Bill Moyers Essay: Thomas Jefferson's Betrayal

For decades, journalist, author, broadcaster and former Director of the Peace Corps under President Lyndon Johnson, Bill Moyers, has been one of the best commentators on current affairs and American history. He has done interviews over a wide range of topics from his seminal series of programs on "The Power of Myth" with Professor Joseph Campbell to his round-table discussions on a variety of political, social and spiritual topics that grew out of his Public Broadcasting series, "Bill Moyers Journal".

Here is one of his latest essays, pointing up the success of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence as a benchmark of human liberty against the terrible institution of slavery which degraded and counterpointed the struggle for freedom in the United States for decades. In was a institution that Jefferson himself perpetuated, as did many of the Founding Fathers.

Not all the major Founding Fathers thought as Jefferson did. Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton criticized Jefferson and his party for demanding freedom for themselves but not for blacks. Hamilton, a senior officer in the Revolutionary war who served directly under George Washington, urged that black men willing to fight for the revolutionary cause in the Continental Army be granted the right to freedom. As an adult Hamilton was opposed to slavery, but his views
on this, as well as his far-sighted need for a National Bank to boost manufacturing, did not survive the need to unify the 13 former colonies after the war.

"The existence of slavery makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason or experience."--Alexander Hamilton.


Although their views on slavery were not advanced by our standards, men like Hamilton and Franklin saw the contradictions of the peculiar institution and served in manumission groups to try and bring a gradual end to the "peculiar institution".

The Original Americans

Some of the 500 nations of Native Americans and "First Peoples" that made up North America before the advent of the United States, Mexico and Canada.

"The truth is, we have a story worth talking about. We have a history worth celebrating. Long before the first Europeans arrived here, there were some 500 nations already in North America. They blanketed the continent from coast to coast, from Central America to the Arctic. There were tens of millions of people here, speaking over 300 languages. Many of them lived in beautiful cities, among the largest and most advanced in the world...We can't turn back the clock. But we can open our eyes and give the first nations of this land the recognition and respect they deserve: their rightful place in the history of the world."--- Kevin Costner (actor/director, "Dances With Wolves"--1991 )

"Repo Man" (1984) Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estavez. Directed by Alex Cox.

• "Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year! They oughta have 'em, too."-- rogue atomic scientist J. Frank Parnell, assuring Otto, his young hitch-hiking friend, that atomic energy is actually quite safe. From "Repo Man"  

When one talks about counter-culture films of the 1980's, it;s not really a long list. But somewhere near the top has to be this film.  "Repo Man" came out smack dab in the middle of Reagan's America: much of the nation was trying to recapture a  pre- Vietnam War America, devoid of doubt for those who could find a comfortable current to float down the Mainstream with. 

 

By 1984, I was 24 and I knew this  America of my early youth was long, long  gone. It was replaced by a light bulb salesman  with is finger on the nucear trigger and a bunch of smug suburbanites waiting for the folks in the wastelands of  inner-city America to kill each other with drugs and guns. Thinking people maintained a healthy distrust of authority, and expected less then did the peace niks and the Woodstock generation.   That culture fight was over and in America and the conservatives were very sore winners.  

 

 The Underground was now in charge in defining the zeitgeist of places like east Los Angeles, where most of this film is set. The sense of confidence once held dear is now only a mirage outside of the campaign slogans and mass market sods pop jingles on television. You could smell the paranoia coming out of the pores of a lot of people, and nobody was immune in my experience. 

 

This movie captures a lot of that feeling.  We used to say among my friends that if somebody didn't "get"  the angst-driven humor of "Repo Man", they were either lucky or stupid.  Both perhaps.  

 

The film follows an aimless young man named Otto (Emilio Estavez) who is walking  into the minefield of young adulthood.  His parents (television-addled burn- outs)  are barely aware he exists. They have taken the money they saved to send him to college to give to a television Evangelist to send Bibles to the already Catholic and war-torn people of El Salvador. 

  Otto leaves his dead-end job in a grocery store and hooks up with a "Repo Man" named Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) who lives by a  a cynical philosophy of life. Frank is an equal opportunity nihilist who will allow neither Communists nor Christians to be his partner in his "repo" work.  Here Bud explains the code to Otto.   (Warning: this clip contains foul language.)

 

 

  He's a throwback to "The Man Who Knows Indians" from the older Western genre, a loner out to do a dirty job who relies on himself and will take in a partner to keep his personal ethos going after he's gone.  It also makes it easier for him to repossess cars to have a partner.

 

The streets in "Repo Man" are unremitting slums; the gritty underworld of criminals, street punks who seem lost in old "Dead End Kids" movie but with cooler hair, angry ex-car owners,  a girlfriend who is in to defining her "relationship" with Otto even after she inadvertently tortures him in a lab test gone  VERY wrong, and a renegade atomic scientist from Los Alamos who is driving a ' 64 Chevy Malibu into the heart of L.A....with something wicked in the trunk.   

"Repo Man" is about the emptiness of American commercial society and also the end of American idealism.  The jarring sounds of Punk Rock have replaced the romantic (or at least idealistic) tempos of rock and folk tunes. 

 

 The 60's are truly dead and the future is no longer anything but a vacuum waiting to be filled by who knows what? 

 

All in all "Repo Man" is both outrageous and honest, a movie that tells the truth about a lot of people's daily lives and makes it's points with a dark humor and wit.           

 

 

 

Some Thoughts on Conservation (or the Lack of it)

"To people who think of themselves as God’s houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it."

- Barbara Kingsolver

Lighting Out for the Territory: Samuel Clemens...Mark Twain

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Biographies & Memoirs
Author:	Roy Morris, Jr.

“If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to it, he is in error. The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are "no account," go away from home, and then you will *have* to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them - if the people you go among suffer by the operation.”
― Mark Twain, "Roughing It" (1872)

************************************************************
Picture a twenty-six year old Mississippi riverboat pilot in 1861 who has just lost his livelihood with the coming of the American Civil War. First he is grabbed off the streets of his home town, Hannibal, Missouri, by a squad of Union troops. He and another pilot are dragooned down river to St. Louis to be interviewed by a major in the regular army about operating a steam boat up the Missouri. Luckily a few beautiful ladies come to visit the major and the young men, one known as Samuel L. Clemens, makes a hasty escape out the back way of the office and hides out with relatives in town unit he can get back home.

Next he joins up with a band of self-appointed Confederate guerrillas. After two or three weeks fighting a nasty horse and mosquito bites and foul weather young Sam and his "Marion's Rangers" decide this business of war is a damn sight over-rated.

Luckily, his older brother, Orion Clemens, has managed to use his links with the abolitionist movement and the Republican Party in Missouri to secure a position from the Lincoln Administration as Secretary to the Territorial Governor of Nevada (or Was-hoe, as some called it.) Orion, a bit of a dim bulb in political affairs, needs an sharp assistant. Would his savvy ex-riverboat pilot be in need a job "out in the territory" where the Civil War is no more than a distraction? Yes, Sam figures, there is a need there and so he obliges.

