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But it turns out there was another whole game being played on a skewed playing field. I don't remember details. If you can read this book and come away with a different conclusion then I'm sorry, but you have been culturally lobotimized; you might as well have "DITTO" tattooed on your forehead. Many of us thought a career in engineering or some other high paying field was the ticket to the promised land. We were holding demonstrations to end apartheid, never thinking that our actions would generate massive corporate support to undermine our activities. My thinking at the time was, "Well sure I'm a liberal, but I'm in engineering, so I'll do great." Ha.The issues that I have struggled with as an adult, have been those that have been ruined by the destruction of the federal goverment: the lousy education my children have received, the inequity in taxation and compensation that has seen the diminution of the middleclass, our attempt to keep up with the Jones' through creditcard debt and home equity borrowing and the resulting divorce rate with disillusioned couples who see the neighbors moving into ever bigger McMansions and don't see that the game is rigged. If, as some say, the Obama administration is our only chance to make a difference in our lifetimes: then we will fail.
The question now is, will the Orwellian nightmare continue for our children or can we rescue the Republic. Liberals need to act now to return our country to a land governed by and for the people, instead of the corporations. It's easy to see. We were idealistic pushing for reform in public transportation and maybe some green issues. Its AMAZING to realize that our little, leftist push to try to create a slightly better world, was being countered by the sycophantic madness of Jack Abramhoff and his American and South African corporate backers. They were focused, greedy and willing to do what it takes to jump on the Reagan gravy train.For those who didn't live through that era, there was a real sense that the Reaganomic's train was leaving the station and you'd better be on it, or your life was going to be ruined.
We laughed in 1984, and "Oohed" and "Aahed" at the Apple ad during the Super Bowl (the woman, with the hammer, with the screen, &c). I think the author would approve if I ended my review with a quote from the only band that mattered:The men at the factory are old and cunningYou don't owe nothing, boy get runningIts the best years of your life they want to stealAll these years we've been working for the clampdown. I am of the age, that I was actively involved in the PIRG on campus when I was in college. And, yet, in hindsight, we kept wondering how these boneheads kept winning. What we didn't realize was that Orwell's '1984' was taking place before our eyes and through the disingenious misinformation of the conservative movement, we have been trumpeting our own demise ever since.
Reward your campaign contributors by outsourcing more and more government functions and awarding the contracts to your contributors. They are like people who complain about the mess the mud between the logs of the log cabin makes inside the cabin, never realizing the purpose of the mud and the damage removing the mud will create.Thanks to The Wrecking Crew, the flaws of this philosophy have never been more evident. How about FEMA and "Heckuva job, Brownie". How about no-bid contracts to Halliburton and using Blackwater mercenaries.I also liked Frank's cataloging of something I've heard before.
If you are someone who believes there is essentially no difference between the two major US political parties, then this book will change your mind.My personal preference is I want to vote for a political party whose approach is to govern by balancing the interests of all parties concerned. My other research led me to believe the things Frank writes about were going on. More on this thought in a moment.Having recommended in my own book independent voters make contributions to both parties in order to see what each party says about the other, I was especially interested in Frank's description of conservative direct mail fund raising and its enabling of the physical (not intellectual) growth of what passes for conservatism. Incur excessive amounts of debt so the government will be forced to shrink and push off its welfare and education programs to churches (or at least that is the whispered plan with a wink. Hollow out and suppress the activities of regulatory agencies by putting political appointees in place who will to keep the agencies from doing their jobs. How about Monica Goodling (a graduate of Pat Robertson's Regent University) using political litmus tests for attorneys to work for the Justice Department. Whether such a plan was actually intended to be supported is debatable).Show me some examples, you say.
In other words, the party might have a preference for one group over another, but the party operates on the premise it will be more likely to be re-elected if it shows itself to be even handed.Republicans/Conservatives take an entirely different approach. If a conservative politician fails to govern well, conservatives will blame not the flawed philosophy. Frank describes the origins of that phenomenon and how the money is used not just for political purposes but also to feather the nests of those who conduct the operations.Frank also does a marvelous job of describing the origins and driving philosophies of people such as Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist and Tom Delay and the creation of the intensive lobbying efforts enabled by those flawed philosophies.Some prime elements of that flawed philosophy include the following. Frank provides the proof without having to do the first hand research.In a nutshell, Frank proves the Republican/Conservative approach to governing is not to govern at all.
This approach, to me, is more likely to produce effective and efficient government. Govern on behalf of business and your campaign contributors at the expense of the public at large, rather than balancing the interests of all. How about failure to regulate financial markets to prevent either the speculation in oil prices or the sub-prime meltdown. Instead, conservatives will say of the politician that he/she was not a "true conservative".Overall, I shake my head at the lack of perspective of the people expressing these philosophies.
