Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right [Paperback]

This is an easy access alternative to "The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism". It is written from a US perspective and so many of the cast of character will be unfamiliar to British readers but the way the New Right has seized the agenda from the liberal/social movements during the current economic crisis is very much the same both sides of the Atlantic. In that we do share a special relationship.

The crisis was the fault of unregulated capitalism, it was the banks and the financial services industry that took the world economy to the brink and that continues to do so. But the swing of public opinion has been to elect governments of the right and this is not just the Tea Party and GOP resurgence in the 2010 mid-term elections, but also in the UK and Spain governments have been elected that want small government, less intervention and who support business.

Frank explains how all this can happen, how the Right have used rhetoric to turn the story to paint themselves and capitalism as the victim and not the cause. Mostly it is blistering attack on that rhetoric and the lack of facts to support it. His particular targets are Glenn Beck and the Tea Party whose continuous stream of lies and mis-direction he tries to unravel. Last of all he shows why the liberal/socialist response has failed and how the Democrats have become mumbo-jumbo speaking technocrats helpless in front of a populist movement. The spreadsheet and flow-chart pushing intellectuals who have forgotten how to fight.

I think it is a great book and I wish more people would read it. Then perhaps we might get a real movement for change.

How about this an explanation for the 2008 financial crash. The reason it occurred is that the banks and financial systems were not free enough . That government regulation and intervention stymied the markets and prevented them operating to their full potential.
Economic catastrophe usually, you would suspect would bring forth mass social protest and demands for change. But when Thomas Frank set out in 2009 to look for signs of blue collar 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 and be given even more freedom to carry out their capitalist economic miracle.
The American Right, which had seemed moribund after the election of 2008, was bizarrely reinvigorated by the arrival of recession and the following austerity measures . The Tea Party movement demanded not that Americans question the system that had collapsed with such disastrous consequences but that they reaffirm their unwavering commitment to it. Republicans in Congress embarked on a bold strategy of total opposition to the liberal state, while on TV ranting right-wing huckster Glenn Beck demonstrated the commercial potential of epic paranoia and the purest libertarian economics, decrying the interference of the state and using that horrible word socialism......ughh!!.No wonder millions of Americans were dragged round to that way of thinking . After all if everything you rely on for your information -the TV, the papers and your most vocal and exposed politicians all say the same thing , then well.....it must be true. Thank the lord for Fox TV.
I am of course being a touch sardonic here , but really what is happening in America cry's out for far more than mild sarcasm For the author , it's as if "the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear power plants in the wake of the Three Mile Island disaster."
And as he also points out , its not as if it is just the Republicans who want to carry on as if 2008 was just a brief aberration. The Democrats have been tongue tied by assaults claiming that the markets have to be free or freedom disappears and President Obama has even co-opted former Wall St doyens into his economic team and has admitted that " As a consequence of my fund-raising I have become more like the wealthy donors I met".
However there is no need for us Brits to be smug. For who is really paying for the 2008 crash over here? It most certainly is not the guys at the top of the top 100 FSTE companies whose wealth has increased by nearly 50% while the rest of us have seen our wages drop in real terms due to pay freezes( or miserly increases) that do not match the rate of inflation. Which is precisely why the Con-Dems make such a big deal about the welfare bill. Scroungers....easy target. lets go for them and distract the populus from who is really responsible.
So it seems 2008 has taught us nothing. Inequality will continue, if not worsen , vested interests will still watch each other backs and the financial markets will blithely and arrogantly carry on as if nothing ever happened. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once said -"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste". It appears that is exactly what the right is doing . Using 2008 as an excuse to pursue even more vigorously, their own rapacious agenda. On both sides of the Atlantic.If you suspect even a scintilla of that is true, this book is a must read.

