RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Jim Hightower Brings the Lowdown on 'Poopgate' and 'Tinkle-Down' Economics

Texas populist gadfly Jim Hightower at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, September 13, 2013. Photos by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Famed Texas populist commentator
and political gadfly, Jim Hightower

In 30 years, we’ve gone from Ronald Reagan’s ‘trickle-down’ to the Koch Brothers’ ‘tinkle down’ economics. We are resurrecting the robber barons and imposing a plutocracy over our democracy.

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / September 26, 2013

Texas populist writer, commentator, and political gadfly Jim Hightower was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, September 13, 2013.

Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer is a weekly syndicated radio program recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download the podcast of our September 13 interview with Jim Hightower here:


Texas progressive populist writer, public speaker, humorist, radio commentator, and political gadfly Jim Hightower was twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner and is a former editor of the Texas Observer.

He is the New York Times best-selling author of seven books including Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow; Thieves In High Places: They've Stolen Our Country And It's Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There's Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos.

Jim Hightower broadcasts daily radio commentaries that are carried on more than 150 commercial and public stations, on the web, and on Radio for Peace International. He publishes a populist political newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown, which now has more than 135,000 subscribers, is the fastest growing political publication in America, and has received both the Alternative Press Award and the Independent Press Association Award for best national newsletter. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.

'Tinkle-down' economics

Jim Hightower told the Rag Radio audience that “we have a greater share of our wealth going to the tiniest portion of our people than any time in the last century.”

“In 30 years,” he said, “we’ve gone from Ronald Reagan’s ‘trickle-down’ to the Koch Brothers’ ‘tinkle down’ economics.” According to Jim, “We are resurrecting the robber barons and imposing a plutocracy over our democracy.”

“This is a structural change,” he says. “this isn’t a recession, this isn’t a technical glitch in the system. Thie is deliberate. We’ve enthroned the corporate powers to rewrite the rules.”

And we have a Congress “that is so ideological that they don’t care. And so many of them really don’t know regular workaday people. They’re millionaires, most of them,” he said. “You’ve got both parties that are tied to the corporate money.”

Thanks to gerrymandering and the dominance of big money in electoral politics, the politicians “rig the system so that they keep getting elected.” The Republicans, who “have voted 40 times to repeal Obamacare," play to a “Republican tea party fringe that doesn’t represent 10 percent of the American people.”

They “ignore the real problems” like “joblessness and rampant underemployment,” and “play games with these phony political issues.”

Hightower faulted the corporate-run media. (“A reporter used to be a working stiff. They worked in rumpled clothes, went home to a working class neighborhood, drank at a bar named Joe.”)

We do have some strong progressive media, he said, citing the country’s numerous independent community radio stations, many of which air Hightower's commentary -- with special praise for Austin’s KOOP and Rag Radio -- and the Texas Observer. “And we’ve got voices like Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman,” he said.

Texas pols -- and 'Poopgate'

On the show, Jim talked about the recent “flapdoodle” in the Texas legislature over abortion and women’s health that drew thousands of activists to the Texas Capitol and was highlighted by State Sen. Wendy Davis’ remarkable filibuster.

“It’s about abortion,” Jim said, “but it really is about power. Mostly men, wanting to go back to ‘Father Knows Best’ years, the 1950s, before women got uppity...” In this case, the dramatic citizen activism “defeated the Republican leadership and embarrassed them. And, quite honestly, frightened them.”

“It was a hoot,” Jim says, “to hear Rick Perry say, ‘It was a mob. Mob rule! Mob rule!' And (Lt. Gov. David) Dewhurst saying, ‘Socialists, socialists!’ One representatives even said we had terrorists in the Capitol.”

Jim wrote about the events at the Capitol in the Hightower Lowdown: “If you’ve never seen a pack of pompous state legislators fall into a panic, you’ve missed a scene of truly uproarious low comedy.”

And then there was ”Poopgate!”

According to Hightower, Lt. Gov. Dewhurst (“he’s such a prissy guy anyway, a multi-millionaire public servant who doesn’t like the public...) got spooked by all the women in the State Capitol building.

Dewhurst “had heard that they were going to bring tampons and other ‘feminine projectiles’ into the Senate chamber, to toss down on the floor,” Jim says. So he had the state troopers search ladies’ purses at the Capitol entrances and confiscate anything resembling a tampon.

And then, as if that wasn't enough, “Dewhurst claimed that they had also confiscated some 19 jars of feces and urine.” But, when pressed by the media, he couldn’t come up with any evidence. So the reporters asked the troopers at the Capitol gates, and they didn’t have a clue what Dewhurst was talking about. “They said, No, that they hadn’t seen any excrement -- except what was in the Lt. Governor’s memo!”

“It’s just astonishing,” Jim said. “The extremism that is loose. And they seem to think that this is leadership.” But, “not only the women who were there, but just people of good will recognize that and think, maybe we can do something. Because there was such a force there that can’t be denied.”

“Throughout our history, we’ve had to do a little screaming, and confrontation, and rebelling -- when the skids are greased and the system is rigged against people. Because that’s what happened that night.”

Whether or not Wendy Davis runs for governor, Hightower believes that real change is in the works for Texas politics. The long-dormant state Democratic Party is alive and kicking, he says, under the “vigorous and vibrant” leadership of new party chair Gilberto Hinojosa, who is committed to returning the party to grassroots organizing.

The Texas Democrats “got way too cozy with the lobbyists and with the money,” Jim says. “We had people sitting in the office down by the Capitol, just talking to each other.” Now the party has 20 organizers working in the field.

Concerning efforts at voter suppression, Hightower asked, “Why don’t Republicans want people to vote?” “We should make it an issue,” he said, “that these bozos are trying to keep people from voting in the United States of America!”

From left, Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer, populist commentator Jim Hightower, and Rag Radio's Tracey Schulz.

Corporate trade scams and NSA eavesdropping

One issue that raises Hightower’s hackles is the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (a secretive and very controversial “nuclearized and supersized NAFTA” that would involve 11 nations, including China and Japan). “It’s not about free trade,” Jim Says. “It’s a corporate coup d’etat. Against us… It’s about enthroning corporate power.”

Jim says there’s strong opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership that's being organized by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, a "wonderful project that's been battling these issues for years." “We’ve defeated 10 of these kind of trade scams just in the last decade,” Jim says. “So people really will make a difference.”

“You know, Lyndon Johnson said, ‘You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken manure.' So, the more people know about this thing, the more that they’re smelling that manure.”

Jim is also enraged about the NSA’s massive eavesdropping program. “This is not just another entity that’s poking into our personal privacy and lives... this is a comprehensive violation of at least the first and fourth amendments, and possibly the fifth and sixth as well. And a violation of the privacy laws of the United States.”

“It’s one thing to use spooks to go chase down terrorists, which we certainly want them to do, but to then decide that the entire 330 million people of the United States of America are suspects, that’s another thing altogether.”

“There are 3 billion phone calls made in the United States every day. They get them all... These are not metadata, as they call them, these are profiles. They’re little pieces of us. And they draw a picture.”

They are “using these super-supercomputers, and using this fog of fear that was generated by the powers that be, using 9-ll, to take away our core rights.”

“Snowden, to me, has done a tremendous public service by revealing all this,” Jim said.

Also read "Jim Hightower and the 'Populist Moment'" on The Rag Blog from April 11, 2012, and listen to our earlier Rag Radio interview with Jim Hightower here.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer; Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is now also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m.

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

[Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering Sixties underground journalist, edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. Dreyer was an editor of The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston, was on the editorial collective of Liberation News Service (LNS) in New York, was general manager of Pacifica's KPFT-FM in Houston, and was a correspondent for the early Texas Monthly magazine. Dreyer can be contacted at editor@theragblog.com. Read more articles by and about Thorne Dreyer on The Rag Blog.]

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, September 27, 2013: In their first father/daughter interview, newsman Dan Rather and Austin-based environmentalist Robin Rather.
Friday, October 4, 2013: Novelist Thomas Zigal, author of Many Rivers to Cross, set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

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Tom Hayden : Sticking It to Wall Street

The fallen bull. Image from Tumblr.
A legacy of Occupy:
Sticking it to Wall Street

The Occupy movement energized a vanguard of voters to become more populist in their demands.

