Julius Caesar, JFK, FDR, and real American economic reform

[ProfessorPlum]

I recently read a short, excellent book called The Assassination Of Julius Caesar: A People's History Of Ancient Rome, by Michael Parenti. It talked about Roman history in the late republic and focused especially on the deaths of the Gracchus brothers and Julius Caesar.

The death of the Gracchi was never much of a mystery to me - they were drivers of popular reform, and the rich men in the Senate literally rose up and killed them, in at least one case using broken Senate benches to beat them to death, to keep them from stopping the rich from exploiting the poor.

But Caesar's death never made much sense to me until this book. Most people will say Caesar was killed because he was acting like a king, too big for his britches, made the wrong enemies, trusted his rivals too much, blah, blah, blah.

This book encouraged the reader to follow the money, and it described a Rome where the rich Romans were exploiting the crap out the populace - stealing their land, charging rents and interest rates that would make a loan shark blush, screwing over their veterans . . . basically the same shenanigans that American bankers and our elite are up to today.

Caesar tried to slow down this theft, just a little bit, and was assassinated, just one in a long line of popular Roman reformers before him. I don't know if we would call him a Democrat by today's standards, but his political faction, the populares, were met with violence and death by the plutocrats in the optimates party.

Which brings me back to America, and the way that our economic elites, kleptocrats, and money men have greeted leaders that really try to make reforms that help the American working class. FDR was the greatest example of this, and was nearly assassinated for it. How many presidents since then were really on the side of labor? Truman, certainly. A case could be made for both JFK and RFK. Clinton didn't have to worry about assassination from the banksters - they knew he would play ball, and he did so spectacularly by taking down the regulations that made banking safe and boring.

I guess what I'm finally ending with is that if a progressive's dream comes true and a real reformer gets into the White House - - - we will have to watch their health and safety like hawks. Because there will be forces at play that echo down the millennia and will want to end them with violence.

[Octafish]

1. Outstanding book, analysis and analogy by Parenti and ProfessorPlum.

Thank you, both!

"Money trumps peace." - George W Bush, Feb. 14, 2007

[ProfessorPlum]

2. excellent, thank you very much for this link

I can't wait to watch it.

[Octafish]

18. TUC Radio has a Parenti Archive...

"Time of Useful Consciousness"...aviation term that refers to the short seconds a pilot has after the cabin depressurizes at altitude before blacking out. Apt metaphor for our Age.

Great audio:

http://www.tucradio.org/parenti.html

Michael Parenti is profound. What's more, unlike most of those passing for intellectuals these days, he has INTEGRITY.

[ProfessorPlum]

23. Thank you for that link -

this will keep me busy for a while

[hedda_foil]

14. Wow! I just saw the whole lecture and I'm in awe of Professor Parenti.

What struck me most vividly were 3 things:

1. That Caesar was in many ways the Roman version of FDR. (My interpretation, not directly stated by Parenti.

2. That the Roman Republic was ruled by a small number of incredibly wealthy oligarchs in the Senate whose definition of freedom was pretty much identical to the Kochsters. i.e., their own freedom to do whatever they wanted to increase their own wealth. They saw the people as nuisances at best, and felt justified in kicking small landowners off their farms and replacing free workers with slaves.

3. That whenever a more populist leader achieved power, they were somehow assassinated. Not just Caesar, but quite a few others over a century or more. e.g., The Gracchus brothers, who have been compared to JFK and RFK.

Thank you both for sending me to Palenti. I'm off to find some of his books and lectures.

[Octafish]

20. Patterns in History that we are supposed to ignore.

"Move on! And let the Trickle Down begin!"

Democracy and the Pathology of Wealth -- Michael Parenti

"Most of the world is capitalist. And most of the world is poor."

Please check out the Parenti archive at TUC Radio above. The guy's lectures are eye opening and give direction for future work, especially in solving that darn historic re-run where the Have-Mores end up with meet everything.

[hedda_foil]

21. Thanks, Octafish. I have his YouTube page up right now.

[ProfessorPlum]

22. I made that same comparison to the Kennedys and FDR

when I was reading the book.

and I'd hate to have another real reformer like Sanders added to that list. (thank goodness FDR survived his coup attempt, and thanks once again to Smedley Butler)

[99th_Monkey]

3. One of the best reasons for VP Elizabeth Warren that I can think of

They would gain nothing by taking Bernie out. Besides the fact that she would make
an excellent VP for many other reasons as well, but his is one of the more compelling ones.

[JudyM]

4. He will choose a great VP. He likely knows others so that Warren can stay in Congress if she wants.

Warren would be superb but I'm betting he knows of other good candidates through his networks.

[99th_Monkey]

5. Who else besides EW has the passion, the in-depth experience, the iron-willed determination?

to take on Wall St. balls-to-the-wall?

I have not seen them, but am open to hearing about them.

[JudyM]

7. Maybe someone who offers some strength in international to complement him.

We shall see, eh? I'm looking forward to finding out.

[hedda_foil]

15. Absolutely agree. I've been thinking that way for the past week or so.

If he wins the nomination, the DNC, Third Way and oligarchs will do almost anything to foist one of their number onto the ticket to ensure the continuation of their power.

[deutsey]

6. Excellent book and K&R

Last edited Thu Jan 14, 2016, 02:32 PM - Edit history (1)

My personal theory is that the "economic royalists" who hated FDR so much--and who even tried to oust him in a fascist coup early on--were hellbent after WWII to never let any popular reformer like him gain the presidency (or to keep it for long if a genuine reform candidate managed to win).

[ProfessorPlum]

8. I think there is a lot to recommend that theory

in addition to just the "less money = hulk smash" reaction that the banksters seem to have about real reform.

[fleur-de-lisa]

9. Very interesting . . .

It seems that most of what modern people know about Caesar comes from Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, and after the hatchet job he did on Richard the Third, it's no wonder he might have misrepresented Caesar.

I am looking for something new to read an this book sounds like something I would really enjoy. Putting on my reading list. Thanks for the post!

[ProfessorPlum]

10. I hope you do enjoy it

as a bonus, Parenti takes a hatchet to Cicero and all of the 'gentlemen historians' who have burnished the historical images of all of these rich kleptocrats down through the ages.

[mrdmk]

16. Ralph Waldo Emerson may have beat you to it in 1841

ESSAY I - History

There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.
I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakspeare's strain.

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind's powers and depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law and political movement has meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, `Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.' This remedies the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions into perspective: and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance, and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.

link to the entire essay: http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/transcendentalism/emerson/essay_history.html

[ProfessorPlum]

11. A really excellent review for the book

that says even more of what I was trying to say here, but does it better than I have, is found at

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/908672439?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1

[ProfessorPlum]

12. It includes this line:

In doing so, he reveals Rome not only as the vicious war machine that we all know and love, but as a place where the ruling class turns the acquisitiveness and violence of its foreign policy on its own people.

that is exactly what has happened in America.

[deutsey]

19. I agree

In my more pessimistic moments, I feel as if we're playing out what happened in Rome, including the gradual decline into a new dark age.

[jwirr]

13. This is terrifying but very understandable. MIC, corporatism

energy industry, media and religion.

One thing the money men had better remember is that after JFK was assassinated LBJ was able to get a lot of his program passed as a type of memorial.

[Odin2005]

17. Damn, as a fan of that time period I need to get that book!