Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich
by Kevin Phillips
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kevin PhillipsEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-04-08
ISBN: 0767905342
Number of pages: 496
Publisher: Broadway
Book Reviews of Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich
Book Review: The Game!
Summary: 5 Stars
The middle class is not democratizing economically or politically. The middle class is not taking control of its money and instead the middle is rapidly transferring money from its savings into the massive market profits for the super rich. The middle class should immediately abandon any transfers from savings into the stock market and preserve their wealth, but instead they will be lured into hedge funds and mutual markets speculating that someday they will be super rich.
Richard Goodwin says, "money establishes priorities, holds down federal revenues, revises federal legislation, shifts income from the middle class to the super rich." "Money restrains the enforcement of laws written to protect the country from abuse of wealth-laws that mandate environmental protection, anti-trust, laws to protect the consumer against fraud, laws that safeguard the securities market...and more." Money in Babylon has become all powerful, while reform has dawdled. Politics has capitulated to the Market barons. For example, lobby investment dollars can turn a 100,000% return. Manufacturers craft industry-specific subsidies, insert tax breaks into code, extend patients or give away public property for free. The Timber industry spent $8 million in campaign contribution to preserve the logged road subsidy worth $458 million. Glaxo Wellcome spent $1.2 million to get a 19th month extension on Zantec worth $1 billions. The tobacco industry spent $30 million in tax contribution for tax breaks totaling $50 billion.
Historically, conspicuous consumption became a pillar of statecraft in Venice. Licentiousness stimulated art demand increasing competition for nude paintings. The market attacked and destroying all moral codes inhibiting content in the market and lead to opulence, extravagance, and vice. "The world we inhabit today, with its ruthless competitiveness, fierce consumerism, restless desire for ever wider horizons, discovery, and innovation...is a world which was made in the Renaissance." Renaissance emerged as Materialism philosophy reigned supreme; objective argument provided the ideology within the corrupting gatherings of individuals. American Renaissance and industrialism embraced Darwinism. Darwinism represented the longest-lasting philosophic shield held up by the American Wealth Accumulators: Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockerfeller, Chauncey Depew, and James J. Hill. The trinity materialistic God equaled Darwinism, conspicuous consumption, and self interest. The Renaissance lionized the idols of consumption, the top artist and purveyors of luxury goods: Bottielli, Titan, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. Monetarist, Milton Friedman said, "Greed was the basis to society" and wanted a system "setup an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm. Capitalism is that kind of system."
Chicago University indoctrinated students with doctrines of big business. Public choice argued American law was a system of commands, prohibitions, and rules often contradicting and countermanding, the "natural logic" of the markets. The cleansing of the law of interferences like government regulation worked to facilitate the freedom of the markets. Disillusionment strengthened and market utopia was a idealism not a reality. Consumption drove debt burdens. Debt burdens peaked in the 1920s, 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s. Debt is the double edged sword that threatens the wealth accumulation of the super rich. The super rich flee markets heavy in debt at a certain point of no return. "Speculative excesses supported by the tendencies of elites spin illusions for themselves and the less-sophisticated public about the new capacities of government and private sector management. Manias require convincing siren songs: insisting that things really are different this time, financially as well as technologically." Debt has transformed the two headed eagle into on head. The fed and the treasury, in a sense have become joint, proactive managers of the multi-trillion dollar "USA fund". Markets economies might be claim, but globalizing U.S government economic management has become the game.
The speculative bubble of 2000-2001 experienced real damage in early 2000s as the recession hit manufacturing and deepened the damage with a crisis in several technology industries, and spread widely into the service industry. The share of U.S manufacturing assets in foreign hands jumped 3% in 1970, 8% in 1980, 19% in 1990 and foreign ownership surged from $270 billion in 1997 to $497 billion in 2000. US companies traded hands with foreign owners: Dresdner Bank purchased Wasserstein Peralla; Sumitomo owned 15% of Goldman Sachs; ING owned Actna Financial Services; Zurich Financial took S Investments, Credit Suisse bought First Boston; and UBS Warburg purchased Paine Webber.
Summary of Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich
For more than thirty years, Kevin Phillips' insight into American politics and economics has helped to make history as well as record it. His bestselling books, including The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) and The Politics of Rich and Poor (1990), have influenced presidential campaigns and changed the way America sees itself. Widely acknowledging Phillips as one of the nation's most perceptive thinkers, reviewers have called him a latter-day Nostradamus and our "modern Thomas Paine." Now, in the first major book of its kind since the 1930s, he turns his attention to the United States' history of great wealth and power, a sweeping cavalcade from the American Revolution to what he calls "the Second Gilded Age" at the turn of the twenty-first century.The Second Gilded Age has been staggering enough in its concentration of wealth to dwarf the original Gilded Age a hundred years earlier. However, the tech crash and then the horrible events of September 11, 2001, pointed out that great riches are as vulnerable as they have ever been. In Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips charts the ongoing American saga of great wealth?how it has been accumulated, its shifting sources, and its ups and downs over more than two centuries. He explores how the rich and politically powerful have frequently worked together to create or perpetuate privilege, often at the expense of the national interest and usually at the expense of the middle and lower classes.
With intriguing chapters on history and bold analysis of present-day America, Phillips illuminates the dangerous politics that go with excessive concentration of wealth. Profiling wealthy Americans?from Astor to Carnegie and Rockefeller to contemporary wealth holders?Phillips provides fascinating details about the peculiarly American ways of becoming and staying a multimillionaire. He exposes the subtle corruption spawned by a money culture and financial power, evident in economic philosophy, tax favoritism, and selective bailouts in the name of free enterprise, economic stimulus, and national security.
Finally, Wealth and Democracy turns to the history of Britain and other leading world economic powers to examine the symptoms that signaled their declines?speculative finance, mounting international debt, record wealth, income polarization, and disgruntled politics?signs that we recognize in America at the start of the twenty-first century. In a time of national crisis, Phillips worries that the growing parallels suggest the tide may already be turning for us all.
From the Hardcover edition.
Most American conservatives take it as an article of faith that the less governmental involvement in affairs of the market and pocketbook the better. The rich do not, whatever they might say--for much of their wealth comes from the "power and preferment of government." So writes Kevin Phillips, the accomplished historian and one-time Washington insider, in this extraordinary survey of plutocracy, excess, and reform. "Laissez-faire is a pretense," he argues; as the wealth of the rich has grown, so has its control over government, making politics a hostage of money. Examining cycles of economic growth and decline from the founding days of the republic to the recent collapse of technology stocks, Phillips dispels notions of trickle-down wealth creation, pricks holes in speculative bubbles, and decries the ever-increasing "financialization" of the economy--all of which, he argues, have served to reduce the well-being of ordinary Americans and government alike. Highly readable for all its charts and graphs, Phillips's book offers a refreshing--and, of course, controversial--blend of economic history and social criticism. His conclusions won't please all readers, but just about everyone who comes to his pages will feel hackles rising. --Gregory McNamee
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