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / November 15, 2012

It is unfortunate that Occupy Wall Street lost its momentum after the uprisings of 2011, because the election and its results have opened another opportunity to stick it to Wall Street and choke and reform the “great vampire squid” for another next generation. As I wrote six months ago in The Nation:

This year marks the first presidential campaign in our lifetime when the gluttony of Wall Street, the failures of capitalism, the evils of big money in politics and a discussion of fundamental reform will be front and center in election debates. No doubt the crisis that gave rise to Occupy will not be fixed by an election, but that’s beside the point. Elections produce popular mandates, and mandates spur popular activism. It’s time to organize a progressive majority.

From the general Occupy standpoint, Obama was just another Wall Street candidate, and the elections did not matter much anyway. That is a tragic view to take, since it robbed Occupy of an occasion to take credit and feel empowered -- “Fired up! Ready to go!” as the Obama multitudes say. In fact, Occupy did influence the election, did influence the outcome, and did shape the mandate, without, in most cases, its members even voting for Obama. Hopefully they will try to shape the terms of the bailout ahead.

The Occupy movement influenced the political climate in which Obama and his advisers chose to attack Romney as an agent of Bain Capital; incidentally, against the strong preferences of such powerful Democratic figures as Bill Clinton and Cory Booker, the Newark mayor who publicly said he was “nauseated” by the president’s attack on private equity.

The Occupy movement energized a vanguard of voters to become more populist in their demands. The Occupy movement surely helped make it possible for Elizabeth Warren to ride the wave to Washington. And those were only some of the aftershocks of Occupy long after it faded from the streets and headlines.

Wall Street, which did everything in its considerable power to turn on and defeat Obama, now thinks it is “time to mend fences.” (New York Times, November 8, 2012) But if Obama and Axelrod retain any of their Chicago political instincts, there should be some payback before any mending takes place. If Obama is forced to compromise his preferences on the fiscal cliff, reforming Wall Street is where he should be able to implement his words from the campaign trail.

If Obama had to stock his cabinet with Wall Street players in order to avoid total economic disaster in 2009, now he can offer some new choices and directions. Where is Ralph Nader when we need him?

Obama should stick it to Wall Street and make it hurt so badly that they will never forget the screws in this lifetime.

First, Obama should encourage Harry Reid to put Elizabeth Warren on the Senate Banking Committee and empower a de facto reform bloc of Sherrod Brown, Bernie Sanders, Tammy Baldwin, Richard Blumenthal, Tom Harkin, Chris Murphy, Al Franken, Jon Tester, and Warren, among others. Let progressive populist leadership come out of the new Senate. Second, deeper public hearings should bore into the scandal and call the attention of public watchdogs over the obscure process of writing Dodd-Frank regulations on derivatives and hedge fund manipulations.

Wall Street lobbyists are already preparing a "lobbying frenzy” against the administration’s tentative plan to “apply derivatives rules to American banks trading overseas.” (New York Times, November 8, 2012) As Obama promised long ago about health care, such Wall Street plans should be exposed on television at every turn because, like mushrooms, they only grow in the dark.

This opening of the process for all to see can be achieved if there is aggressive monitoring of a U.S. senator. Wall Street somehow thinks its world will conveniently go dark as they lobby in stealth to weaken the Volcker Rule, contain the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and legislate a diluted authority for other key agencies.

The opportunity to prolong the recent ideological and values debate may increase, not subside. On the left, an opportunity still exists to enter the debate loud and clear with concrete demands.

To “occupy” Wall Street is no longer a policy demand, if it ever was. Extending democracy to Wall Street might be a better and bolder banner -- with proposals for greater disclosure, accountability, regulation in the public interest, a ban on secret donors to campaigns, a Robin Hood transactions tax, and a long state-by-state campaign to eliminate the Citizens United decision.

The theme song might be Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy Is Coming to the USA.”

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Roger Baker : 'Class' Used to Be a Dirty Word

Class Warfare. Political cartoon by Steve Segelin / Charleston City Paper.
'Class' used to be a dirty word:
Elections point to new paradigm

The 2012 presidential race is shaping up as a new kind of political fight being fairly openly fought around the issue of class and inequality with racial overtones.

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / October 3, 2012

Not so long ago, during Barack Obama's 2008 election for example, class was the "C" word; class was virtually a forbidden topic in American politics. During the Clinton era, politicians sidestepped the issue and got votes by appealing to the "middle class." American voters were taught to think of themselves as members of a nearly classless society within a naturally prosperous nation.

During Obama's first presidential election, his main response to the serious and growing economic crisis was to maintain the fiction that the interests of all economic classes, whether rich or poor, were identical. The 2008 presidential campaign, on the Democratic side, was all about hope.

The hope was that once the economy recovered, as it always did in the modern age, a new tide of economic recovery would lift all boats. This recovery would ease racial tension aimed at immigrants and the low income minority voters who made up much of the Democratic party base.

Especially under the post-9/11 period of corporate domination, the wealthy interests supporting the Republicans were benefiting from exploitative policies that resulted in extreme income inequity. This really amounted to class warfare, but to even raise the issue of inequality would bring immediate charges of inciting class warfare from Republicans.

Even as late as last year, frank discussion about economic injustice was deemed to be such a sensitive topic that Obama was afraid to discuss the issue of rampant and growing economic inequality. Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote at Politico that,

in May 2011, historian Robert Dallek finally asked Obama what the group [meeting in the White House's Family Dining Room] could do to help him. Obama’s answer went right to a present-day concern: “What you could do for me is to help me find a way to discuss the issue of inequality in our society without being accused of class warfare.”

In the 2008 election, Obama had been packaged and sold to voters as the wise and moderate choice. A reasonable African American, a non-partisan political mechanic willing to work with anyone to fix the economy.

He was elected as a man focused on helping a capitalist system, temporarily indisposed by financial excess, to recover. Fixing the economy would require everyone to pitch in and make some sacrifices to restore economic health to Wall Street, from whence benefits would trickle down for the common good.

How fast our politics can change. The 2012 election is now shaping up to be much more about anger and political polarization than hope. This election is now akin to choosing between two armies defined by class interests. Both parties are actively engaged in partisan warfare on the battlefield of congressional politics.

This legislative branch of federal government is essentially gridlocked and dysfunctional on basic issues of policy. Despite his willingness to compromise on virtually everything, Obama is being portrayed as a socialist intent on inciting class warfare.

Jason L. Riley wrote at The Wall Street Journal that,

After securing victory in all five Republican presidential primary contests last night, Mitt Romney told an audience in New Hampshire that President Obama is resorting to class warfare because he can't run on his record.

During the Republican primaries, each candidate had tried to outdo the competition by appealing to the large numbers of voters identifying with an increasingly angry and extremist Tea Party faction that is united with corporate interests in unquestioned devotion to U.S. military power and global finance capital. Government regulation of private capital has become the new enemy.

The Republican party line is that with bold finance capitalists like Mitt Romney in charge, private capital can be freed from the crippling influence of government regulation, thus opening the way to a new era of jobs and prosperity. The Republican convention in Tampa was pretty much dominated by angry white high income party activists ready for a political war against liberals and their fellow travelers.

Many had assumed that with Romney safely positioned as the Republican party nominee, he would tone down his extreme right-wing positions and become more like the moderately centrist governor of Massachusetts he used to be. However, his choice of a leading anti-government ideologue, Rep. Paul Ryan, pretty much blew that theory. Romney has chosen to run as an extreme right wing, selectively anti-government candidate.

Tim Dickinson wrote in Rolling Stone :

The GOP legislation awaiting Romney's signature isn't simply a return to the era of George W. Bush. From abortion rights and gun laws to tax giveaways and energy policy, it's far worse. Measures that have already sailed through the Republican House would roll back clean-air protections, gut both Medicare and Medicaid, lavish trillions in tax cuts on billionaires while raising taxes on the poor, and slash everything from college aid to veteran benefits.

In fact, the tenets of Ryan Republicanism are so extreme that they even offend the pioneers of trickle-down economics. "Ryan takes out the ax and goes after programs for the poor – which is the last thing you ought to cut," says David Stockman, who served as Ronald Reagan's budget director. "It's ideology run amok."

Why class conflict is back in style

With the help of the unlimited corporate cash made possible by the Citizens United ruling, it seemed possible until a few months ago for the Republicans to essentially buy the election. It is now beginning to look as if the Republicans have gone so far to the right, and so fast, that they have generated a backlash of fear that the polls indicate is likely to cost Romney and his corporate allies the presidential election. The Republicans now seem to be in panic mode, willing to use any means to try to hang onto power.

