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Turner Publishing Company - Jack Cafferty

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119 pages

English

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In his bestselling It's Getting Ugly Out There, CNN’s Jack Cafferty skewered the liars and losers who were trying to harm the nation and explained why Americans had to take their country back. While the Bush exit from the White House brings a certain sense of "mission accomplished," for Cafferty that's only the beginning.

In Now or Never, the curmudgeonly Cafferty applies his heat-seeking scrutiny to the hot-button issues that top the 2009 agenda, including the economy, China, Iraq, the war on terror, and our broken immigration, education, and healthcare systems. Will Obama turn things around or will it be business as usual? Will a hitherto spineless Democratic Congress hold individuals accountable for abuses of power? Cafferty gives voice to the fears and hopes of Americans from all around the country; he also gets personal with moving stories of his experiences raising kids with values that seem to be disappearing in our culture.

Powerful, provocative, and drawing on the latest news from America and around the world, Now or Never makes lively reading for Cafferty fans and everyone who cares about America today.
1 Our Last Best Hope.

2 The Primaries: It Was Their Party and They Cried If They Wanted To.

3 As the Iraqis Stand Up, It’s Time for the United States to Clear Out.

4 China: The Global Superpower Goes for the Gold . . . Ours.

5 The Family’s a Corporation Where I Hold All the Voting Shares.

6 The Bush Legacy: Imperial Reign, Impeachable Ruin.

7 Time to Raise Our Grades in Education, Immigration, and Energy.

8 Are We Safer Yet? A World of Foreign Policy Troubles Left Behind.

9 Marriage and Fatherhood Work Best as Sobering Experiences.

10 Debt and Revival.

11 The $1 Billion Battle to Mortgage Our Future.

12 The New Prez’s Real Campaign Begins: To Fix Our Broken Nation.

Epilogue: One Change We Didn’t Need but Are Learning to Live With.

Acknowledgments.

Index.

Sujets

Political Science

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Publié par	Turner Publishing Company
Date de parution	08 avril 2009
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780470532003
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication

Chapter 1 - Our Last Best Hope
Chapter 2 - The Primaries
Chapter 3 - As the Iraqis Stand Up, It’s Time for the United States to Clear Out
Chapter 4 - China
Chapter 5 - The Family’s a Corporation Where I Hold All the Voting Shares
Chapter 6 - The Bush Legacy
Chapter 7 - Time to Raise Our Grades in Education, Immigration, and Energy

Education: When Schools Get the Fs, It’s Our Kids Who Drop Out
Illegal Immigration: Time for Lawmakers to Stop Sitting on the Fence
Fueling the Energy Debate: We Need a Power Surge Right Here at Home

Chapter 8 - Are We Safer Yet?

Afghanistan: Is It Sliding into Another Terrorist Quagmire?
North Korea: Is Kim Jong Il Finally Ready to Quit the Axis of Evil?
Iran: Bomb, Bomb, Bomb—or Talk, Talk, Talk?
Israel and Palestine: The Peace Agreement to Continue to Disagree
Georgia and Russia: A Cold War Heating Up—or Does Putin Just Have Georgia on ...

Chapter 9 - Marriage and Fatherhood Work Best as Sobering Experiences
Chapter 10 - Debt and Revival
Chapter 11 - The $1 Billion Battle to Mortgage Our Future
Chapter 12 - The New Prez’s Real Campaign Begins

Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Index

Copyright ©2009 by Jack Cafferty. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Cafferty, Jack.
Now or never : getting down to the business of saving our American dream / Jack Cafferty. p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-0-470-53200-3
1. United States—Politics and government—2001- I. Title.
JK275.C344 2009
320.60973—dc22
2008055858

