- 5 hours ago
We had this conversation with Thomas Frank in September, 2008. The subject was his just-published book "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule".
The Republican Party had been behaving badly for quite some time. The Supreme Court's 2010 "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission" decision defining money as "speech" and corporations as "persons" made everything worse … much worse. American Citizens must forcefully act to reclaim our faltering, failing Democracy.
The Republican Party had been behaving badly for quite some time. The Supreme Court's 2010 "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission" decision defining money as "speech" and corporations as "persons" made everything worse … much worse. American Citizens must forcefully act to reclaim our faltering, failing Democracy.
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00:02Welcome back. This is the Paula Gordon Show, conversations with people at the leading edge.
00:07It is a great pleasure to be with Thomas Frank, Bill Russell, I Paula.
00:12This at the leading edge thing really matters to me.
00:15This is where we are and where we are going forward.
00:18And it really matters that people like you have taken the trouble to go back and find this stuff that
00:24just sounds crazy,
00:26but is so important to where we are now.
00:29The research in this book involved a lot of research on apartheid South Africa.
00:35Jack Abramoff had a lot going on with apartheid South Africa.
00:37A lot of research on...
00:38He was on the apartheid side.
00:41Yeah.
00:41This was the old...
00:42I'm sorry, did I not make that clear?
00:44No, I just want to make sure nobody is missing that.
00:47He was also on the payroll.
00:49Yeah, but indirectly. He always denied any knowledge of this.
00:53They lied!
00:54Which, in my own opinion, is impossible.
00:57Or highly implausible, let's put it that way.
01:01But these guys would never say...
01:03They weren't racists.
01:04And they wouldn't say, you know, I love apartheid, it's a great system.
01:07They'd say, you know, this government is a staunch ally against communism
01:10and we have to support them with everything we got.
01:12And so they would go over there.
01:14But Savindi, who I mentioned earlier, was apartheid's...
01:17He was... that's who funded and armed him.
01:19He was their proxy in the war against the government of Angola,
01:24which was a Soviet client regime.
01:26I mean, and...
01:27Anyhow.
01:28So that's what happened.
01:29Then they did have a second...
01:30A second get-together.
01:31A Jamba.
01:31The Altamont to Jamba's Woodstock.
01:34Oh, by the way, the Jamba Declaration.
01:35This was something that they...
01:36I believe Grover Norquist wrote.
01:38He was one of...
01:39He sort of always surfaces here and there in the Abramoff story.
01:42They were great friends.
01:43And I believe Grover wrote it.
01:44He's sort of the intellectual center of this movement.
01:47And he is a very intelligent man.
01:49I want to talk about him later because he's in some ways very brilliant, first of all.
01:55And second of all, there is no equivalent to him on the left.
01:58There is nobody out there figuring out the kind of things that Grover figures out for the right.
02:03But he's a bomb thrower as well.
02:05I mean, he's an anarchist, essentially.
02:06Oh, well, I don't know about that.
02:07I mean...
02:08Well, you do say...
02:09He's one of the ones that would say things like, you know,
02:11I'm not against the government.
02:13I like, you know, we need jails and we need police and we need...
02:17And it's important to say, since we're doing words, that is classic libertarianism.
02:22Mm-hmm.
02:23All of these guys that I'm talking about are...
02:25By the way, libertarianism tends to get by as a kind of idealistic doctrine.
02:31It gets off the hook.
02:32People, you know, people let it slide.
02:34There's a lot of libertarians in Washington, D.C.
02:36I would guess almost all of them paid to be libertarians here in Washington, D.C.
02:42Libertarianism is really the sort of fig leaf ideology of big money because it's constantly
02:46pushing for, you know, tax cuts, deregulation, the whole thing.
02:49And nothing is ever pure enough for libertarians.
02:52You know, you never actually get to the free market and so their response is always,
02:56well, the reason you have any kind of market failure is because there was still government.
03:01Until you do away with government finally and forever, you're going to continue to have market failure.
03:05So, you know, I haven't been proven wrong.
03:07We libertarians are never proven wrong when, you know, our free market experiment collapses.
03:12It's because there's still a little bit of government that's contaminating the experiment.
03:18You know, anarchy intrudes.
03:20But before you get to that pure point...
03:22But we're still back at Jamba, aren't we?
03:25Speaking of anarchy, go ahead.
03:27I want the declaration.
03:28The Jamba declaration.
03:29I don't even remember what it is.
03:30I have it back in my files somewhere.
03:32Not memorable?
03:33No, it looks like it was written by a teenager or somebody in high school.
03:38You know, it's just a mess.
03:41You say it conflates the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address.
03:44Yeah, in the Gettysburg Address.
03:45It's got lines from both of them all jumbled up and it's just a...
03:47I'll bet they're not attributed either.
03:49Oh, no, no.
