Escaping Gilded Cages: Breaking the Cycle of Concentrated Wealth & Rebuilding the Common Good - Softcover

Devine, James J

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798174671270

Verlag: Independently published, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

America faces two existential crises at once: a planet warming past the point of no return, and a democracy that no longer responds to the people it claims to serve. James J. Devine argues these are not separate problems. They are one problem, produced by one mechanism—concentrated private wealth converting economic power into political power—and they require one integrated response.

Drawing on the empirical tradition of labor and economic policy research, Devine documents how fifty years of deliberate choices—tax cuts, financial deregulation, union-busting, and trade deals—transferred roughly $60 trillion from the many to the few. He traces the four interlocking mechanisms of political capture: campaign finance, the revolving door, judicial capture, and the filibuster, reinforced by a disinformation infrastructure pioneered by tobacco and perfected by fossil fuels.

But this is not a book of lament. It is a blueprint. Across twenty chapters, Devine lays out a detailed, evidence-based agenda: 100% clean electricity by 2035, Medicare-for-all-style universal coverage, a $25 minimum wage indexed to productivity, a wealth tax, restoration of Glass-Steagall, the PRO Act, the Equal Rights Amendment, reparations, voting rights restoration, Supreme Court reform, AI governance, and payment of America's $800 billion carbon debt. Every proposal is grounded in historical precedent, peer-reviewed evidence, or policies already working in comparable democracies.

The book's most important argument comes last: better arguments alone have never overcome concentrated power. The gap between these policies and current law is a gap of power, not persuasion. Devine closes with a rigorous account of what actually builds power—face-to-face relational organizing, rebuilt unions, cooperatives, and permanent electoral infrastructure—anchored in the examples of Ella Baker, Frederick Douglass, and Mother Jones.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Independently published
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798174671270
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 258
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Printed by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.de/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxemburg