00:02We are delighted to be with Thomas Frank, Bill Russell, I, Paula Gordon.
00:06I found myself as, and I had to sort of read The Wrecking Crew in pieces, because it is overwhelming.
00:12And there is this...
00:13In a good way.
00:14In a fabulous way.
00:17It's also very depressing, and I'm sorry for saying this, but it was a challenge,
00:23because there's so much in there that we've known, we've watched.
00:29You connect it in ways that I'd never seen it connected before.
00:32And in some ways, it's even more trivial than I thought.
00:35But it is also the know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
00:39Or the truth will make you mad, or the truth will go buy you a big bottle of scotch.
00:44To get through it.
00:46And then on the other side, you can...
00:48It really is the truth will set you free.
00:51When you know this stuff, when it is no longer just so big and so overwhelming that it shuts you
00:56down,
00:56which I think, I've been maintaining for a decade, that America has been in the throes of a deep clinical
01:01depression.
01:02We just didn't know what to do.
01:04We were overwhelmed by all of this stuff, and it was getting worse and worse and worse.
01:07But I'm helpless.
01:08And helplessness is one of those markers for depression.
01:11Well, the way you get unhelpless, the way you start back up that very high mountain,
01:16where I'm going to have to climb to put it all back together again,
01:19is to know what in the world was going on in this crazy place.
01:23I wrote myself one note.
01:25I wrote myself many notes on the other pages.
01:27But on the back of the book, I have my own back leaf.
01:30It is, mark it uberalis.
01:32My God, Paula, show that to the camera.
01:35No.
01:35Mark it uberalis.
01:38And it seemed to me, I grew up in a very religious family.
01:41And I once asked, what's the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament?
01:44And this is a little kid answer.
01:46Well, the Old Testament tells you what not to do, and the New Testament tells you what to do.
01:50And I said, well, what's this first one about, I'm the only God and you shouldn't worship any other?
01:57Oh, okay, that's the first commandment.
01:59Well, when you, and the second, you know, the New Testament is do right, love each other.
02:05But when you have violated that first commandment, which is 4,000 years old,
02:09and represents at least Western civilizations, part of our heritage.
02:12When you have violated that first commandment, and mark it uberalis is the defining,
02:19forgive my corrupting the word, ethic, that has profound consequences.
02:24It certainly does.
02:26I mean, just before the break, Bill said it.
02:28I mean, this is the market applied to politics, and that is the thesis of the book in a single
02:33sentence.
02:34These are the instruments by which market forces were applied to the state.
02:38And they, I mean, they sometimes say this very openly and directly.
02:42George Bush himself has said, we need, government should be market-based.
02:47Government should, think about that.
02:49Government should be market-based.
02:51What does it mean to put, you know, the public functions at the service of profit?
02:56Well, it means, we're all seeing what it means.
02:58It means that you, you know, you outsource the departments, you know, you...
03:01Did I mention it wasn't sustainable?
03:03Well, you call them...
03:04Well, what you're also describing is the mafia.
03:06Yeah.
03:06And that is also a market-based...
03:09Mm-hmm.
03:10Institution.
03:11Institution.
03:11By the way, there's a whole chapter in the book.
03:13Can I, another way of summarizing the book is, I, we were in the break, we were talking
03:17about Lincoln Steffens, sort of a forgotten author nowadays, but he was a great muckraker
03:21and wrote a whole, wrote about, he had a theory of corruption, which is very, I was looking
03:26for corruption theories because, you know, it's a study of corruption, among other things.
03:30The way they've smashed, they've wrecked the state, and the corruption is, is, is related
03:35to the misgovernment.
03:36The two things are, are, you know, a yin and yang.
03:39And Lincoln Steffens...
03:39Jack gave them off George Bush.
03:41And Lincoln Steffens' writing coming out of the Gilded Age and all the robber barons,
03:46and there are a lot of folks who've never heard of him, but this is the turn into the
03:4920th century.
03:50That's right.
03:50So here, a hundred years later...
03:51A hundred years ago.
03:52Also predominantly the Republican Party.
03:53Right.
03:54That's right, but there were, the Democrats had a hand in it as well back then, but...
03:58Well, they're not innocent now.
03:59No, no, certainly not.
04:00Certainly not.
04:01But stick with this idea.
04:03Okay.
04:03But Steffens was very useful to me because he had a theory of corruption, and he put it
04:08in the mouth of one of the guys that he interviewed, who was a reformer in St. Louis, and the
04:12guy
04:12said, it is good business that causes bad government.
04:17And this is, this was, the light bulb went on in Steffens' head, and he started studying
04:21corruption in all these different cities.
04:23And in each case, it was business applied to government.
