Thomas Frank: "What's the Matter with Liberals?"

Thomas Frank, who wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,” treated his audience at Shambaugh Auditorium at the University of Iowa Tuesday night to a smart, wry, humorous analysis of why liberals suffered catastrophic defeat in the 2014 midterm elections.

The GOP’s Big Win in the 2014 Midterms:

“First,” he said, “People rallied to economic theories they understood in only the gauziest of terms. It’s been 34 years since supply-side economics, that old-time religion, came to rule Republicans and Democrats. Even universities have perpetuated the nonsensical notion of supply-side economics. It’s preposterous.”

“Let’s acknowledge that the conservative comeback of the last five years to free-market theory in hard times is unheard of . . . . The man in the bread line [doesn’t] ordinarily weep for the man lounging on his yacht.”

Hence the title of his last book, copyrighted in 2012: “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right.”

“After the [Democratic sweep of] 2008, East Coast pundits decided that the reign of conservatism was at an end. ‘The GOP had to become moderate or die,’ they said. What the polite world expected was repentance, contrition. What they got was the opposite at the point of a bayonet. The right wing hit the gas. ‘George W. Bush was not a true conservative,’ the right wing asserted. The solution was to double-down, Tea Partiers concluded.

“In the 2010 midterm elections Tea Party extremists purged GOP “moderates.” The Tea Party purged Eric Cantor, a so-called moderate, in mid-2014.

“That will continue,” Frank said. “Georgia has the highest unemployment rate in the United States, but Georgia elected [Republican David Perdue], a guy who’s proud of out-sourcing jobs [overseas].

“The Tea Party’s strategy is particularly clever because it campaigns against the rich and powerful without actually hurting the rich and powerful.

The Ever So Lame Democratic Response:

“Meanwhile the Democrats are so anxious to compromise with the GOP [that they offer no credible alternative.]

“How did Democrats respond to the populism of the GOP? Democrats chose to rally around dynastic succession. Obama is himself a high-minded post-partisan. Democrats didn’t bother with persuasion. Why? Democrats are a class-based party, a professional/managerial class. Democrats are uncomfortable with blue-collar white men.

“For example, think of Iowa Democrat Bruce Braley’s put-down of Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley. Braley referred to Grassley, now the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as ‘a farmer who never went to law school.’” Braley went to law school, but lost the Iowa Senate election to veteran pig castrator Joni Ernst, who vowed to cut pork and ’make ‘em squeal’ in Washington.

“Contrast Braley’s insult with Kentucky voters’ perception of now Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican, Kentucky) as ‘a friend to the working class.’” Frank ridiculed this false image and emphasized that McConnell is “not a friend of the non-rich.” Somehow, however, he manages to pose as a friend of the working class while taking huge campaign donations from coal mine owners and other super rich special interests.

Bail-Out:

As for the bail-out of Wall Street banks, “you couldn’t have contrived a better scheme to destroy faith in [justice for white-collar criminals],” Frank said.

“The bailout should have created rage. One party tossed their leaders overboard and gave voice to outrage. The other party didn’t. They didn’t embrace what they should have. Obama is ‘powerless,’ pundits like to say.” The presidency is feeble, they say. ‘There’s nothing Obama could have done,’ they say. Frank said those excuses aren’t good enough.

“Obama didn’t press forcefully enough because he didn’t want to.

“It was fully within his power to close down these banks. Roosevelt did it. ‘We bail you out we fire your managers,’ Roosevelt said. Obama wasn’t forced to choose Larry Summers and Tim Geithner as his economic advisors. He wasn’t forced to pick Eric Holder as his attorney general. The economy would have recovered a lot faster if we’d helped Main Street instead of Wall Street. Everyone admits that.

“’Foam the runways’ for the banks, Tim Geithner said.” Why allow AIG to use bailout money for bonuses to their financial services executives? Why not put the banks in receivership? Why not put the FBI in charge of tracking down white-collar criminals? He fired no one. Now the banks are bigger than ever. No bankers were charged.”

[Obama said that Wall Street was unethical, but no laws were broken. Charles Ferguson, in his book “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America,” listed Wall Street’s crimes as

Securities fraud (many forms)

Accounting fraud (many forms)

Honest services violations (mail fraud statute)

Bribery

Perjury and making false statements to federal investigators

Sarbanes-Oxley violations (certifying false accounting statements)

Racketeering (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO)

Criminal anti-trust violations

Federal aid disclosure regulations (related to Federal Reserve loans)

Personal conduct offenses (many forms: drug use, tax evasion, prostitution for business purposes, etc.)]

Thomas Frank concluded by saying that Bill Black, as famous a bank regulator as a bank regulator can be, told him that Obama could have forced the banks and bankers to do what they should have but chose not to.

“The Republican mantra, he said, is to despise the weak, the ‘losers.’ Why fund highways and national parks? They’re irrelevant.

“The destruction of labor unions is a big part of why middle class wages are stagnant. It’s impossible to bring unions back due to labor laws. When Obama had a Democratic majority, he could have changed the labor laws, but he chose not to. We need to reform the tax code and bring back the enforcement of anti-trust laws.

“Former Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court said that anti-trust laws, particularly the Sherman Act, ‘are the Magna Carta of free enterprise.’ Since we no longer enforce anti-trust laws, there is no such thing as free enterprise in an age of mega-mergers taking over large swaths of the market.

When I came up to the podium to get half of my Thomas Frank books autographed (“What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,” a dog-eared copy, and “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right,” which I haven’t read yet, I asked Frank if he was working on another book. He is, and he said it’s a real downer.

He was surprised and pleased that I own all of his books in hardback, and inscribed my dog-eared book with, “To Maria, my kind of reader, Tom Frank.”

I told him that he‘s wrong that Obama is “clean,” which is what he asserted. I told him that former anti-net neutrality corporate lobbyist Tom Wheeler bundled $500,000 in campaign donations for Obama in 2012, also bundled campaign contributions for him in 2008, and is now FCC chairman. Frank, of course, knew that Wheeler is FCC chairman but didn’t know about the $500,000 in campaign donations.

I also told him to Google “Obama Exelon New York Times” and find the 2/3/2008 article that strongly implies that Obama took money from Exelon Nuclear to water down his groundwater contamination bill in the Illinois legislature until it became so meaningless it didn’t pass. Afterward, Obama bragged on the campaign trail that his bill “requiring” nuclear power companies to notify the public when they contaminated groundwater with radiation did pass when it didn’t. Exelon Nuclear then became Obama’s largest campaign contributor when Obama’s bill “suggested” that nuclear power companies notify the public if groundwater was contaminated.

Frank said he’d look into it.