A searing, rage-inducing look at how the misery of the poor lines the pockets of the rich.
A startling study of how private companies—and their wealthy executives—exploit poor customers.
As Washington Monthly contributing editor Kim, author of Abandoned: America’s Lost Youth and the Crisis of Disconnection, demonstrates in this searing text, some of the nation’s most vulnerable populations are fertile ground for predatory private businesses that take advantage of them and send the bill to the federal government. This “vast ecosystem of industries” (which the author calls “Poverty Inc.”) costs the federal government—and consequently, taxpayers—a staggering $900 billion per year. This dizzying array of companies includes medical care, food provision, and prison services. Kim’s litany of well-documented stories are both sobering and infuriating: Tax preparation companies are able to prey on low-income households because “the tax code is complex, and taxpayers are fearful.” Consulting firms get rich off running states’ antipoverty programs. A network of “American Job Centers” often fails to adequately prepare participants for employment. “Health care profiteer” franchises such as Kool Smiles provide medically unnecessary, Medicaid-funded root canals and other procedures. Food service corporations like Aramark stock prison commissaries with low-nutrient junk food, at a markup. After chronicling the misdeeds of Poverty Inc., Kim shows how Congress could improve this morass of profiteering through sharper oversight and better data collection. The list of shoddy practices is exhaustive and devastating, and the great challenge is in shifting a system that makes too many people too much money. Not only are these industries exploitative and extremely expensive; they also contribute to persistent poverty through both passive means—incompetence and inefficiency—and active, via lobbying to block reforms that would help the poor but “endanger [corporations’] revenue streams.” Poverty, in other words, is big business.
A searing, rage-inducing look at how the misery of the poor lines the pockets of the rich.Pub Date: May 28, 2024
ISBN: 9781620977811
Page Count: 352
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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