Thomas Frank Listen Liberal

THE PATHOLOGIES OF PROFESSIONALISM

Having people of talent run the vast federal apparatus is clearly a desirable thing. The EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ought to be under the direction of people who know what they’re doing, as surely as qualified engineers should design our bridges and historians should be the ones who teach history.

But what are we to make of our modern-day technocracy, a meritocracy of failure in which ineffectual people rise to the top and entire professions (accountants, real-estate agents appraisers, etc.) are roiled by corruption scandals?

The answer is that the professional ideology brings with it certain predictable, recurring weakness. The first of these pitfalls of professionalism is that the people with the highest status aren’t necessarily creative or original thinkers. Although the professions are thought to represent the pinnacle of human brilliance, what they are actually brilliant at is defending and applying a given philosophy. In DISCIPLINED MINDS, an important description of the work-life of professionals, the physicist Jeff Schmidt tells us that “ideological discipline is the master key to the professionals.” Despite the favorite Sixties slogan, professionals do not question authority; their job is to apply it. This is the very nature of their work and the object of their training, according to Schmidt; who “implement their employers’ attitudes” and carefully internalize the reigning doctrine of their discipline, whatever this happens to be.

In addition the professions are structured to shield insiders from accountability. This is what defines the category: professionals do not have to listen. They are the only occupational group, as the sociologist Eliot Freidson put it many years ago, with “the recognized right to declare … ‘outside’ evaluation illegitimate and intolerable.”

Exhibit A of these interlocking pathologies is economics, a discipline that often acts like an ideological cartel set up to silence the heterodox. James K. Galbraith has written a classic description of how it works:

Leading active members of today’s economics profession, the generation presently in their 40s and 50s, have joined together into a kind of politburo for correct economic thinking. As a general rule–as one might expect from a gentleman’s club–this has placed them on the wrong side of every important policy issue, and not just recently but for decades. They predict disaster where none occurs. They deny the possibility of events that then happen. ...... No one loses face, in this club, for having been wrong. No one is disinvited from presenting papers at later annual meetings. And still less is anyone from the outside invited in. (Original source: How the Economists Got It Wrong James K. Galbraith 12/19/2001)

Professional economists screw up again and again, and no one cares. The only real accountability they face is from their endlessly forgiving peers in economics departments across the country. Granted, economics is an extreme case, but its thoroughgoing application of the right to disregard criticism has made it a kind of fascinating anti-profession, a brotherhood of folly rather than of expertise.

The peril of orthodoxy is the second great pitfall of professionalism, and it’s not limited to economics. Every academic discipline with which I have some experience is similar: international relations, political science, cultural studies, even American history. None of them are as outrageous as economics, it is true, but each of them is dominated by some convention or ideology. Those who succeed in a professional discipline are those who best absorb and apply its master narrative. (Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.36-9)

But they did reader. Leading Democrats actually chose to reach out to the affluent and turn their back on the workers. We know this because they wrote about it, not secretly – as in the infamous “Powell Memo” of 1971, in which future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell plotted a conservative political awakening — but openly, in tones of proud idealism, calling forthrightly for reorienting the Democratic Party around the desires of the professional class.

I am referring to a book called Changing Sources of Power, a 1971 manifesto by lobbyist and Democratic strategist Frederick Dutton who was one of the guiding forces on the McGovern Commission. Taken along with the Republican Powell Memo, it gives us the plans of the two big party organizations as the country entered upon the disastrous period that would give us Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Gingrich, and the rest. Where Powell was an arch-conservative, however, Dutton was a forthright liberal. Where Powell showed a certain cunning in his expressed desire to revere the flow of history, Dutton’s tone is one of credulity toward the inflated sense of world-historical importance that surround the youth culture in those days. In the book’s preface, for example, he actually writes this: “Never has the future been so fundamentally affected by so many current developments.”

Dutton’s argument was simple: America having become a land of universal and soaring affluence, all that traditional Democratic stuff about forgotten men and workers’ rights was no as relevant as a stack of Victrola discs. And young people, meaning white, upper-middle class college kids — oh , these young people were so wise and so virtuous and even so holy that when contemplating them Dutton could scarcely restrain himself. They were “aristocrats — en masse,” (Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.48-9)

But once in office, he broke with the new deal tradition in all sorts of highly visible ways, cancelling public works projects and conspicuously snubbing organized labor. With the help of a Democratic Congress, he enacted the first of the era's really big tax cuts for the rich and also the first of the really big deregulations. As though to prove how tough and post-partisan he could be, in 1980 he and Paul Volker, his hand-picked Fed chairman, put the country on an austerity diet that was spectacularly punishing to the ordinary working people who had once made up the Democratic base.