Mark Twain recounted his adventures in a book called "Roughing It" in 1872. The book was a best-seller at the time--the second best seller in a row for the newly married author, couple years after his sharp and satirical Americans-in-Europe travel book, "The Innocents Abroad, Volumes I and II".


Before he became what many critics later called "the first authentic American writer", Twain had a colorful career as a government secretary, silver prospector in boom-town in Nevada and California's Sierra Nevada. He also was a speculator in mines and lost a potential fortune from bad company and ill luck. Finally he took up journalism--something he had done a bit of already as a printer with his brother's newspaper in Hannibal and also in contribution to papers in New Orleans while a river boat pilot.
After his travels in and across half the Pacific, he became a full-time writer and lecturer--making a lot of enemies with his acid tongue and satirical pen of the anti-Chinese police forces and the political humbugs, roughneck miners and swindlers he dealt with. He was lucky frankly that he didn't gert shot in those days, as many a desperado who disliked nosy journalist might have put a hole through him. But Twain also made a lot of friends, including for a time another excellent Western writer, Bret Harte, who gave him a job on a magazine in San Francisco for twelve dollars a week at a time when Twain was at his lowest ebb, down to his last dime and considering suicide after a big silver deal he was counting on fell through.

Later, Twain had to beat it out of San Francisco, partly for writing a story about how the police mistreated Chinese crime victims and partly for being friends with a fellow named Bill Gaines who had a habit of skipping out of town after bail hearings. He later sailed off to the Hawaiian Islands and the lecture he gave to San Franciscans and other cities made him as more famous as a humorist for a time then a writer.

It was a story he leard from a bartender about a certain "Jumping Frog" in a mining town called "Jackass Hill" that later became the inspiration for his first famous story, 1865's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County".

This makes for a great read for those interested in Mark Twain's early career. Roy Morris--who had already written several books about the Civil War period from a military and cultural perspective--puts in all the best parts of Twain's travel book as well as clearing up the record of some of "the stretches" (exaggerations) Twain told his readers at the time. The book gives us both the real follies and fortunes of Young Sam and also his budding and ultimately successful career out West, where he emerged by 1867 as 'Mark Twain", the most famous young author on "the Pacific Slope" in America.

Morris book follows the Clemens' stagecoach adventures along the Oregon Trail to a side route to Nevada, and later his travels and writings on San Francisco and the Hawaiian Islands. Twain was a natural traveller and "Roughing It" is a fine book. This book by Morris deepened even further my appreciation of the great author. Morris captures and picks out the best passages of Twain's narratives of his young life and adds dimension to his ability to wander and record the people and customs of a place--"with a few stretchers" by The Great Man for entertainment value.

*****************************
“It was a splendid population - for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home - you never find that sort of people among pioneers - you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day - and when she projects a new surprise the grave world smiles as usual and says, "Well, that is California all over.”
― Mark Twain, on the first California Gold Rush a decade earlier than he arrived, "Roughing It"

GOP Voter Suppression Attempts Start to Backfire

(right: Cartoon depicting the state of Florida's unpopular governor, Rick Scott, and his napalm approach to voter registration irregularities.) 

 

 As some have no doubt heard, the states of Florida, Texas, Wisconsin and several other states dominated by freshly-minted GOP hard liners have recently undertaken attempts to strike voters from the rolls to stay in office or throw the upcoming November election to folks they want to see in office. 

In Florida there were attempts to disenfranchise a couple thousands voters, over eighty percent of which were non-white. One particular instance of attempted disenfranchisement has caught the attention of the regular media.  According to a recent editorial by the Miami Herald's Pulitzer-Prize Winning editorialist, Leonard Pitts,Jr:      

"Bill Internicola had to show his papers.

"He received a letter last month from the Broward County, Fla., Supervisor of Elections informing him the office had "information from the state of Florida that you are not a United States citizen; however, you are registered to vote." So Internicola had to prove he is an American. He sent the county a copy of his Army discharge papers.

"Internicola is 91. He was born in Brooklyn. He is a veteran of the Second World War. He earned a Bronze Star for his part in the Battle of the Bulge. Yet he was required to prove to a county functionary that he is entitled to vote in a U.S. election.

"We learn from a story in last week's Miami Herald that this is part of a campaign by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, to weed non-citizens off the rolls of the state's voters. Initially, Florida claimed 180,000 were possible non-citizens. That number was eventually whittled way down to about 2,600 people. In Miami-Dade County, where the largest number of them live, 385 have been verified as citizens. Ten -- 10! -- have admitted they are ineligible or asked to be removed from the rolls.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/06/02/2829960/the-gop-demographics-and-voter.html

 

So out of 2,600 voters there was 10 voters. This,  out of millions registered  in the "Sunshine State", who needed to be weeded out.  Clearly this was not a major problem in the first place and is more of a scare tactic to suppress ethnic votes that would be unfavorable to the party in power (the Republicans) during a major election. This flies in the face of the spirit of the Voting Rights Act  of 1965 and shows how  desperate some politicos are  of the changing demographics of the southern, southwestern and midwest states where these tactics are the most often applied.

 

Currently the Attorney General's office and parts of our judicial court system  have done a pretty good job keeping this sort of disenfranchisement from getting out of hand. But of course that could change starting this November.  It's clear with enough money and enough fear of "the other" (mainly Hispanics, it seems) these campaigns are so brazen they will not be stalled without plenty of public interest.

 

Even this very day,  there are attempts at voter intimidation and misinformation going on right now in the Governor Scott Walker recall election in Wisconsin.  

http://www.wibw.com/home/nationalnews/headlines/In_Wisconsin_Reports_Of_Voter_Suppression_Efforts_157298065.html

These tactics are not new, as African-American voters who are aware of long fight over Jim Crow Laws are aware, with the long history of "poll taxes" and outright violent suppression of voting rights know about, as women who recall the Suffergate Movement are aware, as Hispanic Americans who face being asked for their citizenship papers thanks to draconian laws in Arizona are well aware. 

 

 What is new in the modern American political scene is the fervor of it all. White conservatives know the demographics of this nation are changing and not to their betterment.  The America of Richard Nixon's white and worried  "Silent Majority" and Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" crowd is seeing their ranks thinning and time marching on.  But they will try to keep the clock back, and try all they can to enforce an internal colonization over the new voting blocs that are more open-minded about issues from economic empathy and marriage rights than they ever were.

 

 it's a strong indication that, as Thomas Jefferson said, "the price of liberty is, [indeed], eternal vigilance!" 

