The financial news may be dire these days, but the outlook isn’t all bad for all businesses. Followers of consultant Darwin Gillett’s “Noble Enterprise” model have every expectation of succeeding no matter how poor economic outlooks are, because Noble Enterprises focus on people and profit: morale and income rise simultaneously, as Gillett demonstrates, when management concentrates on both.

The Cosimo book Noble Enterprise: The Commonsense Guide to Uplifting People and Profits — about how stagnant or even near-death companies can transform themselves for success — offers the insights, leadership tools, and inspiration to create a noble enterprise and lead employees to new heights of performance. Here, business owners learn how to:

• Strengthen your organization: Awaken and activate the rich array of human energy, wisdom, passion, and purpose in your people
• Revitalize your company: Create and implement a plan for turning around (and turning on) even the most “stuck” operation
• Build sustainable growth and profitability: Learn the secrets of corporate revitalization and apply them to achieve sustainable success
• Expand your leadership impact: Build employee morale and commitment, and help your people achieve big performance goals
• Inspire your people: Increase enthusiasm and confidence, and turn your company into a high-performing noble enterprise

Noble Enterprises are great places to work, great places to do business with, and great successes as business ventures, and Noble Enterprise focuses on the often overlooked and typically hidden inner qualities that make these companies succeed by tapping the full range of human energies. The current economic enviroment, with all its challenges and demands, is ideal for shaping currently struggling companies into Noble Enterprises that will succeed long into the future.

Noble Enterprise is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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Cosimo author Danny Schechter — a filmmaker and media commentator first, and author second — has announced that his new Cosimo book, Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, will soon be transformed into a “crash-umentary,” a documentary film exploration of the ongoing economic crash and crisis. The first teaser trailer for the film was recently released:

Read the introduction to Plunder here. (Alert: PDF.)

Plunder is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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It’s not exactly My Pet Goat, but it appears that our president-elect is something of a reader. Barack Obama has been spotted at least twice by the mainstream press with a book in hand. The industry newsletter Shelf Awareness alerted us to this image:

in which the incoming President is seen carrying a copy of Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan. And the British newspaper the Telegraph spotted him encumbered thusly:

The Telegraph says the book is Derek Walcott’s Collected Poems, 1948-1984.

And The New York Times wonders whether Obama is the “new Oprah” when it comes to promoting books: whenever Obama cites a book, book lovers — and publishers — go nuts, as when Obama mentioned, in passing and without specifying its title, a book about Franklin Delano Roosevelt that he was reading. The Times quotes Adam Cohen, author of the forthcoming Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America, as saying:

When people write history, they do not think that it will have any impact on world events. So the idea that we now have a president-elect who is reading multiple books of history and is reading them to shape how he will approach his presidency, I think is inspiring to historians everywhere and augurs well for his presidency. If those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, President Obama seems to really be trying to learn the lessons of history and any historian, whether he reads their book or not, should be very pleased by that.

The Associated Press recently wrote about how excited writers are to see a man of letters — Obama is a bestselling author, after all, as well as a reader — ascend to the Oval Office:

Writers welcome Obama as a peer, a thinker, a man of words — his own words.

“When I was watching Obama’s acceptance speech (Tuesday night), I was convinced that he had written it himself, and therefore that he was saying things that he actually believed and had considered,” says Jane Smiley, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Thousand Acres” and other fiction.

“I find that more convincing in a politician than the usual thing of speaking the words of a raft of hack speechwriters. If he were to lie to us, he would really be betraying his deepest self.”

The AP quotes author and former Hillary Clinton supporter Rick Moody to explain Obama’s appeal to those of a literary bent:

I think the larger issue is cultural. There’s a trickle down from the top in the way art exists inside and outside of the culture as a whole. Here in the USA, you could feel in the Bush years how little regard there was for it. People who disliked art, literature, dance, fine arts, they had a lot of cover for this antipathy. There’s reason to believe that we are in for a much better period.

