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 21^st 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.