This book is dedicated to my greatest source of pride:
my daughters, Julie, Leigh, Jill, Leslie.
1
Our Last Best Hope
I n my 2007 book, It’s Getting Ugly Out There: The Frauds, Bunglers, Liars, and Losers Who Are Hurting America , I went way out on a limb and wondered whether there might actually be a positive, if unintended, consequence of the otherwise miserable legacy of President George W. Bush’s eight years in office. I speculated that it might come in the form of a sudden nationwide awakening near the end of the Bush era, leading to a 2008 stampede to polling places as the citizenry desperately fought to save its democratic system—a runaway train heading off a cliff into oblivion.
I had been screaming, in my way, about “broken government” for a couple of years in hundreds of “Cafferty File” segments on CNN’s The Situation Room. But as the economic crisis seizing America became the story that drove the election, voters were desperately fighting to save not only their political system but also their homes, their jobs, their 401(k)s, their bank savings, and, no doubt, their sanity. And people were paying attention: my “Cafferty File” blog often got three million hits a day and as many as ten thousand e-mail replies flooding in after one of my questions of the hour.
I’m still screaming about what’s gone wrong, and I’ve written it all down in Now or Never: Getting Down to the Business of Saving Our American Dream. The book captures our country at a crossroads unlike any we’ve ever faced in living memory—a momentous period of crisis, threat, challenge, choice, and change as we emerge, finally , into the Barack Obama era. The book also fixes its unflinching, take-no-prisoners sights on what now needs to go right in the first term of President Obama if we hope to survive as the nation we know ourselves to be before it really is too late. As Now or Never makes urgently clear, this is a time for change we not only need, as Obama’s campaign mantra put it, but for change we will believe when we see it.
So many of the things that I suggested were wrong in my first book, It’s Getting Ugly Out There , have proved to be quite wrong. The nation’s confidence in its leaders took a huge hit during President George W. Bush’s two terms in office. Warning signs that we saw a couple of years ago weren’t taken seriously. With, arguably, the exception of the sharp decreases in sectarian violence and U.S. troop casualties in Iraq, we’re in a lot worse shape now than we were two years ago—for a lot of the reasons that I suggested in the first book. The incompetence, dishonesty, and corruption of Washington under President Bush had come together to create the dark economic storm now raging over the Obama administration as it faces the enormous challenge of turning America around.
This book examines the issues, turning points, and personalities that shaped 2008’s historic White House race and Obama’s victory—notably the astonishing two-year economic slide toward the unprecedented $700 billion bailout plan signed by Bush a month before Election Day; the treacherous new phases of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the rival characters and strategies of the Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin tickets that made the ’08 campaign such an extraordinary moment in our history.
The stakes could hardly have been higher. Domestically, our sinking economy is making the new president’s search for solutions—from war-zone strategies to energy and health-care reform; from funding Medicare and Social Security to securing our borders—as daunting as any since Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932, during the Great Depression. Globally, the new commander in chief faces escalating tensions in our dealings with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, the Middle East, and India, particularly since the horrific terror attacks in Mumbai in November 2008.
Obama has eight years of George Bush to thank for the immensity of his task—and for inciting an angry American electorate to action. Now or Never examines the corrosive legacies of the Bush reign; they include its fiscal recklessness, its illegal surveillance and sanctioning of torture, and a sweeping agenda of secrecy, deception, and expanding executive power. Bush is gone, but damaging precedents have been set. As I wrote in It’s Getting Ugly , my hunch was that Bush’s two-term record would prove to be “ so misguided, ineffective, and reckless while his political base was so egregious and arrogant in its corrupt abuse of power that Bush & Co. unwittingly woke up the American people and proved to them that their country was indeed broken and in urgent need of repair before it got too late to undo the harm they had done.”
If I was clearly on to something, I underestimated how bad things would get.
This was a year before the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve started to commit hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to shore up, bail out, and seize control of giant financial and insurance institutions better known for boundless greed than for bended-knee groveling. It was months before Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. scratched out what read in parts like a three-page ransom note (“Decisions by the Secretary . . . may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency”) laying out terms of the initial $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to buy back worthless mortgage-backed securities from failing banks as a way to keep credit flowing. The economy was strangling itself, he said; only a massive infusion of credit between banks, and from banks to businesses, consumers, car loan seekers, home buyers, and so on, would keep it breathing.
Phrases in the air evoked the Great Depression—“a race against time,” “grave threats,” “bank runs,” “bread lines,” “Armageddon,” “once-in-a-century financial crisis”—that from former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. Former General Electric chairman Jack Welch predicted “one hell of a downturn”; Warren Buffett called the markets an “economic Pearl Harbor.” Was this crisis about Wall Street extortion or Main Street extinction? Thirty-five senators and 435 congressmen were up for reelection. No one wanted to vote