After thwarting the Cult of Dionysus and with the city of Nexus in ruins, all that remains for the Apollonians is to find the final Shards of the Risa Star before the Cult can use it to wreak havoc on an astronomical scale—but in this final installment of the Seven Stars trilogy, Jack Lawson and his allies face unexpected challenges. They are worlds apart; some battling old enemies in a desert fortress, and others in a formerly prosperous city-state that is slipping into totalitarianism. All the while, the pieces of a greater puzzle have been moving into place and a trap has been laid, and Jack must confront a truth that threatens to destroy everything.
In November 2010, Republican Scott Walker was elected Governor of Wisconsin. In something of a Tea Party sweep, the iconic Russ Feingold lost his seat in the U.S. Senate and the Wisconsin legislature became Republican in both chambers. In early 2011, Governor Walker announced a budget repair bill that, among other things, gutted collective bargaining rights for most public sector unions. Outraged citizens occupied the state capitol for weeks in an outpouring of opposition, the likes of which had not been seen in Wisconsin since the protests against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. Various recall elections were held in the summer of 2011 (all in regard to the state senate), with another set of elections in June 2012; among them the governor's recall was paramount. Democrats regained control of the senate, but Scott Walker defeated Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett and kept the governor's mansion. Many Democrats were stunned by the failed recall. These essays probe that failure. Every contributor has a unique perspective, but lurking near the core of that probing are two key issues: the extent to which corporations have taken over government and whether ecological crises are revealing conventional politics as complicit in disaster.
Examining the law, regulation and governance of natural resources, this timely work addresses the conflicts and contradictions arising at the intersection between international economic law, sustainable development and other areas of international law, most notably human rights law and environmental law. Bringing together a collection of legal and policy expertise from a range of academic and practitioner perspectives, this book will appeal to scholars of law, political science, international relations, political economy and development studies.
In Real Estate Titans, Erez Cohen shares the advice and learnings of the world's leading real estate experts to create a guide for becoming a savvier real estate player. Cohen draws on his experience as a research and teacher’s assistant at Wharton Business School with an investment expert—and his mentor—Dr. Peter Linneman. Throughout his career, Cohen has collected first-hand knowledge from meetings with such real estate titans as Ronald Terwilliger, Sam Zell, Joseph Sitt, and numerous others. Cohen wanted to understand how these real estate giants became so successful, so he refined his quest into three critical questions: What inspires these titans to work so hard and reach such extraordinary levels of success? What are the main elements and traits inside of them that propel them to be so grandiose? How have these individuals, who had less resources, succeeded on a much bigger scale than so many of their competitors? Real Estate Titans contains the 7 key lessons distilled from interviews with several of the world’s greatest real estate investors. These critical lessons offer insight into the mindset, tactics, and habits that each of the interviewed titans possess. Once you implement these key ideas—which you won’t find anywhere else—into your business, it will grow exponentially within a matter of months. Real Estate Titans offers an insider’s view into several of the most successful investors on the planet. The book’s compelling stories and lessons show why real estate is such a wonderful and important business, and it also offers a roadmap for becoming a world class real estate player.
This is the forty-seventh volume of The Canadian Yearbook of International Law, the first volume of which was published in 1963. The Yearbook is issued annually under the auspices of the Canadian Branch of the International Law Association (Canadian Society of International Law) and the Canadian Council on International Law. The Editor-in-Chief is D.M. McRae, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, and the Associate Editor is A.L.C. de Mestral, Faculty of Law, McGill University. Its Board of Editors includes scholars from leading universities in Canada. The Yearbook contains articles of lasting significance in the field of international legal studies, a notes and comments section, a digest of international economic law, a section on current Canadian practice in international law, a digest of important Canadian cases in the fields of public international law, private international law, and conflict of laws, a list of recent Canadian treaties, and book reviews.
All hail the new masters of Capitalism: How asset managers acquired the world Banks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis over a decade ago. Today, our new financial masters are asset managers, like Blackstone and BlackRock. And they don’t just own financial assets. The roads we drive on; the pipes that supply our drinking water; the farmland that provides our food; energy systems for electricity and heat; hospitals, schools, and even the homes in which many of us live—all now swell asset managers’ bulging investment portfolios. As the owners of more and more of the basic building blocks of everyday life, asset managers shape the lives of each and every one of us in profound and disturbing ways. In this eye-opening follow-up to Rentier Capitalism, Brett Christophers peels back the veil on “asset manager society.” Asset managers, he shows, are unlike traditional owners of housing and other essential infrastructure. Buying and selling these life-supporting assets at a dizzying pace, the crux of their business model is not long-term investment and careful custodianship but making quick profits for themselves and the investors that back them. In asset manager society, the natural and built environments that sustain us become one more vehicle for siphoning money from the many to the few.
In a primary commodities boom spurred on by the rise of China, countries the world over are turning to the extraction of natural resources and the export of primary commodities as an antidote to the global recession. The New Extractivism addresses a fundamental dilemma faced by these governments: to pursue, or not, a development strategy based on resource extraction in the face of immense social and environmental costs, not to mention mass resistance from the people negatively affected by it. With fresh insight and analysis from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, this book looks at the political dynamics of capitalist development in a region where the neoliberal model is collapsing under the weight of a resistance movement lead by peasant farmers and indigenous communities. It calls for us to understand the new extractivism not as a viable development model for the post-neoliberal world, but as the dangerous emergence of a new form of imperialism.
