Search results for ""Author Steven Malanga""

As their infatuation with President Obama fades, millions of Americans anxiously ask, Is this the change we were waiting for? The current administration represents change, for sure, Steven Malanga argues - a momentous transformation of the fundamental structure of American politics. A self-interested coalition of public-sector unions and government-financed community activists (like the young Barack Obama) has become our era's characteristic political machine. In Shakedown, Mr. Malanga shows how this machine's single-minded goal is always bigger government and more public spending. The bill, he says, is now coming due for the relentless rise of this new political powerhouse. He chronicles how public-sector unions and the corrupt political hacks beholden to them have all but bankrupted once-rich states like California and New Jersey. He details the campaigns to undermine the successful and popular 1990s welfare reform and to revitalize the failed, wasteful War on Poverty programs that funnel taxpayer money to the advocacy groups that are integral cogs in the new political machine. And he provides a comprehensive summary of how these same advocacy groups spent decades helping undermine mortgage standards in the name of helping the poor - in the process enriching themselves and enabling the housing meltdown. As Americans anxiously ponder the future direction of their government and their economy, Shakedown explores the questions of who got us in this mess and why we need change - constructive change - more than ever.

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Politics in America today is more than just a contest between left and right, liberal and conservative, argues Steven Malanga in The New New Left. He describes an emerging new political dynamic: the contest between those who benefit from an ever-expanding public sector and those who pay for this bigger government—in other words, between tax consumers and taxpayers. Mr. Malanga traces the rise of the tax consumers' movement to two sources. One is the growth of public-sector employee unions beginning in the 1950s, which produced an increasingly powerful and influential lineup of organizations that are essentially political. The second is the War on Poverty, whose funding of grassroots social service groups in the 1960s created a new type of neighborhood "political club," sustained by and organized around public funding. Unlike the original New Left, which evolved from a naive but genuine effort to create a better society, these new groups, in Malanga's view, pursue an agenda based on their own narrow economic interests. The leading edge of this new movement has engulfed New York City, but it has begun to emerge forcefully in other American cities too, especially in California. In all these locales the New New Left concentrates its political energies toward larger government and higher taxes—to benefit the public sector. And the ideas behind the movement have effectively infiltrated American college campuses. Understanding how American politics works today is incomplete without Mr. Malanga's important book.

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