Carter turned out to be a sort of archetype, the first in a series of passionless Democratic technocrats. That the working people felt the brunt of Carter’s policies was no coincidence; this was not a group for whom his administration felt a great deal of sympathy. In a 1981 interview look back at the administration’s deeds, Carter adviser Alfred Kahn, an economist, had this to say about the fights over deregulation and inflation:

‘I’d love the Teamsters to be worse off. I’d love the automobile workers to be worse off. You may say that’s inhumane [ya think?]; I’m putting it rather badly but I want to eliminate a situation in which certain protected workers in industries insulated from COMPETITION can increase their wage much more rapidly than the average without regard to their MERIT or to what a FREE MARKET would do, and in so doing exploit other workers.’

This is a Democrat, remember, and what he was objecting to was the way unions supposedly allowed workers to prosper "without regard to their merit."

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.... All the bright young Democrats with the post-partisan ideas were saying the same thing. All through the seventies and the eighties, in fact, new waves of liberal thinkers kept washing up, divining from the political stars the same ideas: that labor unions were an economic drag and/or dying fast; that industrial society itself had gone into eclipse [must check when NAFTA eclipsed industrial power].; and that the future belonged to people like them, meaning — always — affluent professionals or some other highly educated and market-savvy cohort.

The most exciting of these bright young thinkers were the tech-minded Washingtonians who called themselves the “Neo-liberals”; in the early 1980s their bold thinkings were the subject of a manifesto, an anthology, a collective biography, and countless news stories. To the reader of today, however, what stands out in their work is the DISTASTE they expressed for organized labor and their enthusiasm for high-tech enterprises. The 1983 Neo-Liberal manifesto, for example, blamed unions for the country’s industrial problems, mourned all the waste involved in the Social Security program [!!!], and called for a war on public school teachers so that we might get a better educational system and thereby “more Route 128s and Silicon Valleys.” ....

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The DLC had a single-factor theory of politics: that voters had grown disgusted with the cultural liberalism of the post-McGovern era. Why did Carter lose in 1980? Too damn liberal. Why did Mondale lose in 1984? Still too liberal. Why did Dukakis lose in 1988? Liberal again. The DLC also had but a single prescription for this malady: the Democratic Party could only win if it moved to “the center,” severing ties with its constituent groups and embracing certain free-market policies of the RIGHT. The essential flaw in this neat little syllogism flashed on and off like a neon sign — that all three of the Democratic candidates in the 1980s had followed this exact strategy of shifting rightward and had lost anyway.

What made the DLC succeed where others had failed were the contradictions it managed to juggle. It was a bluntly PRO-BUSINESS force — friendly with lobbyists and funded by corporate backers — that nevertheless proclaimed itself as a warrior for the working class. . . .

Why working class voters were supposed to pine for balanced budgets, free-trade treaties, and the rest of the items on the DLC wish-list was a mystery. The answer, it would soon become clear, was that the DLC didn’t really care all that much about working people in the first place. The aim of the group was to capture the Democratic Party for its lobbyist supporters by whatever means were at hand, and in the 1980s, claiming to represent the overlooked middle American probably seemed like a good gambit.

By the early 1990s, however, the DLCs proletarian period was over. Instead, the group used different rhetoric to persuade Democrats to let them drive. Now its leaders talked about getting “beyond left and right,” and occupying the ‘vital center,’ about themselves as visionary “New Democrats,” empty phrases that nevertheless carried — that carry still — the “postindustrial, global economy.” It was in order to “do business” in this new realm, the group’s many manifestos declared, that we needed to reform “entitlements” (i.e. Social Security), PRIVATIZE government operations, open charter schools, get tough on crime, and all the rest of it. (Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.54-8)

