Profit Over People

Neoliberalism and Global Order

Why is the Atlantic slowly filling with crude petroleum, threatening a millions-of-years-old ecological balance? Why did traders at prominent banks take high-risk gambles with the money entrusted to them by hundreds of thousands of clients around the world, expanding and leveraging their investments to the point that failure led to a global financial crisis that left millions of people jobless and hundreds of cities economically devastated? Why would the world's most powerful military spend ten years fighting an enemy that presents no direct threat?

The culprit in all cases is neoliberal ideology: the belief in the supremacy of "free" markets to drive and govern human affairs. And in the years since the initial publication of Noam Chomsky's Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, the bitter vines of neoliberalism have only twisted themselves further into the world economy, obliterating the public’s voice in public affairs and substituting the bottom line in place of people’s basic obligation to care for one another. In Profit Over People, Chomsky reveals the roots of the present crisis, tracing the history of neoliberalism through an incisive analysis of free trade agreements of the 1990s, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund—and describes the movements of resistance to the increasing interference by the private sector in global affairs.

In the age of online retailers and large corporate bookstores, independent booksellers can find themselves struggling to keep up. That’s why Seven Stories Press is partnering with indie bookstores for a series of new promotions to encourage readers to buy our books in ways that benefit both booksellers and publishers. The collaboration began in August, with Seven Stories offering indie bookstores a unique discount on a collection of seven themed titles. The first two collections were “For Human Rights, Against War” and “Women in Translation.” The same collections were also featured on the Seven Stories website.

To go with the featured collections, Seven Stories is holding a book display contest, in which indie booksellers compete to construct the best display showcasing the featured titles. Each winner is selected by the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association (NAIBA) and awarded $300. The wonderful winner from our first display, Curious Iguana in Frederick, MD, is featured in the photo above.

This initiative sprang from the question of how independent publishers can leverage their web presence in a way that also benefits independent booksellers. Eileen Dengler, the executive director of NAIBA, and Todd Dickinson, NAIBA’s president and the co-owner of his own indie bookstore, both believe that Seven Stories’s promotional indie partnership is a crucial first step to addressing this question.

Dan Simon, the founder of Seven Stories Press, said the idea for the promotion and contest materialized through conversations with Dengler and Dickinson about ways that publishers can support indies through their approaches to online sales. Dickinson said that of all the publishers NAIBA spoke with about possible partnership, Seven Stories “came back the strongest” and “were the most interested in developing some sort of pilot program” to support indies. Simon acknowledges that the promotional program may adapt over time, but he, Dickinson, and Dengler are confident that the collaboration will have a positive impact on indie booksellers.

From November 15th to November 22nd, seven “Books that Shook the World” will be featured on the Seven Stories website with a special offer: buy three of these books, and receive a fourth free. Just email sevenstories@sevenstories.com with your first and last name, and the book you would like sent for free. We'll verify that you bought three books already, and then get your fourth one in the mail!

Any book purchased through the Seven Stories website comes with a free e-book version, and anyone purchasing one of the titles from an independent bookseller can also get a free e-book by emailing a photo of their receipt to sevenstories@sevenstories.com. For booksellers competing in the November book display contest, submit a picture of the display to NAIBAeileen@gmail.com by 12/3/2018. This promotion is a great opportunity to discover your next favorite book, and to support the many indie booksellers committed to supplying us all with great works of literature.

Born in Philadelphia in 1928, NOAM CHOMSKY is known throughout the world for his political writings, activism, and for for his groundbreaking work in linguistics. A professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955, Chomsky gained recognition in academic circles for his theory of transformational grammar, which drew attention to the syntactic universality of all human languages. But it is as a critic of unending war, corporate control, and neoliberalism that Chomsky has become one of the country’s most well known public intellectuals. The 1969 publication of American Power and the New Mandarins marked the beginning of Chomsky’s rigorous public criticism of American hegemony and its lieges. Since then, with his tireless scholarship and an unflagging sense of moral responsibility, he has become one of the most influential writers in the world. Chomsky is the author of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (with Edward S. Herman), Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, and over one hundred other books. To this day Noam Chomsky remains an active and uncompromising voice of dissent.