Kevin Phillips (1)Rezensionen

liked this "american presidents" bio better than the other one I read, but still feel they sacrifice something by keeping them so short. I still consider McKinley a prequel to the more entertaining T.R., but accept the thesis that he was underrated

Kevin Phillips makes a compelling case that 1775 was at least as important as 1776 in the American Revolution and that the Patriots made many de facto declarations of independence well in advance of the moment we have all come to celebrate as the Birth of the Nation. I have to say his work came up short in convincing me that 1775 was more imporatant than 1776, the latter of which was the year that Americans throughout the colony took up the public debate that tipped the scales in favor of independence. Nevertheless, the book was rich with details and social factors that shaped the emerging American psyche in the late 18th century. Parts of this book read well, while others were more tedious, and I think he gave undue short shrift to the ideological origins of the revolution that cannot be divorced from the events, the economics, culture, and the prevailing social atmosphere.

Excellent writing. Unfortunately, fairly dated. Author did identify some trends correctly but failed to anticipate Obama in 2008.

I couldn't finish this book. It may be a fine description of the U.S. fincanial policies, but it didn't lend itself to an audio book format. At least for me, I couldn't keep my focus on the subject, and my mind kept drifting. After going back and starting anew several times, I realized I could only absorb this book in written, not spoken, format.

I left this review unstarred as the writing style and focus just isn't my cup of tea. I consider myself a student of the American Revolution, our Founders, etc. But I went into this book expecting a narrative of 1775, not an academic analysis. So if that's your thing, I imagine this is very well done. I just found myself re-reading sentences and whole paragraphs multiple times only to find that I just really didn't care about the depth of detail Phillips was providing.

I did something with this book that I rarely do: I gave up.

It’s a long slog, not chronological but an issue-by-issue look at the American Revolution. And it, frankly, goes on too long for what it’s trying to say.

This book posits that 1776 is the only date that is given any consideration when we think of the American Revolution, and that 1775 is much more important. It’s an interesting theory, but I don’t know of anybody who thinks all of this was accomplished in one year. The entire scope of the American Revolution began in earnest in 1774, if not partially before, and the United States wasn’t firmly established until 1789, when the Constitution went into effect and Washington was elected the first president.

The author seems to be pushing to move our celebrations back to 1775, but that’s not really necessary. The thought that 1775 was important is fine, and true, but why act as though the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 was not worthy of marking?

Ultimately, this book reads like a long dissertation. It’s more academic than general, not that reader-friendly. And a tremendous amount of it is just a survey of already-written history books and papers. He may restate it well, but I can’t really find all that much that’s new. He even acknowledges that he relies mostly on what comes before by quoting TWO books at the beginning of each chapter.

It’s full of information, but it’s not must-read material. It didn’t keep me going.

For more of my reviews, go to Ralphsbooks.

The author states up front that his intent is to persuade you that McKinley needs to come up a grade or two in the rankings of presidents. He makes a good case, and I didn't need much convincing anyway, but his statement of his case lands one in the depths of Hagiography Hell; the eulogy book that came out after his assassination which I used to browse at my grandmother's house was less fawning. It doesn't help that he seems to think that an integral part of his brief is to denigrate McKinley's predecessor and successor, both of whom were, in my humble opinion, the best and finest leaders of the age, or any other, come to that. As far as narrative, his main thrust is to describe and analyze McKinley's pursuit of nomination and election to the presidency; Phillips being a noted political consultant and election analyst, this comes naturally and was to me the best part of the book by far. These two emphases leave relatively little space for narrating McKinley's actual conduct of office, which may be just as well, as the burning issues of the day, bimetallism and tariffs, were hardly chosen with twenty-first century reading interests in mind. Historiographically, Phillips could use some coaching; he relies very heavily on quoting biographers, usually laudatory, and said quotations are often unattributed save in the endnotes. This book is informative and insightful in parts, but the ubiquity of its bias represents a considerable irritant.½

Reckless finance, failed politics, and the global crisis of american capitalism

I found Phillips writing of wealth and democracy illuminating, not because I was unaware of the degree to which wealth controls the government, but how it has changed over the years, and the degree to which war profiteering creates wealth. Reading this book, one can't help but notice that the past is repeating, and what it is repeating is ugly, corrupt, and wrong-headed.