03:50Of course.
03:51They're so familiar, you know.
03:53But the right hailed it at the time as this great, you know, statement.
03:58It was instantly forgotten.
04:00I mean, the whole thing was a giant disaster.
04:05And a lot of people made money in the process.
04:07In the process of building the right.
04:09All of this stuff.
04:10Yeah.
04:10I don't know about Jamba.
04:12Jamba was just a big botch.
04:13That's a goof.
04:15But all the way along...
04:17Well, Sabindi did okay.
04:18Yes.
04:19Until the day he died, went down in a hail of bullets.
04:23But it's important to say as all these are happening, lots of profit is being spun off.
04:29I mean, you talk about the geography of Washington.
04:31It isn't by accident, say you with great data to uphold the assertion.
04:38Washington, D.C. has been transformed into one of the richest places in the world.
04:43Well, it's the richest city in America.
04:45I mean, it's tied with the New York metro area and the Silicon Valley metro area.
04:50But the Washington Post is forever claiming it's the richest.
04:54And this is not because of...
04:56That came from somewhere.
04:56It wasn't a backroom tinkerer who invented something.
05:00Well, the standard explanation is it's those damn liberals.
05:03You know, you've got all those bureaucrats there in D.C. and they're overpaid.
05:06And that's...
05:06Get this, Paula.
05:08That's actually wrong.
05:10Whoa.
05:11Yeah.
05:13Do you believe in the Enlightenment?
05:14Do you think evidence matters?
05:16Well, look, I'm a writer.
05:18It matters to me.
05:20I mean, I don't know about the public, you know.
05:22It matters to me.
05:23So evidence should be...
05:24I mean, your argument is that we should look at the evidence rather than the assertions that the language has
05:28been abused sufficiently.
05:30That we should look at the evidence rather than the rhetoric?
05:33We should look beyond the word.
05:34Imagine that.
05:35I'm afraid that is what I believe, yes.
05:37Well, I'm one of these crazy arugula-eating liberals.
05:41I'll go further than that.
05:42I actually grew arugula in a garden in Hyde Park, Chicago.
05:46And Barack Obama's legislative district.
05:48I knew it was Hyde Park.
05:50That goes back to the question you raised, which is, why hasn't somebody else told these stories?
05:57Washington is one of the most covered cities by the media.
06:00Yeah.
06:00The media is all over it.
06:02They've got hundreds of...
06:03Last I looked, four or five thousand people accredited to the White House.
06:07Oh, I know.
06:08Who sit around and take dictation from...
06:09And you go to the conventions.
06:10The reporters outnumber the people at the conventions three to one.
06:14So why would anybody write about this?
06:15And the answer is...
06:16Are you just screamingly out of phase?
06:19Are you making this stuff up?
06:21Well, there is that.
06:21There is that.
06:21Well, now, come on.
06:23I have to ask.
06:24You can read the footnotes.
06:25It's all there.
06:26Well, and it is not always the case that reading the footnotes, and it is the case in The Wrecking
06:32Crew,
06:32and I am here to give evidence that reading the footnotes is as interesting as reading the book.
06:39That's alarming.
06:40I use the notes for...
06:41I use the notes for...
06:42I have a strategy with the notes, and that's...
06:45There's a lot of digressions that I can't make in the main narrative, and so they get pushed to the
06:51notes.
06:51So I have a lot of...
06:52A lot of data in there.
06:53And it's really important stuff.
06:54Sorry about that.
06:55I mean, I know that it throws off your...
06:56Well, I think it's really important to say the United States started as an enlightenment experiment.
07:02Yeah.
07:03The United States of America came out of an era...
07:05Ironic, isn't it?
07:06Well, it's painful to me that it came out of an era, was created by people who did believe
07:11in evidence, who did believe that we should take care of each other.
07:13A respected learning.
07:14I went to Thomas Jefferson's university.
07:17Why has nobody else done this research?
07:19I ask myself that all the time.
07:21When the Abramoff scandal broke, I thought, you know, that...
07:23I was a college Republican.
07:24Did I tell you guys that?
07:25No.
07:25In the early 80s, yeah.
07:26Mm-hmm.
07:28But you sort of have that look.
07:29I do, don't I?
07:30You do.
07:31College Republican.
07:31Oh, yeah.
07:32Scary, ain't it?
07:33Oh, I didn't last long.
07:35Well, but it's very interesting progression, and you go through that, and what's the matter
07:38with Kansas?
07:39Yeah.
07:39And you do disclose that you had been caught up in this same magic.
07:45I loved Reagan.
07:45Yeah.
07:46All this stuff...
07:47I mean, the reason I'm able to write about this stuff is that I believed it once.
07:50I mean, it was a long time ago, but I really, really believed it once.
07:53And it started with that emotion toward that man.
07:56No, it started...
