Hijacked connects deregulation, corporate consolidation, political influence, and inequality in a sweeping examination of how economic power can become political power and what you believe citizens can do about it. Why did you choose Hijacked as the title?

The business community, for at least the past fifty years, has been the prime mover behind all the changes you list in your question, functioning through a multiplicity of funds, agencies, think tanks, lobbying, and organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable. The Constitution was written by our founding fathers as a new kind of government, a government that rejected aristocracy and kingship, that argued that all men are created equal. In the 1950s and 1960s, we were growing closer to realizing that initiative. It strikes me that over the past fifty years, the corporate elite have hijacked our country and taken it down an entirely different, dangerous, and damaging path.

You begin by examining what inequality actually means, and acknowledge that some economic inequality is inevitable. Where do you believe inequality becomes harmful to a democratic society?

A society’s inequality becomes harmful when that inequality harms a significant number of its citizens. Disinterested rational folks can argue about whether that is two tenths of a percent, two percent, five percent, or ten percent of the population, depending on their view about minority rights. But today, when the harm is to more than ninety percent of the population, with a small minority responsible for the damage, inequality has been out of control for at least thirty years and is becoming more so by the month.

Hijacked examines healthcare, housing, education, finance, agriculture, transportation, media, privacy, science, the arts, and many other areas. What did examining them together reveal that studying them separately might not?

I am not an expert in every area. In fact, to begin with, I did not know for sure when the problems I was identifying had started, nor how extensive they were. I discovered that, in nearly every field, the problem began in the mid to late 1970s, and that the impact was pervasive, with very few occupations or disciplines escaping the changes corporations were introducing. I discovered that it wasn’t just that money was becoming the only thing that mattered that if an activity was not remunerative, it did not get addressed properly. It was that the new focus was destroying our society.

After spending so much of the book diagnosing problems, why was it important to conclude with a proposed path forward, and what role do you envision ordinary citizens playing in the reforms you propose?

Clearly, telling people what was happening without providing a practical solution would be unkind and also inaccurate. We do still have the opportunity to vote into office people who are incorruptible and focused on helping the people that vote for them. The major issue is trust. So many promises have been broken that citizens are understandably suspicious of all new promises. Most ordinary citizens don’t have the time to devote to active support of an alternative party, but those who do can poll and represent those who don’t. And the biggest role for ordinary citizens would be to express their wishes and their views. Any viable new party, and any viable new politicians, will need to ask them what they think, by e-mail, on social media, in focus groups, and/or text messages, etc., and respond with policies that represent them. One can imagine that when a bill comes to a committee or comes up in Congress for a vote, the representatives would poll their constituents and vote as they wish–ignoring the lobbyists, pressure groups, and visits from CEOs, because government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people.

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