Wal-Mart ("Is that where people go to buy wall stuff?" Immortal words from the incisive mind [!] of Paris Hilton) is only one of the more obvious symptoms of some of the things that are wrong with America. But they're all part of the same plague.

I am currently reading The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy by William Greider. Highly recommended (CLICK and scroll down for reviews).

Another book I highly recommend is the following:   since this web site (CLICK and scroll down) changes frequently, I will cut and past the brief review (but if the web site is still there, it's worth taking a look at the cover of the book):—

REAGANISM AND THE DEATH OF REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY By Walter Williams (Georgetown University Press, $26.95)

In the hands of a left-wing polemicist, this could be a teeth-grinding exercise: yet another reasoned yet manic screed on Reagan and how he has poisoned the magic political well of America, and hence the world.

But this is not Noam Chomsky. It's Walter Williams, professor emeritus in political science at the UW's Daniel Evans School of Public Policy. And a man who's spent his life in academia is prone to writing like, well, an academic. As such, a notion like "Under Reaganism, the widening income gap has hurt government" becomes: "In the reign of Reaganism, no joint product of economic and political factors may have been more important in the deterioration of the federal institutions of governance than the phenomenal growth of the maldistribution of income and wealth." Form equals function: In Williams' New Deal prose, there's a subjunctive clause in every pot.

Yet, for the genre, Williams is relatively readable, and it helps that what he has to say is worth reading. He's no wild-eyed liberal—the very essence of Reaganism is a plea for greater bipartisanship and a government that makes decisions based on what's best for all its citizens, not simply the self-interest of politicians and their wealthiest supporters. Williams argues, rigorously, that American democracy is broken—paralyzed by its very institution of checks and balances, by enormously expensive campaigns, and by spin-doctor misinformation and a generation of corrosive antigovernment rhetoric. He notes that for 200 years, no other country has adopted the American model of democracy—because it's not working. Then he explains why. And what might help fix it.

Williams is passionate—but less in the Chomskian attack mode than out of a deep belief that Americans deserve better than we're getting. That passion makes Reaganism valuable for readers of any political stripe. Ultimately, we're all in the same boat—and it's sinking.
                                                                                                            —GEOV PARRISH, Seattle Weekly

If the patient is to be saved at all, it's necessary to have an idea of the real nature of the sickness.

Don Firth