Pimping Populism for Post-Proletarians

[laststeamtrain]

Pimping Populism for Post-Proletarians
Rev. Peter Laarman


Never people to spend time reading history (what with the time required for makeup/costume and schmoozing), our corporate media "election team" guys and gals have at least taken some note of McCain's move to out-outrage Obama on the Spoliations of the Speculators, the Peculations of the Privileged, the Avarice of the Already Alarmingly Advantaged.

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What cannot be mimicked: the real Farmers' Alliance folks, and the Populists behind them, did actual bloody battle with the agents and thugs of Jay Gould, James J. Hill, Collis Huntington, and the other railroad barons. They actually organized a movement that had the magnates seriously worried.

What cannot be mimicked is the way the Populists' greatest tribunes, from James Baird Weaver to William Jennings Bryan, did much more than just mouth the right words for a credulous press. They actually pushed back, strategically and often decisively, in legislatures across the country and in the Congress. History, of course, records that the other side "won." Big Capital "won," as it usually does, when Bryant went down in '96. But even in defeat the Populists kept a vital pulse of resistance alive.

Nothing remotely like that is going on today. Among today's newly-dispossessed, whether newly-demonized immigrants or newly-repossessed homeowners or newly-unemployed wage workers, there is no seriously political organizing taking place. Workplace and community organizing, yes, but political organizing based on economic self-interest is quite another thing.

And as for the question of any tribunes arising from today's political class, let this paragraph lifted from a current AP dispatch on the president's $700 billion rescue plan say all that needs to be said:

"Their language reflected a tricky balance that politicians in both parties are trying to strike, just six weeks before Election Day: Back a plan that doles out hundreds of billions to companies that made bad bets and still identify with the plight of middle-class voters."

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-laarman/pimping-populism-for-post_b_128010.html