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The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule

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Following up on his masterly examination of the paradox under which Red Staters consistently vote Republican against their own economic self-interest (WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?), Thomas Frank sets out to trace the present-day conservative Republican approach to government in THE WRECKING CREW. What he demonstrates is deeply disturbing even though it has remained on display virtually every day of the entire Bush II administration.

According to Frank, the conservative worldview is totally committed to "the ideal of laissez faire, meaning minimal government interference in the marketplace, along with hostility to taxation, regulation, organized labor, state ownership, and all the business community's other enemies. "The conservative movement promotes the interests of business exclusively over all else in accordance with the motto, "More business in government, less government in business." So-called "big government," also tagged as the liberal state, is the enemy; in fact, virtually all government is the enemy, other than the national defense.

Mr. Frank follows the conservative movement from the turn of the Twentieth Century through the Depression and New Deal, focusing most heavily on the movement's rebirth under Ronald Reagan and on into the new millennium. Along the way, he discusses the growth of lobbying as a major force in converting the nation's capital into a massive feeding ground for corporate special interests. Frank also highlights the manner in which conservatives have repeatedly run the country into huge spending deficits in order to "defund the left" while simultaneously politicizing government management positions by favoring ideology over competence. The end result under Republican conservative stewardship is government that demonstrates itself as ineffectual and incompetent, offering but further proof that big government is inherently incapable of working and needs to be outsourced to private, professional concerns who can do the job correctly (and then inevitably failing to do so).

THE WRECKING CREW is filled with fascinating side observations, such as its note that the movement has always lionized bullies, from Joe McCarthy to Bill O'Reilly, from Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay to George Allen and Michelle Malkin (whom Frank describes hilariously as "a pundit with the appearance of a Bratz doll but the soul of Chucky"). The book's most effective and outrage-generating section has to be its chapter on the Marianas Island of Saipan. Frank casts Saipan, with all its corruption, nepotism, income inequity, slave labor sweatshops, and local political control exercised in the name of big business as the perfect and ultimate model of the conservative movement ideal, a truly horrific prospect. He also notes, properly, that the morass that is today's Iraq is equally a product of the attempt to force fit these same free market ideals to a foreign country, implemented (so the Bush Administration hoped) by inexperienced, wet-behind-the-ears young idealogues, home-schooled ultra-Christians with college degrees from the likes of Patrick Henry College, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, and Pat Robertson's Regent University. Saipan and Iraq constituted "laboratories of liberty," modern-day "capitalists' dreams" whose realizations are (or at least should be) shameful American nightmares.

There is little good news in THE WRECKING CREW. Author Frank shows that our national government has been hollowed out under Republican conservative control, savaged into an ineffectual husk. Furthermore, he illustrates clearly that this was no mistake, that it is part of a deliberate process not just to privatize government and eradicate government regulation but to make these changes permanent by destroying the liberal left (and with it, of course, the Democratic Party). Frank demonstrates well that present day politics has truly become, to invert von Clausiwitz's famous maxim, "a continuation of war by other means." Regrettably, one side of the battle continues to play the game as politics, as elections won or lost and citizens swayed or not, while the other side approaches it as an act of war, a no-holds-barred contest in which the only goal is the complete and utter destruction of the other side.

THE WRECKING CREW is compelling and informative even as it paints a bleak picture of an America being driven rightward and increasingly toward the excesses and inequities of the pre-New Deal era. We all know how that era ended in October, 1929.

Thomas Frank's latest book is bound to garner a wide spectrum of reviews here, and many of them will be skewed to the far poles of political ideology, both right and left. That said, readers of these reviews should understand that this is an important book and deserves to be taken seriously: whether or not various Amazon reviewers (such as myself) agree or disagree with the author's thesis and conclusions, The Wrecking Crew is going to substantially shape political debate in America. Personally, I found the book engaging, hugely informative, and fascinating -- the way a 40-car pile up or train derailment is fascinating. Frank makes a valiant attempt to end the book on an upbeat note, but on the whole, the picture he presents is like a case study in political despair. The really depressing part is that he seems to have correctly diagnosed the cancer. To paraphrase a remark by a lobbyist friend he quotes -- this at a tony restaurant in DC swarming with other lobbyists -- "You think this is going to change if Obama is elected?" The not so veiled implication: dream on. The Wrecking Crew makes me think we are living in a sort of flashback repeat of the Weimar Republic. Hey, baby, gonna party like it's 1939!

For those of us looking aghast at the endless flow of partisan venom that's become our national media, the feckless catastrophe that's become our national government, and wondered how so many self-proclaimed uberpatriots have managed to steer America from the country the world loved to a blowhard much-despised power in a few short decades, Frank provides interesting answers (and they're well-researched and excellently documented, unlike the spewings of some current conservative chart-topping bestsellers). This book's both horrifying and wickedly funny -- each page is a mixture of laughs and groans of disgust. Difficult to see how even the most rabid partisan could quarrel with many of his conclusions, as they're drawn from direct quotes; Frank's a master of giving pompous politicos enough rope to hang themselves. A page-turner par excellence, and essential reading for any thinking American in this most vital of election years.

