The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: subprime mortgage crisis, Ronald Reagan, White House, Wall Street (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Crime writer Kleinknecht (New Ethnic Mobs) turns his attention to a different kind of organized crime in this critical reassessment of the lasting influence of Ronald Reagan's presidency—and his hand in the current economic crisis. According to the author, Reagan and his ideological fellow travelers abdicated the government's regulatory role to oversee banking, manufacturing, telecommunications, the media, mining and public welfare, leaving Americans without protection from the avarice of shortsighted corporations. While well-documented and forceful, the book has a strident tone that might put off the very people Kleinknecht tries to persuade—those who have lionized Reagan as the people's president. More crucially, the author tries to lay everything from the decline of America's image overseas to the 2008 meltdown of the global banking system at Reagan's feet, and it is often unclear whether Reagan was the mastermind or simply the figurehead behind which other agents carried out their own plans independent of the president's will. Whatever Reagan's complicity, the policies carried out in his name and under his leadership clearly changed the relationship between the American people and their government, and rarely, the author shows, for the better. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Kleinknecht shares Will Bunch’s opinion of Ronald Reagan’s current image (see Tear Down This Myth, 2009) but doesn’t credit Reagan, as Bunch does, for failing to match action to rhetoric. Of course, Kleinknecht doesn’t mention foreign policy, in which Reagan did some good. His focus is domestic, and in 11 cogent chapters, he reveals further falseness in the Reagan myth and the devastating effects of Reaganism on America per se. Reagan pretended to represent small-town, small-enterprise America as embodied by his hometown, which, after leaving for Hollywood, he seldom visited and only for personal publicity’s sake, and whose livelihoods of family farming and small industry his favoritism for high-rolling wheeler-dealers has nearly extinguished. To explain Reagan’s duplicity, Kleinknecht contrasts Reagan’s developed politics of the self with the traditional community politics of his practical opponent during his administration, Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. While O’Neill was inextricable from his community, Reagan made himself a man from nowhere, untrammeled by personal connections, who ignored all damage done in the pursuit of self-aggrandizement. Contemporary America’s decimated manufacturing, fraudulent banking and finance, criminalized poor and minorities, inaccessible health care, venal politics—all this and more, according to Kleinknecht, constitute the real and living Reagan legacy. --Ray Olson

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Nation Books; 1St Edition edition (February 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568584105
• ISBN-13: 978-1568584102
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #101,331 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #14 in

  Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( R ) > Reagan, Ronald

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

99 of 121 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Insights!, February 5, 2009

By	Loyd E. Eskildson "Pragmatist" (Phoenix, AZ.) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Kleinknecht opens by telling us that the Reagan legacy has been devastating for America - especially ordinary Americans. Boom-and-bust cycles, obscene CEO salaries, emergence of "Lockdown America", drug-company scandals, collapsing bridges, huge government deficits, ethical absences, plummeting/stagnating wages for working people, the flight of U.S. manufacturing abroad are all products of Reagan's free-market zealotry and gutting the public sector. Reagan also pioneered the use of wedge issues like race ("welfare queens," "war on drugs").

Kleinknecht also says the book was borne of bewilderment over the myth that continues to surround the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who he characterizes as an empty suit who believed in flying saucers and allowed an astrologer to guide his presidential scheduling. We just finished a presidential campaign season marked by unseeming competition among Republican aspirants to wrap themselves in the Reagan mantle.

Some portions of "The Man Who Sold the World" are missing credible documentation; others blame Reagan for actions that only began during his leadership and were extended by Bush I and II, and Clinton. His 1987 appointment of Alan Greenspan (Mr. Bubbles) to head the Federal Reserve may have been Reagan's worst, given Greenspan's key role in the dot.com and housing bubbles, but we cannot forget he was reappointed again and again by other presidents until 2006. Deregulation of airlines and trucking are also attacked, though undertaken by Carter. And finally, Kleinknecht misses some important additional Reagan actions - eg. undermining Carter's fuel economy and alternative energy initiatives, and the whole Iran-Contra fiasco. Nonetheless, the book still is an important contribution.

Reagan was well known for stories not quite rooted in fact, and his statistics were similarly also sometimes loose. This included his war on regulation and Murray Weidenbaum's (became Reagan's Chairman of Economic Advisers) conclusion that federal regulations cost the economy $103 billion/year in 1978, including $666/car. The Bureau of Labor Statistics later repudiated some of Weidenbaum's methodology and a subsequent year-long Wall St. Journal sponsored study of the 48 largest firms vs. the six most active regulatory agencies found the regulatory impact only 1.1% ($2.6 billion). Worse yet, Weidenbaum's analysis omitted any benefits from these regulations, and Japanese firms spent more for compliance and still cost less. Unfortunately, Weidenbaum's study came first, got all the press, and inspired the administration's weakening of regulations through reducing enforcement funds and installing leaders who didn't believe in regulation.

The finance industry particularly benefited. By the beginning of the 1980s, an estimated two-thirds of the nation's thrifts were losing money, and thousands virtually insolvent. Regulatory relief including increasing FDIC coverage from $40,000 to $100,000, allowing developers to own thrifts and borrow from them, loosening accounting practices to boost net worth, and freeing them from investment restrictions. The result - the 1989 S&L debacle that required $150 billion in taxpayer bailouts.

