Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right [Hardcover]

Thomas Frank (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 3, 2012

From the bestselling author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, a wonderfully insightful and sardonic look at why the worst economy since the 1930s has brought about the revival of conservatism

Economic catastrophe usually brings social protest and demands for change—or at least it's supposed to. But when Thomas Frank set out in 2009 to look for expressions of American discontent, all he could find were loud demands that the economic system be made even harsher on the recession's victims and that society's traditional winners receive even grander prizes. The American Right, which had seemed moribund after the election of 2008, was strangely reinvigorated by the arrival of hard times. The Tea Party movement demanded not that we question the failed system but that we reaffirm our commitment to it. Republicans in Congress embarked on a bold strategy of total opposition to the liberal state. And TV phenom Glenn Beck demonstrated the commercial potential of heroic paranoia and the purest libertarian economics.

In Pity the Billionaire, Frank, the great chronicler of American paradox, examines the peculiar mechanism by which dire economic circumstances have delivered wildly unexpected political results. Using firsthand reporting, a deep knowledge of the American Right, and a wicked sense of humor, he gives us the first full diagnosis of the cultural malady that has transformed collapse into profit, reconceived the Founding Fathers as heroes from an Ayn Rand novel, and enlisted the powerless in a fan club for the prosperous. The understanding Frank reaches is at once startling, original, and profound.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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Amazon Exclusive: A Conversation Between David Sirota and Tom Frank

Journalist and Back to Our Future author David Sirota interviews Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? and The Wrecking Crew, about his latest book.

David Sirota: Do rich people in America genuinely feel persecuted, or are their requests for pity a political ploy to combat their critics?

Tom Frank: Well, we’re talking about something that’s self-evidently preposterous. The phrase “Pity the Billionaire” is the absurd but inevitable end-point of the present conservative argument. The book is about people trying to depict themselves as the victims of a situation where they are manifestly not victims: imagining that corporate enterprises are ground under the iron heel of an over-regulating government, that banks were forced to issue the loans that puffed up the real-estate bubble, that taxes are by definition onerous and thieving, that businesspeople are all, as a rule, hard-working, unassuming, and straight-shooting—and that they have risen up righteously in a great strike, like in Ayn Rand’s and John Boehner’s fantasy.

Sirota: Why has the economic crisis resulted in a rise of conservative economic populism rather than progressive populism?

Frank: Because conservatives got there first with the most money.

Remember, the right has been “populist” for a long time now, raging against this educated elite and that. Populism is a language and a style that the conservative movement is comfortable with. It wasn’t hard to turn a well-funded, well-organized movement already accustomed to thinking of itself this way into a protest movement for hard times.

Of course, this involved the swiping of a whole range of traditional left-wing ideas and symbols, everything from the exaltation of the strike to the notion of a despicable “ruling class.”

The other side of the question is, why weren’t the liberals there to contest this larceny? Where was the left-wing populist movement? Occupy Wall Street didn’t turn up until three whole years after the September ‘08 crash.

The answer to this, I’m afraid, is that genuine populist movements don’t just spring up overnight, in the way the Tea Party did. They come together slowly. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, which is the traditional home of working-class movements, has grown very uncomfortable with populism. They don’t like it, they don’t trust it, they sure as hell don’t know how to talk it. The Democratic Party more and more sees itself as the party of conscientious professionals—of bankers who are socially liberal, for example—and not as the party of working people.

Click here to read more of the conversation

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From Bookforum

In describing the foundational popular protests of the New Deal as a pointed contrast to the Tea Party's rise, Pity the Billionaire often reads like a police procedural that re-creates the political crime scene where left-leaning populism met a swift death. The foundation underlying this entertaining, but at times misguided, book—that the aftermath of the 2008 crisis energized the Right but flummoxed the Left—may have already begun to shift, but it doesn't invalidate Frank's history lesson. —Will Bunch

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books (January 3, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805093699
• ISBN-13: 978-0805093698
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (86 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #311,989 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Founding editor of The Baffler, Thomas Frank is the author of One Market Under God, The Conquest of Cool and What's the Matter With America? He is also a contributor to Harper's, The Nation, and the New York Times op-ed pages.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

186 of 202 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars On History not repeating, and resonating only inversely... December 21, 2011

By John P. Jones III TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America was first published in 2004, to considerable acclaim, for examining why so many Americans voted against their economic interests. He commenced with a startling fact: the poorest county in the United States is not in Appalachia or the Deep South; rather it is on the High Plains, McPherson County, in Nebraska. In the year 2000, more than 80% of the resident voters (admittedly a rather small group) went for George W. Bush, the Republican. "Why" is the subject of that book. How did conservatives capture the American heartland? As Frank pithily postulates: It was as though the French Revolution occurred in reverse, with the people running through the streets demanding that the nobility be given even more money and privileges!

