Regime Change Begins at Home: Freeing America from Corporate Rule

Rating:
Summary: Another bulls-eye
Review: Derber has hit the nail on the head again - in this case it's a bulls-eye, with Bush in the center. But much more important than Bush the individual is Derber's penetrating analysis of the corporate/political elites' control of our democratic processes. By exposing the underlying structure of this control, Derber gives us a meaningful vantage point to understand how the unabashed self-interest of a powerful minority negatigvely impacts the vast majority. I found Derber's upbeat style and witty presentation ultimately hopeful. It's a complicated topic, but this is a readable and important book. We need to wake up ourselves and our country to the reality of what's really happening under Bush (not to mention whoever wins in Nov) - let's demand our leaders and institutions do a much better job of implementing the fundamental ideals and human rights that our country was founded on and that we teach school children to believe in.

Rating:
Summary: A Hopeful and Truthful Voice for Renewed Democacy
Review: I am a very big Charles Derber fan. He is, in my view, the most articulate public intellectual writing about the way corporations have been taking over America, the world, and our lives. As a person greatly worried about the erosion of honest democracy in the U.S., I devoured his earlier books entitled Corporation Nation and People Before Profits. Now, Derber has written another absolute winner with profound implications for political and social renewal. In Regime Change Begins at Home Derber has produced a truthful, witty, provocative, sometimes funny, and profound analysis of corporate ascendancy. He has found a way to combine playful writing with startling insight about the state of the nation. At a time when so many Americans feel powerless to change the course of their government and their lives Derber has provided a reasoned manifesto that renews optimism about the possibility of a new and more humane America.

Please read this book right away since it has such immediate relevance for the upcoming presidential election. Derber provides the straight scoop about the ties between the war in Iraq, the horribly incestuous connections between Bush's presidency and ever-increasing corporate power, the debilitating practical and moral implications of America's empire building throughout the world, the relentless concentration of unthinkable wealth in the hands of so few, and the economic plight of average Americans. While Derber spells out the high stakes of beating Bush in November, the book offers a broader vision based on the notion of regime changes. What makes this work so compelling is Derber's ability to let us see contemporary political events from a broader historical perspective. The book is less about Bush than it is about the possibility, perhaps the inevitability, of regime changes.

History teaches that progressive movements (Roosevelt's "New Deal" being a striking example) have periodically transformed the relationship between the government and corporations, and, thus, the priorities and programs directed toward the production of human capital. Those of us who dearly want a change in direction will draw great hope from this book. Derber shows that certain presidential elections are critically important moments in creating the possibility for regime change. He is not claiming that a democratic victory in November will immediately bring such regime change. Still, you leave this book persuaded that the upcoming election could be a "regime tipping" one. Even if Bush retains the presidency, this book outlines the more global processes through which new political paradigms can eventually emerge.

If you want to participate in creating a more just America (and world) this book will tell you lots of ways to contribute to that end. Even the most hardened cynics about the erosion of democracy will leave this book refreshed. Derber shows how easy it can be to align yourself with social movements and to feel that your voice can matter.

Certainly, one way to empower yourself is to read Regime Change Begins At Home, to share its insights in daily conversation, and to urge everyone you know who yearns for a genuine political and social renaissance to run to their nearest bookstore to pick up a copy. It will inspire them and others, in turn.

Rating:
Summary: The political landscape will never again look the same
Review: If you have read either Corporation Nation or People Before Profit, I am sure you will want to read this new book by Charles Derber. In my opinion his new book provides an even more readable introduction to the ideas of an author who is on the path to becoming one of the nation's foremost public intellectuals. As far as I am concerned this is not a good book, it is a great book.

According to Derber we are currently in the midst of the "Third Corporate Regime," a political regime that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and continues to the present. In case you were wondering, the "First Corporate Regime" ran from 1865-1901 (the Gilded Age) and the "Second Corporate Regime" ran from 1921-1933 (the Roaring Twenties). Thus regimes, as Derber uses the term, refer to broad swings with major realignments of power. All three are referred to as corporate regimes reflecting the marriage between corporate and political power, with big corporations having a great deal of control over the national government. A distinctive aspect of the Third Corporate Regime is that is has power that can be compared with that of both the British and the Roman Empires. It rules "not only America but much of the world."

If Bush wins in the 2004 election, Derber's view is that this will further solidify the Third Corporate Regime, particularly if he wins with substantial majorities in both houses of Congress. The fear is that the nation will become even more of a "corpocracy," his name for a pseudo-democracy in which a formally democratic government become a vehicle for corporate control. Kerry's election would reduce the damage done during the next four years, but it would not, by itself, represent genuine regime change.

