Blog Archives
Federal Debt Essentials: What Every Citizen Should Know
Tom Mast’s Federal Debt Essentials is a compact, plainspoken primer on the size, trajectory, and consequences of the U.S. federal debt. Adapted from a series of Substack posts written between June 2025 and January 2026, the book is meant to give ordinary citizens enough grounding in the subject to understand why Mast considers the debt urgent and to press elected officials for action. He starts with basic definitions, then builds his case through federal spending and revenue figures, debt-to-GDP measurements, interest costs, Social Security and Medicare obligations, and Congressional Budget Office projections. Charts and data from organizations such as the CBO and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation do much of the explanatory work, so the reader gets something closer to a short civic handbook than an academic treatment of public finance.
The book’s central argument is consistent from beginning to end: persistent deficits are pushing federal debt toward increasingly risky levels, rising interest payments are consuming money that could support other government priorities, and Congress has both the constitutional responsibility and the practical obligation to deal with the problem. Mast is especially effective when he translates large numbers into terms that are easier to grasp. In one section, for example, he calculates the estimated 2025 deficit and interest expense on a per-person basis and notes that the government is borrowing about 28 percent of what it spends. That kind of framing makes a subject measured in trillions of dollars feel much less abstract.
Mast also spends considerable time moving from diagnosis to a proposed remedy. His preferred approach is an expert Congressional Commission charged with developing a comprehensive fiscal plan that considers taxes, spending, entitlement programs, economic growth, public acceptance, and long-term safeguards together. He argues that outside experts could give the project the concentration and technical depth that Congress itself often lacks, while Congress would retain responsibility for turning the resulting plan into law. The book’s origin as a sequence of articles shows in its recurring warnings, repeated statistics, quotations, and restatements of the problem, but that repetition also gives it the feel of a sustained public-information campaign. A brief fictional news report set in 2029, imagining a failed Treasury auction and soaring borrowing costs, adds a more dramatic illustration of the consequences Mast fears.
I’d recommend Federal Debt Essentials to people who know the federal debt is important but haven’t spent much time learning how deficits, interest costs, entitlement spending, bond markets, and Congressional budgeting fit together. It should also appeal to civic groups, community discussion groups, introductory public-policy classes, and voters who want a relatively quick foundation before digging into more technical work. Mast clearly wants readers to leave the book with a sense of personal responsibility, not just a collection of statistics: his closing sections ask citizens to understand the risks, persuade others to take them seriously, and urge Congress to establish a fiscal commission. For that audience, the book succeeds as an accessible call for sustained attention to a complicated problem that Mast believes will become considerably harder the longer the country waits to address it.
Pages: 73 | ASIN : B0GX3B533B
Congress’s Quagmire Essentials: What Every Citizen Should Know
Tom Mast’s Congress’s Quagmire Essentials is a compact work of political advocacy built from a series of Substack essays written between May 2025 and February 2026. Its central concern is Congress’s persistent difficulty in addressing major national problems, especially federal debt, fiscal management, immigration, retirement and medical programs, and the balance of power between Congress and the executive branch. Mast argues that these failures are connected. He traces them to a political system dominated by two parties whose incentives favor reelection, party control, and confrontation. The book’s clearest statement of the standard Mast wants Congress to meet is also one of its most effective: “What voters want and deserve from the members of Congress is civility, respect for their colleagues, collaboration in solving problems, and results.”
The book develops this argument methodically, moving from evidence of congressional dysfunction to Mast’s account of its underlying causes. Chapters examine careerism, partisan animosity, polarization, block voting, the decline of regular order, gerrymandering, safe seats, low-turnout primaries, and non-proportional election results. Mast repeatedly distinguishes symptoms from root causes, identifying electoral methods as the most important source of the problem. This gives the book a strong problem-solving structure. Rather than treating congressional behavior simply as a matter of personalities or ideology, Mast asks what institutional incentives produce that behavior. His discussion of regular order is especially useful because it shows what congressional deliberation can look like when committee work, hearings, amendments, debate, and member participation have meaningful roles.
