Nicholas von Hoffman

"All that George W. Bush had to do was plant a weapon of mass destruction on Saddam Hussein in his little cave. He could have posed the tyrant holding a baby atom bomb in his lap with a bucket of anthrax at his side. He didn't bother. From the start of the Iraqi affair the Bush Administration's mendacities have been negligently slapped together because their artificers knew that they had a public which will believe any preposterous confabulation tossed in its direction." "As it turned out "old Europe" didn't buy it, nor did old Asia or old Africa or old South America or old anywhere. Only in new America did the masses and the elites swallow more White House whoppers than they serve at Burger King. How is it that the rest of the world saw Iraq for the toothless military has-been it was, while Americans looked at the half starved, bombed out, burned out, dilapidated country and saw a juggernaut?" "Hoax explains that Americans have their own reality at variance with the rest of the world's. Having perfected the domed stadium, Americans have erected a transcontinental astrodome, their own private biosphere, under which they breathe their own air and cultivate life forms unknown anywhere else on the planet. Like Russian nesting dolls, Americans live in a succession of diminishing bubbles. They shop in bubbled malls, they live in gated communities, and they move from place to place breathing their own, private air in the bubble-mobiles known as SUVs." "Hoax tells the story of how Americas lost their pioneer independence to become bobbleheads in Bubbleland and found a new world to conquor in the far off Middle East."--BOOK JACKET.

Whatever one might say about America's original business giants - the Carnegies, the Morgans, the du Ponts - they built America, virtually inventing modern business techniques in the process, so as to reap profits while improving every American's standard of living. Today's rich and powerful, on the other hand, accumulate vast wealth through sleight-of-hand paper-shuffling, business song-and-dance routines like "leveraged buyouts," and swapping blips on computer screens. They don't make anything, except exorbitant incomes, and improving our quality of life is nowhere near the top of their agenda. What went wrong? When, and how, did we lose our way? In Capitalist Fools, Nicholas von Hoffman answers these questions by telling the surprising, often rollicking story of American business - what its strengths were in its heyday, what went wrong in the last two decades, and what we can do to get it back on track. It is no accident that in the mid-1970s Malcolm Forbes became a national celebrity. The good times were ending. The glory days of American business were long past, and the growth years of the sixties were unequivocally over. With the reality of increasing wealth and higher standards of living a thing of the past, the illusion became all that much more important. If Americans could no longer lead the good life, they could at least watch Malcolm live it for them. But Malcolm played his part too well. He and his peers spent so flamboyantly and publicly that Americans actually believed, all through the "go-go years" of the eighties, that this country's wealth was increasing, and that there was plenty to go around. They were wrong. American business and industry were corrupt and collapsing. While many books, from Liar's Poker to Den of Thieves, have exposed modern business evils, they have treated them as isolated cases and concluded, in essence, that the problem was that the men involved were thieves. Capitalist Fools is the first book to give these evils a context, to show us the big picture, to rage at the decline in our standards, performance, and ethics, and to conclude with a call to action. In this passionate and timely book, Nicholas von Hoffman has written a fascinating, scathing cultural history of American business. It includes colorful portraits of this country's greatest industrialists, from Sam Insull to Andrew Carnegie, of our great managers, like Alfred Sloan, and of the most controversial of the new breed, like Henry Kravis and Carl Icahn. Capitalist Fools is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of American business, or cares about its future.

"In the summer of 1967, youth drew attention itself by clustering in large numbers in most major American cities, where they broke the narcotics laws proudly, publicly, and defiantly. At the same time, they enunciated a different social philosophy and a new politics, and perhaps even mothered into life a subculture that was new to America. This book tries to describe what happened in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. For it was in the Haight that whatever happened, happened most vividly and intensely that it drew international attention to itself. Nicholas Von Hoffman.--From page

Newspaperman's eyewitness account of civil strife in Mississippi in the summer of 1964.