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I finished One Market Under God by Thomas Frank, published in 2000. This is an excellent and very readable book about the recent economy and the rise of "market populism" or more nakedly, corporatism masquerading as such. Reading it in 2006, it's a little difficult to feel quite the outrage -things are much worse now - but I do believe it's not just Bush, not just the people in the White House, that are responsible for today's messes. It's the same corporate greed and manipulation Frank documents in his book, the same theories that form their basis of denial for how they damage the greater community in their quest for more and more that are driving the destruction today. It will take more than a changing of the guard to regain what we lost. It will take a reordering of our priorities and a rediscovering of the art and science of critical thinking. But Thomas Frank thinks we will do it - that we are doing it.
Frank ended this way:
"But the great euphoria of the late nineties was never as much about the return of good times as it was the giddy triumph of one America over another, of their "New Economy" over our New Deal. Though they banged the drum with a fervor almost maniacal, the language of the euphoria still rang so patently false, sounded so transparently self-serving that it threatened to collapse in on itself almost as quickly as it bubbled up from the talk shows and the celebrated think tanks. And in the streets and the union halls and the truck stops and the three-flats and the office blocks there remained all along a vocabulary of fact and knowing and memory, of wit and of everyday doubt, a vernacular that could not be extinguished no matter how it was cursed for "cynicism", a dialect that the focus group could never quite reflect, the resilient language of democracy."
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