All the Populism Money Can Buy
by Alexander Cockburn
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Across the country last weekend, there were antiwar demonstrations, modest in turnout, but hopefully a warning to Obama that war without end or reason in Afghanistan, plus 40,000 more troops to Kabul, is not why people voted for him.
I spoke at our own little rally in my local town of Eureka, Calif. My neighbor Ellen Taylor decided to spice up the proceedings by having a guillotine on the platform, right beside the Eureka Courthouse House steps. Her father was Telford Taylor, chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg,
When she told me about the plan for the guillotine, I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. But Ellen said she wanted to reach out to new constituencies beyond the committed left, and what better siren call than the swoosh of the Avenging Blade? A hundred years ago, people liked to stress the similarities of the American and French revolutions. Mark Twain composed the most eloquent defense of the Terror ever written, in “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” But then, after 1917, the French Revolution was seen as the harbinger of Bolshevik excess and it grew less popular.
Up on the platform I took the guillotine issue head on. Only 666 aristocrats in Paris had been topped versus 1,543 throughout France. The reward: decisive smack on the snout of the land-holding aristocracy; durable popular power for peasants, workers and the petit bourgeois: M. le patron and M. le proprietaire stepped into history.
Here in America, the corporate class is now entirely out of control, lawless and beyond the sanction of prosecutor, juror or ballot box. If every corporate lawbreaker felt that somewhere along the line the retribution of the guillotine might await them, it would concentrate their minds marvelously and cow them into lawfulness.
I got some cheers and a charming young hippie, Brooklyn, mother of three, told me she wanted to move to France forthwith. Ellen told the executioner, Michael Evenson, to put the contraption through its paces. She invited the crowd to call out designated victims—CEOs of the major banks, billionaires of note, and Evenson would drop the blade. He hitched the blade up 6 feet and down it came with quite a satisfactory thwock.
Three days earlier, Goldman Sachs announced $3.1 billion in third-quarter profits, and set aside $5.3 billion for bonuses. Since G-Sachs is only still in business because of public bailout money, the bonus payments really make people mad. On the whole, Americans aren’t keen on axe blades, preferring the lynch mob’s rope, but if the target had been the board members of Goldman Sachs, I’m sure they’d make an exception, particularly after Lord Griffiths’ remarks were widely quoted this side of the Atlantic. Griffiths, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International, told an audience at St Paul’s Cathedral last Tuesday that the public should “tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all. I believe that we should be thinking about the medium-term common good, not the short-term common good …”
Left and liberal commentators have talked yearningly about a new populist fever raging in the American body politic, prompted by the spectacle of bailouts for bankers but foreclosures and the dole for everyone else. I can’t say there’s much sign of populism in any energetic form. Look at movies from the ’30s like Capra’s “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” and there’s a real edge to the anger of that time Capra felt it necessary to convey. These days, the anger is mostly formulaic. Over the weekend the left opinion-makers at the New York Times—Bob Herbert and Frank Rich—chewed out Goldman Sachs. Growled Herbert: “Even as tens of millions of working Americans are struggling to hang onto their jobs and keep a roof over their families’ heads, the wise guys on Wall Street are licking their fat-cat chops over yet another round of obscene multibillion-dollar bonuses—this time thanks to the bailout billions that were sent their way by Uncle Sam, with very little in the way of strings attached.”
The Obama administration promptly rushed to cover its left flank by announcing it’s planning to impose cuts in executive pay at seven companies with substantial bailout funds. The U.S. senate’s parlor populist, Bernie Sanders, dutifully proclaimed that the Obama administration was “taking an important step forward in trying to control the obscene compensation packages of the top executives on Wall Street.”
Note the meek qualifier “trying.” The truth of the matter is that the Obama team has managed the tricky shot of giving more bailout money to the banks than the cumulative dispensations of all previous U.S. governments, while at the same time not giving any significant debt relief to ruined homeowners, a huge slice of whom are poor, black and Hispanic. Obama is not seeking to reform the financial system, and it would be beyond miraculous if it did since the contrivers of the present mess—Lawrence Summers, et al—were given a welcoming clap on the back by the new president as he stepped into the White House and told them to get on with the job. This amazing bailout for the system—as if Lenin had used the October revolution to restore the Romanovs—has been engineered without significant opposition from organized labor or the left-liberal end of Obama’s own party.