Will the next four-to-eight years be better for book lovers? We’ll see…

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Cosimo author Danny Schechter will appear at The Half King Bar and Restaurant, a literary institution in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, on Monday, December 15, 2008, from 6:30 to 8:30pm, to read from his Cosimo book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal.

Schechter’s appearance will be part of The Half King’s long-running Monday Reading series.

The Half King is located at 23rd Street and 10th Avenue. For more information, The Half King’s Web site.

Read the introduction to Plunder here. (Alert: PDF.)

Plunder is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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Barbara Marx Hubbard, coauthor of the Cosimo book The Power of Yin — about how humanity must harness feminine energy if it is to survive — will be the featured presenter at Conscious Choices: The Building Blocks of Conscious Evolution, a retreat sponsored by Evolutionary Women to be held December 5-7, 2008, in Santa Barbara, California. Marx Hubbard says:

Please join me in Santa Barbara for a very special Women’s Retreat being presented in December by two evolutionary women and beloved friends, Bonnie Kelley and Lucky Sweeny. This will be a weekend filled with personal discovery and deep sharing with other like-hearted, evolving women who have a strong sense of what is emergent.  I hope to see many of you there.

For more information, email info@evolutionarywomen.org, call 410-536-0220, or visit the Web site at evolutionarywomen.org.

The Power of Yin is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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For Immediate Release: November 19, 2008
Contact: Author Relations Manager
info@cosimobooks.com
ph. 212-989-3616

THE BAILOUT IS NOT WORKING: BUT DO THE “EXPERTS” KNOW?
Investigative Journalist Danny Schechter questions the government’s & media’s reliance on “experts” who didn’t foresee this crisis

Danny Schechter, Emmy-Award investigative journalist, film producer and author, has been one of the earliest pundits warning about the current crisis. In his 2006 film IN DEBT WE TRUST Schechter exposed the role Wall Street played in promoting deceptive and dodgy subprime lending. In his just released book Plunder: Investigating our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal (Cosimo Books, September, 2008) he documents the causes, from Wall Street greed to the failure of government and the media.

Schechter’s criticism of the government and the media, who seek and present analysis only from the same “experts” who didn’t foresee this crisis, is shared by others.

Economist James Galbraith, son of the leading expert on the Great Crash of 1929, the late John Kenneth Galbraith, states that only around 10 among thousands of professional economists warned of the dangers of a credit collapse and market meltdown. “It is a real blot on our profession,” he says.

According to financial journalist Dean Starkman, monitoring business reporting for the Columbia Journalism Review, the press was no better. He states:

“The business press did not really recognize and understand what they were up against, how dramatic the world had changed, how the lending industry had changed. That’s the thing you’ve documented. How out of control Wall Street had become.”

As the economic recession deepens, and as the public clamors for information and much needed solutions, it becomes even more important to get true analysis and fresh insights. Danny Schechter offers such a perspective and will be speaking on Thursday, November 20 at New York’s National Arts Club on why we keep relying on “experts” who have missed almost every turn of this crisis, including why the current bailout is not working.

Schechter and his book Plunder have received wide praise since its publication:

“Danny Schechter has been one of the few to incisively track the issue that Sen. Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, called “a 50-state Katrina.” Schechter has done so with (…) the perfectly timed release of “Plunder”
The Buffalo News

“Plunder is (..) a consumer book, a warning about how the debt crisis and the federal bailout will affect working individuals, (not just) Wall Street executives.”
Celebrateauthors.com

” Schechter has done in Plunder what countless media outlets and watchdogs agencies have failed to do. His work offers an exciting guide to how “it” broke, where “it” broke and why”.
Max Fraad Wolff, economist at the New School in New York

