Chuck Collins-Burned by Billionaires exposes political & economic consequences

 We’re living through the Second Gilded Age, a period that has witnessed the rise of billionaires from 15 globally in 1980 to over 800 today, and which may mint its first trillionaire—yes, with a T—before the decade is out. The ultrawealthy daily gain access to new levers of power, yet their monies remain hidden—and untaxed—by virtue of the lawyers, accountants and managers who together constitute the “wealth defense industry.” 

 In Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet, author, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and “upper-class traitor” Chuck Collins exposes the system that allows such inequality to thrive and enables the skewing of our politics and the economic distortion of almost every aspect of our daily lives—from housing to healthcare, taxes to the food system, and education to climate. And finding the very existence of billionaires a policy failure rather than an example of capitalism’s flourishing as some maintain, he offers remedies to thwart the continued amassing of democracy-endangering concentrations of wealth.