#Books on plutocracy tv#

Here, for example, is PackerвЂ™s description of how, after nursing quiet misgivings about the great American FUBAR, a North Carolina truck stop owner came to an epiphany one night: But for all their misfortunes, PackerвЂ™s people are never hopeless they are strivers and activists and self-taught prodigies who have figured it all out-or who think they have figured it all out. Weirdly, just about everyone in the book seems to lose money in real estate.

#Books on plutocracy tv#

It presents an astonishing cast of characters: desperate Wal-Mart associates firsthand observers of Wall StreetвЂ™s political power billionaire TV talkers convinced of the righteousness of the self-help gospel. The book is intimate with failure but also with the libertarian ebullience felt by societyвЂ™s winners.

He tells us what life is like on an auto-parts assembly line how money gets its way in Washington and what it sounds like when a Tea Party leader contrives to kill a public-works proposal that would put her unemployed engineer husband back to work. Following the lives of a handful of characters, Packer manages to bring together such varied phases of the disaster as the deindustrialization of Youngstown, Ohio, and the epic boom and bust in Florida real estate-he takes us, in other words, from a landmark disaster of the Carter years to a vision of bony cows wandering among abandoned suburban houses during the Obama administration. George PackerвЂ™s The Unwinding is a minor masterpiece of the social-disintegration genre-a beautifully written, clinically observed story of the slow-rolling economic transformation that has, over the last 30-odd years, made vast parts of America into a destitute wasteland while lifting a fortunate few to a kind of heaven on earth.