,
14 tweets,
5 min read
Read on Twitter
I wrote a book called Goliath about the war between monopoly power and democratic movements in the 20th century. The final version arrived in the mail so here's a picture of it. It's really fun and you should pre-order it. simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/… 
My experience writing a book is that it's a lot more fun to have written a book than to write one.
I wrote it because I was working in Congress during the financial crisis and I slowly realized we were facing not just a technical problem with banks but a political crisis. And I was totally confused, as were all my friends. I usually look to history when I'm confused.
The only person who knew what was happening during the crisis was an older economist named Jane D'Arista. The lobbyists were baffled, the bankers, the regulators, etc. But Jane kept being like 'that market is now going to blow up' and then it would I asked, how did you know?!?!
And she told me she worked for a Congressman named Wright Patman in the 1970s, the last real New Dealer. She saw safety valves get taken apart in the 1980s onward but unlike most others she had learned why they were there in the first place. They were *political protections.*
I learned all about Patman. He didn't just fight big banks, but monopolies. He was part of a whole American tradition of dealing with concentrated power, a tradition I knew *nothing* about. Which was very weird, because I love history and always have.
Most of us didn't know the history of how we dealt with concentrated finance and so we were totally baffled by the crisis and the alphabet soup of terms and agencies. I'm like, wtf. I got a history degree from Harvard. How am I such an idiot? (Question answers itself.)
This history was hidden from us. We were taught not to think about banks and corporations as political. We were told that's technical, scientific, boring. We were taught that's not history, not social justice. And then 2008-2010 happens. Listen to economists. They got this.
It turns out there's a wonderful amazing brilliant history of fights, protests, battles over corporate power and banking power. It is the history of America, of fascism, of democracy. How we trade, how we do business, is how we do justice. simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/…
The history incredibly fun. Business and banking isn't boring, these stories are about the money and power in the world. It's not a history that is anti-business, but about how we do business. Do we organize our corporations as tools of liberty or oppression? The answer is, both!
The most important thing you should know is that this history, these battles, are our heritage. In 2016 I published this piece on how the Democrats reorganized itself in the 1970s, which ultimately led to autocracy in commerce and then Trump. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
Goliath is the full story. It is the story of the railroad/steel barons, the bankers, protesters, the rise and fall of the New Deal, Michael Milken, the DLC, the brilliance of early Silicon Valley and its current brittle arrogance. simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/…
So @fmanjoo profiled Goliath in a piece last month. He really understood what I was trying to do, which was to explain the stories in all of our heads in 2008. I don't condemn, I seek to understand. nytimes.com/2019/09/18/opi…
@fmanjoo Half this book is on the story of how Americans once faced oligarchs and defeated them, and half the book is how how we forgot our own history. I was as ignorant and trapped as anyone. So I researched, and this book is the result. #Goliath simonandschuster.com/books/Goliath/…