As for others' criticisms that times are better for everyone, and that everyone does better when we all do better, that allowing egregious accumulation of wealth allows society to grow, well that is nonsense. I'm not an economics professional, although a member of an international economics honors society and a regular reader of economics books, but my own research indicates that such ideas, justifying gross inequality and the invisible hand, are false.

It is one of the weakest biographies I ever read and definitely the worst work from 'The American Presidents Series'. It's a combination of being very boring, not giving you enough relevant information and at the same time inserting some fancy observations that could be interesting in different settings but provide nothing but distraction in this book.

So much to absorb. It took me the good part of a year to finish this baby, but I did. And I am more knowledgeable for it. Anyone that can write fact after fact and still keep my attention deserves at least a. Four star.

Kevin Phillips, an astute, conservative, politica1 commentator, worries that a deep economic shift has occurred in the United States portending ominous changes in the future. Much of corporate downsizing and "leaning out" benefits speculators, lobbyists, investment bankers, and stock brokers, but does not create jobs or increase the employment base of the country.

"Firms once committed to long term thinking now faced money managers and speculators little concerned about existence beyond the life of a futures contract .... Corporations purged employees, especially older ones close to retirement, cut employee benefits, slashed real wages, and shut down plants in Terre Haute or Muncie .... For the first time in modem US history, stock prices decoupled from the real economy, enabling the Dow-Jones industrial average to keep setting records even as employees' real wages kept declining. Financialization has only a vague definition, but all of these burdens the erosion of wages, the agonies of families and communities - go into it."

Phillips points out that an explosion in wealth occurred in the eighties among the top half of one percent of incomes. Those in the bottom half of that top one percent - the $200,00000 $300,000 bracket-did not improve at all. "Virtually the entire gain went to the top one-half of one percent, the families with $4 million to $5-million net worth on up. Their investment capacity exploded." The economy has improved dramatically, but the median income has fallen when adjusted for inflation. The Perot constituency, in particular, has lost more ground economically than the average voter. Hence the anti-Bush, anti-Clinton, and (he suspects) 1996, anti-Republican vote, unless the polarization ceases or reverses.

As part of my ongoing quest to read a book about every U.S. President, I picked up this volume. Having read a few books and numerous articles by Kevin Phillips, and a number of books in this series, I expected more than I found.

Schlesinger's series offers single-volume biographies of all the Presidents. For the fair-to-middling Presidents without major historical importance, I've relied on this series to fill a lot of the gaps in my quest. The series has been uniformly well written, concise, and informative. None of them go into great detail, but for these Presidential lesser-lights the biographies have been quite adequate.

My problem with Phillips book is is that it isn't truly a biography, but rather a pastiche of gilded age facts and figures, placing McKinley in the context of his times. It is as though he describes an exquisite picture frame and explains how perfectly it suits a portrait of McKinley, but says little about the actual portrait. A key fact about McKinley is that he was assassinated, which Phillips barely mentions; a casual reader might even miss this key fact. And we learn very little about his wife, except that she was terribly ill, prone to epileptic seizures. Perhaps McKinley left little historical record to work with, but surely there was editorial and news coverage to draw on, particularly concerning his assassination, that could have made this into a true biography.

Phillips makes an excellent case that McKinley set the stage for the entire progressive era, following in the footsteps of his hero and mentor Rutherford B. Hayes who also had progressive tendencies. This is an important story to learn, but I think McKinley deserves a longer telling of that story.

A very troubling recognition of the symptoms of the disease that was Bush's America. Why oh why didn't more people read this sooner.

