How the Clinton-Obama Complex Gave Us Trump, And a New Thomas Frank Book Rendezvous With Oblivion

"Over the last month I have tried to describe conservative power in Washington, but with a small change of emphasis I could just as well have been describing the failure of liberalism: the center-left’s inability to comprehend the current political situation or to draw upon what is most vital in its own history.

What we have watched unfold for a few decades, I have argued, is a broad reversion to 19th-century political form, with free-market economics understood as the state of nature, plutocracy as the default social condition, and, enthroned as the nation’s necessary vice, an institutionalized corruption surpassing anything we have seen for 80 years...

When you view the world from the satisfied environs of Washington — a place where lawyers outnumber machinists 27 to 1 and where five suburban counties rank among the seven wealthiest in the nation — the fantasies of postindustrial liberalism make perfect sense. The reign of the 'knowledge workers' seems noble.

Seen from almost anywhere else, however, these are lousy times. The latest data confirms that as the productivity of workers has increased, the ones reaping the benefits are stockholders. Census data tells us that the only reason family income is keeping up with inflation is that more family members are working.

Everything I have written about in this space points to the same conclusion: Democratic leaders must learn to talk about class issues again. But they won’t on their own. So pressure must come from traditional liberal constituencies and the grass roots, like the much-vilified bloggers...

The more comfortable option for Democrats is to maintain their present course, gaming out each election with political science and a little triangulation magic, their relevance slowly ebbing as memories of the middle-class republic fade."

Thomas Frank, Rendezvous With Oblivion, NYT 2006

This guest opinion piece from Thomas Frank in 2006 seems particularly prescient in retrospect today.  It provided the name for a newly published collection of his essays.

This first video interview below is also reprise, but it is so insightful, so spot on, that I thought it would be useful to bring it back now ahead of the fall elections.  It is from that great series of interviews on Reality Asserts Itself.

How soon we forget, with all the distractions and dog and pony shows served up.

Not that the corporate wing of the Democratic Party will listen to reason. The pay is too good, and they will fight to retain their privileges until the bitter end.

They may begin to fake listening to their own broad base, not just the millionaires, more aggressively.  They are good at faking concern and feeling your pain while doing very little.

Change will come only as the Progressives turn the party over on its head from the bottom up, at the primary ballot box and the elections.

Obama was a well polished and timid sell-out, from his first 100 days.  But Bill and Hillary were  venal carnies from the first.    I never voted for either of them.  But I have family in Arkansas, and their nature was well established back then.

And may have been proto-fascists too, if you remember the two highest profile law enforcement actions of the Clinton administration: Waco and Ruby Ridge.

Obama was not much better if one recalls the brutal way in which dissent was suppressed under him, with the historic use of Espionage Act, and the coordinated crushing of Occupy movement and just about anyone else who stood against him.   Like so many verbally acute figures he was given over to paranoid overreach when words failed.

So whenever a hard core Democrat tells me how awful the Trump voters are, and there are some pretty ugly actors in that crowd, and how tragic it is that they failed the country at the polls, I want them to remember this video.

Make no mistake, Trump is embarrassing, and anyone with a view to history can see the damage he is doing with his dilettante, con man's approach to policy.   I forecast that in their anger and frustration people would grab the wrong solution from the shelf, and here it is.

But all things considered, we can thank the arrogant willfulness of Hillary and her corporate stooges for it.   The rise of a demagogue almost always owes something to the long term failure of the governing elite to stand up to the predations and depredations of the rich and the heartless.   And alas, the GOP sold their souls to the moneyed interests long ago, and are beyond redemption.

Thomas Frank has published a new collection of previously published essays titled Rendezvous With Oblivion.  The title comes from a column he wrote for the New York Times in 2006.

A video interview of this new book is included below in the second video.  The interview is an update on the state of US politics, and the Democratic Party in particular. The book is a thematic collection of previously published columns.

I think he could have done a bit more with the material in terms of updating and showing how what he has previously said, and foretold, is unfolding.

The Democratic establishment and highly placed party functionaries do not want to change—   they are dedicated to their own personal power and control, and all about getting paid off first and foremost. 

And their greed is killing us.





Thomas Frank discusses his new book, Rendezvous With Oblivion.




And for good measure, here is a specific discussion of the details of the election blunders and fatal complacency fueled by arrogance and disdain for the common people.