  

"The Americanization of Emily" (1964) James Garner, Julie Andrews, written by Paddy Chayefsky

This 1964 film could be described as an anti-war film in some ways, but I think the best description would be as James Garner, one of my favorite actors and the star of the film, later said in his memoirs, "It allows that sometimes war is necessary, like when you have to defend yourself from an invader. But don't make war so wonderful that kids want to make "the ultimate sacrifice" when they grow up. If we want to end war, we have to stop building shrines (to war)..."

"...Emily", directed by Arthur Hiller, is a movie I remember seeing for the first time shortly after the Fall of Saigon in 1975 and the end of the Vietnam War. It struck a nerve with me, a nerve that exposed me to the fact that most other war films I had ever seen engaged in nobility and sentiments that those men and women who actually experinced war didn't experience--at least until years later.

The end of the Vietnam War in other words a perfect time to see a film that seemed to have been made for an audience a decade ahead of its release date. It showed that every war, even the Second World War, "the Good War" had its share of madness and pointedly senseless sacrifices.

To me the near monologue James Garner delivers here is one of the great anti-war statements of the 1960's, as great as you will find in the novels "Catch-22" and "Slaughterhouse-5" by Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., respectively

This film was made at the start of the Vietnam War but is set twenty years earlier in England. Garner's character is Charlie Madison,a junior officer who is the adjutant to a admiral who is obsessed not with a successful Operation Overlord (the D-Day Invasions) but with the notion that a sailor or marine should be the first to die on a Normandy landing beach, to create a "Tomb of the Unknown Sailor" to match that of the "Unknown Soldier" back at Arlington National Cemetery.


Madison, a former enlisted man and "dog robber" (one who steals supplies of rationed goods from other companies and works the black market to keep his superiors happy) is to be that man. But in this scene his character doesn't know that yet. All he knows is that the young lady he is interested in, Emily, has invited him home to tea to meet her mother in the family garden. He has been warned the mother has lost her husband and a son and has gone a bit mad. But Madison decides to give her his personal war experiences (and pragmatic philosophy) to Emily's "mum" as truthfully and as honestly as he does everyone else in the film, without sentiment and without sparing any sector of society.

I think it's one of the best scenes you'll see from any American movie from the 1960's.

The writer, Chayefsky, had been a US Army infantryman who was wounded by a mine explosion during a combat march. James Garner had also been an Army foot soldier, a decorated Korean War vet who had been wounded by friendly fire and nearly perished in an all-out assault by Chinese troops on a position his company held.

Arthur Hiller had also seen combat action in World War II.The man who played the dangerously depressed and unbalanced Admiral Jessup in the film (Melvyn Douglas) had previously served in the two world wars.

Julie Andrews (who played Emily, the WREN officer) spent many nights singing to keep up morale among her fellow "prisoners" of the Luftwaffe in a London bomb shelter as a young girl during The Blitz.



In short, this was made by people who knew war first-hand, which makes what is said here all the more powerful.

But, judging by the rakish poster art (below) , one could be forgiven as a casual movie-goer in 1964 for thinking this film had little to do with serious matters and was just another run of the mill service comedy.

"The Americanization of Emily" did not do well at the box office that year, although it was a critical success, won Mr. Chayefsky an Academy Award, and earned a respected following since then.

Today in History: Transcontinental Railroad links USA East to West (May 10, 1869)

(above) An 1881 painting, "The Last Spike", celebrating the event,  and a poster for the 1939 Hollywood film spectacular "Union Pacific" with Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea. It was directed by the master of spectacle of pre-1960s Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille.  

 This May 10th marks the anniversary of the first major transcontinental railroad at Promontory, Utah in 1869. The Union and the Central Pacific railroad workers (of Irish, Chinese and other immigrant stock) dynamiting and shoveling and pushing and laying wood and rails across deserts and mountains and forests to bring two civilizations under the same flag together. It's the story many of us learned in school---the forging of an iron link from two competing railway companies, uniting a growing nation, just four years after the Civil War.

A recent PBS documentary on that first great railroad link-up.

 

 

****************************

from Wikipedia:

The construction and operation of the line was authorized by the Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862 and 1864 during the American Civil War. Congress supported it with 30-year U.S. government bonds and extensive land grants of government-owned land. Completion of the railroad was the culmination of a decades-long movement to build such a line. It was one of the crowning achievements in the crossing of plains and high mountains westward by the Union Pacific and eastward by the Central Pacific. Opened for through traffic on May 10, 1869, with the driving of the "Last Spike" at Promontory Summit, Utah, the road established a mechanized transcontinental transportation network that revolutionized the population and economy of the American West.

The Pacific Railroad constituted one of the most significant and ambitious American technological feats of the 19th century following in the footsteps of the building of the Erie Canal in the 1820s and the crossing of the Isthmus of Panama by the Panama Railroad in 1855. It served as a vital link for trade, commerce and travel that joined the eastern and western halves of the late 19th-century United States. The transcontinental railroad slowly ended most of the far slower and more hazardous stagecoach lines and wagon trains that had preceded it. The railroads led to the decline of traffic on the Oregon and California Trail which had populated much of the west. They provided much faster, safer and cheaper (8 days and about $65 economy) transport east and west for people and goods across half a continent."

*****************************

 The other story is more complicated--the first great technological advance in closing of the "American frontier" brought the growth of corporate railroad power to Atlantic and Pacific in a way that would both close the frontier a generation later and further accelerate the end of Native American independence in the West.  These stories--and the struggles of the immigrant workers themselves being a third-- have to all be told for there to be an  honest attempt to balance what was achieved at what price to so many who gave away so much of their labor,  and what was lost forever to the nations of the original Americans.    

Just In! Obama Comes Out in Support of Marriage Equality

The path of justice moved just a bit upward today in America.

Although it is only legal in a handful of states (and none of them the important swing-states like Florida and Virginia), President Obama told Robin Roberts of ABC News he now supports the rights of same-sex couples to be married. 

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is silent on how to react to the President's remarks.  No doubt he will have to huddle for a time with his handlers to figure out the best way to strike out at this plea for tolerance without appearing to be the total panderer to tea-party  far-right policies he had to be for securing the Republican nomination from tea party and priggish  activists.       

 

 

No state in the Union has voted in public referendum to permit gay and lesbian couples to marry, not even in California where there was heavy out-of-state monetary opposition to the issue in the Proposition 8 Amendment battle last year.  Much of the opposition came from the Latter-Day-Saints Church that Mitt Romney belongs. I do not happen to believe this election in November will be decided mainly or perhaps in major part on marriage equality, I do feel Obama should be given credit here since a lot of his support even in the African American community is divided on the issue. A political Rubicon has been crossed here and it should be noted and Obama given credit for standing with a minority for the sake of the spirit of equal rights for all citizens.   

 

 Bravo Mr. President.     

For more on this, see the link below:    

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-obama-abc-gay-marriage-position-20120509,0,6635227.story?track=rss

The "Founding Father" Approach to Combatting Tax-Dodging Corporations

"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations; but, on a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism. If we go over the whole history of ancient and modern republics, we shall find their destruction to have generally resulted from those causes." --James Madison--"Notes on the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention, 1787."