Does focus a bit on Bushian policies, but also on broader societal trends that started in the 1970s, and some earlier. Deepening worries of consumerism, fundamentalism, religion as intermediary in political issues, the greed for oil as political motivator. All of these topics are covered in greater detail in other books, but this one provides a solid overview of them all.

I find it quite interesting that the author was a Nixon strategist - he was arguably one of the presidents most responsible for this deepening fissure in American society.

The author does accurately foresee the 'Great Recession' crash of 2007-8, and the continued resurgence of the Far Right in the current presidential election is troubling (if morbidly amusing) to watch. One wonders if the end is nigh yet.

In 2002, Kevin Phillips documented the vector of economic disparities, the increasing abuses of corrupt white collar criminals with extreme wealth concentrations, and predicted they would take center stage and threaten the national interests as well as the strength of the middle class and the health of the poor. Reading this in 2011, it is clear that his predictions, based on objective economic projections, were prescient. In the summer of 2008, our country was effectively destroyed. The causes of the collapse were exactly as predicted by Mr. Phillips -- the combination of oil wealth corruptibility, fundamentalist extremism, and unprecedented public and consumer debt.

Phillips was educated in the Bronx, Colgate University, Edinburgh, and Harvard Law School. He practiced law as an Assistant to the US AG, and then became a Republican Party strategist. He served as President of the American Political Research Corp, and Editor of the American Political Reporter. He is respected by academics--historians and economists-- and this work reflects documentation, with an Appendix of Price Indices, 1790-1991, charts of US Income distribution, and detailed "Notes" on sources, as well as an Index.

The volume charts the efforts of the super-rich to use political power to perpetuate their usurpations at the expense of the middle class, the poor, and our national interest. Rich in historical underpinnings, the analysis is a bold description of the present ongoing rush to impoverish what was at one time the largest source of wealth on the planet--the American Middle Class.

The money-culture corrupts not only politics, but the free market as well. Tax policies, national security, and competition, are all threatened by the power of the monopolists.

The author turns to the history of England and other world powers, to examine their declines. With the Reagan-Bush-Cheney-Rove era, we recognize the parallels in America -- unregulated speculations, mounting public and consumer debt, income polarization, and stolen elections.

Okay, we're all going to hell in a handbasket. Oil, bad mortgage loans, banking system that is not transparent. The Euro or the Yen will replace the dollar as the currency of choice. Our standard of living is actually falling. Education doesn't really help. Gloom and doom. Maybe it's all correct, but somehow or other I believe USA will muddle through for a little while longer.

The author's thesis, that the joining of politics, religion, and oil can't possibly lead to a good outcome for our democracy, is hard to argue with. The biggest downside of this book is that it drags a great deal, particularly in the sections on oil, and gets too deeply involved in policy for the lay person the book is aimed at; however, the message is timely: if we continue to go down the path we've started on, we could very well end up with an oil-driven theocracy. The author speaks as a Washington insider, and for this reason, his voice carries a ring of authority.

Phillips writes as a true insider, a man who knew the Bushes back when Reagan was president, and longer. He takes an insiders look at politics from the perspective of an influential family, a family with dreams of dynasty. Definitely worth the read, because there's nothing to say another dynasty can't spring up - maybe out of the ashes of the old.½

Phillips follows up this dynasty threat concept in at least one other book,Bad Money. It is an interesting, well written story of this political family, but frankly I think the author is into questionable conspiracy theory.

William McKinley is usually considered a middling US President - not in the top tier of presidents, but not at the bottom either. As one of the later Gilded Age administrations, McKinley and his cabinet are mostly remembered for events like the Spanish-American War in Cuba and the Philippines and for arguments over tariffs and the gold standard. He's considered by most historians to be fairly passive in leading by public opinion and to be the first president to use a modern approach to the press. And his assassination opened the door to Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressives.

