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Sunday Monitor
today
KPFT www.kpft.org or, in Houston, 90.1 FM
7 pm Eastern ... 6 pm Central ... 4 pm Pacific
GUEST: Thomas Frank, plus snippets of Jim Hightower.
Show starts with headlines. Frank may start around 25 after the hour.
What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
His new book is in the top fifty at Amazon.
He grew up in Kansas, was a conservative as a young man. He has written:
What we are observing, then, is a populist movement that has done irreversible harm to the material interests of the common people it professes to love so tenderly--a form of class animosity that rages against a shadowy "elite" while enthroning a new aristocracy of bankers, brokers, and corporate thieves.
In his book --page 128-- he writes:
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.
He says that David Brooks writes that thinking about class is somehow Marxist.
From a review: Tom Frank marveled at how a rural state that saw 50 of its 105 counties lose population between 1990 and 2000 keeps getting tricked into electing politicians who rail against abortion while cutting taxes on corporations that send jobs overseas. Abortion, he said, hasn't gone away, but the jobs sure have.
Cracks the great political mystery of our time: how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans; building the most unnatural of alliances: between blue-collar Midwesterners and Wall Street business interests, workers and bosses, populists and right-wingers.
"The trick never ages, the illusion never wears off," Frank wrote. "Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital-gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization efforts. 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 rewarded in a manner beyond imagining."
From another review: The Republican Party has skillfully trademarked American morality as being exclusive to its own domain and has lassoed Christianity to its bumper, all the while championing economic policies and stances to the poor that are entirely antichristian, and absolute poison to many. Frank: "The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate."
Tune in. Or, if you miss it, check it out the archive at www.kpftx.org
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