A Wall Street Bailout Wouldn't Help Anyone But Rich Investors

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted September 27, 2008.

According to a Sept. 19 New York Times article titled "Putting a Price Tag on a Government Bailout:"

• The government is considering an $800 billion fund to purchase so-called failed assets.
• It is considering a separate $400 billion pool at the FDIC to insure investors in money market funds.
• It pledged $29 billion to help JPMorgan acquire Bear Stearns.
• It agreed to buy as much as $200 billion of stock in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
• The Federal Reserve offered an $85 billion bridge loan to AIG.
• The Federal Reserve joined with other nations to pump $180 billion into global money markets.
• The Treasury Department promised $50 billion to insure the holdings of money market mutual funds for a year.

In his new book, The Wrecking Crew, Thomas Frank writes:

We can now say of that philosophy which regards good government as a laughable impossibility, which elevates bullies and gangsters and CEOs above other humans, which tells us to get wise and stop expecting anything good from Washington -- we can now say with finality that it has had its chance. Whenever there was a choice to be made between markets and free people -- between money and the common good -- the conservatives chose money. It's time to make them answer for it.

Frank, founding editor of the Baffler magazine and a contributing editor at Harper's, is the Wall Street Journal's newest weekly columnist. He is also author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, The Conquest of Cool and One Market Under God.

Terrence McNally: Your first book was about advertising; your last book was about voters and culture, and in this book you take on the Republicans and the methods of their madness over the last 30 years. What's the evolution for you personally?

Thomas Frank: It's curious, isn't it? I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation about the advertising industry in the 1960s. And it was an interesting subject because it was about how Madison Avenue went from being so square in the '50s to being so goddamn hip and cool in the '60s, which of course they remain to this day.

TM: Most have forgotten the organization man in the gray flannel suit.

TF: Our whole commercial culture today is so much cooler than you or I could ever hope to be. In that book I said that coolness has become a kind of orthodoxy of the consumer society. I love coming out here to Los Angeles just to see this theory in action. It's such a shock when you come from Washington or Chicago. Coolness is a civic philosophy out here.

I started out studying culture and coolness and hipness. I was a punk rocker, and I rode my skateboard, and then I got interested in business culture.

I came to an important realization when I was writing The Conquest of Cool, which is, if you don't understand capitalism and business, you don't understand America.

At the time everybody wanted to be in Cultural Studies and talk about how everyone was dissenting by buying some different brand at the supermarket -- remember those days? And it dawned on me that they were just completely missing the boat. If you don't understand the way business dominates our politics and every other aspect of life, you don't understand this country.

I guess for everybody else in the world this realization was a no-brainer, but it took me a really long time to figure it out. While I was coming to that amazing epiphany, the new economy bubble was going, the dot.com froth. I was watching that unfold, and reading, among other things, the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page, but also Fortune magazine. Remember Fortune got up to 500 pages an issue back then?

TM: It was as big as Vogue.

TF: It was cooler than Vogue even. I would have CNBC on all the time. ... I was writing a book about the thinking of the new economy -- this kind of feverish overheated idea that we had turned some economic corner and that the old rules no longer applied and we didn't need the regulatory state anymore. That's what One Market Under God was about, and that led naturally into studying conservatism.

Because economic talk, whether it's on CNBC or in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, whether it's in Fortune or coming from a book like The Beardstown Ladies, a personal investment handbook. This is political.

It doesn't seem like it's political on the surface; maybe it's just some dude picking stocks. But it is political. It has a political agenda. And that's when I became interested in conservatism ...

... Well, I've always been interested in conservatism. As you know, I'm drawn to irony; everything I'm talking about here is an ironic situation filled with unintended consequences and everything turned upside down. So What's the Matter with Kansas was about the biggest irony in all of this -- the phenomenon of working-class conservatism. I don't want to say this has been an unexamined irony, because there have been great books written about this subject. But nobody's ever really gotten to the bottom of it, and I decided I would try that.

See more stories tagged with: economy, wall street, bailout, financial crisis

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org). Visit terrencemcnally.net for podcasts of all interviews and more.

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