KPFA Radio 94.1FM presents:

THOMAS FRANK

“Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Resurgence of the American Right”

Hosted by Richard Wolinsky

Wednesday, January 25, 2012 – 7:30 pm

Berkeley Hillside Club

2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley, CA

$12 advance tickets: brownpapertickets.com :: 800-838-3006

or: Pegasus Books (3 locations), Mrs. Dalloway’s, Moe’s Books,

Walde Pond, DIESEL, A Bookstore, in SF – Modern Times Bookstore ($15 door)

From the bestselling author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? – a stunningly insightful and sardonic look at why the worst economy since the 1930s has incurred the inchoate wrath of tea party conservatism.

Economic catastrophe usually brings social protest and demands for change, but when Thomas Frank se out in 2009 to look for expressions of American discontent, all he could find were loud demands that the economic system be made even harsher on the recession’s victims and that society’s traditional winners be given even grander shares.

The American Right, apparently moribund after the election of 2008, was peculiarly
reinvigorated by the arrival of serious hard times. The Tea Party movement demanded not that we question the failed system (as the Occupy Movement insisted) but that we reaffirm our commitment to its worst excesses. Republicans in Congress embarked on a grim strategy of total opposition to the liberal state.

In Pity the Bilionaire Thomas Frank, the wily chronicler of American paradox, examines the bizarre mechanism by which dire economic circumstances have delivered wildly unexpected political results. Using firsthand reporting, a deep knowledge of the American Right, and a wicked sense of humor, he provides the first full diagnosis of our dangerous cultural malady.

“No one fools Thomas Frank, who is the sharpest, funniest, most intellectually voracious political commentator on the scene…he has written a brilliant expose of the most breathtaking ruse in American political history…”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“Pity the Billionaire? Hell. Pity us all.”

— James K. Galbraith

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