Concentrated market power and the weakened sway of corporate stakeholders over management have emerged as leading concerns of American political economy. Samuel Milner provides a historical context for contemporary efforts to resolve these anxieties by examining the contest to control the distribution of corporate income during the mid‑twentieth century. During this “Golden Age of American Capitalism,” apprehension about the debilitating consequences of industrial concentration fueled efforts to ensure that management would share the fruits of progress with workers, consumers, and society as a whole. Focusing on wage and price determination in steel, automobiles, and electrical equipment, Milner reveals how the management of concentrated industries understood its ability to distribute income to its stakeholders as well as why economists, courts, and public policymakers struggled to curtail the exercise of that market power at its source.

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul looks at how Jesus' teachings were supplanted by St. Paul's doctrines. Jesus is presented to the reader of the New Testament with two different personalities. He is first described as a Jewish Rabbi recognized by His followers as the promised Hebrew Messiah. His second personality, stripped of its Jewish-ness, is somewhat like that of a Greco-Roman god. His Disciples were Hebrew in the first instance and in the second, they were mostly Greco-Roman. Saint Paul authored most of the Greco-Roman tenets in the New Testament, of course. He became a citizen of Rome as Saul of Tarsus, but is now known as Saint Paul. For centuries theologians seem to have preferred Paul's doctrines to the teachings of Jesus and have shaped a message over the years that our faith must be placed in Jesus' death, not in His life. As Christianity took shape, Paul battled to get his Greco-Roman dogma accepted. Those persons supporting Paul soon developed a strategy to accomplish that feat. Belittling the Disciples was one approach to the problem, it appears. This is especially true of Peter in some of Paul's Galatians passages.

It was a time when anything seemed possible–instant wealth, glittering fame, fabulous luxury–and for a run of magical weeks in the spring and summer of 1920, Charles Ponzi made it all come true. Promising to double investors’ money in three months, the dapper, charming Ponzi raised the “rob Peter to pay Paul” scam to an art form. At the peak of his success, Ponzi was raking in more than $2 million a week at his office in downtown Boston. Then his house of cards came crashing down–thanks in large part to the relentless investigative reporting of Richard Grozier’s Boston Post. A classic American tale of immigrant life and the dream of success, Ponzi’s Scheme is the amazing story of the magnetic scoundrel who launched the most successful scheme of financial alchemy in modern history.

Peter Barnes argues that because of globalization, automation, and winner-take-all capitalism, there won’t be enough high-paying jobs to sustain America’s middle class in the future. Therefore, to survive economically, our middle class needs—and deserves—a supplementary source of nonlabor income. To meet this need, Barnes proposes to give every American a share of the wealth we own together— starting with our air and financial infrastructure. These shares would pay dividends of several thousand dollars per year—money that wouldn’t be welfare or wealth redistribution but legitimate property income.

Vivica Jeffries, Belinda Maxwell and Iralaun Fugere are three women who live in Washington, D.C., who realize that pointing fingers at the men in their lives is senseless and that they must take responsibility for the decisions they've made to break the cycle of abuse.

Just who was the man whose name has become synonymous with the classic “rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul” scam in which money from new investors is used to reward earlier ones? In December 1919, he was an unknown thirty-eight-year-old, self-educated Italian immigrant with a borrowed two-hundred dollars in his pocket. Six months later, he was Boston’s famed “wizard of finance,” lionized by the public and politicians alike. Based on exclusive interviews with people who knew Charles Ponzi, lent him their money, and exposed him, Donald Dunn’s Ponzi recreates both one of America’s most notorious and colorful financial con artists and the mad money-hungry era in which he thrived.