Economic Warfare

For more than a decade, America has been waging a new kind of war against the financial networks of rogue regimes, proliferators, terrorist groups, and criminal syndicates. Juan Zarate, a chief architect of modern financial warfare and a former senior Treasury and White House official, pulls back the curtain on this shadowy world. In this gripping story, he explains in unprecedented detail how a small, dedicated group of officials redefined the Treasury's role and used its unique powers, relationships, and reputation to apply financial pressure against America's enemies.

This book demonstrates how economic tools have been used throughout history to accomplish goals of military conflict, how they can be used more effectively than traditional means of warfare in the modern era, and how we can derive a better understanding of economic strategy applicable - not just to the military, but also to market competition.

In an expose of the 2008 financial meltdown from the inside, Ziad K. Abdelnour argues that the political and financial elites have done nothing to fix the structural problems. By creating more market bubbles, they are actually waging a war on the most productive members of society. Abdelnour offers several solutions, including understanding that the government's primary objective is to create an environment conducive to the creation of wealth, not job creation, and not providing lifetime support to those who choose not to take advantage of the innumerable opportunities....

It used to be that ravaging another country’s economy required blockading its ports and laying siege to its cities. Now all it takes is a statement posted online by the U.S. government. In Chokepoints, Edward Fishman, a former top State Department sanctions official, takes us deep into the back rooms of power to reveal the untold history of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which America renounced the gospel of globalization and waged a new kind of economic war.

It’s the Middle Class, Stupid! confirms what we have all suspected: Washington and Wall Street have really screwed things up for the average American. Work has been devalued. Education costs are out of sight. Effort and ambition have never been so scantily rewarded. Political guru James Carville and pollster extraordinaire Stan Greenberg argue that our political parties must admit their failures and the electorate must reclaim its voice, because taking on the wealthy and the privileged is not class warfare—it is a matter of survival.