A strength of this book is that Derber offers solutions. The entire third section of the book is devoted to what can be done to bring about the needed regime change. The election of a Democratic president and a Democratically controlled Congress might prove to be a regime-tipping election that would help create the conditions under which social movements dedicated to regime change could flourish and set the stage for eventual regime change down the pike.

While this book is written primarily for a Democratic and progressive audience it will inform and be of use to traditional conservatives and even some corporate elites. Those who are in close contact with corporate elites would be well advised to read this book because it provides a roadmap as to how progressives could topple the Third Corporate Regime. It also makes a very persuasive case as to why there is likely to be a strong movement to do just that in the not too distant future.

This book is a very easy read. It is hard to put it down and it could not be dealing with a more important set of issues. If enough people read this book, together we are going to be able to make a difference.

Rating:
Summary: A spirited and inspiring wake up call
Review: If you have read either Corporation Nation or People Before Profit, I am sure you will want to read this new book by Charles Derber. In my opinion his new book provides an even more readable introduction to the ideas of an author who is on the path to becoming one of the nation's foremost public intellectuals. As far as I am concerned this is not a good book, it is a great book.

According to Derber we are currently in the midst of the "Third Corporate Regime," a political regime that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and continues to the present. In case you were wondering, the "First Corporate Regime" ran from 1865-1901 (the Gilded Age) and the "Second Corporate Regime" ran from 1921-1933 (the Roaring Twenties). Thus regimes, as Derber uses the term, refer to broad swings with major realignments of power. All three are referred to as corporate regimes reflecting the marriage between corporate and political power, with big corporations having a great deal of control over the national government. A distinctive aspect of the Third Corporate Regime is that is has power that can be compared with that of both the British and the Roman Empires. It rules "not only America but much of the world."

If Bush wins in the 2004 election, Derber's view is that this will further solidify the Third Corporate Regime, particularly if he wins with substantial majorities in both houses of Congress. The fear is that the nation will become even more of a "corpocracy," his name for a pseudo-democracy in which a formally democratic government become a vehicle for corporate control. Kerry's election would reduce the damage done during the next four years, but it would not, by itself, represent genuine regime change.

A strength of this book is that Derber offers solutions. The entire third section of the book is devoted to what can be done to bring about the needed regime change. The election of a Democratic president and a Democratically controlled Congress might prove to be a regime-tipping election that would help create the conditions under which social movements dedicated to regime change could flourish and set the stage for eventual regime change down the pike.

While this book is written primarily for a Democratic and progressive audience it will inform and be of use to traditional conservatives and even some corporate elites. Those who are in close contact with corporate elites would be well advised to read this book because it provides a roadmap as to how progressives could topple the Third Corporate Regime. It also makes a very persuasive case as to why there is likely to be a strong movement to do just that in the not too distant future.

This book is a very easy read. It is hard to put it down and it could not be dealing with a more important set of issues. If enough people read this book, together we are going to be able to make a difference.

Rating:
Summary: A book about our lack of, and potential for, true democracy
Review: The author writes that the costs of the Vietnam war weakened American economic power ; in the meantime West Europe/Japan had grown into full-fledge economic competitors with the U.S. In order to better compete in this environment, corporations decided that they couldn't tolerate the New Deal concessions to unions and other measures, so America began its rightward shift.

He writes, quoting the New York Times and Paul Krugman in The Nation(see endnotes), that from the early 1970's to 2000, the average income in real terms fell by seven percent for the bottom ninety percent in this country. Meanwhile, the income of the top one percent rose by 148 percent, the top tenth of one percent rose by 343 percent, and so on. The unemployed and "working poor" today comprise 40 percent of our employed class. Reagan's tax cuts helped this upward redistribution. In 1998, General Motors, Pepsi, Chevron, Texaco and Enron paid no federal taxes. Bush tax cuts have targeted the wealthy in obvious ways: taxes on capital gains and dividends,, which the vast majority of Americans do not report on their returns. Then there was the estate tax...Meanwhile a treasury department report suppressed in Bush's 2004 budget report projected the national debt reaching eventually reaching 44 trillion dollars. . Bush has proposed the further draconian measure of allow tax-shelter savings accounts where if enough money that only the rich can afford to save is placed it will be tax-free forever.

