Donald L. Barlett

Howard Hughes has always fascinated the public with his mixture of secrecy, dashing lifestyle, and reclusiveness. This is the book that breaks through the image to get at the man. Originally published under the title Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes.

America’s unique prosperity is based on its creation of a middle class. In the twentieth century, that middle class provided the workforce, the educated skills, and the demand that gave life to the world’s greatest consumer economy. It was innovative and dynamic; it eclipsed old imperial systems and colonial archetypes. It gave rise to a dream: that if you worked hard and followed the rules you would prosper in America, and your children would enjoy a better life than yours. The American dream was the lure to gifted immigrants and the birthright opportunity for every American citizen. It is as important a part of the history of the country as the passing of the Bill of Rights, the outcome of the battle of Gettysburg, or the space program. Incredibly, however, for more than thirty years, government and big business in America have conspired to roll back the American dream. What was once accessible to a wide swath of the population is increasingly open only to a privileged few. The story of how the American middle class has been systematically impoverished and its prospects thwarted in favor of a new ruling elite is at the heart of this extraordinarily timely and revealing book, whose devastating findings from two of the finest investigative reporters in the country will leave you astonished and angry.

The culmination of two years of research, and based on a series of articles in the Philadelphia Enquirer, two Pulitzer Prize-winning authors reveal how everyone's lives have been touched by public acts and private greed. Barlett and Steele deftly expose the shifting tax burdens, deregulation, foreign investment, bankruptcy laws, and other changes that have reeked havoc on the middle class.

Award-winning journalists expose the horrific practices within America’s health care system, profiling patients and doctors and offering startling personal stories to illuminate what’s gone wrong. “Every American ought to read this book.”— The Plain Dealer Tens of millions of people with inadequate or no medical coverage . . . dirty examination and operating rooms in doctors’ offices and hospitals . . . more people killed by mistakes than by many diseases. This may sound like the predicament of a failed state, but this is America’s health care reality today. The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other nation, yet benefits are shrinking and life expectancy here is shorter than in countries that spend significantly less. Meanwhile, HMOs, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital chains reap tremendous profits, as our elected politicians, beholden to these same companies, enact piecemeal measures that lead to needless deaths, refusing to come to grips with a system on the verge of collapse. A superb investigative work that is enormously compelling and addresses the concerns of every American , Critical Condition offers an insightful prescription for getting the system back on the right track.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of the bestselling "America: What Went Wrong?" now probe the current scandal of the American tax system and show in detail the inequities that run through federal, state, and local taxation.

Based on a series of articles for the Philadelphia Inquirer, this book shows how three decades of public policies in trade, taxes, employment and education have changed the lives of millions of middle-class Americans--all for the worse. Barlett and Steele, co-authors of America: What Went Wrong? show why most of the American middle-class faces a bleak future.

In The Great American Tax Dodge, a book that should infuriate and galvanize citizens everywhere, the best-selling authors of America: What Went Wrong? expose the millions of Americans who are dodging their income taxes at every honest taxpayer's expense. With the clarity, insight, and readability that earned them two Pulitzer Prizes, Donald Barlett and James Steele explain how Americans are cheating as never before, and why most are getting away with it.The authors relate the stories of a Manhattan couple who spent $1 million a month to maintain their lifestyle yet never paid income tax, a California couple who provided sport utility vehicles for their children at taxpayers' expense, an entrepreneur in Costa Rica who shows Americans how to hide their money in clandestine accounts offshore, and computer technicians at America's largest corporations who live tax-free.Barlett and Steele describe how the Internet has democratized tax cheating, as proliferating Web sites and their often mysterious operators offer every service imaginable to escape taxes. They discuss the double standard the IRS employs in tax audits--one for the rich and well-connected and another for everyone else--and how the Justice Department tries to jail powerless citizens accused of tax law violations while allowing the wealthy and influential to go free. This book also documents how Congress is deliberately undermining the income tax in order to replace it with a system that will provide the largest windfall ever for the richest Americans--and increase the burden on everyone else. And it spells out how executives like Kenneth L. Lay bankrolled campaigns to institute such a tax system, based on accounting principles eerily similar to those employed at Lay's Enron Corporation. Finally, the authors consider our chances for reestablishing what was once the fairest tax system in the world.

“Here is one of the most comprehensive studies to date of this important subject. The authors, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters for the Philadelphia Inquirer spent eighteen months investigating reactor sites and nuclear waste cemeteries, conducting interviews and gathering documents to ferret out little-known information about a grave technical political problem: how to dispose safely of nuclear wastes accumulating at the many nuclear plants around the nation. Their Poe-esque title carries a grisly meaning: millennia from now successive generations may be contaminated by radioactive wastes we bury ‘safely’ today.” ― Publishers Weekly Selected by Library Journal as one of the hundred best books in science and technology for 1985. This book is an outgrowth of a series of articles that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer in November 1983. For eighteen months, the authors traveled some 20,000 miles, interviewing dozens of people and assembling more than 125,000 pages of documents. These included local, state, and federal government reports, state and federal court records, corporate files, congressional hearing transcripts, scientific studies, and internal memoranda of public agencies and private businesses. The resulting newspaper series provoked a much broader reaction than we had anticipated. In response to requests for copies of the articles, more than 25,000 reprints were sent to individuals and organizations in more than forty states and several foreign countries. Many of those who wrote urged the authors to expand the newspaper series into a book. In doing so, they updated the material and added new information, including sections on military waste, foreign reprocessing, and uranium mill tailings. We were tempted to delve into other areas, such as the design and construction of reactors and the economics of nuclear power. But we focused instead on waste―the amount produced, past efforts to manage it, and the politics of its disposal.

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Howard Hughes lived one of the greatest, most heroic, misunderstood, mysterious, bizarre, and tragic lives in American history. In this brilliantly documented biography, the mythology that surrounded that life is disentangled from the truth. Hughes had always been different. Certainly his riches set him apart, but he was also tough. Orphaned and a millionaire at 18, Hughes repudiated his relatives, seized control of the Hughes Tool Company, the linchpin of his fortune, and went on to become a flamboyant movie producer, holder of many world aviation records, principal owner of Trans World Airlines, a critically important defense contractor, Hollywood's most pursued and elusive bachelor, and partner of the United States government.This is an epic biography of an epic figure who bestrode the world like a colossus yet could not master himself.

Howard Hughes lived one of the greatest, most heroic, misunderstood, mysterious, bizarre, and tragic lives in American history. In this brilliantly documented biography, the mythology that surrounded that life is disentangled from the truth. Hughes had always been different. Certainly his riches set him apart, but he was also tough. Orphaned and a millionaire at 18, Hughes repudiated his relatives, seized control of the Hughes Tool Company, the linchpin of his fortune, and went on to become a flamboyant movie producer, holder of many world aviation records, principal owner of Trans World Airlines, a critically important defense contractor, Hollywood's most pursued and elusive bachelor, and partner of the United States government.This is an epic biography of an epic figure who bestrode the world like a colossus yet could not master himself.