Customer Reviews

The Real State Of The Union: From The Best Minds In America, Bold Solutions To The Problems Politicians Dare Not Address (New America Books)

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The title enticed me and I had high expectations to glean some insight into modern economic problems - or at least hear some different perspectives. The book is not a bad read, but it suffers from two continual errors that, as a scholar, I find really annoying. First, in many of the graphs presented, they are not numbered, cited in the text, associated with legends NOR are the axes labelled. The trends are obvious, of course, but I had no idea what the heck I was looking at. There is also a lot of jargon thrown at the reader without explanation.

Second, there are no references for many of the statements made in the book. It would be nice to know where they got their data or even IF they are making a claim based on real data (I assume they are, but without references, who knows?). You may like this book and, again, it's not a bad read, but I got so frustrated with the shoddy scholarship that I just set it down halfway through and gave up. I really don't care to listen to opinions as much as I enjoy examining positions and arguments... and those require some scholarship whereas anyone can throw out an opinion.

The contributing editors, Ted Halstead and Michael Lind, again shine as "hubs" for blending diverse thinkers, including James Pinkerton of the right, and I believe they are completely correct when they say that the State of the Union address has become shallow, partisan, and trivialized. More substantively, they might have offered a piece on the ten reasons to impeach Bush-Cheney, and another on the failure of Congress, which has struck out with the American people: strike one is incumbents shaking down lobbyists for cash; strike two is the extremist leaderships (Democratic as well as Republican) forcing "party line" votes that are totally against the Constitutional intent of having Representatives represent their CONSTITUENCIES; and strike three is the extremist Republicans serving as foot soldiers to a mendacious White House, instead of, as the Constitution intended with Article 1, being the FIRST branch of government. The extremist Republicans (I am a moderate Republican) are nothing less than Constitutional perverts, and I use the term advisedly. (See my reviews on books about these two topics in last two months).

The book is ably summed up in the Preface, which states that neither party has proven capable of offering a coherent, honest, or forward-looking agenda to guide America. Peter Peterson, Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It would certainly agree, as do I. It is my hope that this group might coalesce around someone like Senator Collins (R-MA) running with Governor Warner (D-VA), and announcing a coalition cabinet and one commitment: to electoral reform. Karl Rove knows how to steal close elections, the only way to beat him is to field a multi-party TEAM that can win by a LANDSLIDE. America is ready for that, and the ideas in this book are all implement able by such a team approach to what might be called "networked governance."

While I have six pages of notes on this excellent volume, still relevant to the future, I will touch on just a few highlights:

1) Mass middle class is vital, and Washington has destroyed that base for democracy.

2) American people are not as polarized as their extremist political leaders

3) Our humans are productive but our processes are not. I am reminded of the book in the 1980's on "Human Scale." The federal government has indeed become dysfunctional, running at 3-5 mph while the rest of us are going 100 mph.

4) Need a new social contract. Authors identify the first one as building a nation, the second as healing from the civil war, and the third as building a middle class. We need to re-build the middle class with governance that again represents the citizens and their communities rather than predatory corporations.

5) Private sector, not just government, needs reform.

6) Health care can shift from business to government, and in the process we can find $60 billion a year in savings by using information to create metrics to reduce waste and over-treatment. The author discussing this suggests that 20-30% of what we spend on health care is waste. They do not discuss medical tourism, which I find quite interesting as a trend.

7) We need a nation-wide industrial policy that restores the relationship between business, community, and family, while also restricting the mobility of capital unless it restores the social contract with labor.

8) Radical tax reform could yield $200 billion a year (the author's say this is a low estimate, I agree, import-export tax fraud alone is $50 billion a year, I think the number is closer to $500 billion a year).

9) Take back the airwaves in the public interest.

