00:02This is Paula Gordon Show and I am Paula with my breath still taken away by Thomas Frank.
00:07Bill Russell is here as well. The state is corruption. What does that mean?
00:13That means the market is this pure free, the market, as I said earlier, is civil society.
00:19The market is the natural site of that's where humans do their stuff, whereas government is an
00:25imposition. They've written enormous books of theory on this, that government acts through
00:30a form of extortion, that taxation is a form of theft, that whatever government does is
00:36essentially a criminal act. These are the leaders of the conservative movement, by the way,
00:40who believe this. You can find conservative theorists who say that government should not
00:46criminalize things like insider trading on Wall Street or price fixing between companies.
00:51I even found a conservative theorist that thinks that bribery in certain circumstances,
00:55nothing wrong with that, that's business acting in self-defense against the hated, imposing liberal state.
01:02You talk about market, but you're really talking about capitalism.
01:05Yeah. Yeah, business.
01:08You kind of let capitalism off the hook by talking about market or free market or whatever.
01:11Well, they're inclined in this context, aren't they?
01:15The thing is, what I've always said, every book that I've written is about capitalism.
01:20You don't understand America if you don't understand capitalism. I mean, that's what this country is
01:24about. So when I was in graduate school, that's what I studied. I studied advertising or something
01:28like that, but it's always been capitalism. That's the system that we live under. And so, yeah,
01:34that is what I mean. But we're not talking Marxist theory here either. We're talking about the reality
01:41that is the American experience.
01:43You know, there's capitalism and then there was capitalism in the 1960s when I was growing up
01:48and this country had a very equal distribution of wealth. It was a totally different world.
01:52You know, the workers by and large were unionized. People had health care. You know,
01:57blue-collar people lived next door to white-collar people. It was the great,
02:00it was the affluent society, you know. And today, still a capitalist country, but a very different one.
02:08Well, the genius of the Constitution was the balance of power between, among the three branches.
02:15And that balance of power seems to be necessary, you know, extended through the entire community,
02:22the entire body politic. If one group, let's call them plutocrats, get control
02:28by whatever means. If money is what matters and they've got all the money, then you get the kinds of
02:40radical distortions that we're now seeing. And it leaves everybody else out. And again,
02:46it seems to me that is not sustainable. It never has in history been sustainable.
02:51It's not sustainable because what they're interested in, of course, is immediate gain. Look,
02:55this is the nature of capitalism. It always prioritizes immediate gain over long-term.
03:02And so, you know, they wreck down the regulatory state because the regulatory state, you know,
03:06OSHA bugs them. You know, labor unions bug them. All these things are cutting down on their profit
03:11margin. They want them gone. They get them gone. And then, look what happens. They cannibalize
03:15themselves. I mean, they revert instantly to 19th-century form, as we're seeing before our very eyes.
03:21Well, they also externalize costs. And that's the part that nobody wants to talk about. And they
03:27go, they leave the corporation. They leave the entity. But they go out into the world at large.
03:33Clean air is an obvious example. Polluted foods. I mean, the whole list.
03:37Externalized costs like you and I bailing out AIG.
03:40Tremendous debt.
03:41Yeah. Did I mention socializing the debt and privatizing the profit?
03:48We made a, for the first time in my life, we went to the other Hyde Park this summer,
03:53not the one in Chicago, which has an honorable tradition of its own. This was Franklin Delano
04:00and Eleanor Roosevelt's home. And it was one of those aha moments when I said, oh, yes,
04:08we don't have to do it that way. We can do it a different way. And it was very much
04:13within the
04:14capitalist system. And Franklin Roosevelt was called a traitor to his class because he never
04:19left that class. And he kept saying, I saved capitalism from themselves. Why are they being
04:24mean to me? There is hope in this rather dire story that you tell that it doesn't have to be
04:32that way.
04:33It doesn't have to be that way. But are you ready for the really pessimistic side, Paula?
04:38Yeah, because I can give you the optimistic side.
04:41Look, the last chapter of the book, I told you about the second to the last. The last chapter
04:44of the book is about the conservatives' quest for permanence. This is a word they use a lot,
04:48permanence. What they have in mind is not just winning an election here and there,
04:52not just beating the Democratic Party or something like that, but permanently removing
04:57liberal options from the table. So you couldn't bring back a New Deal state,
05:02even if you wanted to. And by the way, this has been done successfully in a number of countries.
05:06And they've got all sorts of different strategies for doing this, whether it's through trade deals
05:10that you can't alter or whether it's through privatizing Social Security, which, believe me,
05:14would be the A-bomb of this whole battle that we're talking about. Once that's gone,
05:18you know, the welfare state is literally off the table. But there's any number of ways that they've used
05:23to make their vision of the state permanent. And one of them is the outsourcing and privatizing of all this
05:30federal work. How are you going to get that back? You know, and another one is deficits. They build
05:34up these monster deficits and you're stuck with it. You're stuck with it for 20 or 30 years.
05:40And they've been very successful at dreaming up these schemes. This is where we were talking
05:44about the strategy earlier of dreaming up these schemes, these strategies for making their way
05:49permanent and shutting our side down, excuse me, my side down for good. And our team has nobody
05:55thinking along those lines. Permanence only works if you don't believe in evolution.
06:01There you go. If you catch my drift. Very good. I hadn't thought of that.
06:08Well, think about it. Intelligent design. Now, this is intelligent design. It's intelligent
06:13misdesigned. My point, exactly. Exactly. It's also short-termist in remarkable ways,
06:19again, as we're seeing in the markets, even as we speak. Yeah. This, again, is not sustainable.
06:25And things, the only constant is change. So that, I told you I could find a way out of your
06:31pessimism.
06:32There it is. All right, Paul. You're delighted. Thomas Frank.
06:40Unlike many journalists, Thomas Frank has sought out the reality behind the rhetoric of a Republican
06:46party now dominated by extremist ideologues. He has closely examined the impact of their policies
06:53when they are allowed into positions of political or economic power. We thank him for doing his job
07:00and commend his example to others. I'm Paula Gordon. I wish you well.
