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WILL THE REAL POPULISTS
BY RONNIE DUGGER
We are ruled by Big Business and Big
Government as its paid hireling, and we know it. Corporate
money is wrecking popular government in the United States. The
big corporations and the centimillionaires and billionaires have
taken daily control of our work, our pay, our housing, our health,
our pension funds, our bank and savings deposits, our public
lands, our airwaves, our elections and our very government. It is
as if American democracy has been bombed. Will we be able to
recover ourselves and overcome the bombers? Or will they
continue to divide us and will we continue to divide ourselves,
according to our wounds and our alarms, until they have taken
the country away from us for good?
Senate Democratic majority leader George Mitchell
exclaimed late in 1994, shortly before he abandoned Congress
in disgust: "This system stinks. This system is money." The law of
life among us now is what Jefferson called "the general prey of
the rich on the poor." The moment is dangerous. Democracy is
not guaranteed God's protection; systems and nations end. If we
do anything serious now we might make things worse; if we do
nothing serious now we are done for.
The challenge of 1776 was one thing; the challenge of
1995 is another. The northern Europeans who were our
country's founders exterminated or confined millions of Native
Americans whose ancestors had been living here for 30,000
years. African-Americans were enslaved until the Civil War;
women were not allowed to vote for 131 years, until 1920. But
after the abolition-ist, women's suffrage, farmers', union,
progressive, civil rights, environmentalist, feminist and gay and
lesbian liberation move-ments.and much more immigration, the
question now is whether we can found the first genuinely
international democracy. If we cannot, the corporations have us.
Why is there no longer any mass democratic organiza­
tion we can trust and through which we can act together? Where
is the strong national movement that is advancing working
Americans' interests, values and hopes? Where is the parly of
the common person? It's no coincidence that within the same
historical moment we have lost both our self-governance and the
Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, on which many millions
of ordinary people have relied to represent them since the
1930s, has been hollowed out and rebuilt from the inside by
corporate money .What was once 'the party of the common man'
is now the second party of the corporate mannequin. In national
politics ordinary people no longer exist. We simply aren't there.
No wonder only 75 million of us eligible to vote in 1994 did so,
while 108 million more of us, also eligible, did not.
What is government about? As a worker told reporter
Barry Bearak last spring about the U.A.W. strike against the
Caterpillar corporation, government is about “control, you know,
who controls who." Ernesto Cortes Jr., the exceptionally import­
ant organizer who helps people in communities in the Southwest
to act together in their own interests, once exclaimed: "Power!
Power comes in two forms: organized people and organized
money." To govern ourselves, power is what we need. To get it
we must want it and organize for it.
This is a call to hope and action, a call to reclaim and
reinvent democracy, a call to the hard work or reorganizing our­
selves into a broad national coalition, a call to populists,workers,
progressives and liberals to reconstitute ourselves into a smash­
ing new national force to end corporate rule.
This is a call that we pick up the banner where the
People's Party dropped it on July 25, 1896, and form ourselves
into a broad progressive coalition, a new American alliance to take
power so that, in the words of John Quincy Adams, "self-love and
social may be made the same." I would suggest for a name,
tentatively, the Citizen's Alliance or (on a cue from a similar project
in New Zealand) the American Alliance.
But we will have to start small, “to begin humbly." When
only a few come that is enough. The women's movement for the
right to vote started when five women sat down around a table in
a parlor in Waterloo, New York, six miles north of Seneca Falls.
The Populists' National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union
started with a meeting of seven people in a farmhouse in
Lampasas County, Texas.
I propose the emphasis on populism because the 19th
century Populists denied the legitimacy of corporate domination
of a democracy, whereas in this century the progressives, the
unions and the liberals gave up on and forgot about that organic
and controlling issue. I propose that we seize the word Populism
back from its many highjackers, its misusers - the George
Wallaces, David Dukes, Irving Kristols, Newt Gingriches -- and
restore its original meaning in American history, that of the anti­
corporate Populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s. Our
point, our purpose, is the well-being and enhancement of the
person. We are all those who believe the corporations are
becoming our masters and do not want to vote for candidates
of any party dependent on them. We are all those who are tired of
winning elections some of the time but losing our rights and
interests all of the time.
As Lawrence Goodwyn wrote in his definitive work, The
Populist Moment, the Populists were “attempting to construct
within the framework of American capitalism, come variety of
cooperative commonwealth." That was, as he wrote, "the last
substantial effort at structural alteration of hierarchical economic
forms in modern America," and when Populism died out what was
lost was "cultural acceptance of a democratic politics open to
serious structural evolution of society." Well, like the Populists of
that era we are ready again to resume the cool eyeing of the
corporations with a collective will to take back the powers they
have seized from us, the power of farm or no farm,job or no job,
living wage or no living wage, store or no store, medical care or no
medical care, home or no home, pension or no pension.
