A well-researched argument against America’s largest corporations and the politicians who enable them.
A debut work offers a rallying cry for economic and political reform.
Though his book is a searing indictment against 21st-century global capitalism, Rynerson insists in his opening line “I am not a socialist….I am an American.” Indeed, the former Kentucky farm boy has a lifetime of service to his country, having spent two decades in the Air Force and as president of the board of San Francisco’s Big Brothers/Big Sisters. As have many Americans of both major political parties, the author—who at different points has been a Republican and a Democrat and is now an independent—has become increasingly concerned with the growth of unchecked corporate influence in the United States. In this exposé, he tackles over a dozen industries, clearly delineating their negative impacts on contemporary society. The book convincingly makes the case that underregulated corporations are directly to blame for nearly every major issue that decreases America’s standard of living, including inequitable access to health care, wage stagnation, obesity, the opioid epidemic, and even the ideological polarization stoked by social media and partisan news outlets. While many politicians, from Republican Ted Cruz to independent Bernie Sanders, rhetorically lament the unwieldy growth of corporate power, the two major parties are both implicated in Rynerson’s account. According to the author, President Ronald Reagan’s systematic deregulation of industries began the process, but President Bill Clinton’s endorsement of policies favored by his home state’s largest corporation, Wal-Mart, is also to blame for creating today’s milieu of offshore accounts and outsourcing. Not bound by party positions, Rynerson is just as skeptical of globalization, a bogeyman of today’s right, as he is of Wall Street, the left’s go-to villain. His chapter blaming obesity on the food industry for deliberately obscuring ingredient lists and targeting children is particularly compelling. There is even a chapter on the role of corporate greed in inhibiting America’s response to Covid-19. Despite its evenhanded, if hard-hitting, approach, the book is at times redundant in its relentless emphasis on corporate greed.
A well-researched argument against America’s largest corporations and the politicians who enable them.Pub Date: July 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73484-990-5
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Bonneau Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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