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Author Of ‘Pity The Billionaire’ Looks
At Far Right Philosophy
By Barbara Murphy
Contributing Writer
The New York Times ran a front page story on Feb. 12 headlined “Even Critics Of Safety Net Increasingly Depend On It.”
The article by Binyamin Applebaum and Robert Gebeloff began with the story of Ki Gulbranson of Lindstrom, MN, who owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side, makes about $39,000 a year and proclaims he does not need any help from the government. Mr. Gulbranson told The Times he supports politicians who promise to cut government and that in 2010 he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor who was running for Congress.
Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, The Times reporters said, Mr. Gulbranson counts on money from the federal earned income tax credit and signs up his three children for free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. The reporters added that Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.
The article stated that in 2009 various government benefit programs provided an average of $6,583 for every man, woman and child in this country. According to reporters, the government safety net that was created to keep Americans from abject poverty now primarily serves the middle class. But instead of being grateful for what government is doing for so many, the reporters said, many middle class Americans are blaming government for their hard times and are politically turning right rather than left, contrary to what Americans did in the Great Depression.
These newly minted right-wingers say they want to reduce the role of government in their lives, that they want smaller government in general and that they resent the government for creation of the safety net. The people interviewed for The Times article said that they want less help for themselves, less help in caring for relatives and less assistance when they reach old age.
The folks in Lindstrom, MN are not unique. There are people like them all over the country, cheering on candidates who vow to reduce the size of government, cut benefits, slash the taxes used to pay for them, and destroy any program that is at odds with the Constitution as the far right reads it.
How did this happen? Why are people whose economic security has been wiped out by the Great Recession championing the philosophy and policies that actually caused the Recession?
Writer Thomas Frank thinks he knows the answer and he has spelled it out in his new book, “Pity The Billionaire.”
Mr. Frank, a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal, has written several books on economic and political issues, including the acclaimed “What’s The Matter With Kansas?”
Mr. Frank says that down-and-out Americans have been turned into worshippers of that Golden Calf, the free market, by a very effective propaganda machine operated by ultra-conservative strategists. While Democrats and others on the Left have sat on their hands and done nothing to re-create the New Deal, Mr. Frank says, the Right has been operating a very effective strategy to convince Americans that the blame for the Recession lies with Big Government and the “elite” who run it.
As a result, what makes many voters’ blood boil today, Mr. Frank writes, “is not the plight of the debtor but the possibility that such ‘losers’ might escape their predicament — that government might step in and help them.”
“What burns these modern day populists,” Mr. Frank says, “is that anyone has the arrogance to think that human affairs might be arranged any other way; that government might allow one neighbor to evade his part of the common disaster; that some mortgage remediation scheme or farm bill might let him out of the hard-time punishment that he clearly deserves.... To quote the words I saw printed on a sign at one of the first Tea Party protests, ‘Your Mortgage Is Not My Problem.’”
How has the Right convinced millions of Americans to vote against their own economic interest? Mr. Frank says you can give a lot of the credit to Fox News, radio superstar Glen Beck, the billionaire Koch brothers and the internet.
According to Mr. Frank, the Kochs are generous funders of Tea Party institutions, and Mr. Beck has convinced millions of listeners that leftists created the financial crisis, then seized power in response to it, and now are pressing forward with a socialist program that would only make matters worse.
Internet bloggers, Mr. Frank writes, daily spew out diatribes warning Americans that their personal freedom and their democracy are in imminent danger of being destroyed by big government.
He writes that “a Tea Party activist once told historian Jill Lepore, ‘I don’t read books, I read blogs.’”
The right wing bloggers, Mr. Frank notes, relentlessly condemn President Obama as a “socialist” and still turn out the fables that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya and is a Muslim. (Republican Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum recently threw gasoline on that fire when he charged that Mr. Obama’s policies were the product of a “phony theology.”)
Unfortunately, Mr. Frank said, the government brought a lot of this on itself by failing to punish the Wall Street crooks who caused the Great Recession and the government officials who helped them do it. Instead of being punished, he complains, the financial institutions that wrecked the economy were rewarded by bailouts and their CEOs were allowed to keep on collecting their multi-million dollar bonuses.
The bailouts, combined with the Recession, Mr. Frank writes, created a perfect situation for “old fashion calamity howlers, for Jeremiahs raging against the corrupt and the powerful.”
Mr. Frank says the Right also has effectively added a new weapon to its propaganda arsenal — victimhood.
He writes: “Self-pity has become central in the consciousness in the resurgent Right — they are the ones to whom things are done. This is the reason they have taken as their banner a flag that reads ‘Don’t Tread on Me.’”
Mr. Frank says that Matthew Continetti, a journalist who specializes in profiles in victimhood, has written about “the persecution of the Koch brothers, two of the nation’s richest men and most influential political donors, but who, it is Continetti’s solemn duty to report, receive mean e-mails everyday. They are in fact the latest victims of the Left’s ‘Lean Mean Cyber-Vilification Machine.’ Pity these billionaires, reader.”
(Pity The Billionaire by Thomas Frank, published by Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co.; New York, NY, 2012, 225 pages, $25.)