In this volume of the American Presidents series, Kevin Phillips makes the case that McKinley should be considered a much stronger leader who began many of the initiatives later completed by Roosevelt and later Progressive administrations, and should be included in the second tier of presidents, well above where he usually falls in rankings today. If true, there's a disconnect in understanding McKinley, and I'm not sure I buy Phillips' reasoning. McKinley left very little in the way of personal papers and items normally considered direct sources. Phillips instead relies on writings by others around McKinley and some rather speculative interpretation of McKinley's words and deeds. Part of what most bothered me about Phillips' discussion is his speculation on what McKinley "would have done" had he not been assassinated in 1901. I suppose it's ok to do that, but it's a stretch.

Is McKinley the passive placeholder that Phillips put forth as other historians' opinions? Probably not. He was very popular, and did indeed seem to do some things that show a Progressive bent. Would he have brought about the kind of change that Roosevelt did? Should we view Teddy as a continuation of work begun by McKinley? Probably not. Teddy put his own mark on things and did things his own way. But the real McKinley is somewhere in the middle there as a mix of all these aspects. And almost certainly deserving of more respect than he often gets.

Kevin Phillips has published 13 books relating to the subject of doom of the American financial system and as of this review almost 100 reviewers on Amazon have recommended this book and admitted Phillips shows no solution to the decline of the US economy, largely because we have left agriculture and manufacturing for a plunge into finances as our largest economic section. The rest of the world hates and resents us and now has us under their feet. It could have been entitled, Goodbye American Dreams. What is interesting is that published before the Obama administration took office, predictions are correct.

There are interesting historical references to the decline and fall of earlier empires, Rome Spain, the Netherlands,and of course Britain.

Ah, and now, April 2011 the Republicans are about to close the government down to force the Democrats to make drastic cuts in humanitarian spending and the US is getting involved in yet another mid eastern war. This remains a timely book.

