Book Alert / The Man Who Sold The World
The Man Who Sold the World -- Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America, Nation Books '09, $26.95, 371 pages, ISBN #1568584105. Index, sources notes, no bibliography or illustrations.
Now that American liberals can bask in the glow of a left-leaning national administration, they continue to have one burr under their saddle -- the seeming deification of President Ronald Reagan, their bitter foe during most of the 1980s.
Now veteran New Jersey crime reporter William Kleinknecht puts forward a book that aims to set the record straight, arguing that the biggest onus for the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and financial meltdown lies not with George W. Bush but with Reagan himself:
"The financial deregulation launched in the 1980s freed banks and securities firms to squander hundreds of billions of dollars and make a shambles of the economy. Boom-and-bust cycles, obscene CEO salaries, blackouts, drug-company scandals, collapsing bridges, plummeting wages for working people, the flight of U.S. manufacturing abroad -- these are all products of Reagan's free-market zealotry and his gutting of the public sector."
And the idea that Reagan was the little man's friend the author finds laughable: "Far from an advocate for Main Street America, Reagan's gutting of the public sector enacted wrenching social changes that have decimated small town life and undermined values that were once at the core of traditional conservatism."
William Kleinknecht reports for the Newark Star-Ledger and previously covered the crime beat for the New York Daily News. He authored the book, New Ethnic Mobs: The Changing Face of Organized Crime in America.