07:57The thing was, it was the environment that I grew up in, and that whole, the war against
08:01regulation.
08:02And, you know, every adult that I knew was a businessman, large or small businessman.
08:06And that crusade against regulation in the 1970s, it just seems so obviously true.
08:12It's like, who is it?
08:13How can a bureaucrat come and tell you, you know, what to do in your own workplace?
08:18That's crazy.
08:19It's obviously tyranny.
08:20And then along comes Ronald Reagan saying this, and I would read it in Reader's Digest
08:24and in Vital Speeches of the Day and that sort of thing.
08:26And I thought he was so absolutely right and so obviously correct.
08:31And, you know, yeah, I fell for it.
08:34But I was 15, you know, when you're 15 you fall for that kind of Reader's Digest view
08:39of the world, that Boy Scout view of the world.
08:41Turns out these guys aren't Boy Scouts though.
08:43Well, the Washington Press Corps is also not 15 years old, at least chronologically.
08:49Yeah, back to the question, why did they miss it?
08:52Why did they miss all this stuff?
08:53Well, okay, this is what I was getting at when I mentioned I was a college Republican.
08:56That name, Abramoff, it was familiar to me.
08:59And I was like, you know, where have I heard that name?
09:03And so when he, you know, he was in the media and the scandal was unwinding and it was incredible.
09:08I mean, you remember all the weird angles to it, all the money that he ripped off, all
09:13the emails that came out, all the people that he had connections with who were turning their
09:17backs on him, you know, denying that they'd ever met him and this kind of thing.
09:20And so I did what everyone does, which is I did the Lexis Nexus search and I found every
09:24article that had ever mentioned his name.
09:27And I sat down one afternoon and printed out the 150 pages and read it.
09:30And it starts out, you know, he was, he was, he was chairman of the college Republicans
09:34back when I was in the college, what do you know about that?
09:37Then he ran this group that did the stuff with Savimbi, the Jamba thing.
09:43Then he ran this think tank in Washington, D.C.
09:45And then you find, then he became a Hollywood film director.
09:48But this think tank that he was running in D.C. then is revealed 10 years later to have
09:53been a front group for the apartheid regime.
09:56And not just for the apartheid regime, for their military intelligence.
10:00And this came out in the, in the, in the truth and reconciliation hearings in South Africa.
10:04Then the guy becomes a lobbyist for Saipan.
10:06Doesn't that border on treason?
10:08Well, that's not up to me.
10:09I'm not a lawyer.
10:10No, no, but I'm just curious.
10:11I know that, that, that to me is just on the ragged edge.
10:14Working for a foreign secret service would seem to be, uh, mighty peculiar.
10:20Well, peculiar, but also, again, this, the question of legality and all of this.
10:24I, I, and going back to.
10:26I don't want to distract us by that, but it just.
10:27Okay.
10:28Well, let's talk about that.
10:29Because anyhow, so I, so what I read the, the, the skeleton version of his life with
10:33the Lexis Nexus search.
10:34And then I was like, you know, I'm going to start looking into this.
10:36I call the college Republicans.
10:38No, you can't come look at our archives.
10:39So I go over to the Library of Congress.
10:41Turns out his, his think tank, International Freedom Foundation, had a magazine, Jack Abramoff Publisher.
10:46I read every issue of it.
10:48I photocopied the whole thing.
10:50Uh, I, I, they had a newsletter.
10:52I found somebody in New York that had the newsletter.
10:54I found somebody that had all their direct mail.
10:56They did a lot of direct mail.
10:57I found all the college Republicans, somebody else that had all their direct mail.
11:01The thing is that to do this stuff requires library research.
11:04You can't do it online.
11:05And to get the, at the college Republicans, I had to not just go to the library.
11:09I had to make friends with, um, former leaders of the college.
11:13And there are a lot of disgruntled college Republicans who are very happy to tell me about
11:16it.
11:17And they were also, they were, they had been great admirers of Jack.
11:20Uh, they, you know, he was a leader of men.
11:22He was a great CEO, they would say.
11:25Uh, and they couldn't understand how this man had, had, had, had become the sort of horrible
11:30figure that he did.
11:32And, uh, anyhow, we'll get back to the South Africa thing, but I just want to say the moral
11:36of the Jack Abramoff story.
11:37And the reason that it fascinates me is because what it shows is that you can be an idealist
11:41and a corruptionist at the same time in conservative D.C.
11:45You can believe in these principles of the free market and be bribing congressmen at the
11:49same time.
11:50Well, that is a market.
11:51Yeah.
11:52Exactly.
11:53You got it.
11:53That's the book.
11:55That, yeah.
11:55The Congress as market.
11:57We're going to be back in a moment with a good deal more to be said with Thomas Frank,
12:00Bill Russell, I, Paula Gordon, be with us when I return.