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When Done Right - Or Wrong, Depending On How You Look At It - Deficits Remove Liberal Options From The Table. Suddenly There's No Money For Building Bridges Or Inspecting Meat. Not Surprisingly, Running Up A Deficit Is A Strategy Favored By The Wrecking Crew For Its Liberal-killing Properties.

-Thomas Frank

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When Done Right -

Thomas Frank

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When Done Right - Or Wrong, Depending On How You Look At It - Deficits Remove Liberal Options From The Table. Suddenly There's No Money For Building Bridges Or Inspecting Meat. Not Surprisingly, Running Up A Deficit Is A Strategy Favored By The Wrecking Crew For Its Liberal-killing Properties.

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I Was Never A Fan Of Barack Obama's Bipartisanship Routine.

Corruption Is Uniquely Reprehensible In A Democracy Because It Violates The System's First Principle, Which We All Learned Back In The Sunshiny Days Of Elementary School: That The Government Exist To Serve The Public, Not Particular Companies Or Individuals Or Even Elected Officials.

Thanks To A Deal Finalized In 2008, Chicago’s Parking Meters Will Be Operated For The Next 75 Years By A Group Of Investors Put Together By Morgan Stanley, Including The Sovereign Wealth Fund Of Abu Dhabi.

What Becomes Fascinating Is The Way The Culture Industry Doesn't Deny It And Doesn't Try To Mitigate It, But Tries To Sell Its Products As A Way Of Liberating Oneself.

Apparently, There Is No Bad Economic Turn A Conservative Cannot Do Unto His Buddy In The Working Class, As Long As Cultural Solidarity Has Been Cemented Over A Beer.

There Is Much To Dislike About President Obama's Approach To The Financial Crisis. But Opposition, It Seems, Will Have To Come From Somewhere Other Than Conservatism. The Party Out Of Power Is Also A Party Out Of Touch.

One Of The Things I Keep Coming Back To In My Writing Is That Society Doesn't Work On This Mirror Principle - You Don't Have An Exact Replica On The Left Of What You Have On The Right. It Just Doesn't Work That Way.

In The Subprime Mortgage Industry, Bankers Handed Out Iffy Loans Like Candy At A Parade Because Such Loans Meant Revenue And, Hence, Bonuses For Executives In The Here-and-now.

I Think There's Great Potential For Autonomy, But We Have To Remember That We Live In A World Where People May Have Free Will But Have Not Invented Their Circumstances.

This Aesthetic Quality, Then, Is What Politics Is All About. It's Authenticity That Separates Winners From Losers, Good Politics From Bad, And He-man Leader-types From Consultant-directed Puppet-boys.

Is Wall Street The Rightful Master Of Our Economic Fate? Or Should We Choose A Broader Form Of Sovereignty?

Massive Inequality, We Have Learned, Isn't The Best Way To Run An Economy After All. And When You Think About It, It's Also Profoundly Ugly.

Under The Administration Of George W. Bush, You Will Recall, Federal Spending Grew Pretty Significantly. At The Same Time, The Number Of People Directly Employed By The Federal Government Shrank. One Of The Factors That Explained The Difference Was Contracting.

Governing Was Always Difficult For Conservatives, But As They Return To The Opposition, They Are Rediscovering Their Skill At Blame Evasion.

The Great Goal Of The Backlash Is To Nurture A Cultural Class War, And The First Step In Doing So, As We Have Seen, Is To Deny The Economic Basis Of Social Class. After All, You Can Hardly Deride Liberals As Society's "elite" Or Present The Gop As The Party Of The Common Man If You Acknowledge The Existence Of The Corporate World - The Power That Creates The Nation's Real Elite, That Dominates Its Real Class System, And That Wields The Republican Party As Its Personal Political Sidearm.

The Pursuit Of The Vibrant Seems To Be The Universal Job Description Of The Nation's City Planners Nowadays. It Is Also Part Of The Obama Administration's Economic Recovery Strategy For The Nation.

Mounting A Campaign Against Plutocracy Makes As Much Sense To The Typical Washington Liberal As Would Circulating A Petition Against Gravity. What Our Modernized Liberal Leaders Offer Is Not Confrontation But A Kind Of Therapy For Those Flattened By The Free-market Hurricane: They Counsel Us To Accept The Inevitability Of The Situation.

In The Last James Bond Movie, The Villain Was A Culture Captain, A Tycoon Of Culture, A Murdoch Figure. It's Not As If People Don't Know What Is Going On.

There Are Few Things In Politics More Annoying Than The Right's Utter Conviction That It Owns The Patent On The Word 'freedom' That When Its Leaders Stand Up For The Rights Of Banks To Be Unregulated Or Capital Gains To Be Untaxed, That It Is Actually And Obviously Standing Up For Human Liberty, The Noblest Cause Of Them All.

[the Right] May Never Bring Prayer Back To Schools, But It Has Rescued All Manner Of Rightwing Economic Nostrums From History's Dustbins. Having Rolled Back The Landmark Economic Reforms Of The Sixties (the War On Poverty) And Those Of The Thirties (labor Law, Agricultural Price Supports, Banking Regulation), Its Leaders Now Turn Their Guns On The Accomplishments Of The Earliest Years Of Progressivism (woodrow Wilson's Estate Tax; Theodore Roosevelt's Anti-trust Measures). With A Little More Effort, The Backlash May Well Repeal The Entire Twentieth Century.

