2006 Book 17 - American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips

Considering the tomes I've been reading lately I guess it's not too hard to keep up with my book reviews. I just finished another book and here it is:

2006 Book #17 - American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century by Kevin Phillips
I picked up this book because I think I saw it mentioned by member of a community I read on LJ which focuses on the ways in which fundamentalist religions attempt to change secular government. What caught my attention is that the person who mentioned it also said that it was written by a long-time conservative Republican. I admit that I read a large number of liberal-slanted books, but I do like to read ones that are written by "the other side" which at the same time actually addresses the issues instead of attacking the messenger tactics sadly being used these days. The back of the book jacket describes him as "a former Republican strategist" who's also "been a political and economic commentator for more than three decades." After having read this book I would say that he's an "old school" conservative Republican. One who actually believes in conserving money and limiting the intrusion and size of government.

There's a lot of valuable information in this book and it's not written in the Al Franken/Bill Maher kind of way heavy on the opinions and editorializing. Phillips lays out the history and the facts with few of his own opinions and lets the reader do what they will the information. The biggest theme of the book is that the United States isn't as indestructable as many Americans believe it to be. In fact he repeatedly makes parallels with some of the most recent empires which once were in the same position of power as the U.S. is currently - the Spanish, the Dutch, and the British.

The book is divided into three parts: "Oil and American Supremacy," "Too Many Preachers," and "Borrowed Prosperity." The first part connects the U.S.'s increasing energy source problems to history and again shows how the same thing happened to the other empires I mentioned, most recently to England who was mainly powered by coal until the U.S. took over by turning the world onto an oil/petroleum-dependent economy.

The second part had a lot of information I already knew, but it was I think the most interesting to me. It covered the history of religion in the U.S. and actually says what I've said more than once to hedwig_snowy, that the U.S. got the most crazy, most fundamentalist believers from Europe at a time when those religions were going into the dumper over there and set up shop to spread like wildfire here.

It also included the history of the entertwining of politics and religion since the days of the American Revolution. I wish he'd included more maps, but he certainly had plenty of citations that I suppose I could've looked up. The few that he did put in show amazingly how time after time the same people in the same areas keep doing the same thing to the country. Now whether they were once Democrats or Republicans is a different question. I think I remember once mentioning to brain_o_shaner that the primary block of "enlightened" people in the North during the Civil War were Republicans and this seemed to really surprise him. Phillips covers that and how the northern states were primarily Republican until a great and final flip-flop in the 70s where Republicans were mainly Southerners and Democrats mainly Northerners. What doesn't change is what area of the country in general tends to all vote the same. What is interesting is a passing mention in a much later part of the book was to the same type of entertwining of religion and politics in 1914 Britain where, like here, every church was just as wrapped in their flag as U.S. churches are now in the Stars and Stripes.

Finally the last part of the book covered a lot of economics and financial history. I have to admit that some of it was a little over my head and there were a few things that I skimmed and/or it went over my head, but the main message was clear. Also as in the three other countries the U.S. is overextending itself way too far financially borrowing itself deep into the red and being egged on by a religious block who seems to push politicians into spending willy nilly without thought to plans or future consequences. The most important message I think few Americans are aware of and that I surprised a co-worker a year or two ago because I knew it is how far into debt we are for one but for another to WHO that debt is owed. The American dollar is mainly being propped up by Asian currency and if anything ever goes down over there then the value of U.S. Treasury Bonds are going to go into the toilet and we'll be screwed. Besides the Chinese, Japanese, and South Koreans, the Saudis also prop up the dollar by pricing oil in greenbacks. As brain_o_shaner (ever the conspiracy theorist) loves to point out, it's interesting that the U.S. went into the whole Afghanistan/Iraq debacle just as OPEC and Hussein were contemplating starting to price oil in Euros. This is something that is mentioned in this book as well.

Considering how much the U.S. economy depends on a consumer economy this book points out how much no one realizes that all the graphs and data of debt for the entire country mirrors that of a personal/individual's debt. Something unusual to the decline of the U.S. economy in comparison to those three countries is that it's doing this Moebius strip of a method where not only is the U.S. the country in the highest debt, but it's also the country that gives out the most loans. So in effect it's in a self-perpetuating cycle of debt and consumerism fueling each other and causing the greater and greater gap between the rich and the poor (that includes all the people who APPEAR to be well off but are really in serious debt because they just HAD to buy that McMansion).