A little earlier in 1999, Summers had made the cover of Time magazine, along with Greenspan and Rubin, as part of what the magazine called the “Committee to Save the World,” a swashbuckling team of professional class superheroes who intervened all around the globe when economies were in danger of blowing up. The story is one of the all-time great examples of just how bad journalism can get when a scribe is encouraged to express his love for the powerful and his deep respect for ideas that every member of his socioeconomic cohort agrees upon. Time described Summers as a “rocket scientist”; the sagacious Greenspan was said to understand that “markets are an expression of the deepest truths about human nature”; and Rubin was a wizard who had “remade the Treasury into an organization that is ‘more like an investment bank.'” Together they were “a kind of free-market Politburo on economic matters,” Time reported — the only people who mattered in President Clinton’s inner circle.

Today we also know what kind of person didn’t matter. Brooksley Born, who was the chair of Clinton’s Commodities Futures Trading Commission, had seen many ominous signs of impending disaster in certain reaches of the derivative industry; in 1998 she dared to propose that this rapidly growing market be brought under some kind of regulatory scrutiny. Born’s suggestion turned out to be the opposite of a no-brainer: the three members of the Committee to Save the World came together not only to crush her proposal but to do the reverse — to ensure the elimination of the weak regulation that did exist. The ultimate result of their efforts, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, signed into law by Clinton a month before he returned to private life, was a deregulatory debacle to which we can chalk up both the activities of Enron as well as the credit default swaps that brought the entire world economy to the brink of collapse in 2008.

Things ended badly for Brooksley Born, but Robert Rubin left the Treasury Department in glory just a few days after the measure repealing Glass-Steagall had passed the Senate. Four months later he took up work at Citigroup, which by coincidence was the largest beneficiary of the repeal (it allowed the giant bank to merge with a giant insurance company). Rubin had come from Wall Street, delivered enormous bailouts and long-sought deregulation to his old colleagues, and then return to the top ranks of an industry enjoying its most prosperous years in history. .....

It’s striking that so many of the great economic initiatives of the Clinton presidency led eventually to catastrophe. But what really makes this story poisonous is the liberals by and large convinced themselves for many years that nothing had gone wrong at all. Everything Clinton’s team had done was an act of professional-class consensus. Because most of the fuses lit by Clinton and Co. didn’t actually detonate until after he had left office. . . they found it easy to absolve the Democrat from blame.

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It wasn’t Ronald Reagan alone who did it. What distinguishes the political order we live under now is consensus on certain economic questions, and what made that consensus happen was the capitulation of the democrats. Republicans could denounce big government all they wanted, but it took a Democrat to declare that “the era of big government is over” and to make it stick. This was Bill Clinton’s historic achievement. Under his direction, as I wrote back then, the opposition “ceased to oppose.”

The Secret History

For those who are interested in the economic well-being of average Americans and in the political system’s failure to protect them, one of the most telling episodes of the Clinton years is something that went largely unreported at the time: the series of secret negotiations with House speaker Newt Gingrich that Clinton held in 1997. Liberals saw Republican Gingrich back then as Clinton’s unappeasable nemesis – as a berserk hater – but in fact the two men came from a similar class and generational backgrounds and saw eye to eye on a number of things: NAFTA, deficit reduction, welfare reform, and the great overarching sophistries about “change” and the “New Economy.”

The object of Clinton’s outreach to Gingrich in 1997 was Social Security privatization, a hunk of legislative dynamite that would have blown apart the welfare state once and for all. According to Steve Gillon, the historian who uncovered this episode in his 2008 book, the Pact. privatization in some form had become attractive to politicians in both parties at that time; the word he uses to describe this growing attitude is “consensus” as in: the “growing consensus on both sides of the aisle in favor of having Social Security tap into the stock market to increase the rate of return on retirement funds.” (Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.103-7)

The two leaders [Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton] knew this [privatizing Social Security] would mean building “a new center/right political coalition” to get the deed done, because many Democrats could be counted on to oppose the deal. Indeed, … on numerous issues “the president was closer to Gingrich than he was to the leadership of his own party,” a description that could have been accurately applied to each of Clinton’s great accomplishments—NAFTA, welfare reform, and bank deregulation, all of them made into law by cooperation between the Democratic president and the Republicans in Congress.

