Rating  - important issues, terrible writing
This book has been a slow read due to the author's disorganized writing and liberal use of big words for no apparent reason. It's typical of him to mention some phenomenon and then say, but we'll get back to that later. Or he'll say, we've already covered most of this in chapter 4 and table 2.1 but let me add... It's a total mess.
That said, the concepts are interesting, and I think Obama's popularity is a sign that most Americans are getting tired of footing the bill for the mistakes of the wealthy. The most interesting things i've read in this book:
- since the 80's, the US has seen the socialization of financial risk and privatization of risks that every person has (ie the risk of falling ill).
- laissez-faire is an illusion.
- the top individual tax bracket once paid 90% income tax
- the top individual tax bracket now pays about the same as the middle class (or less if the person is "savvy")
- Lincoln (republican) once said: "Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much higher consideration."
- capital has no country
I have not and may not finish reading this book because the prose is so tedious, but 100 pages from the end I have not encountered any mention of the Long Term Capital fiasco that also ended with a taxpayer bailout.
I am an entrepreneur and believe that capitalism is the only way to run economies/markets. However, my experience of over 5 years living in a country with a gini index of 55 has made clear the disadvantages of wealth disparity, even on purely pragmatic terms. Americans, inheritors of the first modern democracy, should do what they can to ensure the powerful do not continue to accumulate disproportionate wealth and power. The United States gini is already at 40.8, the highest since the 60's when the coefficient was first measured. It's also the highest/worst among developed countries and more typical of countries like Senegal and Turkmenistan.
Rating  - Interesting, hard to read with so much data,
i read the first hundred pages and became bogged down. After a couple years I ran out of current reading and picked up where I'd left off. It's reading much faster now - and I'm about 3/4 done. I add this review only because I am recommending the book to another, and I was here, so ....
The book is full of facts and figures to the point it will overwhelm you, but it seems pretty well researched. I sense the author has told this same story many different ways in many different books .. but the basic premise is solid.
Here's a thought: How are you doing in the stock market? Well? Great .. but keep in mind that the really good analysists - those with the Fed Chairman on speed-dial - don't work for the everyday guy, or even Goldman Sacks .. it's like tequila: the really good stuff never gets shared with the public.
The book is about that, and while getting off your duff and taking advantage of opportunites is the best thing to do .. there are some with advantages you can only dream about, and they make sure their cream is skimmed before passing the bottle to you.
Rating  - The true history of the lifestyles of the rich and infamous
If you want a true, accurate, and honest account about how the rich keep getting (not just) rich, and powerful too, read this book.
Conservatives might simply dismiss this as another example of the dreaded "class warfare" they hammer about on Fox News. But this account of the rich and powerful doesn't come from a liberal. It comes from a CONSERVATIVE (and one who served both Reagan and Bush I).
His in depth analysis and his biting commentary about examining his own class of people make this a must read for anyone (left or right) who wants to better understand the rich and powerful...and how they got that way.
Rating - is there any democracy left for the rest of us?
The American experiment in democracy has degenerated into a plutocracy, in which wealth and power preempt democracy's ideals of equality and freedom [cf Kevin Phillips' Wealth & Democracy]. While Phillips gives a depressing history of the decline, and its corruption thru the centuries, Cadillac Desert focuses on perhaps the biggest corrupter of all - the sprawling water projects of the American West, in which water is diverted at huge cost to grow crops no one needs, all to support giant corporations that threaten to wipe out the family farms that were the rationale for the projects in the first place. Taken together, these books demonstrate that ideology or the party in power matters little - elections become a charade, masking the control of government by capital and its corporate controllers.
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