A farmer friend of mine once bemoaned the fact that the Democrat we’d both supported for president, Bill Clinton, was hugging up Wall Street and stiffing family farmers. “I don’t mind losing when we lose,” my friend said, “but I hate losing when we win.”
Agreed. Yet, losing in politics is sometimes a prelude to winning, calling not for despair, but a doubling down on principle and organizing. Take the revolutionary presidential platform put forth by the upstart, unabashedly progressive People’s Party in 1892. It was stunning in its little-d democratic boldness, directly challenging corporate power. The populists became the first to support an eight-hour day and minimum wage for labor, women’s suffrage, graduated income taxes, government farm loans to bypass bank monopolies, veterans’ pensions, direct lawmaking by citizen initiatives, etc.
Wall Street and the two-party duopoly soon conspired to crush the People’s Party. But they could not stop its ideas, which grew in popular support and were largely enacted by state and national governments. This democratic reformation occurred because (1) the populists were unabashedly bold, (2) their ideas were solid, benefitting the common good, and (3) their political heirs were organized and persistent.
That same rebellious spirit remains at the heart and soul of today’s people’s politics. For example, while 2011’s Occupy Wall Street uprising was autocratically crushed, resurgent labor progressives are now carrying its ideals forward — and winning! Likewise, America’s scrappy democratic soul is being expressed every day by grassroots groups of rural poor people battling corporate polluters, child care workers struggling for decent pay, local people standing up to Silicon Valley arrogance and Wall Street greed, etc.
Americans are on the move against plutocratic and autocratic rule. They need a party to move with them.
Woody Guthrie’s prescription for inequality in America was straightforward: “Rich folks got your money with politics. You can get it back with politics.”
For Guthrie, “politics” meant more than voting, since both parties routinely cough-up candidates who meekly accept the business-as-usual system of letting bosses and bankers control America’s wealth and power. It’s useless, he said, to expect change to come from a “choice” between Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber. Instead, common folks must organize into a progressive movement with their own bold change agenda, become their own candidates and create a politics worth voting for.
Pie in the sky? No! Periodic eruptions of progressive grassroots insurgencies have literally defined America, beginning with that big one in 1776. Indeed, we could take a lesson today from another transformative moment of democratic populism that surged more than a century ago, culminating in “The Omaha Platform of 1892.” This was in the depths of the Gilded Age, a sordid period much like ours, characterized by both ostentatious greed and widespread poverty, domination by monopolies, rising xenophobia, institutional racism — and government that ranged from aloof to insane.
But lo — from that darkness, a new People’s Party arose, created by the populist movement of farm and factory mad-as-hellers. They streamed into Omaha on July 4 to hammer out the most progressive platform in US history, specifically rejecting corporate supremacy and demanding direct democracy.
That platform reshaped America’s political agenda, making the sweeping reforms of the Progressive Era and New Deal possible. As one senator said of the Omaha rebellion, it was the start of robber baron wealth flowing “to all the people, from whom it was originally taken.” And that’s what Woody Guthrie meant by “politics.”
And now: A special report from the Department of Really Bad Ideas. And this one is a doozie.
It comes from Hizzoner Eric Adams, the present mayor of New York City. Like mayors everywhere, Adams is routinely expected to respond to city council members, state reps, members of Congress and other elected officials who ask for help on city issues and problems affecting the people they represent. After all, that’s how it’s supposed to work — local folks have an issue needing city attention, so they go to officials in their local community who can carry this issue to the top level. Most of these matters are resolved by — hello — relevant officials simply having a phone call, a quick meeting or even an email exchange.
But no — the Big Apple’s mayor has decreed that elected officials needing to discuss concerns of their constituents may NOT speak directly to him. Nor may they simply speak with his staff, meet with or engage with agency heads, or other mayoral personnel who could help the people. Rather, Adams has decreed that supplicants wanting to approach the city’s public servants must submit a seven-page, online “engagement request.” The mayor’s intergovernmental office will review each one and then decide whether to grant or deny any official engagement.
An Adams gatekeeper hailed this bureaucratic intake process as a “new and exciting tool” to “improve operational efficiency and streamline requests.” Golly — even George Orwell couldn’t have conjured up a statement as soul-sucking as that!
Streamlined efficiency is the ultimate virtue for automatons and authoritarian regimes — NOT for public officials in a democratic society. Democracy is necessarily slower-paced, deliberative and inclusive. And it does not require — or accept — filling out a seven-page form to “engage” with your mayor.
Years ago, Coca-Cola excitedly debuted a new formula for its soda, dubbing it “New Coke.” Consumers hated it, and sales plummeted — a marketing fiasco.
But here comes Coke again, pushing an even worse product: “a better plastic bottle,” trumpeting it as “100% recycled.” Coke really needs an environmental PR goose-up, because today’s consumers know and care a lot about the massive plastic contamination of our planet — and Coke has been ranked as the globe’s number one plastic polluter for six years in a row!
Problem is, the corporation’s recycling hype is a fraud, for plastic is a fossil fuel polymer that essentially is forever. Even though most of us dutifully put throw-away containers in recycling bins, the industry’s dirty secret is that 95% of plastics can’t be recycled, so they’re simply burned, dumped in landfills or tossed “away.” In a February report, The Center for Climate Integrity reveals that the plastics-industrial-complex has been like Big Tobacco and Big Oil — intentionally fabricating, promoting and profiting from a mass-market scam for decades. As the Climate Center commented, “The only thing the plastics industry has actually recycled is their lies over and over again.”
But, taking another lesson from tobacco and oil, Big Plastic figures that if one lie stops working, tell a bigger one. So, Coca-Cola is presently gushing about “better” plastic bottles, while plastic manufacturers are so desperate to keep peddling environmental contamination that their new media blitz frantically insists, “Recycling is Real!” Do they think we have suckerwrappers around our heads?
Of course, their “new” claims are nothing but re-fabricated prevarications. Meanwhile, the industry is planning to dump 300% more plastic on us. Hello, let’s get real — the only way to stop planet-choking plastic contamination is to stop making the stuff.
Jim Hightower is a former Texas Observer editor, former Texas agriculture commissioner, radio commentator and populist sparkplug, a best-selling author and winner of the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Write him at info@jimhightower.com or see www.jimhightower.com.
From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2024
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