In the midst of this period of intense political polarization, Obama can't expect to run again as a centrist, offering not much more than scaled back hopes and still expect to win. Since Obama's election four years ago, the optimism of his core supporters has greatly faded. The public has watched Obama bail out the banks with their tax money without seeing much in return. Under the Obama administration, the rich have been getting richer fast, while most U.S. incomes have declined in real terms.

The 2010 movie Inside Job revealed the truth about institutionalized exploitation of the general public by the biggest banks and their allies. Wall Street bankers were revealed as gamblers promoting risky deals, confident that their bad bets would be covered by either the Federal Reserve or U.S. taxpayers. The public saw scandalous exploitation of the middle class by the unchecked power of concentrated wealth. Yet nobody went to jail.

The economic crisis was actually global, leading to a global upsurge of riots and protests. In early 2011, the Arab Spring, with economic roots, shook the established political order of the Mideast. In September of 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement seemed to come suddenly out of nowhere, a great wave of publicly expressed political outrage against gross inequality and rapacious class oppression by those the Occupiers termed "the 1%."

The Wall Street Occupation captured headlines and stayed in the U.S. news for months, as government officials worked behind the scenes to stem a nationwide surge in regional occupations modeled after the original Zucotti Park Occupation in Manhattan.


The new middle class divide

The Occupy movement has portrayed the current situation as a battle between the oppressed masses and their ruling oppressors; a struggle between the few and the many. This picture presented by the Occupy movement, of the 1% exploiting the other 99%, is true in its way, but still too simple to explain the political dynamics behind this election.

The 1% formulation leaves out the economic forces that drive the Tea Party support and their less energetic sympathizers who also vote out of the political equation. As David Goldman points out in his "Spengler" column at Asia Times, the once monolithic American middle class is now internally divided into roughly equal groups, each with their own distinctly different economic interests and political perspectives.

The great split down the center of American society is not between the rich and the middle class, as the Obama campaign suggests, but within the middle class itself. This helps explain why Paul Ryan was a smart choice for the second spot on the Republican ticket. There are still more people paying taxes than getting a check from the government, and their patience with tax creep is exhausted. The home price collapse wiped out nearly half the median family's wealth during 2007-2010, but the tax burden middle-class homeowners continued to rise...

Now the baby boomers are entering their 60s after losing nearly half their wealth, in the least business-friendly environment the country has had since the 1970s. Rising taxes at the state and local level, and unprecedented deficits at the federal level, worry the middle class, with good reason.

Americans are concerned about the lack of opportunity, but they are even more concerned about the risk that they may lose what little they have left. It's not enough to promote entrepreneurship, as Romney does so enthusiastically. It's also important to talk about deficits. That is the thrust of the Tea Party, a classic middle-class creditors' party responding to the well-justified fear of higher taxes and inflation.

With this situation in mind, it gets a lot easier to make sense of the 2012 presidential election as a political contest between two emerging sectors of an implausibly large middle class, each with different perceptions and class interests.

The upper income sectors of the middle class tend to vote Republican, trying to protect their modest savings from federal taxation that would benefit the poor. They fear a loss of their savings that would be squandered on social programs to benefit the poor, those who don't pay federal taxes, and who tend to vote Democrat.

The top 1% already have most of the wealth and all the political power they can buy, but they lack the numbers needed to win an election. This being the case, the natural course is for the 1% of Republicans to ally themselves with the upper income sector of the middle class, who vote Republican based on their hopes, fears, and class interests.

The video secretly made of Romney speaking to his wealthy contributors revealed a man who views the election in just this way. In order to win the election, Romney needs to pit the interests of the affluent 50% of middle class taxpayers, focused on their own wealth preservation, and get their support in opposition to those who depend on a multitude of federal benefits like pensions, social security, food stamps, and what remains of the social safety net.

The Republicans are united in opposition to nearly all government taxation in theory (excepting foreign domination and bank control perpetuation costs). This outlook is rooted in the Tea Party source of political support, since their anti-tax position requires the broad support of voters to win elections. Realistically the Tea Party is motivated by trying to minimize the tax burden placed on the "have a little and desperate to save what's left" sector of the middle class, which is increasingly fearful of sinking toward poverty through taxation.

In this regard, the Tea Party sector is in a strategic alliance that overlaps with the prevailing desires of the 1%; the very wealthy who oppose nearly any changes to the status quo, which would be likely to cost them very much to implement. All this based on a predictable preference for the very rich to employ as little of their own money to stay as rich as possible, and for as long as possible." According to The Huffington Post,

Voters remain overwhelmingly pessimistic about a still sluggish economy, yet appear poised to reelect President Barack Obama because of perceptions that he understands their lives better than Republican nominee Mitt Romney and would do more to favor the middle class rather than the very wealthy.

The nightmare scenario for the 1% and their Republican allies is that the currently repressed but still deeply held sentiments visibly expressed by the Occupy movement remain, ready to be channeled and expressed as support for Obama over Romney, as is indicated in an October 1, Gallup Poll.

More Americans believe middle-income earners would be better off in four years if President Barack Obama is re-elected than if Mitt Romney wins, by 53% to 43%. The public also says lower-income Americans would be better off under an Obama presidency, while, by an even larger margin, they say upper-income Americans would do better under Romney.

In other words the polls suggest that the public is really viewing this election in terms of their class interests. They suggest that a populist pendulum of political awareness may be swinging to the left, perhaps even picking up speed as it goes. Obama's previous hope is now being replaced by fear of Romney's rapacious greed-junkie reputation.

The context is that many American families are barely surviving now. Members of the Democratic Party base are pinning their diminished hope on the promises of a somewhat more combative and re-imaged Obama. If Obama isn't FDR, at least he isn't Mitt Romney, who scorns them in private on the secret video.

As Saul Alinsky used to say, there are only two real sources of power -- people power and money power. If Obama fails to satisfy even on the scaled back expectations of his popular base during his second term, things could head in the direction of Greece. Lacking a decisive edge in corporate money power, he has to depend on continuing political support from his popular base for his people power.

Obama told a meeting of bankers in 2009 that he is the only thing standing between them and the mobs with pitchforks. In the absence of mobs with pitchforks, and also without effective support from Congress, Obama lacks negotiating power:

"My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” Barack Obama told the CEOs of the world’s most powerful financial institutions on March 27, when they cited competition for talent in an international market as justification for paying higher salaries to their employees.

Arrayed around a long mahogany table in the White House state dining room, the bankers struggled to make themselves clear to the president, but he wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He interrupted them by saying, “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that."

The latent potential of left populism

The 2012 presidential race is in this way shaping up as a new kind of political fight being fairly openly fought around the issue of class and inequality with racial overtones.

Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, describes the current reality of class in the USA as follows:

...in America today we have the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of any major country on earth and... the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider. Today, the top 1 percent earns more income than the bottom 50 percent of Americans. In 2010, 93 percent of all new income went to just the top 1 percent. In terms of wealth, the top 1 percent owns 42 percent of the wealth in America while the bottom 60 percent owns just 2.3 percent...

Most Democrats and Republicans are far too dependent on corporate money to talk as candidly as Sanders does. However, if Sanders and other independent progressive voices like him keep talking about class and civil rights in an honest way, people are likely to start listening to them more than Obama.

In proportion to the attention people pay to Bernie and other truthful populists, it is going to get increasingly harder for those like the Koch Brothers to maintain the control of the 1%. It is a lot easier when people are ignorant and there are only "lesser evil" choices.

Put in political context, this election outcome is of huge importance. Not because of what Obama can or will accomplish, but because of what the public desperately hopes and expects that he can get done -- as a sign of a revival of American class consciousness.

It is important because of what is likely to happen in consequence if the public's scaled-back expectations are not satisfied. This election is in an important way a de facto political referendum on the populist goal of preserving what remains of a social safety net dating back to the great depression.

Obama must depend on retaining wide support to deliver on expectations. His claim that he is the only thing standing between them and the "mobs with pitchforks" needs credibility. Lacking a threat of mobs with pitchforks that he can successfully restrain, plead for, and then help in some modest way, Obama lacks both political power and purpose.

The public will expect Obama to bring some relief as their benefit for electing him. If elections can't bring change, then the public support for government plummets, meaning the 1% will increasingly have to resort to naked power to maintain class control.

This is not easy to do in a nation that can see more clearly than ever that class does indeed make a difference, and that they will probably be better off listening to Senator Bernie Sanders than to President Barack Obama.

