It Could Happen Here: America on the Brink

As "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty", this book has the premonitions of distant thunder, the unsettling tremor of shifting tectonic plates. Americans ignore this book and its important message at their peril.

I can't imagine a more relevant topic right now. Highly recommended. An important addition to your library.

Last week's headlines about Wall Street's latest bonus windfalls once again raise a question most basic: How much greed at the top before America says enough? How much more before some Americans, incensed by the contrast between that greed and their daily struggle to get by, take matters -- rashly -- into their own hands? Might we see, someday soon, unemployed nuclear engineers threatening America with radioactive dirty bombs? Might we experience a home-grown "terrorist act" that ends up collapsing the United States we we know it? Bruce Judson thinks we might -- and we would be wise to listen to his warning. "History teaches that there are limits to the extent of acceptable economic inequality in any society," this senior faculty fellow at Yale University's business school writes in his chilling new book, It Could Happen Here. "We have moved beyond these limits." Judson's slim new volume imagines what might happen if a small group of Americans - infuriated by the demise of the American dream -- decided "to use extreme and abhorrent methods to voice its rage." This gripping and plausible foray into futuristic fiction then segues into a well-argued, totally nonfiction brief against present-day America's extreme -- and growing -- inequality. The brief reads well. A lawyer by training and an entrepreneur by career, Judson knows first-hand how big money gets made in America today. The super rich do not awe him. But their impact does scare him. America's intense concentration of wealth and income over the last three decades, Judson explains, has undermined our middle class economic security. Some eight to ten million families, he notes, now face foreclosure. And nearly 80 percent of America's middle class households lack enough in savings "to survive more than three months at three-quarters of their current spending." "If millions of people -- who believe their anger is justified -- lose their homes, jobs, retirements, and dreams, can we realistically expect continued loyalty to our system?" Judson asks. "In particular, how will angry people react if they feel their lives have been unfairly ruined for the benefit of a small number of people at the top?" Judson, a self-described "ardent capitalist" and "patriot," considers It Could Happen Here "a wake-up call" for a "dysfunctional democracy." The Great Recession, he believes, constitutes just "the first of the dangerous perils that face the nation as a result of unsustainable economic inequality." We obviously need to recover from recession, Judson readily acknowledges, as soon as we can. But economic recovery by itself, he stresses, won't reverse the dynamics -- and dangers -- that our current inequality creates: "We have been placing untenable stress on the middle class for too long, through boom times and recessions, for economic recovery to be the only answer to our ills." The reversal we need, Judson goes on to note, "will require a far more radical realignment of the way wealth is distri

I read the book in a day and a half, because I simply could not put it down. The focus on the impact of rising income inequity and its ability to drive sudden revolutionary events, with specific examples was eye opening, and actually quite riveting. I recommend the book to anyone who is interested in taking a close look at the economic events of the past 30 years and considering a very different outcome than what we have generally considered.

[...] Glens True Story Blog: The lie that is Capitalism I think it's important to establish first that I am a Conservative Christian Republican although some of my views here are contrary to my party's ideology. I do although support true capitalism, but true capitalism in America does not exist and we need to take drastic measures to realign the country with the dream our founding fathers had. I grew up with a great respect for free markets and this notion of Laissez-Faire economics. I was a product of Corporate America and truly believed that we are the America we are because of these principles. Oh how sadly I have been misled. First lets address the context to which Adam Smith described "the invisible hand" and Laissez-Faire Economics. If you do not know the term Laissez-Faire its literal translation is "let the business alone," a philosophy that free markets will always regulate themselves. While this is a brilliant concept it has been grossly distorted through the eyes of Corporate America. Regan's trickle down economics started a landslide of Corporate Power and I would have to argue that Corporate America has become a Monarch, reigning over all the power and all the money, making it harder and harder for middle class Americans to voice their hopes and dreams. When Smith coined this concept it was in direct relationship to local business, that a localized community would regulate supply and demand. Unfortunately it has been the catalyst of income concentration to a minute percentage of the US population, and many middle class Americans do not understand the concepts they so rigidly fight to uphold, myself formally one of them. Bruce Judson does a phenomenal job at walking you through history in his book titled "It can happen here, America on the Brink." A society can not sustain without a middle class, and we have allowed the weakening of Unions, and the creation of a greed machine called Wall St. to erode this middle class. Wall St. operates on one factor, profit at all costs, CEO's being rewarded for layoffs and cost cutting as long as profit was achieved. An obscene example of this was something that I previously supported. I, as did many, said that the AIG bonuses were guaranteed to the AIG executives, and that in the name of capitalism and free markets the government should not take away their bonuses. What a naïve thought! Had the government not bailed out these banks would they have still received their bonuses? Possibly from the bankruptcy judge but even that is debatable. Wall St. has been rewarded for helping destroy the economy of our country. I helped and so did you, were we rewarded? While I do now support the stimulus ( I didn't prior to understanding our history and where we are as a country), I think that we need heavy government regulation on the banking sector. We need to ensure that people, not profit, are considered when making crucial decisions concerning corporations. I believe that federal government involvement