So, as I would have it, we are Populists; but we are many
other things. We are white, black, brown, every religion and
none, young, middle-aged, old. We are people who work, for a
corporation or a small business or a farm, for our families or for
ourselves, or we're job creators, local merchants, small-business
people in the towns or cities, or we're people who can't find work
or have given up trying. We are ordinary people. Prob-ably we
would be no better than the rich if we were rich. But we are not
haters or scapegoaters. We eschew violence; we believe in
active citizenship and, when it is needed, civil disobedience. We
are progressives; we are union workers, or nonunion ones who
might be union if we weren't so afraid of the power and will of
management to fire us if we organize or strike;we are liberals; we
are the poorly educated, the untrained, the minimum-wagers
harried from one job to another with no security and no health
insurance or sunk on welfare, whose grammar might embarrass
high-toned reformers, whose clothes might, too. We are femin-
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ists, environmentalists, peace and antinuclear people, civil liber­
tarians, civil rightsers, radical democrats, democratic socialists,
egalitarians; and we are moderates and conservatives who
believe in family values, work, initiative and responsibility, but not
cynics to whom the point of life is profit and power.
Some of us are Democrats, some independent, some
are or were for Ross Perot, some follow Jesse Jackson's Rain­
bow Coalition, some of us are Green Party, some are libertar-ians
about personal life, a thimbleful of us may be Republicans. This is
not a call to get ready for 1996 politics, nor a call to citi-zens,
Democrats or any other, to decide now whether or not to vote for
any particular candidate or party in 1996. The president-ial race
next year could well become a four- or five-candidate November
smashup of the two party system, and 1996, there-fore, one of
those rare years of historic party realignment. But the situation
might also close back down into the usual choice between the
two major-party nominees. Some or many of us may conclude in
1996 that we are trapped again. The return of ordinary citizens to
national politics through the Alliance might move Democratic
officeholders back toward the people or might provide a
democratic group setting for a reasoned decision on 1996 in
place of the ego-driven chaos we must now expect. But that is
not the chief point. This is a call for the five- or ten-year, one-to-
one hard work of organizing people and bringing together many
disparate associations and efforts into one new national
movement. Let's not even start unless we're in for that. If we are
in for that, we might be trapped one more year, but not longer.
What has happened to us?
Too much, too much.
In 1886 the Supreme Court decided, insanely, that
corporations are "persons“ with the rights our forebears meant
only for people. The corporations -- mere legal fictions created by
the democratic states that are their only source of legitimacy --
disposing of the Populists and slipping free from the states'
leashes, have multiplied into the corrupters of our politics and the
international networks of greed and power that we know today.
Hierarchical, essentially totalitarian, and now gigantic
and global, in effect the corporation is the government, here and
elsewhere. The divine right of kings has been replaced by the
divine rights of C.E.O.s.
Jefferson wrote that what distinguished our new country
from the Old World was the absence among us then of the fatal
concentration of private wealth that so deformed imperial
Europe. Yet the gap between the very rich and the rest of us now
is morally more obscene than anything Jefferson could have had
in mind. One percent of the people among us own 40% of the
national wealth. The after-tax income of the top 20% of U.S.
families exceeds that of all other families combined. Between
1977 and 1989 the 1% of families with incomes over $350,000
received 72% of the country's income gains while the bottom
60% lost ground. In 1992 half of our families had net financial
assets under $1,000. Debts exceeded assets of four out of ten
of our families. In 1994, 70 American individuals and 59 American
families collectively owned $295 billion, an aver-age of $2.3
billion. The top 51 individuals and families owned $197 billion, an
average of $3.9 billion. The two richest Ameri-cans, William’Gates
and Warren Buffett, and the richest Amer-ican family, the
DuPonts, owned a total of $34 billion among them. The rate of
child poverty in the United States is four times the rate in Western
Europe.
Although no democracy can work without a strong
union movement, U.S. unions have been reduced to shadows
by employers' use of sophisticated unionbusters and by the
corporations' government, whose labor-management apparatus
chains down the right to form and maintain unions. Compared
with about 1 in 3 of the work force at the peak, only 1 in 6 work­
ers now belongs to a union - if you exclude public employees,
only 1 in 9.
Multinational corporations now employ about a fifth of the
private American workforce and are getting bigger and more
powerful by the hour. Workers are falling into paycheck poverty --
by the millions we are becoming expendable hired hands,
interchangeable units of work, governed in what counts by
entities that have abandoned the traditional quest for a loyal
workforce, much less a happy one. Corporations are extracting
cuts in wages and benefits from their experienced workers, low-
bailing new worker in 2-tier wage systems, requiring mandatory
overtime and hiring temps to reduce the fringe benefits they
have to pay, and letting hundreds of thousands of workers go
while exporting their jobs to low-wage areas around the world. As
a worker at Caterpillar said, "They use you up and throw
you away.” Young male workers with a high school education lost
30% of their real income in the twenty years ending in 1993, and
the real wages of American production workers have drop-ped
20% in twenty years; average wage levels for men are now below
the levels of the 1960s.As of 1993, 40% of women earned only
about $15,000 a year. Among Hispanics 46% and among
African-Americans 36% of workers do not earn an hourly wage
sufficient to lift them out of poverty.
Many millions of us hunger for serious discussion and
debate on public affairs, but major corporations now control much
of the access to our minds and the selection of the sub-jects we
are encouraged to think about from day to day. Twenty
corporations own and control more than 50% of American radio
and TV stations, newspapers, magazines, book publishers and
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