three columns to an extended conversation with the opera singer Luciano Pavarotti. Stories on a range of subjects somehow returned to his close personal friendship with the king of Sweden. Arthur boasted about having been an early booster of Ralph Nader’s consumer safety work, though the head of an organization Nader started, Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, once declared, “What passes for news in the Medical Tribune is highly filtered editorial comment irrationally favorable to the drug industry.” If Arthur was getting used to the idea of publicity, he insisted that it was publicity on his own terms.


pages: 708 words: 223,211

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

Thanks to Andy Hertzfeld, Paul Resch, Bill Galcher, Donald Norman, Dan O’Neill, and Ray Ozzie for reviewing all or portions of the manuscript over the years. Thanks also to writers Steven Levy and John Markoff, whose inspiring writing, support, and encouragement have helped give me the strength to finish this book. Thanks to Ralph Nader and William C. Taylor, authors of The Big Boys: Power and Position in American Business (Pantheon, 1986), who without hesitation gave me two boxes full of all of their research on Control Data Corporation, including raw interview transcripts and handwritten reporter’s notes, which I put to extensive use in Part Three of this book.


pages: 801 words: 229,742

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, David Brooks, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, invisible hand, low interest rates, oil shock, Project for a New American Century, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

For examples of this argument, Phyllis Chesler, The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2003); Hillel Halkin, “The Return of Anti-Semitism: To Be Against Israel Is to Be Against the Jews,” Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2002; Barry Kosmin and Paul Iganski, “Judeophobia—Not Your Parents’ Anti-Semitism,” Ha’aretz, June 3, 2003; Amnon Rubinstein, “Fighting the New Anti-Semitism,” Ha’aretz, December 2, 2003; Gabriel Schoenfeld, The Return of Anti-Semitism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003); Natan Sharansky, “Anti-Semitism Is Our Problem,” Ha’aretz, August 10, 2003; Yair Sheleg, “A World Cleansed of the Jewish State,” Ha’aretz, April 18, 2002; and Yair Sheleg, “Enemies, a Post-National Story,” Ha’aretz, March 8, 2003. For criticism of this perspective, see Akiva Eldar, “Anti-Semitism Can Be Self-Serving,” Ha’aretz, May 3, 2002; Brian Klug, “The Myth of the New Anti-Semitism,” Nation, February 2, 2004; Ralph Nader, “Criticizing Israel Is Not Anti-Semitism,” CounterPunch.org, October 16/17, 2004; Rieframing Anti-Semitism: Alternative Jewish Perspectives, ed. Henri Picciotto and Mitchell Plitnick (Oakland, CA: Jewish Voice for Peace, 2004); and Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, chaps. 1–3. 84. Helen Nugent, “Chief Rabbi Flays Church over Vote on Israel Assets,” Times (London), February 17, 2006.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

The magazine graph was annotated with landmarks in auto safety which identified the technological, commercial, political, and moralistic forces at work. Over the short run they sometimes pushed against each other, but over the long run they collectively pulled the death rate down, down, down. At times there were moral crusades to reduce the carnage, with automobile manufacturers as the villains. In 1965 a young lawyer named Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, a j’accuse of the industry for neglecting safety in automotive design. Soon after, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was established and legislation was passed requiring new cars to be equipped with a number of safety features. Yet the graph shows that steeper reductions came before the activism and the legislation, and the auto industry was sometimes ahead of its customers and regulators.


pages: 936 words: 252,313

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease by Gary Taubes

Albert Einstein, California gold rush, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Drosophila, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Gary Taubes, invention of agriculture, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, placebo effect, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, selection bias, seminal paper, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, unbiased observer, Upton Sinclair

Though the conflict-of-interest accusations served to discredit the advice proffered in Toward Healthful Diets, the issue was not nearly as simple as the media made it out to be and often still do. Since the 1940s, nutritionists in academia had been encouraged to work closely with industry. In the 1960s, this collaborative relationship deteriorated, at least in public perception, into what Ralph Nader and other advocacy groups would consider an “unholy alliance.” It wasn’t always. As Robert Olson explained at the time, he had received over the course of his career perhaps $10 million in grants from the USDA and NIH, and $250,000 from industry. He had also been on the American Heart Association Research Committee for two decades.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

The cause was determined to be pilot error, as the pilot’s aggressive use of the rudder caused the tail of the plane to snap off, and before the aircraft hit the ground, both engines had fallen off the wing. These three incidents with their very different causes—inadequate air traffic control, faulty maintenance, and pilot error—appear to have taught airlines and aircraft manufacturers many lessons. To quote the title of Ralph Nader’s famous book, air travel was initially “unsafe at any speed” but now is safer than walking across the street. AIRLINE PRICES AND THE INITIAL PROMISE OF AIRLINE DEREGULATION In the history of the U.S. airline industry since World War II, one theme stands out. Air travel rapidly made the transition from a travel mode that was relatively dangerous and expensive to one that opened the world as an affordable destination for millions of Americans.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