"Pity the Billionaire" covers even more astonishing recent developments. It is one thing to have people prostrate themselves before the "free-market god" prior to 2008. But when it became "the god that failed" to reference Arthur Koestler's book about his eventual disillusionment with communism, and the entire house of cards came tumbling down, then how could Americans be calling for yet a purer version of the "free market," effectively doubling down on their bets? Why didn't they throw the rigid ideology of the supremacy of the "free market" into the dust bin of history, along with communism? Frank does a superlative job illuminating how this most unlikely occurrence unfolded.

He reminds us that we have seen this 2008 movie before: The Great Depression.... The excesses of the "Roaring `20's," including highly leveraged speculation on Wall Street, led to massive unemployment, foreclosures, and a decade of hard times. The answer in the `30's commenced by realizing where the problem lay. Prudent rules and laws were enacted to preserve what is still labeled "capitalism," and to tame the "casino mentality." FDR, the "traitor to his own class," talked directly to the workers and the dispossessed, and put many to work in public works projects. The elites were largely vilified, and FDR "welcomed their hatred."

The essence of Frank's work is explaining why there was no rerun of this movie. Most events unfolded in the open, before our eyes. Many mouths gaped that such brazen and implausible events could be pulled off. There was Rick Santelli, a business report, convincing us the "common working man" was the trader at the Chicago Board of Trade. Don't focus on Wall Street, and the trillions required to save their sorry... no, shift the focus to the neighbor who bought the house with the extra bedroom and couldn't afford it. Should you bail out your neighbor for his/her imprudence? Frank discusses the "genius" of Glenn Beck, at length. (It was a variation of "I watch Glenn Beck so you don't have to") - yet Frank nags us that we really must watch him (hopefully only in small doses.) History is constantly re-written; fears like Wells' "invasion of the Martians" are constantly stoked. The problem was not the bonus culture of Wall Street; no, it was big government, and their promotion of housing for the poor. Beck, a consummate actor, can cry when required ... of course, all the way to the bank. Ayn Rand even experiences a revival. Frank details how the Tea Party's righteous anger resulting from the "free-market" failures were channeled at the wrong targets. In fact, as Frank explains, many of the populist forms of rebellion in the `30's were coopted and adopted by the Right after 2008; history resonating inversely. Of the numerous cases Frank cites, it would be hard to trump the sheer chutzpah of Massey Energy's CEO, Don Blankenship, who sponsored a rally to announce solidarity between coal miners and the coal operators, all directed at "getting government bureaucrats off their backs," with their safety and environmental meddling; eight months afterward, 29 miners were killed in an explosion in one of his mines (p 91.)

As so many now know, Obama is no FDR. Starting right from the beginning, when he selected key Wall Street "players" who were instrumental in causing the catastrophe and expecting them to fix it: Summers and Geithner. In contrast, FDR chose a classic populist of a Texas banker, Jesse Jones to run the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (FRC). This time around, "compromise" instead of "welcoming their hatred" was the dominant outlook. I've marked many passages in this book. One that seemed to capture the essence of the triumph of the conservative revival related to the debate on universal health care. The Democrats were unable, or too intimidated to articulate that essential health care is a fundamental right. As Frank says: "It was as though the old-school liberal catechism had become forbidden language, placed on some index of prohibited thoughts" (p. 169).

Inexplicably, Frank does not cover the recent countervailing rise of the "Occupy" movement. And he does end on a down note, suggesting further targets, such as the national parks, the highways, public schools and Social Security are on the Right's agenda as the "nation clambers down through the sulfurous fumes into the pit called utopia..." Still, the increased hubris generated by successfully avoiding the penalty for an ideological failure should only mean that the fall will be that much the greater, the next time around.