Mast’s preferred remedy is greater political competition, with particular emphasis on a Final-Five voting system. Under the model he describes, voters of all affiliations would participate in a single primary, multiple candidates from the same party could run, the top five candidates would advance, and ranked-choice voting would determine a majority winner in the general election. The proposal fits naturally with the book’s broader thesis that the structure of elections shapes the conduct of legislators. Mast also connects electoral reform to fiscal reform, including his support for a federal fiscal commission and longer-term budgeting discipline. Throughout, charts, polling figures, historical references, constitutional provisions, and examples from recent congressional practice give the argument a practical, civic-minded character. The book reads less like an academic political science study than a citizen’s briefing designed to explain a problem, identify causes, and lead readers toward specific action.
The book’s greatest strength is the consistency of its purpose. Mast writes with urgency, but he keeps returning to institutional reform and civic responsibility. His recurring insistence that citizens retain ultimate responsibility for the system gives the closing chapters their force: “We voters are in charge in America; the monkey is on our backs to get the quagmire problems fixed.” Because the material originated as individual posts, some arguments, statistics, quotations, and themes recur frequently, giving the book a deliberately cumulative quality. That repetition reinforces Mast’s central message: congressional dysfunction is a structural problem that requires sustained public attention. Congress’s Quagmire Essentials is therefore best understood as a concise civic argument for electoral competition, responsible fiscal governance, stronger congressional procedure, and greater citizen engagement in shaping the institutions that govern them.
Pages: 110 | ASIN: B0GX2WJTST
Society’s Inequality
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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In Hijacked, Alan Cohen provides a diagnosis to elucidate America’ s shift from a nation “of, by, and for the people” to one dominated by corporate interests, financial elites, and entrenched oligarchies. Through vivid case studies—from the corporatization of medicine to the consolidation and monopolization of finance, agriculture, the media, housing, politics, etc. — Cohen exposes the mechanisms that have hollowed out our democracy while prioritizing profit over citizens’ well-being.
But diagnosis is only the first step. Cohen outlines a path to recovery: a new, transparent, and decentralized political movement capable of restoring equality, opportunity, and the practical problem-solving spirit envisioned by the Founding Fathers.
Hijacked is both a wake-up call and a roadmap for citizens ready to reclaim their country.
Hijacked
Alan Cohen’s Hijacked: How Deregulated Large Corporations with the Collusion of the R and DNC Have Absconded with Equality, Democracy, and Freedom, and How to Get Them Back is an ambitious work of political and economic criticism built around a straightforward concern: who actually exercises power in the United States, and who benefits from it? Cohen argues that over roughly the past fifty years, large corporations and wealthy interests have gained increasing influence over government while ordinary citizens have lost economic security, political influence, and equality of opportunity. He approaches this subject as someone who believes strongly in capitalism but also believes capitalism requires active government oversight to remain competitive and socially useful. The result is a book driven less by party loyalty than by Cohen’s conviction that concentrated economic power has distorted both major political parties. He describes the book as a selective introduction drawing together hundreds of sources on inequality and corporate behavior, and that description captures its character well. It’s essentially a very large argument assembled from history, economics, politics, journalism, and case studies.
One of the book’s most effective choices is to begin by asking what inequality actually means and how much of it a society should accept. Cohen acknowledges that differences in ability, responsibility, effort, and circumstance will naturally produce some inequality. His deeper concern is equality of rights, opportunity, treatment under the law, political influence, and access to economic security. From there, Hijacked builds its central case that markets don’t operate independently of government. Laws establish everything from minimum wages and bankruptcy procedures to union rights, taxation, corporate charters, environmental standards, and financial regulations, so political decisions inevitably shape economic outcomes. Cohen argues that decades of deregulation have steadily changed those rules in favor of large corporations and wealthy individuals. This historical framework is important because it keeps the book from treating present-day inequality as an isolated problem. Cohen places it in a much longer struggle between concentrated wealth and democratic power, moving through ancient societies, the American founding, the rise of corporations, the Gilded Age, the New Deal, postwar prosperity, and the turn toward deregulation beginning in the late twentieth century.
The middle of Hijacked is where its scale really becomes apparent. Cohen moves through pollution, climate change, corporate welfare, military contracting, privatization, food production, medicine, pharmaceuticals, finance, law, housing, education, the arts, retail, transportation, privacy, labor, media, science, and other parts of everyday life. His purpose is cumulative. He wants readers to see these subjects as connected expressions of the same underlying problem. The section on corporate welfare is especially revealing of his method. Cohen surveys tax advantages, subsidies, contracts, bailouts, bankruptcy protections, liability protections, failures of regulation, and other mechanisms that he believes transfer wealth and risk from the public to large corporations. From there he turns to what he calls the destruction of businesses, institutions, and professions, examining how corporate consolidation can alter the priorities of industries that once operated according to professional, civic, or local values. Reading these sections can feel like moving through an enormous case file. Cohen is interested in accumulation, patterns, and connections, and the sheer number of examples is part of his argument.
