Beyond the Bubble: Imagining a New Canadian Economy
James Laxer, Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2009, 264 pages.
“The neo-liberal system has fallen into pieces and cannot be put together again. Nor should humanity attempt it. It is time to move on to a better future.” These are the last words in James Laxer’s Beyond the Bubble. The rest of the book fills in the details of what amounts to a very interesting read for economists and non-economists alike.
This is a book of many stories. Nominally, it’s about a bubble that popped over the housing market. Laxer could have chosen other bubbles – the dot-com crash, the Great Depression – but they may have offered less rhetorical value today.
[Click here to read more!]
Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism that Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs
Muhammad Yunus, New York: Public Affairs, 2010, 226 pages.
As one of the recipients of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, Muhammad Yunus has often spoken out on the failure of the capitalist system to perform its duty to provide for the world’s poorest people.
In Building Social Business, Yunus expands on his self-proclaimed world-changing mechanism for social change that he introduced in an earlier book, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism. He fleshes out the idea more fully in this work by not only defining social business clearly and providing examples of how it has been successful already, but … [Click here to read more!]
The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet
John Bellamy Foster, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009, 328 pages.
Do you ever suspect that there is something fundamentally wrong with our capitalist society? Have you wondered what advice Karl Marx would give to the modern environmentalist? If so, The Ecological Revolution by John Bellamy Foster may interest you.
A professor of sociology at the University of Oregon at Eugene, Foster begins the book in no uncertain terms, arguing that humans need to revolutionize their relationship with Earth, or else suffer many dangerous consequences. He believes that this revolution must be a socialist one, and uses the bulk of The Ecological Revolution to explain why.
The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America’s Emerging Battle Over Food Rights
David E. Gumpert
White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green, 2009, 288 pages
The Raw Milk Revolution, by David E. Gumpert, would more accurately be entitled “Milk Wars.” Any attempt to sell raw milk creates a froth of such proportions that we must conclude that it is symptomatic of something bigger.
The war is all about politics and ideology – about food control and food beliefs. So when battle lines are outwardly drawn around issues of food safety and the right of citizens to choose the food they want, it takes Gumpert’s sharp journalistic skills to uncover what risks to profits and livelihoods could lie beneath….[Click here to read more!]