|
Banned
|
Is America's Response to Death of NOLA & Pat Robertsonized Fed Gov,another Huey Long?
Quote:
http://www.gregpalast.com/madhouse/index.php/46
A Taste of Palast’s Armed MadHouse: 1927. Again.
The National Public Radio news anchor was so excited I thought she’d pee herself: The President of the United States had flown his plane down to 1,700 feet to get a better look at the flood damage! Later, I saw the photo of him looking out of the window of Air Force One. The President looked very serious and concerned. That was on Wednesday, August 31, 2005, two days after the levees broke and Lake Ponchartrain swallowed New Orleans.
The President had waited the extra days to stop first at the Pueblo El Mirage Golf Course in Arizona. I’m sure the people of New Orleans would have liked to show their appreciation for the official Presidential photo-strafing, but their surface-to-air missiles were wet. I don’t want to give the impression the President did nothing. He swiftly ordered the federal government to dispatch to New Orleans 18 water purification units, 50 tons of food, two mobile hospitals, expert search teams, and 20 lighting units with generators. <b>However, that was President Chávez, whose equipment was refused entry to the disaster zone by the U.S. State Department.</b>
President Bush also flew in generators and lights. They were used for a photo op in the French Quarter, then removed when the President concluded his television pitch. The corpses floating through the Ninth Ward attracted vultures. There was ChoicePoint, our friends from Chapter 1: The Fear. They picked up a contract to identify the bodies using their War on Terror DNA database. In the face of tragedy, America’s business community pulled together, lobbying hard to remove the “Davis-Bacon” regulation that guarantees emergency workers receive a minimum prevailing wage.
<b>The Rev. Pat Robertson got a piece of the action.</b> The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Web site encouraged those wanting to help victims to donate to the charities he controls. Within the week, the Navy penned a half-billion-dollar contract for reconstruction work with Halliburton. More would come. Our President, as he does in any emergency situation, announced additional tax cuts. He ordered immediate write-offs for new equipment used in rebuilding. That will likely provide a relief for Halliburton, but the deductions were useless to small New Orleans businesses which had no income to write off. The oil majors, the trillion-dollar babies, won a $700 million tax break. Don’t think of hurricanes as horrors, but as opportunities. For the schoolchildren among the refugees, instead of schools, our President promised school “vouchers” on a grand scale. And there was a bonus. Louisiana had been a “purple” state- neither a solid Republican Red nor Democratic Blue. It was up for grabs politically. With a Democratic Senator and a new Democratic Governor, Louisiana was ready to lead the South out of the GOP. Louisiana’s big blue Democratic splotch was enclosed within the city below sea level.
On August 29, this major electoral problem for the Republican party was solved. I’m not saying our rulers deliberately let New Orleans drown. But before they would save it, the lifeguards boarding Air Force One had to play a few more holes......
....So who’s to blame for losing New Orleans?
That’s easy. It was Franklin Roosevelt. New Orleans was the victim of the New Deal, according to New York Times columnist John Tierney, in “Losing that New Deal Religion.” The free market flat-worlder’s argument goes like this: The idea that government’s job is to protect you is gone with the wind, drowned in the Mississippi. Government’s the problem, and the solution is… Wal-Mart. Turn FEMA into WEMA, the “Wal-Mart Emergency Management Agency.” That’s a quote. Let the market do it, let the market save us. Louisiana’s Republican Senator David Vitter was so excited by the idea of selling off the government, “privatizing,” that he introduced a bill at high tide to do just that, “privatize” emergency planning. <b>But Senator Vitter, didn’t Joe Allbaugh tell you? New Orleans hurricane planning was privatized........</b>
......It wasn’t in the Times, but a year before the hurricane, the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA signed a half-million-dollar contract with a private operator to write up “a catastrophic hurricane disaster plan for the City of New Orleans,” says the press release. Their plan was innovative. We know it was innovative because the work was handed to a company called “Innovative Emergency Management.” Innovative Emergency Management, said a company release, had “teamed” with expert James Lee Witt, the renowned Clinton FEMA chief, which was good news for New Orleans. The bad news was, it wasn’t true. Witt, despite IEM’s press release, said he was not part of the Innovative “team.”
No matter. Innovative Emergency Management’s founder, president and CEO, Madhu Beriwal, I believe, owns an umbrella and she’s an exceptionally experienced donor to the Republican party. She has more campaign committee citations, including donations to Senator Vitter, than evacuation plans to her name. Maybe she has extraordinary credentials for saving a city from flood, but when we called seeking her experience and credentials, we got nothing.