Cohen writes with urgency and with a strong personal point of view, so readers are rarely left wondering what conclusion he wants them to draw. At his best, he takes subjects that are usually discussed separately and makes their relationships easier to see. A discussion of deregulation leads naturally into corporate influence, which leads into campaign financing, regulatory capture, weakened professional independence, and growing inequality. He also spends considerable time challenging what he considers misleading cultural narratives about free markets, government, taxation, privatization, corporate efficiency, upward mobility, and the political identities of the two major parties. His style is closer to an extended civic argument than a detached academic study. That gives Hijacked energy, but it also means the reader is continually being asked to evaluate Cohen’s interpretation of a very large collection of evidence. The book rewards an engaged reader who’s willing to follow hundreds of examples and pause occasionally to consider where the evidence is strongest, where a conclusion is more interpretive, and how the pieces fit into the broader thesis.
I think Cohen wants Hijacked to produce political action. His proposed answer is an alternative party organized around what he repeatedly calls government “of, by, and for the people,” with reducing inequality and limiting concentrated corporate power as its central commitments. He argues that reform efforts in health care, environmental protection, labor rights, education, voting rights, and numerous other areas keep encountering the same political obstacles, so people working on separate causes would gain more by joining forces to change who controls government. Whether readers embrace that solution or reach a different conclusion, the book makes clear why Cohen believes structural political change has to accompany economic reform. I’d recommend Hijacked most strongly to politically engaged readers who are interested in economic inequality, corporate power, regulation, American political history, and the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It will especially appeal to readers who enjoy big-picture nonfiction that gathers material from many fields and tries to turn it into a single explanation of how contemporary America got where it is. Even when readers disagree with Cohen, there’s plenty here to argue with, think about, and investigate further.
Pages: 628 | ASIN : B0H8W5SMSX
There Once Was an Idea Called America
Richard Daniel McCann’s There Once Was an Idea Called America is a forceful examination of what the author sees as the gradual dismantling of the nation’s economic, political, and cultural foundations. McCann’s central concern is that America has drifted away from the principles that once supported its constitutional republic, including national sovereignty, individual liberty, religious faith, strong families, private ownership, and a thriving middle class. Rather than treating the country’s problems as isolated controversies, he presents them as interconnected parts of a larger struggle over what America will become.
The book begins with the economic pressures facing the middle class, tracing the effects of deindustrialization, corporate consolidation, automation, stagnant wages, political neglect, and the movement of jobs overseas. McCann connects economic insecurity to the growing influence of corporations, lobbyists, wealthy donors, and the military-industrial establishment. His discussion of campaign financing, Citizens United, super PACs, dark money, and the revolving door between government and lobbying gives the book one of its strongest through lines. Whether discussing Democratic or Republican administrations, he argues that ordinary citizens increasingly compete against powerful institutions with far greater access to elected officials.
From there, McCann turns to national sovereignty and freedom of expression. He views uncontrolled immigration, international governing bodies, foreign military commitments, and open-border policies as threats to the country’s ability to determine its own future. His chapter on free speech expands the argument into universities, school boards, corporations, government agencies, and social media platforms. The examples involving cancel culture, campus speech restrictions, online censorship, book bans, and political pressure show that his concern isn’t confined to one institution. His writing is direct and urgent, and he makes it clear that protecting disagreeable speech is essential to preserving meaningful debate.
The later chapters focus on journalism, education, religion, crime, gender politics, abortion, and the stability of the American family. McCann believes news organizations have traded impartial reporting for political advocacy, creating a public that no longer trusts the information it receives. He writes with the same intensity about cultural issues, particularly parental authority, Christian faith, public education, and traditional family structures. At times, the rapid movement between subjects and the consistently confrontational language can make the analysis feel more like an extended warning than a measured investigation. Still, the book’s organization, extensive references, historical context, and consistent viewpoint give readers a clear understanding of the author’s position and the values he hopes to defend.