Neither Gore nor Bush had a plan for free national health care, for extensive low-cost housing, for dramatic changes in environmental controls. Both supported the death penalty and the growth of prisons. Both favored a large military establishment, the continued use of land mines, and the use of sanctions against the people of Cuba and Iraq. There was a third-party candidate, Ralph Nader, whose national reputation came from decades of persistent criticism of corporate control of the economy. His program was sharply different from the two major candidates, emphasizing health care, education, and the environment. But he was shut out of the nationally televised debates during the campaign, and, without the support of big business, he had to raise money from the small contributions of people who believed in his program.


pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The question posed now was whether and how the principals could reassert control over their agents.1 If the agents did not wish to be so controlled, they had to take the initiative in demonstrating their value to shareholders or else find ways of releasing themselves from this constraint by becoming the owners as well as the managers. Agency Theory Michael Jensen, a Chicago-trained economist at Rochester, was impressed by a 1970 article in the New York Times by Milton Friedman that announced his arrival as an outspoken advocate of free-market economics. Friedman’s target was activist Ralph Nader’s campaign to get three representatives of the “public interest” on the board of General Motors. Friedman countered that the only responsibility of the corporation was to make profits so long as it engaged in “open and free competition without deception or fraud.” His arguments challenged the managerialism of the past two decades directly: the leaders of the big corporations should neither expect to act as agents of the state nor expect the state to shield them from competition.


pages: 1,199 words: 332,563

Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition by Robert N. Proctor

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", bioinformatics, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, facts on the ground, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, index card, Indoor air pollution, information retrieval, invention of gunpowder, John Snow's cholera map, language of flowers, life extension, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, speech recognition, stem cell, telemarketer, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Cuyler Hammond of the American Cancer Society and Hayden Nicholson of the University of Arkansas, for example, but also McKeen Cattell, chief of pharmacology at Cornell.32 Hueper as head of the NCI’s Environmental Cancer Section must have seemed an attractive candidate: the world’s leading authority on occupational carcinogenesis thought that tobacco was being unfairly blamed as the cause-all of modern cancer and that other kinds of carcinogens were being let off the hook, notably asbestos and the many dangerous pollutants belched forth from the petrochemical industry. And he was partly right. It was easy for the Dows and DuPonts of the world to blame smoking or some other “personal factor” for whatever maladies their workers were contracting. Hueper was a kind of proto-Ralph Nader or Rachel Carson, keenly aware of the depth of corporate neglect and malfeasance. Much of his life had been spent documenting dangers to which workers were exposed, but he was no friend of Big Tobacco and scoffed at the idea of taking money to become their corporate poodle. He didn’t think much about tobacco as a cancer cause—for decades he smoked a pipe and at one point credited 90 percent of all lung cancers to (non-tobacco) environmental and occupational causes, leaving only 10 percent for cigarettes—but he also had a strong moral compass and wasn’t about to let himself be bought.


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

., who had moved to Washington, where Katharine Graham took an interest and arranged for her to work as an editorial assistant, first at the New Republic and then at U.S. News & World Report. In November 1983, in a huge wedding at New York’s Metropolitan Club, she married again, this time to Allen Greenberg, a public-interest lawyer for Ralph Nader. Greenberg had her father’s cool analytical bent and looked like someone who lived in a library. Both Susie’s parents took to their new son-in-law immediately, and people remarked on how much Allen resembled Susie’s father—rational, dispassionate, good at saying no. The newlyweds moved into a Washington town house but rented most of it out to other tenants and lived in a tiny apartment.


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Milk, along with San Francisco mayor George Moscone, was assassinated in 1978. Betty Friedan (1921–2006) Founder of the National Organization of Women (NOW), Friedan was instrumental in leading the feminist movement of the 1960s. Friedan’s groundbreaking book The Feminine Mystique inspired millions of women to envision a life beyond mere ‘homemaker’. Ralph Nader (1934–) The frequent presidential contender (in 2008, Nader received 738,000 votes) is one of America’s staunchest consumer watchdogs. The Harvard-trained lawyer has played a major role in insuring Americans have safer cars, cheaper medicines and cleaner air and water. PAX AMERICANA & THE WAR ON TERROR In 1980, Republican California governor and former actor Ronald Reagan campaigned for president by promising to make Americans feel good about America again.