ix

P r e f a c e

P

erhaps the most widely-used political slogan of the 1960s was “Power to
the People.” It appeared on posters and buttons, and was a common chant
at political rallies. The idea behind it was simple—that the vast majority of
Americans, 190-200 million in that era—did not have power, but should. A
small minority did—high-ranking government officials, directors of corpora-
tions, banking leaders, especially on Wall Street, wealthy international inves-
tors, justices and judges, university administrators, media owners, entertain-
ment and sports owners, military and police forces, some elements of orga-
nized religion, and others recognized as authority. So the basic idea, and the
basic struggle, was to transfer power from the few to the many.
That idea was not new in the 1960s. In fact it is as old as America, com-
ing over with the first colonists in the 1600s. There has always been a conflict,
which at times got violent, between “power” and “people,” between what we
will call the Ruling Classes and the overwhelming majority who did not have
power, the people who have recently come to refer to themselves as the “
Percent.” Since the U.S. developed Capitalism as its economic system, espe-
cially after the Civil War in the 1860s, this conflict has grown and become the
dividing line in American life—who are the “haves” and who are the “have
nots?” Surely there are other significant points of division as well—racial
inequality, discrimination against women, harassment and repression of ethnic