Of course, people curse the bankers and their political flunkeys as they watch their 10Ks atomize, their homes go and their jobs disappear to China. They smolder as they watch the parade of Murdoch’s demagogues on Fox, flirting and toying with the theme of Obama’s assassination. The Obama administration dares to war with Glenn Beck, apparently the only enemy it feels capable of taking on. The gossip site Gawker calls on its readers to turn in all discreditable information about Goldman Sachs executives. The liberal talk host Olbermann calls on his audience to rat out Beck. Neither invitation has thus far yielded any significant harvest.
Alas, American populism needs the octane of cash. During the Clinton scandals, Hustler supreme Larry Flynt wanted his audience to rat out high-ranking Republican sinners. He offered $100,000 cash rewards and the dirt rolled in. Populism has to be cash-based these days. Maybe that was Ralph Nader’s point. His first work of fiction, 700 pages long, is titled “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
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1 Comment by jack bailey on 23 October 2009:
“Here in America, the corporate class is now entirely out of control, lawless and beyond the sanction of prosecutor, juror or ballot box. If every corporate lawbreaker felt that somewhere along the line the retribution of the guillotine might await them, it would concentrate their minds marvelously and cow them into lawfulness”.
Oh how clever! I guess it’s
capitalism stupid! Not the outrageously expanding ever present Federal Government behemoth and the profligate spending unmatched in the history of the universe!! Reading on, there follows a completely erroneous assessment of the French Revolution ( I suppose never read any Erik Von ..). Furthermore, America is still a classless society, no matter how much Obama lovers want it to be otherwise. IN this society, there are always people that succeed and those who fail, those who make a fortune and those that lose. There are no Indian style castes nor will there ever be as long as there is the Constitution. Reading further, there is the theater of the absurd in the safe town of Eureka away from the urban crime realities of Obama’s America, how courageous!( Washington DC crime rate since Obama election up 40%, Oakland 30%, Chicago etc.) And then the completely false explanation of the shell game played by Obama and Goldman Sachs. it’s about stuffing the reelection coffers, not about making outrageous money ot saving capitalism, which is under Obama doomed to extinction, (what Cockburn wants anyway). So what is all this incoherent outrage all for? To fool the reader in supporting the Obama agenda of reshaping America by continuing to be an apathetic Paleo, that’s all. Protesting the War is not protesting Obama, it is protesting Bush and corporate America, never Obama. Anyway, it does not look like anyone bothers to read Cockburn’s columns among Chronicles’ readereship and that is why there are hardly ever any comments. But perhaps some editor at some point should realize how pathetic Cockburn’s writing is. It has nothing to do with Conservatism or Paleoconservatism. There are plenty of places where the Socialst viewpoint is presented, why can’t we be enlightened by authors who share the Paleo point of view instead?
2 Comment by Grumpy Old Man on 23 October 2009:
Small world indeed. Ellen Taylor was in my class in elementary school.
3 Comment by Lone Racer on 24 October 2009:
I second Mr. Bailey’s comments. I can’t stand Cockburn. Who cares if he, too, is against America’s very anti-Middle American Middle East policies? There is a lot more to being a rightist than opposition to foreign entanglements, and such opposition, which can be found amongst leftists like Cockburn as well as paleos, is insufficient to justify publicizing this man’s ignorant rants on this site. It would be far more appropriate to reprint essays from Jared Taylor or Lawrence Auster. If you want regular, topical columns from a truly “alternative” perspective, why not carry Dr. David Duke? One suspects that the majority of readers here would find Duke far more congenial than Cockburn; the real question, though, is, would the editors?
4 Comment by robert on 24 October 2009:
Ol Republican Jack Baily @ 1 says:”Oh how clever! I guess it’s
capitalism stupid! Not the outrageously expanding ever present Federal Government behemoth and the profligate spending unmatched in the history of the universe!!”
U.S. President George W. Bush, saying “our entire economy is in danger,” urged Congress to approve his administration’s $700 billion bailout proposal.
“We’re in the midst of a serious financial crisis, and the federal government is responding with decisive actions,” Bush said in a televised address Wednesday night from the White House.
Bush pointed out that the collapse of several major lenders was rooted in the subprime mortgage market that thrived over the past decade.
He said passage of the $700 billion bailout proposal was needed to restore confidence in the market.
“I’m a strong believer in free enterprise, so my natural instinct is to oppose government intervention,” he said. But “these are not normal circumstances. The market is not functioning properly. There has been a widespread loss of confidence.
“Without immediate action by Congress, America can slip into a major panic.”
