Escaping Gilded Cages by James J. Devine describes a path back to progress and prosperity

New Jersey progressive author James Devine published two new books that make a compelling argument: 'From Reagan to Rollerball: The Corporate Coup Against American Democracy' and 'Escaping Gilded Cages: Breaking the Cycle of Concentrated Wealth & Rebuilding the Common Good.'

From Reagan to Rollerball (amazon.com/dp/B0H7QM29BJ) explains where we are, how we got into this mess, and what will happen if Americans do not prevent disaster.

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Escaping Gilded Cages (amazon.com/dp/B0HK7M84GW) offers a remedy for existential crises caused by concentrated private wealth, which has been transforming economic power into political influence for the past five decades.

These two volumes combined offer real hope to a society fractured by media manipulation and battered by decades of unrelenting class warfare waged against workers by the super wealthy plutocratic parasites, who have taken virtually all the economic gains and robbed the rest of us of our birthright.

Both are well written and compelling, but Escaping Gilded Cages stands out as a unique contribution to political literature.

The book is heavy. You hold it, and you know the man did the work. The endnotes run forty pages. Every number has a source. That is the first thing. The second thing is the anger. It is clean anger. Not the kind that burns itself out. The kind that lasts.

Devine starts with two facts. The planet is dying, and we know how to stop it.

The carbon in the air is at four hundred and twenty-five parts per million. The Doomsday Clock is at eighty-five seconds. What's stopping us from saving our world is political. A study looked at seventeen hundred and seventy-nine policy questions over twenty years. When ordinary people wanted one thing, and rich people wanted another, the ordinary people lost. Every time. Near-zero influence. That is the finding. That is the world we live in.

The book, Escaping Gilded Cages by James J. Devine, tells you how we got here. It is not a mystery. It is a set of choices made by men with names. The Powell Memorandum. The tax cuts. The firing of the air traffic controllers. The trade deals. The deregulation. Each one a decision. Each one with a winner and a loser.

The winners got the money. The losers got the debt and the deaths of despair.

Devine writes about Flint, Michigan. A city poisoned by its own government. He writes about a family in Georgia whose spring water is full of forever chemicals. He writes about Cancer Alley in Louisiana, where people knew they were being poisoned for eight years and the system moved at the speed of legal delay. These are not statistics. They are people. Devine knows the difference.

Then he tells you what to do about it. And here is where the book becomes something rare. It is not just a complaint. It is a plan.

The plan is specific. Twenty-five dollars an hour minimum wage, indexed to productivity. A national insurance pool modeled on Medicare. Guaranteed retirement accounts with a three percent real return. A two percent wealth tax on fortunes over fifty million. Three percent over a billion. A financial transaction tax of one-tenth of one percent. Glass-Steagall restored. The monopolies broken up. Student debt cancelled for the people who were cheated by for-profit colleges. The Equal Rights Amendment published. Reparations for slavery. The PACT Act fully funded. Nuclear arms control restored. Eight hundred billion dollars in climate finance over ten years to pay the carbon debt.

You can argue with any one of these. Devine expects you to. He gives you the sources so you can check his work. That is what a serious man does.

The writing about organizing is the heart of the book. He quotes Frederick Douglass. Power concedes nothing without a demand. He quotes Ella Baker. We cannot rest. He quotes Mother Jones. Tell the truth wherever you please. These are not decorations. They are the argument. Better ideas alone have never beaten organized money. The Powell network built fifty years of institutions. The left built a few and let them rust. The remedy is not a better memo. It is a movement.

Devine is honest about what he does not know. He says he does not know if anyone will read the book. He says he does not know if the work will be done in time. He knows only that we can do it and we should. That is the honest place. That is where a man stands when he has stopped pretending.

The book has a poem at the end. It is called "Americans Are Free in an Economic Prison." It is a good poem. It says you are free to rent forever. Free to choose between two health plans that deny the same procedure. Free to work until you die. Free to die without healthcare. The door was never locked. But you were never going anywhere.

That is the truth of the thing. That is what the book knows.

This is not a book that will make you feel good. It is not supposed to. It is a book that will make you see the machinery. The gears. The levers. Who pulls them. Who pays. And what it would take to stop the machine that might kill us all and build something else.

The description of Devine as a "working-class prophet" is apt, but not because he claims special insight. It is because he insists on naming things that the political class prefers to leave anonymous: that the donor class is waging a class war, that the Democratic Party has become a fundraising apparatus for the wealthy, that the road to freedom is not paved with compromise but with the broken chains of those who refused to wait. He writes with the anger of a man who has watched his country be hollowed out and is not willing to pretend otherwise.

Devine writes in the last chapter that the platform is the map and the organized majority is the vehicle and the individual decision to show up is the fuel. That is right. That is how it works. You either do the work, or you do not. The book will not do it for you. But it will tell you where to start.

Read it. Then do something. That is what the man asks. It is worth the time to find out how to save the world.