Joseph Matthews

Your complete guide to Social Security retirement, Medicare or Medicaid benefits, and other federal benefitsIf you want to get the highest possible retirement or pension income-not to mention the best medical coverage-turn to Social Security, Medicare & Government Pensions to discover the benefits you're entitled to and how to claim them as easily as possible.Navigate the complex and often daunting Social Security and Medicare systems using the resources and information in this complete guide. Learn about Medicare coverage, including Part D prescription drug coverage, and understand how Medicare Advantage and Medigap insurance plans work and which makes the most sense for you. Also learn how to claim disability benefits, veterans benefits, and federal retirement benefits.Bonus: If you're denied any medical treatment or benefits, this book teaches you how to file an appeal with Medicare, Social Security, or your state's Medicaid agency.This new edition has the latest benefit numbers for Social Security, Medicare, SSI, and veterans benefits and includes recent changes to Medicare and Medicaid coverage.

Your complete guide to Social Security retirement and medical benefitsDetermining whether to file early for retirement benefits or wait until age 70 can be complicated. Claiming retirement benefits early can lower your benefits, but it affects dependents and survivors benefits differently. Learn this and more with Social Security, Medicare & Government Pensions--completely updated for 2025.Social Security benefits. Figure out how to get retirement, disability, dependents, and survivors benefits, or Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Decide whether it's best to claim benefits early, at full retirement age, or not until you turn 70--and how to time your claims so you and your spouse get the best benefits.Medicare & Medicaid. Learn how to qualify for and enroll in both programs, including Medicare Part D drug coverage.Medigap insurance & Medicare Advantage plans. Compare Medigap and Medicare Advantage plans, and choose what's best for you.Government pensions & veterans benefits. Discover when and how to claim the benefits you have earned.What's New in 2025?New cap on drug costs under Part DElimination of Part D donut hole, andNew Medicare costs and Social Security amounts for 2025.Whether you're looking for yourself or helping a parent, you'll find valuable information here to help get the benefits you've earned.

After an injury: Settle your claim the right wayWhen you've been hurt in an accident, dealing with insurance companies and their lawyers can feel daunting. But with the right guide, you can handle a claim yourself--and save thousands of dollars.How to Win Your Personal Injury Claim leads you through the insurance claim process, step by step. After almost any kind of accident, from a car crash to a slip and fall, you'll learn how to: figure out how much your injury claim is worthgather the right evidenceprepare an effective demand letterrespond to common insurance company tacticsnegotiate a fair settlement, andfile a small claims lawsuit.This completely updated edition of How to Win Your Personal Injury Claim includes the latest state-by-state lawsuit filing deadlines and small claims court limits.

Set in 1973 Greece during the military dictatorship, Shades of Resistance follows thirty-year-old American Jonas Korda as he stumbles blindly into the islands of the Aegean. Attempting to physically escape from a life--a disillusioned engagement with 1960s politics and an ill-fated sort-of-marriage--that he has long since emotionally fled, Jonas is instead faced with the question of his capacity for true human connections.Unwittingly he becomes involved with two expatriate Greek musicians who had self-exiled from their homeland six years before, when the military junta took power, but are now returning to create oppositional energy through the form they know best: traditional Greek poetry set to the music of a composer who's been banned by the brutal and surreal junta. Through the force of their commitment and sacrifice, Jonas is reacquainted with the relation between the heart and the larger world.Jonas is also confronted, sequentially, by two women who in very different ways bring his emotional struggles into focus. One--a Greek-Canadian searching for her father lost somewhere to the depredations of the dictatorship--who seeks to draw him in. The other--an alienated Belgian painter turning her back on a life of artistic and gender frustrations--who holds him away.The novel's lyrically evoked Greek islands are counterpoint to political terror captured with both shuddering intensity and mordant black humor. Shades of Resistance is that rare work of fiction that explores the relationship between the personal and the political, the heightened responses of a man trapped in a moment of history.