This is a fascinating, extremely well referenced work about the neocon rule book. It explodes all the rumors that Bush is not smart. He has actually just been following this rule book.

Rule One: Government services are bad and business services are good. Attack big government.

Rule Two: Weaken government services so you can declare them incompetent and subcontract out the government services to private businesses.

Rule Three: Replace personnel in key government service positions with your friends, whether or not they are qualified to do the job.

Rule Four: Run up the debt, declare a crisis and cancel social services.

Rule Five: Demonize and demoralize the liberals. Blame them for whatever goes wrong.

Rule Six: Strengthen the ties between businesses and government by hiring only "business-friendly" people and by encouraging business to help write the bills to be passed by the congress.

With the recent books by Jane Mayer, Naomi Klein, Scott McClellan and others I was looking for a composite of how the current administration accomplished their dismantling of government. Mr. Frank has come close to explaining how the conservative thinking came to pass and functioned. This may not be the one book to record the travesty of the last eight years and beyond but it comes close.

Mr. Frank contends the dismantling of government was premeditated by the Bush-Cheney administration and like-minded supporters. Frank contends the appointments to regulatory agencies and other governing bureaus were intentionally incompetent or non-supporters of their assigned agencies. They either incompetently or deliberately neutered these agencies. He states the department of labor was intentionally made impotent in 2 and a half months. We all are privy to the Gonzales incompetence, the "Brownie is doing a great job" incompetence and John Bolton's hate for the United Nations. Frank implies these appointments were intentional to prove that government doesn't work.

Frank's book can be summarized as stating the Bush-Cheney and supporters set out to prove government doesn't work and implies they also had intent to line the pockets of their supporters.

Mr. Frank hits upon the Jack Abramoff - Grover Norquist group pretty hard. He explains how Mr. Abramoff's antics played in the group and how he appearred to be above the law.

Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew may not be the final history book I was looking for, as it is slanted to the left, but then maybe the true history of this time may be that the right is nothing but a bunch of thugs. Only history can judge.

"The "Wrecking Crew" describes what Republicans have been doing to the federal government since the Reagan administration" - they've been wrecking it. In a witty, well-written and hard hitting polemic, Thomas Frank, has shown how the party of Lincoln has come to have such utter contempt for the proposition that we are a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people."

The modern Republican believes that government is always a problem and never a solution; that all taxation is "theft" and not "the price we pay for civilization"; that the best public servant is the worst one; and that they can never be held responsible for the "messes" their administrations produce because their "outsiders."

Unfortunately electing Democrats is not the answer. The Clinton and Obama administrations have shown themselves to be a "distinction without a difference." In fact you could say that present day America is a 0ne Party state consisting of the the corporate party whch has three wings: a right wing called The Democratic Party; an extreme right wing called the Republican Party; and an hysterical right wing called The Tea Party.

What is needed,says Frank,is nothing less than "a direct engagement with and repudiation of laissez faire and a reconstruction project of massive proportions. A wholesale renovation of the federal apparatus, for one thing, must come before there can be any return to the middle class state." This sounds like a very long term project - if, indeed, it can be achieved at all. I certainly wish "godspeed" to whover is going to undertake this project but, personally I think that the prognosis is dismal.

Based principally on the DeLay-Abramoff affair with its muddy torrent of graft, Thomas Frank denounces highly emotionally but limpidly the agenda of the conservative right concerning the State and its government, as well as their ideology of selfishness and greed.

The core of US conservatism is the interests of business. These interests are mightily more important than their `free market' evangel. Mechanisms like tariff walls, public subsidies, monopolies, no-bid contracts or patent protections, will be adopted without any resistance if they enhance profits.

The conservative right sees the liberal State as a perversion, as a corruption of private interests (taxes), not as an instrument to service the population as a whole.

When they took power, they sabotaged the working of the government by appointing ferocious opponents of State agencies (EPA, FDA, SEC) at their head. They even created anti-agencies (OIRA, Council on Competitiveness).

For them, all public services should be subjected to the market system, because that is the most efficient way of ruling. In other words, those services have to be managed by private interests.

For Thomas Frank, the result of these policies was a rip-off. The institutions created for the protection of the population became institutions for the exploitation of the population (arms industry, anti-terrorism, administration of Iraq, recovery of hurricane Katrina ...).

One of the main targets of the conservatives is the Welfare State. The money flows of the welfare programs should be privately managed, thereby generating colossal commissions for a bunch of Wall Street managers, while in the meantime `defunding the left'.

For Thomas Frank, this is a sure way for turning US politics into a plutocracy and concomitantly a `bought' government.

Through lobbyism and pure propaganda for the agenda of the Right, conservatism itself became a business with monster fees for the preachers.

A US senator asked a few years ago: `Have you missed the government?'

If the government had not intervened heavily in the huge banking crisis of the last years, the whole capitalist system would have been turned into a desert, an enormous Great Depression for many years to come. The other side of the coin would have been an astonishing handover of all political, economic and financial world powers to the East (China).

