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Fri 6 Jan, 2012 11:58 am
Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right by Thomas Frank
Book Description
Publication Date: January 3, 2012
From the bestselling author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, a wonderfully insightful and sardonic look at why the worst economy since the 1930s has brought about the revival of conservatism
Economic catastrophe usually brings social protest and demands for change—or at least it's supposed to. But when Thomas Frank set out in 2009 to look for expressions of American discontent, all he could find were loud demands that the economic system be made even harsher on the recession's victims and that society's traditional winners receive even grander prizes. The American Right, which had seemed moribund after the election of 2008, was strangely reinvigorated by the arrival of hard times. The Tea Party movement demanded not that we question the failed system but that we reaffirm our commitment to it. Republicans in Congress embarked on a bold strategy of total opposition to the liberal state. And TV phenom Glenn Beck demonstrated the commercial potential of heroic paranoia and the purest libertarian economics.
In Pity the Billionaire, Frank, the great chronicler of American paradox, examines the peculiar mechanism by which dire economic circumstances have delivered wildly unexpected political results. Using firsthand reporting, a deep knowledge of the American Right, and a wicked sense of humor, he gives us the first full diagnosis of the cultural malady that has transformed collapse into profit, reconceived the Founding Fathers as heroes from an Ayn Rand novel, and enlisted the powerless in a fan club for the prosperous. The understanding Frank reaches is at once startling, original, and profound.
Editorial Reviews
"No one fools Thomas Frank, who is the sharpest, funniest, most intellectually voracious political commentator on the scene. In Pity the Billionaire he has written a brilliant expose of the most breath-taking ruse in American political history: how the right turned the biggest capitalist breakdown since 1929 into an opportunity for themselves." —Barbara Ehrenreich
"Tom Frank has the Tea Parties in his sights! Brisk and searing and deeply informed by the lessons of history (shocking notion!), Frank's latest guide for the perplexed is nothing less than a precious gift to us. Read it, and finally—You. Will. Understand." —Rick Perlstein
"Thomas Frank has crossed the Styx and returned to sing of the tortured, tormented souls of the Tea Party and their sufferings in the Socialist America they have conjured from thin air. This he does with grace, style and humor, which not all of his subjects share. Be glad that in this election year you can read Pity the Billionaire instead of turning on the television or the radio or your computer. Pity the Billionaire? Hell. Pity us all." —James K. Galbraith
About the Author
Thomas Frank is the author of Pity the Billionaire, The Wrecking Crew, What's the Matter with Kansas?, and One Market Under God. A former opinion columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Frank is the founding editor of The Baffler and a monthly columnist for Harper's. He lives outside Washington, D.C.
Customer review
Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America was first published in 2004, to considerable acclaim, for examining why so many Americans voted against their economic interests. He commenced with a startling fact: the poorest county in the United States is not in Appalachia or the Deep South; rather it is on the High Plains, McPherson County, in Nebraska. In the year 2000, more than 80% of the resident voters (admittedly a rather small group) went for George W. Bush, the Republican. "Why" is the subject of that book. How did conservatives capture the American heartland? As Frank pithily postulates: It was as though the French Revolution occurred in reverse, with the people running through the streets demanding that the nobility be given even more money and privileges!
"Pity the Billionaire" covers even more astonishing recent developments. It is one thing to have people prostrate themselves before the "free-market god" prior to 2008. But when it became "the god that failed" to reference Arthur Koestler's book about his eventual disillusionment with communism, and the entire house of cards came tumbling down, then how could Americans be calling for yet a purer version of the "free market," effectively doubling down on their bets? Why didn't they throw the rigid ideology of the supremacy of the "free market" into the dust bin of history, along with communism? Frank does a superlative job illuminating how this most unlikely occurrence unfolded.
He reminds us that we have seen this 2008 movie before: The Great Depression. The excesses of the "Roaring `20's," including highly leveraged speculation on Wall Street, led to massive unemployment, foreclosures, and a decade of hard times. The answer in the `30's commenced by realizing where the problem lay. Prudent rules and laws were enacted to preserve what is still labeled "capitalism," and to tame the "casino mentality." FDR, the "traitor to his own class," talked directly to the workers and the dispossessed, and put many to work in public works projects. The elites were largely vilified, and FDR "welcomed their hatred."
