The Divine Right of Capital

Preface

IF YOU WANT to understand why the recent scandals at Enron, World-Com, and elsewhere have happened, read this book. It tells the story the mainstream media won’t touch: the story not of a few bad-apple CEOs but of an economic system designed to do precisely what it did—to enrich a few at the expense of the many. The few are the financial elite, the aristocracy of our age. At the most visible level, this means CEOs. But if they are the whipping boys singled out for punishment, they have not acted independently. They are subordinates to the real masters of the system, the invisible aristocracy of major shareholders.

In the system design of aristocratic capitalism, CEOs are hired by shareholders and directed by boards to focus on a single ...