|
| Real Change: From the World That Fails to the World That Works | 
 enlarge | Author: Newt Gingrich
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $12.90
You Save: $15.05 (54%)
New (43) Used (23) Collectible (5) from $12.48
Avg. Customer Rating:  83 reviews
Sales Rank: 775
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 310
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 1596980532
Dewey Decimal Number: 320.60973
EAN: 9781596980532
ASIN: 1596980532
Publication Date: January 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Finally, issues raised and solutions suggested... January 20, 2008
32 out of 38 found this review helpful
"The American people are stunningly pragmatic." - from this book, and one of many observations that need to be communicated and understood.
The only disappointment is that the appendices might have been many more in number and more detailed.
This book may be the Common Sense (Thomas Paine) of our time. The government is broken, in fact corrupted, and the author provides the facts to back up his premise that the bureaucracies at all levels of government are neither of or for the people but rather are working to perpetuate their own existence, destroying America in the process. Then, instead of stopping with gripes about where we are, concepts to address the problems are identified and discussed.
The first chapter of this book alone is worth the money and time invested and should be required reading for every taxpayer who is tired of watching our greatness and goodness be put in decline by loud but small fringe groups with narcissism rather than safety, security and prosperity for the whole be the agenda.
Other discussions of note include our failed judiciary, the problems with our education system, real environmentalism, and a thoughtful discussion of immigration that finally addresses the desire of most Americans to welcome immigrants, asking only that they abide by our laws. Perhaps this will resonate with Washington which apparently believes that only citizens should be subject to the economic brutality of the IRS and that a blind eye can be turned to illegal status of many immigrants. The solution is in rigorous law enforcement and implementing a viable guest worker program to satisfy the majority of law-abiding citizens and help our economy and our immigrant brothers and sisters.
This book both inspires the reader to seek real change to move government to a model that works, and causes concern that the need is urgent, and the alternative, continuing down the path of the status quo, is foreboding.
 Disappointing, Revisionist, Misleading, Incomplete January 21, 2008
32 out of 126 found this review helpful
Edit of 13 Feb 08 to remove extraneous negatives.
Although Newt Gingrich is one of a handful of previously elected officials who has both a brain and an appreciation for history, this book is disappointing. It is primarily a base-pleasing blast on a variety of issues that are generally described with no implementation specifics, and certainly nothing in the way of an over-all balanced budget that would show what the trade-offs are.
1) Newt Gingrich was "present at the creation" of the brutally destructive practices of extreme partisanship, and I am not surprised to read, but feel compelled to question, his "immaculate conception" in this book as being good and clear-headed, while relegating all those "left behind" to the role of "evil-doers." Cf. Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency; The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)). In my view, the number of Republicans bailing out of Congress is starkly indicative of their realization that America is fed up with party-line corruption.
2) Claiming that most of America is center-right and that the Democratic party now represents the fringe left places this author at the edge of delusion. Presumably he has read Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It, but I question whether he has a clue about Liberty Coalition, Reuniting America, Cultural Creatives, World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility, Bioneers, or any of the other groups that in the aggregate represent over 150 million American voters who despise BOTH the Republican and Democratic parties and are--as Lou Dobbs urges--declaring Independence.
3) Neither Dick Cheney nor Lou Dobbs appears in this book, nor is there any mention of the manner in which Congress and the White House have deceived and misled the public for over a century (Cf. Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil)
4) His specious recommendations on Iraq are completely inconsistent with reality as I have observed it across many many reviews. He fails to point out that the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Shinseki, correctly told Congress that 400,000 were needed to assure orderly stabilization & reconstruction, and that it was Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney who over-ruled the Army and insisted on listening to a combination of Ahmed Chalabi (an Iranian agent of influence) and the Israeli government all too eager to have us do their dirty work. He natually avoids discussing the fact that we were snookered by Iran into doing what they could not do for themselves. Cf. A Pretext for War : 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies)
Now for the substance, such as it is:
1) Platitudes on steroids. This is a facile book that explodes a YouTube video into a 242-page double-spaced booklet (not counting the last third of the book, appendices).
2) There are no footnotes, endnotes, or bibliography. This is a massive Op-Ed that is totally disconnected from the need to take account of any larger reality.
3)He touches lightly on young people, education, the judiciary, privatizing social security, immgiration (never mind that he consistently failed as Speaker to funded urgently needed border patrol positions), and green conservatism. "National security" gets two double-spaced pages, other topics as many as four to six. Whoopee.
3) His approach to a balanced budget is disingenius as well as mis-directed. He chants the four mantras: 1) cut taxes; 2) increase spending on what I like, decrease it on everything else; 3) end pork barrel spending; and 4) smarter spending. He certainly has a point with respect to the idiocy of rewarding Lockheed Martin for consistently failing NASA, but the last time I looked, the President and Congress had an Office of Management and Budget and a Government Accountability Office, so this is pontifical. He has no serious observations on how to eliminate income taxes (introduce the Tobin tax on Federal reserve transactions); increase revenue (end the import-export pricing fraud, the crop insurance and other frauds, different corporate books for IRS versus stockholders, the list is long and he does not have it).
4) He calls for citizen leadership and more entrepreneurship without any reference to what has been going on for over a decade in the way of World Cafe, Nexus for Change, National Online Deliberation, Wisdom Councils, Wealth of Networks, etcetera.
The book asks three relevant questions and fails to answer them to my satisfaction as a broadly-read person who believes that transpartisanship, not bipartisanship, is the necessary solution:
1) Whom do we serve?
2) What do we value?
3) How do we measure achievement?