Sooner or later the economy is going to break because of too many debts, too many wars, and too much radicalism and this book really made me even more apprehensive of paying off my debts before that all happens. Whether or not it comes true the book says that the economy will really decline in the 2010s or 2020s and by around the 2050s the world just may be in some sort of Euro, Asian, or some combination currency. Oh and that's about when at best things like Social Security will go belly-up too. Just in time for me to be old enough to retire if I'm alive then. Great! That reminds me something I learned was that the U.S. debt numbers at least once have been given that aren't as severe as they really are. Apparently someone flubbed it by off-setting the actual debt by the money for Social Security which actually very much in surplus! Which makes me wonder, are they going to throw away all that money by throwing it at the U.S. debt and then where does that leave all the people who were contributing money that was SUPPOSED to go towards retirement?? I guess that goes with the whole mindset that you have to get those stupid personal accounts rather than SS.

All in all a really good informative read that I felt wasn't particularly slanted other than towards the facts.

And now for some of my favorite quotes. Stop reading if you don't have lots of time! :D

• Former CIA desk officer Pelletière minces few words on this [the two Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003], saying that the behavior of the Americans and British in the run-ups to both wars bore a disturbing similarity to "the Big Lie" used by the Germans in launching World War II. At the very least both are manipulative towards them, to an extreme degree."
  
• ...the United States has a superabundance of denominations and sects compared to Europe, as well as a far higher ratio of churchgoers. By one count, the United States in 1996 had 19 separate Presbyterian denominations, 32 Lutheran, 36 Methodist, 37 Episcopal or Anglican, 60 Baptist, and 241 Pentecostal..."The most important Christian schisms will increasingly follow theological-ideological lines rather than denominational lines. Especially as the historic Catholic-Protestant chasm continues to narrow, Christians will be linked to fellow believers from other denominations according to shared convictions."
  
• [Aha! a referece to another book I read a couple of years ago! -syn] The historical mythmaking of the lost cause did not simply intensify southern and border-state memories; it also recast them. The States where most men serving in Civil War armies had fought for the Union - Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri - would up with a disproportion of southern memorials and museums. James Loewen profiled this Confederate reconquista in his book Lies Across America, which describes inaccurate historical sites.
  
• Some contemporary U.S. tensions, moreover, do resemble those of the antebellum years: sharp national divisions between the red and blue (instead of the blue and gray), war hawks shrilling from a perch in Dixie, Bibles being brandished as public policy guides, pompous sermons proclaiming a chosen nation obliged to redeem the world, and fire-eyed preachers counting down to Armageddon (albeit in the holy land, not along the Potomac or Rappahannock).
  
• The last arena of theological influence, almost as important as sex, birth, and mortality, involves American foreign policy, bringing us to the connections among the war on terror, the rapture, the end times, Armageddon, and the thinly disguised U.S. crusade against radical Islam.
  
• These are not social or "value" judgements. The arguable rights of women (or parents) are bing displaced by the rights of embryos or by the prerogative of sperm and egg to join, decisions rooted largely in theology, not science. Perhaps the preoccupation involves maximizing the potential soul count for the hereafter, in the manner of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inquisitors who ordered that heretics must die even if they repented, yet pursued repentance to save their souls first.
  
• Most Americans, having never heard of Christian Reconstructionism, likely assume it has only fringe status. The groups that monitor such activists - Theocracy Watch, the Public Eye, the First Amendment Foundation, Church & State magazine, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and others - take the movement more seriously, however. Their contention is that the reconstructionists exercise a great deal of indirect influence through the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies Coalition, the conservative Council for National Policy, and other groups that share many of their less radical perspectives. That is plausible, given the array of lesser Christian-right figures who, while denying they are reconstructionists, admit to agreeing with some of their positions.
  
• Signs of that anxiety [to control the federal judiciary by Christian conservatives] burst into view in an early 2005 meeting at which conservative evangelical leaders were addressed by Tom DeLay and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. The focus of the strategy session was how to strip funding or jurisdiction from federal courts, or even eliminate them. James Dobson of the California-based Focus on the Family named one target: the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. "Very few people know this, the Congress can simply disenfranchise a court," Dobson commentd. "They don't have to fire anybody or impeach them or go through that battle. All they have to do is say the 9th Circuit doesn't exist anymore, and it's gone."
  
• In the radical Texas Republican platform adopted in 2004, the Lone State GOP was not content to call for abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy; it also demanded the aboliion of the Internal Revenue Service and the elimination of the income tax, the inheritance tax, the gift tax, the capital-gains levy, the corporate income tax, the payroll tax, and state and local property taxes.
  