The schedule on which the two men agreed went as follows: Clinton would start hinting at the privatization proposal in January 1998. Various groups would then spend the year conducting a Social Security “dialogue” whose conclusions can be easily guessed. Incredibly, the two leaders would somehow contrive to “keep the issue off the table in the 1998 congressional elections,” and then get it enacted during the lame-duck session in December 1998, when nobody could hold either of them responsible.

Clinton actually went through with the first step in the plan, demanding in his 1998 State of the Union address that Congress use the federal surplus to “save Social Security first,” a vague but noble-sounding demand that appears to have been his way of opening the privatization discussion. As it happened, Social Security was already safe—safe from Clinton, that is—thanks to a certain Oval Office dalliance. The week before his speech, the media frenzy over Monica Lewinsky had begun, and it was all polarization and impeachment after that.

The day of the speech itself, Hillary Clinton went on TV and accused a “vast right-wing conspiracy” of coming together in an effort to bring her husband down. This was true enough as regards the sex scandal, but the conspiracy that really mattered was the one between her husband and his putative right-wing rival, Newt Gingrich.

Here’s why the D.C. pundits came to love Bill Clinton: He almost did it. He almost achieved that great coalescence of the professional and business classes.

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A few years ago, I read an article claiming that the United States is the first society ever to record more rapes of men than women, a distinction attributable to the vast numbers of men we have seen fit to imprison.

Another disturbing fact: According to the legal scholar Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, there are now more black adults in some kind of “correctional control” – meaning under restraint of some arm of the criminal justice system – than there were slaves in 1850. Naomi Murakawa, author of The First Civil Right, adds that fully “one in three black men” passes his life “under probation, parole, or prison on any given day.” Not only does the United States have the largest population of the people incarcerated of any country, but we are the only nation that routinely hands out life sentences to children.

…… Alexander writes as follows of Clinton’s 1994 crime law:

Far from resisting the emergence of the new caste system, Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives had imagined possible a decade earlier. As the Justice Policy Institute has observed, “the Clinton Administration’s ‘tough on crime’ policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison in any president in American history.”

If anything, Alexander is soft-peddling her indictment. The Big Clampdown was a massive exercise in prison-building and mandatory sentencing. Clinton himself went before the eyes of the nation to promote this great new tactic called “Three Strikes,” where triple offenders of certain kinds got to spend the rest of their lives in prison. His 1994 crime bill coerced state governments to enact what were called “Truth in Sentencing” provisions – which meant, essentially, a crackdown on parole. In 1995, as I mentioned above, Clinton signed his name to the bill stopping the U.S. Sentencing Commission from abolishing the notoriously racist 100-to-1 difference in penalties for crack and powder cocaine. (Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.110-3)

(Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" excerpts in Egan stumbles

On the financiers, the real Clinton legacy came down to four words: Grab what you can. For them, there were bailouts and trade deals that protected their interests and tax cuts and a timely shot of "liquidity" whenever stock markets seemed to be flagging. And a little deregulation should the laws of the land not meet with their favor.

But the poor needed to learn discipline. that seems to have been one of the ideas behind NAFTA: People employed in manufacturing had to accept working harder for less or else watch their jobs depart for Mexico. Discipline was the point of the '94 crime bill too: The poor were to live in a state of constant supervision where there was "zero tolerance" for those who stepped out of line. Mercy was to be a luxury item now, a thing reserved for those who could make big donations to the Clinton presidential library.

Discipline was most emphatically the point of Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform. This measure, as I said, deleted the longstanding federal guarantee to the people at society’s lowest rung and shifted the obligation to care for them to the states, which were permitted to go about the task however they wanted. States could outsource the program, turn applicants away, give them whatever amount they thought was right, and so on. The only requirement was that NO ONE COULD STAY ON THE ROLLS beyond a certain length of time. The new law made no provision for job training or anything similar, even though the man who signed it was the same person who loved to repeat that “what you earn depends on what you can learn.” For these people it was different: just get out there and work.

Some got the carrot; others got the stick. “Once the Democratic party had adopted this theology,” Christopher Hitchens pointed out in 1999, “the poor had no one to whom they could turn. The immediate consequence of this was probably an intended one: this creation of a large helot underclass disciplined by fear and scarcity, subject to endless surveillance, and used as a weapon against any American worker lucky enough to hold a steady or unionized job.” ......

