I've just finished Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, by Kevin Phillips (c. 2008, Viking). Phillips' earlier book, American Theocracy, was the book that got me alarmed about America's staggering debt - public, corporate, and private - now revealing itself to be the crisis Phillips said it was. This book updates and elaborates Phillips' alarm about debt, written in the wake of the popping of the housing bubble which began, more or less, in mid-2007.

Phillips might rankle free market purists with his criticism of blind faith in markets and suggestions that the financial markets are under-regulated. However, he recognizes that the actions of government, especially one of our favorite foes, the Federal Reserve, are complicit in the trouble. As an example:


As in some other books, such as Naomi Klein's, The Shock Doctrine, criticism of "capitalism" and "free markets" is often more properly criticism of "corporatism", or in Phillips' own terms here, "financial mercantilism".

Anyway, this is another of those books sounding the alarm about the decline of the American Empire, which is all the more infuriating to read in a presidential election year because the shit heads we have for major party candidates won't talk about this stuff. They all remember Reagan's optimism defeating Carter's malaise and feel obliged to tell us that, "America's best days are ahead of us," even if they themselves are not stupid enough to be unaware of the shit we are in for. If they are that stupid, it's another reason, beside their dishonesty, that they are unfit to govern.