Thomas Frank on the Democratic Party, Their Credibility Trap, and the Beleaguered Middle Class

“In its quest for prosperity, the Party of the People declared itself wholeheartedly in favor of a social theory that forthrightly exalted the rich—the all-powerful creative class.

To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you’ll need in the society of the future.

Professional-class liberals aren't really alarmed by oversized rewards for society's winners; on the contrary, this seems natural to them -- because they are society's winners. The liberalism of professionals just does not extend to matters of inequality; this is the area where soft hearts abruptly turn hard.

Of course Republicans do it too. The culture wars unfold in precisely the same way as the liberal virtue-quest: they are an exciting ersatz politics that seem to be really important but at the conclusion of which voters discover they've got little to show for it all besides more free-trade agreements, more bank deregulation, and a different prison spree.”

Thomas Frank


"What is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class."

Alexis de Tocqueville


"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.  Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason.  But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right.  The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich."

John Kenneth Galbraith

The examples of the credibility trap are apparent, especially in the Democratic Party because their own contradictions are so glaring.  It is harder to see in the Republicans because their hypocrisy in serving the wealthy faithfully in economic matters while duping the public with inflammatory cultural issues is almost a trademark.

But as Frank relates, the middle class is being badly abused and neglected by both professional political parties.  And this is unfortunate, because it is a strong and stable middle class that provides a large social organization its coherence and durability.

I do not see meaningful reform coming until the status quo in American party politics is repudiated and renewed again with a more democratic focus on people.

The powerful, those who built and have been fabulously rewarded by the current system, will oppose any threat to their exorbitant privilege, which they see as perfectly equitable and justified and fully well-deserved, with all the wiles and power moves that they can deploy, even against their own.

When one has all that a normal person could possibly need and even want, those who continue on playing for blood, who are generally 'afflicted'  in some manner— for those personalities it becomes all about the game, and winning for its own sake, and power.  And there will never be enough people and things to fill their emptiness.

This growing dichotomy, this gulf between appearance and reality, between policy and outcomes, will not only strain the social fabric, but historically is the kind of human dynamic that can light a fire in hearts and minds, despite increasingly desperate attempts to discredit, suppress, and then extinguish it.

And there are too often consequences that no rational person would wish happen.  And yet they do, and with some striking, almost cyclical, regularity.  Such is the weakness of human nature, and the wonderful power of self-delusion.

Another More Terrible Financial Crisis Is Coming— For the Benefit of a Few

"So we may not be that far away from the next bubble bursting, and I could imagine, if I think about policy, what we just talked about, with the end of a recovery cycle, we’ve pumped $4 trillion in this country, $30 trillion globally, into the economy with monetary policy.   So that’s tapped out.

We are now using fiscal policy to overheat a late-stage recovery in order to keep the Republicans in office.  We are doing nothing to bolster underlying growth with educational reform, infrastructure reform, et cetera."

Rana Foroohar, The Rich Have an Escape Plan


"I think it’s important in the power of finance and how pervasive this is throughout the economy, this has very little to do with Republicans and Democrats. In fact, some of the key opening doors for finance happened in the Clinton administration."

Paul Jay, Clinton's Committee To Save the World Unleashes Wall Street

Rana Foroohar is an associate editor and global business columnist for The Financial Times, and CNN’s global economic analysts. She’s the author of Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business.

Thomas Frank Interviews 7 and 8 with Paul Jay on the Real News Network

Here is the two part continuation of the interviews on the Real News Network between Paul Jay and Thomas Frank.

Frank has the Clintons nailed, and continues to reiterate the high points of how they led the Democratic Party into an historic betrayal of their base, the working people.  For money and power.

However, he is far, far too kind, almost to the point of what can be called a willful bias, to Barack Obama.

I am sorry, but can it be more obvious that Obama was a bait-and-switch brand for the oligarch class?

He seems to come back to a more realistic assessment in the second segment.  But he just cannot bring himself to draw the conclusion that Obama was not some hapless dupe, a victim of circumstance, but knew exactly what he was doing, and early on had made his choice of what or whom to serve.

It is very hard to assess motives to a series of actions.  Was it due to the bullet or the bribe?  Was it a foregone conclusion from the very first?  But at some point the circumstantial and particular evidence can become overwhelming.

He’s afraid of what happened to Martin Luther King Jr. And I know from a good friend who was there when it happened, that at a small dinner with progressive supporters – after these progressive supporters were banging on Obama before the election, 'Why don’t you do the things we thought you stood for?' Obama turned sharply and said, “Don’t you remember what happened to Martin Luther King Jr.?” That’s a quote, and that’s a very revealing quote.

