What to Make of the Age of Trump by Thomas Frank

The day after Donald Trump was elected president, The New York Times recommended six books “for those trying to understand the political, economic, regional and social shifts that drove one of the most stunning political upsets in the nation’s history.” Among them: Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal: Or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? Frank, a Kansas City native, has followed up, embarking on a 13-city barnstorming tour to talk to Trump voters, union leaders, and progressive activists across the Midwest in conjunction with Listen Liberal’s release in paperback. On his last stop¬in Kansas City¬he discusses what he has learned. This event is co-presented by Rainy Day Books. Frank discussed Listen Liberal at the Library in March 2016; you can view the video on YouTube, and you can find the book in the Library Catalog.

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Jeff Rubin: How Globalization Destroyed the Middle Class

It used to be that supply and demand applied to workers and wages within Canada. But globalization has changed that, argues economist Jeff Rubin. When the whole world is your market, there is never a dearth of workers willing to do the same job for less money. On the Agenda, he lays out his arguments for how free trade ruined the middle class, the topic of his new book, “The Expendables: How the Middle Class Got Screwed by Globalization.”

A prophetic interview with Sir James Goldsmith in 1994

Sir James Michael “Jimmy” Goldsmith (26 February 1933  18 July 1997) was an Anglo-French financier. Towards the end of his life, he became a magazine publisher and a politician. In 1994, he was elected to represent France as a Member of the European Parliament and he subsequently founded the short-lived eurosceptic Referendum Party in Britain.
In this interview, Sir Goldsmith discusses the ramifications of free-trade agreements that were about to take place in 1994 (GATT), as you can retrospectively see, he correctly predicted many of the things that happened after that.

John Ralston Saul: The Collapse of Globalism

In the early 1970s, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared, “there is no alternative,” to economic prescriptions to help liberalize the marketplace and expand trade. This approach came to be known as globalization. Rising to fill the vacancy left after 45 years of Keynesianism, it made many promises, which John Ralston Saul says, have all failed. He sits down with Piya Chattopadhyay to discuss his book, “The Collapse of Globalism and The Reinvention of the World.”