From inside the book:
“Since 1980, the economy has been growing, and productivity has been growing, but trickle-down values—that we, the American people promote, pursuant to the Republican Party’s conservative ideology—have rigged the economy to continuously upwardly redistribute those revenues attributable to our increased productivity, yielding a productivity/wage disconnect, resulting in increased concentration of income and wealth at the top, in corporations and among older Americans (beneficiaries of income from Social Security, pensions and investments and continuing income due to delaying retirement), and the lowest percentage of GDP attributable to wages and highest attributable to profits since World War II. But trickle-down has not only distorted our economic thought; it has also distorted our political thought, our sociology and our concept of the rule of law. The result has been that the trickle-down policies promoted by the Republican Party are undermining our economy, democracy, institutions and health.”
For further discussion contact author at johnjseip@gmail.com.
Author Biography:
John Seip is a lawyer and oil and gas landman and regulatory practitioner whose career has been spent entirely in a corporate setting, including having spent several years working with corporate lobbyists, congressional staffers, trade groups and agencies in Washington, DC on energy projects. He worked as a Republican volunteer in the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1980, supported Libertarian Party candidate Ron Paul in the presidential campaign of 1988, and worked as a Democratic volunteer in the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. He has a B.A. in Sociology from Louisiana State University and a J.D. from the Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University.
Dee Wood Harper, Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Criminology at Loyola University New Orleans. His research has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Sociological Spectrum, Annals of Tourism Research, International Journal of Law and Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence and Applications, Criminal Justice Review, Homicide Studies, Deviant Behavior, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, and American Behavioral Scientist. He is also the co-editor and co-author of several books including Violence: Do We Know It When We See It? and Why Violence: Leading Questions Regarding the Conceptualization and Reality of Violence in Society, Crime and Criminal Justice in Disaster, 3rd edition (2015), the foremost book on this topic, Fundamentals of Criminology: New Dimensions, 2nd edition (2015), Preventing Lethal Violence in New Orleans, a Great American City, 2015 and Toward a Criminology of Disaster under contract and coming in 2016. He earned a B.A. from George Peabody College of Vanderbilt University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Louisiana State University. He is also a life-long Democrat whose father, upon graduating from the University of Georgia in 1934 in the midst of the Great Depression, went to work with the Civilian Conservation Corp, cutting firebreaks in the south Georgia piney woods.