  One of America's leading Founding Fathers was James Madison of Virginia. He  acted as a moderating force between the future Federalists and anti-federalist factions during the founding of our nation at the Constitutional debates at Philadelphia in 1787.  He also was a major force in getting the key states of Virginia and, (through his co-authorship of the Federalist Papers) the state of New York to adopt the Constitution leaders of both main political parties revere today. 

   "The Father of the Constitution" (and, later, Fourth President of the United States from 1809-1816)  guided his fellow delegates by reminding them of the pluses and minuses of past governments going back to the time of the Ancient Greek city-states, the Roman Republic and the leagues and confederacies and kingdoms that emerged after its fall  in Western Europe. 

Many today, looking at the qoute above,  might be tempted to see that his remarks about "the majority trampling on the rights of the minority" is  aimed at a class of people who would bring down civil society from below.  Perhaps that was a fear in 1787.   But who really is "the minority " in Washington today?  We are!

 

 I submit that, in an era where huge corporations are  considered  persons and legal-eagle  lobbying mouth-pieces have more power than constituents in the Congress and the state capitals, we are threatened.  It is the ordinary public citizen who is "out-voted" by the fiat of unlimited campaign cash. 

 

  I wonder if Madison would be surprised by the current state of affairs in the proliferation of big-money Super PACs and large-scale  lobbying and "earmarks" and loopholes and of-shore accounts for big business?  How much would he big shocked by all these corporation situated technically in places like Nevada and Delaware but solely for tax purposes?

And all the other off-shore money schemes we see rich individuals and companies like Appleand Google--who make most of their profits in the USA engage in shady loopholes to evade taxes through moving about from the Cayman Islands or Bermuda or, in Google case,  Ireland? 

 Perhaps not all that much.

Alex Marshall in an editorial in today's "New York Times:  "Someday, Madison warned, companies could grow so large they “would pass beyond the authority of a single state, and would do business in other states.” To make sure the companies remained accountable to government, he said the federal government should “grant charters of incorporation in cases where the public good may require them, and the authority of a single state may be incompetent.”

In other words, a National Companies Act." 

Maybe companies who want to do business in the largest economy in the world---and are protected and enhanced by state local and federal government supports and the American citizen as worker and consumer--- should pay for the privilege just as ordinary citizens do. 

 

 

 See article in the link below:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/opinion/solving-the-corporate-tax-code-puzzle.html?_r=1

The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of The Shootout at the OK Corral and How It Changed the American West

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	History
Author:	Jeff Guinn (2011)

There are at least three events that almost all modern Americans of my generation are familiar with in the history of the frontier West, in part thanks to history but in the main thanks to movies and television and to books like this one .

The first is the siege and the defeat of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and about 200 "Texicans" at the hands of overwhelming odds from Santa Anna's Mexican Army at the Alamo in 1836. Roughly forty years later, there came the total defeat of General George Custer's main force of cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn by a combined army of Lakota and Comanche warriors in present day eastern Montana. These were battles by any description--they changed at least for a time the course of history.

The last and most controversial event always seemed inflated beyond measure. But this book explains why what is popularly known as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral became a part of frontier lore.

It directly involved only eight or nine men. It took an estimated thirty seconds to unfold. Thirty bullets were exchanged. Three men died. Three suffered serious wounds. One man was grazed by a bullet but not seriously incapacitated.

And one man--a rough-hewn gambler and former deputy sheriff turned deputized U.S. marshall, Wyatt Earp, walked away unscathed and became, along with "Will Bill" Hickok and "Bat" Masterson, one of a handful of men who were to become the most famous lawmen of the frontier.



The writer, Jeff Guinn, a Texan who has already written a well-received book on Depression Era bank bandits Bonnie and Clyde ("Go Down Together") tries as other historians have since the 1920's, to separate fact and fiction for the reader to try and get a grip on why this one event gained so much publicity at the time and why it became an incident that has fascinated screenwriters, writers of fiction and non-fiction in general and the public ever since.

He does a good job I'd say in laying out the forces, economic and political and personal, that brought these disparate men together on that afternoon.

The idea of this one shoot-out "changing the West" is publishing hype, of course. But it should be noted this was an incident that at the time captured interest all over the territory, the Rocky Mountain states, and the big West Coast newspapers. And the subsequent trials for murder and later the vendetta killings carried out by the Earp Brothers and the Clanton/McLaury families became nationwide stories.

Mr. Guinn does succeed in telling readers why Tombstone (now a tourist den where they reenact the events in an area called "Old Tombstone" ) is a good microcosm to examine the forces of late frontier Westward Expansion.

Tombstone, Arizona, in the southeast corner of the territory was a thriving silver-mining and gambling boom-town in the Arizona Territory that had only come into being three years before the incident at the vacant lot took place. It had already attracted a telegraph station, sewer lines, a regular stagecoach run, two thriving daily newspapers--one serving the Democrats (aimed more to those who had come to Arizona from the former Confederate states) and the other for the Union-minded Republican factions that were the most well-heeled in terms of banking, mining, gambling and prostitution (the latter was legal if the "house of ill-fame" paid taxes to the city.) There was a lot of money to be made in law enforcement there since whomever held the offices of sheriff collected taxes for all of Cochise County--keeping at least ten percent as commission-- and whoever was in charge of Tombstone city police also got a rake-off. In addition there was the office of US Marshall, a post held generally by whoever was appointed by the Territorial governor up in Prescott, a couple hundred miles away. The federal salary was supplemented by the chance to get money from Wells Fargo, a massive corporate-style freight company which had no trouble rewarding good lawmen who brought in stagecoach robbers since the company made a point to make good on any losses from robbery.

It was quite possible to make a large fortune in a very short time in and around Tombstone if you could keep the cattle rustlers in line and collect the taxes on ranches and businesses without much fuss and bother to those who held the big purse-strings. This was a place where lawmen could make the equivalent of 20-30 thousand dollars a year, roughly $400,000 dollars annually in modern terms according to Guinn.


So enter to Tombstone around 1879 the brothers Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt Earp to the new boom-town. They were followed by a dentist-turned-gambler named John Henry "Doc" Holliday, a Georgia-born tubercular patient with a fatalist outlook on life. Wyatt and Doc had been friends and fellow gamblers back when Earp had been in a spot of trouble while gambling in a Texas town and Holliday had come to his defense against strong odds. By all accounts Holliday was usually comfortable around trouble. He would have been a good friends for the Earps to have in Tombstone which was why Wyatt wrote to him to come down there when he and three of his brothers came there.
Earp later worked as a deputy marshall in the Kansas cattle towns of Wichita and Dodge City. Earp's main job was to keep the "drovers" in line--drovers were cattle-wranglers who brought Texas longhorns driven up from that state to the railroad lines that furnished beef for the cities back East.

