The liberal elites don't like real democracy and see mass movements as endangering their 'educated and wise leadership'. Populism and anti-populism has deep roots in American history. Thomas Frank ('What's the Matter with Kansas' and 'The People, No.'), joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

https://vimeo.com/440526579

The liberal elites don't like real democracy and see mass movements as endangering their 'educated and wise leadership'. Populism and anti-populism has deep roots in American history. Thomas Frank ('What's the Matter with Kansas' and 'The People, No.'), joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Transcript

Paul JayHi, I'm Paul Jay, and welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast.Born in Kansas, Thomas Frank, author of, 'What's the Matter with Kansas', has with great insight revealed the disillusionment of large sections of working people in rural and urban America with the liberal elites that run the Democratic Party. In his recent book, he takes on the contempt that this liberal aristocracy feels towards what they call, populism. Here's a quote from the book, 'The People, No.' "Opponents of the right should be claiming the high ground of populism, not ceding it to guys like Donald Trump. Indeed, this is so obvious to me that I'm flabbergasted. Anew every time I see the word abused in this way, how does it help reformers, I wonder, to deliberately devalue the coinage of the American reform tradition? It is my argument that reversing the meaning of populist tells us something important about the people who reversed it. Denunciations of populism, like the ones we hear so frequently nowadays, arise from a long tradition of pessimism about popular sovereignty and democratic participation, and is that pessimism, that tradition of quasi aristocratic scorn that has allowed the paranoid right to flower so abundantly". That, again, is from the book, 'The People, No' by Thomas Frank. Thomas is a political analyst, a historian, a journalist. He co-founded and edited The Baffler magazine, and he's written several books, most notably, 'What's the Matter with Kansas' in 2004, and 'Listen Liberal', in 2016. I did a long series of interviews with Thomas about 'Listen Liberal', and I can attest to the fact that the liberals did not listen.At any rate, his most recent book is, 'The People, No', and I guess that speaks to the same point. Now joining us is Thomas Frank. Thanks for joining us, Thomas.

Thomas FrankYou got it, Paul. It's great to be here.

Paul JaySo we're going to divide this interview into three parts. Part one, we're going to talk about the history of populism and especially in the American context. How did this word begin to be used to describe a political movement? Part two, we're going to talk about getting into the heads of these liberal elites and the Trump version of populism, if that's even how one wants to use the word. And then part three, we're going to talk about what would a democratic populist movement look like if one imagines what it should be and what it is today. But let's start with the history, but before we do, let's talk just a little bit about the title of the book.

What was your thinking behind 'The People, No'?

Thomas FrankSo it's a reference to an American classic that's not widely read anymore. It's a book-length poem by Carl Sandburg called, 'The People Yes', and Sandburg was you know, they called him, in his heyday of the 1920s and 1930s, they called him the poet of the people. And his whole career was about making poetry out of the language and the experiences of ordinary people.There's something of a tradition of this in America. So Walt Whitman did the same kind of thing, and there are many others who have done it as well. But Sandberg was in some ways the best known and most popular poet who sort of worked in this particular vein. And he wrote this book in 1936, 'The People Yes', it was a populist book in a populist era. I mean, the 1930s were the great period of celebrating ordinary people, you know, folk traditions, painting WPA murals of average working people.

The liberal elites don't like real democracy and see mass movements as endangering their 'educated and wise leadership'. Populism and anti-populism has deep roots in American history. Thomas Frank ('What's the Matter with Kansas' and 'The People, No.'), joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

The Federal Reserve has been subsidizing the megabanks, but what's needed is an institution that provides the backstop, the loan guarantees, the subsidies, the lines of credit, et cetera, to support the development of a whole variety of public financial institutions. Gerald Epstein on theanalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.

https://vimeo.com/437362978

The Federal Reserve has been subsidizing the megabanks, but what's needed is an institution that provides the backstop, the loan guarantees, the subsidies, the lines of credit, et cetera, to support the development of a whole variety of public financial institutions. Gerald Epstein on theanalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.

Transcript

Paul JayHi, I'm Paul Jay, and welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast.

As the economic crisis deepens, many states are having a resurgence of the COVID pandemic and we'll soon probably be closing down again, those were mostly states that open too early, but it does not look like a quick fix to the recession, nor is there going to be a quick opening in a broad way of the economy or a quick lessening of the millions of people who are unemployed. The Fed has shown, however, that when it needed to, it could come up with a lot of money.

It's committed to about four trillion dollars of stimulus in one way or the other. I say one way or the other because there's a chunk of this money is being spent to defend the assets of wealthy people to prop up the stock market. Some of it is being spent to help subsidize going towards the federal government, being capable of adding to the unemployment insurance and other kinds of direct plaint payments to workers and small business loans and such, but a large part of the money is going to prop up the value of assets, and rich people have more assets than non-rich people.

At any rate, if there's going to be a change and if there's a Biden presidency and there's any political will to have real reform, that reform is going to have to maybe even start with the Fed and what its role is because the Fed has the ability to finance programs of all types. And the question is; is this Fed going to be funding programs that actually benefit the broad population or continue to socially prop up assets of the wealthy?

