Rating: 
Summary: How Kevin Phillips learned to Relax and Love the Depression
Review: Somewhere in the middle of this book, I realized Kevin Phillips must be putting his readers on. In what is mainly a history of how wealth and politics have coexisted in the U.S., often for the benefit of both the wealthy and political classes, Phillips stops searching for any intellectual coherency to his argument and just goes on the attack. His opponents are the wealthy, of course, and he stops at almost nothing to smear them.
Which is too bad. Phillips? subject -- wealth inequality and its effect on the democratic process -- is a serious one, and he does start off promisingly. Unfortunately, he suffers from the problem of too many advocates -- an inability to simply make a good case and let it stand, when exaggerated overkill feels so much better. It's not enough to argue, for example, that the rich ought to pay somewhat higher taxes and that globalization has gone a little too far, when you can insinuate that the wealthy are selling the country down the river, America is in serious decline, and that much of the modern economics profession is providing intellectual cover for the rich.
Phillips' exaggerated approach naturally leads to some contradictions. On the one hand, he wants to argue that the stock market-driven wealth of the 1920s and the 1990s, were ephemeral and unreal. On the other hand, he wants to argue that this ephemeral and unreal wealth went only to the rich and not to the middle class and poor, and that it exacerbated wealth inequality. But if the gains in the stock market were unreal (paper gains), then surely the wealth inequality those gains bolstered were also unreal.
Phillips' obsession with how well the wealthy are doing leads him into even stranger positions. He actually seems to enjoy the leveling effect of the Great Depression. After he misleadingly shows how much incomes went up between 1933 and 1949 (misleading, because almost all the rise in that period occurred after America's entrance into WW2), he writes, "[t]he relative (short-term) loser of the 1930s and 1940s was wealth..." To which I think the proper response is: yes, the wealthy lost, and so did almost all other Americans. It's hard to be romantic about an economy with steady double-digit unemployment rates in the first half which take a world war in the second half to fix, but Phillips seems to long for that period.
He also belongs to the declinist school of American politics, seeing parallels between the present-day U.S. and other leading economic powers as they faltered. He mentions only briefly that neither late-seventeenth-century Netherlands nor early-twentieth-century Britain had anywhere near the technological advantages in so many areas that present-day America has. Instead, Phillips? catalogue of America?s current problems is so large the reader can begin to understand, even if not agree, with why he seems to long for another depression. He makes the 1990s sound worse in some ways than a depression.
The only problem for Phillips is that many readers of his book have lived through the most recent decade, and not many of them would probably be willing to agree that the solution to whatever problems existed in that decade requires something as drastic as what happened during the 1930s. Phillips?s pessimism about the U.S. runs deep, and his understanding and judgment of what the U.S. needs is faulty as a result. His great concern for America's problems of inequality, some of which are real, allows him to manufacture many which are not. In the end, I found the book?s primary redeeming feature was largely trivial: its wealth of charts and information identifying the wealthy at any one period in American history.
Rating: 
Summary: Smash the Golden Calf -
Review: America suffers from amnesia. The spokespersons of corporate media (Hannity, O'Reilly, Rush "Hillbilly Heroin" Limbaugh, Coulter, Quinn, etc.) airbrush history by pretending that the class struggle and even populism itself is "anti-American". Offering an historical context from the past 200+ years, Kevin Philips offers a much needed (and timely) antidote to this disturbing trend, showing the trickle down golden calf of corporate welfare for what it is. For indeed, the individual does better when everyone else is doing better -At the time of this writing, July 2004, it is better now than when it was published - Conservatives ought to read it, and take heart - for soon their self-serving minions shall be out of power, banished to the nether regions of the Bermuda triangle.
Rating: 
Summary: Reader from Washington is absolutely correct....
Review: Funny, this book is listed as nonfiction. In fact, it should be classified as fiction. The fact that I fond a copy in the fiction dept indicates to me that somebody is trying to get a message out. Will anybody ever tell the truth?
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