Set in 1973 Greece during the military dictatorship, Shades of Resistance follows thirty-year-old American Jonas Korda as he stumbles blindly into the islands of the Aegean. Attempting to physically escape from a life--a disillusioned engagement with 1960s politics and an ill-fated sort-of-marriage--that he has long since emotionally fled, Jonas is instead faced with the question of his capacity for true human connections.Unwittingly he becomes involved with two expatriate Greek musicians who had self-exiled from their homeland six years before, when the military junta took power, but are now returning to create oppositional energy through the form they know best: traditional Greek poetry set to the music of a composer who's been banned by the brutal and surreal junta. Through the force of their commitment and sacrifice, Jonas is reacquainted with the relation between the heart and the larger world.Jonas is also confronted, sequentially, by two women who in very different ways bring his emotional struggles into focus. One--a Greek-Canadian searching for her father lost somewhere to the depredations of the dictatorship--who seeks to draw him in. The other--an alienated Belgian painter turning her back on a life of artistic and gender frustrations--who holds him away.The novel's lyrically evoked Greek islands are counterpoint to political terror captured with both shuddering intensity and mordant black humor. Shades of Resistance is that rare work of fiction that explores the relationship between the personal and the political, the heightened responses of a man trapped in a moment of history.

San Francisco, 1916. The streets roiling: pitched battles between radical workers and the henchmen of industrial barons, and between a vibrant, largely Italian anarchist milieu and the forces of state and church. All in the shadow of Europe's raging war, and of a push for the US to enter it, a war that resisting workers call "killing and dying for profits." Into this maelstrom arrives Kate Jameson, a novice envoy from Washington tasked to secretly investigate the tenor of war support among San Francisco's business elite. She's also hoping to glimpse her wayward daughter, Maggie, whose last message to Kate had come from there. And, too, Kate is seeking the ghost of her husband Jamey, who fifteen years earlier had landed there upon his return, shattered, from the Philippines war. Arriving back in the city at the same moment is Baldo Cavanaugh, a Sicilian-Irish son of San Francisco whose militant beliefs and special skills have led him time and again to the ragged edges of the city's turbulent history, and to the limits of political violence. And who now must confront the intertwined doubts and demons of his own character, which he'd sought to escape by fleeing the city three years before. This stunning tale explores how these two seemingly disparate people--plus a wide cast of historical characters--become engaged with the city's and nation's turmoil, and with the related complexities of their pasts in Boston, Dublin, London, Cuba, and the Philippines. A vivid picture of a city and a moment, the novel brilliantly reveals the explosive admixture of the deeply personal and the deeply political.

San Francisco, 1916. The streets roiling: pitched battles between radical workers and the henchmen of industrial barons, and between a vibrant, largely Italian anarchist milieu and the forces of state and church. All in the shadow of Europe's raging war, and of a push for the US to enter it, a war that resisting workers call "killing and dying for profits." Into this maelstrom arrives Kate Jameson, a novice envoy from Washington tasked to secretly investigate the tenor of war support among San Francisco's business elite. She's also hoping to glimpse her wayward daughter, Maggie, whose last message to Kate had come from there. And, too, Kate is seeking the ghost of her husband Jamey, who fifteen years earlier had landed there upon his return, shattered, from the Philippines war. Arriving back in the city at the same moment is Baldo Cavanaugh, a Sicilian-Irish son of San Francisco whose militant beliefs and special skills have led him time and again to the ragged edges of the city's turbulent history, and to the limits of political violence. And who now must confront the intertwined doubts and demons of his own character, which he'd sought to escape by fleeing the city three years before. This stunning tale explores how these two seemingly disparate people--plus a wide cast of historical characters--become engaged with the city's and nation's turmoil, and with the related complexities of their pasts in Boston, Dublin, London, Cuba, and the Philippines. A vivid picture of a city and a moment, the novel brilliantly reveals the explosive admixture of the deeply personal and the deeply political.

Afflicted Powers is an account of world politics since September 11, 2001. It aims to confront the perplexing doubleness of the presentits lethal mixture of atavism and new-fangledness. The world careers backward into forms of ideological and geo-political combat that call to mind the Scramble for Africa, and the Wars of Religion. But this brute return of the past is accompanied by an equally monstrous political deployment of (and entrapment in) the apparatus of a hyper-modern production of appearances. Capital is on the move again. In the Middle East and elsewhere it is attempting, nakedly, a new round of primitive accumulation and enclosure.Now, however, it is obliged to do so in unprecedented circumstances. Never before has imperialist victory or defeat depended so much on a struggle for hegemony in the world of images; never before has the dominant world power been subject to real catastrophe in the realm of the spectacle. The present turn to empire and enclosure, what Retort terms military neo-liberalism, is confronted not only by various forms of radical Islam but by a new kind of vanguard armed with the toolkit of spectacular politics. This book attempts to rethink certain key aspects of the current global struggle within this overall perspective, and to provide some critical support for present and future oppositions. Its main themes are the spectacle and September 11, blood for oil, permanent war and illusory peace, the US-Israel relationship, revolutionary Islam, and modernity and terror.