Description
Here’s a fresh look at economic inequality in America. Survival of the Richest scrutinizes how the collective wealth of America has been channeled from the poor and middle class into the hands of a few elitists. American industry has been gutted, with wages and benefits stagnant or reduced, thanks to disastrous trade deals, outsourcing, and the crippling of unions. The Occupy Wall Street movement, and the presidential campaigns of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, reveals how more and more people who are struggling understand that the system is rigged against them.
While Americans have been trained to direct their scorn at welfare recipients and the poor in general, a tiny handful of plutocratic elites have profited on an unfathomable scale through corporate welfare and other perks. Unimaginable salaries and bonuses for the 1%, contrasted by layoffs and reduced pay for the majority of the workforce, along with increasing calls for austerity measures and lowered standards of living, have become the “new normal” in America.
Author Donald Jeffries argues that this record economic inequality is more than an unintended consequence of globalism. In Survival of the Richest, he shows how the consolidation of wealth may well prove to be the greatest conspiracy of all.
Hardback, 280 pages
About the Author
Reviews
“Inequality doesn’t just happen. It is created by deliberate actions (or inactions) of the power elites. Read how they do it in Survival of the Richest.”―Jim Hightower, author, commentator, public speaker and editor of the populist newsletter The Hightower Lowdown
“Donald Jeffries’s Survival of the Richest lays out a road map of just how the rich play the money game, at the expense of the rest of us.”―Len Colodny New York Times bestselling author, Silent Coup: The Removal of a President and Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons from Nixon to Obama
“Don Jeffries is that rarest of historians: a truth-teller about the crimes of the ruling class.”
―Lew Rockwell, former chief of staff for Ron Paul and founder of libertarian website LewRockwell.com
“This book vividly documents our state of economic inequalities and the dramatic redistribution of wealth in the past decades. Unfortunately―as this book proves―that redistribution has been from poor and middle class Americans to the wealthiest One Percent. While mainstream media trains us to resent the recipients of what they term ‘social entitlements,’ Survival of the Richest is a stirring indictment of where our scorn should actually be targeted.”―David Wayne, New York Times bestselling coauthor of Hit List and Corporate Conspiracies: How Wall Street Took Over Washington
“Donald Jeffries has clearly stated what the problem with our economy is, and it’s not the minimum wage or job creation. This is a book every person needs to read to understand the real problems with inequality in our world. He hits it out the park!”―Meria Heller, producer and host of The Meria Heller Show
“Donald Jeffries bravely, and with unsparing astuteness, examines and reveals the corruption beneath the present state of America’s economic imbalances and examines how greedy, plutocratic elites―criminal, dishonest, unscrupulous―have been fleecing the population for decades. The country of Greece is supposedly run by six or seven venal and unprincipled families; in a sense, the same thing can be said of the thieves, shroffs, and mountebanks who have been bilking this nation for years. Wall Street brokers are worse by far than common highwaymen, as are certified banks. If ‘corporations are people,’ as Gov. Mitt Romney insists, then they should all be tried, sentenced, and hanged! Read this book!”
―Alexander Theroux, award-winning author of Darconville’s Cat
“1912: Most of the survivors of the Titanic catastrophe were the first-class passengers. Those traveling in steerage drowned. 2017: The odds favoring the wealthy are even better. As Donald Jeffries reveals, today’s rich not only have more cash, they have more life. If you’re a poor 55-year-old man in America, you could reach 77.6. At 55, a rich American male can expect to last to nearly 90. It’s not Darwin’s survival of the fittest, it’s “natural” selection bought, sold, and corrupted in a world where the rich make all the rules. It’s Survival of the Richest. No matter how much or little you have, this book will piss you off. Better still, it will wise you up to the cash-and-carry realities of riches, poverty, morality, and justice in the twenty-first century.”―Alan Axelrod, author of Full Faith and Credit: The National Debt, Taxes, Spending, and the Bankrupting of America
“In a skillfully researched book Jeffries gets it right: maldistribution of wealth is the biggest problem facing our nation today. It has savaged the poor and working class, endangered the middle class, and created economic anxiety for the 99%, all while the rich grow wealthier and wield more political power. Survival of the Richest is an important book―until we comprehend and confront the cancerous consequences of economic inequality it will continue to eat away at our democracy, the public good, and the American dream.”―Arthur Blaustein, author of Make a Difference and former Chair of the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity
“Survival of the Richest is a shrewd, penetrating study of how income inequality and the unrelenting perpetuation of a permanent underclass has made a mockery of any claim that this country has of calling itself a democracy. It’s an important book, a chronicle of how in every aspect of social life the poor are deprived of an equal chance. Author Donald Jeffries moves from jobs to education to sports. If you’re rich, you get ahead. If you’re poor, you have no chance.”―Joan Mellen, author of Faustian Bargains: Lyndon Johnson and Mac Wallace in the Robber Baron Culture of Texas
“Donald Jeffries sounds the alarm that the wealth inequality gap that grew under President Obama may have entered a dangerous phase where the One Percent ‘rich’ are getting ‘richer’ through the systematic exploitation of unfair advantages, perpetrated by globalist free trade policies that doom the ‘poor’ to get ‘poorer.’ How can a nation remain democratic, Jeffries importantly asks, when nearly 100 million able-bodied Americans of working age in a population of 320 million are unable to function without entitlement largess because they lack the skills, the contacts, and the sophistication to advance in a technologically advanced, global economy?”―Jerome R. Corsi, author of Obama Nation and America for Sale
“Written with clarity and passion, Donald Jeffries take us down the dark winding path of rich versus poor and along the way spares no one. He takes on both sides of the political aisle, giving examples of how both parties are in the pockets of the rich and powerful and how they care little for the least among us. Reading Survival of the Richest was like a cold slap in the face.”―William Matson Law, author In the Eye of History
“Donald Jeffries’ Survival of the Richest asks the questions nobody else is asking about fairness, equity, legacy, and the place of America’s poor in society. Where are the statesmen? Where are the humanitarians? Why do the very rich not invest in the poor or in society like their predecessors did? This is a story that needs to be told. And it is incumbent on all of us to listen.” ―John Kiriakou, author of Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison
“For many, rich is just another four-letter word. . . . Examining topics as diverse as immigration, globalization, government bailouts, and celebrity salaries, Jeffries compiles an abundance of statistical information that could just as easily be used to support or refute conventional wisdom regarding the country’s economic foundation and future. This wide-ranging exploration of wealth accumulation and distribution at times borders on the polemic but will nonetheless provide food for thought and fuel for discussion.―Booklist