This book is a must read for all those who want to understand the world we live in.

N.B. James K. Galbraith treated the same all important issues in a more theoretical way in his formidable book `The Predator State'.

I am of the age, that I was actively involved in the PIRG on campus when I was in college. We were idealistic pushing for reform in public transportation and maybe some green issues. I don't remember details. Its AMAZING to realize that our little, leftist push to try to create a slightly better world, was being countered by the sycophantic madness of Jack Abramhoff and his American and South African corporate backers.

We were holding demonstrations to end apartheid, never thinking that our actions would generate massive corporate support to undermine our activities. And, yet, in hindsight, we kept wondering how these boneheads kept winning. It's easy to see. They were focused, greedy and willing to do what it takes to jump on the Reagan gravy train.

For those who didn't live through that era, there was a real sense that the Reaganomic's train was leaving the station and you'd better be on it, or your life was going to be ruined. Many of us thought a career in engineering or some other high paying field was the ticket to the promised land. But it turns out there was another whole game being played on a skewed playing field. My thinking at the time was, "Well sure I'm a liberal, but I'm in engineering, so I'll do great."

Ha!

The issues that I have struggled with as an adult, have been those that have been ruined by the destruction of the federal goverment: the lousy education my children have received, the inequity in taxation and compensation that has seen the diminution of the middleclass, our attempt to keep up with the Jones' through creditcard debt and home equity borrowing and the resulting divorce rate with disillusioned couples who see the neighbors moving into ever bigger McMansions and don't see that the game is rigged.

We laughed in 1984, and "Oohed" and "Aahed" at the Apple ad during the Super Bowl (the woman, with the hammer, with the screen, &c). What we didn't realize was that Orwell's '1984' was taking place before our eyes and through the disingenious misinformation of the conservative movement, we have been trumpeting our own demise ever since. The question now is, will the Orwellian nightmare continue for our children or can we rescue the Republic?

If, as some say, the Obama administration is our only chance to make a difference in our lifetimes: then we will fail. Liberals need to act now to return our country to a land governed by and for the people, instead of the corporations.

I think the author would approve if I ended my review with a quote from the only band that mattered:

The men at the factory are old and cunning

You don't owe nothing, boy get running

Its the best years of your life they want to steal

All these years we've been working for the clampdown. If you can read this book and come away with a different conclusion then I'm sorry, but you have been culturally lobotimized; you might as well have "DITTO" tattooed on your forehead.

The Republicans believe that there is no such thing as "the common good." Rather, they believe that people are fundamentally selfish and only out for themselves; so when they band together to pursue their interests, they create a vicious zero-sum game in which the devil takes the hindmost. Consequently, they see government as a scam in which one group gains control in order to loot the public treasury and pillage the public trust.

Governing is not about, well, _governing._ It is a mad scramble to see how much of the public treasury you can make off and how many permanent advantages you can vote yourself with before the public catches on and throws you out. Thus, they regard any talk about the government improving the nation or the lives of the people in it as fundamentally dishonest. It is just one of the many customary lies that political parties tell people in order to gain their trust so you can betray that trust later.

Since they see the role of government as primarily one of redistributing wealth from one group or stratum of society to another, their primary concern is to make sure that it is they who are sitting in the Brinks truck that is backed up to the U.S. Treasury. Despite their much publicized preference for "smaller" government, there is actually no size of government that the Republicans would find acceptable. As they discovered in the years between Reagan and Bush II, the bigger government is the more lucrative opportunities it offers for profits and plunder through the privatization and outsourcing of its functions.

"Smaller government" is really a code term for ineffectual government. When the government is an honest beat cop, they can't get away with much. But when cop on the beat is on the take, they can fleece the public like it's almost legal. The trick, then, is to convince the public that it is normal and natural for governments to be corrupt, so they might as well do away with regulation altogether, and let the efficient market and Nature take its course; i.e., let the rich continue to grow richer until they become an aristocracy of wealth that owns the country outright, while the rest of us "commoners" struggle to keep from drowning in a sea of debt.

The Wrecking Crew describes how this plutocatization done. First, replace the all the dedicated career civil servants whose years of experience and actual expertise might prove useful with third-rate party hacks, wild-eyed ideologues, and people from industry who are hostile to the regulatory mission of the agency. Next, "starve the beast," by underfunding and understaffing the agency, so that it becomes so dysfunctional that nobody in their right mind would want to work there. Then, deliberately enact programs that cannot possibly work, and then when they fail, blame it on the inability of government to do anything right. And, keep on repeating this process until there is no effective government left and nobody is sorry to see it go.

At this point, unaccountable corporate CEOs will be making policies formerly made by elected officials, and it will be implemented by the hidden hand of the corporation using its vast wealth to work its will on unregulated markets.

Sickening and superbly documented history of the conservative movement, and the great evil it has done this country. Inspired by trash writers such as Ayn Rand, these transparent sociopaths have courageously prescribed social darwinism for America's most vulnerable citizens, meanwhile driving us deeply into debt to create a neonatal intensive care ward for corporations. By all means read this book, but not on a full stomach.