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

It was better than the partisan tea party bashing that I was expecting to be honest. A very concise evaluation of the differences between the market crashes of the 30's to the more recent ones, and the cultural/political changes that followed each. Very well researched with footnotes galore, and I had to do a bit of my own research while reading as well (to find out what a credit default swap was for instance). While clearly written with a left leaning slant, it is easy to draw your own conclusions from the information presented. And personally I gained a better understanding of what might have motivated a group of people to protest and vote against what would appear to be their own self interests. Fascinating read, I recommend it.

Like Colin Crouch's The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism Thomas Frank examines how the wealthy elite have managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by convincing the 99% that what is good for the 1% - neoliberal deregulation, privatisation, financialisation and the gutting of the public sphere is good for all.

As in the final scene from a slasher movie, when the killer seems to rise from the dead to continue the mayhem, neoliberalism - the ideology of the powerful - has been resurrected. When Alan Greenspan grudgingly accepted that there was a flaw in 'the system' - or, more accurately, in his Ayn Randian paradigm, belief in the idea of self-regulating 'free' markets seemed to be crumbing all around him. Keynes's name began to be dusted down as people from all sides of the political spectrum looked into the abyss.

And yet, just a few months later, after the bailouts, as the most critical corner seemed to have been turned, the Masters of the Universe, regrouped got back onto their mangy horse and road back into town to shoot the place up with their crazed rhetoric about government spending, labour unions, public sector workers and the sick and elderly being responsible for the whole darn mess - even as they were being injected with billions of printed dollars and pounds. They even had the gall to start down-rating the very governments that bailed them out - because they had become a credit risk!

But, as Frank describes, the most inexplicable element was how the average American or Brit took it on the chin and agreed with their abuser in some sort of globalised Stockholm Syndrome - where the hostage identifies with the interests of his captor.

Frank illustrates how the mega-rich of America have funded the astro-turf campaigns that have captured the warped imaginations of millions who seem to believe the US was built on free markets and self-reliance - rather than as the result of a judicious mix of government planning, spending, support and, whisper it quietly, outright protectionism, before collapsing in an orgy of 'Gilded Age' greed, learning the lesson of the Depression, and re-setting the agenda for the post-war boom which shared the benefits of capitalist society more widely than ever before, producing one of the most productive periods in economic history.

And yet, after thirty years of accelerating inequality, concentrations of wealth and power have enabled the corporations - more particularly the financial sector - to capture government and the media and convince those suffering from an impoverished public infrastructure, public education and failing healthcare system that their future is dependent on the John Galts of this 'Atlas Shrugged' dystopia - to whom they must be grateful for the scraps they receive because they have saved them from the 'serfdom' promised by Big Government.

Their captors have even assumed the language of their opponents, with their talk of 'radicalism' and their appeals to Main Street - from their gated penthouses.

But, as Frank argues, much if the blame for this must go to what Dean Baker calls 'loser liberalism' - the way in which those that once stood for Progressive ideals have given up on their principles, and their constituencies in an attempt to make peace with the zealots of market fundamentalism (and keep those campaign dollars rolling in).

Well worth a read.

later note: Red and Blue and Broke All Over by Charles Goyette goes somewhat deeper but Macrowikinomics gives a better idea of the out-of-the box thinking that's essential.
This book turned out to be a sadly shallow look at the reasons for the rebirth of right-wing populism.

Just two highly relevant areas completely overlooked by the author:

- unexplained exit poll "discrepancies" versus charges of election frauds: for instance, the exit polls of those states with paper ballots were measurably closer than those that used paperless systems.
and
- the heartsickness that has been sweeping across the heartland of the US has been ignored by the focus on socioeconomic issues while the deepest unmet needs of constituents are primarily psycho-spiritual in nature: neither red nor blue parties address worldly issues of social justice and economic balance in any depth whatsoever. Our deepest needs are genuine community and a tangible spiritual experience, areas shunned by politicians.

Instead, chapter after chapter is offered on the endless scams perpetrated by the "Right". They repeatedly scream that, free from regulation "everyone would live in harmony with nature and the intent of the Founders" and no one would be cheated, no insider trading would happen, no mortgages would be mis-sold. This is a hallucination of utopian capitalism - created by those who don't want us to notice that, without regulation, exploitation and corruption are inevitable.

As Bromwich pointed out in The Guardian, most of us don't know - and don't appear to care - what a complex derivative is, or a credit default swap, or any of the other devices by which the banks and money firms gambled away pension funds and town and state budgets by slicing and dicing tons of rubbish and selling it all as chocolate cake certified triple-A. For decades we have all been encouraged to believe it's in our best interests for Wall Street [and the City of London] and the banks to game the whole system.

No culprits have been found among the money "masters" in the money firms. There has been little accountability for the economic disaster. Government has acted ever since as though nothing really untoward happened at all. The bailout money will be recouped, they tell us. The experts understand these things. You could not have contrived a scenario better calculated to destroy public faith in institutions.

Yet, Americans clamour for less regulation! They have been painstakingly trained to blame "big government" for every lost job, every personal bankruptcy, every home foreclosure, every struggling small business and to believe that letting the money "masters" do whatever they wish can actually fix what is broken! Just like the lyrics of that Diana Ross classic: upside down and inside out and around and around you're turning me.

The book also points accusingly at the refusal of the "Left" to examine the many failures, but actually there's so little difference now between the parties that they are often now known as Republicrats. While the author goes out of his way to claim that Democrats and Republicans are more different than Pepsi and Coca Cola, it is an open secret that both parties are bought and sold - by the same 1% who continue getting richer. (Check out the 2010 OECD finding that, far from being the storybook land of opportunity, parental income is actually a better predictor of a child's future in America than in much of Europe.) So, not much difference which party gets voted in?

Tellingly the book somehow fails to notice that, at some (subliminal?) level, Americans seem to understand that it doesn't matter which puppet is voted in. The 41.6% turnout of eligible voters in 2010 indicates that nearly 60% understand this, at some level. Rather than writing what is essentially a continuation and expansion of his 2005 book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?" and his 2009 book "The Wrecking Crew" on corrupt politics, Frank might have considered going deeper into the root causes.

The author, who has examined this issue for over a decade, offers many reasons and proofs but has somehow failed to notice the systemic failures underlying the economic disintegration. A major underlying cause, for instance, is ignorance. So much money has been thrown at schooling - specifically to ensure that Americans today are poorly educated. This is the same basis on which hundreds of billions have been thrown at health"care", "war on drugs" and "war on terrorism" - all that money has been well-spent, as far as concerns those intent on ensuring that the opposite is achieved to what is claimed - as is overwhelmingly proven by statistics. (BTW, terrorism IS war: surely it is impossible to have war on war?)

Seemingly separate but really due to the same criminal and adolescent mentality, the entertainment media gets more dumbed-down and/or bloodthirsty by the year, the vast majority of video games are based on murder and even torture (an efficient - and profitable - way to pre-programme the soldiers of tomorrow) and for decades it has even been difficult to find children's cartoons that do not involve violence or brutality (The Magic School Bus series being a delightful exception). As the title of this book's final chapter says: trample the weak.

Let's hope this is a transitional phase since it does not need to be this way: Americans are, at heart, honourable and well-meaning - and just need to grow up, as a nation.

Those who assume the book is not relevant in Britain: please explain the differences between our political parties and also how our services have improved over the last half-century (do start with our health"care", "justice" system, and education).

Final thought: For all of us, isn't it about "getting" that we're all in this together - intimately entangled in a love story of over 7 billions of us?