00:02Welcome back. I am Paula Gordon, Bill Russell. We're delighted to be with Thomas Frank.
00:07A lot of people would know your name and associate it with a very widely read book called What's the
00:11Matter with Kansas?
00:13I might also mention even more people know me as the Big Hurt. I used to hit home runs for
00:18the Chicago White Sox.
00:19Oh, well, that would do it, wouldn't it? I'm going to change the subject from baseball for just a moment.
00:25Actually, I want to stay with that Big Hurt theme. How has the reception been for this book in places
00:31like Kansas and Plain, Virginia?
00:35I wanted to say there's a book that he has written since What's the Matter with Kansas called The Wrecking
00:40Crew.
00:40That's what we're talking about, The Wrecking Crew.
00:41Yeah, yeah.
00:43I was in Kansas the other day and there's a large audience and they seem very appreciative.
00:49Did they, forgive me, I'm going to use this word once, resonate with the message?
00:57Absolutely. Of course.
00:59Listen, let me tell you, The Wrecking Crew is about conservative misrule.
01:03About, you know, these agencies thrown into reverse, these incompetent people put in charge.
01:06This sort of massive wave of corruption and scandal, you know, the lobbying, all that stuff.
01:11I have yet to find anybody, I've been on this book tour, did I tell you six weeks I've been
01:17on this book tour?
01:17I have yet to have anybody stand up for that system and say,
01:22No, no, that system rocks, that system delivers, that system is, you know, that's great stuff.
01:26You've got it all wrong, Frank. You know what they say instead?
01:29Those people are liberals. What you're talking about?
01:32Yeah. George W. Bush? Liberal.
01:35Ronald Reagan, you know, if he did what you say he did, liberal.
01:39No.
01:40Yes.
01:40I just, this happened to me just the other day.
01:42I was in a radio debate, I don't even remember what city I was in.
01:45I believe it was in Chicago.
01:47And there was a, look, you have a lot of guys who really believe in conservative principles
01:52and they see what the Bush administration is doing and it's just, it's cognitive dissonance.
01:56This was their man.
01:57Four years ago they worshipped him, they bought little bronze statuettes of him to put on their, you know, on
02:01their desk.
02:02And look what he's done. Look what he's done.
02:04And their only response is to say, he is liberal, he is liberal, he is not me, he is the
02:12other.
02:12But that's part of the game that they're playing.
02:14Yeah, it is.
02:15It's opportunism.
02:17Well, we've got, you know, we're sitting in the middle of a political campaign
02:19where you've got the candidate of the Republican Party running against his party.
02:23Yeah.
02:24And the party applauding him for running against the party as if somehow or other Republicans, I mean, they're new
02:31zombies.
02:32There was?
02:33New zombies.
02:33Somebody took over their minds and bodies.
02:34Yeah, not the old zombies, we're the new ones.
02:35The new ones, uh-oh.
02:36Did you see Mitt Romney's speech at the Republican convention two weeks ago?
02:39Romney said, Washington, D.C. isn't conservative, it is liberal.
02:43And he said, and it's been liberal for 30 years now.
02:45Now, I have to ask you a question right here.
02:48Because some of what is at the heart of classic propaganda, and you go to the book, you look under
02:55P, propaganda, is you take words, and you twist them, and you make them something else.
03:00This is pure Orwell.
03:02It's Orwell, but it's also, and then you say it louder and louder and louder and louder.
03:06I'm saying, Alice in Wonderland was a wimp.
03:11Aren't you telling me that this is all very cynical manipulation of a very eager-to-be-fooled audience?
03:20Oh, yeah, well, cynicism is the name of the game here.
03:23I mean, this book could have been called Adventures in Cynicism, or An Economy of Cynicism.
03:28I mean, you've got people that, you know, running against their own party is just the start of it.
03:33These are people who have ruled Washington, D.C. for 30 years.