IEM’s press release, besides the fib about Witt, made this utterly truthful point: Given this area’s vulnerability and elevation…a plan that facilitates a rapid and effective hurricane response is critical. Amen to that.
So I called IEM in Baton Rouge to see their critical and innovative plan that was supposed to be complete well before Katrina’s landfall. The Wal-Mart of disaster prep couldn’t get me a copy. In fact, they couldn’t say if they had it. Nor if the City of New Orleans had it. Or if Senator Vitter or anyone had it or if it existed.
Could they tell me the name of someone at FEMA who had the evacuation plan? They hesitated, so I prompted, “Well, who do you call if there’s an emergency?” The question stumped them. And it stumped FEMA, which wouldn’t provide me a copy. The problem, I was informed, was that they couldn’t confirm it existed.
There is nothing new under the sun. A Republican president going for the photo op as the Mississippi rolls over New Orleans. It was 1927, and President Calvin Coolidge sent Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, “a little fat man with a notebook in his hand,” who mugged for the cameras and promised to build the city a wall of protection. They had their photos taken. Then they left to play golf with Ken Lay or, rather, the Ken Lay railroad baron equivalent of his day.
In 1927, the Democratic Party had died and was awaiting burial. As depression approached, the coma-Dems, like Franklin Roosevelt, called for, of all things, balancing the budget.
<center><img src="http://static.flickr.com/72/160165321_e9a484c7ca_o.jpg"></center>
Then, as the Mississippi waters rose, one politician, the state’s electricity regulator, stood up on the back of a flatbed truck rigged with loudspeakers, and said, roughly, “Listen up! They’re lying! The President’s lying! The rich fat jackals that are drowning you will do it again and again and again. They lead you into imperialist wars for profit, they take away your schools and your hope, and when you complain, they blame Blacks and Jews and immigrants. Then they drown your kids. I say, Kick’m in the ass and take your share of the wealth you created.” <h3>Huey Long was our Hugo Chávez</h3>, and he laid out a plan: a progressive income tax, real money for education, public works to rebuild Louisiana and America, Social Security old age pensions, veterans’ benefits, regulation of the big utility holding companies, an end to what he called, “rich men’s wars,” and an end to the financial royalism of the One Percent.
He even had the audacity to suggest that the poor’s votes should count, calling for the end to the poll tax four decades before Martin Luther King succeeded in ending it. Long recorded his motto as a musical anthem: “Everyman a King.”
The waters receded, the anger did not, and, in 1928, Huey “Kingfish” Long was elected Governor of Louisiana. At the time, Louisiana schools were free, but not the textbooks. The elite liked it that way, but Long didn’t. To pay for the books, the Kingfish levied a special tax on Big Oil. But the oil companies refused to pay for the textbooks. Governor Long then ordered the National Guard to seize the oil fields in the Delta.
It was Huey Long who established the principle that a government of the people must protect the people, school them, build the infrastructure, regulate industry and share the nation’s wealth-and that meant facing down “the concentrations of monopoly power” of the corporate aristocracy-”the thieves of Wall Street,” as he called them.
In other words, Huey Long founded the modern Democratic Party. FDR and the party establishment, scared witless of Long’s ineluctable march to the White House, adopted his program, albeit diluted, called it the New Deal and later the New Frontier and the Great Society. America and the party prospered. What happened to the Kingfish? As with Chávez, the oil industry and local oligarchs had few options for responding to Governor Long’s populist appeal and the success of his egalitarian economic program. On September 8, 1935, Huey Long, by then a U.S. Senator, was shot dead. He was 42.
And now is the moment, as it was in ‘27.
|
<b>Read Palast's description of how republican "caging lists" eliminated the majority advantage of the predicted opposition vote, at whatever polling places "Tim Griffin's" Blackberry equipped voting saboteurs honed in on...</b>
Note that since that 2004 election, the DOJ civil rights enforcement division has been dismantled...."redirected" to hunting for president Bush's "passion", "voter fraud", that the NY Times reported, does not exist. Tim Griffin was rewarded with an appointment as US Attorney in Arkansas....</b>
Quote:
http://www.democracynow.org/article..../06/14/1424239
Wednesday, June 14th, 2006
The Front Lines of the Class War from 1927 to Today
Investigative journalist Greg Palast discusses the disenfranchising of black voters from the voters rolls and what he calls "other dispatches front lines of the class war." Palast is author of the book, "Armed Madhouse." [includes rush transcript]
......So you can't, you can't just – You know, this is the old gimmick of – like they used to have literacy tests in the South in you know, in the Jim Crow era, where only black people were asked tough literacy questions. Same thing, you cannot target just African-Americans. I mean, you go to jail for that. The only problem is – and people ask, 'Why didn't they go to jail now that you've caught them?' Because the cops, the voting cops in the United States are in the U.S. Justice Department, and at the time, 2004, the voting cop was John Ashcroft. You know, George Bush's guy, and now we have Gonzales.