At Far Right Philosophy
By Barbara Murphy
Contributing Writer
The New York Times ran a front page story on Feb. 12 headlined “Even Critics Of Safety Net Increasingly Depend On It.”
The article by Binyamin Applebaum and Robert Gebeloff began with the story of Ki Gulbranson of Lindstrom, MN, who owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side, makes about $39,000 a year and proclaims he does not need any help from the government. Mr. Gulbranson told The Times he supports politicians who promise to cut government and that in 2010 he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor who was running for Congress.
Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, The Times reporters said, Mr. Gulbranson counts on money from the federal earned income tax credit and signs up his three children for free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. The reporters added that Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.
The article stated that in 2009 various government benefit programs provided an average of $6,583 for every man, woman and child in this country. According to reporters, the government safety net that was created to keep Americans from abject poverty now primarily serves the middle class. But instead of being grateful for what government is doing for so many, the reporters said, many middle class Americans are blaming government for their hard times and are politically turning right rather than left, contrary to what Americans did in the Great Depression.
These newly minted right-wingers say they want to reduce the role of government in their lives, that they want smaller government in general and that they resent the government for creation of the safety net. The people interviewed for The Times article said that they want less help for themselves, less help in caring for relatives and less assistance when they reach old age.
The folks in Lindstrom, MN are not unique. There are people like them all over the country, cheering on candidates who vow to reduce the size of government, cut benefits, slash the taxes used to pay for them, and destroy any program that is at odds with the Constitution as the far right reads it.
How did this happen? Why are people whose economic security has been wiped out by the Great Recession championing the philosophy and policies that actually caused the Recession?
Writer Thomas Frank thinks he knows the answer and he has spelled it out in his new book, “Pity The Billionaire.”
Mr. Frank, a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal, has written several books on economic and political issues, including the acclaimed “What’s The Matter With Kansas?”
Mr. Frank says that down-and-out Americans have been turned into worshippers of that Golden Calf, the free market, by a very effective propaganda machine operated by ultra-conservative strategists. While Democrats and others on the Left have sat on their hands and done nothing to re-create the New Deal, Mr. Frank says, the Right has been operating a very effective strategy to convince Americans that the blame for the Recession lies with Big Government and the “elite” who run it.
As a result, what makes many voters’ blood boil today, Mr. Frank writes, “is not the plight of the debtor but the possibility that such ‘losers’ might escape their predicament — that government might step in and help them.”
“What burns these modern day populists,” Mr. Frank says, “is that anyone has the arrogance to think that human affairs might be arranged any other way; that government might allow one neighbor to evade his part of the common disaster; that some mortgage remediation scheme or farm bill might let him out of the hard-time punishment that he clearly deserves.... To quote the words I saw printed on a sign at one of the first Tea Party protests, ‘Your Mortgage Is Not My Problem.’”
How has the Right convinced millions of Americans to vote against their own economic interest? Mr. Frank says you can give a lot of the credit to Fox News, radio superstar Glen Beck, the billionaire Koch brothers and the internet.
According to Mr. Frank, the Kochs are generous funders of Tea Party institutions, and Mr. Beck has convinced millions of listeners that leftists created the financial crisis, then seized power in response to it, and now are pressing forward with a socialist program that would only make matters worse.
Internet bloggers, Mr. Frank writes, daily spew out diatribes warning Americans that their personal freedom and their democracy are in imminent danger of being destroyed by big government.
He writes that “a Tea Party activist once told historian Jill Lepore, ‘I don’t read books, I read blogs.’”
The right wing bloggers, Mr. Frank notes, relentlessly condemn President Obama as a “socialist” and still turn out the fables that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya and is a Muslim. (Republican Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum recently threw gasoline on that fire when he charged that Mr. Obama’s policies were the product of a “phony theology.”)
Unfortunately, Mr. Frank said, the government brought a lot of this on itself by failing to punish the Wall Street crooks who caused the Great Recession and the government officials who helped them do it. Instead of being punished, he complains, the financial institutions that wrecked the economy were rewarded by bailouts and their CEOs were allowed to keep on collecting their multi-million dollar bonuses.
The bailouts, combined with the Recession, Mr. Frank writes, created a perfect situation for “old fashion calamity howlers, for Jeremiahs raging against the corrupt and the powerful.”
Mr. Frank says the Right also has effectively added a new weapon to its propaganda arsenal — victimhood.
He writes: “Self-pity has become central in the consciousness in the resurgent Right — they are the ones to whom things are done. This is the reason they have taken as their banner a flag that reads ‘Don’t Tread on Me.’”
Mr. Frank says that Matthew Continetti, a journalist who specializes in profiles in victimhood, has written about “the persecution of the Koch brothers, two of the nation’s richest men and most influential political donors, but who, it is Continetti’s solemn duty to report, receive mean e-mails everyday. They are in fact the latest victims of the Left’s ‘Lean Mean Cyber-Vilification Machine.’ Pity these billionaires, reader.”
(Pity The Billionaire by Thomas Frank, published by Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co.; New York, NY, 2012, 225 pages, $25.)