Welcome to Saturday! Today I want to bring your attention to a new Bill Moyers interview with Mike Lofgren, the ex-GOP staffer who wrote the incendiary Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult . Mr. Lofgren has written a book extending on his thoughts on the extremism of his old party (and the dysfunction of Democrats) called The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.
From the interview:
Bill Moyers: The second subtitle, “The Party Is Over: Democrats Became Useless.” How did Democrats become useless?
Mike Lofgren: I think they got complacent during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. And then finally after that period, they woke up, found they had lost three straight presidential elections. So they had to retool and make themselves more corporate friendly.
Bill Moyers: Corporate friendly?
Mike Lofgren: Absolutely. And it certainly helped Bill Clinton get elected. And while he did some good things like balancing the budget, he also unleashed Wall Street by repealing Glass-Steagall, and he signed bills that would end regulation on derivatives. So he is at least to some degree responsible for the Wall Street debacle.
Mike Lofgren: That’s something of a mystery. The Federal Reserve, in one of their recent reports, found that net household income fell about 40 percent since 2007. That’s a tremendous drop. Yet, here we have as the nominee for one of the two major parties, we only have a binary choice in this country, is by all accounts the richest man ever to run for president and was a leverage buyout artist.
The party is really oriented towards the concerns of the rich. It’s about cutting their taxes, reducing regulation on business, making things wide open for Wall Street. Now you’re not going to get anybody to the polls and consciously pull the lever for the Republicans if they say, “Our agenda is to further entrench the rich and, oh by the way, your pension may take a hit.”
So they use the culture wars quite cynically, as essentially rube bait to get people to the polls. And that explains why, for instance, the Koch brothers were early funders of Michele Bachmann, who is a darling of the religious right. They don’t care particularly, I would assume, about her religious foibles. What they care about is the bottom line. And these religious right candidates, many of them believing in the health and wealth, name it and claim it prosperity gospel, believe that the rich are sanctified and the poor punished
The entire interview is approx. 20 minutes long. Definitely worth it. And this book looks like a Must Read.
What interests you today?