The essence of Frank's work is explaining why there was no rerun of this movie. Most events unfolded in the open, before our eyes. Many mouths gaped that such brazen and implausible events could be pulled off. There was Rick Santelli, a business report, convincing us the "common working man" was the trader at the Chicago Board of Trade. Don't focus on Wall Street, and the trillions required to save their sorry... no, shift the focus to the neighbor who bought the house with the extra bedroom and couldn't afford it. Should you bail out your neighbor for his/her imprudence? Frank discusses the "genius" of Glenn Beck, at length. (It was a variation of "I watch Glenn Beck so you don't have to") - yet Frank nags us that we really must watch him (hopefully only in small doses.) History is constantly re-written; fears like Wells' "invasion of the Martians" are constantly stoked. The problem was not the bonus culture of Wall Street; no, it was big government, and their promotion of housing for the poor. Beck, a consummate actor, can cry when required ... of course, all the way to the bank. Ayn Rand even experiences a revival. Frank details how the Tea Party's righteous anger resulting from the "free-market" failures were channeled at the wrong targets. In fact, as Frank explains, many of the populist forms of rebellion in the `30's were coopted and adopted by the Right after 2008; history resonating inversely. Of the numerous cases Frank cites, it would be hard to trump the sheer chutzpah of Massey Energy's CEO, Don Blankenship, who sponsored a rally to announce solidarity between coal miners and the coal operators, all directed at "getting government bureaucrats off their backs," with their safety and environmental meddling; eight months afterward, 29 miners were killed in an explosion in one of his mines (p 91.)
As so many now know, Obama is no FDR. Starting right from the beginning, when he selected key Wall Street "players" who were instrumental in causing the catastrophe and expecting them to fix it: Summers and Geithner. In contrast, FDR chose a classic populist of a Texas banker, Jesse Jones to run the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (FRC). This time around, "compromise" instead of "welcoming their hatred" was the dominant outlook. I've marked many passages in this book. One that seemed to capture the essence of the triumph of the conservative revival related to the debate on universal health care. The Democrats were unable, or too intimidated to articulate that essential health care is a fundamental right. As Frank says: "It was as though the old-school liberal catechism had become forbidden language, placed on some index of prohibited thoughts" (p. 169).
Inexplicably, Frank does not cover the recent countervailing rise of the "Occupy" movement. And he does end on a down note, suggesting further targets, such as the national parks, the highways, public schools and Social Security are on the Right's agenda as the "nation clambers down through the sulfurous fumes into the pit called utopia..." Still, the increased hubris generated by successfully avoiding the penalty for an ideological failure should only mean that the fall will be that much the greater, the next time around.
Frank has written a worthy sequel to "Kansas," a 5-star effort.
@BumbleBeeBoogie,
'Pity The Billionaire': The Right's Unlikely Comeback
by NPR Staff - All Things Considered
How did the economic collapse of 2008 and 2009 give birth to a conservative populist revolt?
That's the question Thomas Frank tries to answer in his new book — and sharp-tongued liberal polemic — Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right.
Frank, whose previous books include What's the Matter with Kansas?, writes that the recent revival of the right is just as extraordinary as "if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear power plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster."
"Before 2009," Frank writes, "the man in the bread line did not ordinarily weep for the man lounging on his yacht." And yet, Frank says, that's become the central paradox of our time.
"We've just come through this extraordinary financial collapse. We know that this was almost directly the result of 30 years of bank deregulation and of all the sort of financial experimentation that our government encouraged," he tells NPR's Melissa Block. "And what the Tea Party movement and what the conservative revival generally is telling us to do is ... double down on that ideology that we've been following all these years."
On its surface, Frank says, that can be an appealing proposal.
"They're asking questions that need to be answered: Why did the regulators fail? That's a really good question. They're theory is that it's government — government always fails," he says. "The important thing is what's the answer coming from the other side? What is, say, the administration of Barack Obama — what's their answer to the question? You know what it is? Nothing. They don't ever talk about it."
