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| 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
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Avg. Customer Rating:  80 reviews
Sales Rank: 1097
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
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Product Description
What will take us from the world that fails to the world that works? Real change---the kind of change that happens when politicians drop their own agendas and respond to the will of the people. Newt Gingrich shows us how we can make real change a reality.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 75 more reviews...
 At last someone is making sense.... January 17, 2008
127 out of 141 found this review helpful
All I can say is its about time someone wrote a book that isn't a down in the mouth, whimpering review of how bad it is. Newt Gingrich shows us how we can grab a future we'll be proud to leave our children and grand-children in Real Change. Let me also say that Real Change doesn't attempt to only Republicans, but makes arguments that should appeal to all Americans regardless of your political leanings.
Why hasn't someone else shouted out these solutions? As another reviewer pointed out, most of us are not divided as a people. We all want the same things: affordable healthcare, education that educates, a healthy economy, and a national defense system that separates our friends from our foes. This is what Newt Gingrich says we can have.
To get the country we want we need to hold our elected officials feet to the fire and demand real change. Make them serve us, the citizen and not some special interest group, including the well organized and politically saavy illegal immigrants. Notice, I said "illegal." I have nothing against immigrants who come into the country the way my grandparents came in....legally. Politicians need to know we want progress and will not accept the status quo.
If you're tired of hearing the doom and gloomers, then Real Change is for you. Pick up a copy and you'll find yourself engrossed. This is a real page turner.....really.
I highly recommend Real Change by Newt Gingrich.
Peace to all.
It's about time someone said this in print January 15, 2008
51 out of 63 found this review helpful
Finally, someone with the credentials to say it has said it! Newt is right on target with "Real Change" and we all need to read this and digest it. He's right, we need to demand results from those we send to Washington. The book takes on the tough issues facing us today, and looks at how and who put us in the tenuous position we find ourselves. Immigration reform is a must, or we're going to lose our country. We must not elect those who would cut and run from the most dangerous war we've been in since WWII. We cannot lose this war as many on the left would have us do. We need tough judges, tax reform and we need to bring religion out of the darkness 10% of those in this country have put it in. The leftists who support these kooks on the far left must be stopped before it's too late. Read every page in this book to understand why change is so very necessary.
Morgan Norval, terrorism expert, author of The Fifteen Century War: Islam's Violent Heritage
A Visionary Plan For The Future February 7, 2008
40 out of 45 found this review helpful
Unlike the typical negative political rhetoric, Newt Gingrich has composed an amazing roadmap for positive change.
Virtually everyone is aware of the myriad of problems facing the United States today. There are problems with illegal immigration, high taxes, high energy prices, a failing Social Security system, spiraling health care costs, a divisive war, pathetic performance by government at all levels (e.g. Hurricane Katrina relief) and many others. Many are good at pointing out the challenges; few are good at providing answers. That is not the case here.
The former Speaker of the House stands alone at the top in terms of innovative ideas that could lead us to a very bright future. Everyone, regardless of political affiliation, should read the ideas in this book. Whereas almost all politicians focus on short term changes to gain political advantage, Gingrich concentrates on meaningful long term solutions.
One of his points is that America is not rigidly divided into red and blue states. He contends that there are core issues upon which the vast majority of Americans agree. He supports this with polling data. He has put together a platform featuring many of these consensus issues.
Not only would this approach help to unite Americans again, these ideas, if enacted, would make things immeasurably better for all. Some of these are as follows: Overhauling the Social Security system before it goes bankrupt, replacing the current air and railway transportation systems with much more effective ones, redesigning health care payment and delivery with 21st century technology to replace the 1950s model currently in place, reigning in an out-of-control judiciary, and many others.
Clearly, our big problems will require bold new solutions. Gingrich has proposed some of those and has shown a way that we can provide incentives to entrepreneurs for many more. We can either keep doing things the way we have been (like all of the presidential candidates would do with slight variations), or we can create a brighter future. Albert Einstein said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results." That is the way our system has been functioning. It is time to do something different.
I could go on and on about this book. It is so packed full of ideas and wisdom that it is hard not to do so. I will not do that though. I do recommend that you buy it, read it, and share it with others.
 Disappointing, Revisionist, Misleading, Incomplete January 21, 2008
35 out of 133 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.
Finally! January 24, 2008
33 out of 41 found this review helpful
Real Change: From the World That Fails to the World That Works
This is a book that is a must-read for all Americans. Brilliantly capturing what real Americans think, Gingrich provides research-based policy recommendations that (if adopted)would put the United States on the right path to future success and renewed greatness.
This book is the appropriate antidote to the currently popular soundbites that supposedly capture the policy prescriptions of out current crop of presidential wannabees.
EVERYBODY should read this book and get copies for all family memebers and friends. Even better would be to get one for politicians you know and insist that they read it.
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