The business of America may be business, but America’s most prestigious book reviews don’t pay much attention to it. So it’s worth noting Riches to Rags, the New York Times Book Review’s look at “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism,” by Kevin Phillips.
The reviewer, Daniel Gross, praises Phillips for his writing style, but says “The book is like a greatest-hits collection with a few new tracks. Like many such compilations, it will thrill convinced fans and fail to win many new converts.” Gross goes on to assail Phillips’ core contention: that the American financial elite is in cahoots with the government to keep the stock market bubbly. As Gross notes, “if there is a Plunge Protection Team, it’s doing a profoundly awful job.”
Gross’s conclusion: we’re not having a global crisis of American capitalism. Capitalism is fine. It is, rather, “the first American crisis of global capitalism.”
Other reviewers have been more receptive. The Los Angeles Times’ Tim Rutten calls Phillips’ book “positively alarming” especially for raising the specter of long-term American economic decline. Yet he also says parts of the book feel rushed.
Bloomberg News noted that Phillips, who first made his name as a Republican campaign strategist who developed Nixon’s successful “Southern strategy,” has used “Bad Money”
to update his 2006 book, “American Theocracy,” which warned that the U.S. was dangerously dependent on debt and oil. Events have so far vindicated his views.
Overall, it sounds like a rehash of older ideas meant to get those ideas back into the political mix in time for the election. Savvy, but not necessarily worth the time.
Other links of interest:
Buzzflash says the book “Pulls the fire alarm on an American economy that both political parties have given over to the financial industry.”
The Democracy Now transcript of its interview with Kevin Phillips
