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Best Books of 2024: \"Frerick's prose throughout is both direct and masterfully controlled, with every point supported by extensive references and notes.This is no alarmist screed but rather a careful, systematic, and utterly damning demolition job--an exquisitely informed exposé.

Stoked by a series of major scandals, popular fears of corruption in the Civil War North provide a unique window into Northern culture in the Civil War era. InThe Enemy Within,Michael Thomas Smith relates these scandals-including those involving John C. Frémont's administration in Missouri, Benjamin F. Butler's in Louisiana, bounty jumping and recruitment fraud, controversial wartime innovations in the Treasury Department, government contracting, and the cotton trade-to deeper anxieties. The massive growth of the national government during the Civil War and lack of effective regulation made corruption all but inevitable, as indeed it has been in all the nation's wars and in every period of the nation's history. Civil War Northerners responded with unique intensity to these threats, however. If anything, the actual scale of nineteenth-century public corruption and the party campaign fundraising with which it tended to intertwine was tiny compared with that of later eras, following the growth and consolidation of big business and corporations. Nevertheless, Civil War Northerners responded with far greater vigor than their descendants would muster against larger and more insidious threats. In the 1860s the popular conception of corruption could still encompass such social trends as extravagant spending or the enjoyment of luxury goods. Even more telling are the ways in which citizens' definitions of corruption manifested their specific fears: of government spending and centralization; of immigrants and the urban poor; of aristocratic ambition and pretension; and, most fundamentally, of modernization itself. Rational concerns about government honesty and efficiency had a way of spiraling into irrational suspicions of corrupt cabals and conspiracies. Those shadowy fears by contrast starkly illuminate Northerners' most cherished beliefs and values.

\"In 2020, hundreds of thousands of coronavirus deaths were caused not by the vicissitudes of nature but by the callous and opportunistic decisions of powerful people, as revealed here by John Nichols\"-- Provided by publisher

The global consumption of fossil fuels is dramatically rising, while inversely, the supply is in permanent decline. The \"end of oil\" threatens the very future of Western civilization. Oil, Globalization, and the War for the Arctic Refuge examines the politics of drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and presents this controversy as a precursor of future \"resource wars\" where ideas and values collide and polarize. The reader is introduced to the primary participants involved: global corporations, politicians, nongovernmental organizations, indigenous peoples and organizations, and human rights/religious organizations. Author David M. Standlea argues in favor of seeing this comparatively \"local\" conflict as part of a larger struggle between the proponents of an alternative, positive vision for the future and an American culture presently willing to sacrifice that future for immediate profit.

\"Barons is the story of seven corporate titans, their rise to power, and the consequences for everyone else. Take Mike McCloskey, Chairman of Fair Oaks Farms. In a few short decades, he went from managing a modest dairy herd to running the Disneyland of agriculture, where school children ride trams through mechanized warehouses filled with tens of thousands of cows that never see the light of day. What was the key to his success? Hard work and exceptional business savvy? Maybe. But more than anything else, Mike benefited from deregulation of the American food industry, a phenomenon that has consolidated wealth in the hands of select tycoons, and along the way, hollowed out the nation's rural towns and local businesses. Along with Mike McCloskey, readers will meet a secretive German family that took over the global coffee industry in less than a decade, relying on wealth traced back to the Nazis to gobble up countless independent roasters. They will discover how a small grain business transformed itself into an empire bigger than Koch Industries, with ample help from taxpayer dollars. And they will learn that in the food business, crime really does pay--especially when you can bribe and then double-cross the president of Brazil. These, and the other stories in this book, are simply examples of the monopolies and ubiquitous corruption that today define American food. The tycoons profiled in these pages are hardly unique: many other companies have manipulated our lax laws and failed policies for their own benefit, to the detriment of our neighborhoods, livelihoods, and our democracy itself. Barons paints a stark portrait of the consequences of corporate consolidation, but it also shows we can choose a different path. A fair, healthy, and prosperous food industry is possible--if we take back power from the barons who have robbed us of it.\"--Amazon.com.

