Barack Obama: Authoritarian Populist

In the 1920s and early 30s, Huey Long was the King of Louisiana. The actual elected offices he held - Public Service Commissioner, Governor and Senator - were mere formalities. Long ruled Louisiana with absolute power.

He rigged his share of elections, but once in power he really didn't have to - he got all the votes he needed by bribing people. Not with money or jobs (though he used those, too), but with populism.

The Kingfish was for the little guy, and he proved it with lots of laws, policies and programs that started to lift Louisiana out of its 18th-century mudhole and alleviate some of the worst of its poverty.

But the price Louisianans paid for a small improvement in their standard of living was losing the liberty to hold their benefactor accountable. Their votes had put him in position to grab so much power they couldn't get rid of him.

An assassin put an end to the career that might have taken the Kingfish to the White House, so the question of whether Long was a genuine American Fascist or simply the most powerful Populist in American history remains unresolved.

Today, however, we have before us the spectacle of a political debate in which self-proclaimed "liberals" and "progressives" are defending Barack Obama's profoundly un-American and un-Constitutional vote to dismantle the Fourth Amendment. They defend Obama on the grounds that - wait for it - he's a Populist.

Well, of course he is. That's the way - the only way - a Democratic candidate gets elected president.

But today, by voting to gut the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, Barack Obama proved himself an authoritarian willing to do whatever it takes to gain and hold power.

Don't get me wrong. I'm voting for Obama in November and encourage everyone else to do so, too. But let's elect him our 44th President with our eyes wide open about his Authoritarian Populism.

Obama has taken strong progessive stands on issues dear to Democratic and Liberal hearts, including:

• Come out against the California gay marriage amendment
• Promoted details of a tax plan which would cut taxes for the working poor and middle class by thousands of dollars each, while massively increasing taxes on the wealthy
• Condemned bad trade deals, enough to raise the ire of the news pages of the Wall Street Journal (which under Murdoch are morphing into as rightwing as the old editorial pages) which characterized his stance as "likely to rile allies."
• And just yesterday called for overhaul of the 2005 bankruptcy bill and denounced McCain for his support of the bill and the banking industry "at the expense of hardworking Americans."

But not since Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent thousands of American citizens to prison camps for the crime of choosing their ancestors poorly has a Democratic presidential candidate so blatantly attacked the Constitutional rights of American citizens.

As Glenn Greenwald put it in just the latest of his many superb and passionate posts on the FISA abomination:

Today, the Democratic-led Senate ignored those protests, acted to protect the single most flagrant act of Bush lawbreaking of the last seven years, eviscerated the core Fourth Amendment prohibition of surveillance without warrants, gave an extraordinary and extraordinarily corrupt gift to an extremely powerful corporate lobby, and cemented the proposition that the rule of law does not apply to the Washington Establishment.

I still hold out hope that Obama is playing a very deep game and will tack back to the true American majority after he is elected.

But as the Kingfish discovered, authoritarian power is, in the end, incompatible with American Democracy.

Cross-posted at Blue in the Bluegrass.

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Who's Afraid of Mike Huckabee?

Anyone who's ever been to a Chamber of Commerce meeting knows the idea of those overfed, self-satisfied incompetents* actually getting out of their comfy office suites to build anything is too hilarious for words.

But it seems the impudence of presidential candidates daring to utter "populist" ideas has got the chamber's national president sputtering empty threats:

From The Los Angeles Times:

Alarmed at the increasingly populist tone of the 2008 political campaign, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is set to issue a fiery promise to spend millions of dollars to defeat candidates deemed to be anti-business.

"We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed," chamber President Tom Donohue said....

Although Donohue shied away from precise figures, he indicated that his organization would spend in excess of the approximately $60 million it spent in the last presidential cycle. That approaches the spending levels planned by the largest labor unions....

"I'm concerned about anti-corporate and populist rhetoric from candidates for the presidency, members of Congress and the media," he said. "It suggests to us that we have to demonstrate who it is in this society that creates jobs, wealth and benefits -- and who it is that eats them."

Okay, leaving aside the sexual-sado-masochistic metaphors that bring to mind corpulent 19th-century factory owners buggering their starving child laborers, Donohue's got this completely backwards.

(More after the jump.)

As I wrote in a comment to TPMMuckraker:

Companies do NOT create jobs; consumers of products that companies manufacture create jobs.

Seen the horse-whip industry creating many jobs lately?

High time someone reminded the Chamber that "labor" is not a bunch of non-consuming Martians outside the economy. "Labor" is consumers.

Decades ago, a GM exec showed UAW leader Walter Reuther an auto-building robot and crowed, "Let's see you get him to join a union!":

Ruether retorted: "Let's see you get him to buy a car."

