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A Political History of the American Rich
Broadway
April 2003
496 pages
ISBN: 0767905342
Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction Political
For more than thirty years, Kevin Phillips' insight into
American politics and economics has helped to make history
as well as record it. His bestselling books, including
The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) and The
Politics of Rich and Poor (1990), have influenced
presidential campaigns and changed the way America sees
itself. Widely acknowledging Phillips as one of the nation's
most perceptive thinkers, reviewers have called him a
latter-day Nostradamus and our "modern Thomas Paine." Now,
in the first major book of its kind since the 1930s, he
turns his attention to the United States' history of great
wealth and power, a sweeping cavalcade from the American
Revolution to what he calls "the Second Gilded Age" at the
turn of the twenty-first century.
The Second Gilded
Age has been staggering enough in its concentration of
wealth to dwarf the original Gilded Age a hundred years
earlier. However, the tech crash and then the horrible
events of September 11, 2001, pointed out that great riches
are as vulnerable as they have ever been. In Wealth and
Democracy, Kevin Phillips charts the ongoing American
saga of great wealth--how it has been accumulated, its
shifting sources, and its ups and downs over more than two
centuries. He explores how the rich and politically
powerful have frequently worked together to create or
perpetuate privilege, often at the expense of the national
interest and usually at the expense of the middle and lower
classes.
With intriguing chapters on history and bold analysis of
present-day America, Phillips illuminates the dangerous
politics that go with excessive concentration of wealth.
Profiling wealthy Americans--from Astor to Carnegie and
Rockefeller to contemporary wealth holders--Phillips
provides fascinating details about the peculiarly American
ways of becoming and staying a multimillionaire. He
exposes the subtle corruption spawned by a money culture and
financial power, evident in economic philosophy, tax
favoritism, and selective bailouts in the name of free
enterprise, economic stimulus, and national
security.
Finally, Wealth and Democracy turns
to the history of Britain and other leading world economic
powers to examine the symptoms that signaled their
declines--speculative finance, mounting international debt,
record wealth, income polarization, and disgruntled
politics--signs that we recognize in America at the start of
the twenty-first century. In a time of national crisis,
Phillips worries that the growing parallels suggest the tide
may already be turning for us all.
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