Böcker av Loretta Napoleoni

The respected Italian economist and journalist offers a bold and provocative argument that the speed of technological transformation is threatening our future. At the dawn of the digital revolution, the internet was going to be the great equalizer, a global democratic force. Instead, with the money printed electronically to bail out banks, Wall Street ended up funding a new breed of serial capitalists, the Techtitans, who embraced rapid, transformational change while stripping their workers of rights and enriching themselves beyond anybody''s wildest imagination; and the Space Barons, who mine new frontiers for precious resources. Then came the gig-economy, another supposed digital equalizer, where everybody was his or her own boss, but it was just another illusion. Tech pioneers like Google, Facebook, Apple, Uber, and Microsoft never had any intention of spreading democracy. Those who control and own the technology are the absolute masters. As artificial intelligence enters the labour

In her characteristically direct approach, political analyst Loretta Napoleoni takes on the vexed story-and threat-of North Korea for those of us in the West who remain blinded by its myths and bigotry. Like China's Mao Zedong, Kim Il-Sung - North Korea's leader from its founding in 1948 until his death in 1994 - washed away the humiliation caused by Japanese colonisation and re-created an ancient nation. He consolidated and protected the country with strict principles of unity and isolation. His grandson Kim Jong-un is following in the footsteps of Chinese revolutionary politics by modernising the country using the economy as the main tool of transformation. This short, informative book is an account of a country central to world politics and yet little understood. Further, it presents insider narratives of its people, whose self-image is radically different to the image we have of them.

In Terror Incorporated, Loretta Napoleoni maps out the arteries of an international economic system that feeds armed groups the world over. Chasing terror money, she takes the reader from CIA headquarters to the smuggling routes of the Far East, from the back rooms of Wall Street to hawala exchanges in the Middle East. Napoleoni describes the "New Economy of Terror," "a fast-growing international economic system with a turnover of about $1.5 trillion [that] is challenging Western hegemony." It is made up of illegal businesses such as arms and narcotics trading, and oil and diamond smuggling, as well as charitable donations and legal profits. Napoleoni reveals the interdependency between economies run by armed groups and western economies, and provides a pioneering examination of the system and methods by which international terrorism is financed.