Conscientious Equity by Neal Asbury (Palgrave Macmillan, to be released in hardcover Fall 2010)

 In this book, Neal Asbury presents an extraordinary and groundbreaking vision, one that posits solutions to America’s and the globe’s most pressing problems in a kind of win-win scenario that truly changes the game. In Conscientious Equity, Asbury argues that moving away from intransigent political ideologies and toward a world driven by international commerce allows us to address and in fact solve economic instability, the destruction of the environment, crushing poverty, and crippling corruption all over the planet. Asbury has been working as an international entrepreneur for nearly three decades, and he knows perhaps better than anyone alive, how much of a boon the principles of Conscientious Equity could be to both America and all citizens of the world.

The core notion of Conscientious Equity is indeed a big idea whose time has come. But Conscientious Equity is much more than a policy book. It is alive with the people its philosophy will benefit the most. In here, you’ll meet, among others, Bong, a Filipino farmer whose corrupt government keeps him from earning a decent living, and E.T., a Vietnam vet who can no longer live in America yet still finds a way to serve the country he loves. You’ll travel around the globe with Asbury as he ducks the assassination attempts of Communist “Sparrow Units” in the Philippines, comes face-to-face with a particularly brutal form of Islamic justice, and argues Japanese trade policy with an American vice admiral. Conscientious Equity is such a powerful reading experience because it is so real. Asbury’s perspective is not an academic or journalistic one – it is the perspective of someone who intimately knows the world of which he writes.

Neal Asbury is the host of the syndicated “Neal Asbury Show,” which is recorded in Washington at both the TV studio of the Republican National Committee and the radio studio of the Brookings Institute. It is affiliated with Bloomberg News and CNBC, and currently airs in twelve markets, including the top-rated talk station in DC, San Francisco, Miami, Seattle, Atlanta, Houston, and others. Neal has appeared several times on network television and has been quoted in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and LeMonde. He gives sixty speeches a year, and he has the ear of Washington, even receiving a recent invitation to meet with the Obama Administration about his ideas. He is also in leadership positions with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Department of Commerce, and the Small Business Administration.

Praise for Conscientious Equity

“Conscientious Equity is written from the hands-on perspective of an American businessman who has been in the trenches of owning and operating his own business in the Philippines.  This is a valuable contribution to our discussion about how to get economies, including our own, going again.”—John D. Negroponte, Yale University, Former United States Deputy Secretary of State