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Jan. 21, 2017 - Jimmy Dore Show
58:42
20170121_The_Jimmy_Dore_Show_1-20-17
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Get ready for an outstanding entertainment program.
The Jimmy Dore Show!
Hi, this is Jimmy.
Hey, what are you?
Are you calling?
Hey, am I calling you?
Is this Vince Vaughan?
This is, oh, okay.
Yeah, this is Vince Vaughn.
Who's this?
Oh, hey, how are you doing, Vince?
It's Jimmy Dore.
I'm doing great, Jimmy.
I'm doing fantastic.
I'm glad you asked.
I just made Hacksaw Ridge with Bel Gibson, who, as you know, is a great man and a great patriot as well.
We're getting nominated, and it feels good.
I'm not going to lie, it feels very good.
And after Trump won the election, I took a sex tour of Southeast Asia to celebrate for three weeks.
And now I'm back stateside just in time to make America great again.
Oh, really?
How are you going to make America great again, Vince?
How am I going to make America great?
I'll tell you how, Jimmy.
I'm personally attending the fucking inauguration, aka America Balooza 2017.
That's how.
And it's not just me.
It's James Woods, John Voigt, and one Chuck Norris are taking a road trip to D.C. as we speak.
We're going to stay at the Wanner Ed Day Hotel when we get there.
We're going to get screwy with the Wild Turkey and reenact the Dixon break-in like Patriots.
And then we're going to have some women pee on us.
Hopefully women.
We're not even super picky about that.
James is particularly not picky about that point, I have to say, which I find rather hot, somewhat disturbing.
But we'll figure that out when we get there.
In the meantime, I have a question.
You do the road.
Do you know where we can get an eight ball in Zanesville, Ohio?
Asking for a friend who is also Ed Jalita's estrange father.
No, I do not know.
I was never a Coke guy.
Sorry.
You're worthless to me.
So listen, you guys are the actors who are also Republicans.
It's kind of an island.
You're kind of on an island, aren't you?
Well, yeah, you know what?
You know what I think about all these Hollywood celebs?
Guess what?
They need to shut it.
Nobody cares what the Gilmore girls think about shit, okay?
Nobody.
Not Americans or whoever, whoever we're talking about.
I don't know if you saw this, but I was there with the Golden Globes when Meryl Streep decided to run her mouth off.
Did you see that?
It was disgusting.
It was shameful.
You know what?
I don't think I could watch Deerhunter again.
I really don't think I can.
Well, you've already seen it, so you don't need to see it again.
I'm not even going to lie.
It's a great piece of cinema that Bears re-watching.
So listen, you don't know.
Unless they do a Meryl Street free edit.
You just said that the actors should shut it up.
Hollywood celebrities should shut up.
But aren't you a Hollywood celebrity yourself, Vince?
Correction, Seamus.
I live in Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, a bird you might be familiar with.
I'm not sure if you are or not.
Oh, that's right.
You're from there.
As you know, it's in the Midwest.
So I'm a real American.
I'm a family man.
I have guns and I own stocks.
I'm invested in this country.
I don't know about you, but I've invested.
I have equity in this country and its great industries.
What about you?
What do you do?
What's your, how are you American?
I pay taxes.
Do you pay taxes?
Yeah, we pay a lot of taxes.
Yes, we pay a lot of taxes.
That's how I'm American.
Yeah, well, do you have stocks?
I don't really think I have stocks.
No.
Well, talk to me when you're a real person.
Okay.
Now, Vince, I hear you say you lived in Chicago still, but I understood that you sold your penthouse.
You moved to La Cresena right out here by Pasadena, just outside Don's outskirts of Los Angeles, and you bought like a $3 million estate.
Did you move back to Chicago?
Well, you know what?
I like to think of La Creseta as the Chicago of the San Fernando Valley.
I get it.
It's where normal people live.
I like to be around normal.
I like to be around Americans because I live in America.
I am in America.
So I like to be around other Americans.
I think that makes me a normal person.
And if you are out here, I don't even consider it part of Los Angeles.
Clock President is a different thing.
It's where working people work and live, pay taxes, maybe fool around a little bit with their neighbor's wife, whatever.
Still a normal place.
So listen, aren't you worried at all about these cabinet picks?
You know what?
You mean Trump's cabinet picks?
You know what?
Looks good to me.
I don't give a shit.
Come on.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't give a shit.
I care less about the cabinet in the White House than the kitchen cabinets of my third home.
I don't give a shit.
Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban People, fine by me.
When's the last time you cared who the Secretary of the HUD was?
Honestly, be honest.
Or education.
Can you name them?
Yes.
Can you even name them?
Can you never name the previous?
No, no, nobody knows.
Nobody cares.
If the Secretary of Labor was named Biddy Bob McGee, I'd probably remember that briefly, primarily for humor reasons.
But then I completely forget it after a few weeks because it doesn't matter.
People are making a big deal about these snoozers because Trump picked them.
That's the only reason.
Otherwise, you wouldn't care who these people were.
Okay.
What do you said about the cabinet picks?
Well, I don't like any of them, but I never liked any of the cabin.
I didn't like pretty much any of Obama's cabinet.
I didn't like Arnie Duncan.
I think he's just as bad as Betsy Dutch.
I literally have no idea who that guy is.
He was Obama's Secretary of Education.
He tried to corporatize public schools also.
Take public money, give it to corporations.
You know what?
I say, good.
Make schools great again.
That's a bad idea.
We're all against it.
The profit move is the only thing that's going to save anything in America.
It's going to save the schools.
It's going to make the schools better.
Look at what the Profit Motivist does for our healthcare.
Now we get worse medicine and at twice the price as the rest of the world.
It's fantastic.
I'm healthy.
You sound good.
I don't know what the problem is.
Look, you feel that Trump will make America great again?
Well, how will he do that for you?
Me specifically?
If he is someone in the entertainment industry, it's going to be fantastic.
You know why?
Because war movies are going to be awesome again.