03:36And, you know, there's a biography of Bush that came out a few years ago, and they called him the
03:39Rebel-in-Chief.
03:40He's supposed to be a rebel against the Washington, D.C. order.
03:43The dude is the president, and his party controlled Congress at the time, and they had for many years.
03:49And before him, there was his dad. And before him, there was Ronald Reagan.
03:52Who was his surrogate dad.
03:53Yeah, and to try to understand them as rebels against the system, which they have themselves built.
04:01Which is the same, forgive my sake, lie that McCain is doing.
04:05He's saying, well, I will never.
04:06He has slightly better claim to that.
04:08Well, 91%. He's got a 9% better claim.
04:13Yes, he does.
04:14But there are a few real things that he did that Bush would never have done.
04:19But, I mean, we'll give him credit for that later on.
04:22But he regrets them all.
04:22But that's just the beginning.
04:24That kind of cynicism is just the beginning.
04:25You've got to remember, these people come into office with this deep hatred of the liberal state,
04:30and these extraordinarily cynical views of the liberal state, where they, in their mind, government is not a legitimate institution.
04:40The market, man, that is legitimate.
04:43That's natural.
04:44That's civil society.
04:46That is the real world.
04:47Government is this imposition.
04:48Free market.
04:50Not any market.
04:51By the way, we're talking about cynicism.
04:52I mean, one of the things that they do is toss concepts and constituencies overboard when it becomes convenient.
04:59You know, there is no loyalty to anything except for business.
05:02And the concept of the free market has always been sort of the greatest fig leaf of them all for,
05:07you know, the needs of business,
05:09the needs of the upper class in America.
05:11It's, oh, that's just the free market in action.
05:13That's just, globalization is what did that to you, buddy, you know, come on.
05:17And then, of course, when they need to be bailed out, then it's like, you know, forget the free market.
05:22Even that goes, you know.
05:23There's nothing free about the free market.
05:26We socialize the debts, we socialize the losses, and we privatize the profits.
05:31I mean, this is...
05:32That's right.
05:33Oh, do that again.
05:34It's not an exaggeration.
05:35It's not original.
05:36You can find it anywhere.
05:37It's still good.
05:38It's in What's the Matter with Kansas.
05:40That's a well-known...
05:41I mean, and I quote it from the Wall Street Journal back then, you know.
05:44And, you know, we're doing it.
05:45We're right smack in the middle of another one of those exercises.
05:48And history, you're a historian.
05:49I mean, do you think they're going to make the former CEO of Merrill Lynch give back his $100 million,
05:53you know, severance package or whatever it was?
05:56I doubt it.
05:56Two things.
05:57I want to go back.
05:58This notion of free market is simply incorrect.
06:01The market has never been free.
06:03Well, it's a utopian scheme.
06:05It can never happen.
06:06It's utopian, and it wouldn't work anyway.
06:07Yeah.
06:07And the closer we get, the more obvious that is.
06:09We're not even close because it's not a free market.
06:12It is a manipulated market.
06:14It's essentially crony capitalism, which is not the same as a free market.
06:19The closer you get to a free market, the worse.
06:21Ask the people in Saipan.
06:22Exactly.
06:22The closer you get to where management has all the power, the workers have none.
06:27I mean, because a union is also supposed to be a violation of the free market.
06:29So if the workers get together and organize, oh, the free market's gone, got to bust that up.
06:34So, you know, the closer you get to a free market is the closer you get to sort of pure,
06:38you know, 19th century misery.
06:42Yes.
06:42Which I describe in the book, there's been some experiments in this, even on American soil.
06:47And I mentioned Saipan.
06:49It's this island in the western Pacific where they...
06:51Which is our territory.
06:52Our territory.
06:52It is part of the United States of America.
06:53But when they signed up to be part of the U.S., they got to control their own immigration law
06:57and their own minimum wage and a couple other things.
07:00And they take this great deal that they got from us.
