Thomas Frank’s new book, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, is a brief but insightful examination of one of the most curious political phenomena to occur in America in recent memory: the rise of the Tea Party. At this point, we’re all so used to seeing spittle-flecked oldsters in tri-corner hats ranting about the Constitution that we take it for granted. That obscures the fundamental insanity of what went down on Main Streets and Town Halls in 2009-2010. Wall Street traders, in a frenzy of greed and irresponsibility, deliberately and fraudulently inflated a speculative housing bubble that inevitably burst, leveling the American economy and costing millions of people their jobs and/or their homes. Then, instead of being paraded down Broadway in leg irons and pelted with rotten fruit by the populace, these same corporate pirates were rewarded with a massive infusion of public funds to make good on their bad bets while ordinary people struggled through a disaster not of their making.
And how did the simple folks of the American plains respond to this massive corporate injustice? By forming a populist movement intent on protecting the fat cats who ruined the economy from taxation or oversight.
Huh? As Frank points out, “before 2009, the man on the bread line did not ordinarily weep for the man lounging on his yacht.”
Frank’s concisely explains just how right-wing financiers, politicians and sundry hucksters spun the base lead of free-floating populist rage into the precious gold of free market dogmatism. First of all, the right was willing and able to exploit the anger and confusion of the Great Recession in a way that the bloodless technocrats of the post-Clinton Democratic Party were constitutionally incapable of doing. Then, utilizing what the immortal Bill McNeil once called “half-truths and gorilla dust,” Tea Party leaders of both the grassroot and Astroturf variety obfuscated the real causes of the collapse and pointed the finger at a new collection of villains. It wasn’t unfettered capitalist speculation that ruined the economy, it was the regulation-happy thugs at the federal government. It wasn’t a cadre of conservative Republicans who pushed TARP through, it was Barack Obama utilizing some kind of wormhole. This rewriting of history was made easier by the fact that the timeline and mechanisms of the crisis were so complicated that most people couldn’t be bothered to sort through all the strands and were happy to listen to the side who told the most coherent and forceful story. TARP, CDS, CDO, AIG, the parade of letters tend to blur into one another after awhile and canny propagandists of the right were able to conflate the bailout, the stimulus bill and, eventually, health care reform into an undifferentiated mass of Big Government waste and fraud, fueling outrage so intense that the actual chronology of deregulation, heedless bubble building, collapse and bailout was forgotten. In a further bit of rhetorical legerdemain, the investment bankers whose idiocy and greed caused the disaster in the first place were rechristened as “job creators,” the only people in America with the initiative and ingenuity to rescue the economy, as long as their taxes are kept as low as possible.
The scam worked like a charm. It made a lot of money for political grifters like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, it sold a bunch of gold coins to paranoid shut-ins, but it’s crowning achievement was electing the Tea-tastic 112th Congress. This gang of snake handlers and Know-Nothings successfully stymied President Obama’s entire domestic agenda and nearly set fire to the smoldering ruins of the American economy with their debt-ceiling brinkmanship. They also managed to shift the agenda in Washington from stimulating the economy to cutting the budget. By the fall of 2011, the reactionary right had successfully turned an economic crisis that had come as a direct result of the application of its dogma into an opportunity to take sledgehammers to the welfare state.
But something funny happened on the way to destroying Medicare, repealing the Affordable Health-care Act and fitting the nation’s teen girls with chastity belts. Two things, actually. First, the Occupy movement reclaimed righteous populist anger on behalf of the left and highlighted the ever-widening chasm between most Americans and the wealthy elite. Second, the Republican establishment decided that their standard bearer for 2012 would be the last election’s runner-up: former Massachusetts governor, venture capitalist, and patrician cyborg Mitt Romney.
The Republican’s “Hard-Times Swindle,” as Thomas Frank calls it, works first and foremost by fogging the issues surrounding the economic collapse and subsequent recession, funnelling the ambient rage of a scared and struggling populace towards the same policy positions as the finance sector ghouls who caused it in the first place. The Occupy Movement and the Romney candidacy cut through this miasma. Occupy reminded people just who the real villains of the Great Recession are, and then Mitt Romney showed up to become the bad guy’s tribune and avatar.
