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A bestselling author’s shocking analysis of the many ways we are victimized by corporations   David Cay Johnston, the bestselling author of Perfectly Legal and Free Lunch, is famous for exposing the perfidies of our biggest institutions. Now he turns his attention to the ways huge corporations hide sneaky stipulations in just about every contract, often with government permission.   No other modern country gives corporations the unfettered power found in America to gouge customers, shortchange w...

Reasonable people disagree about the reach of the federal government, but there is near-universal consensus that it should protect us from such dangers as bacteria-infested food, harmful drugs, toxic pollution, crumbling bridges, and unsafe toys. And yet, the agencies that shoulder these responsibilities are in shambles; if they continue to decline, lives will be lost and natural resources will be squandered. In this timely book, Rena Steinzor and Sidney Shapiro take a hard look at the tangled w...

Shoppers with Internet access and a bargain-hunting impulse can find a universe of products at their fingertips. In this thought-provoking expose, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke invite us to take a harder look at today's app-assisted paradise of digital shopping. While consumers reap many benefits from online purchasing, the sophisticated algorithms and data-crunching that make browsing so convenient are also changing the nature of market competition, and not always for the better. Computers c...

The progressive economics writer redefines the national conversation about American freedom Health insurance, student loan debt, retirement security, child care, work-life balance, access to home ownership-these are the issues driving America's current political debates. And they are all linked, as this brilliant and timely book reveals, by a single question: should we allow the free market to determine our lives? In the tradition of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, noted economic commentator M...

This book charts the difficulties encountered by vulnerable consumers in their access to justice, through the contributions of prominent authors (academic, practitioners and consultants) in the field of consumer law and access to justice. It demonstrates that despite the development of ADR, access to justice is still severely lacking for the vulnerable consumer. The book highlights that a broad understanding of access to justice, which encompasses good regulation and its public enforcement, is...

Meltdown reveals how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was able to curb unsafe and unfair practices that led to the 2008 financial crisis. In interviews with key government, industry, and advocacy groups along with deep archival research, Kirsch and Squires show where the CFPB was able to overcome many abusive practices, where it was less able to do so, and why.Open for business in 2011, the CFPB was Congress's response to the financial catastrophe that shattered millions of middle-class...

This book is an introductory text on building measurement and estimating for simple buildings in Hong Kong, based on the Hong Kong Standard Method of Measurement of Building Works 4th Edition Revised 2018 (HKSMM4 Rev 2018). It provides a toolkit for students and surveying technicians who are new to the subject. This second edition updates the contents in line with the HKSMM4 Rev 2018 and incorporates the latest industry developments such as BIM. The main text is divided into five parts followi...

How do drugs get to the market? What controls are there and what procedures for monitoring their effects? And how adequate are the regulators in protecting public health when new drugs have serious side effects? The Therapeutic Nightmare tells the story of the sleeping pill Halcion - a story which is far from over. First marketed in the 1970s, Halcion has been taken by millions of patients around the world. For many years it has been associated with serious adverse effects such as amnesia, hallu...

Due to the absence of due process and other procedural guarantees generally offered by judicial enforcement, informal debt collection practices (IDCPs) can become abusive, harming both consumers and the economy by threatening consumers’ physical, psychological, and economic wellbeing; exposing law-abiding debt collectors to unfair competition; undermining the financial system, and negatively impacting social peace by resorting to criminal activity. The need to control and harmonize IDCPs surface...

Drawn from the personal experience of dozens of victims, including the author's own encounters, Scammed exposes the most prevalent consumer and money scams lurking in modern society. With so many people falling prey to a wide variety of frauds due to increasing vulnerability on the anonymous Internet, an expose has never been timelier. This recounts the stories of victims of over two dozen different types of scams, and what they did to recover. These scams include: Auto repair industry scams In...

These are the most powerful private citizens in America: the Washington lawyers whose impact is hidden-and made effective-in the halls of Congress and the hearing rooms of the regulatory agencies. Drawing on his training as a lawyer, Mark Green describes the tactics that influential law firms use to represent big business against the interests of consumer health and safety. Through anecdote and analysis, we see the tactics used, the associations made, the positions Washington's lawyers take to i...