Words matter. These are the best Thomas Frank Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Is Wall Street the rightful master of our economic fate? Or should we choose a broader form of sovereignty?
Above all else stands the burning question of bipartisanship. Whatever else the politicians might say they’re about, our news analysts know that this is the true object of the nation’s desire, the topic to which those slippery presidential spokesmen need always to be dragged back.
Former President Bill Clinton, who is widely regarded as a political mastermind, may have sounded like a traditional liberal at the beginning of his term in office. But what ultimately defined his presidency was his amazing pliability on matters of principle.
Media bias has been a favorite theme of the Right for decades, of course.
The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat – to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.
People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.
Public borrowing is costly these days, true, but interest rates on municipal bonds are still considerably lower than those borne by corporate debt.
Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners’ persecution.
In the last James Bond movie, the villain was a culture captain, a tycoon of culture, a Murdoch figure. It’s not as if people don’t know what is going on.
American conservatism depends on its continued dominance and even for its very existence on people never making connections about the world, connections that until recent were treated as obvious or self-evident everywhere on the planet.
Presidential legacies are valuable things, too valuable to be left up to historians.
Whereas all liberals are thought to erupt self-righteously whenever they feel like it, conservatives believe that they themselves are never permitted to say what they really think.
Liberal that I am, I support health-care reform on its merits alone. My liberal blood boils, for example, when I read that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are brought on, in part, by medical expenses.
Vibrancy is so universally desirable, so totemic in its powers, that even though we aren’t sure what the word means, we know the quality it designates must be cultivated. The vibrant, we believe, is what makes certain cities flourish.
Can policy be both wise and aggressively partisan? Ask any Republican worth his salt and the answer will be an unequivocal yes. Ask a Democrat of the respectable Beltway variety and he will twist himself into a pretzel denying it.
Promises to get beyond partisanship are the most perfunctory sort of campaign rhetoric, almost as empty as the partisanship itself.
Just as the financial crisis has created toxic assets and ‘zombie’ financial institutions, so has it transformed conservatism into a movement of the living dead.
Money has transformed every watchdog, every independent authority. Medical doctors are increasingly gulled by the lobbying of pharmaceutical salesmen.
The only truly individualistic health-care choice – where you receive care that is unpolluted by anyone else’s funds – is to forgo insurance altogether, paying out-of-pocket for health services as you need them.
Mr. Obama still has time to reverse course. A great deal depends on it. To fail on health care yet again might well be the ‘Waterloo’ Republicans dream of.
Most of Roosevelt’s innovations have been the law of the land for 70 years now, and yet we are still a free society free enough, that is, to allow tens of thousands of protesters to gather on the National Mall and to broadcast their slogans and speeches to the world via C-SPAN.
Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn’t successful – isn’t even a city, really – unless it can lay claim to being ‘vibrant.’
There is much to dislike about President Obama’s approach to the financial crisis. But opposition, it seems, will have to come from somewhere other than conservatism. The party out of power is also a party out of touch.
Allowing a private rather than a public entity to take over your toll road merely means that your tolls will have to be that much higher to cover their more expensive debt.
This aesthetic quality, then, is what politics is all about. It’s authenticity that separates winners from losers, good politics from bad, and he-man leader-types from consultant-directed puppet-boys.
I think there’s great potential for autonomy, but we have to remember that we live in a world where people may have free will but have not invented their circumstances.
Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains.
One of the things I keep coming back to in my writing is that society doesn’t work on this mirror principle, you don’t have an exact replica on the left of what you have on the right. It just doesn’t work that way.
The pursuit of the vibrant seems to be the universal job description of the nation’s city planners nowadays. It is also part of the Obama administration’s economic recovery strategy for the nation.
Yes, Democrats can prove that America pays more for health care than other countries; yes, they have won the dispute that private health insurance is needlessly expensive. But what they’ve lost is the argument that we are a society.
The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.
Money never seems to be interested in strengthening regulatory agencies, for example, but always in subverting them, in making them miss the danger signs in coal mines and in derivatives trading and in deep-sea oil wells.
Our laws governing lobbying and campaign contributions have struck the right balance between the wishes of the people and those of private industry, so why are we so quick to doubt that the same great results can be achieved by putting the government’s justice-dealing branch on the same market-based course?
Massive inequality, we have learned, isn’t the best way to run an economy after all. And when you think about it, it’s also profoundly ugly.
Our current way of regulating the financial system is dysfunctional. Oversight is dispersed among numerous confusing bodies that at times have seemed to be racing each other to the bottom. Setting up One Big Regulator would end that problem.
