The Republicans control the Supreme Court, the Senate, Congress and the White House. They dominate the mass media. They will use any and all means necessary to win in the upcoming election. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber are two of the most important analysts of the propaganda used by the rich and the powerful to control the citizens of the most powerful democracy on earth. Here they show how the techniques developed by Bush's team in Texas, in the 2000 and 2002 elections, and in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq will be deployed over the next six months to secure a second term for their boss. The presidential campaign of 2004 is the latest instalment of a psychological warfare operation against the American people that is unprecedented in both scale and sophistication. Success could spell disaster for America and the world. George W. Bush has presided over the greatest security disaster in US history, vandalised the US economy, flouted international law and savaged the Constitution. Now he wants four more years to finish the job. Here's how he plans to do it.
In the tradition of Pour Your Heart Into It and How Starbucks Saved My Life, a surprising and inspiring memoir from the founders of Banana Republic. With $1,500 and no business experience, Mel and Patricia Ziegler turned a wild idea into a company that would become the international retail colossus Banana Republic. Re-imagining military surplus as safari and expedition wear, the former journalist and artist created a world that captured the zeitgeist for a generation and spoke to the creativity, adventure, and independence in everyone. In a book that’s honest, funny, and charming, Mel and Patricia tell in alternating voices how they upended business conventions and survived on their wits and imagination. Many retail and fashion merchants still consider Banana Republic’s early heyday to be one of the most remarkable stories in fashion and business history. The couple detail how, as “professional amateurs,” they developed the wildly original merchandise and marketing innovations that broke all retail records and produced what has been acclaimed by industry professionals to be “the best catalogue of all time.” A love story wrapped in a business adventure, Wild Company is a soulful, inspiring tale for readers determined to create their own destiny with a passion for life and work and fun.
In this new analysis of Honduran social and political development, Dar degreeso Euraque explains why Honduras escaped the pattern of revolution and civil wars suffered by its neighbors Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Within this comparative framework, he challenges the traditional Banana Republic 'theory' and its assumption that multinational corporations completely controlled state formation in Central America. Instead, he demonstrates how local society in Honduras's North Coast banana-exporting region influenced national political development. According to Euraque, the reformism of the 1970s, which prevented social and political polarization in the 1980s, originated in the local politics of San Pedro Sula and other cities along the North Coast. Moreover, Euraque shows that by the 1960s, the banana-growing areas had become bastions of liberalism, led by local capitalists and organized workers. This regional political culture directly influenced events at the national level, argues Euraque. Specifically, the military coup of 1972 drew its ideology and civilian leaders from the North Coast, and as a result, the new regime was able to successfully channel popular unrest into state-sponsored reform projects. Based on long-ignored sources in Honduran and American archives and on interviews, the book signals a major reinterpretation of modern Honduran history.
Part family memoir, part political commentary, part apologia, Dream State is all Floridian, telling the grand and sometimes crazy story of the twenty-seventh state through the eyes of one of its native daughters. Acclaimed journalist and NPR commentator Diane Roberts has many family secrets and she's ready to tell them. Like the time her cousin state Senator Luther Tucker wrapped his Caddy around a tree, allegedly with a jug of moonshine on the seat next to him. Or how cousin Susan Branford was given an African girl for her eighth birthday. Or the time when cousin Enid Broward was made the May Queen of 1907, even though her daddy the governor shocked the state by trying to drain the entire Everglades. Roberts' ancestors helped settle Florida, kill off its pesky Indians, enslave some of its inhabitants, clear its forests, lay its train tracks, and pave its roads, all the time weaving themselves into the very fabric of this dangling chad of a state. With a storyteller's talent for setting great scenes, Roberts lays out the sweeping history of eight geberations of Browards and Bradfords, Tuckers anf Robertses, even as she Forest Gumps them into situations with more historically familiar names. Whether it's the American court of Catherine de Médicis, the Tallahassee court of Katherine Harris, Henry Flagler's boardroom -- not to mention his bedroom -- or Jeb Bush's statehouse, you're likely to find a branch or a root of the Roberts family growing entangled nearby. Starting in the recent past with the botched presidential election of 2000, Roberts introduces the many sides of the debate, coincidentally peopled with cousins both kissing and close. She then goes back to Florida's first inhabitants, showing how this alluring peninsula many called a paradise played a role in the destiny of those who settled there. Following their colorful progress up to the present, she renders them all with a deep, familial affection. Florida has forced itself into the collective American unconscious with its messed-up elections, anthrax scares, shark attacks,boat lifts, snowbirds, and the Bush dynasty. While exposing the real people whom Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard have been fictionalizing for years, Dream State ultimately reveals the cogs and wheels that make the state tick.