Kleinknecht believes the rapid rise of M&A activity under Reagan's relaxed anti-trust enforcement became a prime cause of our manufacturing decline. CEOs lived in fear of 90%-leveraged LBOs using the firm's own assets as collateral, instead of focusing on customers and the Japanese. The M&A/LBO debts incurred ($33+ billion in 1981, plus at least another $70 billion tied up in merger-related loan commitments) hampered firms from investing in new equipment and made them more vulnerable to downturns. Between 1980-86, M&A went from 1,565 ($33 billion) to $4,323 ($204 billion).

Business tax cuts, instead of spurring new investment in equipment, were largely used for M&A as well. Kleinknecht cites the example of G.E. - paid no income tax the first three years of Reagan, received $283 million in rebates (despite pretax profits exceeding $6.5 billion), while shedding 50,000 jobs through layoffs, attrition, and selling subsidiaries. Meanwhile, it acquired RCA and NBC, among others.

A number of credible studies document long-term stock losses by the majority of merged companies. A Wall St. Journal study in 2002 found the stocks of the 50 biggest corporate acquirers fell 3X the DJIA.

Kleinknecht's data on "Lockdown America" is quite limited, consisting of data from New Jersey. In 1980 it had 76 prison inmates per 100,000 population, and 331 in 2002; meanwhile, violent crime increased.

Overall, "The Man Who Sold the World" is important reading.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars God bless social Darwinism, August 27, 2009

By	C. Wagner "cecilkunkle" (On the banks of the Wabash far away) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book was particularily painful to me, because I remember the President's announcement that we would have a one world economy and watched my home town slide from a bastion of business and industry to a place of poverty where Feed Our Children sends tractor trailers full of food. Yet the subject of Kleinknecht's no-holds barred expose is one of our two best loved modern presidents.
I have given this book 4 rather than 5 stars because it is currently being ignored and will soon be forgotten, even though it is a title that should be a part of all U.S. history collections.
Here follows a minor insight into the content of the title:
"The contagion of free-market purisim has infected almost every sector of American life (p xii)." He cites a rising inequality whith those on top reaping the benefits and claims the obvious that trickle economics is a fallacy. "With Reaganism has come an abandonment of all faith in reason and progress." There is the decline of heavy industry (p.7) and the factory farm policies which have all but destroyed family farms (p. 11). The destruction of unions was an obvious plus for the haves and a bitter pill to swallow for the nots.
But, to get back to the title of this essay: "...the ignomy of social Darwinism which had nourished a view of the lower classes as predestined by genetics and breeding to live in squalor (pp.24-25)." Perhaps the term anti-social Darwinism would have been more to the point.
Corporate income tax drops created a sea of red ink helping to justify the cutting of beneficial social programs (p. 29). As a pioneer of the use of soft money for campaigning this administration walked point for the election styles of the present (p.59).
The business of this presidency, said the author was business (p. 70). This included the evisceration of regulations a more sensible generation had put into place which led to financial disasters (p. 72) that taxpayers just just begun to fund. The destruction of the 1927 McFadden Act which restricted the ability of financial institutions to operate in more than one state was a disaster still not entirely realized and Proxmire's prediction of doom was laughed at (p.109). The author said that the move was to "Privatize the wealth and socialize the risk (p.119.)" The list goes on and on.
This book deserves to be read slowly and seriously.

35 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars About Time!, March 3, 2009

By	E. Dolnack (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a very timely book that could not have come at a more appropriate time for Americans. I personally found this book to be a very valuable insight into the so-called "legacy" of one of America's most revered and misunderstood presidents.

Packed full of evidence, quotations, and good sources, this timely look into the results of Reagan's Presidency will reveal many details for the reader. Rather than take the easy way out and present empty social mores and personal attacks, the author presents evidence of cause-&-effect scenarios that were directly or indirectly the result of Ronald Reagan's influence - an influence that is still a very viable and dominant force in business and politics today, both in America and around the world. The author dares to question that influence, and does so not by making blanket statements with little real backing, but genuine qualifications of facts and figures that any honest man or woman would find hard to refute in any serious debate.

Author William Kleinknecht does not spend as much time in his book giving a biography of Ronald Reagan. Nor does he attack the 40th President of the United States' character in sound-bites and talking-points, as many social conservatives tend to do when discussing the Carter or Clinton Administrations. Rather, Kleinknecht tears away at the legacy of Reaganism: discussing the after-effects of that legacy and what it means to us today in current situations.

As Reaganism and Supply-side economics are so defended among conservatives today, a new fresh and honest look at the Presidency of Ronald Reagan comes at a very good time. The current housing bubble bursts and financial institution crashes have many Americans rightfully questioning the ethics and outcomes of too zealously embracing free market economic philosophy of Milton Friedman today. Many would-be disciples of free market capitalism are beginning to feel the fear the generations that lived under the Great Depression and market crashes of 1929 knew only too familiarly in their time. Those generations well understood that markets can be unreliable and untrustworthy. Reagan took America back to a pre-populist, pre-progressive mindset that is only too glaringly obvious in its shortcomings today. Supply-side economics is not looking as convincing an argument today as it did during the 1980s and time may be indeed proving Reagan wrong and the Keynesians right.

I can not recommend this wonderful piece of American history by William Kleinknecht more today! I highly praise this effort by the author and thank him personally for giving valuable insight into the fruit of the mighty tree of Reaganism.