Frank has written a worthy sequel to "Kansas," a 5-star effort. Read more ›

65 of 71 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Far Right Fantasies January 6, 2012

By J. Alan Bock

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Thomas Frank is one of my favorite authors and "Pity the Billionaire" is the third work of his that I have read. It is a rather sombre work and does not have the rollicking wit and sense of humor that he demonstrated in "What's the Matter With Kansas?" and "The Wrecking Crew." "Pity the Billionaire" is subtitled "The Hard Times Swindle and Unlikely Comeback of the Right." By "Unlikely Comeback" he apparently means that a takeover of the government by the Far Right would lead to the destruction of American civilization - there will be nothing to come back to.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (a Republican) once famously said: "Taxation is the price we pay for civilization," by which he meant that taxation is how we fund government which is a necessity for civilization. On the basis of the Republican debates I have watched so far I have concluded that all of the Republican candidates seem to have trouble with the concept of "civilization" as we know it in the western world - i.e. a political system providing a safety net for all of its citizens. It's every man for himelf, buddy.

Mr. Frank spends a lot of time exploring the incredible ideology of the Far Right and how they came by it. They inhabit a very separate world - almost a parallel universe. What kind of misapprehension permits the Right to brush off truths that everyone else can see so plainly? That the great crash of 2008 was caused, not by too much regulation over business, but by lack of any effective regulation at all (repeal of the New Deal regulatory laws has been going on for over 30 years!) That critics of the bailouts were responsible for those bailouts.That Ayn Rand is not the hero but the villain of this disaster. Other examples of conservatism's "dalliance with error" abound.... The long embarassing story of the evolution debate or the global warming controversy or the Bush administration's various campaigns against government scientists and those who doubted the official rationale for the Iraq War, or their long love affair with "supply side economics" despite that theory's persistent failure to work.

We could put a spotlight on the outright falsehoods that the conservative movement lists among its articles of faith: that FDR's policies either caused or worsened the Great Depression - the incredible popularity of this man who was elected to 4 terms certainly gives lie to this canard; that progressives have been in control of the nation ever since the days of Woodrow Wilson; that George Bush was just "pretending" to be a conservative; that bond traders are "ordinary workers"; that the government (and not the banks) bears the entire responsibility for the mortgage meltdown; and those 3 really wierd and idiotic ideas regarding Obama's place of birth, his "secret army", and who wrote his first book!

Some liberals like to apply the word "liar" to the leaders of the Right, but that's not the whole story. There have been attempts to deceive and even deliberate misrepresentation from time to time. More disturbingly, however, there is a certain remoteness from reality, a kind of "politized groupthink, " that seems to get worse each year as the Right withdraws even further into a fantasy world of its own.

Only late in the book does Frank get to the shortcomings of the Obama adminstration. In a nutshell the great Democratic Party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, no longer exists. It has been corrupted by money. In 2008 Obama received over 3.5 million dollars in contributions from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., UBS AG, and Morgan Stanley (they gave a little over a million to McCain!) The "economic royalists" are well entrenched in the "party of the people." That is why, in this crisis brought on by Wall Street, Obama responded, not like FDR, but like Herbert Hoover! Where are the criminal prosecutions? Where is Ferdinand Pecora?

Frank concludes his book with a short and frightening chapter entitled: "Trample the Weak." In 1944 the Hungarian historian Karl Polanyi told the story of what he called the utopian idea of the self-regulating market - and of what happened when theorists and dreamers tried to put that utopia into effect. To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings . . . would result in the demolition of society.

"Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized,the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed."

In those days the experience of the depression had just persuaded the world to forswear any further pursuit of that deadly free-market dream. Society periodically and instinctively tried to defend itself against the depredations of the market and the world assumed this pattern was a natural one. Another economic crisis, and you'de get another New Deal. But this time around we saw a new pattern develop. After the market vandalized American society along the lines Polanyi described, society fairly begged to be trashed again . . . Trample the weak instead of coddling them."