Fake populism requires fake populists to sell it, and, from George W. Bush to Sarah Palin, the modern GOP has been adept at finding them. Mitt Romney may be fake, but he ain’t no populist. In fact, Mitt Romney may be the most artificial human to ever seek the presidency, but one thing about him is achingly authentic: his oozing sense of upper class privilege. Romney’s campaign is about as spontaneous as North Korean gymnastics, yet he continues to alienate voters with off-the-cuff pronouncements. Last summer, he told a crowd in Iowa that “corporations are people, too, my friend.” Then, he casually offered to bet Rick Perry ten thousand dollars, a sum the loss of which would be catastrophic to most Americans. He referred to the $374, 327.62 he made in the last year in speaking fees as “not a lot of money.” After winning the Florida primary, he assured the voters of the country that he’s “not concerned about the very poor.” (Because they have a safety net! You know, the safety net that Republicans have vowed to shred?) All of these gaffes speak to Romney’s fundamental disconnection from the economic reality of the country at large. To make matters worse, Romney first made his fabulous fortune at Bain Capital Ventures, taking over struggling companies in order to sell off their assets and “streamline” (i.e. lay off) their workforce. In every sense, conducting himself with the same myopic fixation on extracting personal profit at all costs as the Wall Street sleazebags who wrecked the joint.
So now, the 1% of “earners” who have accumulated almost all of the wealth created in the last thirty years at the expense of the rest of us have a spokesman, and it’s the same guy who’s been running around the country, joylessly mouthing the same free market platitudes as the Tea Partiers. It has not gone unnoticed. Republican primary voters have repeatedly tried to buck him out of the saddle, but considering his massive campaign war chest and the rodeo clowns running against him, he’ll probably end up securing the nomination. And as he does the Robot across the nation from now until November, his very existence will continue clarify the issues at hand and drive away the fog where monsters breed.
Mitt Romney: Piercing the Veil of Maya
Thomas Frank’s new book, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, is a brief but insightful examination of one of the most curious political phenomena to occur in America in recent memory: the rise of the Tea Party. At this point, we’re all so used to seeing spittle-flecked oldsters in tri-corner hats ranting about the Constitution that we take it for granted. That obscures the fundamental insanity of what went down on Main Streets and Town Halls in 2009-2010. Wall Street traders, in a frenzy of greed and irresponsibility, deliberately and fraudulently inflated a speculative housing bubble that inevitably burst, leveling the American economy and costing millions of people their jobs and/or their homes. Then, instead of being paraded down Broadway in leg irons and pelted with rotten fruit by the populace, these same corporate pirates were rewarded with a massive infusion of public funds to make good on their bad bets while ordinary people struggled through a disaster not of their making.
And how did the simple folks of the American plains respond to this massive corporate injustice? By forming a populist movement intent on protecting the fat cats who ruined the economy from taxation or oversight.
Huh? As Frank points out, “before 2009, the man on the bread line did not ordinarily weep for the man lounging on his yacht.”
Frank’s concisely explains just how right-wing financiers, politicians and sundry hucksters spun the base lead of free-floating populist rage into the precious gold of free market dogmatism. First of all, the right was willing and able to exploit the anger and confusion of the Great Recession in a way that the bloodless technocrats of the post-Clinton Democratic Party were constitutionally incapable of doing. Then, utilizing what the immortal Bill McNeil once called “half-truths and gorilla dust,” Tea Party leaders of both the grassroot and Astroturf variety obfuscated the real causes of the collapse and pointed the finger at a new collection of villains. It wasn’t unfettered capitalist speculation that ruined the economy, it was the regulation-happy thugs at the federal government. It wasn’t a cadre of conservative Republicans who pushed TARP through, it was Barack Obama utilizing some kind of wormhole. This rewriting of history was made easier by the fact that the timeline and mechanisms of the crisis were so complicated that most people couldn’t be bothered to sort through all the strands and were happy to listen to the side who told the most coherent and forceful story. TARP, CDS, CDO, AIG, the parade of letters tend to blur into one another after awhile and canny propagandists of the right were able to conflate the bailout, the stimulus bill and, eventually, health care reform into an undifferentiated mass of Big Government waste and fraud, fueling outrage so intense that the actual chronology of deregulation, heedless bubble building, collapse and bailout was forgotten. In a further bit of rhetorical legerdemain, the investment bankers whose idiocy and greed caused the disaster in the first place were rechristened as “job creators,” the only people in America with the initiative and ingenuity to rescue the economy, as long as their taxes are kept as low as possible.