Another goal of welfare reform was reducing what used to be called the “illegitimacy rate.” By removing society’s guarantee for single moms, its proponents use to say, we would change the incentives and give people [mothers] a nudge, and soon everyone would get married before they had kids. (Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.116-7)

(Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" excerpts in "Listen, Liberal" is a must-read book for progressives

That a Democrat might be the one to pick apart the safety net is a violation of this basic brand identity, but by the very structure of the system it is extremely difficult to hold the party accountable for such a deed. This, in turn, is why only a Democrat was able to do that job and get away with it. Only a Democrat was capable of getting bank deregulation passed; only a Democrat could have rammed NAFTA through congress; and only a Democrat would be capable of privatizing Social Security, Gas George W. Bush found out in 2005. “It’s kind of the Nixon goes-to-China theory,” the conservative Democrat Charles Stenholm told the historian Steven Gillon on this last subject. “It takes a Democrat to do some of the hard choices in social programs.”

To judge by what he actually accomplished, Bill Clinton was not the lesser of two evils, as people on the left always say about Democrats at election time; he was the greater of the two. What he did as president was beyond the reach of even the most diabolical Republican.

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…… Thus in the summer of 2000, an article appeared in Blueprint, the magazine of the Democratic Leadership Council, insisting that thanks to the deeds of Bill Clinton, we now knew how to reduce inequality. All that America needed to end the gap between the rich and everyone else was growth brought on by “fiscal discipline, global competition, flexible labor markets, transparent capital markets, deregulated businesses, rapid communications, and limited government interference in markets.”

And these were Democrats. Over the years to come, their mantra would become a liberal version of the right’s “voodoo economics.” Just as Ronald Reagan’s Republicans claimed to be able to bring down the federal deficit by cutting taxes, so Clinton’s Democratic heirs were able to pass off virtually any favor to the rich as an act of concern for the poor. How, you might ask, does deregulating the banks help those who work? Well, that’s what Bill Clinton did, and just look at what happened. Just look at how that glowing pink line went up and up. (Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.122-3)

In 2007, the business world was startled to learn that John Mack, the CEO of Morgan Stanley and a prominent fundraiser for George W. Bush, declared himself ready for Hillary Clinton, hosting a fund-raiser for the former first lady’s presidential campaign in the investment bank’s offices. The financier’s conversion was so startling that it made the cover of Fortune magazine, with the words “Business Loves Hillary!” printed over a photograph of Ms. Clinton.

The Democrat who would really pitch Wall Street woo in 2008, however, was not Hillary Clinton but her rival, Illinois Senator Barack Obama. He became in that year not only the first Democratic presidential candidate in modern times to badly out-fund-raise his Republican opponent, but the first to prevail in campaign contributions from the financial industry specifically, traditionally a Republican bulwark.

....... But let us not discount the professional-class admiration the financiers themselves expressed to the press. “My goal is not to pay less taxes,” the Obama donor and hedge fund boss William Ackman told Reuters in July of 2008. “My goal is to elect an incredibly smart and capable guy."... (Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.130-1)

Barack Obama could have changed this, and by extension, changed the political climate of the country merely by deciding to enforce the nation’s laws in the same way that administrations before Reagan did. The antitrust laws themselves were written a century ago and are still on the books. The current Republican Congress would have had little say in the matter. It would have been almost entirely up to the executive branch.

https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/monsanto-and-hillary-clintons-redemptive-first-act-secretary-state https://www.naturalnews.com/049755_Bride_of_Frankenfood_Hillary_Clinton_Monsanto.html https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/6/1480931/-Hillary-Clinton-and-Monsanto On this front and many others* Obama was completely free to act, especially before 2010, and even after the Republicans took Congress. The times certainly called for it, with Amazon, Google, and AB InBev romping the globe. Still, he did next to nothing. I fact, anti-monopoly investigations conducted by Obama’s Justice Department went from a barely breathing four in 2009 to a flat zero in 2004. (By way of contrast: In 1980, under a different Democratic administration, there were 65 such investigations.)

Let us return again to the financial crisis and the Wall Street bailouts – the episode that will define our politics for generations, that captured everything that is going wrong with the country, that ensured Obama’s election as president in the first place. Today that Obama fumbled this most critical issue is to understate the matter pretty dramatically. More to the point is the great question of why he fumbled it so dramatically. Was it because of the ocean liner couldn’t be turned?

