(December 21) – “The telephone rings. It does not chirp or beep, it rings — an actual clapper strikes brass bells and the 1940’s Bakelite body shudders — like a voice from another time, like a wake-up call,” writes John Schwartz in today’s New York Times.

“Thomas Frank answers. He has been waiting, here in his home office in the Hyde Park neighborhood. On the other end of the line is an interviewer from a National Public Radio station at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, ready to fill an hour with a phone-in discussion of Mr. Frank’s new book, One Market, Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy (Doubleday).”

“In a sweeping, savage and witty indictment of American business, Mr. Frank, 35, slams the notion that the 1990’s lived up to the promise of the new economy — a sensibility summed up by commercials for WorldCom that ask, ‘Is this a great time, or what?’ “

“Mr. Frank argues that the answer is ‘or what.’ Behind the go-go stock market and the feel-good atmosphere, he says, the American economy that bloomed in the 1990’s is sick: the divide between rich and poor has widened, he insists, and mechanisms like government regulation and unions that traditionally protected underdogs have been hobbled.”

“Mergers and globalization, meanwhile, are homogenizing the world into one big Wal-Mart. Yet, he says, Americans have been sold the notion that the pixie-dust prosperity has touched almost everyone.”

“His timing could not be better: Mr. Frank is riding a nascent wave of antibusiness resentment that shows itself in everything from consumer complaints about health maintenance organizations to trashed Starbucks stores during last year’s World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Vice President Al Gore knew the sentiment was there when he attacked ‘big tobacco, big oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the H.M.O.’s.’ And even Business Week asked on its Sept. 11 cover: ‘Too Much Corporate Power?’ “

“One Market, Under God vivisects the libertarian manifestoes, management how-to books, academic gobbledygook, advertisements and finance-oriented cable networks to describe Mr. Frank’s key bête noire: market populism.”