UNITED STATES OF OLIGARCHY: How America's Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy, what it says on the tin

UNITED STATES OF OLIGARCHY: How America's Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy
CASEY MICHEL
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A staggering examination of how America's wealthiest infiltrated the government and allied with dictators, transforming the U.S. from democracy to oligarchy.

For years, a small group of billionaires has amassed increasing power, steering American politics for their own benefit. Many of these figures are familiar. There’s Elon Musk, who has used his wealth to help place Donald Trump back in the White House. There’s Mark Zuckerberg, who has used his resources to transform America into his own digital playground. There’s Jared Kushner, who has used family connections to gain more political power than he ever dreamed of.

There is only one word to describe such extreme levels of wealth, avarice, and political control: Oligarchy. But the oligarchs are not working alone. From China to Russia to Saudi Arabia and beyond, many of these men have cultivated alliances with America’s most notorious adversaries, opening the doors for autocrats around the world to sink their teeth into the U.S. Placing profit over patriotism, they have transformed into vectors of influence for some of the world’s most repulsive dictatorships, all of whom are trying to create a world dominated by imperialism and tyranny. Connecting everything from the devastation in Ukraine to destruction in Gaza to destabilization in Greenland, these oligarchs have transformed American policy and American politics into their own private fiefdoms, regardless of what Americans actually want.

In United States of Oligarchy, Casey Michel illuminates a story decades in the making, from the earliest efforts to corral and combat American oligarchs, to the new crop of individuals monopolizing American democracy and making the world safe for dictatorship – all for their own benefit.

The oligarchs have risen, and are attempting to reign. The only question remaining is whether or not it’s too late to stop them.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I have no words. Spoken to introduce hundreds of them. I have no words adequate to the task of conveying the sickened terror this read left me with. More accurate, less punchy....

The U.S. is on a terrible downward slide from a not-great low point we've been heading for the entirety of the twenty-first century. I'm shocked every time I see the receipts Author Michel, a practicing journalist, brings to the table to back up the quite appalling allegations he presents. From the author's bio on St. Martin's Press's website:

His writing on offshoring, foreign lobbying, authoritarianism, and illicit wealth has appeared in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The Washington Post, among other outlets, and he has appeared on NPR, BBC, CNN, and MSNBC, among other stations. He has also testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the links between illicit financial networks and national security. He received his Master’s degree in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies from Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, and he is currently sanctioned by the Russian regime for his work.

It's obvious from this CV that Author Michel already knew what he was up against, what his story needed to be. As someone who understands the demands of journalism at a high level...look at those bona fides...this story could feel as though it was less a book, more a fattened-up magazine article.

There is some justice in this perception. It really is a topic that badly needs the timeliness of journalistic publishing because the issues addressed are so egregiously impacting the immediate, day-to-day politics of the US. That kind of reporting needs outlets, though, and outlets of the caliber capable of supporting reporting at this level are not common; the ones willing to grapple with the repugnant, malignant spread of The Oligarchy℠ less common still. Their owners are among the...people...reported on.

The book as written is a series of interconnected profiles of people and entities as interconnected as is conceivable for them to be. That they are based in any given country is utterly irrelevant. Their physical locations aren't determinative, their loyalty is to an ideology (greed) and it trumps any other ties. Their ties to each other are the sole important ones, their actions and influence uses make perfect sense through that lens.

As a book-reading experience, Author Michel has made every effort to present his impeccable research in the most fluid manner possible. It works. It's a hard book to put down, though for my health's sake I put it down regularly. I have that visceral response to writing about greed a lot.

It is not a book that will change closed minds, it's too fact-heavy to do that reliably and repeatably. Those with an emotional allegiance to the purported goals of the...people...reported on in here, the safety security prosperity guff they spout, will not come to the sudden understanding that their safety security prosperity is of no interest to the oligarchs, all the safety security prosperity "They" are interested in is "Their" own. It is a book for those who know there's something very bad happening, and they need to know what it is to take effective action.

This is where UNITED STATES OF OLIGARCHY: How America's Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy shines. One can't resist deleterious action without knowing where it's coming from, who's committing it, and it very much helps to have an inkling why. All the way through this chronicle of sordid greed, massive stupidity, and genuine malevolence, Author Michel presents his receipts in such a way as to make we-the-reader better able to see the interconnectedness of the oligarchy.

Because only when your perspective is outside the system can you identify the system's tricks and misdirections, thus its weak points. Cyclops, one eyed as he was, could never comprehend three-dimensional attack.