*High-profile prosecutions of financial-industry fraudsters would have been healthy and were entirely within Obama’s power even after the Democrats lost Congress. Using Education Department funding to encourage universities to reconsider their out-of-control tuition inflating would also have been transformative. Obama’s Federal Trade Commission could have cracked down on the pharmaceutical companies that have been raising so dramatically the price of certain prescription drugs. On this last topic, see David Dayan, “Why Are Drug Companies Running Amok?” The Intercept. December 16, 2015

On the contrary. It was fully within Obama’s power to react to the financial crisis in a more aggressive and appropriate way: laws were in place, there was ample precedent, he wasn’t forced to pick the men whom Senator Byron Dorgan plaintively called “the wrong people” for his economic team. It wasn’t the Republicans who made Obama choose Tim Geithner to run the bailouts or Attorney General Eric Holder to (not) prosecute dishonest bankers or Ben Bernanke to serve another term at the Fed.

It would have been good policy had Obama reacted to the financial crisis in a more aggressive and appropriate way by which I mean, the economy would have recovered more quickly and the danger of future crisis brought on by financial fraud or concentrated economic power would have been reduced.

It would have been massively popular had Obama swung the wheel of the ocean liner and reacted to the financial crisis in a more aggressive and appropriate way. Everyone admits this at least tacitly, even the architects of Obama’s bailout policies, who like to think of themselves as having resisted the public’s mindless baying for banker blood. Acting aggressively might also have countered the sham populism of the Tea Party movement and prevented Republican reconquista of Congress.

There were countless opportunities for the kind of decisive action I am describing: Obama could have questioned or even unwound Bush’s bailouts; he could have fired the bad regulators who let it all happen; he could have stopped the AIG bonuses instead of having his team go on television to defend them; he could have bushed to allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages; he could have put the 'zombie banks' into receivership; he could have shifted FBI agents back to white-collar crime; and so on.

Obama did none of it.

And still he didn’t do it. He didn’t even try. In fact, Obama’s team did the opposite. They did everything they could to “foam the runways” and never showed any real interest in confronting the big banks.

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High-profile prosecutions of financial-industry fraudsters would have been healthy and were entirely within Obama’s power even after the Democrats lost Congress. Using Education Department funding to encourage universities to reconsider their out-of-control tuition inflating would also have been transformative. Obama’s Federal Trade Commission could have cracked down on the pharmaceutical companies that have been raising so dramatically the price of certain prescription drugs. On this last topic, see David Dayan, “Why Are Drug Companies Running Amok?” The Intercept. December 16, 2015

All of them, for starters, chose complexity over straightforwardness. The virtue of the old Glass-Steagal Act, which regulated the banking industry from 1933 until its final repeal in the Clinton era, was its simplicity: It structurally separated investment banking from commercial banking and forced those parts to compete with one another. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which was supposed to re-regulate the business, uses a different method – it instructs federal agencies to make detailed new rules for the industry. As I write this, the agencies have finished about two-thirds of the task, with their regulatory work now running to a staggering 22,000 pages of rules, loopholes, and exceptions.

This intricacy doesn’t make Dodd-Frank an outlier among Obama-era reforms; this makes it typical. The Affordable Care Act is even more profoundly dizzying. On the matter of reforming the country’s health care system, there were in 2009 two admirably straightforward proposals on the table: a Canadian-style single-payer system and the briefly popular “public option,” in which the government itself would provide competition to existing insurance companies. President Obama publically declared his support for both these choices over the years. Neither won the favor of Obama’s all-important proxy on this issue, however, by which I mean former Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, a notable friend of the lobbyist and (as of this writing) the U.S. ambassador to China.

Instead we got Obamacare, with its exchanges, its individual and employer mandates, its Cadillac tax, its subsidies to individuals and to the insurance industry, and its thousands of other moving parts, sluicing funding this way and that. Complexity is its most striking characteristic. ..... (Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.156-63)

(Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.156-63)

In the summer of 2009, PhRMA, the lobby of Big Pharma companies, aggressively supported the President's health care proposal. In exchange for their support, the administration had made a deal barring any possibility of drug reimportation from Canada, a country with a sane health care system. (Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.161-3)

The reason is plain enough: monopoly is the most direct road to profit, and the online world offers countless opportunities to achieve it. Jaron Lanier has described all the ways dominant digital networks can use market power to coerce customers, users, advertisers; in his account the powerful players are all patterned after Wal-Mart, which so effectively dominates its suppliers and ruins its small-town competitors.