[Roger Baker is a long time transportation-oriented environmental activist, an amateur energy-oriented economist, an amateur scientist and science writer, and a founding member of and an advisor to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA. He is active in the Green Party and the ACLU, and is a director of the Save Our Springs Association and the Save Barton Creek Association in Austin. Mostly he enjoys being an irreverent policy wonk and writing irreverent wonkish articles for The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Roger Baker on The Rag Blog.]

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Tom Hayden : Building Populist Communities

Tom Hayden speaks with members of the Austin activist community, Friday, August 24, 2012, at a South Austin Mexican restaurant. The next day he spoke before a larger group at the 5604 Manor Community Center. Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.
Building populist communities

We must focus on fostering 'communities of meaning' where alternative identities, consciousness-raising projects, and even ways of life are built...

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / September 12, 2012

No matter the outcome of the November election, but particularly should the federal government become crippled by Republican judges and House members, defensive Democrats, and deadheaded bureaucrats, we need to be prepared to dig our way out and press onward.

To my way of thinking, we in the movements must focus on fostering what I call “communities of meaning” -- those where alternative identities, consciousness-raising projects, and even ways of life are built during the long periods between the rise and end of social movements.

A community of meaning enabled the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to survive for more than five years while the Voting Rights Act was achieved. A community of meaning persisted throughout the 100 straight years of struggle for women to win the right to vote, a victory by the slenderest of margins. A community of meaning provided a sense of solidarity and growth for the student-led democracy movement against the Vietnam War. And these changes did not come easily.

Though sometimes there are surprising breakthroughs, more generally people must live their lives, raise their children and make their livings during the long spells before real victories. Richard Flacks’ great book, Making History: The American Left and the American Mind, is alone worth reading for its description of how the Left became a community of learning, self-help, and empowerment for immigrant communities a century ago.

But there is more than a cultural assertion. There is also the political. As Louis Brandeis wrote, it is about states (and cities) being “laboratories of reform.”

We are not going to radicalize Texas anytime soon, nor the diehard states of the Old Confederacy and Wild West. San Antonio, however, is promising; so, too, is Austin as I was recently reminded during my visit where I met with Javier Sicilia and his Caravan for Peace against the War on Drugs and with peace activists at the 5604 Manor Community Center in an event organized by The Rag Blog. Communities lead to cities, which lead to states, and in time you have half a nation and more.

Looking to communities, even when it comes to foreign wars, our urban mayors have been leading. Los Angeles’ Antonio Villaraigosa, chair of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, pushed through a resolution demanding an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and that their funding be transferred to our cities and domestic priorities. He followed up by lobbying Congress.

If the Congress does not preempt the states from acting, this is the ground whereon a battle for a Canadian-styled healthcare system is likely to be fought. It is where alternative energy, clean air, and fuel-efficiency programs already have and will continue to blossom from California to New York. It is where immigrant rights will be mainstreamed, and it is where same-sex marriage and reproductive rights are going to be protected and flourish.

And, if progressives get their act together, it is the ground on which a better, more accessible and affordable education system will take root. It is where the next generation of judges will start to address the role of money in politics, and where voting rights will either be protected or shredded.

The Arizonas will be the new Mississippis. If the federal government is on our side -- like Obama’s Justice Department is today against Arizona -- so much the better. If not, the progressive majority will have to lead, and defend against the white reactionaries, until the federal government eventually follows.

It is important that Obama wins, that Elizabeth Warren wins, and that the Congressional Progressive Caucus grows in size. But let us not federalize our minds altogether. Local control and states’ rights should not and do not belong to the Rick Perrys alone. Progressive populist movements can be the cradle of a new economy, politics, and culture.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Webb Dreyer : Jim Hightower and the 'Populist Moment'

Jim Hightower in the KOOP studios in Austin, Friday, April 6, 2012. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.
Rag Radio:
Jim Hightower and the 'populist moment'

By Thorne Webb Dreyer / The Rag Blog / April 11, 2012

Jim Hightower will headline a "Spring Song Fiesta" at Scholz Beer Garten in Austin on Sunday, April 15, from 1-9 p.m. Hightower will speak at 7, following a live KOOP-sponsored debate among Austin mayoral candidates starting at 6. Bands will include the Therapy Sisters, Paper Moon Shiners, Bill Oliver, Son y No Son, Barbara K, Floyd Domino, and Ted Roddy and the Hit Kickers. It all benefits community radio KOOP-FM.

According to Jim Hightower, “even the smallest dog can lift its leg on the tallest building.”

Progressive Texas populist author, commentator, and orator Hightower -- perhaps our country's most celebrated champion of the common folk -- was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, April 6, on Austin’s community radio station, KOOP 91.7-FM, and streamed live on the Internet.

You can listen to the show here:


We discussed populism as a political movement -- and what Jim Hightower sees as a “populist moment” existing in this country today.

“Populism is about confronting money and power in our society and realizing that too few people control too much money,” Hightower told the Rag Radio audience. “The few are doing extremely well, but they seem to think that they can separate their well-being from the good fortunes of the many.”

Hightower, who served two terms as Texas Agriculture Commissioner, is a New York Times bestselling author. His weekly newsletter, the Hightower Lowdown, goes out to 135,000 subscribers, he writes a weekly newspaper column for Creators Syndicate, and his radio commentaries air on stations around the country, including Austin’s KOOP.

A former editor of the Texas Observer, Hightower has been involved in progressive politics for decades and has established himself as one of the country’s most influential consumer advocates, especially focusing on corporate power in the food economy.

Jim Hightower’s latest book is Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow.

Rag Radio, hosted by longtime alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, editor of The Rag Blog and a pioneer of the Sixties underground press, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about progressive politics, history, and culture.

The show is broadcast on Austin’s KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run community radio station, on Fridays, 2-3 p.m. (CST) and is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST). It also has a widespread internet audience and podcasts of all shows can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.


Populist moment

Jim Hightower said on Rag Radio that he thinks “we have a strong populist moment, a strong populist possibility, to make fundamental change.”

He says that the Wall Street bailout “was the initial spark for the Tea Party movement,” but that it got captured by former Texas Congressman and Koch-funded Washington lobbyist Dick Armey, and was turned into a “right-wing hugging organization.”

But Hightower believes that the Occupy movement could connect with the Tea Party rank and file, and “turn into something real, something that does try to decentralize power down to the grassroots level for ordinary working people.”

He sees lots of things going on in the country that make him hopeful.

He believes that all the Republican anti-union activity has reinvigorated the labor movement. AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka “declared that he was going to make [Wisconsin Gov.] Scott Walker the ‘organizer of the year.’” All the anti-union rhetoric “has given them their own sense of history back, and their own spirit back, and the recognition that the public is with them.”

Hightower spoke before 150,000 people in 20-degree weather last February in Madison, at a rally opposing the Wisconsin anti-union legislation. There were people “just as far as you could see.”

“It was just a beautiful, spirited moment.”

And he sees more positive signs.

People are working on a grassroots level for a “bevy of new and good candidates running for office all across the country” -- like Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Norman Solomon in Northern California, and Eric Griego in Albuquerque -- and to overturn Citizens United (“the grotesque absurdity that a corporation is a person”).

“As we say here,” Hightower reminds us, “a corporation is not a person until Texas executes one.”

Jim Hightower supports a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling.

“We don’t have to convince people that Citizens United's unleashing unlimited amounts of secret corporate money into our elections is a bad idea.”

“If we get that to a vote, we win.”

“There’s a movement, and the Occupy people are involved in this, to confront every candidate for every office in the country, at their public forums… at their political rallies… or just go to their office, and say, ‘Do you think a corporation is a person? We want you on record.”

From left, Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer, Jeff Zavala and Grace Alfar of ZGrafix, and guest Jim Hightower during Rag Radio broadcast, Friday, April 6, 2012, at KOOP-FM in Austin. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.

Coops and food economy

Hightower also believes that the fast-growing coop movement “is extraordinary in this country [and] there’s very little coverage of it.”

“[It gives us] models that we can go to… and say, here’s another way to organize it. It doesn’t have to be the CEO getting $50 million a year and workers having their wages knocked down and their health care and other benefits taken away.”

Another -- and related -- area of encouraging activity, Hightower said, is in the food economy. “We’ve had a revolution in food in America… It came from farmers saying, there’s gotta be a better way than all these pesticides… and making bad food and poisoning our animals and genetically manipulating our animals.”