Ray McGovern

The Democrats love to blame those diabolically crafty Republicans, the evil and omnipresent Russians, the weakness of virtue in the face of implacable darkness.

But for a variety of reasons, the liberal intelligentsia cannot bring themselves to accept the fact that our first 'black president,' articulate, well-educated, and charismatic, for whatever reasons, quickly became a willing tool of the moneyed interests.  Paul Jay flat out says, 'Obama is too sacred to touch.'

And the 800 pound gorilla in the room, who is incredibly never mentioned, who was a phenomenon in the presidential primaries, is Bernie Sanders.  They did manage a passing nod to Elizabeth Warren, however.  Paul Jay kept trying to bring the conversation back to Obamas ongoing role in crushing the Sanders progressive wing of the Democrats, but Frank cannot help but run away from it, back to the more comfortable areas of liberal outrage like W.

There seems to be a lot of that going around, however.  The supporters of Trump are buying into his populist mystique, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that he is a long time friend of big money, albeit a much clumsier deceiver and liar. 

Ah the wonderful ironies of the credibility trap.  

And how easy it is to see the hypocrisy and expedient rationalizations of the other guys. Which is why we must examine our own souls first before we would seek to harshly criticize another.

Don't get me wrong. I find both Thomas Frank and Paul Jay to be absolutely spellbinding, and much more intelligent and articulate than myself. It is just what, a comfort, to see that even the professionals and highly talented have the same human foibles as ourselves.

Where will all this end, this tragic overreach by the rich and the powerful?  History and human nature both suggest that the truth cannot be admitted, and then faced and overcome, until one hits bottom.

I have embedded episode 7 here.   You can click on the link below this to go to the RAI site for episode 8 and presumably an episode 9 when it appears.





Click here for episode 8.

Here is a link to the Reality Asserts Itself series on the Real News Network.

Hillary as President: Robert Reich vs. Nomi Prins

I am so very glad that Pam and Russ Martens have written this article below.   I had intended to write something on this topic, and I probably would not have done it nearly so succinctly and so well.

The excerpt below is just a taste of a longer and more interesting piece, and I suggest that you read it.

While the Republicans are temporarily fragmenting along lines of personal ambition and various billionaire special interest groups, the Democrats are continuing to split between the Wall Street and populist progressive wings.   

And The Clintons are the unabashed leaders of the big money wing of the party.  With regard to the most recent series of financial crises, the Clinton's set the stage, and Bush II enacted it.

It seems likely that if unchallenged, the party bosses will be running roughshod over the concerns of the progressive and reform-minded elements of their constituency.

Another election of Bush v. Clinton would be a suitable emblem for the decline of democracy.

The next election, I believe, will be the opening act in an interesting decades long evolution of the American Republic.

Wall Street On Parade
Debating Hillary for President: Robert Reich v. Nomi Prins
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 25, 2015

Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary in Bill Clinton’s administration and currently Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, is an important voice for tackling income inequality in America by bringing back the Glass-Steagall Act, busting up the too-big-to-fail banks, and imposing a securities transaction tax...

Unfortunately, Reich, an otherwise clear-eyed progressive has a deep blind spot. Her name is Hillary Clinton...

There is one person in America who might be able to change Robert Reich’s mind about Hillary before he blows his otherwise stellar work on taming Wall Street with an unwise gambit of getting deeper into the Hillary camp. That person is Nomi Prins, a Wall Street veteran and meticulous researcher on the democracy-shriveling nexus between Wall Street and the Oval Office...

A column by Prins on Hillary Clinton’s Presidential attributes was posted to Paul Craig Roberts’ web site last Friday. It is not the detail-lite version on Rubin. Prins writes:

“When Hillary Clinton video-announced her bid for the Oval Office, she claimed she wanted to be a ‘champion’ for the American people. Since then, she has attempted to recast herself as a populist and distance herself from some of the policies of her husband. But Bill Clinton did not become president without sharing the friendships, associations, and ideologies of the elite banking sect, nor will Hillary Clinton. Such relationships run too deep and are too longstanding…

“Though she may, in the heat of that campaign, raise the bad-apples or bad-situation explanation for Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis of 2007-2008, rest assured that she will not point fingers at her friends. She will not chastise the people that pay her hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop to speak or the ones that have long shared the social circles in which she and her husband move…”

Read the entire article at Wall Street On Parade here.