With Amazon the Wal-Mart comparison is obvious. the giant online retailer has used its position as the countries dominant bookstore to dictate terms to book publishers and to punish those who won’t play ball. During its dispute with Hachette in 2014, the retailer actually singled out certain authors (namely, one Paul Ryan) for preferential treatment. Nice, friendly Google does similar things with its advertisers and was investigated ......

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But in its endless conflict between management and labor that our innovation class has shown true genius. It is a matter of legal record that, for years, the CEOs of Apple, Intel, Google Pixar, and other Silicon Valley firms operated something very much like a cartel against their own employees. In a scandal that journalists now call “the Techtopus,” these worthies agreed to avoid recruiting one another’s tech workers and thus keep those workers’ wages down across the industry. In 2007, in one of the most famous chapters of the Techtopus story, the famous innovator Steve Jobs emailed Eric Schmidt, demanding that this CEO and friend of top Democrats do something about a Google recruiter who was trying to lure an employee away from Apple. Two days later, according to the reporter who has studied the case most comprehensively, Schmidt wrote back to Jobs to tell him the recruiter had been fired. Jobs then forwarded Schmidt’s email around with this comment appended: “:)” (Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.210-1)

Let’s look again at Uber, the machine for inequality, which has had a damaging effect on many people who drive taxis for a living. It also happens to be a clever innovation. This has made it a basic political test for Democrats: Should they support the company with its igneous software, or the working people whose livelihoods it threatens?

Some cities in Belgium, Canada, Germany, and India have answered the question by banning Uber. France had declared certain Uber oerations illegal and at one point arrested several Uber executives. In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio chose to side with taxi drivers, calling for a cap on the number of Uber drivers allowed in the city. But Governor Andrew Cuomo got the last word, forcing de Blasio to back down and saluting Uber as “one of these great inventions, startups, of this new economy … it’s offering a great service for people, and it’s giving people jobs.”

Had Andrew Cuomo chosen to require Uber to play by the existing rules in New York, he could have done so. Had the Federal Trade Commission wished to rein in exorbitant price increases in certain prescription drugs, they could have done so. Had the FTC chosen to lower the boom on Google, that too appears to have been within its power. Why didn’t the Party of the People try? Was that old ocean liner just too hard to turn?

I doubt it. That Google hired several of Obama’s former advisers probably had something to do with it. …. (Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.214-5)

As Hillary Clinton has no doubt noticed, the circumstances of 2016 present a striking similarity to the ones that put her husband in the White House in 1992. Again Americans are outraged at the way the middle class is falling to pieces and at the greed of the people on top. The best-seller lists are once again filled with books about in equality. Today Americans are working even harder for even less than when Bill Clinton made "working harder for less" his campaign catchphrase. Hillary Clinton -- the way any Democrat -- will play such a situation is extremely easy to guess.

"You see corporations making record profits, with CEOs making record pay, but your paychecks have barely budged," Hillary declared in June 2015, launching her presidential campaign. "Prosperity can't be just for CEOs and hedge fund managers." On she talked as the months rolled by, pronouncing in her careful way the rote denunciations of Wall Street that were supposed to make the crowds roar and the financiers tremble.

That those financiers and hedge fund managers do not actually find Hillary's populism menacing is a well established fact. Barack Obama's mild rebukes caused Wall Street to explode in fury and self-pity back in 2009 and 2010; the financiers pouted and cried and picked up their campaign donations and went home. But Hillary's comments provoke no such reaction. Only a few days before she launched her campaign, for example, John Mack, the former CEO of Morgan Stanley, was asked by a host on the Fox Business channel whether her populist talk was causing him to reconsider his support for her. On the contrary: "To me, it's all politics," he responded. "It's trying to get elected, to get the nomination."

