by Bill Moyers
What’s still relevant about that early populism?
We need to remember that the ideas put forward by the populists in the late nineteenth century were considered harebrained. Crank ideas. But by the early twentieth century, those ideas, many of them, had been realized. The income tax, the direct election of senators, the whole regulatory state of the twentienth century had their roots in that early populism.
Populists feared monopolies and wanted to control their power, wanted to check the big industrial giants, the money trusts.
That’s right. Remember that what we call laissez-faire capitalism didn’t look kindly on government interference. The populists, however, said that government should serve the people, not just the corporations and the very wealthy.
What does it say to you that income inequality, which was a big issue in the Populist Era, grew significantly in the last year for which we had data, 2005? The top 1 percent of people received the largest share of national income since 1928, the year before the big crash.
Yes. It’s frightening, isn’t it?
And what does that say to you?
It says, “Oh! We’re going to have another damn depression.” That’s what it says to me. And then I remember that we have a lot of safeguards in place that were not in place in 1929 and are in place now because of the disaster of the Great Depression. But then again, many of those safeguards have been weakened, particularly over the last quarter century or so. I think that’s what we see in the credit crunch. It started with subprime mortgages but spread throughout the whole financial sector because of the lack of regulation.
There’s a story this week that says the vast majority of African American and Latino families who have entered the middle class are either borderline or at high risk of falling out of the middle class altogether. This report, published by Brandeis University, says about 95 percent of African American and 87 percent percent of Latino middle-class families don’t have enough net assets to meet their essential living expenses for even three months if their source of income disappears.
Yes. Yes. We’re not just seeing income disparities. We’re seeing huge wealth disparities. Wealth is family assets. Your house. Your car. Your savings. Your retirement. Your life insurance. Your cash. It’s that very money that you can use in unusual times, whether a breadwinner loses a job, whether somebody falls ill, whether a child has to go to college or graduate school. To have the wealth to be able to get by month by month, that’s crucial to stay in the middle class or to move up. So many families are short of wealth. Some time ago I was asked by some Democratic senators what can be done about the situation of struggling black families. And I said, “People need jobs. People need jobs.” If I were running the world, I would call back Franklin Roosevelt, and people would have jobs.
What might the populists of old be saying to us about all this?
“Who does the government serve? Who should it serve?” Bill, I believe government can work for people. That’s at the heart of election reform, public financing of elections. Do we let the free market run amok as if it were good for all of us? No, it’s not necessarily good for all of us. Because we get tainted food, dangerous toys, diseased cattle processed into hamburger. We need to call up some of those questions that the populists were asking a hundred years ago—and some of the answers, too.
What about the title of your book, Standing at Armageddon? Why did you choose that?
Because so many people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century actually felt that their world was collapsing around them. The end of their world was at hand. Standing at Armageddon actually comes from Teddy Roosevelt. When he was running as the Progressive Party candidate for president in 1912, he rallied his delegates by saying: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”
Interesting, isn’t it, that Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin Roosevelt, both men of means, championed the cause of people against the big corporations?
Because they realized that not standing up to gross economic power risked ruining this country, risked incredible disorder, risked asking for Armageddon. Theodore Roosevelt came to say that he couldn’t just let the bankers and the railroads call the tune. They would run the country into the ground. Franklin Roosevelt in the Great Depression, with the strikes and marches, realized once again that government would have to step in on the side of ordinary people.
Are we standing at Armageddon today?
In the sense of a revolution? No. We’re too big for that. One of our safeguards is our huge size. Everything takes a lot of time. So in that sense, we’re not standing at Armageddon. However, we certainly are standing at a critical moment when we decide whether or not to continue, in William Jennings Bryan’s terms, as an “empire,” or whether we want to return to our roots as a democracy. A very critical moment.