I mean, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, called, by the way, for a criminal investigation when I began showing this evidence. I don't give them my sources, but I do give them the public evidence, with the BBC's approval. You'll see it in the book. They did vote for criminal investigations. This never got reported in America. The reaction of the Justice Department was to completely ignore the demand for a criminal investigation, and George Bush fired every member of the Civil Rights Commission that voted for the criminal investigation. Do you like that?....
......So I looked at 2004 for BBC, and we were able to get out of – they didn't go after the felons this time. The new target group – or they did, but now they've added a new target group: suspect voters, with suspect addresses. And I was able to get out of Republican Party computers, using a fake front, actually working with a joke website, GeorgeWBush.org, we literally sucked files and emails out of the Republican computers. I know some people may object to that but –
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean.
<h3>GREG PALAST: Well what happened was the top brass of the Republican Party, a guy Tim Griffin, who is head of operations and research, was sending a bunch of emails to the chairmen of the state committees, top-level guys of the Bush campaign in 2004, attaching lists of voters and addresses – very unusual. </h3>What's all of this clerical stuff going on back and forth between the very top guys? And they're saying, "Here's a caging list. Here's another caging list. Here's another caging list."
Quote:
http://www.boston.com/news/education...an_law_school/
....Regent University School of Law, <b>founded by televangelist Pat Robertson to provide "Christian leadership to change the world,"</b> has worked hard in its two-decade history to upgrade its reputation, fighting past years when a majority of its graduates couldn't pass the bar exam and leading up to recent victories over Ivy League teams in national law student competitions.......
......But even in its darker days, Regent has had no better friend than the Bush administration. Graduates of the law school have been among the most influential of the more than 150 Regent University alumni hired to federal government positions since President Bush took office in 2001, according to a university website.
One of those graduates is Monica Goodling , the former top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who is at the center of the storm over the firing of US attorneys. Goodling, who resigned on Friday, has become the face of Regent overnight -- and drawn a harsh spotlight to the administration's hiring of officials educated at smaller, conservative schools with sometimes marginal academic reputations.
Documents show that Goodling, who has asserted her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying before Congress, was one of a handful of officials overseeing the firings. <h3>She helped install Timothy Griffin , the Karl Rove aide and her former boss at the Republican National Committee, as a replacement US attorney in Arkansas....
</h3>
Not long ago, it was rare for Regent graduates to join the federal government. But in 2001, the Bush administration picked the dean of Regent's government school, Kay Coles James , to be the director of the Office of Personnel Management -- essentially the head of human resources for the executive branch. The doors of opportunity for government jobs were thrown open to Regent alumni.....
|
GREG PALAST: That's right, and it went two ways. In the case of the black soldiers, what was particularly evil – see, in the felon case, they could make some type of claim, 'Oh, we didn't know that we had a bad list; we didn't know that these were innocent people.'
.
<b>....In places like Wisconsin, by the way, we've just discovered – How did they even know how to challenge these people? They were using Blackberries loaded with the names. This is one expensive multimillion-dollar operation, and by the way, Amy, it's illegal, okay?</b> One of the reasons why the Republican Party didn't 'fess up when we showed them the sheets and they said, 'Oh, it's donors,' is that if you target black people, or Jewish voters, as they did in a few districts, because that's a democratic demographic, if you challenge these people, that's against the law. That's against the voting rights act of 1965. It's a felony crime, you know.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Greg Palast, author of Armed Madhouse. Very quickly, Greg, on the issue of class war, where this relates, if you can just summarize your thoughts?
GREG PALAST: Class war – look, when they take away your vote – 3.6 million people cast ballots that didn't count. While race is the badge of poverty, what we're finding is that it's the income of the voter that mattered on whether your vote counted. It's not – and, look, you go through my book and you've seen my reports on your show. Whether it's Iraq, what Huey Long of 70 years ago, used to call “rich men's wars.”
