Thomas Frank Talks With Truthout on How Wall Street Doubled Down on Trashing America's Economy

"TF: What Naomi Klein was talking about were deeply unpopular policies forced on nations at moments of crisis. You might say that the Wall Street bailouts of 2008-09 fit this pattern: at a moment of supreme danger, the country was asked to prop up the banks that had basically spent the previous decade in an orgy of fraud and bonuses. Give Wall Street what it wants, we were told, or else.

But what is really spectacular is how this alarming historical episode got processed through the right's upside-down machine and came out as the story of how power-hungry leftists tried to "transform America" by force during a crisis: Rather than Hank Paulson and Co. bailing out their friends, it was Big Government trying to get its fingers around the throat of free enterprise. This was the moment, you will recall, when sales of "Atlas Shrugged" really spiked, and the great fear of a crazed government reacting to hard times by grabbing economic power really got going. The year after that (2010) saw the publication of Glenn Beck's novel, "The Overton Window," with its big central idea of liberals using fake crises to grab power.

The funny thing is that everyone wants to imagine themselves as the victims of the "shock doctrine" - even the parties that were manifestly the beneficiaries/architects of it."

rest at http://www.truth-out.org/ten-questions-truthouts-and-buzzflashs-progressive-pick-week-pity-billionaire/1329415813