So now joining us to discuss this is Gerald Epstein. He's a professor of economics and co-director of Political Economy Research Institute, Perry, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His recent book is Political Economy, Central Banking, Contested Control and the Power of Finance. Thanks for joining us, Jerry.

Gerald EpsteinThanks for having me, Paul.

Paul JaySo I would like to have a bit of a blue sky day, as they call it, discussion, meaning what could one do with the Fed if there was a real progressive government with a progressive mass movement to support it? And of course, it's going to run into in the title of your book, 'The Real Power of Finance', which is considerable. But first of all, let's just start with, for people that don't have a handle on how and why we have a Fed, why do we have a central bank that is so controlled by private bankers?

Gerald EpsteinWell, their central banks in most countries around the world and the history of central banks is that most of them started off as private banks, the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, other banks. But most of these private banks, central banks, evolved and were taken over by the government. And at that point, the private banks lost formal control over the central bank. The Federal Reserve, however, is different in that the private banks have continued to have a formal role as being members of the boards of directors of the regional Federal Reserve banks, which there are well, and the reserve has a lot of influence by bankers informally, where bankers play a very important role in helping to frame what the Federal Reserve does, there's a revolving door between Federal Reserve officials and Wall Street.

This is true to some extent of most central banks,

The Federal Reserve has been subsidizing the megabanks, but what's needed is an institution that provides the backstop, the loan guarantees, the subsidies, the lines of credit, et cetera, to support the development of a whole variety of public financial institutions. Gerald Epstein on theanalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.

The massive finance firm Blackrock says there will be "de-globalization" and intensifying rivalry between the U.S. and China no matter who wins the November elections. Heiner Flassbeck says Europe cannot agree to take sides, on theAnalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.

https://vimeo.com/438722890

The massive finance firm Blackrock says there will be "de-globalization" and intensifying rivalry between the U.S. and China no matter who wins the November elections. Heiner Flassbeck says Europe cannot agree to take sides, on theAnalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.

Transcript

Paul JayI'm Paul Jay and welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast.With millions still unemployed in the United States and COVID cases spiking across the country, it's going to take some time before the economy returns to whatever normal is going to look like. The American government's extension of unemployment payments ends at the end of July, and the Republicans are complaining that workers would rather sit at home with their government checks than try to go to work. In other words, risk their lives to get the economy going - while the investor class with the Fed support cashes in no matter what. Europe and Germany have been praised for finally coming around to the need for government stimulus during a recession. The German investor class has made austerity practically a religion; but is its current stimulus actually such a big break with the past? How long will this revolution in policy, as the massive finance company BlackRock calls it, last? Talking about stimulus funds, the pandemic is far from over, yet there is already talk of inflation down the line and eventually the need for austerity. Now joining us is Heiner Flassbeck. He became the state secretary, vice-minister of the federal German Ministry of Finance from 1998 to 1999, where he was responsible for international affairs, the EEU and relations with the IMF. Flassbeck worked for the United Nations agency UNCTAD in Geneva from 2000 on and from 2003 to 2012 he was the director of the Division on Globalization and Development Strategies. Since January 2013, Heiner has been director of Flassbeck Economics, a consultancy for global macroeconomic questions. Thanks so much for joining us, Heiner.

Heiner Flassbeck Thanks for inviting me.

Paul Jay: So what city are you in? Where are you today?Heiner Flassbeck: I’m in Geneva, and France soon.

Paul JayLet's start with Europe and then we'll move to the United States. Germany and most of the other European countries that have the capacity to do so have put, what we read about in the newspapers at the very least, significant amounts of stimulus money directly into the economy. We're told Germany has done something significant. How do you rate how the governments' central banks of Europe, particularly Germany, are dealing with the crisis?

Heiner FlassbeckWell, first round the institutions, the government, the central bank, and the European central bank, seem to have understood how dangerous this crisis is so they reacted immediately. They reacted with huge sums of money that they put on the table. But the very open question is now, how deep is the crisis? And more critical than that, how quickly would Europe and Germany get out of this crisis? And there is a lot of uncertainty around this. We have seen the biggest shock ever in economic history since the wars at least, and that was clearly a government-made shock. So it was an intentional shock, it was not coming from the economy, it came from the government. And the first idea was that the government would, so to say, create a scenario of a long vacation. We all will have two months of vacation, more or less, and then we go back to work on the first of September every year.But this has not played out because the unemployment check was too big and the compensation that the government gave all of Europe, including Germany, was too little and too small. So that even in Germany, we have something like nine million people who are directly affected by the economic fallout of th...

The massive finance firm Blackrock says there will be "de-globalization" and intensifying rivalry between the U.S. and China no matter who wins the November elections. Heiner Flassbeck says Europe cannot agree to take sides, on theAnalysis.news podcast with Paul Jay.

Trump administration considers restarting nuclear weapons tests