The need for maximum labor flexibility in order to ensure competitiveness has replaced the old aim of making workers into productive allies and mass consumers. Jacques B. Gelinas' vivid text picks out the key elements of this new economic landscape, and explains why the owners and CEO's of this new transnational economy no longer need their traditional alliance with the state and the middle classes. He depicts governments, spellbound by the market, abandoning their obligations to defend civil society.

Biotech Juggernaut: Hope, Hype, and Hidden Agendas of Entrepreneurial BioScience relates the intensifying effort of bioentrepreneurs to apply genetic engineering technologies to the human species and to extend the commercial reach of synthetic biology or "extreme genetic engineering." In 1980, legal developments concerning patenting laws transformed scientific researchers into bioentrepreneurs. Often motivated to create profit-driven biotech start-up companies or to serve on their advisory boards, university researchers now commonly operate under serious conflicts of interest. These conflicts stand in the way of giving full consideration to the social and ethical consequences of the technologies they seek to develop. Too often, bioentrepreneurs have worked to obscure how these technologies could alter human evolution and to hide the social costs of keeping on this path. Tracing the rise and cultural politics of biotechnology from a critical perspective, Biotech Juggernaut aims to correct the informational imbalance between producers of biotechnologies on the one hand, and the intended consumers of these technologies and general society, on the other. It explains how the converging vectors of economic, political, social, and cultural elements driving biotechnology’s swift advance constitutes a juggernaut. It concludes with a reflection on whether it is possible for an informed public to halt what appears to be a runaway force.

In the ten years since 9/11, a grassroots truth movement has sprung up that unites the best elements of the right and left. The call to resist the secrecy, imperialism, and the manipulation of the elite has been heard by a wide spectrum of people, across religious and political lines. This is a revolutionary moment that has lacked a clarifying manifesto. Until now. Pulling from his personal confrontations with the FBI, Rudolph Giuliani, Eliot Spitzer, and Dick Cheney, activist, maverick, and investigative reporter Sander Hicks reaches for a broader understanding of who was behind the 9/11 attacks. He reports the mysterious murder of Dr. David M. Graham, a Shreveport dentist who met two of the 9/11 hijackers but was then harassed by the FBI and poisoned. Scientific evidence leads him to take a hard, critical stance against Bush, Cheney, and the 9/11 “Official Story.” Weaving evidence with anecdote, Slingshot to the Juggernaut is an inspiring ride into the 9/11 cover-up and the revolutionary possibilities it inadvertently created. Provocative and unyielding, Hicks examines the evidence, draws conclusions, and offers a vision for the future of the United States.

Half the population of the world are the sons of Abraham. Who we are, where we came from, and where we are headed next is an astonishing, stunning story. Abraham's Juggernaut feeds our culture. Our history. Our politics and our diplomacy. It permeates all of our religions. It defines our sociology and our psychology. The Juggernaut is an approach to life, a perspective on history, on other peoples and other cultures that exploded like a sunburst out of the Holy Land three millennia ago. It is a set of assumptions about how the universe is storied. Abraham's Juggernaut is also a series of values and priorities that demand obedience. It serves as a "justification" for actions taken. It persists because it is so passionately embraced. The Juggernaut roils and reverberates through Space and Time.

Ralph Nader is one of America's most passionate and effective social critics. He has been called a muckraker, a consumer crusader, and America's public defender. The cars we drive, the food we eat, the water we drink-their safety has been enhanced largely due to Ralph Nader. His inspiration and example have rallied consumer advocates, citizen activists, public interest lawyers, and government officials into action, and in the 2000 election, nearly three million people voted for him. An inspiring and defiant memoir, Crashing the Party takes us inside Nader's campaign and explains what it took to fight the two-party juggernaut; why Bush and Gore were really afraid to let him in on their debates; why progressive Democrats have been left behind and ignored by their party; how Democrat and Republican interests have been lost to corporate bankrolling; and what needs to happen in the future for people to take back their political system.

We live today in an interconnected world in which ordinary people can became instant online celebrities to fans thousands of miles away, in which religious leaders can influence millions globally, in which humans are altering the climate and environment, and in which complex social forces intersect across continents. This is globalization. In the fifth edition of his bestselling Very Short Introduction Manfred B. Steger considers the major dimensions of globalization: economic, political, cultural, ideological, and ecological. He looks at its causes and effects, and engages with the hotly contested question of whether globalization is, ultimately, a good or a bad thing. From climate change to the Ebola virus, Donald Trump to Twitter, trade wars to China's growing global profile, Steger explores today's unprecedented levels of planetary integration as well as the recent challenges posed by resurgent national populism. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.