Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street from Wall Street - Hardcover

Democracy at Risk; Rescuing Main Street from Wall Street. A Populist Vision for the Twenty-First Century

Hardcover. Zustand: Good. Zustand des Schutzumschlags: Very good. First Printing [Stated]. xxix, [1], 400 pages. Pencil marks and underlining noted. Includes Acknowledgments, Introduction, Epilogue, Notes, and Index. Topics covered include Out-of-Control Capitalism; Reclaiming Global Leadership; The Path from Here to There; and Share Our Wealth 2000. Inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper. Inscription reads: To Jim Wolfensohn--With best regards, Jeff Gates. James David Wolfensohn, KBE, AO (born 1 December 1933) is an Australian-American lawyer, investment banker, and economist who served as the ninth president of the World Bank Group (1995-2005). When Wolfensohn took over at the World Bank in 1995, he viewed himself as a spiritual successor to a former World Bank chief, Robert McNamara. He was born in Sydney, Australia, and is a graduate of the University of Sydney and Harvard Business School; he was also an Olympic fencer. He worked for various companies in Britain and the United States before forming his own investment firm. Wolfensohn became an American citizen in 1980, requiring him to renounce his Australian citizenship although he eventually regained it in 2010. He served two terms as President of the World Bank on the nomination of U.S. President Bill Clinton, and has since held various positions with charitable organizations. Drawing from his own experience on the front lines (as a pioneer of employee stock ownership legislation and a lifetime in national politics and corporate finance), and citing startling statistics of the growing disparities in wealth and income, the author paints a compelling picture of how political and business interests have long conspired to concentrate power and influence. The effects are manifested in a variety of increasingly disturbing conditions that reflect a penchant for short-term returns over long-term solutions--from voter apathy to ecological devastation to an educational system in crisis. The author offers politically practical and financially feasible ways toward a broad-based prosperity around the world. Citing cherry-picked statistics, Jeff Gates argues that the economic boom was largely a mirage, buoyed by policies that continue to reward the wealthy and ignore the poor. With equal measures of passion and sophistic reasoning, he proposes a program of financial, political, and economic change. Derived from a Publisher's Weekly review: Gates is enthusiastic about both capitalism and democracy--but he's a little concerned that one (capitalism) is advancing at the expense of the other, and that today's profit-or-perish economy endangers the viability of community. "My goal," he writes, "is to smarten up free enterprise." So, in this well-meaning populist primer, Gates--former counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance--maps out a plan for a more "democratic capitalism" that would make the world safe from the ravages of global financial markets that benefit the few at the expense of the many. Among other things, he proposes a "freeloader's levy" that would take money from the $8 trillion now stashed in the world's tax havens and redistribute it to humanitarian projects in the developing world, and he imagines a scheme for reinvesting retirement assets to assist self-reliant pensioners. Most compellingly, he proposes a series of strategies (based in part on his 1998 book The Ownership Solution) for "peoplizing ownership"--expanding the edges of corporations through various customer, employee and citizen stock-ownership plans. Gates is at his best when analyzing specific tactics to back up his rhetorical salvos. But a number of his critiques lose their focus as he barrels pell-mell through an onslaught of subject matter--foreign relations, monetary policy, bioterrorism, Gandhi, perceived misdeeds of Wal-Mart, and cybernetics. Still, even if the answers Gates turns up don't always hit the mark, at least he's raising an important set of questions. Artikel-Nr. 79860

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