book Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right By Thomas Franks - Metropolitan Books
Best known for his book What’s the Matter With Kansas?, analyzing the paradox of middle class Americans voting against their own interests, Thomas Franks turns his attention to the recent Tea Party phenomenon, and that monumental paradox of victims of a Wall Street-induced Great Recession rallying for unfettered free enterprise at the precise moment it “has proven itself to be a philosophy of ruination and fraud.” His answer is unconventional. While other commentators note the apocalyptic tendencies of Tea Party members, Franks writes that they’re really utopian, and their utopia is a free enterprise that never was or could be. So facts don’t interfere with their faith in it. Franks shows how this utopia is based on the idealization of small businesses, which unfortunately has little to do with super-corporate capitalism and international finance. But to adherents, free enterprise failures are due to sinister forces: Big Government and its “crony capitalism” partners, socialism and liberals in general. This conviction feeds a closed circuit of grievance and self-pity, which Franks say “has become central in the consciousness of the resurgent Right.” Victims of the class warfare conspiracy include the world’s wealthiest capitalists — “the persecution of the Koch Brothers,” who fund right wing causes and candidates with their fossil fuel fortunes. “Pity these billionaires, reader.” Franks illuminates a related mystery, the phenomenon of Glenn Beck. The first time I saw Beck on TV I knew he was principally an actor, and Franks adds the telling detail that Beck’s hero is actor/director Orson Welles, particularly for his War of the Worlds radio broadcast which panicked listeners who thought the Martian invasion was real. According to Franks, Beck relentlessly cast liberals as the Martians, and Barack Obama as leader of the alien invasion. Besides being entertaining enough to slightly distract from the depressing content, Franks’ overall analysis is nuanced, complex and convincing but still incomplete. He doesn’t fully explain the logical connection between free market utopianism and fundamentalist Christianity. But most importantly, he barely mentions race as a factor — which is especially puzzling to me, since it was by reading Franks’ earlier work that I recognized the suburban euphemisms and undercurrent of dog whistle racism that seems to me to be a very big part of what’s going on now. Franks faults Democrats for not acting more forcefully and failing to provide a compelling Great Recession explanation, creating a vacuum that the Tea Party filled. His account ends with the infamous debt ceiling fight. Since then the Tea Party has waned, Occupy Wall Street has risen, and a liberated President Obama has a different kind of populist message. Still, this book provides useful explanations for Mitt Romney’s candidacy and Newt Gingrich’s politics of rage and grievance. — William Kowinski
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The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 Directed by Göran Olsson Sundance Selects
The making of the excellent documentary, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, an artfully edited collage of unearthed archival film footage, came by accident. “There was a rumor around for years among filmmakers that Sweden had more archive material on the Black Panthers than the entire USA,” said Göran Olsson, the film’s director, interviewed in the British film magazine, Sight & Sound. “A couple of years ago I was working on a film on Philly soul and was browsing the archives at Swedish Television — and found out that it was true.” The Black Power Mixtape focuses on the principle leaders of the Black Power movement, including Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton, consisting mostly of film footage not seen since it was initially aired in Sweden. Presented in a chronological timeline, the documentary begins with Carmichael, the quickwitted, charismatic leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who popularized the phrase, “Black Power.” Though he worked extensively with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the early ’60s, by ’67, Carmichael was moving away from King’s “non-violent” credo. “He made one fallacious assumption,” Carmichael says, speaking to an audience in Stockholm. “In order for non-violence to work, your opponent has to have a conscience. The United States does not.” The assassinations of King, Medgar Evers and Robert Kennedy provided fuel to the fire for a number of bright, young, intelligent and angry members of the African-American community during a turbulent period — with the Vietnam War, race riots and Watergate. We see Davis, appearing sleep deprived and pale while incarcerated in a San Francisco jail charged with a death penalty crime (she was later acquitted), speaking of a fight for goals that reach beyond the African-American community, like King’s. The aim was for overarching justice for all people: free schools and lunches, gainful employment, a living wage, the end of the war and the eradication of racism. In addition to voice-overs from survivors of the movement, like Davis, Kathleen Cleaver and poet Sonia Sanchez, The Black Power Mixtape also includes younger voices, such as musicians Erykah Beduh and Questlove (who contributes to the film’s soundtrack). It’s chilling to hear Harry Belafonte’s present-day voice as he speaks of anticipating King’s death after he spoke out against the Vietnam War and the domestic conditions of the poor. “All of these things put a huge bulls-eye on Dr. King because he was now tampering with the playground of the wealthy. He had to go.” The documentary asks a key question: How free is freedom in this country? There’s an irony in how some Swedish journalists viewed the lives of AfricanAmerican communities with such openness, and near innocence, where most of the U.S. mainstream media simply ignored — or feared — that world. — Mark Shikuma
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