The scam worked like a charm. It made a lot of money for political grifters like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, it sold a bunch of gold coins to paranoid shut-ins, but it’s crowning achievement was electing the Tea-tastic 112th Congress. This gang of snake handlers and Know-Nothings successfully stymied President Obama’s entire domestic agenda and nearly set fire to the smoldering ruins of the American economy with their debt-ceiling brinkmanship. They also managed to shift the agenda in Washington from stimulating the economy to cutting the budget. By the fall of 2011, the reactionary right had successfully turned an economic crisis that had come as a direct result of the application of its dogma into an opportunity to take sledgehammers to the welfare state.
But something funny happened on the way to destroying Medicare, repealing the Affordable Health-care Act and fitting the nation’s teen girls with chastity belts. Two things, actually. First, the Occupy movement reclaimed righteous populist anger on behalf of the left and highlighted the ever-widening chasm between most Americans and the wealthy elite. Second, the Republican establishment decided that their standard bearer for 2012 would be the last election’s runner-up: former Massachusetts governor, venture capitalist, and patrician cyborg Mitt Romney.
The Republican’s “Hard-Times Swindle,” as Thomas Frank calls it, works first and foremost by fogging the issues surrounding the economic collapse and subsequent recession, funnelling the ambient rage of a scared and struggling populace towards the same policy positions as the finance sector ghouls who caused it in the first place. The Occupy Movement and the Romney candidacy cut through this miasma. Occupy reminded people just who the real villains of the Great Recession are, and then Mitt Romney showed up to become the bad guy’s tribune and avatar.
Fake populism requires fake populists to sell it, and, from George W. Bush to Sarah Palin, the modern GOP has been adept at finding them. Mitt Romney may be fake, but he ain’t no populist. In fact, Mitt Romney may be the most artificial human to ever seek the presidency, but one thing about him is achingly authentic: his oozing sense of upper class privilege. Romney’s campaign is about as spontaneous as North Korean gymnastics, yet he continues to alienate voters with off-the-cuff pronouncements. Last summer, he told a crowd in Iowa that “corporations are people, too, my friend.” Then, he casually offered to bet Rick Perry ten thousand dollars, a sum the loss of which would be catastrophic to most Americans. He referred to the $374, 327.62 he made in the last year in speaking fees as “not a lot of money.” After winning the Florida primary, he assured the voters of the country that he’s “not concerned about the very poor.” (Because they have a safety net! You know, the safety net that Republicans have vowed to shred?) All of these gaffes speak to Romney’s fundamental disconnection from the economic reality of the country at large. To make matters worse, Romney first made his fabulous fortune at Bain Capital Ventures, taking over struggling companies in order to sell off their assets and “streamline” (i.e. lay off) their workforce. In every sense, conducting himself with the same myopic fixation on extracting personal profit at all costs as the Wall Street sleazebags who wrecked the joint.
So now, the 1% of “earners” who have accumulated almost all of the wealth created in the last thirty years at the expense of the rest of us have a spokesman, and it’s the same guy who’s been running around the country, joylessly mouthing the same free market platitudes as the Tea Partiers. It has not gone unnoticed. Republican primary voters have repeatedly tried to buck him out of the saddle, but considering his massive campaign war chest and the rodeo clowns running against him, he’ll probably end up securing the nomination. And as he does the Robot across the nation from now until November, his very existence will continue clarify the issues at hand and drive away the fog where monsters breed.
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