Meanwhile, white blue-collar workers are abandoning the Democratic Party in droves and going Republican. It's a shift Frank attributes to Democrats' inability to effectively speak the populist language, and the conservative movement's "extremely good populist game."
"These people are waging a really terrific class war against what they believe to be the ruling class," he says, "and it is no surprise to me at all that it appeals to working class voters."
@BumbleBeeBoogie,
Excerpt: Pity The Billionaire
This book is a chronicle of a confused time, a period when Americans rose up against imaginary threats and rallied to economic theories they understood only in the gauziest terms. It is about a country where fears of a radical takeover became epidemic even though radicals themselves had long since ceased to play any role in the national life; a land where ideological nightmares conjured by TV entertainers came to seem more vivid and compelling than the contents of the news pages.
Seen from another perspective, this is a chronicle of a miraculous time, of another "Great Awakening," of a revival crusade preaching the old-time religion of the free market.1 It's the story of a grassroots rebellion and the incredible recovery of the conservative movement from the gloomy depths of defeat. Inevitably the words "populist" and "revolt" are applied to it, or the all-out phrase chosen by Dick Armey, the Washington magnifico who heads one of the main insurgent organizations: a "true bottom-up revolution."
Let us confess that there is indeed something miraculous, something astonishing, about all this. Consider the barest facts: this is the fourth successful conservative uprising to happen in the last half century,* each one more a-puff with populist bluster than the last, each one standing slightly more rightward, and each one helping to compose a more spellbinding chapter in the historical epoch that I call "the Great Backlash," and that others call the "Age of Reagan" (the historian Sean Wilentz), the "Age of Greed" (the journalist Jeff Madrick), the "Conservative Ascendancy" (the journalist Godfrey Hodgson), or the "Washington Consensus" (various economists).
Think about it this way. It has now been more than thirty years since the supply-side revolution conquered Washington, since laissez-faire became the dogma of the nation's ruling class, shared by large numbers of Democrats as well as Republicans. We have lived through decades of deregulation, deunionization, privatization, and free-trade agreements; the neoliberal ideal has been projected into every corner of the nation's life. Universities try to put themselves on a market-based footing these days; so do hospitals, electric utilities, churches, and museums; so does the Post Office, the CIA, and the U.S. Army.
And now, after all this has been going on for decades, we have a people's uprising demanding that we bow down before the altar of the free market. And this only a short while after the high priests of that very cosmology led the world into the greatest economic catastrophe in memory. "Amazing" is right. "Unlikely" would also be right. "Preposterous" would be even righter.
In 2008, the country's financial system suffered an epic breakdown, largely the result — as nearly every credible observer agrees — of the decades-long effort to roll back bank supervision and encourage financial experimentation. The banks' stumble quickly plunged the nation and the world into the worst recession since the thirties. This was no ordinary business-cycle downturn. Millions of Americans, and a large number of their banks, became insolvent in a matter of weeks. Sixteen trillion dollars in household wealth was incinerated on the pyre Wall Street had kindled. And yet, as I write this, the most effective political response to these events is a campaign to roll back regulation, to strip government employees of the right to collectively bargain, and to clamp down on federal spending.
So let us give the rebels their due. Let us acknowledge that the conservative comeback of the last few years is indeed something unique in the history of American social movements: a mass conversion to free-market theory as a response to hard times. Before the present economic slump, I had never heard of a recession's victims developing a wholesale taste for neoclassical economics or a spontaneous hostility to the works of Franklin Roosevelt. Before this recession, people who had been cheated by bankers almost never took that occasion to demand that bankers be freed from "red tape" and the scrutiny of the law. Before 2009, the man in the bread line did not ordinarily weep for the man lounging on his yacht.
*1. The original backlash of the Vietnam War era, culminating in the election of Richard Nixon. 2. The tax revolts and culture wars of the seventies, climaxing with the Reagan Revolution of 1980. 3. The "Contract with America" and the Gingrich Revolution of 1994.
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