Every Step You Take

Like its current citizens the United States was born in debt-a debt so deep that it threatened to destroy the young nation. Thomas Jefferson considered the national debt a monstrous fraud on posterity while Alexander Hamilton believed debt would help America prosper. Both as it turns out were right.

One Nation Under Debt explores the untold history of America's first national debt which arose from the immense sums needed to conduct the American Revolution. Noted economic historian Robert Wright Ph.D. tells in riveting narrative how a subjugated but enlightened people cast off a great tyrant-“but their liberty won with promises as well as with the blood of patriots came at a high price.” He brings to life the key events that shaped the U.S. financial system and explains how the actions of our forefathers laid the groundwork for the debt we still carry today.

As an economically tenuous nation by Revolution's end America's people struggled to get on their feet. Wright outlines how the formation of a new government originally reduced the nation's debt-but as debt was critical to this government's survival it resurfaced to be beaten back once more. Wright then reveals how political leaders began accumulating massive new debts to ensure their popularity setting the financial stage for decades to come.

Wright traces critical evolutionary developments-from Alexander Hamilton's creation of the nation's first modern capital market to the use of national bonds to further financial goals to the drafting of state constitutions that created non-predatory governments. He shows how by the end of Andrew Jackson's administration America's financial system was contributing to national growth while at the same time new national and state debts were amassing sealing the fate for future generations.

All across America's workplaces; workers are being injured, killed or exposed to toxic chemicals from which they are dying. An estimated 66,000 persons die each year from occupational illnesses and injuries in our country: An epidemic of monumental proportions. Almost a century after the introduction of Workers' Compensation; workers, their families, communities all pay the price for the devastating human and environmental consequences of this failure to hold corporations accountable for their actions.

The stories in Depraved Indifference are the stories of ordinary people. Discarded and forgotten by their employers, denied medical coverage by the workers' compensation insurers; many have been left to die, slowly and agonizingly, unnoticed by all but the ones who really care - their grieving families.

Depraved Indifference represents over five years of research and interviews. It lays bare a Workers' Compensation system that cavalierly exposes workers to severe injury, toxic exposure and death; while throwing the major cost unto the family and the taxpayer, without fear of lawsuit, prosecution or even public outcry. It is a call to action.