Quote

Back in the days when the market was a kind of secular god and all the world thrilled to behold the amazing powers of private capital, the idea of privatizing highways and airports and other bits of our transportation infrastructure made a certain kind of sense.

Thomas Frank

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thomas Frank
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: March 21
Historian
Journalist
Kansas City
Missouri
Thomas Carr Frank
Ideas
Private
Transportation
Made
Amazing
Airports
Kind
Bits
Highways
World
Days
Infrastructure
Idea
Secular
Sense
Capital
Privatizing
Certain
Powers
Thrilled
Back
Market
Behold

More quotes by Thomas Frank

Image
When done right - or wrong, depending on how you look at it - deficits remove liberal options from the table. Suddenly there's no money for building bridges or inspecting meat. Not surprisingly, running up a deficit is a strategy favored by the wrecking crew for its liberal-killing properties.
Thomas Frank
Image
Republicans run the machine when it's their turn, and then hand the wheel over to Democrats when the public has had enough.
Thomas Frank
Image
I was never a fan of Barack Obama's bipartisanship routine.
Thomas Frank
Image
We have become a society that can't self-correct, that can't address its obvious problems, that can't pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that - for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati - we can't wake up from.
Thomas Frank
Image
Apparently, there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer.
Thomas Frank
Image
These days, of course, the focus of talk about popular liberation through products is mostly associated with the Internet. I've been collecting computer ads and ads dealing with Internet industries.
Thomas Frank
Image
Vibrancy is so universally desirable, so totemic in its powers, that even though we aren't sure what the word means, we know the quality it designates must be cultivated. The vibrant, we believe, is what makes certain cities flourish.
Thomas Frank
Image
If your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta.
Thomas Frank
Image
Under the administration of George W. Bush, you will recall, federal spending grew pretty significantly. At the same time, the number of people directly employed by the federal government shrank. One of the factors that explained the difference was contracting.
Thomas Frank
Image
The pursuit of the vibrant seems to be the universal job description of the nation's city planners nowadays. It is also part of the Obama administration's economic recovery strategy for the nation.
Thomas Frank
Image
The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat - to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.
Thomas Frank
Image
Joe Klein is the flower of American political journalism, a sharp raconteur who shows traces of the gonzo style that was in vogue when he was honing his craft at Rolling Stone back in the day.
Thomas Frank
Image
It is always a disappointment to turn from forthright consideration of some subject - whether from the Left or the Right, a poet or a plumber - to the Beltway version, in which the only aspects of the issue that matter are the effects it will have on the fortunes of the two parties and the various men in power.
Thomas Frank
Image
During the financial crisis and bailouts of 2008, it probably occurred to very few average people that we were entering a period of hardship for billionaires.
Thomas Frank
Image
As you watch the world crumble, try taking your Armageddon with this sprinkling of irony: Over the last three decades, business has got virtually everything it wanted, and its doomsday scenario from the 1970s has come true because of it.
Thomas Frank
Image
Conservatism is not a doctrine of contentment. Not a doctrine for the satisfied and the smug. It's a politics that's at war with the world.
Thomas Frank
Image
Thanks to a deal finalized in 2008, Chicago’s parking meters will be operated for the next 75 years by a group of investors put together by Morgan Stanley, including the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi.
Thomas Frank
Image
I was in a bad mood when I wrote that.
Thomas Frank
Image
Americans have known about mounting inequality and king-sized Wall Street bonuses for years. But we also had an entire genre of journalism dedicated to brushing the problem off.
Thomas Frank
Image
In the last James Bond movie, the villain was a culture captain, a tycoon of culture, a Murdoch figure. It's not as if people don't know what is going on.
Thomas Frank