I may have picked up "Wealth And Democracy" a full decade ago, after hearing Kevin Phillips on NPR. Since then I had reasons to pick something other than a history book on economics, which turns out to be as fun as it sounds. Mr. Phillips is a bit of an odd duck in that he used to be a Republican campaign strategist (working for Nixon), then later flipped to what I'll call a populist point of view. The majority of the book concerns the economic and political impacts of bubbles throughout the history of America and previous global powers. It was written after the tech bubble, but before the banking bubble of 2008. This was particularly interesting as he basically showed it was the working class that took the majority of hits in each case. In other words, while the duration of the Great Recession is notable, the fact that the middle class paid almost all of the price is of no surprise. After some bubbles U.S. citizens took action against the concentration of wealth in the top 1%. We have yet to see a groundswell in the aftermath of the bank collapse. In my opinion this is because American Christianity supports wealth going to the top, just like in the kingdoms they supported throughout the Dark Ages.