2009
But the situation isn't hopeless. Schlesinger profiles individuals and institutions renewing the practice of inquiry—particularly in America's youth—at a time when our society demands such activity from us all. Our resilience will depend on our ability to struggle with what we don't know, to live and think outside comfortable bubbles of sameness, and, ultimately, to ask questions.
• Argues passionately for the critical importance of inquiry to a healthy democracy
• Shows how the very institutions that should be encouraging inquiry—schools, the media, government, the Internet—are actually discouraging it
• Highlights hopeful examples of people working to restore inquiry to its rightful place of importance
The spirit of inquiry is the engine of democracy. The democratic process is nothing less than citizens regularly asking what kind of society they want to live in and whom they want to lead them. But more and more people are avoiding the whole messy business of questioning. Americans are instead being trained to look for ready-made answers, with potentially dire implications for the health of our society.
In this impassioned new book, Andrea Batista Schlesinger argues that we’re besieged by cultural forces that urge us to avoid independent thought and critical analysis. The media reduces politics to a spectator sport, focusing on polls and personalities rather than issues and ideas. Schools teach to standardized tests—students learn to fill in the bubbles, not open their minds. “Financial literacy” courses have replaced civics classes, graduating smart shoppers rather than informed citizens. Even the Internet promotes habits that discourage inquiry.
Regurgitating search-engine results becomes a substitute for genuine research and reflection. Social networks promote connection rather than engagement. With all the information available online, over a third of those younger than twenty-five say they get no news on a typical day, up from 25 percent in 1998.
The situation isn’t hopeless. Batista Schlesinger spotlights individuals and institutions across the country that are working to renew a healthy sense of curiosity and skepticism, particularly in American’s youth. It is, at this point, an uphill battle but one well worth undertaking. The Death of “Why?” offers both a penetrating socio-cultural critique of our current path and a way forward for cultivating inquiry and reinvigorating our democracy.
Packed with the real-world experiences of small business owners making the transition to professional management
- Forgoes academic jargon and dense management theory to provide practical, accessible methods for taking your small business to the next level
- Packed with the real-world experiences of small business owners making the transition to professional management, including Mathile's own
- Published in collaboration with Aileron, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to helping private business owners develop their professional management system
Running a thriving business is the American dream: no boss to answer to, a flexible schedule, calling your own shots. But then there is the reality: sixteen-hour days, little time for family and friends, and the unrelenting pressure to create constant growth while attending to all the day-to-day details. And ironically, all this hard hands-on work is only going to take you so far. To get to the next level, you need to step back from being the entrepreneur/owner who makes every single decision and run your business by the fundamentals of professional management.
Run Your Business, Don't Let It Run You introduces proven management fundamentals and disciplines in a systematic, practical way, one that has been developed for and used by thousands of business owners. You'll get real-world details that academic courses don't teach-true stories from the trenches from those who, like Clay Mathile, made this difficult transition and thrived as a result. You will discover a way to help you gain the freedom that propelled you to become a business owner in the first place.
Mathile outlines the shifts you need to make to lay out the overall direction for your organization, ensure that your plan is put into action, and establish indicators so you can monitor progress and make corrections. You'll discover how to focus on what is important, not just urgent, and to view and manage the whole system, not become entangled in the individual parts. This book's insights and tools will help businesses adapt and grow in any market environment while preserving their distinctive values and core practices-and the leader's sanity.
To create a sustainable and profitable business, you must change your focus to working on your business, not in it. With Clay Mathile as your mentor, you can take that next step forward, making your business more successful and your life more livable.
2012
They explore specific strategies to conserve natural resources, stabilize population, reduce inequality, fix the financial system, create jobs, and more—all with the aim of maximizing long-term well-being instead of short-term profits. Filled with fresh ideas and surprising optimism, Enough Is Enough is the primer for achieving genuine prosperity and a hopeful future for all.
In The Divine Right of Capital, Kelly argues that focusing on the interests of stockholders to the exclusion of everyone else's interests is a form of discrimination based on property or wealth. She shows how this bias is held by our institutional structures, much as they once held biases against blacks and women.
The Divine Right of Capital exposes six aristocratic principles that corporations are built on, principles that we would never accept in our modern democratic society but which we accept unquestioningly in our economy. Wealth bias is a holdover from our pre-democratic past. It has enabled shareholders to become a kind of economic aristocracy. Kelly shows how to design more equitable alternatives-new property rights, new forms of corporate governance, new ways of looking at corporate performance-that build on both free-market and democratic principles.
We think of shareholder primacy as the natural law of the free market, much as our forebears thought of monarchy as the most natural form of government. But in The Divine Right of Capital, Kelly brilliantly demonstrates that it is no more "natural" than any other human creation. People designed this system and people can change it.
We need a change of mind as profound as that of the American Revolution. We must question the legitimacy of a system that gives the wealthy few-the ten percent of Americans who own ninety percent of all stock-a disproportionate power over the many. In so doing, we can fulfill the democratic principles of our nation not only in the political sphere, but in the economic sphere as well.
- Updated paperback edition includes a new chapter and a Reader's Guide
- Explores the real causes of the Enron fiasco and other recent corporate scandals
- Explodes the myth that the stock market is "democratizing" wealth
- Gives practical guidance to help employees and communities change corporate governance and unfetter the genius of the free market
2016
There's nothing inherently unconstitutional in limiting the amount of speech, Cressman insists. We do it all the time—for example, cities control when and where demonstrations can take place or how long people can speak at council meetings. Moreover, he argues that while you choose to patronize Fox News, MSNBC, the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal, political advertising is forced upon you. It's not really free speech at all—it's paid speech. It's not at all what the Founders had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment.
Cressman examines how courts have foiled attempts to limit campaign spending, details what a constitutional amendment limiting paid speech should say, and reveals an overlooked political tool concerned citizens can use to help gain the amendment's passage. Seven times before in our history we have approved constitutional amendments to overturn wrongheaded rulings by the Supreme Court—there's no reason we can't do it again.
Thom Hartmann, the most popular progressive radio host in America and a New York Times bestselling author, looks at the real history of guns in America and what we can do to limit both their lethal impact and the power of the gun lobby.
Taking his typically in-depth, historically informed view, Hartmann examines the brutal role guns have played in American history, from the genocide of the Native Americans to the enforcement of slavery (Slave Patrols are in fact the Second Amendment's “well-regulated militias”) and the racist post–Civil War social order. He shows how the NRA and conservative Supreme Court justices used specious logic to invent a virtually unlimited individual right to own guns, which has enabled the ever-growing number of mass shootings in the United States. But Hartmann also identifies a handful of powerful, commonsense solutions that would break the power of the gun lobby and restore the understanding of the Second Amendment that the Framers of the Constitution intended. This is the kind of brief, brilliant analysis for which Hartmann is justly renowned.
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