Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

I'm so tired of the lies being told by the right. They manipulate people with their lies and are bold enough to flaunt what they do. It's such a critical time in the United States and the world. People need to come together and work in harmony for the betterment of all. We need the truth to get out there and Kurt Anderson does just that with this book. He explains a lot about the Capitalistic right and how they consistently manipulate those who are uneducated and or misinformed about what is truly going on in America. The truth will prevail but there will be many lost because of the lies perpetuated by the right media and politicians. Look at the covid situation. We have lost so many people because of the lies and greed that the right perpetuates through the media. I hope many will read this book and see the ugly truth about the capitalistic right. Its purpose is to protect the rich and they don't care who they hurt. They use religion and God to control the masses who are blinded by their lies and that is truly a sad time for mankind. The rich control this world through fear, lies and they use God's name to do it. It won't get better until people wake up to the truth. Money runs everything in American and the world. Money buys positions in our government and legal system. People are suffering all over American and for what? Until the inequities are fixed, the divide between the rich and the poor will continue. It all starts at the foundation. There shouldn't be people out on the streets in American. There should be healthcare for everyone. No one should be struggling to live day to day on an income so low that they can't afford to rent an apartment or buy a house. The American dream is to buy a house and live comfortably. The Right has taken that dream away for so many people. They use fear to control the masses whom they have brainwashed with their lies. Wake up people. Read and see the truth. The right has preyed on the weak minded. They've told you what you want to hear. They spread fear to keep you where they want you. Educate yourselves and look around you. Who is really benefiting in this world. It's the Trumps, McConnells, the Grahams, the Manchins, the Sinema, the McCartheys, the Koch family, the oil executives/CEOS, Big Pharma, the Federalist Society, the Zuckerburgs, and I could go on and on. Who is suffering from this? It's those who don't have the money and don't have a voice. What is right about that?

Andersen lived the undoing of America that has been documented by so many. The book is not politically partisan in an overt way. Rather, it is permeated with sad, patriotic regret like a requiem about what an unbridled embrace of greed has done to a democracy. The author's biography as an American from Nebraska who got a Harvard education and then passively participated in bringing America down is the big difference between this book and those by economists and political scientists. Whereas Piketty, Stiglitz and Appelbaum show you how a worship of markets resulted in upward mobility in the US ranking dead last among highly developed countries and allowed the top 10% to take just about everything since 1980, Andersen gives you the experience of being in this horror as a highly informed observer. Also, while historians like Gordon Lafer show exactly how PACs of the wealthy and big business wrote and passed legislation to roll back funding for education and health, and weakened or disbanded labor unions, Andresen gives you the cultural background of why this was possible.Anyone who took a snapshot of the US in 1990 and again in 2020 would see that the place has become much more like South or Central America - with the rich clustered together in beautiful places, educated at the best institutions around the globe, and the poor just trying to survive. Andersen's Evil Geniuses is as good a place as any to begin understanding how this happened. If you want more detail on the changes in economics, Appelbaum's The Economists' Hour is very good, albeit dry. Piketty's Capital and Ideology will show you that the place where America is headed (with the wealthy owning everything and the poor fighting for their next month of existence) is pretty much where the whole world was for most of history. This may cheer up some and deeply frighten others with its sense of inevitability. What you get in Andresen is someone who during youth had internalized a deep sense of an egalitarian and hopeful America, common among people after World War II, and is trying to understand how it came to be replaced by an embattled world in which most Americans struggle to compete for their housing, health and education. If you are young and have little sense of that old view of the country as egalitarian, this book could be very helpful. You can also find that cultural remnant of America it in Robert Putnam's Our Kids, which offers great detail about the hard future facing American children born after 2000 (compared to his own future - again as seen from after WWII).

If you want to know all the economic and political history that got us to the right-wing extremist Republican party, there’s no more entertaining way to do so than Kurt Anderson’s latest book “Evil Geniuses”. And be sure to read his book “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History”. It is one of the best books I’ve ever read.This book has insights into Trump & Health care I haven’t seen elsewhere, such as how Koch and other billionaires who originated the Tea Party used the same astroturf operations to create a fake movement of angry people who refused to wear masks, which turned into millions refusing to do so and countless thousands of extra deaths.My personal take on this after reading the book is: Don’t billionaires have enough money? Can’t they just let folks keep safe until a vaccine is found, and help pay for their rent and wages out of their ill-gotten billions obtained by paying low wages in the first place, rather than sharing profits with their workers?I was frustrated that such a great writer and book were marred by a lack of awareness of biophysical economics, ecology, or limits to growth. Andersen might have written an even better book if he’d read “Energy and the Wealth of Nations: understanding the biophysical economy”, “Limits to Growth”, “When trucks stop running: energy and the future of transportation”, “Living within Limits”, or “Extracted: How the quest for mineral wealth is plundering the planet”.

Superbly researched, written and incredibly informative - a must read!!!

libro molto interessante sulla psiche dell'America

Genial lectura para comprender la trampa neocon conservadora entre las clases populares norteamericanas.

Without a doubt, and thanks largely to Roosevelt’s New Deal, America’s best era was the twenty years following the end of WW2, characterised by benign government, a vibrant economy and a generally kinder, more cohesive, society; most jobs tended to be well-paid and, typically, a single wage-earner per household would guarantee a more than acceptable standard of living. During this period, Americans, by and large, tended to trust their governments but this began to go awry, starting with the disastrous Vietnam War, the race riots (following the assassination of Martin Luther King) and, ultimately, the unmasking of the criminal Watergate conspiracy, leading to the resignation from office of President Richard Nixon. A group far less enamoured by the New Deal (and the Keynesian economics it embraced) were those on the Far-Right of US politics, namely the super-rich, big business and, naturally, Wall Street, all of whom were incandescent over the high marginal tax rates they were being asked to pay. During the 12 or so years culminating in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election victory, an insidious campaign, mounted by these conservative elements and with cooperation from parts of the media, drip-fed the message that the nation’s unrest and distrust was the inevitable result of ‘too much socialism’; the concept of Neoliberalism was, accordingly, put forward as a remedy. The basic tenets of this doctrine are small government, large tax reductions for the wealthy and deregulation, all of which were subsequently pursued by Reagan and remain the main policy pillars of US Republicans to this day. Four decades on, the cost of the Neoliberal project has been a disaster, with the economic elite wealthy to obscene levels, the middle-class all but wiped out and the poor struggling along as best they can. Back in 2016, this widespread and profound outrage at Washington was seized upon as an election game-changer by Donald Trump, when he vowed to “drain the swamp”. Although Trump certainly attracted support from dubious circles (white racists, religious nuts and the gun lobby) others undoubtedly voted for him to clean up Congress and give them a better and fairer stake in society. We will all have our opinions on the success (or otherwise) of Trump’s term in office but, over the past four years, one ‘achievement’ seems to stand out, namely a one trillion dollar tax cut - for the wealthy!! To conclude, Mr Andersen covers all the above ground in interesting detail and in an engaging style, which is never boring but, importantly, there is also humour in his presentation, possibly even some optimism, which I hope is not misplaced.

Kurt Anderson has collected all those half heard sound bites and put them into understandable history to explain why the English speaking countries are all on a downward spiral. If only everyone would read this…