One thing about the current Republican Party is they are not afraid to blatantly lie, cheat and steal from the middle class at home to achieve neo-con ends abroad . Never have been and never will be. As Professor Wilson likes to point out: “It has beens so from the beginning, is now and ever shall be. Amen”
5 Comment by robert on 24 October 2009:
Ol Republican Jack Baily @ 1 says:”Oh how clever! I guess it’s
capitalism stupid! Not the outrageously expanding ever present Federal Government behemoth and the profligate spending unmatched in the history of the universe!!”
U.S. President George W. Bush, saying “our entire economy is in danger,” urged Congress to approve his administration’s $700 billion bailout proposal.
“We’re in the midst of a serious financial crisis, and the federal government is responding with decisive actions,” Bush said in a televised address Wednesday night from the White House.
Bush pointed out that the collapse of several major lenders was rooted in the subprime mortgage market that thrived over the past decade.
He said passage of the $700 billion bailout proposal was needed to restore confidence in the market.
“I’m a strong believer in free enterprise, so my natural instinct is to oppose government intervention,” he said. But “these are not normal circumstances. The market is not functioning properly. There has been a widespread loss of confidence.
“Without immediate action by Congress, America can slip into a major panic.”
One thing about the current Republican Party is they are not afraid to blatantly lie, cheat and steal from the middle class at home to achieve neo-con ends abroad . Never have been and never will be. As Professor Wilson likes to point out: “It has beens so from the beginning, is now and ever shall be. Amen”
Oops…forgot to say great post! Looking forward to your next one.
6 Comment by Lone Racer on 24 October 2009:
Robert @4:
Your comments are irrelevant. Bailey @1 did not praise Bush, but was simply exposing leftist Cockburn’s hypocrisy.
More importantly, you sound like one of those paleo-fools who think the ‘real’ problem is American adventurism. Yes, our foreign policy is objectionable, but not fatal. What is killing America and the West is totalitarian race-replacement. What is necessary is to have millions of discussions among whites around the planet, from the web to the kitchen table, about the reality of race, and of the necessity for strong measures (ie immigrant repatriation, or for the strong of heart and mind, “racial cleansing”), to ensure our racial and civilizational survival.
I confess to being continually astonished at the lack of interest in even discussing on this site the race war being waged against whites. Within the purely political realm (within our own lives we all have many personal, familial and professional concerns), what could possibly be more important – or fascinating?
7 Comment by Theodore Van Oosbree on 24 October 2009:
The French revolutionaries also slaughtered hundreds of thousands of peasants in the Vendee (a fact that has gone down the memory hole).
8 Comment by Ed Roberts on 25 October 2009:
“Yes, our foreign policy is objectionable, but not fatal.”
The foreign policy of the US is “Invade the world, Invite the world”. It’s part and parcel of the assault on Western civilization which includes the invasion of Christendom by islam.
The foreign policy of the US will prove fatal, not by itself, but in conjunction with such fatal domestic policies as open borders and insistence on multiculturalism.
9 Comment by Joe Porreca on 25 October 2009:
When Alexander Cockburn says that “the corporate class is now entirely out of control, lawless and beyond the sanction of prosecutor,” he is consistent with points made in Chronicles magazine by David Hartman, who has called for more adequate regulation of the financial sector, and William Quirk, who drew attention to the devastating effects of the Clinton administration passage of laws which removed legal barriers to the recklessness that enabled the financial crisis. Cockburn is also consistent with William Quirk when he says, “Obama is not seeking to reform the financial system, and it would be beyond miraculous if it did since the contrivers of the present mess—Lawrence Summers, et al—were given a welcoming clap on the back by the new president as he stepped into the White House and told them to get on with the job.”
I have enjoyed Cockburn’s articles on the Chronicles web site.
10 Comment by Lone Racer on 26 October 2009:
The financial implosion, which devastated my own portfolio (having disproportionately invested in Citigroup and AIG on the theory that, though I knew the market was considerably overvalued when the Dow hit merely 12000, I thought such financial behemoths must be competently run, and thus ’safe’, at least from going belly-up; my naivete was, however, in part conditioned by the government regulators themselves over the decades, whose raison d’etre I thought was limiting the possibilities for recklessness, at least for the financial sector), was mostly the creation of government, from the Fed’s horrible easy money policy, begun under Greenspan, and massively extended under the awful Bernanke, to arcane and incredibly market-distorting financial regulations, which only served to REDUCE transparency, and essentially make it impossible for individual investors to understand the interrelationships of various financial companies with the broader economy, to a “socialization of risk / privatization of profit” mentality on Wall Street, which had its origins in the general post-New Deal financial architecture.
