The constitutional lawyer and U.S. Representative considers the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and the lawless administration that fomented them.
“How did we end up here, with fascists trashing our Capitol Building and killing people?” asks Raskin, who led the House’s second impeachment proceedings against the former president. His narrative has three strands. The first is personal looking out on the political, recounting the experiences of his father, one of John Kennedy’s “best and brightest,” who left government in opposition to the nuclear arms race. More effective, and saddening, is the second: the suicide of his son, beset by anxiety and depression, who was buried on Jan. 5. The following day brought “strategic violence by extremist elements outside the Capitol…fusing with manipulative tactics inside the Capitol to coerce Vice President Pence and Congress to overthrow the electoral votes in the states and force us into a contingent election.” Raskin makes two related things eminently clear. First, he and other House leaders were prepared for the Republicans’ coercive ploy, albeit surprised that Pence, “despite lots of genuflecting to the disseminators of the Big Lie,” did the right thing. What they were not prepared for, he writes, was an armed mob storming the Capitol and pursuing elected officials through its corridors. For this, Raskin assigns a measure of self-blame, since Alexander Hamilton warned of just such a possibility in the first of the Federalist Papers, and the former president had recruited “thousands of the…‘very fine’ people he had seen marching on the fascist side of the street in 2017 in Charlottesville” to stage his insurrection. Raskin’s detailed account of the second impeachment proceedings goes on at great but not burdensome length, joining Adam Schiff’s Midnight in Washington as a close study in how such matters work.
A brilliant preface, one might guess, to further legal actions against the disgraced former president for his crimes.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-063-20978-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2022
Categories: CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | U.S. GOVERNMENT | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | POLITICS | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | PUBLIC POLICY | TRUE CRIME
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Everyone’s favorite avuncular socialist sends up a rousing call to remake the American way of doing business.
“In the twenty-first century we can end the vicious dog-eat-dog economy in which the vast majority struggle to survive,” writes Sanders, “while a handful of billionaires have more wealth than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes.” With that statement, the author updates an argument as old as Marx and Proudhon. In a nice play on words, he condemns “the uber-capitalist system under which we live,” showing how it benefits only the slimmest slice of the few while imposing undue burdens on everyone else. Along the way, Sanders notes that resentment over this inequality was powerful fuel for the disastrous Trump administration, since the Democratic Party thoughtlessly largely abandoned underprivileged voters in favor of “wealthy campaign contributors and the ‘beautiful people.’ ” The author looks squarely at Jeff Bezos, whose company “paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2017 and 2018.” Indeed, writes Sanders, “Bezos is the embodiment of the extreme corporate greed that shapes our times.” Aside from a few passages putting a face to avarice, Sanders lays forth a well-reasoned platform of programs to retool the American economy for greater equity, including investment in education and taking seriously a progressive (in all senses) corporate and personal taxation system to make the rich pay their fair share. In the end, he urges, “We must stop being afraid to call out capitalism and demand fundamental change to a corrupt and rigged system.” One wonders if this firebrand of a manifesto is the opening gambit in still another Sanders run for the presidency. If it is, well, the plutocrats might want to take cover for the duration.
Even if they're pie-in-the-sky exercises, Sanders’ pitched arguments bear consideration by nonbillionaires.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593238714
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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SEEN & HEARD
“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. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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