because the very fact of the equality has a corrosive harmful effect ackerson. you open by talking about the american dream or the american dream as quest and belittle it will encourage you are chord. a ridge it was possible for a worker to get a decent job. at a core of children who are school. collapse. imagine yourself in an outside position looking for mars. what do you see. in the united states when there are professed to like democracy. in a democracy public opinion is going to have some influence on poesy. and then the government carries out actions determined by the population and that's what democracy means. it's important to understand that privileged and powerful sectors have never liked democracy and for very good reasons. democracy puts power into the hands of the general population and takes it away from them. as kind of the principle of concentration of wealth and power. concentration of wealth yields concentration of power particularly so as the cost of elections skyrockets which kind of forces the political parties into the pockets of major corp

but the book does that for me please welcome douglas ackerson. [applause] >> thank you for that lovely introduction and for coming out on this rather cold day. i've been told to speak slowly so i will see what i can do about that. but with most books on the adams family and of the 80 -year-old congressman john quincy adams to honor resolution thinking american soldiers and the war of mexico was the most unjust and the husband of katie stanton that grabs hold and then tilts sideways he died two days later in the capital building the numbers add up to 11 those that have died in the capital. and those that did not arrive in washington to say goodbye to his father he got as far as philadelphia and then he realized his father was dead. before arriving in washington henry clay as the secretary of state say that lester would continue and that is a challenge. so not only the last surviving child that he was the son and the grandson and at that time they were the only dynasty. with john adams in martin van buren so imagine the pressure that turns out very