Kevin Phillips - Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism

Understanding the Financial Crisis

A generation ago, Kevin Phillips wrote The Emerging Republican Majority, which Newsweek described as the “political bible of the Nixon administration.” Throughout the ’70s and ’80s Kevin Phillips was viewed as one of the GOP’s top theoreticians and electoral analysts. But today he’s considered one of the leading critics of US political culture. Kevin Phillips’s latest book is Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism. It’s the fourteenth volume in his series of reflections on US political culture, following his bestseller American Theocracy.

In the below articles and videos, Kevin Phillips talks about a "25 year debt build-up" and its consequences, which we are seeing today. In discussing "bad money", Phillips lays out how "bad capitalism drives out good capitalism. He talks about:

- the "greatest story never told"
- lies, deceptions, frauds and the question of what's been bubbling here
- how the United States in the last 20 years engaged in an enormous transformation with no risk because of the financial sector has never been graded on its competency
- how this created great wealth for a small fraction of people
- the middle class is shrinking and the pie goes to top 1-2%
- how we have never had such polarization and wealth disparity as we do now
- bailouts have been going on since beginning of the 1980's
- how America became a country which became further and further in debt
- the central component being the rise of the "dead industry", such as found in the quadrupling of credit card debt over the span of Greenspan's tenure.
- this has been a bipartisan phenomenon Clinton aided and abetted

Please consider exploring and sharing the below resources for more information:

Bill Moyers interviewed Kevin Phillips on September 19, 2008 on his weekly television broadcast. Please go here for the transcript or video: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09192008/profile.html.

Please go here for Amy Goodman's interview with Kevin Phillips on Democracy NOW! on May 06, 2008: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/6/bad_money_reckless_finance_failed_politics

Bad Money website by Kevin Phillips: http://www.bad-money.com/. This includes interviews and articles from several months ago, including:

Interview in the New York Observer

Why Wall Street Socialism Will Fail

If America Declines, Don't Expect Anyone to Talk About It

The Destructive Rise of Big Finance

Preface: The Political Economics of Deception

Kevin Phillips, author, columist, former Republican Political Strategist, spoke at the Bagdad Theater in Portland, Oregon on April 28, 2008: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3035415655640961960

Here is a NY Times review of Phillips' book: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/books/21gewen.html

Kevin Phillips: The Crisis Of American Capitalism, speech given on April 24, 2008 http://fora.tv/2008/04/24/Kevin_Phillips_The_Crisis_Of_American_Capitalism

The Destructive Rise of Big Finance by Kevin Phillips, March 31, 2008 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-phillips/the-destructive-rise-of-b_b_94351.html

Envisioning a world that works for all...

Molly

"I began writing about these matters with a 1990 book entitled The Politics of Rich and Poor, and in several other volumes since then. Today, the economic negligence of Washington and Wall Street, more than two decades in the making, has led to a multi-dimensional crisis in which this country faces an unprecedented convergence of problems: unprecedented debt, tumbling home prices, reckless money supply expansion, growing inflation, insufficient and expensive oil, and an eroding dollar. Sadly, there may no longer be a plausible way out." - Kevin Phillips, 3/31/08