| View Larger Image | The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule | Hardcoverby Thomas Frank (Author)
| List Price: | $25.00 | | Price: | $6.59 | | You Save: | $18.41 (74%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Hardcover | | Publisher: | Metropolitan Books | | Page Count: | 384 Pages | | Publication Date: | August 05, 2008 | | Sales Rank: | 20,241th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780805079883
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
From the author of the landmark bestseller What’s the Matter with Kansas?, a jaw-dropping investigation of the decades of deliberate—and lucrative—conservative misruleIn his previous book, Thomas Frank explained why working America votes for politicians who reserve their favors for the rich. Now, in The Wrecking Crew, Frank examines the blundering and corrupt Washington those politicians have given us. Casting back to the early days of the conservative revolution, Frank describes the rise of a ruling coalition dedicated to dismantling government. But rather than cutting down the big government they claim to hate, conservatives have simply sold it off, deregulating some industries, defunding others, but always turning public policy into a private-sector bidding war. Washington itself has been remade into a golden landscape of super-wealthy suburbs and gleaming lobbyist headquarters—the wages of government-by-entrepreneurship practiced so outrageously by figures such as Jack Abramoff.It is no coincidence, Frank argues, that the same politicians who guffaw at the idea of effective government have installed a regime in which incompetence is the rule. Nor will the country easily shake off the consequences of deliberate misgovernment through the usual election remedies. Obsessed with achieving a lasting victory, conservatives have taken pains to enshrine the free market as the permanent creed of state.Stamped with Thomas Frank’s audacity, analytic brilliance, and wit, The Wrecking Crew is his most revelatory work yet—and his most important. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 53 reviews)
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Excellent account of the self agrandizement of the Neo Cons by Marc D. Heineman (Bayside New York)  4 Stars
November 26, 2009
A scathing well documented account of and analysis of the The Neo conservative movement and their calculated abuse of power. Neo cons professed to despise the concept of "big" government but the book shows the neocon despised the citizens more. After professing a mandate after the slimmest of "victories" the cheney bush administration continued the Texan governors businesses by and for his cronies. It is ironic that no one ever grew the government budget deficit like this character who professed that government should be run like a business.
Whether the main motive was to prove government was incapable to succeed or outsource to cronies whose main qualification was who they did what favors for , the result was to take a surplus left by Clinton and siphon off not only the tax money but creating an enormous deficit never seen before. The books premise is that driving the economy to the brink of disaster will in effect result in making liberal agenda improbable to function as stated on Page 264 which sums it up succinctly -"Deficits defund liberalism".
Neo cons wanted to siphon money away from the government programs intended to provide some public good in order to pay back political favors. Appointments were made also based on favors rather than qualifications. The Katrina incident was where things really blew up. The figure that bush appointed to head FEMA was close to an imbecile. The trailers that were allotted to victims whose homes were damaged were filled with toxic levels of formaldehyde. This from a president who early in his first term decided that allowing higher levels of arsenic in the drinking water would be good for business too. Neo cons defunded government programs , they favor defunding programs rather than shutting an agency down so that after killing the budget they can say look at what a poor job that agency did. Likewise by placing a friend without proper qualifications as head of an important program that the neo cons despise will lead to that programs planned failure.
Prices were driven up and wages were bid down for working people. CEO salaries however grew along with the money going to lobbyists and political contributions. While manufacturing during the Reagan-bush1-gingrich-cheney-bush2 days was moving from the Midwest to the south to the Marianas to the Philipines, K street lobbyists offices expanded and the payments which went through K street increased at a rate much greater than other facets of the economy. Lobbyist were invited by neo cons to write the legislation which then becomes law of the land.
Unlike Republican presidents like Roosevelt and Eisenhower and figures such as Goldwater who believed in fiscal responsibility and who were patriotic believers in the country; the -bush2 administration was filled by vile individuals who as Neo conservatives were capable of the basest acts
and were less interested in the well being of the country or preserving a link between the past and present than their own self aggrandizement.
