For three decades after World War II, the United States operated under a set of enforceable constraints that forced capital to absorb its own costs. Wages rose with productivity. Pensions were funded. Jobs were stable. A single working-class income could sustain a family, buy a house, and send children to college. Then those constraints were dismantled.
The dismantling was not an accident of globalization or the invisible hand. It was the result of a fifty-year campaign by named individuals operating through identifiable institutions: think tanks, courts, regulatory agencies, financial firms, and the political coalitions they assembled. Step by step, the load-bearing elements of the postwar settlement were removed. Labor law was hollowed out. Pensions were converted from employer obligations into worker risk. Immigration was weaponized against wages. Arbitration clauses replaced courts. Stock buybacks replaced reinvestment. The wealth that once circulated through workers, communities, and the public balance sheet now flows to a narrow stratum of dynastic families and the new tech oligarchy that has joined them.
The Oligarchs' Arithmetic of Plunder, Volume I: The Worker is a forensic accounting of how this happened. It is the first volume of a planned four-volume investigation. Drawing on regulatory filings, court records, financial disclosures, and decades of published reporting, it traces the dismantling chapter by chapter. The architecture of enforced equilibrium. The campaigns that breached it. The extractive dominance that followed. And the counterrevolution now culminating in techno-feudalism, where data centers, algorithmic management, and programmable identity threaten to replace what remains of American democratic constraint.
The book is written for two audiences simultaneously. To the American: here is what was done to us, and how. To the reader abroad: here is a mechanism you can recognize early, before it takes the same form in your own country.
The names are real. The money is traceable. The arithmetic is documented.