And the consumers are saying, “We don’t like industrialized, conglomeratized, globalized, capitalized food. We want real food.”

“And the two found each other.”

“It began with ex-hippies selling bad tomatoes out of broken-down VW buses in the 70’s.” But then came the food coops and the farmers’ markets. “We helped to establish more than 100 of them [in Texas], just by putting the tools in the hands of local people.”

“It’s a tremendous movement,” he says. In Austin, “we have a dozen farms… linking up with chefs and linking up directly with restaurants and directly with government institutions to buy food.”


Privatization and the commons

An issue that Jim Hightower is especially concerned about is the alarming spread of privatization and the resulting impact on the public sector, on the commons.

He has recently written in his Hightower Lowdown about the move to privatize the post office, about the “corporate foreign legion” that "has taken over America’s intelligence and military functions,” and about the closing of state parks around the country. (“By axing parks, politicos are stealing the people’s property,” he wrote.)

“It’s dangerous. It’s dangerous for our democracy, it’s dangerous for our health, it’s dangerous for our economy,” he said on Rag Radio. “Because it allows a few profit-seeking organizations to take charge.”

They’re saying that the post office is “wasteful, they’re broke, they’re bankrupt… and that they can’t compete with the internet and Fedex, etc… Well, as we say out in Lubbock, that’s bovine excrement. The post office last year had… an operating profit of 700 million dollars.”

“This is about the common good… The post office is in every community in America… They deliver by pack mule. They deliver by planes, they deliver by boats.”

“They get the job done.”

“And it is the most popular federal agency in all of government. People feel an attachment to their post office… because it is a community center.”

Hightower says that the move to privatize parks is happening all over the country.

“The workaday people… don’t fly to Aspen when they need a weekend. They don’t summer in France. They go to their parks.”

“These parks are jewels. And yet, we’re abandoning them. [Gov. Rick] Perry and the legislature just whacked the hell out of them” in Texas. The state parks director has been forced to make public appeals for support of the park system. “We’re out there with a tin cup on the side of the street saying, anybody got a nickel for a state park?”

“It’s a complete abdication of long-term responsibility to the people of this state and future generations.”

And now, Hightower says, privatization has moved, with almost no public notice or discussion by lawmakers, into the military and into the military intelligence agencies.

He says he was “stunned” when he researched the issue for the Hightower Lowdown. “I had no idea it was this big, this extensive.”

“We have roughly 80,000 troops in Afghanistan. And now we’ve got 113,00 contractors… And they’re not there just to do administrative chores. They’re doing war planning, they are targeting the enemy, they are killing.”

Hightower says we are giving up “the government’s most sensitive activities to corporations” whose “loyalty is not to the United States of America. It is to the bottom line, to the profit of the shareholders.”


Texas and the populist movement

Jim Hightower reminded Rag Radio listeners that the populist movement actually started in Texas -- in Lampasas -- “with four farmers sitting around a kitchen table over there in 1868, saying, this is killing us -- [with] the railroad monopolies, and the bankers putting the squeeze on them.”

“They had to find some other way.”

“So they established what became the Farmers Alliance.” It failed at first but eventually, it “spread through Texas, all up through the Plains states, went through the South, went all the way to New York State, all the way out to California.”

“They created cooperatives, the financing mechanisms so farmers could get capital without being gouged by the banks, and then a holding mechanism for their crops, storage facilities, so that they could be in charge. And then a market mechanism.”

“And all of it was cooperatively-run.”

"And it was also a cultural movement," Hightower added. "Because rural people were illiterate. They didn’t know how to write. They hadn’t read history. So they had educational courses, they had cultural programs, they created choirs, and concerts, and they had parades, and fun.

“Everybody could join it. And 'everybody' included African-Americns. Back in that day, in the 1870s.”

“It was a huge people’s movement.”

“In fact, Thorne, the original Texas constitution outlawed banks… They hated ‘em. Because we were settled by debtors, people fleeing out of Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi.”


We concluded by asking Jim Hightower if he plans to ever run for office again.

His firm "No" came with a satisfied smile. He's having too much fun just being Jim Hightower.


Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

[Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering Sixties underground journalist, edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. He can be contacted at editor@theragblog.com. Read more articles by and about Thorne Dreyer on The Rag Blog.]

Coming up on Rag Radio:

THIS FRIDAY, April 13, 2012: Sustainability activist Bill Neiman of Native American Seeds.
April 20, 2012: David P. Hamilton on the upcoming French elections, and Philip Russell on the coming elections in Mexico.


VIDEO: Jim Hightower on Rag Radio

Video of Thorne Dreyer's Rag Radio interview with Jim Hightower, produced by Jeff Zavala of ZGrafix.org. The video can also be seen on Jeff's Blip TV channel.
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Bob Feldman : Populism, Labor Organizing, and White Chauvinism in Texas, 1876-1890

Flag of the Texas Farmers Alliance. Image from HHS AP US History.
The hidden history of Texas

Part VIII: Populism, labor organizing, and white chauvinism in Texas, 1876-1890

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / January 4, 2012

[This is Part 8 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Between 1870 and 1890 the number of people who lived in Texas increased from 818,000 to 2,235,000 and most of the people residing in Texas in 1890 had previously lived in the southeastern United States.

Although the number of Texas residents who were of African descent increased from 253,000 to 488,000 during these same 20 years, the percentage of all Texas residents who were African-American decreased from 32 to 22 percent during this period. And by 1890, 125,000 people of German descent now also lived in Texas. The number of people of Mexican descent then living in Texas was only 105,000.

Between 1876 and 1890, most of the people who lived in Texas were also still farmers. In 1890, for example, 84 percent of Texans still lived in rural areas on about 228,000 farms.

The number of Native Americans who were able to live in Texas, however, continued to decrease between 1870 and 1890 as U.S. government “military pressure on the Indians began to intensify during the early 1870s,” and “white hunters started to inflict an equally serious blow by destroying the great buffalo herds,” according to Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas.

Following the summer of 1874 incursion of 5,000 U.S. Army troops, during the Red River War, into the areas of Texas where Native American tribes like the Comanche and Kiowa tribes still lived, “the way for Texans to cover the prairies and Panhandle with cattle and cowboys” was opened, and “by the mid-1870s, the success of trailing cattle to market, combined with the elimination of Indians and buffaloes from northwestern Texas, encouraged the establishment of ranches in that region,” according to the same book.

By 1890, absentee foreign investors from the UK had helped quickly transform Texas’s cattle ranching industry into one dominated by corporate ranchers who paid their Texas cowboys and ranch workers low wages. So, not surprisingly, in 1883 “a group of cowboys” had “demanded higher wages” and gone “on strike against five ranches,” according to Gone To Texas.

But, although “the Cowboy Strike” involved “as many as 300 men” and “lasted more than two months,” it failed to win higher wages primarily because the corporate “ranchers had no trouble hiring replacements,” according to the same book.

The first assembly of the Knights of Labor organization of U.S. workers was held in Texas in 1882, and by 1886 about 30,000 workers in Texas were members of the Knights of Labor. So when a Knights of Labor foreman for union activities at the Texas & Pacific railroad shops in Marshall, Texas, was fired in 1886, the Knights of Labor in Texas began its Great Southwest Strike against all of Robber Baron Jay Gould’s Southwest railroad lines.

After Gould’s Texas & Pacific railroad executives refused to negotiate with its Knights of Labor-led strikers and hired strikebreakers, Texas Rangers and Texas state militia were ordered to break the strike by state government officials. In several Texas cities during the 1880s, Knights of Labor union locals also “accepted black members,” and an African-American worker named David Black also served on the Knights of Labor’s state executive board during the 1880s, according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans.

Between 1876 and 1890 more and more of the people who lived in rural Texas did not own the land on which they farmed. In the 1880s, for example, “the number of Texas farms worked by landless tenants rose by more than 30,000,” according to Gone To Texas, and “most farmed as either share tenants or sharecroppers paying rent with portions of the crop they produced.”

The same book noted that “by 1890, 42 percent of all Texas farms were worked by tenants,” the percentage "continued to rise year by year,” and “Texas farmers by the tens of thousands seemed doomed to live endlessly in near poverty -- working someone else’s land.”

So in response to the increasing impoverishment and loss of land ownership experienced by Texas farmers between 1876 and 1890, many Texas farmers, not surprisingly, became politically active in farmer protest groups like the Grange (during the 1870s) and the Texas Farmers Alliance (during the 1880s).