AMY GOODMAN: Huey Long being –
GREG PALAST: Huey Long was the governor of Louisiana, and it's a very simple point. Whether it's Iraq, whether it's elections, whether it's Hurricane Katrina, and whether it's Enron that we've discussed. These are all aspects of a class war against the very powerful and the very wealthy, against the average person. We've had a class war declared in America, and one of the points in the book is that these are – all of my investigations are really investigations of various fronts in the class war. And we are not shooting back because we don't have a general. The closest thing we have to a general is far away in Caracas, Hugo Chavez. And we've been here before in America. You know, last night, you and I were with Paul Krugman, who said, 'We need a new F.D.R., a new Franklin Roosevelt to bring us a New Deal, to turn things around.' That's not how it works. Back in 1927, the entire nation changed when the levees of New Orleans broke and New Orleans was drowned. This entire nation – it was a Republican era, Republican Congress, Republican President. Business was in charge of everything, then New Orleans' levees broke. And –
AMY GOODMAN: The great flood of 1927.
GREG PALAST: The great flood of 1927. When the floodwaters hit Louisiana, one guy – and Democrats were saying nothing except, 'Balance the budget.' One Democrat stood up on the back of a flatbed truck, grabbed the Internet of the day, which was the radio. He was the first guy to use radio. He grabbed the radio microphone and said, "This is it. The rich are drowning us. The rich don't pay for our schools. The rich are leading us into their wars for oil." – At that time, by the way -- "The rich will not give us social security for old age. They are not protecting us or providing infrastructure. They are not saving us from deadly work, and they're letting the oil companies and the banks control this nation, and we have got to end it. We're going to take this nation back. We're going to share the wealth. Join with me." And there was a huge national uprising.
Huey Long created something called "Share the Wealth clubs.” And it went like a prairie fire, man. It was explosive. And the Democratic Party itself got scared to death. And I hate to say it, two things happened. First, they assassinated Huey Long, who had become governor of Louisiana and was heading towards the White House, but then Franklin Roosevelt, a very weak governor, conservative governor of New York, conservative Democrat, suddenly said – took on Huey's spirit, kind of, and said, 'Okay, because we're going to lose this country, and even the billionaires are going to lose their billions.' And so, it was not that we had a great man. This is a new myth that we had a great man, F.D.R. What we did was, we had a great movement that found F.D.R., and F.D.R. found the movement, and that changed America. It's 1927 again, Amy. It could be......
|
[/quote]
Quote:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/08/23/rob...vez/index.html
U.S. dismisses call for Chavez's killing
Venezuela VP urges U.S. to act on Robertson's 'criminal' remark
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
....Robertson told viewers of his longtime show, "The 700 Club," on Monday that Chavez was turning his oil-rich South American country into "a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism all over the continent." (Full story)
"If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it," said Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition. .......
|
Quote:
http://www.citizensforethics.org./
CREW Documents Tell Story of Aid Not Used to Help Katrina Victims
29 Apr 2007 // In light of today's Washington Post article, "Most Katrina Aid From Overseas Went Unclaimed," Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is posting a series of documents obtained by CREW from the Dept. of State as a result of FOIA requests....
....Incredibly, $854 million in aid was offered from countries across the world, yet only $40 million has been used so far for victims or reconstruction. In fact, offers to provide rescue equipment, cruise ships, medical teams and water were rejected, as victims went without basic necessities. Even assistance that was accepted, such as medical supplies from Italy, were unused, exposed to the elements and eventually discarded.....
|
Quote:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/author/rj_eskow
New Orleans: Dark End of the Street
by RJ Eskow | May 5 2007 - 10:18am
Four days in New Orleans to attend a conference, hear some great music, and see the city for the first time since Katrina. <b>My impression? It's a theme park in the middle of apocalypse. </b>They're using music more than ever to sell the place and it seems to be working, even as the Lower Ninth Ward continues to rot. America apparently loves the music these days and it makes you wonder: If we love the flowers so much, how can we watch the garden die? ....
|
Quote:
<b>Send in the Clowns</b>
by Stephen Fleischman | May 6 2007 - 9:27am | permalink
(with apologies to Stephen Sondheim)
In the United States of America, the greatest country in the world, as many as three and a half million people experience <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States#Statistics_and_demographics">homelessness</a> in a given year and of that, about a million and a half (39%) are children under the age of 18.
<b>Isn't it rich...?</b>
<a href="http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/09/news/newsmakers/billionaires_forbes/index.htm?cnn=yes">The total number of billionaires in the world</a> is 793 with 371 of them being in the United States of America, that's about 322 more than there were 20 years ago.