THE REVERSE CENTAUR'S GUIDE TO LIFE AFTER AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late, latest Doctorow klaxon

THE REVERSE CENTAUR'S GUIDE TO LIFE AFTER AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late
CORY DOCTOROW
MCD x FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Whether you want to criticize, kill, or use AI, you have to get through the hype and uncover the real story.

Start with labor: in automation theory, a centaur is a person who chooses to use technology to help them do the things that matter to them. A reverse centaur is a person who has been conscripted to serve as a helper for a machine, at an inhuman, machine pace: a driver made to deliver all day long, nonstop; a warehouse worker made to work without food or bathroom breaks; a programmer made to crank out impossible amounts of code. As Doctorow says: it's not enough to ask what the technology does—we have to understand who it's doing it for and who it's doing it to.

The intended audience for AI hype isn't the people who are forced to use AI. The AI show is a performance staged for bosses and investors. Investment bankers claim AI will to be worth more than $16 trillion: a number that only makes sense if AI replaces vast swathes of the wage-earning human workforce. To justify that level of "value," every story about AI must be presented as inevitable, world-changing disruption. Even the tales of the robot apocalypse are a calculated attempt to bolster the fearsome power of AI.

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. When the AI bubble bursts, what will we salvage? Is there something in the wreckage that everyday people will find useful? In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI—as he so successfully did in Enshittification—Doctorow recounts both how we found ourselves in this dire situation and how we can get through it, to a life "after" AI in which the tools work for us, not the other way around.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The argument I myownself have against "AI" (which isn't and won't be intelligent the way humans are) is financial. There is an AI bubble running right now that's gifted us the utterly brummagem world's first trillionaire. Look a little more deeply into SpaceX's IPO, you'll see how much of it's built on AI (which was partially trained on stolen US Government data via the little dickweeds from DOGE).

It really looks a lot like a gigantic pump-and-dump scheme when one reads Author Cory's work as digested and documented in this scathing book. He's been in the trenches reporting on tech matters for what feels like forever. Enshittification, anyone? It must make the guy a crazy person to present his deeply researched, well sourced and informed conclusions to general apathy. It lights fires under some of us, my dude, so please don't stop!

Especially relevant to my eagerness to share this book with all y'all is the centering of "AI"'s intended impact on labor. It's Author Cory's clear statement that the bubble's partly fueled by tech scum's intense desire to destroy any power of workers over their work, the conditions and rewards thereof, and the very nature of employment as reconstituted post-Great Depression. Wealth inequality is something "AI" is designed to entrench.

I hope a skilled human copyeditor went over this book after my DRC was created. There are some amusing errors of fact that, honestly, trouble me a bit, eg referring to trustbusting under FDR instead of his distant cousin TR. Some other errors niggled at me, but...well...consider the subject matter, maybe these sorts of issues are proof positive of the validity of Author Cory's thesis...?

I'm very serious when I say this: reading this book can give you tools to manage your personal interactions with the "AI" being rammed down our unwilling throats to further enrich the riches scum ever to rise to the controlling positions they're now it. It can do this by alerting the complacent or avoidant reader to what is actually at risk in this economic bubble's inflation.

An easy prose style delivers a hard-to-fathom message. It's one of my favorite reads of 2026. Please get one and read it. Libraries are very likely to have copies in stock now. Of course, if you can, making the purchase for your own shelves or devices is the best way to support Author Cory in his quest to wake us all up to the threats...and the opportunities knowing they're there present...to our essential human nature.

MOTHER OF CAPITAL: How Rent Gave Birth to Modernity, necessary reading

MOTHER OF CAPITAL: How Rent Gave Birth to Modernity
MATTHEW COSTA
Pluto Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$31.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five, because of the learning curve involved

The Publisher Says: Rent, or unearned income, is a pervasive concept in contemporary economics. Economists of all stripes see today’s global economy as riddled with harmful rents, but most deny these are intrinsic to capitalism, and insist they can be eliminated with the right policies. It begs the question, why is rent theory so critical of the present but so optimistic about the future?

In Mother of Capital, Matthew Costa delves into the intellectual and social history of rent to solve this puzzle. Centring rent as the engine of capitalism’s historical emergence in medieval Europe, he offers a groundbreaking, systematic history of rent and rent theory. The book also traces the history of resistance to rent from below, and unearths a neglected body of critical rent theory.

Weaving complex strands of social and intellectual history into a vivid, lively, and original explanation of how the society we live in came to be, Costa makes a bold intervention into contemporary debates about the origins and future of capitalism, the nature of social change, and of history itself.