========================

About the Author
DANNY SCHECHTER is uniquely qualified to tell this story. Schechter, a.k.a., “The News Dissector” spent decades as a truth teller in the media with leading media companies, and as an independent filmmaker with award-winning independent company Globalvision. A graduate of Cornell and the London School of Economics, Schechter was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard, and a multiple Emmy Award winner at ABC News , where he was among the first to cover the S&L crisis. In 2006 his film IN DEBT WE TRUST was the first to expose Wall Street’s connection to subprime loans, predicting the economic crisis that his book Plunder investigates. He has written on the economic crisis for Nieman Reports, The Nation, The Huffington Post, and other websites including Mediachannel.org, the media issues network he edits. Schechter has also appeared on multiple radio and TV outlets in the US, from NPR’s On Point to Tavis Smiley, and internationally. Danny Schechter is available for speaking engagements in public for a, colleges and in the media.

About Cosimo Books
Cosimo Books, based in New York, is an imprint of Cosimo, Inc., a specialty publisher of books and publications that inspire, inform and engage readers. Cosimo’s mission is to offer unique books to niche audiences around the world.

Always available at online bookstores. Visit cosimobooks.com
BE INSPIRED, BE INFORMED

Plunder is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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Danny Schechter, author of the new Cosimo book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, will appear at The National Arts Club at 15 Gramercy Park South in New York City on Thursday, November 20, from 6pm to 8pm, at a gala event to celebrate the publication of the book. See the National Arts Club’s Web site for more info.

Schechter’s been busy around the mediascape getting the word out about Plunder. At The Editors Weblog, Katherine Thompson explores, with Schechter, the corporate media’s failure to report on the predictions of the global financial crisis that were appearing in smaller media, and its continued lack of understanding of the issues involved. A taste:

Schechter believes that the media failed in its role because of vested interests. He points out that one of the key sources of revenue for newspapers is real estate advertising in weekend supplements and classifieds, as well as advertisements for credit card and refinancing companies. As a result, he argues there is a connection between the real estate and newspaper industry, their future and success are intertwined. Schechter says, “The newspaper industry is the marketing arm of the real estate industry. In some cities you actually had newspapers getting a piece of the action of sales through the ads that they generated. So they were actually part of the corruption of this whole relationship. So of course there was little real scrutiny about what was actually happening in the neighbourhoods where houses were flipping, where people who couldn’t afford to buy houses were buying them with bogus mortgages. Newspapers were making money on the sales of these homes.”

LinkTV has been airing Schechter’s documentary In Debt We Trust, and features new interview segments during which host Wendy Hanamura and Schechter discuss how we can free ourselves from the tyranny of debt, and why the mainstream media has preferred to keep this story under wraps. More info at LinkTV; go here for details on how to watch LinkTV on cable and satellite; watch excerpts from the Hanamura/Schechter segments here.

Schechter recently appeared at McNally Jackson Bookstore in New York to discuss the ongoing financial crisis. Excerpts from his comversation with the crowd:

Schechter also recently appeared on NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook; listen to the program here.

Finally, a recent New York Times article about the credit-card crunch — “In Civil Court, One Nation, Under Debt” — mentions Schechter’s prescience on the economic meltdown:

What happens in the civil courts are the last tremors of an economy built around the twin seductions of consumption and debt, a dance portrayed in “In Debt We Trust: America Before the Bubble Bursts,” a 2007 documentary by Danny Schechter.

Read the introduction to Plunder here. (Alert: PDF.)

Plunder is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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Cosimo is proud to announce the publication of a new, updated edition of Looking for Orthon: The Story of George Adamski, the First Flying Saucer Contactee, and How He Changed the World, by Colin Bennett.

On November 20, 1952, George Adamski first made contact with extraterrestrials — including a long-haired youth from Venus named Orthon — in the California desert…or so he claimed. He offered photographic proof. He wrote books about his encounters, including the sensational bestseller Flying Saucers Have Landed. He never stopped advocating the truth of his claims even as he came under extraordinary ridicule. And in the process, however inadvertently, Adamski invented the modern mass counterculture.