Wyatt Earp had honed his skills at "buffaloing" rowdies and pistol-whipping drunken hot-heads while serving as a bouncer in a bordello or two in Illinois (his birth state) and also running (and protecting) the card gaming that typically went on in places like Dodge City where there were men with new money in their pockets and the foolish desire to gamble with card sharps like Earp and Holliday.

All these towns , including Tombstone, had serious gun-control laws by the way. If you went to an area of saloons and gambling clubs, et al, the authorities took your gun and you got it back when you left town. Similar laws were enforced in Tombstone in 1881. The fact that some men were allowed to have guns in town with permits and other, like the "cow-boys", couldn't get those permits usually made for more bad blood between the factions.

"Few frontier lawmen had clean records," Guinn records. "The idea was that men who had broken laws themselves would understand best how to prevent others from doing the same."

A short entry from Wikipedia sums up Wyatt Earp's past: "Earp left Dodge City in 1879, and with his brothers James and Virgil, moved to Tombstone, Arizona. The Earps bought an interest in the Vizina mine and some water rights. There, the Earps clashed with a loose federation of outlaw Cowboys. Wyatt, Virgil, and their younger brother Morgan held various law enforcement positions that put them in conflict with Tom and Frank McLaury, and Ike and Billy Clanton, who threatened to kill the Earps. The conflict escalated over the next year, culminating on October 26, 1881 in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, during which the Earps and Holliday killed three of the Cowboys. In the next five months, Virgil was ambushed and maimed and Morgan was assassinated. Wyatt, his brother Warren, Holliday, and others pursued the Cowboys they thought responsible in a vendetta.

"After leaving Tombstone, Earp continually invested in various mining interests and saloons. He and his third wife, in their later years, moved between Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert, where the town of Earp, California was named after him. Although his brother Virgil had far more experience as a sheriff, constable, and marshal,[1] because Wyatt outlived Virgil, and due to a largely fictionalized biography by Stuart Lake that made Wyatt famous, he has been the subject of and model for a large number of films, TV shows, biographies and works of fiction.":

Indeed in my opinion the best lawman among the Earps was Virgil Earp. He had the best "people skills" and likely had a cooler head when dealing with potential opponents. He had had been crippled in a sneak attack shortly after the famous gunfight and lost part of his arm. His life was more sedate after that, while Wyatt still pursued fame. Late in life, Wyatt became (as the last living man at the famous shoot-out) a minor celebrity. He moved to Los Angeles more or less permanently in the 1920s with his wife and made friends with Hollywood western actors like Tom Mix and William S. Hart. He also was a friend of a young director of Westerns named John Ford, who introduced him to a young prop-man in the Ford company named Marion Morrison, soon to be known as John Wayne.

In his last years, Earp, who died in January of 1929, age 80, tried to capitalize on a renewed interest in the Old West. He hoped that William S. Hart would play him in a film, but it never happened. Earp did find his main biographer, Stuart Lake, and hoped to tell his side of the story about life in Tombstone almost a half-century later. As it was, Wyatt died before the success of the Lake book and the beginnings of the legend of him through "the silver screen" career came about. At least a dozen famous actors--including Henry Fonda to James Garner to Kurt Russell to Burt Lancaster and Kevin Costner have played Wyatt Earp or, in the case of Errol Flynn and Randolph Scott, played men inspired by his exploits, however close to the truth they really were.

"The Last Gunfight" is a very interesting book for those interested in Western lore, history and how it all reflects American culture today.

Letters of Note--A Website of Fine Letters by Interesting People

http://www.lettersofnote.com/



Here is (to me at least) an interesting site edited by Shaun Usher which every day features one or two new letters by a major historical figure in the literary, political or social world.

It also has occasional interesting letters written by lesser-known persons of historic note. Several recent examples of note have come from John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, Douglas Adams, Nick Cave, Mark Twain, E.B White, etc.

I hope you'll have a look. :-)

The Philipine-American War (1899-1902); America's Last 'Frontier Outpost' And First Asian War

"There is the case of the Philippines. I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it—perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those islands—but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector—not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now—why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.”---Mark Twain (founding member of The Anti-Imperialist League) from a letter in "The New York World", circa 1900.)

Starting in 1898, the United States, under President William McKinley, annexed the islands of Hawaii as a United States territory.  (There had been a coup backed by US business interests there in 1893.) It was the first stirrings of American power beyond the continental frontier that stopped at the West Coast.

 

In February ,1898, after years of hyperbolic anti-Spanish "yellow journalism" in the big city papers of William Randolph Hearst and other publishers of "the yellow press",  war broke out two months after the US battleship Maine blew up in Havana Harbor, with the loss of 200 sailors. 

Soon ,despite attempts to placate the US government,  Spain was locked in a war with the young nation over the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, the little island of Guam in the remote central Pacific and the large archipelago of the Philippines in Southeast Asia.   

The United States intelligentsia, government and business officials paid very little attention to the Philippines in the decades before the war, according to Professor Richard Sibley in his 2007 book, "A War For Frontier and Empire".  Indeed only a few dozen articles about the enormous chain of islands had even been published in American periodicals for the decades prior to the conquest. 

   By the Summer of 1898, the Spanish forces--which faced defeat from Filipino Independence fighters in all but its capital of Manila--were suddenly faced with defeat at sea.  This came fromm American Admiral George Dewey's Pacific Fleet in Manila Bay itself.  Spainish forces surrendered to the Americans after a one-sided sea battle.  The "Battle for Manila" that shortly followed the loss of the Spanish fleet was more of a hand-over between high officials of two governments than an actual fight.  

The point of the battle was to prevent the imposition of forces from The First Philippine Republic, led by President Emilio Aquinaldo, into the city.  The new president was suffering under the impression that the Americans had no interest in an empire in his country--or so he had been led to believe reportedly by US officials in Hong Kong before the firing started.

But now he was frustrated from taking control of the capital city---the main conduit of commerce and information to the outside world.  By early 1899--shortly before the US Senate in Washington was ready to vote to accept the annexation of the islands from Spain---a shooting incident on a bridge on the outskirts of Manila, started by one American soldier, precipitated an exchange of volleys between Alquinaldo's forces and the Yankees.

 

 The second phase of the war, called "The Philippine Insurrection" by some historians, had begun. 

The US Army and Marines drove the often lightly-armed Philippinos back in conventional attacks on the main island of Luzon.  One of the American commanders was General Arthur MacArthur, the father of the more famous "American Caesar" of World War II and Korea, Douglas.          

     A bloody war became bloodier when the local forces broke into guerrilla groups later in 1899 to try and fight back against the Americans.  To counter the "hit-and-run" strategy and the casualties brought on by unconventional warfare, the Americans became more aggressive. Torture techniques such as "the water cure" were introduced to get suspicious men to talk.  This was like the water-boarding methods of today, only you put a man on the ground and force-filled him with water until his stomach was extended.  If he didn't talk, as happened often according to reports, the torture was repeated.   