• Parallels to the deficit in social consciousness on the part of the FIRE [finance, insurance, and real estate] sector abound....current-day critics saw as much need to deal with the conditions that enticed young Americans into taking on crippling debt. Sociologist Robert Manning later detailed how banking deregulation during the late 1990s facilitated an "enormously successful mass marketing campaign" that "dramatically altered American attitudes toward consumer credit and debt," not least on the part of teenagers. "The key is here," he had said, "as the marketing of consumption goes younger and younger and younger, we're talking about people who have never had jobs and haven't had to establish a budget." Similarly Boston economist Juliet Schor argued that advertising had drawn children into rampant and gullible materialism...The New York Times summarized that "the machinery of American marketing, media and finance all encourage the consumption habit. Many consumers are unable to resist the overpowering mantra: spend, spend, spend."
  
• The debilitation of wage earners is clear enough. Over the last four decades, as manyufacturing employment has tumbled and finance has gained, wages hve declined sharply as a share of personal income. Borrowing and spending as a percentage of wages, in turn, have both soared. For not quite half of the population, what some Democrats would picture as "involuntary servitude" can be summed up thus: the number of good jobs shrunks, wages decline, consumer appetites remain constant or intensify, credit cards are pitched endlessly and misleadingly, the credulous sign up, and cards are issued. Rates and charges eventually change, pain begins, and on go the plastic shackles. [That's me! - syn]
  
• Policy excesses and blind constutuency commitments have a long history of develiping around a stagnantbut entrenched politics that has overstayed its national usefulness. This, alas, is an established pattern in the UNited States, with its long cycles of party domination in Washington. It does not really matter which of the three is primary at any given moment.
  
• Among oil producers... Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, Venezuela, and others had moved earlier [in 2003? 2004?] to reduce their use of dollarys or to take other measures against u.S. financial domination of the ioil markets. in 2005 Russia, Singapore, and Malaysia all announced small but significant shifts in their central-bank reserves from dollars to euros.
  
• One can only imagine the private conversations - the blunt economic language - in the conference rooms of Asian financiers and exporters, each group as confident of its contingent's coming hour as executives in Mangattan and Chicago circa 1919 were of America's: "Why don't the Americans take care of their industry and invest in it? Why do they dither over primitve and antiscientific religion? Why are their children so far behind our own students? Why can't they cut back on their foolish and unaffordable overconsumption of oil? How far can we - should we - support them?"
  
• While the Christian right and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration blocked sex-linked medications for women - a vaccine to prevent HPV, the virus responsible for most cervical cancers, and Intrinsa, a testosterone patch intended to raise libido in women whose ovaries have been removed - male use of Viagra was encouraged. For five years, until the discovery of the practice in 2005, New York State handed out free Viagra (under Medicaid) to sex criminals because state authorities thought that federal rules so required.
  
• The U.S. difficulty in facing these problems has been matched by a similar failure of leadership, incapacity of the parties, and aristocratization or sclerosis of institutions. One troubling aspect...is the emergence within the U.S. system of a great-family politics, most vivid on the Republican side...Inbred and sclerotic vie as appropriate descriptions of the two parties' selection processes. Such continuity of power elites suggests little capacity for challenging the status quo.
  
• Never before has a U.S. political coalition been so domination by an array of outside religious denominations caught up in biblical morality, distrust of science, and a global imperative of political and religious evangelicalism. These groups may represent only a quarter to a third of the U.S. population [there goes that 20-30% I'm always talking about!!! - syn], but they are mobilized, as the turnout in 2004 showed.
  
• History, however, suggests that if the hour was not at hand for Rome, Spain, the Dutch Republic, or Britain circa 1914, despite their convictions of God's favor and heaven's special attention, then God may also spurn his Republican faithful in and out of Washington. And should religious excess and overambition become part of an epitaph for the twenty-first-century United Sates, as it did for some of the others, the current GOP ntional coalition will share in the ignominy.

The book I started reading on Friday is an old book by Molly Ivins. It came in the mail a couple of weeks ago from some bookring I signed up for I suppose. I don't even remember doing it, but I do love Molly Ivins, so that must be true! It's actually kind of giving me nostalgia. It covers politics from the Clinton era and compared to these days and the book I'd just finished reading that includes 5 years of the Bush administration, it seems so... pleasant! It's called You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You: Politics in the Clinton Years.

Honestly, I need to get away from these politics books soon! I have a whole bunch of "fun" books I've bought at Borders and I haven't been able to get to them because of first two books from the library that were on waiting lists so I wasn't going to be able to renew and now this bookring book that I need to get moving to the next person. argh. Ok, next book has to be fun. No more bookrings! :D