Moneyed interests understand that with no second FDR, no incorruptible new cop on the financial beat, no return to the rules that once made the banking business boring but safe, they have nothing to fear from us and may do as they please. But the scenario that should concern us most is what will happen when the new Right gets their hands on the machinery of government. They are the same old wrecking crew as their predecessors but now there is a swaggering, in your face brazenness to their sabotage. We got a taste of their vision when they reconquered the House of Representatives in 2010 and immediately cracked down on the Securities and Exchange Commission, the regulatory agency charged with preventing fraud on Wall Street!

Given the chance to actually run the government of the most complex economy on earth like a small business, they will slam the brakes on spending and level the regulatory state. Dare we even guess at the consequences? Read more ›

59 of 67 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Worthwhile examination of a strange historical anomaly January 5, 2012

By John A. Suda VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

After trying to figure out why so many middle and working class Americans vote against their own self-interests in "What's Wrong with Kansas?" author Thomas Frank has a go at trying to explain why the Great Recession of 2008 has bolstered-not reduced-America's support for conservatism and free market economics, turning conventional expectations upside down.

At all other times in American history when there has been an economic bust or crisis middle and working class Americans generally blamed conservative politics, the financial elite, and the capitalist system. They reacted by advocating economic and political reforms in opposition to the policies favoring the rich including increasing unionization, increasing financial regulation, and social policies to weaken the harsher consequences of the capitalist market system.

Now, despite the outrageous financial shenanigans of Wall Street and its conservative friends in business and government, the reaction has been in support of even more free-market behavior, less regulation, less government involvement in the economy, and less consumer protection.

At a minimum, this is a strange phenomenon.

In 189 pages covering 12 (total)chapters, Mr. Frank explains quite clearly how this reaction is irrational in so many ways in regard to the objective interests of these supporters. He explains how these people are favoring the same or even more extreme policies and behaviors which already have cost them their jobs, pensions, 401(k) balances, medical insurance, homes, and which have contributed mightily to the depletion of the U.S. Treasury on top of all that....

Here are some of his hypotheses of why this has happened:

-These people are merely lashing out, as they traditionally do, against the party in power at the time of the economic crisis (the Democrats) and associates its platform with the crisis

-There is some modest evidence of a white racist reaction against our first black president and a party made up of much diversity

-The reaction is merely an extension of the culture wars now focused on economics and finance instead of social issues like abortion, sexual orientation, and the like

-These people are being emotionally manipulated by the financial elite through fear mongering and other tactics designed to obtain support for policies favoring the financial elite class

-Some portion of this group is made up of paranoid types which want to see conspiracies and dangers everywhere and they have been inflamed by the media, especially Glenn Beck and other bombastic sorts.

-This is a values-based reaction to targets which may or not be responsible for what they see as the declining character of American society

Mr. Frank digs broadly and fairly deeply into the specifics of each of these hypotheses. He examines in great details the influence of the bombastic media types, the behind-the-scenes financial support and stirrings up by big conservative ideologues, the deeply rooted fears and anxieties of these classes of people becoming more and more marginalized in the economy, the resentment of the less educated against what they see as the "intellectual elite," and some people's disposition for conspiracy theory.

The conservative financial elite seems to have created or merely shaped an idealistic "story" of populist rebellion against what the author sees as the absolutely wrong targets. But those targets-the Democratic Party, progressives, intellectuals, etc.-have not fought back, or have been reacting only passively and ineffectively. President Obama is described as emotionally aloof and prone to compromise, even as the opposition holds firm to uncompromising principles.

Despite offering a bunch of possible explanations, Mr. Frank doesn't find definite or satisfactory reasons for this anomalous behavior by so many. He is befuddled and has no suggestions how other like-minded people to him should respond. He sees a severe downside to the country if the conservative Republican Party wins the Presidency and Congress in 2012 when the government is likely to be even more downsized, less able to restrain the financial elite, and will dismantle even more of the safety net which supports middle and working classes.

One can't fault Mr. Frank for failing to come up with answers; he deserves credit for his good reporting, his attention to journalistic details, and his sense of logic and absurdity.

(FTC disclosure (16 CFR Part 255)): The reviewer has accepted a reviewer's copy of this book which is his to keep. He intends to provide an honest, independent, and fair evaluation of the book in all circumstances.) Read more ›