An illuminating look at an overlooked but crucial element of American governance.
A former inspector general discusses the critical role IGs play in maintaining the integrity of U.S. governmental operations.
Polls show that confidence in government has dropped to all-time lows; Congress bottomed out at 7%. The only institution that still garners trust is the military because “when it identifies mistakes or misconduct, in most cases it seeks to take corrective actions.” Fine, who served as an IG for both the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense, examines the invisible but very necessary work he and other inspectors general have done to hold government agencies and officials accountable for their actions. Unlike other external government watchdogs like the Government Accountability Office, public interest groups, and the free press, IGs exist within each federal agency but are independent of them. They “investigate misconduct and promote efficiency” and encourage transparency on behalf of their “ultimate boss,” the American people. Speaking with the candor that made him less than popular “in the halls of the Justice Department or on the Pentagon food court,” Fine cites numerous examples of agency debacles, including the FBI’s inability to provide more than 1,000 documents to convicted terrorist Timothy McVeigh’s lawyers and the DOD’s failure to implement strategies that would better protect it from price gouging by government contractors. The author also offers recommendations to improve oversight, including setting term limits for IGs and creating IG roles for the Supreme Court and federal judiciary, especially in light of recent allegations of ethical misconduct by multiple justices, most notably Clarence Thomas. While the book will appeal primarily to those interested in law and American government, anyone seeking to understand—and perhaps improve—the system of checks and balances crucial to a healthy, functioning democracy will find it useful.
An illuminating look at an overlooked but crucial element of American governance.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780813952468
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Univ. of Virginia
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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