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Pension Dumping: The Reasons, the Wreckage, the Stakes for Wall Street
Pension plans in America no longer represent commitments that financially troubled companies will honor. Neither bankruptcy courts, nor Washington, nor unions have the clout to make them do so. The disposition of these plans is instead left to serve the needs of big investors. Often these investors are a company's best hope of restructuring after bankruptcy. Investors want a lean investment unburdened with financial promises to employees no longer on the payroll. Despite laws passed to discourage the termination of plans, the courts allow it, caving in to the forces garnered to reinvigorate a failing company. Unions are often compelled to choose between the financial welfare of retirees and jobs for active workers. This book explains in shocking detail how terminating the pension plan became a knee-jerk strategy for bankrupt companies that hope to attract big investors to help them reorganize..
Price: $13.97
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Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators
A provocative look at how the disappearance of the world’s great predators has upset the delicate balance of the environment, and what their disappearance portends for the future, by an acclaimed science journalist. It wasn’t so long ago that wolves and great cats, monstrous fish and flying raptors ruled the peak of nature’s food pyramid. Not so anymore. All but exterminated, these predators of the not-too-distant past have been reduced to minor players of the modern era. And what of it? Wildlife journalist William Stolzenburg follows in the wake of nature’s topmost carnivores, and finds chaos in their absence. From the brazen mobs of deer and marauding raccoons of backyard America to streamsides of Yellowstone National Park crushed by massive herds of elk; from urchin-scoured reefs in the North Pacific to ant-devoured islands in Venezuela, Stolzenburg leads a startling tour through bizarre, impoverished landscapes of pest and plague. For anyone who has seldom given thought to the meat-eating beasts so recently missing from the web of life, here is a world of reason to think again. .
Price: $16.49
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Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
It was wonderful to be young and working on Wall Street in the 1980s: never had so many twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time. In this shrewd and wickedly funny audiobook, Michael Lewis describes an astonishing era and his own rake’s progress through a powerful investment bank. From an unlikely beginning (art history at Princeton?) he rose in two short years from Salomon Brothers trainee to Geek (the lowest form of life on the trading floor) to Big Swinging Dick–a bond salesman who could turn over millions of dollars’ worth of doubtful bonds with just one call. A born storyteller, Michael Lewis shows us how things really worked on Wall Street. The bond traders, wearing greed and ambition as badges of honor, might well have swaggered straight from the pages of Bonfire of the Vanities. But for all their outrageous behavior, they were in fact presiding over enormous changes in the world economy. Lewis’s job was to transfer money, in the form of bonds, from those outside American who saved to those inside America who consumed. In doing so, he generated tens of millions of dollars for Salomon Brothers, and earned for himself a ringside seat on the greatest financial spectacle of the decade: the leveraging of America..
Price: $8.33
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Wreckage Begins with "W": Cartoons of the Bush Administration
JEFF DANZIGER IS an independent political cartoonist whose work appears in hundreds of newspapers around the world via the New York Times Syndicate. He draws from six to ten cartoons a week on a wide variety of subjects, from international folly to Hollywood hubris. An equal opportunity satirist, he is politically to the left of Genghis Kahn — everyone and everything is fair game. His dark drawings, pull-no-punches humor, and “Danziger” signature line are instantly recognizable to any regular reader of newspaper opinion pages. As with any great political humorist, Danziger’s funniest creations lampoon the most deadly serious subjects. Created in the heat of the moment and collected here for the first time, Danziger’s cartoons of George W. Bush’s ascent to the White House and first term in office amount to a highly entertaining excursion through the national and international political landscape of the past four years. Wreckage Begins with “W” showcases a singular wit and an artist of uncanny prescience..
Price: $16.94
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