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| January 8, 2012 Tomgram: Thomas Frank, Why the Tea Party Needs Mitt
Ode on American Earnings
A Poem for Campaign 2012 Goldman Sachs ($367,200) Credit Suisse Group ($203,750) Morgan Stanley ($199,800) HIG Capital ($186,500) Barclays ($157,750) Kirkland & Ellis ($132,100) Bank of America ($126,500) PriceWaterhouseCoopers ($118,250) EMC Corp ($117,300) JPMorgan Chase & Co ($112,250) The Villages ($97,500) Vivint Inc ($80,750) Marriott International ($79,837) Sullivan & Cromwell ($79,250) Bain Capital ($74,500) UBS AG ($73,750) Wells Fargo ($61,500) Blackstone Group ($59,800) Citigroup Inc ($57,050) Bain & Co ($52,500). Now, if that isn’t a poem that sings the (corporate) body electric, I don’t know what is. According to the invaluable OpenSecrets.org website, it’s also the list of the top 20 contributors to presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign. It’s his “people,” so to speak. And if he weren’t to get the nomination, those involved (or their PACs, employees, owners, and top execs) would be someone else’s people because places like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase -- four of whose officials recently held a $2,500-a-person fundraiser for Romney in New York City -- just love presidential candidates. They are simply so much more civic-minded than the rest of us. As it happens, another must-read ode to our screwy moment has entered our world. Just out from Thomas Frank (author of the bestselling What’s the Matter with Kansas?) is a riveting new book on the Tea Party and the country. It’s focus: how for almost two post-economic meltdown years -- until, that is, Occupy Wall Street came along -- we were left in a land of activists (and Republican operatives and billionaires) promoting a set of positions so wild that, under normal conditions, they might send you to an asylum, not the White House. It is a movement, Frank writes, “in favor of the very conditions that had allowed Wall Street to loot the world.” It’s as if, having had your city ravaged by Attila the Hun, you formed a movement in total outrage that essentially begged Attila to take another whistle-stop hop through your wrecked community. The book, with a title to die for, is Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, and Frank has a little advice for the Tea Party whose life he’s chronicled and whose rank-and-file activists could still help put a quarter-billionaire in the White House to defend his financial betters. Tom Pity the Quarter-Billionaire |