Every so often I get the craving to read political texts. The problem with this urge is that I have no interest in picking up the edited transcript/ghost written crap put out by Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly, the frankly embarrassing Dinesh D’Souza, or the “Look at me! Look at me! Look at MEEEE!” shrillness that passes for the corporeal form of Ann Coulter. That’s what’s on offer on the right side of the spectrum.Too frequently when I read a lefty’s political book of any kind, I find it dully confirming a great number of my already held prejudices and regurgitating things I read on the blogs months ago. Rarely do any of these books enlighten or educate me in any real fashion. Oh, I may pick up an anecdote here or there or may recall one or two unfamiliar facts to buttress my earlier beliefs, but it’s hardly the same as learning. What a revelation then Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, a book I entirely put into the category of prejudice bolstering anti-fundamentalist GOP tract.I had always meant to read the book, the conjunction of religion and power an all too often unacknowledged aspect of American politics. By this I mean, people may discuss how Republicans court the religious right and kowtow to the fundamentalist line on all sexual matters (gays, women’s rights, abortion), but exactly how much of the GOP platform is dictated by the Religious Right is hardly ever outright discussed (outside of the same mentioned lefty blogs).When the author ranks fundamentalist Jewish and Christian sects on the same level as Jihadism and refers to the GOP as America’s first religious party, you’d be tempted to believe that the author was a Democrat, or even an unaffiliated liberal. How surprising then to find that Phillips was a member of the Nixon Administration and author of the seminal electoral text The Emerging Republican Majority. He has also written extensively on a range of historical subjects from the presidency of William McKinley to the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War in The Cousins War.Phillips’ range of comparison is convincing, illustrating the collapses of the Roman Empire, the Spanish Hapsburg Empire, the Dutch naval empire, and the well-known British Empire with intricate detail, demonstrating how financial strain, badly managed resources, and religious intolerance were sizable factors in each one, aggravating already existing problems.Which is to say, Phillips brings an impressive historical scope to his analysis of where the American Empire is headed. In short, disaster. Having made the case of how those problems were instrumental, he then bluntly lays into modern American political culture with bruising clarity and straightforwardness demonstrating over the past several decades how get-rich-quick attitudes and short-term gain have sacrificed long-term stability, most commonly abetted by the Republican Party and their corporate backers and Taliban-like fundie ground troops.Perhaps the most common criticism against Phillips’ book is the eye-rolling toward the notion that Bush and the GOP lead us into the Iraq quagmire based on oil dreams. It always strikes me as patently ridiculous that anyone could argue that other motivations were as strong as that single one. After all, weapons of mass destruction and democracy fostering could be even more strongly argued for North Korea or Iran, yet neither of those is sitting on oil reserves the size of Iraq’s.Part of how Phillips demolishes arguments that counter the rather obvious one he makes — oil was the primary and overwhelming motive for war in Iraq — is to consult the historical record. Even his detractors can’t argue that the man is not thorough. In considering the American economy’s relationship with oil, Phillips returns to the industry of whaling and starts from there, building his case for the energy industry’s outlandish power from the ground up. In considering imperial designs on the Fertile Crescent, he returns to Rome, though most of his global focus rests on the British Empire and their colonial inheritors of hegemony.“Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath,” Phillips quotes an oil analyst from a couple of years ago. “You can’t ask for better than that.” And while Iraq remains a central front in this particular petro-war (it being of significant note that in 2000 Baghdad switched from the dollar standard for oil export to the Euro, a move reversed post-invasion), Phillips points out the recent clustering of semi-temporary American military bases and/or the presence of U.S. military advisors near Kazakhastan, Colombia, the Caucasian republic of Georgia, Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Sao Tome, Indonesia, the Strait of Malaca, the Balkans, and any other region that just so coincidentally happens to run along oil and gas pipelines or be possessed of sizable oil fields. Such maps, one historian notes, bear a striking resemblance to the global span of imperial Britain’s protected collieries.It is one of the book’s ironies to learn that the likely greatest failure of the British Empire was its heavy dependence on coal and its refusal to adjust its coal-based infrastructure and mindset. This spectacular myopia lead them to sort of overlook and underestimate petroleum. King Coal would always rule, they believed.Such mindsets were behind another feature of declining empire, the overtaking of actual manufacturing as a base of the economy in favor of finance-based speculative markets. Heavy borrowing, stock-trading, futures markets, all of these non-productive types of wealth accumulation and management have come to dominate the American business sector, with solid manufacturing jobs being shipped out to slave-wage-labor third-world sweatshops. As wealth becomes more and more speculative and less and less based on solid material growth, empires overextend themselves and the merest of financial catastrophes balloon.This is well illustrated by Phillips’ consideration of personal, corporate, and government debt, handily summarized by American’s net savings for the first time in history showing a negative balance. We now, as a nation and as family units, spend more than we earn. While it’s clear Phillips abhors this practice at the individual level, he is ruthless in his excoriation of the architects of such economies, epitomized in the person of former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. Phillips stops just short of suggesting Greenspan should be burned in effigy in the streets or tarred and feathered, but such notions probably aren’t far from his mind.But nowhere in the book is Phillips more scathing and venomous than in lambasting the hucksterism of the Religious Right, a group he compares unfavorably with radical Muslim clerics, as well as frauds and opportunists looking to cash in on the credulous. Tying this into the petroleum dilemmas, Phillips takes us inside what the Coors Beer family fortune has wrought, the staffing of “the principal units charged with resources stewardship (the Environmental Protection Agency and the departments of the Interior and Energy)” with cronies from: the GOP’s business-religious axis: the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, the Mountain States Legal Foundation, the Council for National Policy…, and, more marginally, the Coalition on Revival (bridging the theological gap between the rapture believers and the Christian Reconstructionists who believe a theocratic type of government must be built before Jesus will return).As if you needed a better reason not to drink the Coors family’s shitty beer.With the third group in that category, the Council for National Policy, Phillips takes special attention toward Tim LaHaye, a hilariously inept favorite here on this site, and quotes one analysis of the novels LaHaye “co-wrote” with draftsman Jerry B. Jenkins as “And God so loved the world that He sent World War Three.” Phillips considers his influence to have “warped the Republican party” which is putting it mildly to say the least and heaps scorn on this sizable GOP constituency. You can almost hear the sneer when he notes that such among the faithful believe as soon as a sperm fertilizes an egg — “pop” god slips in a soul.That Phillips is a Republican attacking Republicans does not mean that he has suddenly become sympathetic to liberal ideas; he merely embraces science over religious tenets in decision making. He also doesn’t appear to have any reactions to the hot button issues of conservative fundamentalists (abortion, evolution, climate change, sex education). It’s refreshing to hear a GOP man discuss favorably how union labor lifted the American population by and large into the middle class, whereas today’s current money markets are pushing in the opposite direction. It is likewise a sign of his rationality that he finds fault with the Reagan years lust for deregulation which allowed for all kinds of economic mischief.To read American Theocracy is to have your eyes opened repeatedly with an erudition more entertaining political tracts lack. When the author mixes these three dangerous strands of his book together, the result promises a combustible future on this continent.Phillips has no great praise for Democrats in general, but to hear his concerns, his favorable impressions, his economic insights and views on what is needed to save America from ruinous collapse, you’d think you were hearing someone slightly to the right of Ralph Nader.And if that ain’t a sign of how warped the Republican Party has become, I don’t know what would demonstrate it better.