According to John Hicks’ The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmer’s Alliance and the People’s Party, during the 1880s the Texas Farmers Alliance “soon achieved considerable prominence throughout central and northern Texas,” and “by December 1885, the claim was made that the Alliance had about 50,000 members scattered among not less than 1,200 locals.”

At its 1886 state meeting in Cleburne, the Texas Farmers Alliance adopted resolutions which “put the Alliance on record as favoring the higher taxation of lands held for speculative purposes, the prohibition of alien landownership, the prevention of dealing in futures, so far as agricultural products were concerned, more adequate taxation of the railways, new issues of paper money” and “an interstate commerce law.”

As Gone To Texas recalled, “by 1890… many Texas farmers… thought that their desperate situation required drastic steps” and “a good many Texans had found the `New South’ an empty promise and wanted something better.”

The Texas Farmers Alliance still refused -- on white chauvinist grounds -- to allow Texas farmers of African descent to become members of that organization. So, “a southern white man, R. M. Humphrey, who had been a Baptist missionary” among African-Americans, according to The Populist Revolt, apparently joined with Texas African-American farmers in organizing and forming a Colored Farmers Alliance group in Houston in December 1886, which soon attracted many African-American farmers in Texas as members.

Between 1876 and 1890, white supremacist racist Democratic Party-oriented groups in Texas also apparently began to use both violent and legal means to deny many African-Americans their democratic right to vote and participate as equals in Texas state electoral politics. As Black Texans recalled:

In the late 1870s white men’s parties or intimidation of Negro voters developed in the town of Navasota and in Leon, Montgomery, Colorado, DeWitt, and Washington counties. Similar events occurred in Waller, Harris, Washington, Matagorda, and Wharton counties in the 1880s.

White Democrats in Fort Bend County organized in 1888 a club known as the Jaybirds… whippings, assaults, and killings followed… White men’s associations organized in Colorado, Matagorda, Brazoria, Grimes, Milam, and Marion counties to assure `that white supremacy must obtain.’ In Robertson County Democrats stopped black Populists from voting with rifles, pistols and baseball bats.

Given the role that the Democratic Party-oriented white supremacist groups played in denying democratic political rights to African-Americans in Texas between 1876 and 1890, most African-Americans in Texas, not surprisingly, supported either the Republican Party or the Greenback Party between 1876 and 1890.

During the 1880s, around 90 percent of all members of Texas’s Republican Party were African-Americans, and after the Greenback insurgent third party of the 1870s began organizing in Texas in 1877, “black delegates appeared in the earliest third-party meetings and represented 70 Greenback clubs for Negroes at the state convention in 1878,” according to Black Texans.

The same book also noted that “in addition to their economic program, Greenbackers appealed for black votes by calling for a better public school system” in Texas during the late 1870s; and the nine African-American GOP or Greenback Party candidates who were elected to the Texas state legislature during the late 1870s also (at that time) “helped defeat a poll tax measure when the Democratic majority divided on the issue.”

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Remembering Woody Guthrie in the Age of Obama

Woody Guthrie in 1943. Photo by Al Aumuller / New York World-Telegram and the Sun / Wikimedia Commons.
Remembering Woody Guthrie
in the age of Obama

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / July 19, 2011

Woody Guthrie, the songwriter, musician, social philosopher, and populist extraordinaire, would have turned 99 this past week (July 14) had he lived. He died of Huntington's disease in 1967. He wrote perhaps thousands of songs, some of which continued to be sung after his death by popular performers, including Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, his son Arlo Guthrie, and many others.

Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, traveled to California with migrant workers during the dust bowl and then all over the country. He hosted a live radio program in California that was very popular for a few years, but Woody did not take kindly to being told what to do or whom to associate with or what he could say, so that job ended.

In 1941, he was hired by the Department of the Interior to write songs about the Columbia River and the dams being built there in connection with a documentary project. Producing electricity from the flowing waters of the Columbia caught his imagination.

When he saw an item in the newspaper that offended his sense of social justice, he was inclined to write a song about it. That's how "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos" came to be written. A group of Mexican migrant workers were killed as they were sent back to Mexico after harvesting crops in the western U.S. He lamented how these people were used to put food on the tables of Americans and their deaths weren't given a second thought. Their names weren't even reported in the news articles. "All they called them were just deportees."

You don't have to agree with everything Woody wrote to appreciate his contribution to American culture. After all, no two people agree on everything, but the strength of his feeling for the American people cannot be denied. That feeling is best found, perhaps, in what has become an anthem of populism -- "This Land is Your Land."

This Land is Your Land
(words and music by Woody Guthrie)

Chorus:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me

As I was walking a ribbon of highway
I saw above me an endless skyway
I saw below me a golden valley
This land was made for you and me

(Chorus)

I've roamed and rambled and I've followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me

(Chorus)

The sun comes shining as I was strolling
The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
The fog was lifting a voice come chanting
This land was made for you and me

(Chorus)

As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress-passin'
But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

(Chorus)

In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin'
If this land's still made for you and me.

(Chorus 2x)

Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen perform "This Land Is Your Land" before President Obama's inauguration. Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images.
In 2008, from everywhere in the country, the spirits of populists and caring people, and those who spent their lives working for social and economic justice for all, were lifted by the election of Barack Obama as president. At a special pre-inaugural gathering, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, and others joined in singing all those verses to Woody's anthem. That's how high expectations were for Obama among those who favor a more compassionate world.

Such enthusiasm does not exist today. Obama has thrown in with the wealthy, the corporatists, the bankers, the exploiters, the war profiteers, and he seems to have forgotten the millions of average Americans who are without jobs, without the money to pay their mortgages, without hope for a better future.

I know that Obama faces great opposition, assuming that he cares about Woody's people, but that is no excuse for not using every ounce of his energy and influence for average Americans, rather than the elite. If this land was made for us all, it seems that we should have a government at least as good as its people. I've come to wish that at least we had a president that good as well.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Bill Fletcher, Jr. : Obama, Progressives, and the White Nationalist Backlash

Image from Reckless Eyeballing.
Task for progressives in 2012:
Monkey-wrenching the white united front

It has been striking that many progressives have said so little about race, racism, and the discourse of right-wing populism in the context of the upcoming elections.

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. / The Rag Blog / May 22, 2011

In the context of the criticisms that many of us have of the Obama administration for what it has not accomplished, for its advance of a corporate agenda, and for the unacceptable compromises it has made with the Republicans, there is something that I have seen few progressives address.

To borrow from a comment offered by television commentator Tavis Smiley, the 2012 elections are likely to be the most racist that most of us have seen in our lifetimes. Given this, what are the implications?

It has been striking that many progressives, particularly those who have not only written off President Obama but also written off all those who offered critical support to the Obama campaign in 2008, have said so little about race, racism, and the discourse of right-wing populism in the context of the upcoming elections.

We have witnessed the first Black president of the United States questioned about his citizenship and birthplace, yet I have seen precious little from many friends on the left side of the aisle (particularly those so critical of Obama) responding to this. If you put your ear to the ground, however, you hear the murmurings of Black Americans furious that Obama was put in a place where he had to file a petition in order to obtain his Hawaii birth certificate.

The murmurings do not stop there. When Donald Trump and other opportunists started asking questions about how it was that Obama got into Columbia University and Harvard Law School (i.e., was he REALLY qualified to have gotten into those schools?), for most of us enough was enough. Because this was no longer about Obama and it had very little to do with criticisms of Obama and his policies.

The white nationalist backlash is using Obama as the target but they are attempting to create a white united front to, in their minds, take back the United States. Part of this agenda means delegitimizing the democratically elected President, but it also goes towards tampering with election laws and voting processes in state after state.

In case you have not noticed, in many states where there is a Republican majority in control, efforts are underway to restrict voting, whether by further limiting ex-felons from voting, to eliminating same-day voter registration, to the demand for picture identifications at the time of voting, to the shortening of periods of early voting.

The objective is to reduce the potential anti-Republican electorate. This is being done by demagogically and inaccurately crowing about alleged voter fraud. But this happens through the Right racializing alleged voter fraud. In other words, as opposed to a discussion about real voter theft, e.g., the Republican theft of the 2000 election, the right wing uses black and brown characters as the way of convincing segments of the white populace that something needs to be done, otherwise these colored peoples will be taking over.