Matthew Costa is an Australian political economist. He has been a sessional lecturer and honorary associate in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is currently a Director at New South Wales Treasury, and was previously an economic policy advisor in Australia’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If you're willing to put in the work, this is a good way to understand how capitalism got organized around the concept of extraction. Author Costa is an academic. It shows. You'll need your dictionary handy. The concepts he's explaining in these sophisticated words are, once you've familiarized yourself with the vocabulary, strikingly simple to assimilate. The end result of the read is to make available to the reader a different, probably new, angle of viewing and interpreting the modern world.

Ideological principles that go unchallenged in spite of their deleterious effects on humanity appear in stark relief when this angle of viewing is assumed. It is an angle I encourage you to investigate for yourself...don't trust me, or anyone else, to give you from On High the One True Vision of the world. Acquire a bit of knowledge from a lot of sources. This source is one whose angle of view you won't find in the huge mass of economic-discussion sources in the mainstream. Once you get your head around the light this book sheds on the system we all live within, you will understand why.

It's worth making the effort. It *is* an effort. I encourage you to fight the innerer Schweinehund, get off your mental pillow, and learn something new as painlessly as is possible. The value of the perspective this book offers you on the world as it is can't be overstated.

THE PRICE FOR THEIR POUND OF FLESH: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, capitalism has a lot to answer for

THE PRICE FOR THEIR POUND OF FLESH: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation
DAINA RAMEY BERRY
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America

In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full "life cycle," historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating "ghost values" or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools.

This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry's exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples' experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Reaching out from these pages, they compel the reader to bear witness to their stories, to see them as human beings, not merely commodities.

A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Almost ten years ago, I read this appalling chronicle of the profit-and-loss mentality as applied to human beings.

It horrified and appalled me.

Cliometrics, the science of statistical analysis applied to databases of historical origin (eg, census data, tax rolls), is a discipline we've only developed in the past half-century or so. The wealth of data regarding enslaved people collected by different governments and organizations has made tracing the stark outlines of how the property impacted the economy; Author Daina Ramey Berry had to come along before someone got up the support and the courage...it definitely took a lot to do this work in a post-Ferguson/George Floyd world...to merge the statistical analysis of the past with the stories of the people who lived it.

No, it's not a breezy little bagatelle to read. It is a work of solid, enduring value to historians, and to historical researchers in economics and medicine and sociology and anthropology. I'm not going to apply the "a-word" to it, you know the one; it sends all y'all's wallets into torpor. Instead I'll note that the style's readable, there's flashes...rare, but there...of humor; and for the non-fiction snobs, there's no getting away from the fact that it's got deep roots in the primary and secondary sources.

There are quite a number of period illustrations to, um, liven things up. I found them somewhat distracting, which could be good when I was in a darker passage, or bad, if the illustration was cheerless. I'm glad on balance to have them included.

WHO KNOWS YOU BY HEART, layered storytelling...in the Satanic second person

WHO KNOWS YOU BY HEART
C.J. FARLEY
William Morrow (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Part social thriller, part modern love story, Who Knows You by Heart is a sly, witty, and endlessly discussable tale of Big Tech, new money, relationships, race, and discovering what’s real in an age of artificial intelligence.

Octavia Crenshaw, a Jamaican-American coder living in Manhattan, is broke, burned out, and haunted by her parents’ deaths. Desperate to pay off some debts, she ditches her nonprofit job for a high-paying gig at Eustachian Inc., a Big Tech company that specializes in audio entertainment. Language, communication, human connection—these are the markets Eustachian wants to revolutionize...and dominate.

Octavia finds herself swept up in the world of the Tech Titans, with its lure of instant riches and its seemingly limitless future. But as one of Eustachian’s very few Black employees, Octavia is uncomfortably aware of things that seem to escape her unexplained tech glitches, cryptic remarks, a mysterious secret floor in the corporation’s gleaming headquarters.

But she sets her suspicions aside when she’s recruited by another Black coder—the infuriating but attractive Walcott—to collaborate on a secret project code-named Zion. Zion is a new kind of AI-powered storytelling, one that’s programmed to be free from the racist and sexist biases that plague other AI products. Zion could launch Eustachian into a bold new future and make its developers super rich while righting all kinds of injustices. Octavia and Walcott’s excitement over their creation sets off romantic sparks between the two of them, until they discover a toxic secret about their employer—something that they can’t unlearn, or overlook, but must overcome.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Told in second person, so no possibility for anything above four of five stars exists. A Columbia educated (as we're reminded often) Black woman succumbs to the lure of tech money in this romance-tinged technothriller. It's very much a game of two halves, as the beginning sets up the circumstances of Octavia's decision to accept cold capitalist reality and take a high-paying, not likely to be fulfilling job in order to buy her way out of debt...much of which was inherited from her mother, thus involving Octavia in debt peonage.Fortunately for her a megacompany, Eustachian, Inc.'s, testing algorithm taps her as A Talent.