07:03But it's part of the U.S.
07:03So there's no tariff duties on anything they manufacture there.
07:06And they show it around to various manufacturers in the world.
07:09And next thing you know, I mean, they've got this sweatshop gulag there just built overnight.
07:14You know, they import workers.
07:16They work for very low wages.
07:18The stuff gets sent to America.
07:20It's made in the USA.
07:21When the workers get out of line or complain or do anything wrong, boom, back.
07:25Back to their home country.
07:26And, of course, the workers have borrowed money to come there.
07:29So they don't dare, you know, step out of line.
07:32And this has become the entire economy on the island.
07:35It started with the garment factories.
07:37But now it's like, you know, the hotels, the, you know, the resorts.
07:42Even the newspapers run on workers brought in from other countries.
07:46And people have domestic servants.
07:48Even, you know, welfare recipients on Saipan have servants in their house because they can pay them.
07:54I think it's less than a dollar an hour.
07:55By the way, they could.
07:56This is all, their lobbyist was a fellow named Jack Abramoff.
08:01Yes.
08:03His job was to keep the federal government from coming in and applying our horrible liberal rules to them.
08:09And now that he's out of the picture, we did it.
08:11Before we go to Jack the Ripper.
08:15Can we call him Jack the Ripper?
08:16I don't know.
08:16It just occurred to me.
08:17I'm sorry.
08:18Saucy Jack.
08:19Saucy Jack.
08:21You say that the management is in charge on Saipan.
08:25And it's important.
08:25The piece that you didn't quite add that I would like you to add and continue to explore is that
08:32they also control the government.
08:33Yeah.
08:34So it isn't just the guys who run the businesses.
08:36The business community runs the government.
08:40That's right.
08:40And the government.
08:41By definition, because it's ethnically defined.
08:44The citizens there are the indigenous islanders.
08:48And these workers have no chance to become citizens.
08:52The workers aren't citizens.
08:52No.
08:53They can't become citizens.
08:54They can't vote.
08:55They can't serve on juries.
08:57Don't you call that at least indentured servitude, if not slavery?
09:01It is, I think, by definition.
09:03What it is by definition is debt bondage, which is a form of indentured servitude.
09:07So, yeah.
09:08That's what it is.
09:10And it's pretty rugged.
09:12I had thought until I read your book that Burma was rapidly becoming the model for what these
09:18people have in mind.
09:20Burma?
09:20Burma.
09:21Mylar.
09:22Look at the way the government operates there.
09:25It has a lot of the same similarities.
09:27You essentially have a plutocracy, and it does what it bloody well pleases.
09:32It has essentially alienated itself from the rest of the world, so there's not much interference.
09:38And in a way, that sort of describes what these folks want to do.
09:43But Saipan, it's closer to home.
09:46Saipan's up there.
09:47Well, it's part of the U.S.
09:49It's part of the U.S.
09:50But it's like Dubai or something like that.
09:52Or what Iraq was supposed to be.
09:54In the free market paradise.
09:56Right.
09:57Yeah.
09:57Is it possible that we could ask these people to move there?
10:00You mean the people who created it, who now are overseeing our demise?
10:06Sorry about that.
10:07I want to go back.
10:08It's easy to mock this because it's just so patently absurd.
10:12Yeah.
10:12If we weren't smack in the middle of it.
10:14You said earlier, you were talking earlier about the liberal state.
10:17And liberal has been so thoroughly abused in the language that I think most people are clueless
10:22about what you mean when you say a liberal state.
10:24And having had a real good time in this segment, let's start there again when we come back
10:28in a moment.
10:29We'll be serious.
10:31We'll be serious when we come back.
10:31That's fine.
10:32That's fine.
10:32We'll be serious when we come back.
10:33That Frank will address liberal and the liberal state when in a moment we come back.
10:37Bill Russell, I, Paula Gordon, we trust you'll be with us.