Word of these techniques (as well as mass shootings in villages by soldiers and Marines ) were leaked out of the war zone by American soldiers and newspapermen from  the USA, Britain, France, et al.  Soldiers themselves risked court-martials by writing about what was taking place in their units to family members back home.   They told of the "water cure" tactics and regular firing squad reprisals against villagers suspected of harboring "rebels". Then there were the camps: 

 

From Wikipedia:          

Filipino villagers were forced into concentration camps called reconcentrados which were surrounded by free-fire zones, or in other words “dead zones.” Furthermore, these camps were overcrowded and filled with disease, causing the death rate to be extremely high. Conditions in these “reconcentrados” are generally acknowledged to have been inhumane. Between January and April 1902, 8,350 prisoners of approximately 298,000 died. Some camps incurred death rates as high as 20 percent."

 

 "One camp was two miles by one mile (3.2 by 1.6 km) in area and 'home' to some 8,000 Filipinos. Men were rounded up for questioning, tortured, and summarily executed"

"In Batangas Province, where General Franklin Bell was responsible for setting up a concentration camp, a correspondent described the operation as “relentless.” General Bell ordered that by December 25, 1901, the entire population of both Batangas Province and Laguna Province had to gather into small areas within the “poblacion” of their respective towns. Barrio families had to bring everything they could carry because anything left behind—including houses, gardens, carts, poultry and animals—was to be burned by the U.S. Army. Anyone found outside the concentration camps was shot. General Bell insisted that he had built these camps to "protect friendly natives from the insurgents, assure them an adequate food supply" while teaching them "proper sanitary standards." The commandant of one of the camps referred to them as the "suburbs of Hell."

Estimates vary over how many Philippine civilians died, but the numbers were in the hundreds of thousands.  Most of them died from cholera and typhus outbreaks in the camps.  As in all wars, atrocities were committed on both sides, but the suffering fell harder on least trained and out-fitted forces. 

 

The US military lost 4,200 men in the war and 20,000 Philipinos combatants fell officially in action.   By the end of the main part of the war (July, 1902) General Alquinaldo had been captured and the islands were on their way to becoming Americanized--with English-language schools, an American style court system and a lower house of elected representatives to bring a measure of democracy to the whole affair of American conquest.  The Upper House remained in the hands of the American Commissioners, acting much as the viceroys and district commissioners of another empire.  

The Philippine-American war is not much discussed in American schools, and is low on the radar of major US  conflicts.  But in it contains all the seeds of the modern wars in American history from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan.  It's not surprise that this is so, given that the "frontier attitude" of many Americans combined well with the colonial aspirations of any emerging industrial nation of the time.    

 

 There seems little in this chapter of imperialism of just over a century ago that is becoming of a republic.   And the words of Mark Twain above could have been said of Iraq and Vietnam and our extended time in other areas as well.

"Reds" (1981) Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Maureen Stapleton

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

Last night i watched this film for the first time in thirty years. I found it a daring tour de force by star-director-co-screenwriter Warren Beatty at the time. "A three-hour film about an American Communist who goes to Russia...and dies" as he puts it in the DVD commentary was not potentially the stuff of box-office gold in 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan and the most heated time of Cold War America since the early Sixties.

But the film did do well enough at the box office to make a small profit and earn a number of awards, including an Oscar for Beatty as a director and Maureen Stapelton in her role as Emma Goldman.

The film follows early 20th Century American globe-trotting journalist and activist John "Jack" Reed and Louise Bryant as writers and political radicals. They fall in love and then, after moving from staid Portland, Oregon, to living a bohemian lifestyle in the Greenwich Village part of New York (and having some tumultuous old-fashioned Hollywood romantic complications) go to Russia to witness, report and (for Reed) participate in the October Revolution of 1917. Seeing the film the first time prompted me to go out and read John Reed's "Ten Days That Shook the World" and its a great piece of reportage, and historically significant even if some critics have found it too kind to one political movement in that revolution.

Written as it was at the beginning of such an epochal event in human history, Reed can be forgiven for being a bit too romantic about the possibilities of what was happening in Russia to empower workers and forgotten people all over the world.

The first half of the film shows us Reed's view of the Revolution and the growth of radical labor politics in World War II era America. The scene with the laborers in the barn in the clip is indicative of that.

The second half of the film shows how those around Reed (including Bryant and Emma Goldman) become more disillusioned with the chances of radical change in America and the high cost that Lenin's government is exacting on the Russian people. At the same time, Beatty and his fellow screenwriter, the British playwright Trevor Griffiths, make it clear that Reed is a man who is a man trapped between his own country (where he faces jail for sedition charges stemming from opposing the entry of America in World War One) and his lack of total revolutionary fervor for some in Russia who increasingly use him as a tool to promote their own ideas as the Bolsheviks desperately try to fight off the attempts by disenfranchised revolutionary parties, moderate and reactionary groups and foreign armies who mean to bring down their government. He seems a man without a country, chasing a revolution that has little use for his true reflections.


I couldn't help wondering what would have become of Reed's view of Russia had he lived longer? According to a quote attributed to Bryant, he felt at the end of his life he might have misjudged the Bolsheviks. But there is controversy there. What we do know without controversy is that John Reed at his best was courageous and had no tolerance for censorship or the lies of politicians or bureaucrats.

It's clear though his is a tale that would be little known outside formal history classes in America were it not for the box office clout of a American film star. No matter what you think about the beliefs of these two main people when you reflect upon them, I think most would say this is a tale well worth the telling.

Truman fights back: A Lesson For Obama

The 1948 Election was not unlike what America faces in 2012--a do-nothing Congress against a president with low approval ratings and an economy with problems (higher prices then, unemployment today) and trouble spots overseas.

Rather than play an accommodating "Associate Professor of America" as Barack Obama did in 2010 and most of 2011, the underdog candidate for the 1948 election, Harry Truman fought back and put the onus on the "80th Do-Nothing" Republican dominated Congress, which had pushed against increases in minimum wages, labor rights and a national health care program.

The result was a complete turnaround in voters perceptions of President Truman and his party. This is a good lesson for all Democrats running for office. A discouraged enlightened electorate does little but to encourage its adversaries.

Can history repeat itself? Let's just say this is how a Democratic President running for election SHOULD sound like.

Huey Long: Man of the People or Dangerous Autocrat? Or Both?

Perhaps no one politician in the 20th Century held so much power in one state than governor, and later Senator from Louisiana, Huey P. Long (1893-1935) , held in the early 1930's.   

Long rose to power as the Railroad Commissioner of the Bayou State, when he was elected in 1918, only three years after he was admitted to the bar to practice law. He set about reforming and creating new regulations for public utilities and campaigned for taxes to bear on the mighty Standard Oil Company. He also set about to do battle with the "old regulars" in the do-little Democratic Party machine that was based in New Orleans. 

