Fleeced!: Telemarketing Rip-Offs and how to Avoid Them Book

THE ENGINEERS OF HUMAN SOULS

Elizabeth Fones-Wolf 1996 publication "Selling Free Enterprise" is a comprehensive look at the efforts of the business community, between 1945 and 1960, to marginalise organised labour and retard any further development of the progressive politics that gained ground during the period from the 1930's Depression through to the end of the war.

The result is a dense well sourced book that details the conflict, primarily between organised labour and the business associations, over the United States political-economic development. Other protaganists include religious organisations and the media who were to varying degrees subverted by the business community as part of their efforts to turn their "free enterprise" credo into the common wisdom that constrains debate and decisions about political-economic life in the United States. Organised Labour and others efforts to defend and extend the gains of the New Deal era are examined closely, and the author doesn't shy away from identifying those defeats that were far from inevitable, despite the cards stacked against them.

On the downside some may find Fones-Wolf's prose more than a little dry, certainly it is not a racy read, but she is nothing if not thorough end-notes to each chapter testify. On the context within which the events examined occurred, such as the first third of the Cold War and the period of political repression known as McCarthyism, Fones-Wolf is perhaps not as thorough as she might have been. Certainly the phenomena of McCarthyism during her period, and its role in creating a congenial environment for the advancing of businesses agenda, deserves a chapter in itself.

Despite these shortcomings the book is an interesting look at how the Business community fought to re-engineer the outlook of America in its own interests, and the efforts of Unions and others to block this development. Readers interested in McCarthyism can find a short and readable introduction in Ellen Schreckers "The Age of McCarthyism".