Power, Money, Media, & the Courts is the fourth book in the EATMS Productions Civics series, a practical political survival guide for women trying to understand who rebuilt American power, who benefits from the current system, and how private wealth captured public machinery over time. Book 1 mapped the machinery of American government. Book 2 explained parties, ideologies, promises, and political language. Book 3 explained elections, voting, suppression, and civic leverage. This final volume gives readers the ownership map: money, courts, media, donor networks, corporate strategy, regulatory capture, and the long transfer of public power toward private wealth.
Written by Ima Thorne and Luna Max, with an introduction by Esme Mees, this book traces the capture arc from the Powell Memo and Reaganomics through union destruction, campaign finance, Citizens United, court capture, media consolidation, and regulatory capture. It explains how tax policy moved wealth upward, how anti-union politics weakened one of the strongest counterweights to corporate power, how campaign money buys access before voters arrive, and how courts converted concentrated wealth into durable political force. It also shows why the Supreme Court, lower federal courts, legal networks, think tanks, media ownership, and captured agencies are not background institutions. They are the machinery that decides what democracy can still reach.
This is not a civics textbook, campaign manual, or abstract book about oligarchy. It is a field guide to concentrated power in authoritarian America: corporate strategy, donor infrastructure, judicial pipelines, dark money, Super PACs, the Federalist Society ecosystem, the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, Project 250 Years, media framing, regulatory rollback, and the policy language that makes upward transfer sound like freedom, efficiency, family, or common sense. As part of the EATMS Productions catalog of survival guides, systems analysis, and social criticism, this volume gives readers a practical method for reading the capture system without mistaking confusion for complexity.
For readers interested in oligarchy, money in politics, campaign finance, Citizens United, corporate power, media consolidation, court capture, the Supreme Court, regulatory capture, union decline, Reaganomics, the Powell Memo, Project 2025, Project 250 Years, Christian nationalism, women’s rights, authoritarian America, American government, political corruption, and women’s political education, this book offers a clear, blunt, women-centered guide. It does not ask readers to trust the system, worship elections, or confuse performance with structure. It asks them to see who bought the machinery.
