Try free for 30 days
-
Barons
- Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry
- Narrated by: Stephen Bel Davies
- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Pre-order for $24.37
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also picked
-
Healing Grounds
- Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming
- By: Liz Carlisle
- Narrated by: Liz Carlisle
- Length: 6 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Healing Grounds, Liz Carlisle tells the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are reviving their ancestors' methods of growing food—techniques long suppressed by the industrial food system. These farmers are restoring native prairies, nurturing beneficial fungi, and enriching soil health. While feeding their communities and revitalizing cultural ties to land, they are steadily stitching ecosystems back together and repairing the natural carbon cycle.
-
Seeds of Resistance
- The Fight to Save Our Food Supply
- By: Mark Schapiro
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ten thousand years after humans figured out how to stop wandering and plant crops, veteran investigative journalist Mark Schapiro plunges into the struggle already underway for control of seeds, the ground-zero ingredient for our food. Three-quarters of the seed varieties on Earth in 1900 had become extinct by 2015. In Seeds of Resistance, Schapiro takes us onto the frontlines of a struggle over the seeds that remain, one that will determine the long-term security of our food supply in the face of unprecedented climate volatility. More than half of all commercially-traded seeds have fallen under the control of just three multinational agri-chemical companies....
-
-
Vital message for mankind
- By Anonymous User on 07-04-2022
-
Beyond the Mountain
- By: Steve House, Reinhold Messner - foreword
- Narrated by: Steve House
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What does it take to be one of the world's best high-altitude mountain climbers? A lot of fundraising; traveling in some of the world's most dangerous countries; enduring cold bivouacs, searing lungs, and a cloudy mind when you can least afford one. It means learning the hard lessons the mountains teach. Steve House built his reputation on ascents throughout the Alps, Canada, Alaska, the Karakoram, and the Himalaya that have expanded possibilities of style, speed, and difficulty.
-
-
really enjoyed the honesty and fallibility
- By John C on 31-01-2021
-
Paper Soldiers
- How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order
- By: Saleha Mohsin
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1995, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin re-defined the next thirty years of currency policy that ushered in exceptional prosperity and cheap foreign goods, but the strong dollar policy also played a role in the devastating hollowing out of America’s manufacturing sector. Meanwhile, abroad, the United States increasingly turned to the dollar as a weapon of war. In Paper Soldiers, Saleha Mohsin reveals how the Treasury Department has shaped U.S. policy at home and overseas by wielding the American dollar as a weapon—and what that means in a new age of crisis.
-
Perilous Bounty
- The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It
- By: Tom Philpott
- Narrated by: Eric Meyers
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
More than a decade after Michael Pollan's game-changing The Omnivore's Dilemma transformed the conversation about what we eat, a combination of global diet trends and corporate interests have put American agriculture into a state of 'quiet emergency', from dangerous drought in California - which grows more than 50 percent of the fruits and vegetables we eat - to catastrophic topsoil loss in the 'breadbasket' heartland of the United States.
-
Soil Science for Regenerative Agriculture
- A Comprehensive Guide to Living Soil, No-till Gardening, Composting and Natural Farming - Complete with a Step-by-Step Action Plan to Quickly Grow Soil
- By: Amélie des Plantes
- Narrated by: Al Pagano
- Length: 4 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
According to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), each year, an estimated 24 billion tons of fertile soil are lost due to erosion. That’s a whopping 3.4 tons lost every year for each person on the planet.
-
-
Adds little of worth, terrible narration
- By Anonymous User on 03-05-2024
-
Healing Grounds
- Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming
- By: Liz Carlisle
- Narrated by: Liz Carlisle
- Length: 6 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Healing Grounds, Liz Carlisle tells the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are reviving their ancestors' methods of growing food—techniques long suppressed by the industrial food system. These farmers are restoring native prairies, nurturing beneficial fungi, and enriching soil health. While feeding their communities and revitalizing cultural ties to land, they are steadily stitching ecosystems back together and repairing the natural carbon cycle.
-
Seeds of Resistance
- The Fight to Save Our Food Supply
- By: Mark Schapiro
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ten thousand years after humans figured out how to stop wandering and plant crops, veteran investigative journalist Mark Schapiro plunges into the struggle already underway for control of seeds, the ground-zero ingredient for our food. Three-quarters of the seed varieties on Earth in 1900 had become extinct by 2015. In Seeds of Resistance, Schapiro takes us onto the frontlines of a struggle over the seeds that remain, one that will determine the long-term security of our food supply in the face of unprecedented climate volatility. More than half of all commercially-traded seeds have fallen under the control of just three multinational agri-chemical companies....
-
-
Vital message for mankind
- By Anonymous User on 07-04-2022
-
Beyond the Mountain
- By: Steve House, Reinhold Messner - foreword
- Narrated by: Steve House
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What does it take to be one of the world's best high-altitude mountain climbers? A lot of fundraising; traveling in some of the world's most dangerous countries; enduring cold bivouacs, searing lungs, and a cloudy mind when you can least afford one. It means learning the hard lessons the mountains teach. Steve House built his reputation on ascents throughout the Alps, Canada, Alaska, the Karakoram, and the Himalaya that have expanded possibilities of style, speed, and difficulty.
-
-
really enjoyed the honesty and fallibility
- By John C on 31-01-2021
-
Paper Soldiers
- How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order
- By: Saleha Mohsin
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1995, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin re-defined the next thirty years of currency policy that ushered in exceptional prosperity and cheap foreign goods, but the strong dollar policy also played a role in the devastating hollowing out of America’s manufacturing sector. Meanwhile, abroad, the United States increasingly turned to the dollar as a weapon of war. In Paper Soldiers, Saleha Mohsin reveals how the Treasury Department has shaped U.S. policy at home and overseas by wielding the American dollar as a weapon—and what that means in a new age of crisis.
-
Perilous Bounty
- The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It
- By: Tom Philpott
- Narrated by: Eric Meyers
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
More than a decade after Michael Pollan's game-changing The Omnivore's Dilemma transformed the conversation about what we eat, a combination of global diet trends and corporate interests have put American agriculture into a state of 'quiet emergency', from dangerous drought in California - which grows more than 50 percent of the fruits and vegetables we eat - to catastrophic topsoil loss in the 'breadbasket' heartland of the United States.
-
Soil Science for Regenerative Agriculture
- A Comprehensive Guide to Living Soil, No-till Gardening, Composting and Natural Farming - Complete with a Step-by-Step Action Plan to Quickly Grow Soil
- By: Amélie des Plantes
- Narrated by: Al Pagano
- Length: 4 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
According to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), each year, an estimated 24 billion tons of fertile soil are lost due to erosion. That’s a whopping 3.4 tons lost every year for each person on the planet.
-
-
Adds little of worth, terrible narration
- By Anonymous User on 03-05-2024
-
Break 'Em Up
- Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money
- By: Zephyr Teachout, Bernie Sanders - foreword
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey, Zephyr Teachout
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Every facet of American life is being overtaken by big platform monopolists like Facebook, Google, and Bayer (which has merged with the former agricultural giant Monsanto), resulting in a greater concentration of wealth and power than we've seen since the Gilded Age. They are evolving into political entities that often have more influence than the actual government, bending state and federal legislatures to their will and even creating arbitration courts that circumvent the US justice system.
-
The Age of Grievance
- By: Frank Bruni
- Narrated by: Frank Bruni
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The twists and turns of American politics are unpredictable, but the tone is a troubling given. It’s one of grievance. More and more Americans are convinced that they’re losing because somebody else is winning. More and more tally their slights, measure their misfortune, and assign particular people responsibility for it. The blame game has become the country’s most popular sport and victimhood its most fashionable garb. How did we get here? What does it say about us, and where does it leave us? The Age of Grievance examines these critical questions and charts a path forward.
-
Small Farm Republic
- Why Conservatives Must Embrace Local Agriculture, Reject Climate Alarmism, and Lead an Environmental Revival
- By: John Klar
- Narrated by: John Klar
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From farmer, lawyer, and political activist John Klar comes a bold, solutions-based plan for Conservatives that gets beyond the fatuous pipe dreams and social-justice platitudes of the dominant, Liberal “Green” agenda—offering a healthy way forward for everyone.
-
Wall Street's War on Workers
- How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It
- By: Les Leopold
- Narrated by: Madison Niederhauser
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Wall Street’s War on Workers, Les Leopold, co-founder of the Labor Institute, provides a clear lens with which we can see how healthy corporations in the United States have used mass layoffs and stock buybacks to enrich shareholders at the expense of employees. With detailed research and concise language, Leopold explains why mass layoffs occur and how our current laws and regulations allow companies to turn these layoffs into short-term financial gains.
-
Second Class
- How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women
- By: Batya Ungar-Sargon
- Narrated by: Batya Ungar-Sargon
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Second Class, working-class Americans of all races, political orientations, and occupations share their stories—cleaning ladies, health care aides, cops, truck drivers, fast food workers, electricians, and more. In their own words, these working-class Americans explain the struggles and triumphs of their increasingly precarious lives—as well as what policies they think would improve them.
