Charles Ferguson

Charles H. Ferguson, who electrified the world with his Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, now explains how a predator elite took over the country, step by step, and he exposes the networks of academic, financial, and political influence, in all recent administrations, that prepared the predators’ path to conquest. 

Over the last several decades, the United States has undergone one of the most radical social and economic transformations in its history. 

- Finance has become America’s dominant industry, while manufacturing, even for high technology industries, has nearly disappeared.

- The financial sector has become increasingly criminalized, with the widespread fraud that caused the housing bubble going completely unpunished.

- Federal tax collections as a share of GDP are at their lowest level in sixty years, with the wealthy and highly profitable corporations enjoying the greatest tax reductions.

- Most shockingly, the United States, so long the beacon of opportunity for the ambitious poor, has become one of the world’s most unequal and unfair societies. 

If you’re smart and a hard worker, but your parents aren’t rich, you’re now better off being born in Munich, Germany or in Singapore than in Cleveland, Ohio or New York. This radical shift did not happen by accident. 

Ferguson shows how, since the Reagan administration in the 1980s, both major political parties have become captives of the moneyed elite.  It was the Clinton administration that dismantled the regulatory controls that protected the average citizen from avaricious financiers.  It was the Bush team that destroyed the federal revenue base with its grotesquely skewed tax cuts for the rich. And it is the Obama White House that has allowed financial criminals to continue to operate unchecked, even after supposed “reforms” installed after the collapse of 2008.

Predator Nation reveals how once-revered figures like Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers became mere courtiers to the elite.  Based on many newly released court filings, it details the extent of the crimes—there is no other word—committed in the frenzied chase for wealth that caused the financial crisis.  And, finally, it lays out a plan of action for how we might take back our country and the American dream.

The first book of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq's descent into guerilla war, warlord rule, criminality, and anarchy, No End In Sight is a shocking story of wholesale incompetence, recklessness, and venality.

Culled from over 200 hours of footage collected for the film, the book provides a candid and alarming retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003 by high ranking officials, Iraqi civilians, American soldiers, and prominent analysts. Together, these voices reveal the principal errors of U.S. policy that largely created the insurgency and chaos that engulf Iraq today—and what we could and should do about them now.

No End In Sight marks the first time Americans will be allowed inside the White House, Pentagon, and Baghdad's Green Zone to understand for themselves the disintegration of Iraq— and how arrogance and ignorance turned a military victory into a seemingly endless and deepening nightmare of a war.

While the Internet revolution has vastly improved communications among businesses and individuals in the US, pressure has been building for faster and less expensive broadband data services. However, broadband services and prices have not kept pace either with demand or with progress in information technology. This title analyses the markets and policy issues underlying the broadband dilemma. Ferguson asserts that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and federal policy have failed to provide sufficient levels of new entry, competition and innovation in the local telecommunications market, which remains dominated by monopoly telephone companies. New entrants and Internet-based firms remain disadvantaged relative to the monopoly incumbent local exchange carriers (ILEC). The combined result of these market and policy failures is inadequate technological progress, innovation and productivity growth in advanced Internet services and in telecommunications services in general. Ferguson believes federal policy must be adjusted to ensure the robust infrastructure necessary for advanced Internet services, electronic commerce, open-systems HDTV, videoconferencing and improved voice telephony.

High Stakes, No Prisoners is a sharp, brilliant insider's account of the way Silicon Valley really works: the sharks, powerful incumbents, and old-boy networks who play hardball all the time and the geniuses who make the products that have changed the world.