<b>Are we a pair...?</b>
America has developed an underclass of its own that rivals the untouchables of India; except you don't see them. An elaborate matrix has been constructed to keep them hidden. There are homeless shelters. Some find temporary shelter in church basements or abandoned buildings. They live in cars. They're put in welfare motels. They double up with relatives. They are children. They are seniors. They are adults with full-time jobs.
<b>Making my entrance again with my usual flair...</b>
When too many of them start showing up soliciting on the streets, cleaning car windshields at traffic stop signs or sleeping on park benches, more shelters are build and they are again removed from sight.
<b>I thought that you'd want what I want.</b>
One American, in eight, lives below the official poverty line.
<b>Me here at last on the ground...</b>
The destruction of the middle class began during the Reagan Administration, in the 1980s, with the breaking of the labor movement and the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Those at the lowest end of the ladder fall even lower while there is an explosion of wealth at the top.
<b>You in mid air.</b>
Is that the nature of capitalism? There used to be a system of checks and balances and safety nets.
<b>Don't you love farce?<b>
Is it the system, Stupid?
There was a time, in this system, when people mattered. When infrastructure mattered. When environment mattered. We had an NRA and a WPA and a Tennessee Valley Authority and a Living Newspaper, a Federal Theatre Project and a Farm Security Administration and ways of putting people to work.
Good riddance, you say. The depression is over. Let the private sector do it. Well, what goes around comes around. We may not be at '29 but we may be sneaking up on '28.
There are creeping signs that the capitalist structure is creaking again. Its nature is to boom and bust.
<b>Losing my timing this late in my career?</b>
Something's got to be done about it! We have to send in somebody! Well, send in the clowns.
<b>Don't bother, they're here.</b>
|
Quote:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAlongH.htm
15) Huey P. Long, obituary, New York Times (11th September, 1935)
Of Huey Long personally it is no longer necessary to speak except with charity. His motives, his character, have passed beyond human judgment. People will long talk of his picturesque career and extraordinary individual qualities. He carried daring to the point of audacity. He did not hesitate to flaunt his great personal vainglory in public. This he would probably have defended both as a form of self-confidence, and a means of impressing the public. He had a knack of always getting into the picture, and often bursting out of its frame. There would be no end if one were to try to enumerate all his traits, so distinct and so full of color. He succeeded in establishing a legend about himself - a legend of invincibility - which it will be hard to dissipate.
It is to Senator Long as a public man, rather than as a dashing personality, that the thoughts of Americans should chiefly turn as his tragic death extinguishe the envy. What he did and what he promised to do are full of political instruction and also of warning. In his own State of Louisiana he showed how it is possible to destroy self-government while maintaining its ostensible and legal form. He made himself an unquestioned dictator, though a State Legislature was still elected by a nominally free people, as was also a Governor, who was, however, nothing but a dummy for Huey Long. In reality. Senator Long set up a Fascist government in Louisiana. It was disguised, but only thinly. There was no outward appearance of a revolution, no march of Black Shirts upon Baton Rouge, but the effectual result was to lodge all the power of the State in the hands of one man.
<h3>If Fascism ever comes in the United States it will come in something like that way.</h3> No one will set himself up as an avowed dictator, but if he can succeed in dictating everything, the name does not matter. Laws and Constitutions guaranteeing liberty and individual rights may remain on the statute books, but the life will have gone out of them. Institutions may be designated as before, but they will have become only empty shells. We thus have an indication of the points at which American vigilance must be eternal if it desires to withstand the subtle inroads of the Fascist spirit. There is no need to be on the watch for a revolutionary leader to rise up and call upon his followers to march on Washington. No such sinister figure is likely to appear. The danger is, as Senator Long demonstrated in Louisiana, that freedom may be done away with in the name of efficiency and a strong paternal government.