As Hillary Clinton has no doubt noticed, the circumstances of 2016 present a striking similarity to the ones that put her husband in the White House in 1992. Again Americans are outraged at the way the middle class is falling to pieces and at the greed of the people on top. The best-seller lists are once again filled with books about in equality. Today Americans are working even harder for even less than when Bill Clinton made "working harder for less" his campaign catchphrase. Hillary Clinton -- the way any Democrat -- will play such a situation is extremely easy to guess.

"You see corporations making record profits, with CEOs making record pay, but your paychecks have barely budged," Hillary declared in June 2015, launching her presidential campaign. "Prosperity can't be just for CEOs and hedge fund managers." On she talked as the months rolled by, pronouncing in her careful way the rote denunciations of Wall Street that were supposed to make the crowds roar and the financiers tremble.

That those financiers and hedge fund managers do not actually find Hillary's populism menacing is a well-established fact. Barack Obama's mild rebukes caused Wall Street to explode in fury and self-pity back in 2009 and 2010; the financiers pouted and cried and picked up their campaign donation and went home. But Hillary’s comments provoke no such reaction. Only a few days before she launched her campaign, for example, John Mack, the former CEO of Morgan Stanley, was asked by a host on the Fox Business channel whether her populist talk was causing him to reconsider his support for her. On the contrary: “To me it’s all politics,” he responded. “It’s trying to get elected, to get the nomination.”

“None of them think she really means her populism,” wrote a prominent business journalist in 2014 about the bankers and Hillary. The Clinton Foundation has actually held meetings at the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, he points out. He quotes another Morgan Stanley officer, who believes that “like her husband [Hillary] will govern from the center, and work to get things done, and be capable of garnering support across different groups, including working with Republicans.” How are the bankers so sure? Possibly because they have read the memoirs of Robert Rubin, the former chairman of Citibank, the former secretary of the Treasury, the former co-head of Goldman Sachs. One of the themes in this book is Rubin’s constant war with the populists in the Party and in the Clinton administration – a struggle in which Hillary was an important ally. Rubin tells how Hillary once helped him to get what he calls “class-laden language” deleted from a presidential speech and how she helped prevent the Democrats from appealing to “class conflict” in a general election – on the grounds that it “is not an effective approach” to the “swing voters in the middle of the electorate.”

Trying to figure out exactly where Hillary Clinton actually stands on political issues can be crazy-making. As a presidential candidate, for example, she says she deplores the revolving door between government and Wall Street because it destroys our “trust in government” – a noble sentiment. When she ran the State Department, however, that door spun on a well-lubricated axis. As a presidential candidate, she opposes Obama’s Tran-Pacific Partnership treaty, as do I; as secretary of state, however, she helped negotiate it. As a presidential candidate in 2008, she claimed to oppose NAFTA, the first great triumph of the (Bill) Clinton administration; not only had she supported it earlier, but as a U.S. senator, she had voted for numerous Bush administration free-trade treaties.

The same is true nearly wherever you look. The great imprisonment mania of the 1990s, for example: as first lady, Hillary’s appetite to incarcerate was unassuageable. “We need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders, “she said in 1994, kicking off a bloodthirsty call for more three-strikes laws. On another day, seven years later, Senator Hillary Clinton could be found urging law students to “Dare to care about the one and a half million children who have a parent in jail.” Even the well-being of poor women and children, Hillary’s great signature issue in her youth had to hit the bricks when the time arrived in 1996 for welfare reform, a measure she not only supported but for which she says she lobbied. (Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.218-9)

Nothing is more characteristic of the liberal class than its members' sense of their own elevated goodness...

That was my first experience of the microclimate of virtue that surrounds Hillary Rodham Clinton. The mystic bond between high-achieving American professionals and the planet's most victimized people, I would discover, is a recurring theme in her life and work.

But it is not her theme alone. Regardless of who leads it, the professional-class liberalism I have been describing in these pages seems to be forever traveling on a quest for some place of greater righteousness. It is always engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self- interested class program. (Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.227-8)

(Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 p.) excerpts

(Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 Excerpts from Truthout

(Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" 2016 excerpts at Amazon

(Thomas Frank "Listen Liberal" excerpts at My Old Reading Site

Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? — a Book Review and excerpts

Thomas Frank – ‘Listen Liberal’? 03/21/2016

Thomas Frank on How Democrats Went From Being the ‘Party of the People’ to the Party of Rich Elites 04/26/2016

Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why by Thomas Frank 03/07/2016