10) James Pinkerton is brilliant in explaining the three eras of education as agricultural (nine-month school year), industrial (rote learning) and experimental (nostrums at expense of basics). See also Derek Bok's piece on "Reinventing Education at Forbes.com. James missed the opportunity to discuss how free universal access to all knowledge, and using serious games to educate on a just enough, just in time basis, in all languages, could reconfigure education world-wide.

11) Matthew Miller (see my review of his superb book, The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love) outlines what $30 billion could buy in terms of moving teachers up the food chain. Just in passing, if we cut our grotesquely ineffective intelligence community back from $60 billion a year to $30 billion a year, we can create a truly smart nation (see my book coming out on 11 September, THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest and in passing get better secret intelligence in the context of a national Open Source (Intelligence) Network that feeds not only the spies and diplomats, but also the schoolhouses, statehouses, and social clubs.

12) A thread that I found interesting throughout the book is how we lack the information needed to make smart choices. We lack statistical information on medical treatments and results that might allow "evidence-based medicine." As I have pointed out elsewhere (Google for <ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers>), the U.S. Government is remarkably ignorant and uninformed across all these areas.

13) The rest of the book on aging productively, incentivizing exercise and penalizing fast food, on rebuilding the heartland with information infrastructure, on mixed races where third generations inter-marry at a 55% rate, on conflicted Muslims, on "opportunity lost" in foreign affairs and national security, all top notch.

The book ends brilliantly, as it began, with a commentary on the dysfunctional duopology of the extremist Republicans where dogma trumps honesty, and the divided Democrats trapped in the past. As the founder of a small non-rival party blog, Citizens-Party.org, I consider this book, and the New America Foundation, to be the people's voice at a time when the Congress and the White House most certainly are not.

This book is great at presenting problems and, perhaps more importantly, solutions facing our country today. Although it appears to be focused mainly on the last presidential election, the issues are still relevant today. It has been over a year since the 2004 presidential election and many of the concerns in this book have not been addressed by either side of the aisle. Each article is managable to the average fan of politics and yet it is detailed enough to make the most involved citizen think in different ways. Of particular note are the chapters on education. They are well written and offer very insightful solutions. This is an excellent book for you to read to get in touch with some of the real problems in America.

The Real State of the Union is an extensive discussion on the issues that currently face the United states. This book is no action packed thriler, yet it is a very thoughtful and well put together.Each issue is taken apart and thorougly evaluated. The out- of-the-box thinking gives readers something to think about while "they" analyze the situation. The clarity of this book is its greatest quality. There is a simple setup in each chapter in which; the author explains the problems with the issue, gives examples, and then provides a solution. Besides this, many chapters include graphs to visually help explain some of the complex issues, such as radical tax reform and public capital stock.

Instead of blaming the right or the left for the country's problems, this book offers solutions.

In the past couple of years I've gotten more interested in politics. I've read books on how different parties and people are dragging this country down, but nothing on how things could be turned around. Our country has change drastically since the New Deal. The old Republican/Democrat political vision is outdated. This book offers new thinking and ideas to get this country on track.

This Real State Of The Union makes sense. I'd like to buy a copy for every government official in Washington if I could.

Thank goodness for this book. Ted Halstead has collected some real gems here. The essays are excellent in and of themselves, but this book screams a bigger message: if we cannot collectively think outside the box of partisan politics, the good ole U.S. of A. is on its way down the tube.

The Real State of the Union contains intelligent analysis, accurate problem identification and "real" problem solving. As a psychotherapist and author (Embracing Fear, HarperSanFrancisco) reflecting on the lack of mental health and emotional development in our nation's political system, this book offers some rare and welcome hope that it may not be too late.

The chief characteristic that distinguishes human beings from other species is our endless capacity to miss the point. Only through genuine connection and authentic communication can we change this. The Real State of the Union is significant in its potential to take us in that direction.

Buy several copies of this one and share it with friends. Let's follow Mr. Halstead's lead. Let's consider the real possibility that we might collectively GO SANE.

- Thom Rutledge
Author of the e-mail feature, "Going Sane."