Senator Long's career is also a reminder that material for the agitator and the demagogue is always ample in this country. He found it and played upon it skillfully, first of all in what may be called the lower levels of society in Louisiana. Afterward, when he began to swell with national ambition, and cast about for a fetching cry, he found it, or thought he did, in his vague formulas, never worked out, about the "distribution of wealth." For a time he seemed in this way to be about to fascinate and capture a great multitude of followers, or at least endorsers, mainly in the cities of this country. There is reason to believe that his hold upon them was relaxing before his assassination. Many observers thought that he had already passed the peak of his national influence. Be that as it may, the moral of his remarkable adventure in politics
remains the same. It is that in the United States we have to re-educate each generation in the fundamentals of self government and in the principles of sound finance. And we must have leaders able to defend the faith that is in them. When such masses of people are all too ready to run after a professed miracle-worker, it is essential that we have trained minds to confront the ignorant, to show to the credulous the error of their ways, and to keep alive and fresh the true tradition of democracy in which this country was cradled and brought to maturity.
|
The NY Times obituary was what the corporate controlled establishment, even in 1935 (especially in 1935)....wanted "the man on the street" to believe was the definitive legacy of Huey Long....but there is another side...
Quote:
http://www.gregpalast.com/bush-straf...our-huey-long/
......Huey Long laid out a plan: a progressive income tax, real money for education, public works to rebuild Louisiana and America, an end to wars for empire, and an end to financial oligarchy. The waters receded, the anger did not, and Huey “Kingfish” Long was elected Governor of Louisiana in 1928.
At the time, Louisiana schools were free, but not the textbooks. Governor Long taxed Big Oil to pay for the books. Rockefeller’s oil companies refused pay the textbook tax, so Long ordered the National Guard to seize Standard Oil’s fields in the Delta.
Huey Long was called a “demagogue” and a “dictator.” Of course. Because it was Huey Long who established the concept that a government of the people must protect the people, school, house, and feed them and give every man or woman a job who needs one.
Quote:
http://hnn.us/articles/7603.html
....He instead confined himself to noting that “some scholars, uncomfortable with its pejorative tone, dislike the word ‘demagogue.’” Bennett referred specifically to Southern history scholar and <b>Huey Long biographer T. Harry Williams, who wrote in 1960 that we should “dispense with the word demagogue in dealing with men like Long and employ instead a term suggested by [philosopher] Eric Hoffer, mass leader.”</b> Williams rightly objected to the term “demagogue” in the sense he had observed scholars using it: They “have been influenced by the notion that violent language is the peculiar mark of the demagogue. They seem to think that popular leaders have risen to power because they could excite and entertain the voters.” In preferring “mass leader” to demagogue, Williams had in mind the qualities of “audacity, an iron will, faith in his cause or in himself, unbounded brazenness, and a capacity for hatred, without which he may be deflected from his goal.” The chief faults with this definition lie in the first and last qualifiers--at least, that is, as Williams further defined them. “Audacity” he expressed as “a boundless self-confidence which ... enables him to disregard conventionality and consistency.”.....
|
Government, he said, “We The People,” not plutocrats nor Halliburtons, must build bridges and levees to keep the waters from rising over our heads. All we had to do was share the nation’s wealth we created as a nation. But that meant facing down what he called the “concentrations of monopoly power” to finance the needs of the public.
In other words, Huey Long founded the modern Democratic Party. Franklin Roosevelt and the party establishment, scared senseless of Long’s ineluctable march to the White House, adopted his program, called it the New Deal, and later The New Frontier and the Great Society.
America and the party prospered.
America could use a Democratic Party again and there’s a rumor it’s alive — somewhere.......
<i>A pedagogical note:</i> As I travel around the USA, I’m just horrified at America’s stubborn historical amnesia. Americans, as Sam Cooke said, don’t know squat about history. We don’t learn the names of a nation’s capital until the 82d Airborne lands there. And it doesn’t count if you’ve watched a Ken Burns documentary on PBS.
I suggest starting with this: read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0394747909/qid=1125666142/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-4647567-8541636?v=glance&s=books&n=507846">“Huey Long” by the late historian T. Harry Williams.</a> If you want to ease into it, get the <a href="http://www.randynewman.com/">Randy Newman</a> album inspired by it (Good Old Boys) with the song, “Louisiana 1927.” Listen to part of the song here. Do NOT watch the crappy right-wing agit-prop film, “Huey Long,” by Ken Burns.
|
Quote:
http://www.vqronline.org/articles/20...arry-williams/
T. Harry Williams: A Remembrance
Harold B. McSween
....This is found in his presidential address of Nov. 2, 1959, before the Southern Historical Association, entitled "The Gentleman from Louisiana: Demagogue or Democrat." [See The Pursuit of Southern History: Presidential Addresses of the Southern Historical Association, 1935—1963 (1964).] In this address, Williams notes that a political status quo had been maintained in Louisiana for a half-century since Reconstruction's end until the governorship of Huey Long. In 1928, for example, Louisiana could boast of but 296 miles of concrete roads, 35 miles of asphalt, 5,728 miles of gravel, and three major bridges—none of which crossed the Mississippi River either at New Orleans or Baton Rouge. Trains would uncouple, ferry across the river at New Orleans. By the time of Huey's death, the highway system consisted of 2,446 miles of concrete roads, 1,308 miles of asphalt, 9,629 miles of gravel, and more than 40 major bridges.