There Once Was an Idea Called America will appeal most to readers concerned about political corruption, globalism, free speech, border security, media bias, family values, and the future of American democracy. It’s particularly suited to conservative readers, independent voters, students of contemporary politics, and anyone interested in arguments for restoring national identity and civic responsibility. As a work of conservative political nonfiction, American political commentary, cultural criticism, and social issues analysis, the book offers a passionate call for citizens to protect constitutional government, rebuild domestic institutions, and take a more active role in shaping the nation’s future.
Pages: 172 | ISBN : 978-1608628971
Jeanne la femme en rouge
Jeanne la femme en rouge, by Isabelle B.L., is a historical novel about Jeanne Tunica y Casas, a fierce political agitator, teacher, artist, wife, and aging woman whose life stretches across Nîmes, Paris, Nouméa, Sydney, and Santo. The novel frames Jeanne in her later years, confined to a retirement home in 1967, while memory keeps pulling her back to Paco, her beloved husband, and to the decades she spent writing, organizing, arguing, teaching, and defending exploited workers in New Caledonia. It is a story of love and ideology, but also of erasure: a woman who fought to be heard now has to fight against institutional silence, old age, and the soft violence of being managed.
What struck me first was the book’s refusal to make Jeanne easy. She is not softened into a saint of justice or tidied into a tragic widow. She is abrasive, brilliant, difficult, lonely, funny, and sometimes exhausting. I admired that. The prose keeps returning to objects, vinyl chairs, folded handkerchiefs, flowers, newspapers, Paco’s clothes, an ugly institutional room, and these details become emotional detonators. Jeanne’s mind is never still; it attacks, remembers, mourns, judges, and revises. The novel makes consciousness feel like a crowded room where history, grief, and political conviction are all speaking at once.
I also appreciated the way the book treats politics as something lived in the body, not merely debated in pamphlets. Jeanne’s communism, pacifism, and anti-colonial anger are not decorative backstory; they shape how she sees chairs, labor, flowers, language, and even the manners of nurses. The novel can be rhetorically intense, and some readers may find Jeanne’s interiority sharp-edged or relentless, but that relentlessness feels honest to the character. The book is most moving when it lets tenderness and fury occupy the same sentence: Paco’s death, Jeanne’s memories of teaching children, her refusal to be patronized, and her terror of dying alone all gather into a portrait that is both intimate and insurgent.
This book is best suited for readers of historical fiction, biographical fiction, feminist fiction, political fiction, and novels about aging, memory, and social justice. Readers who appreciate the moral seriousness of Isabel Allende or the politically charged intimacy of The Book of Night Women by Marlon James may find a similar urgency here, though this novel is quieter, more interior, and more elegiac. Jeanne la femme en rouge is a tribute to a woman history nearly misplaced, and it burns brightest when it lets her remain inconvenient. A vivid, unsentimental novel about a woman who would not become quiet simply because the world preferred her that way.
Pages: 214 | ASIN : B0GHG89KSB
Making Global Sense: Grounded hope for democracy and the earth (inspired by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense)
Making Global Sense is Judah Freed’s ambitious and personal attempt to carry the spirit of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense into the crises of the twenty-first century. Blending memoir, political argument, spiritual reflection, and social critique, Freed calls for a “global sense” rooted in interdependence, mindful self-rule, democracy, gender equality, ecological responsibility, and resistance to authoritarianism. The book moves through antiwar protests, illness, childhood wounds, cult experience, world travel, marriage, cancer, climate anxiety, and democratic peril, using the author’s life as both evidence and vessel for a broader plea: humanity must outgrow its craving for kings and learn to govern itself with courage, conscience, and care.
Freed doesn’t write as a detached theorist arranging ideas behind glass; he writes as someone who has been bruised by the very forces he’s trying to name. His recollection of the 1971 May Day protest in Washington, DC, with its mixture of youthful idealism, state violence, and spiritual awakening in the woods afterward, gives the book its essential grammar. Again and again, public crisis folds into private reckoning. The same pattern appears in his account of surviving Stage IV cancer on Kauai, where the body becomes a map of fear, will, dependence, and grace. I found those passages the most affecting because they keep the book from floating away into abstraction. Freed’s ideas are large, sometimes almost planetary in scale, but his best writing happens when he lets a single scene carry the weight: a medic armband, a hospital bed, a crushed car under a snow-laden limb, the strange quiet at the Chalice Well, a driver in Mumbai trying to understand an American who wants Gandhi rather than shopping.
