A forceful argument that resurrecting equitable, intelligent government starts with understanding how the present plutocracy...
A refreshingly no-holds-barred exegesis on the naked cynicism of conservatism in America by The Baffler founder and political observer Frank (What’s the Matter with Kansas?, 2004, etc.).
When conservatives rule, all hell breaks loose, the author amply demonstrates in this muckraking, well-reasoned account. The concept of a conservative state is not new, he writes: Business largely laid the foundation of this country and developed a steadfast commitment to the ideal of laissez-faire, as well as hostility to taxation, regulation, organized labor and state ownership. Since the Reagan revolution, however, and especially since George W. Bush came to office, the conservative pattern of deregulation, tax cuts, privatization and outsourcing has massively enriched “everyone who grabbed as the government handed off its essential responsibilities to the private sector.” Despite holding executive or legislative power over the last 28 years, conservatives champion themselves as insurgent outsiders, notes Frank; yet Washington has become a developers’ and lobbyists’ city, grown hugely affluent by tearing down the government. The author traces conservatism’s triumph through two innovations: the “adversarial fantasy” (see above) and the fantastic potential for turning politics into a source of profit (e.g., direct mail and Iran Contra). The right’s fortunes depend on robust public cynicism toward government, so conservatives fill the bureaucracy with cronies, hacks, partisans and creationists, ensuring lousy management and little or no regulatory enforcement. Frank’s look at how conservatism mimics its enemies—the federal government is now bigger, not smaller—is hilariously spooky, as is his chapter on lobbyists, “City of Bought Men.” Clear-eyed and occasionally sarcastic, he offers examples of such howlers as conservatives’ rationalization of apartheid in South Africa, the depredations of Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, labor exploitation in Saipan and the right’s blatant goal to defund and destroy the pillars of liberalism.
A forceful argument that resurrecting equitable, intelligent government starts with understanding how the present plutocracy came about.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7988-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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