Making A Killing

Using Marxism, anarchism, and social ecology to explore domination, power, and hierarchy, the author criticizes the use and abuse of animals in capitalist society and argues for the abolition of animal involvement in industry and as a human food source.

The international financial system is not only economic, but political. Making a Killing explores the often-overlooked world of terrorist financing and the involvement of the international banking system. In order to address the threat of terrorist organizations in a post-9/11 world – and how they are funded and financed in particular – the international community has constructed a vast architecture of counterterrorist finance laws, policies, and institutions. Connecting the fields of security studies, political economy, and finance, Ian Oxnevad argues that a bank’s institutional link to a state (as a state-owned bank or a bank with strong state connections) will protect it from any enforcement action for violations of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing regulations. In the face of states blocking such enforcement actions, these regulations prove ineffective in preventing the financing of terrorism, as the state’s self-interest supersedes its interest in preventing terrorist financing. Making a Killing seeks to assess how effective new laws and regulations have been, as well as to identify best practices for future attempts to counter the financing of terrorism.

'A terrifying story of profit before patients, and a chilling glimpse of what can happen when private companies are allowed to take charge of healthcare.' Gavin Francis Six decades ago, researchers achieved the impossible: developing a treatment that transformed kidney failure from a death sentence to a manageable condition. Yet, in the hands of a predatory medical industry, this triumph led to skyrocketing costs and worsening care. A gripping account of privatised healthcare gone wrong, How to Make a Killing recounts how the optimism of the 1950s and 1960s - when transplants and dialysis machines offered hope - gave way to anguished debates about the ethics of rationing and profiting from life-saving care, and how Big Dialysis proliferated at the expense of its patients. A triumph of investigative research, Tom Mueller's book features an unforgettable cast of characters: CEOs who dress as musketeers to exhort more aggressive profit-seeking, nephrologist insiders who reveal the substandard care this causes, and heroic patients who risk their lives to reveal the truth.

Provides an overview of the gun industry, including an analysis of gun violence in today's society in relation to the manufacturing of new guns that are more lethal and more easily concealed

Since 1993, more than five hundred women and girls have been murdered in Ciudad Juárez across the border from El Paso, Texas. At least a third have been sexually violated and mutilated as well. Thousands more have been reported missing and remain unaccounted for. The crimes have been poorly investigated and have gone unpunished and unresolved by Mexican authorities, thus creating an epidemic of misogynist violence on an increasingly globalized U.S.-Mexico border. This book, the first anthology to focus exclusively on the Juárez femicides, as the crimes have come to be known, compiles several different scholarly "interventions" from diverse perspectives, including feminism, Marxism, critical race theory, semiotics, and textual analysis. Editor Alicia Gaspar de Alba shapes a multidisciplinary analytical framework for considering the interconnections between gender, violence, and the U.S.-Mexico border. The essays examine the social and cultural conditions that have led to the heinous victimization of women on the border—from globalization, free trade agreements, exploitative maquiladora working conditions, and border politics, to the sexist attitudes that pervade the social discourse about the victims. The book also explores the evolving social movement that has been created by NGOs, mothers' organizing efforts, and other grassroots forms of activism related to the crimes. Contributors include U.S. and Mexican scholars and activists, as well as personal testimonies of two mothers of femicide victims.

A dramatic and compelling journey into the dark heart of globalization. What happens when multinational corporations decide that the use of armed force is just business by other means? In Making a Killing, Madelaine Drohan looks at the shocking number of companies that have linked up with mercenaries, warlords, armies and private militias in order to make a profit. In a world where multinationals often rival national governments in size and clout, the implications of such partnerships are ominous. What leads respectable corporations down the path to violence? Drohan answers this question by examining the actions of several companies operating in Africa, such as Ranger Oil West Africa, which used the mercenary group Executive Outcomes to take on rebels in Angola’s long-running civil war; and Talisman Energy, whose security was provided by Sudanese army units conducting a scorched-earth policy in the oil fields. Drohan traces the modern roots of corporate armed force, beginning with Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company, which at the turn of the century built its own army. Also included is the stranger-than-fiction tale of ex-MI5 spymaster Sir Percy Sillitoe, who was hired by the De Beers diamond king to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring smuggled diamonds in order to develop the hydrogen bomb. These accounts read like adventure stories in the tradition of Rudyard Kipling and Ian Fleming, but they are essential reading for anyone interested in the effects of unfettered multinational influence. Making a Killing provides a road map for corporations, policy makers and investors struggling to come to terms with their roles in today’s increasingly globalized world.

In 'Making a Killing', Ashcroft provides a first-hand view of the secret world of private security in Iraq where ex-soldiers employed to protect US and British interests can make up to $1000 a day. But he also reveals a new kind of warfare where the rules are still being written. Originally published: 2006.

Newtown, Connecticut. Aurora, Colorado. Both have entered our collective memory as sites of unimaginable heartbreak and mass slaughter perpetrated by lone gunmen. Meanwhile, cities such as Chicago and Washington, D.C., are dealing with the painful, everyday reality of record rates of gun-related deaths. By any account, gun violence in the United States has reached epidemic proportions. A widely respected activist and policy analyst—as well as a former gun enthusiast and an ex-member of the National Rifle Association—Tom Diaz presents a chilling, up-to-date survey of the changed landscape of gun manufacturing and marketing. The Last Gun explores how the gun industry and the nature of gun violence have changed, including the disturbing rise in military-grade gun models. But Diaz also argues that the once formidable gun lobby has become a "paper tiger," marshaling a range of evidence and case studies to make the case that now is the time for a renewed political effort to attack gun violence at its source—the guns themselves. In the aftermath of Newtown, a challenging national conversation lies ahead. The Last Gun is an indispensable guide to this debate, and essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we can finally rid America’s streets, schools, and homes of gun violence and prevent future Newtowns.