cover image Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual: How to Rebuild Our Country So the Politics Aren't Broken and Politicians Aren't Fixed

Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual: How to Rebuild Our Country So the Politics Aren't Broken and Politicians Aren't Fixed

Sam Smith. W. W. Norton & Company, $27.5 (247pp) ISBN 978-0-393-04122-4

""We are now in one of those periods in which everything seems weighted against the interests of the ordinary human being,"" contends Smith, citing a recent poll in which only 2% of U.S. residents responding thought the country was in excellent shape. We basically have two choices, he adds: ""One is to do nothing and just let it get worse. The other is to follow in the footsteps of those before us who refused to let this happen and who refused to believe they couldn't beat city hall."" In this bracing compendium of fact and myth about how the system is--and isn't--working, Smith (Shadows of Hope: A Freethinker's Guide to Politics in the Time of Clinton) offers hundreds of remedies for the sense that we are powerless to recover ownership of the country. He tackles the monetization of values, the dependence on statisticians and economists (who ""not only have trouble with theory but can't add right""), the power of global corporations that only use America as a mail drop, the substitution of busing for residential integration and the media's obfuscation of real information. Among Smith's suggestions: that communities, organizations and even individuals can raise money for their projects by printing their own--perfectly legal if it can't be mistaken for the government kind--for circulation in the local economy; that unemployment ought to be reduced by shortening workweeks instead of downsizing; that education and jobs control population growth more effectively than contraceptives. But these are only a fraction of the suggestions packed into this upbeat and rich exploration of how to refocus the democracy. Author tour. (July)