In this address, Williams holds that Long was an American boss, "a powerful and sometimes ruthless one, who in his last phase had too much power." <h3>Long, though, "had none of the qualities we associate with the Fascist leader."</h3> Williams also sees Long as a mass leader, and advances the view that politicians are judged by a standard higher than businessmen are judged, doubtless referring to business practices begun during the Gilded Age and yet prevailing......
....."Harry, how did Huey go wrong after such an auspicious start as governor ...initiatives of several kinds that included the largest new highway construction program of any state in the nation?"
Williams did not hesitate. <b>He said that Huey and FDR were not compatible. Roosevelt was an elitist snob who looked down on Huey as a low-born common man not to be trusted. Huey underrated FDR and the huge political apparatus that FDR would set against him: sending a battalion of IRS agents to Louisiana and awarding political patronage to Huey's enemies. Huey reacted by extracting even more power</b> from the Louisiana legislature, meeting in special sessions, for the caretaker state administration that he controlled from Washington as if yet governor........
.....From this can be seen how he might have proceeded with his biography of LBJ. Moreover, Williams gives a synthesis about radicalism in the South:
My thesis is that although radicalism has not appeared often in the South, when it has, it has been more intense and insistent than in other sections. In support of this thesis I offer that the two greatest political radicals in recent history have been Huey Long and Lyndon Johnson and that the most radical mass movement in recent times has been the black civil rights movement—all of these phenomena coming out of the South, that supposedly conservative South that would win in a landslide any contest to pick the section least likely to dissent. <b>Two of these phenomena, Huey Long and the civil rights masses, were so radical that they were willing to bend or even break the system.</b> The other one, equally rooted in the South, remained convinced that reform must come within the system—Lyndon Johnson.
|
Do we owe more credit to Huey Long, because of the political pressure that he put on Roosevelt to create an American economic "safety net", than we do to Roosevelt? This may surprise you:
http://www.ssa.gov/history/huey.html
http://www.ssa.gov/history/hlong1.html
Quote:
http://www.ssa.gov/history/longsen.html
THE CONGRESSIONAL RECORD -- February 5, 1934
Mr. Long: Mr. President, I send to the desk and ask to have printed in the RECORD not a speech but what is more in the nature of an appeal to the people of America.
There being no objection, the paper entitled "Carry Out the Command of the Lord" was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
By Huey P. Long, United States Senator
People of America: In every community get together at once and organize a share-our-wealth society--Motto: Every man a king
Principles and platform:
1. To limit poverty by providing that every deserving family shall share in the wealth of America for not less than one third of the average wealth, thereby to possess not less than $5,000 free of debt.
2. To limit fortunes to such a few million dollars as will allow the balance of the American people to share in the wealth and profits of the land.
3. Old-age pensions of $30 per month to persons over 60 years of age who do not earn as much as $1,000 per year or who possess less than $10,000 in cash or property, thereby to remove from the field of labor in times of unemployment those who have contributed their share to the public service.
4. To limit the hours of work to such an extent as to prevent overproduction and to give the workers of America some share in the recreations, conveniences, and luxuries of life.
5. To balance agricultural production with what can be sold and consumed according to the laws of God, which have never failed.
6. To care for the veterans of our wars.
7. Taxation to run the Government to be supported, first, by reducing big fortunes from the top, thereby to improve the country and provide employment in public works whenever agricultural surplus is such as to render unnecessary, in whole or in part, any particular crop.
Simple and Concrete--Not an Experiment
To share our wealth by providing for every deserving family to have one third of the average wealth would mean that, at the worst, such a family could have a fairly comfortable home, an automobile, and a radio, with other reasonable home conveniences, and a place to educate their children. Through sharing the work, that is, by limiting the hours of toil so that all would share in what is made and produced in the land, every family would have enough coming in every year to feed, clothe, and provide a fair share of the luxuries of life to its members. Such is the result to a family, at the worst.
From the worst to the best there would be no limit to opportunity. One might become a millionaire or more. There would be a chance for talent to make a man big, because enough would be floating in the land to give brains its chance to be used. As it is, no matter how smart a man may be, everything is tied up in so few hands that no amount of energy or talent has a chance to gain any of it.