its incredible how accurately this book predicted the current economic realities we are currently experiencing , It was written over 3 years ago. This book makes credible arguments that oil and religion have been the focus of our politics at the cost to the american people. I mean , we went into Iraq for Oil and we didn`t even get it ...the chinese won the first contract. The direction and political decisions influenced by religion is staggering and scary. A worthwhile and eye-opening read. This book will not make you happy. It points out the ugly truths and trends in America which could lead to its demise. And the downside of the book is that there were no solutions ventured forth . I for one believe that with the new President and congress some of the issues this book sheds light on , Obama already repealed some of the religious fueled policies of Bush and we have our first study FDA approved trial of stem cells therapy. I believe that Obama`s focus , unlike the oilmen Bush and Cheney , is truly to ween us off of Oil and I believe the economy meltdown has put market forces back to work in the right way for that to happen. As far as the economy and debt , The economic recession has also radically changed the corporate financial landscape , Obama will push through more regulatory oversight to prevent such recurrence and we as Americans have no choice but to become savers not spenders and one can see this happening now as more and more retail stores shut down , and businesses cut back. We may raise our National debt in the short term but I feel that the painful corrections at home and in business are well under way. There is hope.

Phillips' articulates the concerns of many Americans that are troubled by the current blending of American religion and democracy. He moves on to assess the dangers oil diplomacy and excessive national and household debt. This book was written before the current home mortgage crises, but it clearly predicts that the real estate boom spurred by the Federal Reserve cannot continue. That now appears to be an easy prediction to make. So why weren't the bankers smart enough to anticipate it?

Read in April, 2007

Keven Phillips is a respected and knowledgeable writer on politics and economics since as a young man he predicted the realignment of American politics with the domination of conservative Republicans. In this book he looks at the current global crisis, comparing it against three previous imperial failures, that of Spain, the Dutch, and the British. He goes into lengthy explanations of the financial services sector domination of the U.S. economy and the questionable nature of the wealth it produced and the reasons for the failure of these financial instruments. He also ties in the question of the influence of oil on the world's economy, politics, and wars. If oil production has, or is about, to, peak, the world's economies are in for major and painful restructuring. Moreover, failed U.S. foreign policy, especially the disastrous Iraq war, has increased the speed of the formation of anti-American or post-American power blocks.

An important look at the current financial crisis and the problems that led up to it.