15 Steps to Corporate Feudalism (BOOK REVIEW)
Fifteen Steps to Corporate Feudalism:
How the Rich Convinced America’s Middle Class to Eliminate
Themselves
by Dennis Marker
One Standard Press
Paperback, $17.00
232 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9837112-0-9
Book
Review by Kam Williams
“Today,
there is little doubt that the U.S.
middle class is shrinking… What most do not know, however, is why. Many believe
it is a combination of bad luck, poor planning, and irresponsible politicians...
[But]
the failure of the U.S.
middle class is the direct and intentional outcome of fifteen separate policies
first advocated during the Reagan administration and implemented over the next
thirty years. The purpose of this book is to explain how and why the U.S. middle
class is being eliminated.”
--
Excerpted from the Introduction (pg. ix)
In recent
years, folks have been falling out of the middle class at a record rate. All it
seems to take is the loss of a job, a home foreclosure or an uninsured illness
for a family to find itself permanently lodged among the ranks of the poor.
How did the
America Dream turn into a never-ending nightmare after what used to be just a temporary
setback? That is the question addressed in depth by Dennis Marker in Fifteen
Steps to Corporate Feudalism: How the Rich Convinced America’s Middle Class to
Eliminate Themselves.
The book is
basically a scathing indictment of the country’s wealthiest 1%, a greedy
corporatocracy that the author alleges has been strategically turning the rest of
us into paupers for several decades. Why? To institute a 21st
Century version of an exploitative, medieval economic system that would reduce
the masses to serfdom while funneling most of the money, resources and means of
production into the hands of a few individuals.
But the
author is more interested in exploring exactly how they managed to achieve this
feat, and he dedicates a separate chapter to each of the fifteen steps that
were involved. These include “Controlling the Media,” “Destroying the Unions,”
“Teaching People to Hate Their Government,” “Deregulating American Business,”
“Destroying Public Education,” and “Conning the Evangelical Church,” to name a
few.
The
author’s persuasive argument inexorably builds to the shocking conclusion that
the ultimate goal of this right-wing revolution is “to bankrupt the United
States” and thereby plunge the populace into such an economic crisis that it
voluntarily accepts the oppressive policies of a New World Order as dictated by
“Disaster Capitalism.” A sobering clarion call to question authority before the
power elite hammers the final nail in the coffin of the rapidly-disappearing
middle class.
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