David S. Broder

After graduating from high school and deciding not to go on to college, a young girl struggles to figure out who she is and what she wants to do with her life.

"The 2007-08 credit crisis and the long recession that followed brutally exposed the economic and social costs of financialization. ... Using comparative data covering the last four decades, Durand examines the relationship between trends such as the rise in private and public debt and the proliferation of financial products; norms such as our habitual assumptions about the production of value and financial stability; and the relationship of all this to political power.... Durand argues that the accelerated expansion of financial operations is a sign of the declining power of the economies of the Global North. The City, Wall Street and other centres of the power of money, he suggests, may already be caked with the frosts of winter."--

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist argues that initiatives put on ballots by millionaires and special-interest groups are destroying the United States Constitution's system of checks and balances. Examines California's Proposition 13 and Oregon's assisted suicide laws, among other examples.