Towards Water Wisdom makes a fervent plea for an urgent and radical transformation of our thinking on water. The author redefines the projected water crisis as one of mismanagement rather than scarcity, and calls for a more equitable, harmonious and sustainable management of the resource. Water-related conflicts are also discussed, including the Indus Treaty, the differences over Baglihar, the Cauvery and Ravi-Beas disputes, and rehabilitation problems in the Narmada Valley. The author questions the idea of property rights in water and argues that the fundamental or human right to water must take precedence over contractual and economic rights. The inadequacies of India`s water laws and policies are examined and a case made for a constitutional declaration on water and a national water law. Finally, the author widens the perspective and draws attention to a changing world that makes a change in our thinking imperative.
Depicted as braggart, brute, and bore in The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan has gotten a bad rap and means to correct the record. That weak-kneed, simpering cousin of his wife's, with his prattling about some lost idealized American individualism and rectitude, was not only a fool and a liar, but worse: a failed bond salesman. Pathetic. But by 1924 Tom has bigger problems than the pathos of the summer of '22. First, there's Aunt Gertrude, who has assumed control of the Buchanan fortune. Second, what with Daisy getting jowly and the maids indiscreet, there's little tranquillity at home. Third, a revolution is brewing in Nicaragua that's threatening to ensnare the family investments. So when Tom is dispatched to maneuver among Nicaragua's international corporate intrigues, machine-gun-toting rival political parties, and competing American intelligence agencies, he spies his chance. A rollicking, outrageous, and altogether brilliant perversion of known facts, Banana Republican sends the sexist, racist, elitist Buchanan careening through America's brilliantly mismanaged intervention in Nicaragua in the early twentieth century. Eric Rauchway bends history to Buchanan's memoir as Tom blunders, shoots, and screws his way through the historical record and makes the case that greed and amorality have always been at the heart of the American dream.
"Award-winning journalist Dan Koeppel navigates across the planet and throughout history, telling the cultural and scientific story of the world's most ubiquitous fruit"--Page 4 of cover.
When William Sydney Porter faces prison for embezzlement in Austin, Texas, he catches the first tramp steamer to Central America. The year is 1905. He washes up in the town of Coralio, in a country with no extradition treaty with the U.S. and a government at the mercy of American scoundrels, drunks, and robber-barons. Porter establishes himself as a newspaper printer, despite violent opposition from the most powerful individual in the country--Walter Whitaker, the president of the Vesuvius Fruit Company. Whitaker sees Porter's newspaper as a threat to his plans to overthrow the government and install a puppet who will give him concessions to build a railroad to the new Panama Canal. Loosely based on the history of U.S. intervention in the "banana wars" of the early twentieth century, as well as on the life and stories of O. Henry, Banana Republic is a comic tale of greed, ambition, and gunboat diplomacy.
Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this lively, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States. Beginning in the 1870s when bananas first appeared in the U.S. marketplace, Soluri examines the tensions between the small-scale growers, who dominated the trade in the early years, and the shippers. He then shows how rising demand led to changes in production that resulted in the formation of major agribusinesses, spawned international migrations, and transformed great swaths of the Honduran environment into monocultures susceptible to plant disease epidemics that in turn changed Central American livelihoods. Soluri also looks at labor practices and workers' lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, the effects of pesticides on the Honduran environment and people, and the mass marketing of bananas to consumers in the United States. His multifaceted account of a century of banana production and consumption adds an important chapter to the history of Honduras, as well as to the larger history of globalization and its effects on rural peoples, local economies, and biodiversity.