My point is simply that we do not need additional regulations of any kind. We need massive and comprehensive deregulation, a return to totally free capital markets, without any government guarantees – and no bailouts! You fail, you’re outta there! That system is both just and maximally efficient, and is called capitalism. What we have now is “social democracy cum crony (or “Goldman-Sachs”) capitalism”. The present system is emphatically NOT what Mises or Hayek ever advocated.
Incidentally, I am not a libertarian, for many philosophical as well as pragmatic reasons. I do think they are correct in their basic economics, though they are deeply flawed in their “meta-economics”. But those areas where the market needs to be regulated are never purely economic; they are always related to something “extra-economic”, like environmental preservation, epidemiological security, military security, or demographic preservation. But if you’re after truth respecting the economy, one must start one’s analysis on an Austro-libertarian microeconomic foundation, and then deviate from market purism as non-market influences demand adjustments.
11 Comment by Lone Racer on 26 October 2009:
To Ed@7:
You refute yourself. It is not the foreign policy, bad as it is, that threatens the very foundations of our civilization, but open borders, and multicultural ideology.
Paleos need to get their priorities straight. If all they are are Christian apologists, then multiculturalism should not be a problem, except wrt Islam. Open borders, again with the exception of the Europe/Islam connection, would not be especially objectionable, either. But “Christianity” and “conservatism”, though overlapping both philosophically and sociologically, are not coterminous. While this might be debatable, I believe one can be a good Christian without being a political conservative. Likewise, one can certainly be conservative, or at least,”on the right”, without being Christian.
The main problem killing the West, the preservation of which is the ’sumum bonum’ of conservatism, is not de-Christianization, nor certainly our alternating liberal/neocon foreign policy. It is the non-white immigration invasion and colonization. When the biological type, or race, which created the West is no longer numerically preponderant within the historic territories of the West, then our civilization will be at an end. We can renew ourselves from infinite follies – but not if we lose our racial purity or numerical superiority … which is exactly what is happening, day in, day out.
12 Comment by Ed Roberts on 26 October 2009:
“You refute yourself. It is not the foreign policy, bad as it is, that threatens the very foundations of our civilization, but open borders, and multicultural ideology.”
By all means, argue with what you wish I had said rather than what I said.
13 Comment by robert on 26 October 2009:
Dear Lone Racer,
Most folks who blog at Chronicles use real names or at least names that resemble Western culture. It seems ironic that a man of your principles would utilize the very modern practice of disguise here at the Chronicles blog instead of say, the “Free Republic” blog. It all reminds me of the maniacal observations of the suicidal french poet, Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, and his memorable line about the modern men he despised: “I IS ANOTHER.” No one around here is scared to speak about race, it just isn’t raised to the level of a door to eternal life. One problem I see in this area that white racist never desire to speak about is the fact that whites have just about contracepted their way out of existence. Not to say that because folks don’t like kids, there house should be opened to strangers but immigration is a multi-faceted issue and the oligarchs thoink slavery is good for business and what the oligarchs like, the oligarchs get — white folks or blacks folks be damned.
14 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 26 October 2009:
If the US ever becomes intolerable as the entire goes the way of Detroit, where would you all go? For me I think the Chilean Lake District. Maybe Northern Quebec, because I can always learn more French.
15 Comment by Lone Racer on 27 October 2009:
Many white preservationists (these used to be known as ‘conservatives’) are very worried about the Europoid population implosion, which is not primarily due to contraception (or abortion) , but rather, to feminism and the late marriages (and lack of any at all) that often have resulted from it. But declining white populations, though hardly suggestive of civilizational dynamism, are not the ultimate problem, which is non-white immigration. We need to be clear about that.
Immigration is not multi-faceted in terms of its effects on both Western survival, and current Western quality of life. Certain selfish and treasonous economic interests may favor mass immigration, but who cares? Our job is to defeat them.
And oh yes, race is central to the survival of the West; it is the “door to eternal (Western) life”. More precisly, if we don’t slam that door shut, our civilization is over – and with its demise goes everything social and political and eventually even cultural that rightists have sought to conserve.
16 Comment by robert on 27 October 2009:
Lone Racer writes:
“And oh yes, race is central to the survival of the West; it is the “door to eternal (Western) life”. More precisly, if we don’t slam that door shut, our civilization is over – and with its demise goes everything social and political and eventually even cultural that rightists have sought to conserve.”