When elected Governor in 1928, he went to work raising taxes on the rich for  new public projects: 2,000 miles of new paved roads in Louisiana, free textbooks for school children, a major improvement to the Louisiana State University and major public works projects for charity hospitals and proper facilities for the mentally ill. 

 

Long also was a grafter and a leader  who once said to a legislator "I am the law now," in Louisiana.  He expected every pubic employee in his state to  contribute ten percent of their respective earnings to his "De-duct Box", a personal cache of money in the millions that  he planned to use to buy votes and slander his enemies through a newspaper he expected all good public workers to subscribe to. He  planned a national campaign for President in 1936, in an alliance with the future anti-semite and pro-fascist speaker, Catholic Father Charles  Coughlin, a demagogue figure from Michigan who was the Rush Limbaugh of his day.       

Long also proposed a major wealth redistribution that, at least to many , would cure the excesses of the Depression.  With so many out of work, his "Share the Wealth" ideas  broadened Long's appeal to millions all over the country that, like those in the backwoods of Louisiana, had felt oppressed  for far too long. 

 

Long was no shrinking violet when it came to backroom deals: (the following is an excerpt on Long's entry from Wikipedia:)

 

 

"On occasion, (while governor)  he even entered the legislative chambers, going so far as to sit on representatives' and senators' desks and sternly lecture them on his positions. He also retaliated against those who voted against him and used patronage and state funding (especially highways) to maneuver Louisiana toward what opponents called a Long "dictatorship". Having broken with the Old Regulars and T. Semmes Walmsley in the fall of 1933, Long inserted himself into the New Orleans mayoral election of 1934 and began a dramatic public feud with the city's government that lasted for two years.

"In 1934, Long and James A. Noe, an independent oilman and member of the Louisiana Senate, formed the controversial Win or Lose Oil Company. The firm was established to obtain leases on state-owned lands so that its directors might collect bonuses and sublease the mineral rights to the major oil companies. Although ruled legal, these activities were done in secret and the stockholders were unknown to the public. Long made a profit on the bonuses and the resale of those state leases, using the funds primarily for political purposes.^[37]

"By 1934, Long began a reorganization of the state government that reduced the authority of local governments in anti-Long strongholds New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Alexandria. It further gave the governor the power to appoint all state employees. Long passed what he called "a tax on lying" and a 2 percent tax on newspaper advertising revenue. He created the Bureau of Criminal Identification, a special force of plainclothes police answerable only to the governor. He also had the legislature enact the same tax on refined oil that in 1929 had nearly led to his impeachment, which he used as a bargaining chip to promote oil drilling in Louisiana. After Standard Oil agreed that 80 percent of the oil sent to its refineries would be drilled in Louisiana, Long's government refunded most of these tax revenues."

There is more than a whiff of fascism in all this.

 

On the far left, both the Socialist and Communist Parties opposed this income scheme as just a manipulation of a failed capitalist system that had brought about the Great Depression. His fellow Democratic politicos abandoned the somewhat loutish but brilliant "Kingfish" when he turned against Franklin Roosevelt's  "New Deal" and promoted his "Every Man A King" book.  Millions of regular people bought his ideas and its clear that his challenge to Roosevelt as a third-party candidate might have swung the election to the Republican candidate in 1936.   By 1940, given the GOP's lackluster track record on economic fixes in those days, Huey Long might have been the President of the United States.           

Upon his death at 42 from an assassin's bullet in September 1935--by a young surgeon named Carl Weiss, who was upset that his father-in-law was going to lose a judgeship thanks to Long's maneuvering--the point became moot. 

 

What would have become of the country had he lived?   Would be have helped the nation--some say he already had by pushing FDR toward Social Security and more public works projects--or would he have destroyed the Constitutional "separation of powers" in pursuit of a Caesar-ian dictatorship that would have unleashed revolutionary ferment in the country?    

I.F. Stone, the late prominent progressive journalist, thought Long was not a positive force but more of a Greco-Roman tyrant  (i.e., a manipulator of public policy for his own gain) ,  rather than a legitimate reformer who empowers the people.  On this I agree. But he certainly made enemies,  like political bosses and big oil companies, who were worthy opponents to any reformer in one of the poorest states in America..

 

Even today, while Long's legacy is controversial, its safe to say many of his ideas  have a modern resonance in  the times we live in  today.      

Bay Area News Pioneer Belva Davis--"Never In My Wildest Dreams"

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 60's-70's and early 80's, I used to watch Belva Davis on television. She was  a television news anchor first on CBS Channel 5 (KPIX) and later on the main Public Broadcasting station in the Bay Area, KQED, which she hosted a nightly news program called "A Closer Look" and later a show called "This Week in Northern California."   She and the erudite Rollin Post were my favorite news people on the tube.    

I realized she was unique in being an African-American Woman on the television, but I didn't know  she was the only African American female anchor west of the Mississippi.   Or that her life was so interesting and so remote from the past I imagined.  Thanks to her fortitude and inner power to overcome the racism endemic in a high-profile business she did excellent work in documentaries and interviews and captured a lot of those times--which included riots in Berkeley over the Vietnam War, the rise and violence swirling and surrounding  the Black Panther movement, the Zebra and  Zodiac mass murders of the early 70's, the firing of radical UCLA Professor Angela Davis by the then-Governor Ronald Reagan,  the kidnapping of Patty Hearst in 1974, the mass killings of 900 people in Guyana in November 1978 by the demonic Jim Jones and his People's Temple followers and the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and America's first openly-Gay supervisor,  Harvey Milk, at the San Francisco City Hall that  very same month. 

Her memoir tells these stories as well as her own---a child raised by her aunt in Monroe, Louisiana--the same town that Black Panther Huey Newton came from--and her coming to California with her family when jobs in military plants opened up in World War II.  I know a lot of people have never heard of this lady, but I think at least the broad outlines of her life is worth hearing about.   And she's still working.

 Here is a introduction to Ms. Davis from the PBS News Hour .    

Back To the Future for the Republicans in 2012?

Watching the latest GOP Debate in Las Vegas on Tuesday night, I was  struck by how far to the right almost all of the six Republican candidates have gone in order to try and capture the GOP base, which appears to be, in the words of Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, made up by self-proclaimed "religious warriors and anti-government agitators." 

One candidate, Godfather Pizza honcho Herman Cain, claimed again that people who were out of a job and weren't rich have only themselves to blame.  (Really Herman? In this economy?) That's a but like saying black people were to blame for not being able to vote in the South back in the bad old Jim Crow days. Of course, back when Cain was a young man in Georgia in the 1960s, he meekly went to the back of the bus and waited for others to liberate him.  Instead of Dr. King's "We Shall Overcome", young Citizen Cane mantra was, to quote one wag in Newsweek, "Me Shall Overcome."

