Review of "Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right," by Thomas Fran

 Review of

Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, by Thomas Frank, ISBN 9780805093698

Five out of five stars

To the failures went the spoils

 This is an amazing book about an incredible event. In September 2008 the Lehman Brothers financial institution collapsed into bankruptcy, triggering the bursting of a financial bubble that vaporized trillions of dollars of paper assets. The bubble was fueled by cheap credit and lax lending standards that were possible due to extensive financial deregulation by Congress. What some have said would have been a second coming of the Depression was averted when the federal government immediately stepped in and funded a massive bailout of the financial system as well as several businesses deemed “too big to fail.”

 If history were to be followed, the perpetrators of this debacle would have been drummed out of their industry and forced to lose both face and assets. Furthermore, there would have been the passing of significant legislation to re-regulate the financial industry so that such an event could not happen again.

 As Frank states very clearly with solid references, while there was a short-term backlash against the perpetrators and the laws that allowed them to do it, the pressure to fix the system did not last long. While newly elected president Barack Obama made a lot of noise about fixing things, his choices of Wall Street operatives to run the economic show blunted any attempt to fix things.

 Furthermore, within two years there was the historical anomaly that the very people that created the circumstances of the financial bubble were ultimately rewarded with federal dollars. There also arose a movement that was ultimately covered by the phrase “Tea Party.” It was a movement heavily funded by the right wing and grew very noisy and powerful quickly so that there was a powerful Republican resurgence in the Congress.

 All of these events are discussed and at least partially explained by Frank. Some of the reasons for the rise of the Tea Party are still not fully understood, so this lack of a full explanation is understandable. In a case of history repeating itself, many of the facts and situations explained by Frank in 2012 have been repeated in the intervening years. The members of the far right have been emboldened, even when they seemingly don’t have enough power to overturn several liberal social icons. Frank is also correct in scolding the Democrats for being very slow and clumsy in reacting.

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