Would it break up big concerns? No. It would simply mean that, instead of one man getting all the one concern made, that there might be 1,000 or 10,000 persons sharing in such excess fortune, any one of whom, or all of whom, might be millionaires and over.
I ask somebody in every city, town, village, and farm community of America to take this as my personal request to call a meeting of as many neighbors and friends as will come to it to start a share-our-wealth society. Elect a president and a secretary and charge no dues. The meeting can be held at a courthouse, in some town hall or public building, or in the home of someone.
It does not matter how many will come to the first meeting. Get a society organized, if it has only two members. Then let us get to work quick, quick, quick to put an end by law to people starving and going naked in this land of too much to eat and too much to wear. The case is all with us. It is the word and work of the Lord. The Gideons had but two men when they organized. Three tailors of Tooley Street drew the Magna Carta of England. The Lord says: "For where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them."
We propose to help our people into the place where the Lord said was their rightful own and no more.
We have waited long enough for these financial masters to do these things. They have promised and promised. Now we find our country $10 billion further in debt on account of the depression, and big lenders even propose to get 90 percent of that out of the hides of the common people in the form of a sales tax.
There is nothing wrong with the United States. We have more food than we can eat. We have more clothes and things out of which to make clothes than we can wear. We have more houses and lands than the whole 120 million can use if they all had good homes. So what is the trouble? Nothing except that a handful of men have everything and the balance of the people have nothing if their debts were paid. There should be every man a king in this land flowing with milk and honey instead of the lords of finance at the top and slaves and peasants at the bottom.
Now be prepared for the slurs and snickers of some high-ups when you start your local spread-our-wealth society. Also when you call your meeting be on your guard for some smart-aleck tool of the interests to come in and ask questions. Refer such to me for an answer to any question, and I will send you a copy. Spend your time getting the people to work to save their children and to save their homes, or to get a home for those who have already lost their own.
To explain the title, motto, and principles of such a society I give the full information, viz:
Title: Share-our-wealth society is simply to mean that God's creatures on this lovely American continent have a right to share in the wealth they have created in this country. They have the right to a living, with the conveniences and some of the luxuries of this life, so long as there are too many or enough for all. They have a right to raise their children in a healthy, wholesome atmosphere and to educate them, rather than to face the dread of their under-nourishment and sadness by being denied a real life.
Motto: "Every man a king" conveys the great plan of God and of the Declaration of Independence, which said: "All men are created equal." It conveys that no one man is the lord of another, but that from the head to the foot of every man is carried his sovereignty.
Now to cover the principles of the share-our-wealth society, I give them in order:
....3. Old-age pensions:
Everyone has begun to realize something must be done for our old people who work out their lives, feed and clothe children and are left penniless in their declining years. They should be made to look forward to their mature years for comfort rather than fear. We propose that, at the age of 60, every person should begin to draw a pension from our Government of $30 per month, unless the person of 60 or over has an income of over $1,000 per year or is worth $10,000, which is two thirds of the average wealth in America, even figured on a basis of it being frozen into a few hands. Such a pension would retire from labor those persons who keep the rising generations from finding employment.....
|
Huey Long's FOIA FBI File:
http://web.archive.org/web/200012111...v/hueylong.htm
If you've gotten this far, can you tell me how a Huey Long, or a Hugo Chavez, for that matter, vision for America's political future is not in the interests of all of us who have been victimized by the Bush administrations attack on our government, on our justice, and on our wealth?
Pat Robertson endorsed the assassination of Hugo Chavez, while a dean from Robertson's University was busy hiring it's grads to further the Bush agenda.
It may very well be that Bush gained his elected office via targeted voter fraud, not once, but twice. Wouldn't a populist demagogue who favors massive redistribution of American wealth....in the direction of the 50 percent who currently "own" only 2-1/2 percent of all assets in America, be a big improvement over what we have now, just as it seems to be an improvement for the masses in Venezuala, led by Chavez?
How could the construction achievements, the elimination of the poll tax, and the distribution of free textbooks to school children......what Huey Long accomplished, in just seven years.....ever be achieved rapidly, or at all, within "the system"?
Is it any wonder why Huey Long, and now, Cesar Chavez are demonized?
Has the Bush/Robertson alliance and other impetus for Republican Corruption, created the social conditions for another Huey Long to emerge?
Last edited by host; 05-06-2007 at 09:19 AM..
|
05-06-2007, 09:11 AM
