The Brainwashing of the American InvestorRevised Edition is the updated, hands-on investing manual that challenges the prevailing wisdom to put your trust blindly in Wall Street.

The Brainwashing of the American InvestorRevised Edition is the updated, hands-on investing manual that challenges the prevailing wisdom to put your trust blindly in Wall Street.

Every day you’re bombarded by ideas that could derail your financial future. Bad advice, differing expert opinions, and sales pitches are everywhere. You’re faced with important money decisions that could either be very costly or really pay off in the long run. Whether you personally have $100,000 or $100 million, you feel the burden and stress of making the best moves for your future despite a lot of uncertainty. How do you decide what to do with your money? Where do you turn for financial advice? What if you’ve been misled? In Stress-Free Money, Chad shows you how to overcome the seven obstacles standing between you and financial freedom. He exposes the risks, biases, and major mistakes that keep so many people from reaching their goals. Financial security and peace of mind are within reach, but most of us don’t know where to start. The insights and stories in Stress-Free Money will give you confidence and guidance toward a life where you spend less time worrying about money and more time doing everything else.

Many Americans believe Barak Obama represents a hopeful future for America. But does he also reflect the American politics of the past? This book offers the broadest and best-informed understanding on the meaning of the "Obama phenomenon" to date. Paul Street was on the ground throughout the Iowa campaign, and his stories of the rising Obama phenomenon are poignant. Yet the author's background in American political history allows him to explore the deeper meanings of Obama's remarkable political career. He looks at Obama in relation to contemporary issues of class, race, war, and empire. He considers Obama in the context of our nation's political history, with comparisons to FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton, and other leaders. Street finds that the Obama persona, crafted by campaign consultants and filtered through dominant media trends, masks the "change" candidate's adherence to long-prevailing power structures and party doctrines. He shows how American political culture has produced misperceptions by the electorate of Obama's positions and values. Obama is no magical exception to the narrow-spectrum electoral system and ideological culture that have done so much to define and limit the American political tradition. Yet the author suggests key ways in which Obama potentially advances democratic transformation. Street makes recommendations on how citizens can productively respond to and act upon Obama's influence and the broader historical and social forces that have produced his celebrity and relevance. He also lays out a real agenda for change for the new presidential administration, one that addresses the recent failures of democratic politics.

This book advances an original conception of the relationship between state and corporate power in the United States. Using what he terms an Institutional Marxist framework, Maher argues that, far from passively responding to interest group pressures, the state has been a key agent in politically mobilizing business, and has played an active role in the organization of lobbying groups. Such business associations do not merely express the pre-existing interests of their corporate members, but are also mechanisms through which the state organizes the political power of the capitalist class. They form part of what the author refers to as an integral state—a wider network of state power which traverses and interpenetrates the state bureaucracy, the legislature, the industrial policy apparatus, and corporate governance. Based on extensive archival research, this book tracks the role of the General Electric Company as a pillar of the integral state in the United States from the finance capital period (1880 to 1930), through the managerial period (1930-1979), to the restructuring leading up to the age of neoliberalism (1979-present).