As witty, obsevant Octavia spends time in Eustachian, Inc., we get the deeply uneasy sense of "offness" that a thriller needs to make it exciting. The author chooses to make this a very extended part of the book, not igniting the thriller part until Walcott, the love interest/cospirator with excellent aims, appears far too near the halfway point. This is also when the language shifts registers as technobabble (for all of me, anyway) predominates from here on out. I perked up, though, because the stated aim of these two Black folks in a lily-white tech company staffed by tech bros is to subvert the systemic racism and misogyny from within using coding skills.

As this is exactly what I think keeps Aynholes awake at night and causes them to refuse DEI anything with all their might, I was so down with this! Especially since I was being tenderized by the (for white people) immersion into Black culture, use of Black contributions to the world, and centering of a Black woman in a plot about confronting and subverting racism and misogyny.

You'll have noticed the incomplete fourth star. I was a bit surprised by Author Farley's complete absence of Asian characters in a novel centering race-based prejudice. Historical reckoning with racism and combating is perpetuation is very much incomplete without more inclusion. Still, It's not fatal as flaws go, nowhere near as guaranteed to put me off as Satanic second-person narration.

I would've relegated this novel to a short review until I got to the final chapter. A summation of the extreme dangers inherent in AI's development *at*all* left me slightly winded from the emotional ooof as the gut-punch landed.

For that alone I hope you'll read the book. (I won't forgive the second-personning waterboard torture, though.)

THE PARADOX HOTEL, rollicking good time-travel story

THE PARADOX HOTEL
ROB HART
Ballantine Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$4.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An impossible crime. A detective on the edge of madness. The future of time travel at stake.

January Cole’s job just got a whole lot harder.

Not that running security at the Paradox was ever really easy. Nothing’s simple at a hotel where the ultra-wealthy tourists arrive costumed for a dozen different time periods, all eagerly waiting to catch their “flights” to the past.

Or where proximity to the timeport makes the clocks run backward on occasion—and, rumor has it, allows ghosts to stroll the halls.

None of that compares to the corpse in room 526. The one that seems to be both there and not there. The one that somehow only January can see.

On top of that, some very important new guests have just checked in. Because the U.S. government is about to privatize time-travel technology—and the world’s most powerful people are on hand to stake their claims.

January is sure the timing isn’t a coincidence. Neither are those “accidents” that start stalking their bidders.

There’s a reason January can glimpse what others can’t. A reason why she’s the only one who can catch a killer who’s operating invisibly and in plain sight, all at once.

But her ability is also destroying her grip on reality—and as her past, present, and future collide, she finds herself confronting not just the hotel’s dark secrets but her own.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Witty, fun dialogue describing a very standard plot. I'm not complainig, I'm explaining. If you like our Unstuck heroine,January Cole, you'll like the whole effort. I liked her; I think most of y'all might as well. If you're not all lemon-puckered about SF, you might already know Author Rob's work from The Warehouse. (Plenty of subtext in that sentence if you know what you're looking for.)

"Unstuck"? Um, well, yeah...it's a time-travel book, featuring some yucky trillionaire types without morals or scruples, who can afford their very own access to time travel:

“There’s this saying, about people who are born on third base and think they hit a triple,” I tell him. “About the way people inherit wealth and power and think that not only did they earn it, but they deserve it. We deal with a different sort in this place. People who were born on third base and think they built the stadium.”

A consequence of developing time travel is that some people come "Unstuck" from their roots in...whatever Time is...hence are "Unstuck." Think The Time Traveler's Wife, or Everything Everywhere All at Once. Like all the best time-travel stories, those and this one are about bigger things, grief, the idea of inequality, the process of identity versus the certainties most of us crave for identity to provide...y'know, Life.

Author Rob digs in, plays it out, makes us care while taking our little teeny Stuck selves through a mad, whirling, loud maelstrom of voices and ideas. January lost Mena, grieves for her, but...what does loss really mean to someone Unstuck? Why is everything everywhere here and why is now all at once? With time crimes to solve, security professional January needs to track everyone and through the everywhere that is the Paradox Hotel...which is being sold in the process of the US Government privatizing the ability to time travel, just to add some more complexity.