It always happens when you get a real patriot in the White House, like Reagan.
Those were the best war movies ever made.
Sid said, all the war movies, they're just gay.
They're all about how war was bad and men cried in them like babies.
Shameful.
Now they're going to be good.
It's going to go back to when war movies were good again.
Yeah.
Steven Seagal would punch an entire submarine in the face.
Fucking awesome.
It's going back to that.
And I'm going to be in it.
Hacksaw Ridge was just the tip of the iceberg.
I'm going to do nothing but war movies and make America look awesome.
And, you know, we're going to be fighting.
You know, we're not going to do the thing where we're like, oh, let's make North 3 the bad guy.
No, Arabs.
We're going to fight and fuck up Arabs in these war movies.
It's going to be great.
Well, listen, Vince, I'm glad you're glad.
I doubt that he's going to make America great again.
We'll see.
I got an open mind.
You watch Libby, Liberal Libby.
Yeah.
Okay.
That was a bad nickname.
I'm sorry.
I'll do a better one next time.
Thanks for calling in, though, Vince.
I really appreciate it.
We'll be talking again.
We'll be keeping tabs on this administration together.
Oh, definitely.
I'll be calling you rubbing his successes in your fucking face.
Okay, and I'll be showing you how he's actually a charlatan and selling out the people he claims to be helping.
But listen, you know, maybe you'll come do a live show sometime.
We sold out already for our January 30th show.
It's already all sold out.
Oh, really?
Maybe I'll show up.
Maybe I'll come in and drop in and say some shit.
Okay.
Yeah, you got it, Chestnut.
music It's the Jimmy Dore Show.
The show for...
...the kind of people that are...
...home bench maybe on...
It's the show that makes Anderson Cooper save.
It's hard to talk when you're kidding.
And now, here's a guy who sounds a lot like me.
Yeah.
It's Jimmy Dore!
It's Jimmy Dore!
Hey, everybody, happy inauguration day.
Hope you're enjoying it.
Hope you're enjoying it.
Today we have a special show.
We're going to interview New York Times best-selling author and journalist and historian Thomas Frank.
Thomas Frank has written one of my favorite new books called Listen Liberal.
He's also the author of a book I'm sure you heard of called What's the Matter with Kansas.
Well, he's written a new autopsy on what happened to the Democratic Party, exactly what happened, and it's excruciating.
He lays it out.
If you read this book, it will make you a radical.
That's all I'm going to say.
And it's really about how we got to Trump.
So there's no better day to do this than to talk with Thomas Frank, an amazing author who's written a couple of amazing books.
And his new book, his latest book is called Listen Liberal.
And it's really a history of how the Democratic Party shifted to the right, got in bed with Wall Street and the people they used to try to fight against and what happened and how we got Trump.
That's really what it's about.
So let's get to our interview with him.
And thanks, everybody who bought tickets for our January 30th show.
It's been sold out for a while now.
So yes, if you didn't get your ticket, it's a little too late.
But we're looking forward to seeing all the KPFK people, all the Pacifica listeners on January 30th.
That show's already sold out.
We have another show coming up in February.
Okay, so let's get to our Thomas Frank interview.
Okay, and it's my pleasure to have with us today the author of Listen Liberal.
It is Thomas Frank.
Now, he also wrote the book, What's the Matter with Kansas, which was widely talked about.
There was a time I couldn't turn on cable news without seeing him talking about it and everybody else talking about it.
Listen liberal, for some reason, I don't know what it is.
Maybe he can tell us.
I'm not seeing him as much in the mainstream news media as I used to.
So let me first welcome our esteemed guest, Thomas Frank.
How are you, Thomas?
Hey, I'm good.
I'm actually, I'm actually, I feel, it's funny that you bring that up.
I feel not only do I feel great, but I feel better than I did back in Kansas days.
Did you cut out dairy?
I think I'm better at the game now than I was then.
I hear what you're saying.
Okay.
Would you agree with my assessment that you were received much more warmly by the media over what's the matter with Kansas than you are with Listen Liberal?
Well, at first, the media really hated What's the Matter with Kansas because they thought it was inappropriate, you know, to title, to give a book that title, to go after certain political figures in the way that I did.
This is in 2004, remember?
This was one of the first books to really attack the conservative movement in that particular way.
And that was new.
And there was a lot of anger, you know.
But this one, the response, I mean, I'm not complaining, by the way.
Listen liberal is the book is selling and I'm happy.
But the mainstream, well, there's very little interest in it at all from the mainstream American media.
Now, I'm on TV in foreign countries all the time.
They're very interested in this because you see what's happening.
This is happening all over the world.
What's happened just happened here.
They're very curious about it.
But no, our own media in this country, this is how can I put it?
Critiquing the Democratic Party in the way that I did is not acceptable to them.
It's not something you're permitted to do, even if it's all accurate and true.
And it is.
I didn't make it up.
It's all true.
For instance, what did Rachel Maddow say to you about this book when she interviewed you about it?
She didn't.
Nothing.
Oh, you're kidding.
She didn't interview you.
That is so weird because she's the leading liberal voice and a road scholar.
You'd think she would have the number one writer who's a New York Times best-selling author who critiqued the Democratic Party.
She'd probably have him on every week.
Come somewhere to talk about something that's, especially right now in this tumultuous time where the Democratic Party is going through their autopsy right now.
You know, the autopsy of what went wrong.
And it turned out what went wrong was Russia.
Oh, oh, no.
Oh, okay.
I missed that.
So I didn't write about that.
Lots of people doing autopsies about the election.
And no, by and large, I'm not invited to participate in those.
There's no interest in that.
So the first paragraph says, liberals like to believe that if only Democrats can continue to dominate national elections, if only those awful Republicans are beaten into submission, then the country will be on the right track.
Unfortunately, this view fundamentally misunderstands the modern Democratic Party.
Explain to me what you mean by that.
Well, look, it's all self-evident now.
So that was written.
The book was published in March, you know.
I was at the time trying to persuade Democrats that their strategy for winning elections wasn't necessary.
I mean, it seems, it almost seems, you know, like a waste of time to talk about it now, but I was trying to persuade them that their strategy for winning national elections was not necessarily a good one.
You know, if you only focus on the presidential election and you figure you've got it in the bag no matter what all the time, it's going to lead to all sorts of, I mean, just in just in tactical terms here, to complacency.
I mean, which you saw in spades in the Hillary Clinton campaign, you know?
I mean, this is, these are people that just could not get, could not get excited about anything.
You know, the sort of unofficial slogan of the campaign was, America is already great.
It's like, it's like, it's just a recipe for putting people to sleep.
There's, you know, they were just completely out of touch with discontent.
You know, and you can't have a left party that's just so in such an in-your-face way, a party of the affluent and the well-to-do and of the contented.
You know, that doesn't work.
I mean, it'll work from time to time, you know, and these guys think, you know, by the way, Jimmy, did I tell you, I live here in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. And so I spent a lot of time.
I spent a lot of time around these people.
I mean, that's where all of this comes from.
And when I wrote this book, there's a lot of things that made me write it, but one of them was sitting there and listening to somebody explain to me the theory of what they called the coalition of the ascendant.
You remember this?
Yes.
And this is basically, this is basically the idea that Democrats could never lose national elections from here on, from here to eternity, they could never lose.
And so therefore, they didn't have to do anything.
They didn't have to serve anybody.
They didn't have to do anything different.
And the only people that they had to do favors for were Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Big Pharma.
This is who they had.
This was the, that was the swing vote of American politics.
That was the groups that they had to reach out to were these particular industries.
And you saw this with Hillary's campaign, where who was the group she was after?
She was trying to win over.
It's suburban, highly educated Republicans.
And, Well, that didn't work.
But it's look, at the end of the day, we have this.
I don't particularly like the two-party system.
You've read the book, so you know that I kind of hate the two-party system, but that's what we've got.
And the Democrats are the left party in that system.
And for a left party to do these things and to make itself into a voice of the contented, the voice of the affluent, the voice of the professional class, you can pull that off for a short, you know, a short amount of time, but in the long term, that's disaster.
We just saw it.
She lost to a man who had no business running for president.
You are correct.
So I want to start at the beginning.
If people actually knew what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama actually did, instead of what they think they did, or how those two guys made people feel inside, that they would be screaming bloody murder, which is what I've been doing ever since I read your book.
And before I've been doing this for quite a while, and then I read your book, and I actually would have to stop reading it for long periods of time because it would make me too angry.
I apologize for that.
Reading.
Look, I was just, I was doing my best to describe my own.
I'm like in my 50s now, and I'm trying to describe my frustration with this party, you know, as the years go by.
And I'm just going to repeat some of the stuff I've seen you say.
You've talked about how, you know, neoliberalism, capitalism is collapsing all over the world.
This is true to a certain degree.
They just went through this incredible, the system just went through this incredible crisis.
And it's, you know, we've come out the other end, but like in what kind of condition, it's not good.
Inequality gets worse all the time.
And we've got this left party in America that can't seem to, well, look, I'm talking in way too broad strokes here.
We should come down to particulars because you just said something very important.
If people knew what Clinton and Obama actually did, the actual policies of these guys rather than think about them in these hazy.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
It would make you very angry.
Very angry.
Can I take a step back here when I'm writing this book?
I did not read any of the Bill Clinton hate literature.
Like in the 90s, there are all these books put out by right-wingers about how he, you know, they accused him of murder.
They accused him of running drugs.
They accused him of ridiculous things.
And I didn't touch any of that stuff.
My critique of Bill Clinton all derives from books and journalism by his supporters and by his admirers.
That's what I used.
Yes.
And same with Obama.
That was the only way to be fair to these guys, I thought.
So let's start with Bill Clinton.
What happened was Ronald Reagan was very popular.
He started the beginning of the end for unions, middle class, and workers in America.
I point to the Patco strike where he fired all the air traffic controllers and he set he and Margaret Thatcher really ushered in neoliberalism.
They called it, you know, conservatism.
It was really what was the beginning of neoliberalism, which is this trickle-down screw over workers, outsource jobs.
And if it's good for Wall Street, it's good for America kind of thinking, which coincidentally, ever since that was instituted, the workers in America haven't seen a raise.
And all the wealth that has been generated in this economy has gone to the upper 10%, most of it going to the upper 1%.
And that our politics, that the end result of policy, it's been proven by the Princeton study, has no correlation with 90% of what the electorate wants.
There's 90% of what people want, the bottom 90% income earners, their desires are never reflected in legislation, except for the upper 10%, which is completely correctly correlated with how many people in the upper 10% want legislation and what actually gets passed.
So we're living in what Paul Krugman is exactly correct.
Paul Krugman will openly admit, Paul Krugman, a rabid Clinton supporter and Bernie Basher, will openly admit, which he's done on video, that we live in an oligarchy.
Yet his prescription lately to fix it is more oligarchy.
So I just wanted you to talk about what did Bill Clinton do that people don't realize what he did?
Because what he did was things that Republicans could only dream about.
The way that he passed NAFTA, a Republican couldn't.
The way he gutted welfare, a Republican couldn't.
And the way he exploded the prison population at the same time repealing the New Deal bank regulations.
Republicans couldn't do any of these things.
It took a Democrat who spoke the words of populism then to go back doors and do those things.
And you make the case that Bill Clinton was actually the greater evil in both of his elections.
Can you talk about the initial letdown of the American workers by Bill Clinton and the Democrats?
Absolutely.
Well, it's because it's because Bill Clinton got things done where a Republican never would.
And the things that he got done were profoundly bad.
But take a step back here.
What you said about Reagan and Thatcher, you're describing, that was, I was 15 when Reagan got elected, but you're describing my, that is the background of my entire adult life is the neoliberal term.
And this has been going on and it chugs on and it goes and goes and goes.
And my entire career has been concerned with explaining how this happened and how it keeps going and how we keep, why we keep voting for it.
And what's the matter with Kansas was one part of that story.
And this, this is really, this is the other part.
Okay.
Bill Clinton is an absolutely essential player in this story.
Okay.
If you read Clinton's, the books by Clinton's supporters and admirers, they say that he had five achievements as president, five big achievements.
He had a lot of little things.
He did all sorts of little things here and there, but he had five big things.
I'm going to go down the list real quickly.
NAFTA is the first one.
The crime bill of 94 is the second one.
Deregulation of banks, deregulation of telecoms is three.
Welfare reform is four.
And balanced budget is the fifth.
Okay.
There's two things about those achievements.
All of them are Republican.
Every single one of them is a Republican measure or in the case of budget balancing or Republican obsession or in the case of bank deregulation.
This is part of the Republican theology, the theology of free markets.
And then the other thing is every single one of these things, with the exception of the balanced budget, every single one of these things ended in disaster.
I'd say the balanced budget ended in disaster too, but that's arguable.
You can take both sides on that.
But the idea of balancing the budget in the teeth of a recession, which Clinton did, when we talk about, and by the way, this gets back to Krugman, who has a very interesting, well, I don't know if it's interesting, but when you talk about the push towards austerity now, when you saw it with Obama and you see it in Europe, these people turning towards austerity in the face as the answer to hard times, and you wonder why they do that, they always have one historical example that they can point back to where it was successful.
Clinton.
It's this guy.
It's like everything goes back to this guy.
It's extraordinary.
But these are all things that the Republicans wanted, but that they couldn't get.
NAFTA was negotiated by Republicans, but they couldn't pass it.
Remember, Congress in those days was controlled by old school Democrats, and they had controlled Congress since the 1930s, almost continuously.
And there's no way they were going to pass NAFTA.
It took a Democratic president, you know, with Rahm Emmanuel at his side, setting up his war room and doing all this stuff and steamrolling these guys to get it done.
Okay.
And you go over to the rest of them.
They're all essentially Republican measures where he was trying to out, like with the crime bill, he was trying to outdo the Republicans.
He was going to show that he was even tougher than them, you know, or welfare reform, which was another Republican.
Well, it was Republican legislation straight up.
I mean, all of these things were telecom deregulation, all of them.
Anyhow, every single one of them, catastrophe.
But this also leads to, you have a huge problem when you make that man's wife your presidential candidate, which is that you can't talk straight about these things.
You can't, you know, because you're too afraid of tarnishing the Clinton name, you know, the Clinton wing of the party.
You don't want to make them feel bad.
And this is, by the way, I mean, in my opinion, Hillary Clinton is the only one of the Democrats out there that Trump could have beaten.
Trump is a terrible candidate, like the worst presidential candidate we have ever seen.
But he had this one issue.
He had this one killer issue, trade.
It was absolutely, that's where, you know, he's out there turning union rank and file guys against their leadership.
You know, he's winning all these rural areas.
What the hell is going on?
It's because Hillary Clinton is uniquely vulnerable to that issue because of NAFTA.
And then additionally, because she's Secretary of State under Obama and negotiating the TPP.
And no matter what he says, how she twists and turns and recants and says she changed her mind and has had a change of heart and, you know, and says it in the most convincing way she can, which is not very convincing.
No matter what she says, she is stuck with that word NAFTA.
And by the way, this is, you know, NAFTA took some time to sink in.
People didn't realize, I mean, people were against it at the time, but it's only as the years passed and management would use it in contract negotiations with their unions and with labor of all kinds.
Be like, you know, if we don't like what you're doing, we don't, you know, if you complain in the factory, boom, we're moving, we're moving overseas because of NAFTA.
NAFTA lets us do that.
It was a weapon that they could use over their workers.
And today, you know, when I go around and talk to people, working class people, they hate NAFTA and they do not forgive Clinton for it.
They're still bitter about it.
I mean, probably more bitter now than they were at the time.
And what do you say?
What do you say to the people?
Because I've been on news panels with progressive news hosts who say that people in the Rust Belt have no idea what the TPP is or NAFTA.
Don't add nobody voted on that.
What do you say to those geniuses?
Well, I don't know about the TPP specifically, but we know how many people voted on the trade issue.
It was in the exit polls.
And I'm sure we'll be able to dig deeper into it as the time passes and more stuff comes out.
But for one thing, this is Trump's number one issue.
You know, he talks about it constantly.
If you watched his rallies, the whole rally would be about trade.
And he'd always come back to it.
He'd wander away and talk about something else, but then he would come back to trade.
Always comes back to this is the great betrayal.
This is when the Democrats slipped the knife between the ribs of their ally, organized labor, and workers, working class people in general.
And everybody knows it.
And what you just described is something, like I said, I live here in D.C., something I encounter all the time.
And it's basically the bad conscience of the Democrats.
They have, they will not admit this is a real issue.
You know, they say, well, you know, they come up with all sorts of, can I say bullshit on your show?
Yes.
They come up with all sorts of bullshit statistics to try to make the trade deals look good.
They, you know, they turn to sort of neoclassical economic theory to insist that trade deals can never do anything wrong.
They'll say anything.
It's funny that, you know, because this is their great betrayal.
This is when they turn to their former rank and file of the Democratic Party, the working class of this country, and said, you know, screw you.
And for whatever reason, they have never been able to walk that back.
And they will, it's psychologically basic.
Basically, the reaction that you just described and that I've been seeing all these years here in D.C. is a psychological reaction.
It's not related to facts or reality.
It's them trying desperately to rationalize a betrayal that they committed and that they are in turn committed to.
And that they will never walk back.
You sound very divisive.
Why do you keep pointing out where the Democrats have screwed over with unions and stuck a knife into the back of their base?
That's very divisive.
I don't know why you would do that.
Why are you such a purity guy?
Hey, did your purity handbook?
I'm glad to see your Democratic Purity Handbook arrive before Christmas, Thomas.
Hey, hope you're enjoying this great interview with Thomas Frank.
I was, of course, nervous to talk to someone who's smarter than me, as I always am.
He actually is a scholar.
But this is exactly what's needed.
But right now, I want to let everybody know that a great way to help support the Jimmy Dore show is to use our Amazon.com link.
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Now let's get to the second half of the show.
Welcome back to the second half of today's Jimmy Dore show.
We're having a special show.
We're interviewing New York Times best-selling author Thomas Frank, the author of What's the Matter with Kansas.
And his latest book, Listen Liberal, lays out what exactly happened with the Democratic Party, their shift to the right, why it happened.
And it's way worse than anyone really imagines.
And it really kind of lays out the case for why Trump happened.
So let's get back with our interview with best-selling author, journalist, historian Thomas Frank.
The intelligentsia, the writers from Atlantic, the jagoff hosts from MSNBC.
They're all, by the way, stunned that Trump won.
They don't understand why people don't want to vote for a corporatist warmonger with a history of screwing over and in your words, putting the knife in the back of unions.
And when I bring this up, I'm the guy who's creating division inside the Democratic Party.
No, the people who would be the people creating division inside the Democratic Party are the people screwing over the people they're asking to vote for them, which would be workers and former union members and people that are, you know, half the country is living in poverty or poor.
And when I say that to progressive news hosts, their mind explodes.
And you know what they say?
Do you, what sources are you citing?
And I say, apparently, your fingers are broken or your internet doesn't work anymore because Google half the country's poor, you fucking lazy journalist, and you'll find out.
Half the Democratic Party doesn't want to hear that.
And they're still smearing Bernie Sanders.
That is for sure.
That is for sure.
They don't want to hear it.
But you just described it in a very, you know, in a very poignant way.
This is something I have been arguing with them about for years, about the trade deals in particular.
And there's, you know, there's lots of people that have been working this vein and they can't get the time of day from the Democratic Party.
They have doubled down on their betrayal of labor.
Now, this is something that happened a long time ago, but ever since then, they've made themselves more and more and more into this, you know, the party of free traders.
But this is a really, really interesting point.
And I want to tell you what my take on all this is because people have, of course, said this to me: that they think that a journalist has an obligation to do party propaganda, essentially.
And they wonder why I'm not doing that.
I've never done that.
That's not my job as a journalist.
And before I was a journalist, I was a historian.
I gave up on academia, but I'm not going to give up on those values.
That would be crazy.
That's who I am.
I'm not part of a political party.
I mean, I'm registered to vote as a Democrat, but I'm not a party functionary.
I'm not a propaganda organ for anyone.
I work on what I want to work on.
And I come up with results that the material dictates.
That's not who I am.
So you're a party player.
So you're telling me you're an evidence-based journalist?
And isn't that funny?
I mean, because I am an opinion, I am an opinion writer.
I've never camouflaged that.
I editorialized all the time.
I relate, but I do.
But if I get facts wrong, I want you to tell me, Jimmy.
I mean, it's important to me to get stuff right.
So you would be one of those fact-based journalists.
So now it was revealed in the John Podesta emails, a whole cadre of quote-unquote progressive journalists who actually are not, who are actually doing exactly what you just described, being tools of propaganda.
Who are associated with the party or one of its yes.
One of the really interesting things about the Podesta emails was I had no idea how far the sort of tentacles went.
I mean, I always assumed that political parties were weak structures, you know.
And here we see, in fact, it's extremely elaborate.
Looking at those things really opened my eyes to how this city, how Washington works, how the political part, how the political parties work.
And also, you know, we also saw in what happened to Bernie Sanders.
But this year, I just want to say something.
So I'm, like I said, I'm 50 years old.
I've been around.
I have never seen the media as committed to a political candidate or as determined to play the propaganda game as I've seen them be this year.
Now, it's the candidate I voted for Hillary in the end, by the way, in November.
It's a candidate that I voted for.
It was still astonishing to me in a sociological sense, or in a historical sense, like that journalism has the nature of journalism in this country has changed.
Something really fundamental about it has changed.
And I have really not, and I don't think anyone has really got to the bottom of that, has really understood that or even made an effort to understand that.
So when you tell people like Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow that the nature of journalism has fundamentally changed, what do they say to you on air?
Well, nothing.
Like I said, so I haven't been on, I was on Chris Hayes's.
Last time I was on Chris Hayes's show was in March, I think it was when the book came out.
And we didn't talk about that.
We talked about other things, but you only get a few minutes.
Yeah.
Yeah, because they have to get to an empty podium of Trump.
They have to show that for 30 minutes.
Because that's the kind of brilliant journalism that's being done at our lefty news.
But, Jimmy, I used to be on there all the time.
So go ahead and tell me about your article.
It was in Harper's magazine.
And what I did was I read all the every op-ed or editorial the Washington Post ran about Bernie Sanders from January to June of 2016.
And because I was, you know, just reading the paper and kind of anecdotally, right, just sitting there at my breakfast table reading it every morning, I was struck by how negative they were about Bernie Sanders.
You know, it was a really peculiar thing, you know, because the people who work on their op-ed page have been there for years.
It's not like they brought them on in order to go after Bernie Sanders.
And yet there's this incredible anonymity among these people, right?
That was really strange.
And so I decided to look into it.
And I read all of these articles for Harper's Magazine.
I sat down, did LexisNexis search, read them all.
They were five to one against Bernie Sanders.
Five to one.
That's impressive.
For every one article they published saying something nice about him, they ran five attacking the guy.
And so I went through it and went through all the all the different sort of lines of attack that they took on Bernie Sanders.
Some of the columnists would take more than one, like three or four different ones, going after him from all of these different directions.
The reason it surprised me so much is because in my mind, Bernie Sanders is kind of a, he strikes me as a beloved elder figure.
You know, he's not the kind of guy that people should dislike.
And yet they, you know, they took this incredible dislike to him.
And then there's, you know, later, I didn't write about this, but there's, of course, Hillary hatred out there on the right, too, which is also a very interesting subject.
That's not my subject, but other people have written about that.
But this hatred of Bernie Sanders was, it was, it was irrational, basically.
There was something going on there that we don't really understand.
I mean, we do understand it.
We haven't got to my explanation for everything I've been saying, by the way.
Go ahead.
Class, social class, Jimmy.
So this is everything that everything, what I always come back to in my explanations for these things is, you know, historical sociology.
And the class in this case is the professional class.
So people with advanced degrees, people working in the knowledge industries.
And by and large, the Democratic Party has decided, and this was a conscious decision that they made back in the 1970s to dispense with working class voters and to instead cast their lot with this group, the affluent, you know, knowledge class professionals.
And, you know, You can see this to this day in places like Boston, Massachusetts, which is the sort of ground zero of the professional class.
You know, this is where big pharma is based there.
And there's all of this kind of, you know, knowledge industry ferment and computer industry, all this innovation stuff going on.
And this place is intensely, deeply Democratic, very, very satisfied by a candidate like Hillary Clinton.
She's, you know, exactly what they want in a politician.
But then you go to these, so another place that I've been spending time lately is in rural Missouri, you know, these counties that used to be Democratic and that are today, you know, Trump won them by like 75%.
And they're filled with former Democrats.
I mean, the state of Missouri, you know, this is Harry Truman country.
This is Dick Gephardt country.
And today it went for Trump.
Nowadays, you know, this last election went for Trump, but Donald Trump in this extraordinary, overwhelming sort of way.
These are the people that the Democratic Party does not care about, does not listen to, is not interested in their problems.
Now, they would like it if those people would vote for them.
You know, of course, they want as many votes as they can get, but they're not going to do any.
They're not going to actually compete for those people's votes.
That would require them to do very different things.
And they're not interested in that.
So you boil down what really happened to the Democratic Party and why we really don't have a party of workers anymore, the party of unions, which is why Trump won, which is why there's a feeling of I want to smash the establishment in America.
And that's why Hillary Clinton was the worst candidate at the worst time with the worst message and the worst personality in the history of America.
And that's why everybody's walking around scratching their head, hey, how did Trump win?
We've interviewed people who are minimum wage workers on this show from Virginia.
And he was a cook from a Waffle House who made $2 an hour.
And he said, you know, the people in the South, he said, I'm a redneck from the holler.
We don't have any delusions about Donald Trump.
We thought he was some loudmouth Yankee who should have got his ass whooped a long time ago.
But the fact that the people here voted for him means that we're really desperate because he was the only one at least saying something and no one else was even offering us anything.
And that message that doesn't sink through the stupid liberal class is mind-boggling.
And then when I mention this, again, I'm called divisive.
Meanwhile, their party elite is screwing over the people that they should be the most aligned with and they're losing elections at the presidency, the Senate, the Congress, state houses across the country.
They're wiped out.
But somehow it's not their message and it's not their neoliberalism.
Somehow it's because of people like me and Jill Stein.
That's awesome.
I love that.
But look, you took the words out of my mouth.
I mean, this election, yes, Hillary got more popular votes.
By all rights, she should have been president.
It still boggles the mind that she lost to this clown, you know, but this was a wipeout.
Okay.
It's not just the presidency.
Look, everybody thought they were going to take the Senate.
At some point, there was, you know, this was, this was also, everybody thought this was going to happen.
It didn't happen.
They're wiped out in state legislatures across this country.
I mean, it is extraordinary.
And this is wave.
How many conservative waves have there been?
Five?
You know, you go back to Nixon, then Reagan, then Gingrich, the Tea Party movement, George W. Bush, the Tea Party movement.
And it's, you know, one after another.
And it's like, when is this going to stop?
And it's all of it is based on progressively turning the white working class against the Democrats a little bit more each time.
A little bit worse each time.
By the way, I wrote about this some years ago.
Do you remember this?
What's the matter with Kansas?
This is what it was about.
This is what it was about.
And the Democrats essentially, for a while, they were interested in hearing that argument.
The part of it that they didn't want to hear, the last chapter of that book is basically the acorn of Listen Liberal.
This is the beginning of it.
This is the seed of it, where I say, we got to, you know, if we want to understand how this is happening, you know, we can laugh at those people in Kansas.
You know, they want to fight over the theory of evolution or something like that.
But ultimately, you have to look at the Democratic Party and why and how it has, how it's failed to, you know, how it's failed these people.
That is an enormous story.
And that side of the coin, they never wanted to look at.
And now look what's happened, you know.
And if what you're saying is true and they still don't want to look at it after this kind of disaster and they still don't want to know what went wrong and they still figure it out, you know, that's, that's terrifying.
That's almost as bad as Trump winning.
You know what they're counting on, though?
They're counting on Trump, I mean, being such a fuck up that he'll screw things up so quickly that they can't help but get back in, you know?
So, and that's, I hate to say it, but to a large degree, that's always been their strategy.
That's just wait for these guys.
Wait for these guys to screw up.
That's been their strategy since Reagan, and it's worked for him so far because if you remember, George Bush and Dick Cheney were so unpopular and the Republican Congress was so unpopular that in six years they flipped the Senate.
And then two years later, they got the full Congress, House and Senate to switch to liberal.
And then they got the president, a black guy with a Muslim name for fuck's sake.
His middle name was Hussein.
And they got him elected overwhelmingly because what did he promise?
He promised change.
And what did we get?
No change.
We got change on the outside.
That's exactly.
I'm rolling up my sleeves here because now we're getting into it.
But that's exactly right.
So, and I, by the way, I was, I was one of those, I was one of those, those Obama believers.
I went to graduate school in Chicago.
I lived in his neighborhood and used to see him at house parties.
And I loved that guy.
I thought he was the greatest thing in the world.
Me too.
And, you know, so I was a believer.
But I mean, what can I say?
So he continued the, I mean, the thing that he never lived down, that he never got over was continuing the Bush policy on the bailouts and on the banks and not coming down like a ton of bricks on Wall Street when they everyone thought that's what he was going to do.
We thought that's why we'd elected him.
And he had the country at his back.
The country would have backed him.
They were totally in support.
They were ready for that kind of showdown, some kind of Rooseveltian showdown.
He didn't do it.
He made friends with these guys.
He made friends with big pharma.
And by the way, that's another one that Trump was able to use on him.
And Trump did not talk about the sort of the bank stuff all that much, but he did raise the essential issue of accountability, which is this is one of the places where Barack Obama failed the worst.
It's like for average criminals, for people who lied on their mortgage application, yes, the FBI went after them.
Seriously, big time.
They rounded those people up and those people are in jail.
If you were a senior executive at one of these firms who is deliberately crafting fraudulent mortgages into a security that you're then selling to retirees in germany or something like that nothing happened your bank might have had to pay a fine but nothing happened to you You know, nothing happened to the individual.
There's no accountability for these people on top.
And this is something that Trump was able to did refer to all the time, especially when talking about, you know, Hillary Clinton and there's no accountability for this very senior figure in the Democratic Party.
Jesus Christ, what a disaster.
Sorry.
No, that's exactly right.
I think he's never lived that down.
I think that was a mistake that he never recovered from.
When you say that's a disaster that he, Barack Obama, never recovered from, the disaster of him not breaking up the banks and prosecuting the people responsible for it, which would guarantee it wouldn't happen again.
But the fact that he didn't prosecute them guarantees that those crimes will happen again, which is why one of the big reasons why you prosecute a crime is a deterrent to make sure it doesn't happen again.
But when you don't prosecute them, but instead do the exact opposite, make sure that they are getting their bonuses still, even when you're giving austerity to the rest of the country.
He made sure the bankers got their bonuses and they made those banks even bigger, which ensured that fraud would continue to happen, which just got revealed recently that Wells Fargo was practicing fraud on their own goddamn customers.
They had to fire 5,000 people.
Nobody went to jail, but they had to fire 5,000 people for committing fraud against their own.
So the whole goddamn thing has been based on fraud for a long time.
Nobody goes to jail and everybody gets a bonus.
But if you get caught selling Lucy's on the street, you'll be choked out by an agent of the state in broad daylight and killed on the street.
And no one will go to jail for that too.
Yeah, well, that's, I mean, we live in this world that's just incredibly punitive towards small-time criminals, as you just mentioned, incredibly punitive, you know, to the point of cops killing people.
And now, thankfully, there's a backlash against that, that no one, people won't stand for that anymore.
But no, that is exactly right.
And look, and the response that someone would make is, well, but Tom, how can you say that people should have been prosecuted?
You know, you have no idea if someone should be sent to jail or the cases were never brought.
And that's totally true.
But there's a million other steps that Obama could have taken.
You know, he didn't even investigate these people.
Where's the FBI agents?
Why are they swarming over these banks?
He had, as, you know, in the bailout authority, he had total authority to fire the senior executives of these banks.
That's what Roosevelt did in the bailout in the 1930s.
You know, just go in there and fire these guys.
If they didn't like the way a bank had been managed, boom.
Top management's gone.
Replace them with people of your own.
That would never happen today.
Can you imagine Barack Obama firing Jamie Diamond and General Motors?
It did happen to GM.
Obama did do it to GM.
He just wouldn't do it to Wall Street.
Now, why is that?
Why is that?
It's a really interesting question.
But he had no compunction about doing that.
So, Thomas, the way you frame it by saying that Barack Obama will never live that down by not doing what he was supposed to do, prosecute criminal bankers, the country was hurt so badly by that that he could never recover from the missed opportunity of doing that and the benefits of doing that to our economy.
He'll never got those benefits that would have came from that.
Of course, but it's, it's, I don't know what the, I mean, I think, yes, the country would have recovered faster if you just put Citibank out of business and a bunch of other companies like that.
Yes, I think that is probably true, but we just don't know.
We do know this, though, that there's no accountability for the people on top.
And so you give them a bailout and then you say basically there's blanket immunity for a class of Americans.
That is profoundly disturbing in a democracy.
And by the way, it's not just that.
There's a whole series of events in the course of the Obama administration that kept confirming that this was the case.
By the way, and compare it to the past financial episodes of financial fraud, the savings and loan debacle in the 80s, lots of prosecutions.
Lots of people got fired.
Lots of banks went out of business.
Enron, which is a case I know something about at the time, I was very involved in that and I wrote a lot about Enron.
George W. Bush was personal friends with Ken Lay and prosecuted him.
Prosecuted him.
Jeff Skilling went to jail.
He's still there.
But these guys who are doing things that are arguably much worse, much more consequential, there is no criminal liability.
And they didn't even get fired.
Like I said, there's many, many, many steps that Obama could have taken.
He didn't take any of them.
He didn't escalate it at all.
So this is the kind of thing that would make me have to stop reading your book when I would get to a point in the book like this.
Because in my mind, it was always, well, Barack Obama did the best he could, but he had these Republicans obstructing him.
And he got done the most that he could possibly get done.
And then I read your book and you time and time again show that, no, not only did Barack Obama not do what he was supposed to, he didn't even do the preliminary steps of what he was supposed to.
He didn't even do one-tenth of 1% of the things he could have done all by himself, meaning he could have had the FBI investigate these people.
He could have had them prosecuted.
He could have had them all fired.
He could have.
He could have fired them.
It was totally within his authority as the bailout agent.
Yeah.
You know, I remember Dilligan Radigan did a rant on MSNBC, which he was quickly fired for when he talked about how that the Wall Street economic system is built on extracting wealth from America.
It's just extract their, it's built on extraction.
That's our whole motto.
And he said, I'm just going to lay the cards on the table.
And he went on to say, they go, well, what would you do if you were President Obama?
They kept saying, what is he supposed to do?
And he said he should set up a nationalized bank with 2% blending with re-imported money.