JIM HIGHTOWER
Nell Painter looks at populism as an historian; Jim Hightower writes about it as a journalist and lives it as an activist—or, by his own definition, “a populist agitator.” On his home page he modestly refers to himself as “America’s #1 Populist.” He’s earned the title over a prolific lifetime of battling Big Money, including two terms as Texas agriculture commissioner, a job he took to heart by standing up for small farmers and consumers. He was then overwhelmed by the deep pockets of a vindictive agribusiness, in a campaign orchestrated by Karl Rove for the current Texas governor Rick Perry.
Undaunted and unbowed, Hightower has kept on battling the principalities and powers of corporate America as the publisher of The Hightower Lowdown, a newsletter as well researched and highly readable as the work of the early muckrakers. The Lowdown has won both the Alternative Press Award and the Independent Press Association Award for best national newsletter.
Hightower also broadcasts daily commentaries on radio, writes a newspaper column, makes scores of speeches every year, and turns out bestselling books with eye-catching titles: Thieves in High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country and It’s Time to Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; There’s Nothing in the Middle of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos; and Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go with the Flow.
He grew up where populism once flourished, in northeast Texas, in a family of small-business owners, tenant farmers, and, in his parlance, “just plain folks.”
—Bill Moyers
Populism began in Texas, right?
It did. In 1877, out near Lampasas, in central Texas. Farmers sitting around a table much like this. Getting run over by the banks and by the railroad monopolies, not unlike what’s happening today. People were being knocked down by corporate power. And that power was initially the banks that gouged them. Usurious rates of lending. Farmers live on credit, you know; they were getting stuck with 20 percent, 25–30 percent, and they were going to go broke. And they said, “We’ve got to do something.” That issue has come up so much throughout history. We’ve got to do something. And people figure it out. This became the most extensive and successful mass grassroots movement ever in this country around economic issues. It didn’t begin as a political movement. They found ways to get credit, establish their own credit system, bypassing the banks. They created their own supply system—seed, fertilizer, and that sort of thing—and then their own marketing system. They also began to build a cultural movement around it. They educated people. They had a speakers’ bureau. And it was an intellectual movement. It was an education movement, cultural movement, economic movement. Then it became political. They elected candidates across the country, New York to California.
Yes, the movement spread from Texas to Kansas and—
Up to the plains states. And over into the upper Midwest. And then east and then west and then down through the South. So it was everywhere. A very powerful movement.
They were the first to call for the direct election of senators, to oppose all subsidies to corporations. They called for pensions for veterans. They wanted to
corral the power of lobbyists and end all subsidies to corporations. What do we owe them?
We owe them imitation. We owe them the continuation of the spirit that saw we do not have to just accept what is handed to us. We can battle back against the powers. But it’s not just going to a rally and shouting. It’s organizing and thinking and reaching out to others, and building a real people’s movement.
How does the Tea Party differ from the people you’re talking about?
Here’s what populism is not. It is not just an incoherent outburst of anger. And certainly it is not anger that is funded and organized by corporate front groups, as the initial Tea Party effort was, and as most of it is still today, though there is legitimate anger within it, in terms of the people who are there. But what populism is at its essence is a determined focus on helping people be able to get out of the iron grip of the corporate power that is overwhelming our economy, our environment, energy, the media, government. That’s one big difference between real populism and what the Tea Party is. Real populists understand that government has become a subsidiary of corporations. So you can’t say, “Let’s get rid of government.” You need to be saying, “Let’s take over government.”
You’re often described as a progressive. Why don’t you call yourself a liberal?
The difference between a liberal and a progressive is the liberals want to assuage the problems that we have because of corporate power. Populists want to get rid of corporate power. An example is what’s happening, right now, with the Wall Street “reform” that’s in Washington.
I heard quotation marks around that word reform.
Here come the Democrats again, just weaker than Canadian hot sauce, you know? Offering a little reform. I saw one of the senators, a Democrat, saying, we’re going to have a robust disclosure program. Oh, good. They’re going to tell us the banks are stealing from us. So liberals want to—
To regulate the banks.