This is true when civilzations are clashing as is Islam in Europe and England but not so desperate when differnt peoples of the same civilazation are clashing as with Mexican immigrants. It will be a disaster at the rate we are attempting to sustain it, but at least the mexicans have the essential cult which our own survival depends upon — The Holy Sacrifice of The Mass and devotion to The Mother of God. Cheers
17 Comment by Chris on 27 October 2009:
Robert, what nonsense. The Mexicans are not a part of Western Civilisation. Western Civilisation is a product of both the European people and the Catholic Church. Merely having the correct faith is totally insufficient.
18 Comment by robert on 28 October 2009:
Chris,
I stand corrected as to your understanding of the relationship of Western Civilization to Mexico. But, the essence of what I said and what I meant is :”It will be a disaster at the rate we are attempting to sustain it, but at least the Mexicans have the essential cult which our own survival depends upon — The Holy Sacrifice of The Mass and devotion to The Mother of God.” Islam and the oriental cults are a totally differnt matter. As Pat Buchanan has correctly stated the problem for us, “one cannot fight a great religion with no religion” this is not the issue with Mexican immigrants. Again, this is not something our oligarchs understand or even care about. For them, a slave is a slave whether he comes from Asia, Africa or South America. I wish the issue was as simple as White Man all good, Brown Man not so good.Yet, like any ism, racism ignores more truths than it helps to discover.
19 Comment by robert on 28 October 2009:
“If the US ever becomes intolerable as the entire country goes the way of Detroit, where would you all go?”
Coastal Peru. But I don’t need to worry about it now, I made it over the hump and can see something like mercy and “the end” from here.
20 Comment by Lone Racer on 28 October 2009:
Robert and Chris @15-18:
I actually agree with both of you, and that is no contradiction. The West is indeed the product of the white race (biology), with, now, the overlay of the Christian, especially Catholic, faith (being Catholic myself, I admit to being biased here; I really do believe, however, that Protestants are deeply wrong, even – especially? – the ones with whom I am in general political agreement; I include here both the strict Calvinists, whose views I consider monstrous, even as I have friends amongst them, and the evangelicals, who are just silly to me). Of course, we need to be careful about overemphasizing not race (as most Chronicles writers and blog commenters strangely might aver), but faith, as The One True Faith is a potential gift for all men, but the pre-Christian ancients, undeniably part of our civilization (just ask this site’s editor), are ours alone. Indeed, I argue there would be every bit as much deep psychological compatibility between an ancient Roman, and at least a paleoconservative white man, as between two contemporary Christians of different races.
Both the West and Christianity are larger than each other.
Muslims are infinitely more dangerous immigrants than Mexicans, as my own mother has been saying for years, and for the very reasons above (true, she also says the same thing about all-non-Christian immigrants, including the Chinese – and Jews). The Muslims represent an alien and mostly antagonistic civilization, with a very strong and confident worldview in opposition to our own, both metaphysically as well as temporally (politically and culturally). They have a deep history (and historical memory) of conflict with us. Allowing them to immigrate en masse into Europe over the past half-century was a series of acts of world-historical treason on the part of European “leaders”, and someday, there must be Nuremberg-style trials and punishments for them.
Although there is a radical and racist fringe (”Aztlan”) to the Mexican ‘reconquista’ of the American southwest, I do not think that most Mexicans are either as profoundly oppositional, or as ideologically radicalized, as Muslims (though our own treasonous liberal multiculturalists certainly don’t help matters!). I’ve employed, worked with, etc, many of them, and most are just concerned with bettering themselves (though such betterment can be effectuated by welfare for many of them as much as by work). The point, though, is that, taken as a whole, they are racially inferior to whites – less intelligent, less capable, less entrepreneurial, less rectitudinous, and, of course, still racially mostly incompatible. I’m not sure Mexicans constitute a mortal civilizational threat, but they do lower what used to be called in saner times our “national quality”.
21 Comment by Chris on 28 October 2009:
Lone Racer, that was an excellent post.
22 Comment by S.L. Toddard on 28 October 2009:
“A hundred years ago, people liked to stress the similarities of the American and French revolutions”
It is the differences that are most important.
23 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 2 November 2009:
C’mon, Jack Bailey and Lone Racer, let Alex sing. Think of him as our canary in the coal mine of leftism. We can gauge its current toxicity by the weirdness of his warbling. Our man in the asylum those on the “committed left” commit themselves to every time they open their mouths. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve always dreamed of eloping to France with a hippy chick who’s turned on by guillotines.