00:06Greetings, my friends, and welcome to the Paula Gordon Show, conversations with people at the
00:11leading edge. I'm Paula. Free markets are a chimera. Corporations have become the de facto
00:18fourth branch of the government and the most powerful. Thomas Frank says this can't last,
00:24but that the damage their Republican agents are doing will last a long time. It's not
00:30sustainable because what they're interested in, of course, is immediate gain. Look, this is the
00:35nature of capitalism. It always prioritizes immediate gain over long term, and so they
00:41wreck down the regulatory state because the regulatory state, you know, OSHA bugs them,
00:46labor unions bug them. All these things are cutting down on their profit margin. They want
00:51them gone. They get them gone, and then look what happens. They cannibalize themselves.
00:55I mean, they revert instantly to 19th century form, as we're seeing before our very eyes.
01:00But there's any number of ways that they've used to make their vision of the state permanent,
01:06and one of them is the outsourcing and privatizing of all this federal work. How are you going to get
01:11that back? You know, and another one is deficits. They build up these monster deficits, and you're
01:16stuck with it. You're stuck with it for 20 or 30 years, and they've been very successful at dreaming
01:22up these schemes.
01:23Thomas Frank is a journalist and historian. In The Wrecking Crew, he documents the reckless
01:29destruction and impoverishment of America by the Republican agents of crony capitalists.
01:38Thomas Frank, I remember being in college and being very excited that I could take a government
01:43course because I would then know what the rules were. The one question looking back I wish that
01:50I had asked in my government classes is, what do you do when they cheat? Isn't that the question
02:01that we have failed to ask for about 40 years? That's, that's, that's a really good way of putting
02:06it. Uh, I, um, yeah. Isn't that the essential missing? What about when they don't play by the
02:13rules? You know, what do you do? Precisely. Uh, you know, do you cry for the playground monitor?
02:17Well, in America, we think of this as, uh, you know, we really honor fair play. Uh, everybody's
02:23going to do right. We're all honorable. After all, we're Americans, but it ain't true. What do you do
02:30when they cheat? Well, uh, so far, what you do is you lose when the other side cheats. They, uh,
02:37their cheating is rewarded, uh, you know, and they win. Um, you're, you want me to give you an example
02:44from the book is what I'm betting. I don't care if it's from the book or not. If you'd like
02:48to,
02:48the book is fine. Well, or from your next book. Whether you call it cheating or whether you call
02:53it just, uh, playing by their own rules or playing, you know, extraordinarily, uh, uh, you know,
02:59hardball sort of manner. Um, well, I'll, I'll give you, I'll up the ante. What if they're vandals?
03:06Okay. That's, uh, that's, that's, uh, see, you're, you're better at this than me. I mean,
03:10this is, this is, Paula, you should explain this book. I could, but I'd rather you did since you
03:15wrote it. You have more credibility. All right. What the book is about is about the conservatism
03:21as it's, as it, as you see it in Washington, DC, which is a very different creature than what you
03:26see,
03:26say in a place like Kansas or in one of your red States or your culture war battles or anything
03:30like that. And yes, vandalism is one way of describing what, uh, conservatives in Washington
03:36has done, have done. Not playing by the rules is another way. But basically what you're talking
03:41about is people that have managed to take over the government and then say, let's take, you know,
03:45they take a department, say the department of labor. Okay. Congress says, Congress set up the
03:49department of labor 80 years ago to, uh, you know, um, look after the, uh, um, the, the
03:56worker in this country to, to mind the workplaces, regular people, people, like we, the people,
04:02those people, when we go to work, this department is supposed to be, uh, have us on their mind.
04:07Well, what if you get people in government who don't agree with that mission and you think,
04:11well, you know, Congress was that, that's an annoying thing. And, and you remember when president
04:16Reagan ran in 1980, it was like a businessman's crusade against OSHA. Remember OSHA, OSHA is a
04:22part, part of the department of labor. That's why I bring it up. I remember it, but it's hard to
04:26remember because this is the occupational safety hazards administration. Oh, I know. That's the
04:31problem with all of these things. Who knew? With all of these things is that you're talking about
04:35things that are at the same time, incredibly important, you know, to, to, to everything around
04:40us. As we're finding out right now, as we watch the financial world come crashing down around our ears,
04:46incredibly important to the very basis of the way we live. And at the same time, you can't be bothered
04:52to remember the name, you know, even I can, you know, what was the scandal last week? The, uh, MMS
04:58mining and minerals. Uh, I don't even know part of the department of the interior. We'll come to that
05:03later though, but let's say you get these guys in, in, in power who don't believe in the mission.
05:08They don't believe in these agencies that you've set up. They don't believe in government. Yeah.
05:15Some parts of government, they do. They like the police force. They like the army. This is called
05:20the night watchman state. Yeah. Yeah. They like the federal reserve for reasons that were all too
05:26apparent right now. That is to say, it'll bail them out when they fail. That's right. They did,
05:31they did not like the federal reserve before say 1978, but because it used to be run by Keynesians,
05:37you know, it used to be run by liberals. I mean, it was set up as a, it was set
05:41up by Wilson and then
05:41reinvigorated by Roosevelt as a very liberal enterprise. Because the system had, um, come in
05:49stock. Yeah, the system had, in the word, failed. And, uh, we needed a, you know, we needed someone
05:55minding the financial system and, you know, uh, uh, uh, keeping the guardrails up and,
06:02uh, you know, moderating the speed, speeding it up, slowing it down, doing all the things
06:06that had to be done. Hence the federal reserve. That's why you have it. But anyhow, so conservatives
06:10don't disagree with every aspect of government. Uh, you know, they like prisons, you know, especially
06:17when you've privatized them and they're profitable. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But, but no, but the liberal
06:21state is what I'm talking about. And that's, that's when, when they talk about how much they hate government,
06:24that's what they're referring to is the liberal state things, essentially government since
06:29Franklin Roosevelt. So let's come back in just a moment with Thomas Frank and talk about what that
06:34means, because we need to redefine a number of things in the United States, including the word
06:39liberal, which has lost the original meaning. Well, we need to, I think, reclaim the language.
06:44Indeed. Is that part of this? We'll do that when we come back with Thomas Frank. This is the Paula
06:48Gordon Show, Bill Russell. I'm Paula Thomas Frank. Be with us when we return.
