Excerpts: “Such a colossal irony: after socialists and Communists in the 1930s and then the New Left in the 1960s had tried and failed to achieve a radical class-based reordering of the American political economy, the economic far right took its shot doing that in the 1970s and succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest hope or fear” (p. 100).
“In 1985 Murdoch moved into television, spending the equivalent of $5 billion to buy TV stations in seven of the ten biggest cities. Reagan helped: he fast-traced Murdoch for U.S. citizenship so that his company could get around the federal law forbidding foreigners from owning stations, then waived the federal rule forbidding anyone from owning a TV station and a newspaper in the same city, as Murdoch suddenly did in New York and Boston. The footings were now in place to build the important final piece of the right’s counter-Establishment” (p. 114).
“The gambling hall replaced the factory floor as our governing economic symbol, a flashy, totally temporary gathering of magical-thinking individual strangers whose fortunes depend overwhelming on luck instead of on collective hard work with trusted industrious colleagues day after day” (p. 152).
“Wall Street’s new hegemony was first enabled by Milton Friedman’s mainstreamed libertarianism and then reinforced it in turn – ditto with financialization and deregulation, the Law and Economics movement, the atrophying of antitrust, the lionization of guys like Jack Welch and Gordon Gekko, the digital revolution, increasingly short-term thinking, only the rich get richer, and the explosion of corporate lobbying in Washington” (p. 154-155).
“Because if the stock price is everything, whatever got companies to that end – less competition and thus less innovation and lower salaries, draconian cost-cutting – was justified” (p.181).
“Fiscal responsibility rhetorically pops back to life for Republicans only when they’re out of power in Washington, and only as an argument for achieving their secondary goals of reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits and preventing any major expansion of health or education or other social programs” (p. 223).
[In footnote] “A right-wing legal group that for a decade laid important groundwork for the Citizens United case was the James Madison Center, founded in 1997 by Senator Mitch McConnell with funds provided by Betsy Devos (p. 278).
For Greenspan, however, the problem isn’t extreme inequality per se, or the newly extreme inequality between the great majority and the rich, but rather the envy of the poor for the middle class. And his proposed solution to that, honest to God, was to contrive to pay middle-class workers even less, to bring their incomes down closer to those of the poor (p. 280).
“As a member of Congress, he said, ‘you are a slave to the donors. They own you. That’s [the] real corruption, the ownership of Congress by the rich'” (p. 299).
“Two basic goals will seem contradictory: we want everyone with talent or passion for their work to keep working, and all employees to be treated with fairness and respect now, but for the long term we need to start making self-respect and usefulness more independent of employment, to education and enable and encourage Americans to be and feel engaged and useful and respected regardless of how they receive their fair share of the national wealth” (p. 334).
“What else do all Americans own in common that could generate income and directly improve everybody’s lives, like the oil under the North Slope did only for Alaskans? The air over the whole United States. Instead of just giving away the right to dump 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide into our air every year, we should start charging a fee for it, by means of taxes on oil and other fossilized carbon we burn. Those tax revenues could cover an annual dividend paid to every citizen, even oil-enriched Alaskans” (p. 364).
Andersen, Kurt (2020). Evil Geniuses – The Unmaking of America: A Recent History. New York: Random House.