The racist attacks on Obama, then, fuse with the larger right-wing narrative: the United States of America is being lost to white people. This has been the core of the Birther message, but it has also been the core of the attacks that contributed to the collapse of ACORN, as well as the blitzkrieg effort of the Right to overturn voting rights.

In its more extreme version it is the core of the message that comes out of the fascist and semi-fascist movements among white nationalists such as the Sovereign Citizens (the subject of a segment of the May 15th episode of 60 Minutes).

What we are witnessing is disturbingly similar to the period of the overthrow of Reconstruction and the building of the Jim Crow segregationist system in the South. Appealing to fears among whites, and in a frantic effort to destabilize any efforts at unity between the black and white poor in the South at the end of the 19th century, white Southern elites moved an agenda of voter disenfranchisement, hiding behind various coded concerns such as the literacy of the electorate.

African Americans were completely disenfranchised, and quite ironically, so were many poor whites.

Despite our knowledge of history and awareness of the antics of white right-wing populism, few progressives are discussing the implications of any of this for the 2012 elections. The implications, it would seem to me, are quite profound, and range from what this means about HOW to criticize the Obama administration, to how to ensure that the elections are not outright stolen by the white Right.

Just to be clear before some of my critics start yelling that "Fletcher is covering for Obama," this column is about racial politics in the USA. The particular flashpoint happens to be Obama but what is at stake, as I have attempted to elaborate, is far more than the political future of a corporate liberal president.

Silence on the part of progressives in the face of this situation, despite our own legitimate criticisms of Obama, misses the larger picture. Yes, we must criticize Obama; yes, we must push this administration; yes, we must protest any retrograde domestic or foreign policies. But in the end, we need to be discussing how this is done in the context of fighting a white, right-wing populism that is arguing that Obama is an alien and that he (and the changing demographics of the USA) represents the end of the white "American Dream."

We should have no illusions that the Republican candidate for the presidency, irrespective of who gets it, will center their campaign on anything but this one, critical message.

I think it is time to talk about strategy and tactics in the fight for power and against the Right, and not only about matters of policy. Politics is dirty, but it is also very complicated, that is, if one exists in the real world rather than in one's own playpen.

[BlackCommentator.com editorial board member, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfricaForum and co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. This article was first posted at BlackCommentator.com and was distributed by Progressive America Rising.]

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Pitchfork Populism : What Damage Will The Tea Baggers Do?

Photo from jkurt58 / Photobucket.
What will they do to America?
Right wing populism and the Tea Baggers

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / June 18, 2010

Maybe the great body of Tea Baggers cannot be reached, but we must answer their charges in hopes of contributing to an eventual paradigm shift for some of them. Only disconcerting facts or personal experiences lead people to change mindsets.

Many of us are tired of reading and writing about the Tea Baggers, but a few facts will help us to understand why we need to keep studying them.

Half of the unaffiliated voters in the United States say they are closer to the Tea Bag movement than to anyone else. This movement has the potential to recreate the situation after 9/11, when the political middle shrank dramatically. This time, there is the possibility that the near disappearance of the middle will greatly benefit the right. Third, Noam Chomsky, one of our brightest progressive scholars, warns that the present level of anger in politics arouses legitimate fear that fascism could emerge here

When the Tea Baggers appeared, they very briefly seemed a little like real economic populists as they were raising hell about what the Wall Street speculators did to our economy and financial system. But they soon forgot about the bankers and focused on punishing those who voted for the TARP and upon “taking back our country.”

A Republican pundit tried to paint the Tea Baggers as playing a role similar to that of the hippie counterculture radicals of the 1960s. But the young rebels of that time read some good journalism and often had a serious theoretical critique of the system. And they had ethical grounding that came from their roots in the civil rights movement. The Tea Baggers might be like Wall Mart hippies in that they do not see through the establishment’s propaganda machine; rather they soaked up much of what it had to say.


Pitchfork Populism

Time used the term “pitchfork populism” to describe the Tea Party movement. That is a reference to the Southern Populists of the late 19th Century, one of whose leaders was called “Pitchfork Ben.” That movement, starting out as the Farmers or Southern Alliance, had genuine economic grievances against the banks and railroads. There was a brief moment when some of those deeply frustrated white farmers allied with African-American share-croppers. After all they were all in the same boat. The Southern establishment eventually co-opted the white farmers by getting them excited about preventing blacks from voting and enacting Jim Crow legislation.

Some of these people were not nice, God-fearing farmers who were somehow misled. More than a few spent years in paramilitary anti-black movements and were deeply hostile to Catholics and Jews. There is a parallel here with some of the extreme right militia groups that constitute one of the two nuclei of the Tea Baggers. (The other nucleus is libertarianism, which is far less important in Teabaggism than some suppose.)

What the Southern Bourbons accomplished over some time in the 1890s occurred among the Tea Baggers in a matter of months. People who started out as would-be populists soon became spear carriers for the Southern Establishment, and some of them fought strenuously to uphold every aspect of the southern conservative canon. They became political fundamentalists.

Similarly, the Tea Baggers briefly showed a flash of economic populism when they complained about Wall Street, the insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical companies. In less than a few months, they were denouncing efforts to regulate business or the banks, and were running cover for people like Mitch McConnell, who on behalf of the banks and speculators, watered down financial reform. Like the Southern Populists, these people became preoccupied with race.

Their talk about “taking back government” seems to be about race and resenting the poor. They oppose big government but cannot define what that means other than being against taxes and programs that assist “people who don’t want to work.”

Pitchfork populists at 2009 Chicago tea party. Photo from Marathon Pundit.
Extreme right-wing populism
Ratcheted up to a dangerous level?

These are hard times, and people whose incomes and security are threatened sometimes grasp at straws. Most Tea Baggers appear to have jobs and some savings, but they seem to be worried about their 401ks, mortgages under water, whether their pensions will be cut, and whether their Medicaid benefits will be cut to provide medical coverage for over 30 million more people.

For more than three decades the income of the middle class has been shrinking. Few reasonable people can deny this or argue that this will change soon. Even the slightest knowledge of what happened in 2007 and 2008 would prompt the expectation that things are likely to get a lot worse for the middle class. Some people -- perhaps even a majority -- just cannot live with that kind of knowledge. Their solution is to resort to hysterics, anger, threatening behavior, and simplistic thinking.


Eliminationism

This writer and others have worked within the framework that classifies Teabaggism as the most extreme form of right-wing populism. Some, following Daniel J. Goldhagen, call it “ Eliminationism” because these extremists react so harshly against pluralism and people who are culturally and racially different from them. Granted, what we observe here is what might be a relatively mild form of eliminationism. None of them are talking about camps or Nuremberg laws.


Tea Baggism = Political fundamentalism

On the other hand, this model may be flawed. For one thing, the Republicans have had over three decades to ramp up right-wing populism. One can doubt that there were that many more conservative religious and rural folk out there to enlist in these ranks. What is happening now is that large numbers who were formerly not affiliated have flooded into Tea Bagger ranks. They are not, for the most part, people who think mainly about such hot button issues as abortion and stem cell research. Perhaps something else is going on.

It is very difficult to draw a clear line between the two phenomena, and they sometimes merge. Many of the Tea Baggers clearly have roots in right-wing populism and the Christian Right. Today, the Tea Baggers share characteristics with right-wing populists, and there are elements of overlap. Sometimes we find in the Tea Baggers an admixture of conventional religious thought. The political fundamentalist tends toward dogmatic attitudes, violence -- at least verbally, and a refusal to accept challenges to the conservative elements of the conventional wisdom. The inclination toward dogmatic attitudes does not include carefully stated policies.

When one studies the European right-wing authoritarian movements of the 1930s, right-wing populism was there, but over time it diminished and became political fundamentalism with an inclination toward accepting authoritarianism. Political fundamentalism was at the core of those movements. It was larger and more fanatical and dangerous. Tea Baggism is essentially a version of “political fundamentalism. ” There is a strong urge to shut down one’s critical processes and hang on desperately to some elements of conservative conventional wisdom. They offer ready-made answers and are embedded in our culture and sold to us daily by mainstream media and culture. What is happening is that frightened people are simply reverting to “default” positions and clinging to them for dear life. They try very hard to convince others perhaps because they want to be convinced themselves.

A blinkered view of reality is reassuring and comforting. Political fundamentalism thrives on simplicities and simplifications. There is such a thing as “protective stupidity” which more than a few need in order to be comfortable with their lives and it is likely that conservative strategists know how to feed it. The only antidote is continual reality therapy, and it may not work quickly.