I admired the book’s moral urgency. Freed’s central concepts, especially “alpha male rule” and “authority addiction,” are forceful and memorable, and at their best they illuminate the hidden emotional bargains people make with power. His argument that democracy is not only a political structure but an inner discipline feels genuinely valuable. Climate change, patriarchy, authoritarian politics, consumer culture, trauma, spiritual awakening, economics, and global governance all gather under one immense canopy. Freed is not interested in tidy compartmentalization. His style has the breathless drive of a lifelong journalist who has also become a survivor, seeker, and elder. It can be aphoristic, impassioned, blunt, tender, and occasionally overfull, but it rarely feels indifferent.
The ideas that stayed with me most were the ones linking personal growth to democratic responsibility. Freed’s insistence that inner work and outer work belong together feels less like a slogan than a hard-won conclusion. His proposal of “personal democracy” asks for something more demanding than voting or agreeing with virtuous principles; it asks for a kind of daily moral adulthood. I was especially moved by the way he returns to Thomas Paine not as a museum figure but as a living provocation. Paine’s challenge to monarchy becomes, in Freed’s hands, a challenge to every place we still secretly want someone else to think, choose, rescue, punish, or rule for us. Making Global Sense is a brave, searching, and unusually intimate book, written with the conviction that hope must be grounded or it becomes fantasy. I’d recommend it to readers drawn to political spirituality, democracy movements, climate ethics, memoir-driven social criticism, and big, earnest books that ask not only what the world needs, but what kind of person we’re willing to become.
Pages: 357 | ASIN: B0DLHMMS72
Echoes of Memory: War, Testimony, and Survival on Sanzao Island
Echoes of Memory is a deeply personal work of public history by Robert Cupchoy and Lani Cupchoy, rooted in survivor testimony, family archive, poetry, and scholarly reflection. It traces the Japanese occupation of Sanzao Island during World War II, beginning with the shattering recollections of Fook Im Chen as planes descend over rice fields, moving through starvation, forced labor, cultural suppression, and the devastating history of the comfort women system, then widening into questions of inheritance, healing, and remembrance. What makes the book distinctive is its refusal to separate history from kinship. The authors present Sanzao not as an obscure footnote to larger wartime narratives, but as a wounded, living place whose people carried memory in stories, rituals, photographs, silence, and even in the later transformation of the family home into the Cupchoy Café.
Fook Im’s memories of bombs falling, villagers hiding food, and families clinging to one another have an aching immediacy that formal history often struggles to hold. The chapter on the comfort women is especially harrowing, not because it reaches for shock, but because it understands the intimacy of violation. Jin Yuan Lin’s presence in the comfort house, his memory of the women staring out windows, and his fear that forgetting them would mean losing them again, left me with a quiet grief that lingered after the page ended. The writing is sometimes at its strongest in these moments of restraint, when the authors trust a remembered image to carry the weight. The prose can become academically dense, with theoretical frameworks crowding the emotional field, but even then, I sensed the urgency behind it. The book wants to protect these stories from being dismissed as anecdote, and that protective instinct gives the scholarship its moral heat.
What I admired most is the book’s central idea that memory itself can be a form of evidence. That argument feels both intellectually persuasive and emotionally earned. The poems that open chapters don’t always have the precision of the testimonies, but I appreciated their function: they create a ritual threshold before the reader enters material that is painful, fractured, and sacred. I was also moved by the book’s attention to cultural survival, especially its insistence that festivals, language, family meals, and oral storytelling matter as much as destroyed homes and ruined fields. The Cupchoy Café section could easily have felt sentimental, yet it becomes one of the book’s most affecting gestures, a cup of Hawaiian coffee in Sanzao carrying the long route from violence to diaspora to renewal. That image feels humble and profound, proof that remembrance doesn’t only live in monuments. Sometimes it lives in a room where people gather again.
Echoes of Memory is a work of witness rather than a conventional history, and that is its strength. Its emotional truth is unmistakable. I closed it with a fuller sense of how war survives inside families, landscapes, and inherited silences, and with real respect for the labor required to turn private grief into communal memory. This is a thoughtful, affecting book for readers interested in World War II history, Asian and Pacific studies, oral history, trauma studies, family archives, and anyone drawn to histories told from within the circle of those who still carry them. Its lasting gift is its conviction that to remember the dead with care is also to restore dignity to the living.
Pages: 232 | ISBN : 9798279679836