-
Spy the Lie
- Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception
- By: Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, Susan Carnicero, and others
- Narrated by: Fred Berman
- Length: 4 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Imagine how different your life would be if you could tell whether someone was lying or telling you the truth. Be it hiring a new employee, investing in a financial interest, speaking with your child about drugs, confronting your significant other about suspected infidelity, or even dating someone new, having the ability to unmask a lie can have far-reaching and even life-altering consequences. As former CIA officers, Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, and Susan Carnicero are among the world’s best at recognizing deceptive behavior.
-
-
Brilliant
- By Amazon Customer on 14-12-2021
-
Native Nations
- A Millennium in North America
- By: Kathleen DuVal
- Narrated by: Carolina Hoyos
- Length: 21 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today. Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
-
White Rural Rage
- The Threat to American Democracy
- By: Tom Schaller, Paul Waldman
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
White rural voters hold the greatest electoral sway of any demographic group in the United States, yet rural communities suffer from poor healthcare access, failing infrastructure, and severe manufacturing and farming job losses. Rural voters believe our nation has betrayed them, and to some degree, they’re right. In White Rural Rage, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman explore why rural Whites have failed to reap the benefits from their outsize political power and why, as a result, they are the most likely group to abandon democratic norms and traditions.
-
-
Had to stop listening at Covid. This book is a left wing bible.
- By Anonymous User on 15-03-2024
-
Shopping All the Way to the Woods
- How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America
- By: Rachel S. Gross
- Narrated by: Melissa Redmond
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
No escape to nature is complete without a trip to an outdoor recreational store or a browse through online offerings. This is the irony of the American outdoor experience: visiting wild spaces supposedly untouched by capitalism first requires shopping.
-
What We've Become
- Living and Dying in a Country of Arms
- By: Jonathan M. Metzl
- Narrated by: Bob Johnson
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Long at the forefront of a movement advocating for gun reform as a matter of public health, Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl has been on constant media call in the aftermath of fatal shootings. But the 2018 Nashville killings led him on a path toward recognizing the limitations of biomedical frameworks for fully diagnosing or treating the impassioned complexities of American gun politics. As he came to understand it, public health is a harder sell in a nation that fundamentally disagrees about what it means to be safe, healthy, or free.
-
A Bold Return to Giving a Damn
- One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food
- By: Will Harris
- Narrated by: Will Harris
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Raised as a fourth-generation farmer, when Will Harris inherited White Oak Pastures he was a full-time commodity cowboy who played hard and fast with every tool the system offered–chemicals, antibiotics, steroids, and more. His ancestors had built a highly profitable, conventionally run machine, but over time he found himself disgusted with the excess, cruelty, and smalltown devastation this system entailed. So he bet the farm on forging a different way of doing things. One that works with nature not against it, and bridges the quickly widening delta between consumers and their food.
-
-
My favourite subject
- By Anonymous User on 18-03-2024
-
The Rebels
- Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics
- By: Joshua Green
- Narrated by: Philip Hernandez
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In his classic book Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green chronicled how the forces of economic populism on the right, led by the likes of Steve Bannon, turned Donald Trump into their flawed but powerful vessel. In The Rebels, he gives an epic account of the long struggle that has played out in parallel on the left, told through an intimate reckoning with the careers of the three political figures who have led the charge most prominently.
Publisher's Summary
Barons is the story of seven corporate titans, their rise to power, and the consequences for everyone else. Take Mike McCloskey, chairman of Fair Oaks Farms. In a few short decades, he went from managing a modest dairy herd to running the Disneyland of agriculture. Mike benefited from deregulation of the American food industry, a phenomenon that has consolidated wealth in the hands of select tycoons, and along the way, hollowed out the nation's rural towns and local businesses.
Along with Mike McCloskey, listeners will meet a secretive German family that took over the global coffee industry in less than a decade, relying on wealth traced back to the Nazis to gobble up countless independent roasters. And they will learn that in the food business, crime really does pay-especially when you can bribe and then double-cross the president of Brazil.
These, and the other stories in this book, are simply examples of the monopolies and ubiquitous corruption that today define American food. The tycoons profiled are hardly unique: many other companies have manipulated our lax laws and failed policies for their own benefit, to the detriment of our neighborhoods, livelihoods, and our democracy itself. A fair, healthy, and prosperous food industry is possible-if we take back power from the barons who have robbed us of it.