The book contains scattered impulses, some good (Hart-Rudman emphasized that the failure of US education, especially in mathematics and science, was a major threat to the future of the Republic), and some bad (several blatant overtures to evangelicals).
Enough.
By way of larger context for those who believe non-fiction can be useful:
1) There are ten high-level threats to mankind identified by LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft and other members of the High-Level Threat Panel, as reported out in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility--Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change:
01 Poverty
02 Infectious Disease
03 Environmental Degradation
04 Inter-State Conflict
05 Civil War
06 Genocide
07 Other Atrocities
08 Proliferation
09 Terrorism
10 Transnational Crime
Bush-Cheney, and Gingrich, ignore the first 8 threats as well as the last. The global war on terrorism is a fraud. What we *should* be doing is orchestrating a $250 billion a year program against the first seven threats, stop being the world's largest arms merchant, and start phasing out the 44 dictators, all but two our best pals (see Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025.
2) There are twelve policies that must be harmonized if we are to stabilize and reconstruct our own country:
01 Agriculture
02 Diplomacy
03 Economy
04 Education
05 Energy
06 Family
07 Health
08 Immigration
09 Justice
10 Security
11 Society
12 Water
3) Nothing the USA or EU in the next ten years will matter EXCEPT AND UNLESS they create an EarthGame, an Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, that compellingly demonstrates to the eight demographic challengers (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards like the Congo) how they can avoid our mistakes.
Earth Intelligence Network is offering a free book online today that will be available on Amazon in late Feburary, "COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace." Here is the bottom line: the age of top-down elite "management" of complex societies, using secrecy, scarcity, and fear to concentrate wealth and abuse the majority, is over. There is a broad literature on the emergence of bottom-up consensual citizen power including localized wisdom councils, and I have over 70 lists that can guide the earnest reader, but I will content myself for now with my last alloted link: The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All.
This book will, I hope, make money for the author. It will not, however, do anything for the Republic. Below I list seven REAL changes:
1) Electoral Reform Act (One-Page Outline at Earth Intelligence Network
2) Debates Open to ALL Parties, Not Just the Two Corrupt Parties
3) End Winner Take All in Both Cabinet and Congress
4) No Legislation Without Prior Public Posting in Detail
5) End Individual Income Taxes, Substitute Tobin Tax on Federal Reserve
6) End CEO Greed, Top Salary No More Than 1000X Lowest Salary
7) End Secrecy, Make All Government Decisions Transparent
To end on a positive note, I am quite certain that Speaker Gingrich would be a most valuable participant in any transpartisan cabinet that brought together leaders from across the spectrum. Our Nation needs more than platitudes--it needs a Transpartisan People's Trust that buys back the government; and an EarthGame in which each person has full access to all relevant information and we can self-govern in the context of the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers. It does not help that we have lost an entire generation to lazy rote mediocrity in our schools.
The bottom line is that this book does not reflect the demonstrated breadth and depth of the Speaker's knowledge. It's a shallow quickie.
 Dishonest Drivel! January 21, 2008
20 out of 129 found this review helpful
"The American people are united on almost every important issue facing the country." So begins Gingrich in his latest book - "Real Change." If only it were so - immigration, taxes, trade policy, health care, Iraq, mid-East policy, the role of government in our lives, etc. provide examples of key areas where Americans are seriously divided.
Continuing, Gingrich tells us that "We're standing on the edge of a potential golden age for America . . . enjoy(ing) a level of prosperity, safety, and freedom unknown to previous generations." What dream world does this man live in - Americans have been losing good jobs, those retaining their jobs have been losing benefits or having them reduced, "real income" is down or stagnant, we live in constant threat of nutcases and terrorists in our cities, schools and malls, TSA still doesn't inspect airplane or ship freight, and the Cold War with Russia is warming up again.
"Republican Party candidates tend to come fro the business and professional world, which operates rationally in a business school-like manner. They often have little interest in or knowledge of politics as a method of accumulating power among a free people." I guess Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist, Rick Santorum and their "K Street Project" to create permanent Republican domination never existed!
There's more. Gingrich blames Detroit and Michigan Democrat political leaders for job losses incurred under their administrations. NAFTA, Free Trade, and poor American auto company design and management had nothing to do with it?
I admired Newt Gingrich when he came out with the "Contract for America" and wondered why he faded so quickly. "Real Change" and its lies and distortions provides some insight.
Thoughtful Reflection on State of Our Union March 22, 2008
17 out of 19 found this review helpful
Gingrich of all that this reviewer hears opine on TV about the issues that trouble us, seems always to be the most composed and fresh thinker to have thought through and provide what sounds like a non-partisan what is good for America presentation.
Such is this book. He has criticism for both parties, showing that they are far more inclined to vote for their campaign treasuries than what the people need. Corporations and interest groups on the one side, and bureauocracy, unions and a liberal elite culture group on the other.
No wonder the majority of people feel disinfranchised from the whole 'we the people' government we hear idealized in speeches, but never seems to live in Congress and the White House.
Gingrich bases responses to major problems of healthcare, education, Social Security, etc. with a polling concept, which if true, shows that the vast majority of Americans support various goals and strategies which to date we don't hear from any one political candidate.
This truly is a book for all Americans to read and ponder. Very well done!
Liberialism is a LIE January 23, 2008
16 out of 34 found this review helpful
If you are a communist, socialist, leftist, democrap, and/or liberal---Why the heck are you reading this book???? Why are you suprised by it?? Reagan, Limbaugh, and Gingrich are the only true voices of this Great Country. Love it or Leave it!!! See....Said in 4 short sentences!!!
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