This new edition of Colin Bennett’s modern classic posits, in the author’s uniquely engaging style, Adamski as a kind of unwitting performance artist who “structured one of the most blatant acts of visionary cheek of the twentieth century,” introducing the jittery postwar Western world to the image of the UFO, which confounded and tweaked authority while also fully embodying Cold War neuroses. Whether Adamski was telling the truth or not is almost irrelevant — though Bennett has his own ideas about Adamski’s veracity. What remains compelling about Adamski’s bizarre and compelling tale of alien visitations is the transformative power of stories, even if they’re false, to warp our culture on a grand scale.

Looking for Orthon is available at Amazon and other online booksellers.

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“First came the mortgage crisis. Now comes the credit card crisis.” So says no less an authority than The New York Times. In an article dated October 28, 2008, the Times noted that:

Lenders wrote off an estimated $21 billion in bad credit card loans in the first half of 2008 as more borrowers defaulted on their payments. With companies laying off tens of thousands of workers, the industry stands to lose at least another $55 billion over the next year and a half, analysts say. Currently, the total losses amount to 5.5 percent of credit card debt outstanding, and could surpass the 7.9 percent level reached after the technology bubble burst in 2001.

“If unemployment continues to increase, credit card net charge-offs could exceed historical norms,” Gary L. Crittenden, Citigroup’s chief financial officer, said.

Faced with sobering conditions, companies that issue MasterCard, Visa and other cards are rushing to stanch the bleeding, even as options once easily tapped by borrowers to pay off credit card obligations, like home equity lines or the ability to transfer balances to a new card, dry up.

And on October 30, 2008, the Associated Press (via the Times) highlighted the lengths credit card issuers are suddenly going to in order to lessen the impact of the crisis… on themselves:

Big banks have formed an unusual alliance with consumer advocates to urge the government to allow huge portions of credit card debt to be forgiven, a turnabout from recent years when the banking industry lobbied strenuously to make it harder for consumers to erase their credit card debts in bankruptcy.

…

In an increasingly tough economic climate, banks and other mortgage lenders already have been agreeing to modify loans of distressed homeowners to help them avoid foreclosure. Now, banks making credit card loans have reached a point where they can lose less by forgiving part of the debt than seeing the consumer walk away entirely.

But Cosimo author Danny Schechter, whose new book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal exposes precisely how we got into the mess — and who is responsible — was alerting us to the danger of a credit-card collapse as far back as June 2008. In an article in LA City Beat, Schechter predicted precisely what the mainstream media is only now noting. A few excerpts from the June piece:

While many eyes are focusing on the housing meltdown and its hugely negative effect on an economy clearly moving into recession, few are paying attention to the next bubble expected to burst: credit cards. Combined with the subprime losses, such a credit card nightmare has the potential, experts say, of bringing down the entire financial system and global economy. You and your credit card have become key players in the highly unstable financial crunch. Mortgage lender cupidity and bank credit card greed wedded to financial institution deregulation supported by both political parties, have been made manifestly worse by Bush administration support-the-rich policies. It has brought us to a brink not seen since just before the Great Depression.

…

How bad is it?

• Financial analysts say that in the U.S. alone more than $850 billion in unpaid credit card balances is at stake and fast approaching $1 trillion, roughly the same amount as in the subprime market.

• CNN reports that worldwide, consumers have racked up more than $2.2 trillion in purchases and cash advances on major credit cards in just the last year.

• The unpaid debt portion of this is continuing to pile up, with U.S. consumers last year adding $68 billion against their credit lines, boosting credit card debt by 7.8 percent, the largest increase in seven years, just when the last recession was beginning.

• Even as they spent, consumers have been going into default at a stunning rate. The percentage of people delinquent on their credit cards is soaring, and credit card companies are now writing off somewhere near 5 percent of payments.

More of Schechter’s wisdom on the economic collapse is available in Plunder.

Read the introduction to Plunder here. (Alert: PDF.)

Plunder is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.

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