He should have quoted David Stockman's admission that the Reaganites embarked upon their insane military spending produced deficit in part in order to have an excuse to slash social programs. Bush is repeating this. Bush has already set in motion a partial Medicare privatization. Our political order encourages companies to move overseas to exploit repressed third world labor while leaving in wake a horde of workers who have to grasp for short term/temp jobs and have no health insurance, etc. It allows speculators to move two trillion dollars around the globe a day and leave financial disaster in their wake. It allows for companies to manipulate their stock value with their accountant's complicity. Now mutual funds are getting ready to have the government give them social security funds, so they can gamble with them on the stock market, an alarming prospect giving the recent accounting scandals on Wall Street. He quotes Fortune magazine as saying that the Enron-style chicaneries were quite widespread, not a few bad apples. Meanwhile the trade deficit may become completely unmanageable. The rich continue to get their corporate welfare, speculative bonanzas, etc but the country in the long term is heading towards a catastrophic debt.

He notes that the Cold War was a cover to support right wing dictators and death squads that repressed third world workers for the benefit of corporations. He mentions the flat tax imposed by Bremer on Iraq and the giving away of Iraq's economic assets to foreigners. He notes that Bush later admitted that there is no evidence of an Iraq-9/11 connection; for the Iraq war, he invoked a law that allowed the president to move against countries who played a role in the 9-11 butchery. Obviously the law didn't apply here. The "war on terror" is mainly about distracting Americans from Bush's draconian domestic measures and a cover to increase support for such pro-American, pro-oil and gas company murderers as Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan. He observes that Wolfowitz, Feith, etc. set up a Pentagon body (OSP) that would feed them the bogus intelligence for the war they needed.

Kerry would be somewhat better than Bush, but both are supporters of the current monstrous corporate order, though less extreme than Bush. The Republicans can gerrymander themselves into congressional victories.. They can throw voters off the rolls. But student, labor and other currently growing grassroots groups can affect a great change. He points to Moveon.org mobilizing its grassroots to get congress to repeal an FCC deregulatory measure . "An amazing organization!" he gushes about Moveon(but will they treat a democratic president as harshly when he does similar things as Bush?). He observes that Dennis Kucinich is one who has been overwhelmingly re-elected by the "Nascar Dads", "Reagan Democrats," by strongly articulating a populist economic message. Half of Americans don't vote; the dems could mobilize them but....

The author is a little simplistic in his invocation of American nostalgia. Teddy Roosevelt preached that corporations needed to be controlled in the public interest but that was mostly fraud. Corporations may have been paranoid about FDR but they were still very much in control. Inequality stayed the same from the beginning to the end of his rule. But his empowering to some extent of unions did play a role in eventually creating the American Middle Class. Gene Debs was a much better American hero.

The author's "new democracy" scheme for America, though accepting capitalism, goes a long way towards expanding democracy in this country.

I think the author should have made his factual points less vague; as it is, his main concentration seems to be to exhort the reader.











Rating:
Summary: The political landscape will never again look the same
Review: When I first heard that Charles Derber's new book was entitled "Regime Change Begins at Home," I chuckled, and figured that he'd joined the Al Franken/Michael Moore wing of political sloganeering. Not that I have anything against Franken and Moore -- far from it -- but I expect greater depth from Derber, whose fine "Corporation Nation" was the first book to not only sound the alarm against corporate power but also dig into its roots.

So I got a copy of "Regime Change Begins at Home" -- and found not only the hoped-for depth but also a entire new perspective on politics that, once seen, is obviously true. This is quite simply the most important political book I've read in years. I urge you to get a copy as soon as you can, read it, and spread the word to your friends to do the same. This is a book that can make a difference in the direction of our country and the world, but only if lots of people read it. Happily, Derber writes not like the academic he is but in a clear, simple, populist style.

I won't go on and on. Suffice it to say that Derber, a sociologist and political economist at Boston University, uses the word "regime" not as an epithet but in its deepest meaning. He says that American political history since the Civil War has had only five regimes, each spanning several presidencies; we are now living in the Third Corporate Regime. The First Corporate Regime lasted from 1865 to 1901, when it was supplanted by the Progressive Regime; that was supplanted by the Second Corporate Regime during the Roaring Twenties; it gave way to the New Deal Regime, which lasted longer than any other but ended in 1980 as the Third Corporate Regime took power with Ronald Reagan. Regimes come and regimes go, Derber makes clear, and he delves into why they go and the necessary ingredients of regime change. Read this book and you will see George Bush, John kerry, and Howard Dean in new light.

The good news is that Derber sees and describes wide cracks in the Third Corporate Regime, and suggests how to stick crowbars in them and get on with regime change. It all makes elegant sense. Please, for the good of our nation and the world, get this book and read it -- and act on its wisdom.