04:27You know, one of the chamber, the Chamber of Commerce used to have a slogan, it was
04:31their saying, it was, what was it, less government in business, more business in government.
04:35Which you say has been the conservative...
04:38It's their mantra, yeah.
04:39...for always.
04:40Yeah.
04:40Well, it sounds benign on the surface.
04:42You want government to be able to do, you know, basic bookkeeping.
04:45People say that to me all the time.
04:46We just, we just need to be more business-like in government.
04:49But in one sense, that's perfectly harmless.
04:52But what they mean, think about the deeper meaning of that.
04:54To, like Bush says, government should be market-based.
04:57Or like they said in the Clinton era, you needed entrepreneurial government.
05:01You need, you know, and not what, you know what this means, of course, is it's, it's,
05:04it's, it's turning government over to the market.
05:06It's getting rid of the civil service, putting them on a for-profit basis.
05:10But when government is for-profit, the government is up, it's no longer democracy.
05:15It's true.
05:15It answers to money, not to we the people.
05:18It's plutocracy.
05:19And this is also what Steffen's discovered.
05:21And he used to say in his book, in what, I think it's in his, in his, his autobiography,
05:26he would, he would relate how he, he would sit down with these very corrupt politicians
05:31in different cities.
05:32He loved to do this.
05:33And he would tell them his theory.
05:35And he'd say, look, what you're doing seems like good business.
05:37You're making a lot of money here in Philadelphia or whatever it is, but think about what you're
05:41doing to the country that you, that you love.
05:43And these people were all, you know, they were, they, they loved their country.
05:46Everybody does.
05:47And he would explain to them that they were making it from a democracy into a plutocracy.
05:51And then he would say, in each case, these people would be shocked and they would understand
05:55that he was right.
05:56And they would be alarmed by this.
05:58And the funny, the difference between then and now, I mean, there's many, many differences
06:01between then and now, but one of them is that doesn't shock these people.
06:04That's what they wanted to do.
06:06And that's what they have done.
06:08There's also a piece.
06:11Stephens did not have to deal directly.
06:13The environment he was working in did not have to deal directly with the personhood of
06:17corporations.
06:18The supposed Supreme Court decision had been rendered by that point.
06:22It didn't say that, but that's another story.
06:23And it didn't happen.
06:24And it didn't happen.
06:24But we now have this condition where corporations are treated as people under the Constitution
06:35of the United States, which means they have all the rights and privileges that you and I
06:37have, except they don't get to die.
06:39They're not obligated to any community.
06:41Which is bad news.
06:42And it's hard to put them in jail.
06:43There are all sorts of strange problems with that.
06:45But what you're, you know, the core of this, it's not just the market.
06:48It's not just the economics.
06:49It is the entities, the individuals who are dominant, the powers in business and the resources
06:55that they can bring to bear that is really the focal point of that.
06:59That is the real engine that drives this thing you're talking about because it runs on money.
07:05Yeah, absolutely.
07:06You guys didn't quite finish the part about the reporters.
07:09And it is the direct feedback into what Bill's saying.
07:13Some of the answer to why it hasn't been reported is because these reporters work for
07:19and get their living from big businesses who are making big money off of this very process.
07:24But I should also mention that reporters aren't, they don't do analysis.
07:28They don't connect dots.
07:30Well, they could.
07:31If they felt like it.
07:32But they wouldn't be able to do it in the newspaper, not in the newspaper's time.
07:35They wouldn't.
07:36Look, my, I mean, I didn't report all of this stuff firsthand.
07:39My stuff comes from the Washington Post, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and things
07:43like Government Executive Magazine, which you would only read if you live in Washington, D.C.
07:47Hot dog.
07:48No, but hey, if you want to write a book like this, you're going to be reading Government
07:51Executive Magazine, you know.
07:52You're going to be a hardcore insomniac, I assume.
07:56And, hey, there's some good reporters over there.
07:58I mean, I've made presents over there.
07:59Well, at least they collected this stuff for you.
08:00We're going to go.
08:01Yeah, but then it's up to people like me to try to develop a theory out of this.
08:06And so that's what I was trying to do, is what Lincoln Steffens did, was develop a theory.
08:10Now, let me take a step back here.
08:12There is a, the second to last chapter of the book is about the conservatives' corruption
08:16theory, because they've got their own corruption theory.
08:19And you know what their theory is?
08:20Yeah.
08:20Can you do it in 12 seconds?
08:23It's not that the state might be corrupted.
08:26It's that the state is corruption.
08:29How do you like that, Paula?
08:31It takes my breath away.
08:32We're going to be back in a moment.
08:33I'll think about it.
08:34Stay with us.