Most Of Roosevelt's Innovations Have Been The Law Of The Land For 70 Years Now, And Yet We Are Still A Free Society Free Enough, That Is, To Allow Tens Of Thousands Of Protesters To Gather On The National Mall And To Broadcast Their Slogans And Speeches To The World Via C-span.

When Done Right - Or Wrong, Depending On How You Look At It - Deficits Remove Liberal Options From The Table. Suddenly There's No Money For Building Bridges Or Inspecting Meat. Not Surprisingly, Running Up A Deficit Is A Strategy Favored By The Wrecking Crew For Its Liberal-killing Properties.

Acknowledging Class Was Always Difficult For 'new Democrats' - It Was Second-wave, It Was Divisive - But 2008 Made Retro Politics Cool Again.

We Are Watching Industries Crumble, Wall Street Firms Disappear, Unemployment Spike, And Unprecedented Government Intervention. And Our Designated Opinion Leaders Want To Know: Is Obama Up This Week? Is He Down? And Is His Leadership Style More Like Bill Clinton's, Or Abraham Lincoln's?

Opinion Leaders

As You May Recall, Truman Was Extremely Unpopular When He Finally Left Washington In 1953, Thanks Largely To The Korean War. Today, However, He Is Thought To Have Been A Solidly Good President, A 'near Great' Even, In The Terminology Of Those Surveys Of Historians They Do Every Now And Then.

In America, We No Longer Have An Institutionalized, Organized Way Of Calling Business To Task - Of Taking Them To Account For What They've Done - And This Is Especially True In The Cultural Realm.

The Thing Now Is To Seem Concerned In A Vaguely Social-democratic Way.

People Are Born In A Certain Place, And In A Certain Society. I Don't Mean To Sound Like A Determinist, But To Think We're Entirely Free To Do Whatever We Want Betrays A Certain Class Perspective. For Most People Who Have To Work For A Living, And Work At Jobs Under Conditions They May Not Like, It's Just Not Simple When It Comes To Freedom.

There Is No Higher Claim To Journalistic Integrity Than Going To Jail To Protect A Source.

Journalism Has A Special, Hallowed Place For Stories Of Its Practitioners' Persecution.

The Great Fear That Hung Over The Business Community In The 1970s Was Death By Regulation, And The Great Goal Of The Conservative Movement, As It Rose To Triumph In The 1980s, Was To Remove That Threat - To Keep Osha, The Epa, And The Ftc From Choking Off Entrepreneurship With Their Infernal Meddling In The Marketplace.

Americans Have Known About Mounting Inequality And King-sized Wall Street Bonuses For Years. But We Also Had An Entire Genre Of Journalism Dedicated To Brushing The Problem Off.

Media Bias Has Been A Favorite Theme Of The Right For Decades, Of Course.

Bad Government Is The Natural Product Of Rule By Those Who Believe Government Is Bad.

Back In The Days When The Market Was A Kind Of Secular God And All The World Thrilled To Behold The Amazing Powers Of Private Capital, The Idea Of Privatizing Highways And Airports And Other Bits Of Our Transportation Infrastructure Made A Certain Kind Of Sense.

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It Is Always A Disappointment To Turn From Forthright Consideration Of Some Subject - Whether From The Left Or The Right, A Poet Or A Plumber - To The Beltway Version, In Which The Only Aspects Of The Issue That Matter Are The Effects It Will Have On The Fortunes Of The Two Parties And The Various Men In Power.

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Promises To Get Beyond Partisanship Are The Most Perfunctory Sort Of Campaign Rhetoric, Almost As Empty As The Partisanship Itself.

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They, The Conservatives, Are The Real Outsides, They Tell Us, Gazing With Disgust Upon The Ludicrous Manners Of The High And Mighty. Or, They Tell Us, They Are Rough-and-ready Proles, Laughing Along With Us At The Efforts Of Our Social "betters" To Reform And Improve Us. That They Are Often, In Fact, People Of Privilege Doing Their Utmost To Boost The Fortunes Of A Political Party That Is The Traditional Tool Of The Privileged Is A Contradiction That Does Not Trouble Them.

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Money Never Seems To Be Interested In Strengthening Regulatory Agencies, For Example, But Always In Subverting Them, In Making Them Miss The Danger Signs In Coal Mines And In Derivatives Trading And In Deep-sea Oil Wells.

Vote To Stand Tall Against Terrorists ; Receive Social Security Privatization . Vote To Strike A Blow Against Elitism; Receive A Social Order In Which Wealth Is More Concentrated Than Ever Before In Our Lifetimes , In Which Workers Have Been Stripped Of Power And Ceos Are Rewarded In A Manner Beyond Imagining.

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Government Is, By Its Very Nature, A Destroyer Of Liberties; The Obama Administration, Specifically, Is Promising To Interfere With The Economy And The Health Care System So Profoundly That Washington Will Soon Have Us All In Chains.

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