Acknowledgments First Edition, 1998
I stole the title. But I don’t know from whom I stole it. I may have lifted it from the 1993 Aerosmith CD Get a Grip, which has a song by the same name. But Colorado journalist Dan Dunn informs me that Aerosmith might have nicked it, too. Dunn says there’s a tune with that moniker on Motorhead’s 1988 album, Rock’n’Roll . And Motorhead may have filched the thing themselves, because I first saw the phrase on T-shirts worn by the Shi’ite Amal militia in Lebanon in 1984 or 1985. I don’t know where the Amal got the phrase, but I assure you that they stole the T-shirts. Perhaps “Eat the Rich” is a part of the world’s folk-music heritage, the original version to be unearthed, by some archivist, from a forgotten Folkways recording, Songs of the Economic Advisers :
Kill the poor, Eat the rich, Screw every other son-of-a-bitch.
The rest of the book is my own work, for good or for ill, although I had a tremendous amount of help putting it together. As has been the case for the past thirteen years, Rolling Stone paid for the travel. All the foreign adventures and my trip to Wall Street first appeared, in modified form, in that magazine, and part of Chapter II appeared in Rolling Stone’ s brother publication Men’s Journal . I owe a huge debt of gratitude (and unfinished assignments) to Rolling Stone’ s founder and editor in chief, Jann S. Wenner. Besides being a good friend, he has been a remarkably tolerant boss. Rolling Stone already had someone writing about political-economy issues, my ideological pal-in-opposition, National Affairs editor William Greider. When I went to Jann in 1995 and told him I wanted to write about economics, he was momentarily taken aback. But he didn’t fire me. He just sighed and said, “You mean I now have two lunatic economists on the staff of a rock and roll magazine?” Part of Chapter X also appeared in the London Sunday Telegraph . Editor
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