It was Henry Ford, a capitalist who makes the fascists in the Chamber seems like Commies, who paid his assembly-line workers the un-heard-of sum of $5 per day for one purely capitalist reason:

So they could afford to BUY the cars they were BUILDING.

Wake up, assholes. By opposing populism, you're digging your own graves.

*The Chamber, especially in its lobbying-centric national form, is hardly friendly to the entrepreneurial small business people who are the true backbone of the U.S. economy.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

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Will 2008 be the Year of the Populist?

Perhaps.

How else to explain the insurgent popularity of Mike Huckabee?

There is always a populist somewhere in the Democratic field, at least early on. John Edwards has tapped into a vein of traditional Democratic working-class and man-of-the-people appeals; and as the message seems to be catching on this election cycle, other Democratic candidates are scurrying to don the populist cloth. Even Hillary. "The wealthy and the well-connected have had a president for seven years," she told a crowd in Ottumwa last night. "Meanwhile, most Americans have seen their incomes stall."

But I honestly don't think I can place a single Republican populist in the Republican field, ever. I have certainly never seen one with the support Huckabee is currently enjoying.

The Huckabee campaign presents a real opportunity for head-scratching on the part of the bought-and-paid-for corporatists of the Republican Party, which has traditionally been business friendly at the expense of all other interests.

None of the other Republicans candidates have taken up the charge. In fact, Frederick of Hollywood stuck to the script (there's a writer's strike on, you know) and continued to insist that "[N]ot enough has been done to tell what some call the greatest story never told, and that is that we are enjoying a period of growth right now."

It doesn't hurt the populist message any that oil hit a hundred bucks a barrel the day before Iowans caucus. John Edwards immediately seized on the price of oil and incorporated it into his campaign message the day before the first votes are cast. "Today's report that the price of oil has reached $100 a barrel is just another example of how corporate greed is squeezing the middle class," said Mr. Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, in a statement. At a packed coffeehouse in downtown Iowa City yesterday, he asked the crowd, "Are you going to let corporate greed steal your children's future?"

[Keep reading]

That message can't help but hit home in a state where towns are far-flung, and farms dot the landscape. And every one of those farms has at least a couple of 250-gallon tanks (one for gas, one for diesel) that have to be filled up regularly, and there is no buy-in-bulk discount. (Those Massey-Fergusson and John Deere tractors and combines that plant and harvest a lot of the food you buy at Albertson's and Safeway get fueled up at home, not in town at the gas station.)

Huckabee frequently cites escalating fuel prices as a major concern for voters, and even goes so far as to contrast CEO pay with stagnating wages. On New Years Day he told an audience that "A president needs to understand that what's good for the American economy needs to be good for all Americans."

He also contrasts his own humble roots with the privileged life of his chief rival here in Iowa, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. "If politics is going to end up being nothing more than about who has the most money, then we've not had a presidency, we've had a plutocracy, and we might as well put it on eBay and sell it to the highest bidder," he said yesterday in Mason City.

Huckabee might be getting grief from that embarrassing gasbag Limbaugh and his slavering minions of the so-called "right" - but his message is resonating with people who are more concerned about paying for their next tank of $3 per gallon gasoline than whether they ditched their illegal viagra before they attempted to clear customs after their latest Dominican fleshpot cruise.

One of the pillars of Huckabee's economic plan is a "fair tax" - a national sales tax that would replace the income tax (this is anathema to business interests, which guard their favorite loopholes in the tax code as jealously as a Texas high-school cheerleaders mother). Conservatives and liberals alike denounce the notion as dangerous, because it would have to be much higher than what Mr. Huckabee has proposed in order to raise enough revenue to keep the country running. Critics also charge that the "fair tax" Huckabee proposes would hit the very working-class people he aims to help the hardest.

But that doesn't stop it from resonating. It hit home with 22-year-old Jason Downs, a University of Iowa student who recently went to a Huckabee rally. "Right now the middle class is paying more taxes, the upper class has abilities to get accountants and move funds around and all that. Where if you have a consumption tax, it's going to be a fair amount," said Mr. Downs.

John Edwards, who never left Iowa after the 2004 election, has been priming the populist pump in Iowa ever since. And with energy prices so high, and healthcare so tenuous (farmers are self employed and have to buy their own health coverage, unless a spouse works "in town" and likely only took the job in the first place in order to get insurance. And still the premiums and copays keep going up.)

Whatever happens tonight in Iowa, and next week in New Hampshire, the economic message of populism is going to influence the rest of the campaign.

And while I am not a populist (insert joke about city dwellers and public transportation here) I welcome the message. For too long corporate interests have run roughshod over the interests of ordinary people, to the point that it now represents a serious threat to our liberty. So I welcome anything that might reverse that trend.

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