Reading Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew has been like finding a key piece to a jigsaw puzzle. According to Frank's book, Republicans govern only to benefit business and their supporters, not the public as a whole. How about passing drug legislation without negotiation requirements or credit card bills written by credit card companies.
Ever since Reagan was elected, it has amazed me that a group of wealthy people have been able to both control government and use it to expand their wealth, while at the same time undermining the faith in government of the average citizen. The overall effect of this makes the book read as if it were written by an undergraduate student who is too vague about his argument & how to structure it. or are they just buying them because they agree with the writer's politics and then putting them on their shelves to show friends that they are hip too. As someone who likes to keep abreast of current issues & debates, but doesn't have the time to wade through pages of hyperbole & meandering prose, I must say I'm disappointed by this one. Am I the only one who doesn't have time to wade through an introduction that never seems to an end. I don't need the additional (repetitive) commentary and analysis about how bad things are in American politics interrupting every other sentence in a description of D.C.'s suburban layout.Another annoying aspect to Frank's writing is that instead of actually identifying people, Frank often refers to people generically ("a billionaire," "a lobbyist".).
student, now with a "real" job, I have grown weary of how poorly written most books are, particularly those from a viewpoint with which I sympathize. I am baffled by how many poorly written books earn heaps of praise both on websites and in literary reviews and then go on to become bestsellers. This is exactly what Frank proposes to detail & explain here (and in his previous book). I also enjoyed the book Commodify Your Dissent. Thomas Frank really needs to take a writing class or get someone to edit his books. I want facts, figures, names, dates.
He pulls similar stunts with places & events, referring to them in abstract or vague ways. My mother's side of the family comes from the DC area & so I was eager to read his take on the politics of the current political class that owns the DC suburbs & the federal government. He then uses pages & pages of footnotes, almost as if to prove that what he is saying is true, but unfortunately the footnotes usually don't clarify the details any. without naming them. So, he has a compulsive need to overcompensate for the lack of content by using "proof" (i.e. or who tires of prose that reads as is if every 5th word either came from a thesaurus or is a word that the author coined himself.
So, after missing out on all the books he's written since then, I picked this one up with interest. Unfortunately, while Thomas Frank may share my political sentiments & while this book may have informative details, I found it to be too poorly written to read very much beyond the first chapter. Are people actually reading these things. Hopefully he'll take a writing class and hire an editor for his next one. footnotes) in order to convince the reader that what he's writing is true.So, while the book may have interesting tidbits of information about DC & its suburban spawn, I found Frank's writing to meander too much to turn his information into a compelling read. I subscribed to The Baffler & usually enjoyed (and agreed with) Tom Frank's commentary most of the time.
As a recovering Ph.D. Let the information speak for itself.
Brilliant. I love Frank's analysis of American politics and governance in the post-1980 era.I've highly recommended it to many people. Brilliant. Brilliant.After hearing Bob McChesney, the host of Media Matters radio show, rave about The Wrecking Crew, (something that he rarely does) and listening to his interview with Thomas Frank, I bought a copy of the book in Chennai, India.
A must-read for every thoughtful citizen who is concerned about America's future - though it will not convert the hard-core targets it demasks, anyone who believes in "compassionate conservatism" who is truly open-minded will find in it cause for reflection. As the author says in his introduction, "we shall gaze upon one of the true marvels of history: democracy buried beneath an avalanche of money." The book is written in a highly readable, fast-paced style with numerous entertaining anecdotes concerning the various shady characters making up the neocon "fringe" - which turns out to be far less "fringe" than commonly believed. At the same time, government became riddled with money politics, an ever-expanding lobbyist community working on behalf of (and themselves making immense profits from) big money interests which took over, through outsourcing or indirect control, government functions they were completely unqualified to perform. Frank meticulously details how successive conservative governments dating back to Reagan have deliberately emasculated and debased the US government, ensuring that government would become less and less effective while carrying on deficit spending at a rate that ensures that "liberal" administrations, when elected, no longer have the means to put their idealism into practice. This is probably one of the most incisive political books of recent years with immense relevance to our current crisis. The essence of "conservative government" consists in doing the will of business - labor and environmental protection laws written in the 60s and 70s were reversed or simply allowed to atrophy by hostile heads of departments like James Watt at Interior. Like a good "Whodunit" I could not put it down as the saga of the eroding power of the average working citizen in the world's most powerful democracy continued to unfold.
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