Politicians across the political spectrum, from Barack Obama to Sarah Palin and Rand Paul, routinely castigate lobbyists for engaging in supposedly corrupt activities or having unequal access to elected officials. Since attaining office President Obama has imposed unprecedented new lobbying regulations, and he is not alone: both Congress and state and local legislative bodies have done so in recent years. At the same time, federal courts, relying upon the Supreme Court's new campaign finance decision in Citizens United v. FEC, have begun striking down lobbying regulations, including important regulations that limit campaign finance activities of lobbyists and impose a waiting period before legislators or legislative staffers may work as lobbyists. Two courts have held such laws could not be sustained on anticorruption grounds, and they are unlikely to be sustained on political equality grounds either. This Article advances an alternative rationale which could support some, though not all, of the recent wave of new lobbying regulations: the state's interest in promoting national economic welfare. Lobbyists threaten national economic welfare in two ways. First, lobbyists facilitate rent-seeking activities. Rentseeking occurs when individuals or groups devote resources to capturing government transfers, rather than putting them to a productive use, and lobbyists are often the key actors securing such benefits. Second, lobbyists tend to lobby for legislation that is itself an inefficient use of government resources. Part I of this Article provides an overview of the current state of lobbying regulation and lobbying jurisprudence. Part II proposes a new national economic welfare rationale for lobbying regulation. It begins by describing the political science literature on how lobbying works, as well as current statistics on the extent of lobbying on the federal level and the costs of lobbyist-driven rent-seeking on the national economy. Some of the new and proposed lobbying regulations, such as antibundling provisions and anti-revolving-door provisions, could decrease the total amount of interest group rent-seeking. The state's national economic welfare interest must be balanced against the First Amendment costs of lobbying regulation in infringing on the right to speak and petition the government. I defend this interest as an important (even potentially compelling) state interest that justifies at least some new lobbying regulations against constitutional challenge. Part III turns to objections and extensions of the argument. I respond to objections on both ends and means. On ends I consider the circumstances in which the promotion of national economic welfare can trump First Amendment rights. On means, I consider whether there is sufficient proof that lobbying regulations are sufficiently tailored to a reduction in rent-seeking and whether, because of the \"hydraulic\" nature of money in politics, attempts to regulate lobbying so as to decrease rent-seeking will be easy to evade. Under extensions, I consider whether the national economic welfare rationale could be used to justify the reenactment, as suggested by Justice Stevens, of the ban on spending corporate treasury funds in candidate elections, as well as the recent SEC \"pay-to-play\" rule for investment advisers.

Africa loses more than $50 billion annually through illicit financial outflows, and most countries have remained over-dependent on resources supplied by development partners. Efforts to address these impediments are mainly focused on reducing outflows and ensuring development resources remain within the continent. This article builds on traditional anti-corruption mechanisms and explores processes that support strategic litigation. We find opportunities to use both the merged and yet-to-be-operationalized African Court of Justice and Human Rights (AfCJHR) and the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights (AfCHPR). The analysis aims to understand the normative frameworks of corruption both as a human rights violation and a crime of the most concern to the international community. A synopsis of various legal instruments, case laws, and legal studies attest to an international pronouncement or acceptance that corruption amounts to a crime of most concern to the international community (international crime) and corruption is not a victimless crime. Although not yet recognized as an international crime, the normative character in binding international treaties justifies the international acceptance that corruption is a heinous crime. They also reveal that anti-corruption mechanisms at the national and regional levels, with a few exceptions, have been very disappointing. Many of these anti-corruption agencies face operational constraints which make them relatively ineffective. Human rights mechanisms, particularly a strong reliance on the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights or its successor in the yet-to-be-operationalized African Court of Justice and Human Rights jurisdiction could contribute to creating greater transparency and accountability in dealing with corruption. This would ensure strategic litigations of perpetrators of corruption who defy national justice systems to have no chance to escape the regional accountability system. This is possible, if member states reaffirm their commitments under Articles 5 (1, d& 3) and 34(6) of the Protocol establishing the African Court on Human and Peoples Rights and Article 8 (3) of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights is ratified.

\"Barons is the story of seven corporate titans, their rise to power, and the consequences for everyone else. Take Mike McCloskey, Chairman of Fair Oaks Farms. In a few short decades, he went from managing a modest dairy herd to running the Disneyland of agriculture, where school children ride trams through mechanized warehouses filled with tens of thousands of cows that never see the light of day. What was the key to his success? Hard work and exceptional business savvy? Maybe. But more than anything else, Mike benefited from deregulation of the American food industry, a phenomenon that has consolidated wealth in the hands of select tycoons, and along the way, hollowed out the nation's rural towns and local businesses. Along with Mike McCloskey, readers will meet a secretive German family that took over the global coffee industry in less than a decade, relying on wealth traced back to the Nazis to gobble up countless independent roasters. They will discover how a small grain business transformed itself into an empire bigger than Koch Industries, with ample help from taxpayer dollars. And they will learn that in the food business, crime really does pay--especially when you can bribe and then double-cross the president of Brazil. These, and the other stories in this book, are simply examples of the monopolies and ubiquitous corruption that today define American food. The tycoons profiled in these pages are hardly unique: many other companies have manipulated our lax laws and failed policies for their own benefit, to the detriment of our neighborhoods, livelihoods, and our democracy itself. Barons paints a stark portrait of the consequences of corporate consolidation, but it also shows we can choose a different path. A fair, healthy, and prosperous food industry is possible--if we take back power from the barons who have robbed us of it.\"--Publisher's website.