And I didn't know what the hell any of that meant at the time.
So I had to go look it up.
And so Chris Hedges also makes the point that he could have set up national banks, 10 different national banks.
He could have capitalized them with $2 billion at 10 to 1.
And because my brother was a small business owner in Chicago, he's a construction.
And he kept saying, I can't get a loan.
Nobody will get, I can't finance projects because I can't get money.
I go, but what about all the TARP money they're throwing at the banks?
He said, that's not trickling down to us.
We can't get money.
And so what Chris Hedges says is they shouldn't.
So they should have set up 10 different regional banks, capitalized them with $10 to $1 billion, $2 billion.
And that would have brought back the economy way better.
And what Paul Krugman kept screaming about in the New York Times was that he just wanted a rational response to our economic problems.
And Barack Obama would not give us a rational response.
You're describing another thing that Roosevelt did, which was when he didn't like the, you know, when the bank itself, you know, when it was failing.
By the way, they put banks out of business in this country.
It happens all the time.
But for whatever reason, these banks at the very top were, again, immune from that sort of accountability.
It just wasn't going to happen.
But by the way, I heard that argument so many times that Obama can't act because Republicans have Congress.
And that's true.
Republicans, once they took control of Congress in 2011, really big legislative things were off the table.
But I heard that argument so many times that I started coming up with lists of things that he could do independently of Congress and things that would make a huge difference in people's lives.
And he never did them.
The first one, I mean, the one that's most obvious was NAFTA.
Obama said he was against, he wanted to renegotiate NAFTA in 08.
There's a famous debate with him and Hillary where they were both saying they were against NAFTA.
And one of the things that Obama says in this debate, it happened in Cleveland of all places.
I mean, because that's the side of the Trump's convention.
That's why I got interested in it.
Obama says the president can unilaterally walk out of NAFTA.
There's an escape hatch in NAFTA.
The president, you don't need Congress.
Obama says this in the debate.
You know something else he could have done, Jimmy?
You know what else he could have done?
Antitrust.
Another thing, nobody remembers this from 2008.
Nobody remembers this.
One of the reasons Obama beat Hillary in Iowa in 08.
Remember what a shocker that was?
Because Iowa is a very white state.
And here's this black guy from Chicago.
He comes in and he beats Hillary Clinton, the beloved, you know, standard bearer of the Democratic Party in Iowa, of all places.
How did he do that?
You know how he did it?
He went around.
He had a way of talking to small farmers.
He'd been in the Illinois legislature and he knew what their concerns were.
And the A number one concern of small farmers in America are farm monopolies, you know, these agricultural monopolies that control the price of everything.
If you go to sell your hogs or whatever, there's only like two buyers anymore, maybe only one where you live.
And you have to pay.
There's no competition, right?
So he talks to them about antitrust.
Guess what?
He doesn't have to get any laws passed to start enforcing antitrust.
Laws were passed 100 years ago.
They're all on the books.
It's up to the president to enforce them.
And every president since Reagan has declined to enforce them.
Well, all Obama has to do is go to Eric Holder and say, we're going to start enforcing this law again.
That's all he has to do.
Congress has no say in it.
He never did it.
He even promised to do it when he was running in 08.
And you wonder why all these rural counties all over America, like you look at a map of Iowa in 08 and how they went for Obama.
It wasn't just the cities and the college towns.
It was everywhere in Iowa or Wisconsin.
It was all the rural counties.
They loved Obama.
This year, all that enthusiasm is gone.
Why are you so divisive?
Why can't we're all supposed to?
I don't understand why you're being so divisive.
That's what's going to be said to you after this interview, okay?
So just get ready.
Don't read the YouTube comments.
I'm just letting you know, don't read the comments and stay off Twitter for a while because that's what people are going to be saying to you over and over and over.
Yellow.
Yellow?
Is this Yemi?
This is the Obama.
Oh, hi, Barack, President Obama.
You keep calling my show, and I can't help but tell you, I don't feel that excited about it anymore.
Huh?
Well, curl up your unhappy ass and laid some illegal pipeline.
Look at me.
I'm as happy as a guy who's about to move into the same Washington, D.C. neighborhood as Ivanka Trump and her lovely husband, Mr. Wall Street.
That's why we call him to his face, because he likes it.
And he's got a lot of money.
Well, that's the part of why I'm not excited to hear from you, Barack.
It's a disappointment, to say the least.
I know what you're saying, Jimmy.
We have our differences.
But when it comes to brass tax, we all have to learn to live with each other in a rich enclave next door to billionaires, surrounded by the Secret Service, away from real people and their problems.
How can you feel that way?
The Democratic Party's in shambles, and the country's about to be in the hands of a maniac.
Calm down, you pistachio-munching hamster.
Things are significantly better since I became president two terms ago.
Did you know that eight white millionaires now own more than half the world's wealth?
Yeah.
How is that better?
It used to be seven.
I think one of them died and left everything to his two sons.
See, things are incrementally getting less horrific.
You know, there's a lot more to that Barack Obama call, but you have to get the premium.
It's going to be in this week's premium, plus a lot of other stuff in this week's premium.
There's a lot more from Thomas Frank.
We talk for an hour and a half, Thomas Frank and I. And the stuff coming up in the premium, even better.
Jimmy, no kidding?
Ah, yes.
So how do I get the premium?
You go to JimmyDoorComedy.com.
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So I'll let you know when that's happening, but that will be very soon.
Okay, well, guess what?
Today's show was written.
That's right.
It was written by Mike McRae, Robert Yasimura, Jim Earle, and Mark Van Landuit.
All the voices today performed by the one and the only, the inimitable, Mike McRae, who can be found at mikemcray.com.
That's it for this week.
Until next week, this is Jimmy Door saying you be the best you can be, and I'll keep being me.
Do not freak out.
Do not freak out.
I'm not kidding.
Do not freak out.
Do not freak out.
Don't break out.
Don't break.
Do not freak out.
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