The Soft Cage is the first book to detail the continuum of surveillance in the making of the United States-from the slave pass to the Social Security number all the way to the many forms of computerized monitoring now shaping the post-9/11 world. The Soft Cage explores not just the history but also the politics of everyday surveillance, and explains to readers why the question of who is watching and listening is of utmost importance today.Parenti details how seemingly benign technologies-E-ZPass, GPS systems in rental cars, and iris scans at airports-present opportunities for a reconfiguration of the balance of power between the individual and the state. Under the aegis of security and convenience, Parenti argues, corporations and the U.S. government, often working together, have, without any oversight, substantially eroded civil liberties-including the right to privacy -that Americans have long taken for granted.

The Soft Cage: Surveillance In America From Slavery To The War On Terror

Politics & Social Sciences

Parenti, Christian

Sociology

Basic Books

On a typical day, you might make a call on a cell phone, withdraw money at an ATM, visit the mall, and make a purchase with a credit card. Each of these routine transactions leaves a digital trail for government agencies and businesses to access. As cutting-edge historian and journalist Christian Parenti points out, these everyday intrusions on privacy, while harmless in themselves, are part of a relentless (and clandestine) expansion of routine surveillance in American life over the last two centuries-from controlling slaves in the old South to implementing early criminal justice and tracking immigrants. Parenti explores the role computers are playing in creating a whole new world of seemingly benign technologies-such as credit cards, website "cookies," and electronic toll collection-that have expanded this trend in the twenty-first century. The Soft Cage offers a compelling, vitally important history lesson for every American concerned about the expansion of surveillance into our public and private lives.

The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror

History

Americas

Prison privatization is a rapidly increasing phenomenon in many Western countries as governments seek to manage burgeoning prison populations within the constraints of a neo-liberal political agenda. But how is public well being served when prisons are run for profit? Bringing together a group of the most accomplished writers and activists on human rights and prison priva-tization, Capitalist Punishment: Prison Privatization &amp; Human Rights discusses privatization within its historical and ideological context, and in relation to international standard minimum rules developed by the United Nations in relation to prison management. Capitalist Punishment examines the adverse effects of private prisons on inmates related to physical and sexual abuse, health care, education, training, and rehabilitation, as corporations seek to maximize profits. It describes the impact on prison staff, from whose salaries corporate profits are wrung, of further cost cutting in the design of facilities and allocation of personnel. Special attention is paid to the effect on vulnerable groups such as women, children, and dispro-portionately incarcerated minority and indigenous communities. Even as serious questions emerge in the West as to whether privatized prisons offer a more effective and efficient prison system for either inmates or the public at large, the trend to privatization is spreading. Revealing important links between neo-liberal policies locally and their global effects, Capitalist Punishment offers a disturbing glimpse into the transnational spread of privatized incarceration, as developing nations bound by IMFrestrictions are forced into the hands of transnational corporations to the detriment of local incarceration alternatives.

CAPITALIST PUNISHMENT: Prison Privatization and Human Rights

Alexander, Elizabeth

Friedman, Alex

Campbell, Allison

Hannah-Moffat, Kelly

Arts & Photography

Clarity Press, Inc.

In summer 2013 Triple Canopy invited writers, artists, scientists, activists, economists and technologists to bet on the future: which future do you want to see realized? How precisely can you describe it? What demands might this future make on the present? The answers were presented as Speculations ("The future is ______"), 50 days of lectures and discussions at MoMA PS1, Triple Canopy's contribution to the exhibition EXPO 1: New York. This book, a lexicon of the central terms of Speculations, conveys the relationship between ideation and action and suggests viable approaches to interpreting and changing the world. Triple Canopy considers economic interventions ("guaranteed basic income"), political abstractions ("autonomy," "prometheanism"), figments of the imagination ("planetary colonization"), modes of expression ("science fiction") and useful neologisms ("hedge-fund utilitarians").

Speculations (The future is ______) (TRIPLE CANOPY)

Chiang, Ted

Reddy, Srikanth

Kushner, Rachel

Galchen, Rivka

Paglen, Trevor

Graeber, David

RIEFF, DAVID

FEDERICI, SILVIA

Hayles, N. Katherine

DELANY, Samuel

Balakrishnan, Gopal

Brassier, Ray

Clayton, Jayce

Kline, Josh

Leeson, Lynn

Mohaiemen, Naeem

Morozov, Evgeni

Ngô, Hu+O+Ng

History & Criticism

Triple Canopy

Consistently compared with the work of Hunter S. Thompson and Michael Herr, The Freedom provides a fearless and unsanitized tour of the disastrous occupation of Iraq, in all its surreal and terrifying detail. Drawing on the best tradition of war reporting, here is a rare book that “embeds” with both sides—the U.S. military and the Iraqi resistance.
Acclaimed journalist Christian Parenti takes us on a high-speed ride along treacherous roads to the centers of the ongoing conflict in Fallujah, Ramadi, and Sadr City through the first year of the occupation. He introduces us to relatives waiting anxiously outside the holding fortress of Abu Ghraib and takes a night drive around Baghdad with the insurgents. He recounts the military’s use of drugs and prostitutes, the imperial buffoonery of the Green Zone, and the religious ecstasy of the Shiites. And he allows us to witness, close up and in riveting detail, the cataclysmic violence, rampant gangsterism, and quotidian heroism that is today’s Iraq.
As predicted by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, when “historians of tomorrow start writing, they will doubtless have copies of The Freedom close at hand.”

The Freedom: Shadows And Hallucinations In Occupied Iraq

Asia

The New Press

From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. 
In Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe--the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency. 
Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism"--a political hardening of wealthy states-- is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.

Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence

Social Sciences

Nation Books

Bold Type Books

Tropics of Chaos

The Freedom: Shadows And Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq

The Earth has reached a tipping point. Runaway climate change, the sixth great extinction of planetary life, the acidification of the oceans—all point toward an era of unprecedented turbulence in humanity’s relationship within the web of life. But just what is that relationship, and how do we make sense of this extraordinary transition? Anthropocene or Capitalocene? offers answers to these questions from a dynamic group of leading critical scholars who challenge the conventional practice of dividing historical change and contemporary reality into “Nature” and “Society,” demonstrating the possibilities offered by a more nuanced and connective view of human environment-making, joined at every step with and within the biosphere. In distinct registers, the authors frame their discussions within a politics of hope that signal the possibilities for transcending capitalism, broadly understood as a “world-ecology” that joins nature, capital, and power as a historically evolving whole.

Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (KAIROS)

Altvater, Elmar

Crist, Eileen C.

Haraway, Donna J.

Hartley, Daniel

McBrien, Justin

Reference

PM Press

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