Right-wing populists are mainly concerned with cultural and values questions. Aside from the matter of race, these hot button values are often of secondary importance to political fundamentalists. People in both movements seem to have problems with race, but it is a much more central to the American political fundamentalist.

Most American populists -- right or left -- believe in the democratic process. No matter what the Tea Baggers say, their actions show that they are perfectly willing to do permanent harm to that process by disrupting rallies, displaying weapons to intimidate people, threatening opponents, and demanding that their elected officials do all they can to shut down the legislative process. Some even spat on Congressmen and called them vile names.

Populists differ from political fundamentalists in another important way. Back in the 1930s, the followers of Huey Long and Father Charles Caughlin embraced some very unorthodox monetary theories. It is difficult to imagine the political fundamentalists flirting with fiscal heterodoxy for very long. We have already seen how they have taken up arms to defend big business and the Wall Street bankers sand speculators from government regulation.

The Kingfish: Former Louisiana governor Huey Long. Photo from News Real Blog.


Political fundamentalism is a barometer of crisis

The more people who are in turmoil and crisis, the more political fundamentalism there will be.

Even before 2001, there were conditions present that encouraged political fundamentalism. Many people could not deal with a diverse, urban society and the anomie that went with it. Truth seemed harder to establish, and many simply could not deal with the relativity of truth. They hankered for absolute certainties, and were unable to compartmentalize things in their own minds. People were less connected to others than before, and people were so absorbed multitasking that they had little opportunity to develop rich inner lives, without which there can be nothing but selfishness, fear of others, and a lack of empathy.

Then came the terrible events of 9/11, creating a siege atmosphere that began to move many Americans toward political fundamentalism, and the George W. Bush administration did all it could to produce this result -- recklessly insinuating that anyone who disagreed with it was an ally of Al Qaeda. Thus, Max Cleland, a U.S. Senator from Georgia who lost three limbs in service to his country, was turned out of office because he was said to be insufficiently patriotic. He was replaced by someone who had not worn the uniform. The onset of a near depression and the near destruction of our financial system in 2008 greatly exacerbated the crisis atmosphere.


Why some are more prone to political fundamentalism

Recently, Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weller noted that many Americans have a great need for order and certainty and cannot deal with ambiguities. People who find reality difficult to tolerate have a deep need to find simple and certain explanations. They develop an aversion to unbiased information. They also need scapegoats, such as blacks, Hispanics, Moslems, liberals, and homosexuals. These are authoritarian tendencies, so using the imagery of the Boston Tea Party and griping about government in general terms does not make one anti-authoritarian.

Sixty years ago, Konrad Lorenz, a brilliant scientist whose politics we rightly deplore, knew that there were many people who were naturally fearful and given to simple solutions. These people had problems facing unpleasant realities and reverted to the sunny promises offered by conventional wisdom. In a crisis, these people become politically activated and embrace political fundamentalism. This is why people in Europe moved to the right when struck with inflation and the great depression. To go the other way would require the ability to accept reality, question accepted wisdom, eschew simple answers, and abandon core beliefs of a lifetime.

When confronted with a crisis, it is so much easier to accept a simple framework that explains “everything” quickly; it is much like a religious conversion. Tea Bag ideas transform some of these people from feeling helpless and victimized to feeling empowered. Attending Tea Bagger meetings for them can be cathartic and deeply therapeutic. Many of their converts are political neophytes for whom this is not so much a political rebirth as a political birth.

Political fundamentalism is a somewhat new ideology and a metaphor for dogmatic solutions that are like panaceas. It offers black-and-white, simple answers that do not require careful thought, weighing of evidence, or compartmentalizing things.

Teabagging became a sort of hysteria that seems to be easily moved from target to target by those who have subtly directed it. At first these people thought they were victims of the banks and Big Pharma. In no time flat, they were fierce defenders of those in Congress who do the most for the banks and Big Pharma. Tea Baggers even denounced Senator Scott Brown when he did not back Republican efforts to defend Wall Street by blocking financial reform.

This transformation would be amusing if it were not such a tragedy. But in all these cases, they moved naturally from brief complaints about banks, speculators, or Big Pharma to dogmatic adherence to what they think are American “givens” -- opposing meddling government and regulations that could harm banks and business. They are back to the old idea that so-called free markets solve all problems. It was this outlook that nearly brought on a depression and the destruction of the financial system.

It is astonishing to watch the growing number of Americans who share this sentiment as hostility to regulation and the health care legislation continue to grow. Apparently, Americans are so stressed now that many naturally revert to some degree or other to the verities that we have long been fed by our culture, the mass media, and the Republican information machine.



Certainty resides to the right

Tea Bag sentiment, of necessity, tends to the right and to authoritarian positions. Perhaps they are first aroused by the misbehavior of the banks, but in the long run their quest for certainty and simple answers leads them to what they think are American fundamentals. In 2004, some of these people were deeply offended that anyone could suggest that Americans were actually torturing detainees. Once it became clear that this was the case, political fundamentalists quickly moved toward approving the torture. It was a matter of Americans versus “Others.” Some mistakenly think the Tea Baggers are essentially libertarians. A few are, like Rand Paul, but most are not libertarians. Most of them do not complain about the surveillance state and agree with Texas Senator John Cornyn, who ridicules people who worry about civil liberties: “None of your civil liberties matter after you are dead.”

Probably not one Tea Bagger in a thousand will see the inconsistency in Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s and Sarah Palin’s conduct. For a long time, Jindal said the federal government should stay out of our lives, but now it must build sand barriers and compensate fishermen. Sarah Palin sang the same song about less government and is now all over President Barack Obama because he has not figured out how to shut down the well in the Gulf or found a way to scoop up millions of gallons of oil heading toward marshes and beaches.

Paul has talked about a planned 10-lane highway -- coupled with a pipeline and rail line -- that will soon link Mexico. the U.S. and Canada -- as part of NAFTA. He says there might also be a common currency. Wild stuff!

Now Rand Paul, perhaps the nation’s leading Tea Bagger, denounced Obama for criticizing BP; Paul says criticizing business is “un-American.” Maybe he forgot that the original Tea Baggers -- those angry folks in Boston back in 1773 -- were reacting against a monopoly given to a business, the East India Company. In Colorado, Dan Maes, a Tea Bagger-backed candidate for Governor, is saying Coloradans should “beg forgiveness from the energy industry that Bill Ritter chased out of this state.”

Sharron Angle, the Tea Bagger nominated to oppose Harry Reid, calls for abolition of Social Security, and the 16th Amendment. Will senior citizen Tea Baggers in Nevada become rational enough to realize she wants to stop their monthly checks? Time will tell.

One truly zany Tea Bagger, Tim D’ Annunzio, was not nominated for a North Carolina congressional seat. According to his estranged wife, he thinks he is the Messiah and tried to raise his father-in-law from the dead. He wants to abolish 11 cabinet departments.

We may be certain that the folks at FAUX News and the big conservative think tanks, as well as Richard Armey, Mrs. Clarence Thomas, and the small army of cable and radio shock jocks are pleased with their work and laughing about how these little people are so easily manipulated. Hysteria is one of the characteristics of such movements, and it is easy for skilled propagandists to use it to political advantage.

Interviews with ordinary Tea Baggers have been published in several places. One of the most interesting phenomena that recur is that so many of these people say that the economy went bad after Barack Obama took office. They have the chronology of events completely wrong and they refuse to acknowledge that Obama had a role in preventing another depression. Some -- though a smaller number -- insist that Obama and the Democrats initiated TARP.

Chip Berlet, an expert on right-wing populism, says this movement has the force of a tornado, but he adds, “Its unpredictable. It can blow away in 10 seconds, or it can blow society up.” This applies even more to political fundamentalism. Right-wing populism these days has greater staying power because it has been so well cultivated and has deep roots in culture and religion. Political populism will develop staying power if progressives delay taking it on with civility and reason. It is dangerous to let these ideas take root and fester because the false historical memory the movement promotes will become part of the collective memory and be reinforced by intense emotion.

[Sherman DeBrosse is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. A retired history professor, he also blogs at Sherm Says and on DailyKos.]

Also on The Rag Blog:

• Sherman DeBrosse : Rage, Racism, and the Future of the Tea Bagger Movement
• Sherman DeBrosse : The Resistible Rise of the Tea Bagger Movement

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