And who's the dead guy in room 526 that no one else can see?

All of these are questions January needs to solve/resolve. It's the only focus she has that can override her desperate, raging grief for Mena. And it might keep her employed at the Paradox Hotel.

And alive. All because she's Unstuck, so the only one who *can* do it all.

I don't offer a fifth star because the humor is often bitter, sometimes forced, and always facetious. I resonate with most of it. I love Jodi Taylor's emotionally intense, very funny books; they're happy humor, laughing...sometimes mordantly...together with the story. In Author Rob's work, we stand outside and laugh at things with January. It can feel off-putting. So no fifth star for you.

It's still a really good time for the right mood, the right reader, the right moment. Look into it!

EMPTY VESSEL: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge, the best kind of economic microhistory

EMPTY VESSEL: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge
IAN KUMEKAWA
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

LISTEN TO THE AUTHOR ON SMARTY PANTS!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The rise of globalization and financialization as seen from a barge—one Swedish barge, to be exact, built in 1979

What do a barracks for British troops in the Falklands War, a floating jail off the Bronx, and temporary housing for VW factory workers in Germany have in common? The Balder, a single barge that served all three roles. Though the name would eventually change to Finnboda 12. And then to Safe Esperia. And later on, to the Bibby Resolution. And after that . . . in short, a vessel with so many names, and so many fates, that to keep it in our sights—as the protagonist of this fascinating economic parable—Ian Kumekawa has no choice but to call it, simply, the Vessel.

Despite its sturdy steel structure, weighing 9,500 deadweight tons, the Vessel is a figure as elusive and abstract as the offshore market it comes to a world of island tax havens, exploited labor forces, free banking zones, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and mass incarceration, where even the prisoners are held offshore. Fitted with modular shipping containers, themselves the product of standardized global trade, the ship could become whatever the market demanded. Whether caught in an international dispute involving Hong Kong, Nigeria, Indonesia, and the Virgin Islands—to be settled in an English court of law—or flying yet another foreign “flag of convenience” to mask its ownership—the barge is ever a container for forces much larger than even its hulking self.

Empty Vessel is a jaw-dropping microhistory that speaks volumes about the global economy as a whole. In following the Vessel—and its Sister Vessel, built alongside it in Stockholm—from one thankless task to the next, Kumekawa connects the dots of a neoliberal world order in the making, where regulation is for suckers and “Made in USA” feels almost quaint.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I love microhistories. They're so sweeping. They explain so much of life, and politics, and economics. Marc Levinson's terrific THE BOX: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, for a foundational read in this subject, is another sweeping microhistory to read and enjoy. Or maybe "value" is a better word; the prose in a microhistory is of secondary importance. Clarity is, or should be, the author of a microhistory's primary aim.

Author Kumekawa, Harvard historian by day, read that lesson, internalized it, and applies it to every piece of this complex-but-not-complicated story of the modern world using one barge's life history. The interconnectedness of the global economy, the ways and means of the greedy to avoid scrutiny...always, always it boils down to greed...and detailing the astonishing accumulation of profit from unglamourous quotidian needs-meeting.

What makes the story of a floatel/mobile military barracks/overflow prison as engrossing in this book is the carefully constructed mental diagram of interconnections of the barge's redesigns and refits and destinations. It was, however, that very complexity that knocked off my fifth star. Just too much work needed to follow them all to derive the full import of his points will cost even the most felicitous of writers a star. Shopping for the least profit-trimming places to "register" the barge...that's code for "who will take a small enough bribe for it to be cheaper than actual safety maintenance?"...as seaworthy and owned by a legitimate business has kept the author's research interesting. I expect his search history caused the FBI, NSA, and other initialism-yclept shadow dwellers a good deal of curiosity.

Why I myownself want you to read it is that it uses something very simple as a lens to focus attention on the quiet parts of capitalism that very badly need saying out loud. The money the owners of this barge collected was never huge, but was "protected" from taxation so greater in effect than simple face value. It is the fundament...double sense very much intended...of international capital's business model.

In case you're new here, I do not subscribe to the "greed is good" mindset.

Author Kumekawa's done us a solid in getting curious one day when he heard of a prison barge moored in New York City's river. (I think it's the East River, but can't be sure...could be the Bronx River, could be Long Island Sound, but I'm too lazy to look it up.) Where it's led him is the place I hoped it would go: The bank lobby where the capitalsts hide their ill-got gains from the people whose labor produces them.

Good choice for a read in the present political climate.