And Mr. Cain surely is a successful man.  But he's also a plutocratic ninny with a boneheaded and regressive "9-9-9" tax plan.  This would create a nine-percent sales tax on everything and would, once again, give millionaires more tax breaks than they already have had in the last thirty years.  Great. Even Ronald Reagan would have gagged on this plan. 

 

Mr. Cain also has no foreign policy experience or even much interest in the matter.  Ignorance of the leader of Kazakhstan is a badge of honor to him. And, to top it all off, his solution to illegal immigration along the Mexican border is to put up an  electrified fence and kill people before they cross the border.  A kind of reverse Berlin Wall you could call that.  (And here I thought there was nothing to learn from the old East German puppet state.)  

   And this guy is the front runner in South Carolina and Florida?  Is it possible the GOP voters are so desperate to get rid of President Obama that they are willing to even support this guy over the conservative-but-sane former Governor Mitt Romney?     

And then there is Rick Perry and his new flat tax that is about to roll out soon.  And Newt Gingrich who blames the whole of the economic meltdown, caused in the main by unscrupulous mortgage brokers and Wall Street speculators, on...the same "bad big government" he helped make sure was deregulated to impotency while Speaker of the Houe in the 1990s!  All  for the best interests of multi-national banks and big mortgage outfits like Countrywide and IndyMac.

 

 The federal government in question is filled with officials of both parties willing to do Wall Streets' bidding for plenty of re-election cash needed to get Congressmen and women in office.  It also keeps cabinet officials of both parties well represented by friends of billionaire speculators like Tim Geithner at Treasury and Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs, who oversaw that department during the Great Meltdown and bank bailout of 2008.    

Of course, some like Ron Paul hate the Federal Reserve and the bank bailout of 2008 , which would make sense if the whole economy wouldn't have collapsed further without it.  The thing to do was to regulate Wall Street before the crisis, not deregulate it.  And now all these candidates want to roll back the regulations that have been put back into place--over banking lobbyist objections. At least the new Dodd-Frank Law recreates a watered-down version of the old restrictions that kept our economy from tanking for 68 years!  

Michelle Bachmann tells people without their old  full-time jobs and foreclosure of their homes staring them in the face to "hang on".  She offered no explanation as to what she would do however and it appears she too would not dare resort to anything beyond the "invisible hand" of the marketplace to help distressed people.

Frankly this is all very discouraging.  The US public does deserve a real choice in 2012 for the next presidential election.  But what we are getting from the "loyal opposition" are candidates who represent the top one percent of income and wealth gatherers. They hope to please them and bring the rest of their electorate along on the "wedge issues" like immigration, abortion, getting tougher somehow on China or Iran or something else.

The only Republican I can see who really has a grip on reality is former Utah Governor John Huntsman, who was also most recently the Obama administration's Ambassador to China. "The work of the nation isn't getting done," Huntsman says as he campaigned in New Hampshire recently, "because we got extreme elements on both sides that are barking at each other and the entire middle has been hollowed out." 

Huntsman is right about "the hollow middle". But the only extremists who matter in this coming round of Republican primaries are the tea party hard rightists, the reactionaries who have been bankrolled by the Koch Brothers and Dick Armey's  Freedom Works lobby. You have to give them credit;  they  managed to convince millions that the failures of the mortgage giants and Wall Street are the fault of government regulation.  (Actually it was the lack of regulation or diligence to enforce same that is clearly to blame.)  

It's the soft core pro-corporate Democrats of the Clinton White House  and the hard core "ownership society" anti-regulatory and tax-cuts mania policies of the Bush Administration that put us in the great recession. Even if Obama was an effective president (and he surely isn't at this juncture) he is too wedded to the status quo and too hemmed in by the need to capture 60 Votes in the 100 seat Senate to pass anything that would help the average American in economic distress.  

 

Luckily for the candidates for the Republican nomination, their target voters have so far been mostly chumps. The activist/straw poll voters don't care about much more than getting that "black guy with a funny name" out of "their" White House and taking "their" country back.  And there's a lot to be said for enthusiasm in a democratic election.

 

But there comes a point in politics, however, when you try so hard to catch votes on the fringes that you forget that most Americans, I believe, care more about a man or woman who can get something passed in Washington, a pragmatist, than some unalloyed purity-figure.  

Or care, paradoxically, unlike the Red State hot heads, to be sure how little experience a candidate can prove he has  in elected office. 

 

The GOP has a unpopular President to run against, but so far all their candidates (save the unelectable Huntsman and possibly Romney)  are so far right they better pray for another economic meltdown to get themselves into that White House they think is theirs.                    

 

     There has always been room in both political parties for some extremism. But the last time extremists totally dominated a major political party like this was in 1964, when a surge of conservatives and newly minted anti-Civil Rights former Democrats from the Southern states got together and nominated the states-rights hardliner Barry Goldwater of Arizona.  The result was a landslide for Lyndon Johnson, a President who thought he would have real trouble in the election according to the tapes he recorded of himself while serving in the Oval Office while finishing John Kennedy's term.   

But LBJ won by a landslide.

 

But at least Senator Goldwater carried his  Grand Canyon State of Arizona and the deep South.   History may not repeat itself, but it just might echo like a yell across that big deep canyon.        

Global mass protests 15th October 2011

Link

FYI: From Wall Street to Washington to town squares like my home town to European capitals and lots of other places, it's looks like groups like the USA tea party folk are starting to get some competition in the protest biz.   

Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan: Today's "Class Warfare" Was Yesterday's Pragmatic Conservatism

Funny how the Republican and Libertarian Party stalwarts only remember selective portion of Ronald Reagan's policy pronouncements.

Reagan's push to close tax loopholes for the rich and get budgets balanced with cuts and tax revenue in his second term has totally slipped their minds. He also actually came out for stronger public trade unions---in Eastern Europe at least.

In a Labor Day address in 1980, Ronald Reagan said:

"These are the values inspiring those brave workers in Poland … They remind us that where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost."

Funny that today collective bargaining is under attack for American citizens in Ohio and Wisconsin from the likes of GOP Governors Scott Walker of the Badger State and John Kasich or Ohio.

The modern Reaganauts chastise President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress for doing exactly what their own Hollywood-minted shining hero did twenty-five years earlier.

In one way its sad to see how extreme the right end of the political spectrum has gone. No GOP candidate in a recent primary debate would even agree to raise one dollar in tax revenue for every ten dollars in austerity-maniacal tax cuts to everything the government does from deliver the mail to supporting public schools to helping the unemployed get retraining or basic benefits.

One local legislator in southern Oregon, a dandy named Sal Esquivel recently said of the Wall Street protests, "If you want to work you can work, and, if you don't want to work you don't work." Spoken like a man who never had a layoff notice from the boss.

In another light, it's hard for these folks to to argue with The Gipper himself.

Though I'll bet the spinmeisters are hard at work now that this video is out on the Internet.

Here's a reminder from Ed Schultz at MSNBC. Thanks Think Progress.