Take the letters M A R K E T and with the change of just a single letter you have an anagram of `racket'. Not for a moment, of course, do I suggest that the two concepts are simply interchangeable. However it would be hard to deny, from any point of view, that deregulated financial markets came recently within a whisker of torpedoing the entire global economy. Thomas Frank's brilliant and most entertaining analysis of the matter helps to supply what has been a crying lack, namely articulacy and pizzazz in arguing what so many have felt all along, that much of the world of banking and investment had become a downright racket. More especially, the book is concerned with another grotesque piece of effrontery, by which the perpetrators of the disaster have not only escaped unpunished but are managing to masquerade as some sort of victims and/or champions of the common man. The proponents of this viewpoint can certainly be congratulated on their chutzpah if nothing else. In particular they have deployed brilliant PR and controlled the vocabulary, and while in terms of intellectual grip and argumentative panache Thomas Frank can wipe the floor with the whole wretched gang books still have to struggle against the organised Goebbelsian salvoes that substitute volume and repetition for argument. Galbraith had a wonderful expression `the stridently vocal and pathologically ignorant'. In case even that may be too elitist and taken as further proof of attempts at seizing power by liberals or god knows who, may I humbly offer to the forces of light two simple and familiar expressions to help penetrate the clouds of obfuscation being visited on the victims of these scams. For the financial operations themselves the word is of course `racket': for the way it is being sanitised and served up for approval there is the excellent American phrase `snow job'.

Most of the book is devoted to analysing the techniques used in this saga of double-speak and double-think. In fact I got the impression that a lot of it comes down to just one basic technique - whenever the malefactors are accused, however reasonably, of any particular malfeasance the double-think apparatchiks simply reply `No, you'. It is automatic, it is instantaneous, it annuls thought and reason, and it gains force simply by familiarity. Thomas Frank cites example after example. Consistency is not a problem either - if the money moguls and manipulators are attacked by their critics on the liberal side then the liberals are victimising the said moguls (it passes belief, doesn't it?); but without missing a beat the pitch can be modified to present the money-monsters as protecting the small businessman from the big guys.

If you think that the supply-side monetarists have had things their way for the last 30 years, it's worth saying that in some right-wing quarters the feeling is strong that their hour has never really come. This is the familiar argument that when a policy looks to be an unmitigated disaster that is because it has not been pursued thoroughly enough, or that it is not really a disaster but a brilliant triumph, or both. Thomas Frank devotes a good deal of energy to dissecting this proposition, but there is another side to it that I suspect he is missing because he is just not old enough to have the background. I am not American myself, but I have been visiting this great republic all my life, and I had made a few of my visits before Thomas Frank was even born. He often cites a certain Glenn Beck whose show I have never seen, and who apparently majors in paranoia about liberals, socialists etc seizing power, `taking over' (whatever that is) and similar claptrap. This stuff is as old as the hills, and attractive though America is in so many ways it has been the home to a large minority of right-wing nutters since I can ever remember. In the 60's we had the John Birch Society, now we have the Tea Party, and there has always been the constant theme of claiming ownership of the constitution, the flag, the bill of rights etc, the same fixation with taxes, and the non-stop invocations of `liberty', which has morphed from its origin in rejection of George III into a near-meaningless adhesive label attached mechanically to anything the right may be doing. Above all, such propaganda, however ludicrous, is kept in people's consciousness by the simple device, now as then, of turning up the volume-level.

Thomas Frank ends with his insight into how this monstrous nonsense has achieved the level of acceptance that it has. Partly it is that it was well prepared and financed, but he does not spare the Democratic party in general or Mr Obama in particular for being desperately ineffectual. Forget Mr Beck's takeovers, seizures of power and whatnot: if any of that is going on it is not coming from the quarter where Mr Beck purports to find it, although we can all join in criticising the government on this issue at least. I do not know just how long the genuine majority who are being manipulated will put up with it, but there does seem to be some kind of reaction at last, and it appears to be global. That leaves me with another thought: do the deregulators and free-marketers really think that trans-national corporations, however deregulated in America (suppose), can operate on any such basis worldwide? I wonder whether it has really sunk in that the world consists of anywhere else besides America.