A Satire of American Plutocracy,Lost American Dream,In Greed We Trust

Here are some quotes from the book. As you will quickly see, C. Binal Running, CEO of Porcudyne, Inc., will add startling wisdom to yur pathetic, underachieving lives, and help you also become one of the one in ten thousand super-rich people who rule America.

“…whatever the circumstances, blame someone else.” (from "Blame")

“…wealth creates images of greatness in the minds of those who don’t have it.” (from "Compensation")

“Nothing will perk you up and make you appreciate your own life more than mingling with the masses, the poor, the diseased, and the desperate.” (from "Depression")

“A little government is not a bad thing so long as the right people have access to it.” (from "Government")

“Nothing interferes more with the conduct of good business than nagging feelings.” (from "Sentimentality")

“Options always make better deals than deals, particularly when you can exercise them before you received them.” (from "Stock Options")

“Only fools and poor people pay taxes.” (from "Taxes")

“There is no greater risk to business as usual than a highly organized majority of ordinary people determined to impose their will on those who hold power and own capital.” (from "Unions")

Metrics describe but don't explain the world's financial collapse in 2008. To find causes, you must open the door to the human heart - and examine the climate that has assaulted it for four decades. In Greed We Trust will help you pick the lock.

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 legitimized a movement determined to dismantle government and social services; deregulate corporate business; reduce taxes for capitalists and corporations; kill unions; shrink wages and benefits for workers; export jobs to exploit cheap foreign labor; and unleash greed and empire as legitimate pursuits. The first step was to take capital and power out of the hands of ordinary citizens and put both into the hands of a small class of wealthy, influential, interconnected individuals determined to rule.

In service to this plutocracy, Washington morphed from a capitol into a lobby, and think tanks sprouted like magic mushrooms, each well funded to manufacture opinion supporting the idea of an empire of greed, a New American Century destined to dominate the world for a millennium.

However, in 2008, a few decades short of rapture, this delusion imploded. World finance collapsed and the Masters of the Universe were exposed as financial cannibals. What was the cost?

This ideological climate glorified ruthless individualism at the expense of the common good. It put winning above decency, credentials above performance, and image above substance. It transformed America from a manufacturing titan into a

into a service-and-finance geek. And it converted the Fourth Estate from journalistic independence and excellence into a parrot of the status quo and a sycophant to wealth and power. It took jobs, benefits, money, opportunity and dignity from citizens and gave everything it could to the self-anointed. It learned to lie, cheat, steal and exploit with impunity. Were Enron, Jack Abramoff and Michael Milken just a few bad apples among the best and brightest? Or were they in fact the vanguard of a whole culture of sleaze, self-serving arrogance and mediocrity that spawned Countrywide, Lehman Brothers, AIG, The Carlyle Group, Bernard Madoff and hundreds of like-minded corporations and individuals? Consider the case of George W. Bush, carefully credentialed by Phillips Academy, Yale, Skull and Bones, and the Harvard Graduate School of Business. Was he a shining example of a prince born to lead? Or a shallow, quixotic pretender allowed to mismanage and nearly destroy the republic that supported him?

In order to understand what The American Dream is we must first understand what it is not. Here, In Greed We Trust: Secrets of a Dead Billionaire is the most relevant book in America. With brutal honesty, it deconstructs greed, plutocracy, and the American Dream. And it clarifies, in painfully clever detail, the values of a fictional financial Master who is the logical product of his era and its excesses. Is this man's twisted vision of America, of commerce, and of humanity desirable? Or does it reveal a new standard of banality against which our least defensible aspirations must now be measured?

Read, get angry and enjoy. And as you read let your mind and imagination redefine and revitalize the American Dream -- and not just for yourself and your fellow citizens. It is still, after all, the hope of people everywhere to replace oppression and abuse with liberty, justice and self-government.