The authors are necessarily forceful, and they offer a well-written must-read for those ready to give up hope about politics...
An examination of how “the rapid proliferation of a system akin to oligarchy—within our own country—threatens to cripple our march forward.”
Center for Public Integrity senior analyst Potter (Obamacare? What’s in It for Me, 2013, etc.) and Issue One executive director Penniman cite historical and current incidents of America’s “coin-operated government” and its outsized influence on legislation. Money dominates the political system as it muzzles more Americans than it empowers. The authors especially point to the election of 1896, in which businessman Marcus Hanna bankrolled William McKinley’s campaign “almost entirely with his own money.” That election recorded, as a percentage of GDP, the largest spending levels ever, before or since. With a ray of hope, the authors point out that Theodore Roosevelt’s administration turned the tables on corporate spending. Later, the Tillman Act of 1907 and the Hatch Act of 1939 tried to limit campaign activity and contributions. The Taft Hartley Act of 1943 banned direct spending by unions and corporations, which led to the creation of the first PACs. The authors pull no punches regarding the “corrupting influence” of the Citizens United decision, and they succinctly and clearly expose the direct influence of lobbyists for such industries as banking, mortgages, oil and other fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, coal, and even food and beverages. Lobbyists demand self-regulation, threaten job losses if they have too many rules, and encourage delaying tactics in Congress. Thankfully, Potter and Penniman offer practical answers and point out that reform beginning at the local level is most effective and that “sunlight is the baseline for all reform.” As they note, the underfunded and dysfunctional Federal Election Commission, the IRS, the president, and the Securities and Exchange Commission all have tools to help, but they have to use them.
The authors are necessarily forceful, and they offer a well-written must-read for those ready to give up hope about politics and government in the United States.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-109-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
SEEN & HEARD
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