Excellent account and thoroughly footnoted
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A Comprehensive Critique of Conservatism by Kelly Cooper 4 Stars
October 25, 2009
The audio CD of "The Wrecking Crew" is handled by Oliver Wyman, who after a few hours begins to sound eerily similar to Casey Kasem. I've read a couple of books labored over by Thomas Frank ("Commodify Your Dissent" and "One Market Under God"), and find that he is erudite, crisply efficient, and relentlessly adversarial with respect to the fetishization of markets as moral instruments. For those who are familiar with the machinations of self-styled "free market capitalists," there isn't a great deal in this book that will surprise; however, it does an excellent job of categorizing and delineating the nature and scope of modern Conservatism. It is a one-sided argument, which by no means lessens its merit - it is incumbent upon the opposition, after all, to mount a defense. While I agree with the central point of the book (i.e., that doctrinaire Conservatism seeks to dismantle government bureaucracy in league with the business lobby), Mr. Frank does a regrettably inadequate job of addressing inevitable counter-arguments. For example, non-Libertarian Conservatives are known for their support of some government bureaucracies (i.e., military, police, utilities, commerce, and infrastructure); a more robust explanation of why this "Constitutionalist" worldview is intellectually bankrupt seemed wanting.
On the whole, however, I found that the central premises of the book would be perfectly acceptable to many Conservatives... which is perhaps the most frightening aspect of the whole story. To the hardcore `Winger,' Jack Abramoff was man who's criminality was entirely separate from the good work he did as a foot soldier for the Republican Party. This isn't a book about hating Conservative governance; it's a book about understanding it.
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Stating the Obviouis by K. Steen (Louisiana)  5 Stars
September 22, 2009
Mr. Frank's analysis here is not only cogent and accessible, it states what has become obvious at least since the ENRON swindle in 2001 and the publication of books like Kevin Phillips' "Wealth and Democracy" and Paul Krugman's "Conscience of a Liberal" (American usage): neoliberalism is a hoax. Frank begins his book with an instructive normative comparison of the milieu in Washington, D.C. during FDR's early years as idealistic young men and women came to build the New Deal and the milieu in the capital during the post-Reagan period when venal men and women came to destroy the New Deal. An easy read, so enjoy it...if you can.
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share the blame by Independent! (Vancouver, WA) 4 Stars
September 17, 2009
Republicans are not the only people to blame for Americas shift from the largest creditor nation to the largest beggar/debtor nation in the history of the planet earth. They, of course will blame the "liberals" for that shift even though liberals couldn't grab [...] with both hands when it comes to forcing policy through our corrupt system. Stupid lazy Americans as well as bought and paid for Democrats played their part in Americas fall from grace. Lets not forget the 600 lb. psychopath in the room, the corporation, read the book "The Corporation" for a quick insight into an entity given the legal rights of an individual but with no responsibility, accountability, soul or conscious. The corporations only one purpose for existence is profit and it has demonstrated time and time again it will even kill for more profit. When we look within the hollow shell that once was a vital economic powerhouse with a strong middle class we will be able to lay blame on all of the above, not just republicans.
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An evangel for corruption by Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) 5 Stars
August 19, 2009
Based principally on the DeLay-Abramoff affair with its muddy torrent of graft, Thomas Frank denounces highly emotionally but limpidly the agenda of the conservative right concerning the State and its government, as well as their ideology of selfishness and greed.
The core of US conservatism is the interests of business. These interests are mightily more important than their `free market' evangel. Mechanisms like tariff walls, public subsidies, monopolies, no-bid contracts or patent protections, will be adopted without any resistance if they enhance profits.
The conservative right sees the liberal State as a perversion, as a corruption of private interests (taxes), not as an instrument to service the population as a whole.
When they took power, they sabotaged the working of the government by appointing ferocious opponents of State agencies (EPA, FDA, SEC) at their head. They even created anti-agencies (OIRA, Council on Competitiveness).
For them, all public services should be subjected to the market system, because that is the most efficient way of ruling. In other words, those services have to be managed by private interests.
For Thomas Frank, the result of these policies was a rip-off. The institutions created for the protection of the population became institutions for the exploitation of the population (arms industry, anti-terrorism, administration of Iraq, recovery of hurricane Katrina ...).
One of the main targets of the conservatives is the Welfare State. The money flows of the welfare programs should be privately managed, thereby generating colossal commissions for a bunch of Wall Street managers, while in the meantime `defunding the left'.
For Thomas Frank, this is a sure way for turning US politics into a plutocracy and concomitantly a `bought' government.
Through lobbyism and pure propaganda for the agenda of the Right, conservatism itself became a business with monster fees for the preachers.
A US senator asked a few years ago: `Have you missed the government?'
If the government had not intervened heavily in the huge banking crisis of the last years, the whole capitalist system would have been turned into a desert, an enormous Great Depression for many years to come. The other side of the coin would have been an astonishing handover of all political, economic and financial world powers to the East (China).
This book is a must read for all those who want to understand the world we live in.
N.B. James K. Galbraith treated the same all important issues in a more theoretical way in his formidable book `The Predator State'.
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