Capital Moves: RCA’s 70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor


The highly acclaimed account of one renowned company’s labor struggles in its rise to global power. Globalization is the lead story of the new century, but its roots reach back nearly one hundred years, to major corporations’ quest for stable, inexpensive, and pliant sources of labor. Before the largest companies moved beyond national boundaries, they crossed state lines, abandoning the industrial centers of the Eastern Seaboard for impoverished rural communities in the Midwest and South. In their wake they left the decaying urban landscapes and unemployment rates that became hallmarks of late-twentieth-century America. This is the story that Jefferson Cowie, in “a stunningly important work of historical imagination and rediscovery” (Nelson Lichtenstein), tells through the lens of a single American corporation, RCA. Capital Moves takes us through the interconnected histories of Camden, New Jersey; Bloomington, Indiana; Memphis, Tennessee; and Juárez, Mexico—four cities radically transformed by America’s leading manufacturer of records and radio sets. In a sweeping narrative of economic upheaval and class conflict, Cowie weaves together the rich detail of local history with the national—and ultimately international—story of economic and social change. 22 black-and-white photographs.

List Price: $ 16.95

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An urgent look at our world’s looming crises and what we must do to avert them

In Threshold, writer and Air America host Thom Hartmann looks at the deteriorating state of our planet, where the dynamics of environmental, economic, and population change are boiling over the limits within which society can function. In clear and impassioned prose, Hartmann busts the myths and ideologies of religious fundamentalism, capitalism run amok, male domination, and militarism that are draining our world of its natural and human resources and engendering the suffering of millions for the benefit of the few.

No mere jeremiad, Threshold examines cultures that have thrived, from the mother city of Caral, Peru, to modern Denmark, and targets five areas of policy-national, religious, economic, corporate, and environmental-for specific and immediate reform. Radical in its scope and boldness but simple in its commonsense logic, Threshold illustrates the mistakes we have made-as a culture, as a country, and as individuals-and provides the inspiration and motivation readers are looking for to build a better, more sustainable world for all. Part prophecy, part call to arms, part policy prescription, Threshold is, for readers of Jared Diamond, Thomas Friedman, and Paul Hawken, the wake-up call our society so badly needs.

List Price: $ 25.95

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