A compendium of talking points for the midterm, tetchy without being shrill.
“Hillary Clinton and Tom Paine vs. Ayn Rand and Robinson Crusoe.” So Democratic politico Green summarizes the current political scene in this brightly written polemic.
If you’ve been reading the headlines, have been keeping up with the work of Kevin Phillips, and are already disposed to think that the nation is a mess politically, then most of what Green has to say won’t come as news. Still, this is a handy one-volume summary to keep near the dining-room table for arguments with your neocon neighbor, the one who thinks the Bush administration really cares for the average American. Not so, says Green, adding, “George W. Bush has embraced democracy more as a prop than a policy.” His catalogue of Bush and company’s misdeeds adds up to an impressive indictment, but it is his diagnosis of the underlying causes for them that resonates. For one thing, he argues, Republican rightists have been more successful at “marketing their brand” than has the opposition, in some measure because of the illegal and/or unethical machinations of bigwigs like the now-deposed Tom DeLay; for another, you’ve got to be rich or a superb fundraiser to enter politics these days—he notes that it cost Ken Livingstone 80 cents per vote in the London mayoral race of 2001, whereas it cost Michael Bloomberg $100 for the same thing in New York that same year—which gives well-to-do corporations even more access and power in the political process. Add fundamentalist Christianity, laissez-faire policies, the administration’s fondness for outright lying and deception, a misguided war on terror and chaotic worldview, the Patriot Act, and the like, and even though the president “does not wake up daily and figure out how to sabotage democracy,” his actions trump whatever good intentions he might have, with the loss of democracy the result.
A compendium of talking points for the midterm, tetchy without being shrill.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-4022-0701-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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