Yes, yes. Rather than bring them down to size. When you’re too big to fail, you’re too big, period. And now they’ve become not only too big to fail, but too big to care.
So when you identify yourself as a populist, what are you saying?
I’m saying that the central issue in politics is the rise of corporate power. Overwhelming, overweening corporate power that is running roughshod over the workaday people of the country. They think they’re the top dogs and we’re a bunch of fire hydrants, you know? And they can do what they want to us. What’s been missing is, what can we do about it? It’s about the long haul. The target is not government; it’s those who are pulling the strings of government, those corporate lobbyists and the money that the corporate executives and now corporations directly can put into our campaigns.
Because of the recent Supreme Court decision, Citizens United?
Yes. Citizens United, which is really a black-robed coup by five men on the Supreme Court. And Bill, there’s another fraud. These people on the Supreme Court call themselves conservatives and the media goes along with it. There’s nothing conservative at all about that decision to allow corporations to be “people” and to contribute all the money that they want out of their corporate treasuries into our campaigns. That is a usurpation of democratic power.
You wouldn’t call them conservative, what would you call them?
I would call them traitors to the democratic ideal of the self-government of people.
In your books and speeches you describe a political landscape that has been radically altered.
And both political parties have been a part of this. But the altering has been done by the corporate interests. They have changed the way our economy works. They beat up on labor unions. So now they can fire at will. They can offshore. They can downsize. They can do what they want with the workers.
You quote a Wall Street honcho who says, “American business is about maximizing shareholder value.... You basically don’t want workers.”
Exactly. And that’s what’s happening. They’ve changed the whole dynamic of power in our economy. It is now concentrated in these corporate suites. They have the lobbying power. They make financial contributions to Congress. Enormous power. Already corporations have amassed almost half a billion dollars for the 2010 elections.
And that doesn’t count what’s going to come with the Supreme Court decision allowing all that money from the corporate treasuries to be unleashed on candidates. Already the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is spending more money than both the Democratic national party and the Republican national party combined.
So let’s pass an amendment that says, “No, a corporation cannot contribute its money to politics.” In fact, originally most of the state charters in the country prohibited any corporate involvement in politics whatsoever. The founders, Jefferson and Madison, feared corporate power, because they knew it could amass unlimited amounts of money and overwhelm the government. They advocated strict standards for performance, because a corporation is a selfish entity that has no public responsibility. It was a dangerous threat, and it has to be not only strictly regulated but also structured in such a way that serves us rather than vice versa.
So many people in high places fear populism. They see it—
Of course.
—as a menace to their position. Take a look at these comments from several politicians.
SENATOR JUDD GREGG: Well, the problem we have is that there’s populist fervor, sort of this Huey Long attitude out there that says that all banks are bad and that the financial system is evil and that as a result we must do things which will basically end up reducing our competitiveness as a nation....
MAYOR MIKE BLOOMBERG: And the real danger here is that we write a bill based on populist reaction: “I’m going to get those SOBs,” because of a financial crisis, which, incidentally, they may or—they had something to do with but were not the only ones responsible for.
SENATOR BOB CORKER: Look, we—this is important stuff. This isn’t about populist ideas, and this isn’t about a political issue. We’re going to have to live with this. It’s going to affect our competitiveness around the world in big ways.
They’re afraid of you.
Absolutely. If ignorance is bliss, these people must be ecstatic, because they don’t have a clue about what’s going on in the countryside. It is not just populist anger. It’s information. It’s education. People are informed. They know what’s going on. And despite Senator Gregg’s comments there, people do not hate all banks. They know the difference between Goldman Sachs and the local community bank. They know the difference between JPMorgan Chase and their credit union. They know who’s serving the community and who is not. And who’s offering financial products that actually serve our society and those that are just gimmicks to further enrich the rich.
You were very influenced in your own populist beliefs by your father. What was it he said?
Everybody does better when everybody does better.
Which means?
That means that instead of tinkle-down economics that we’ve been trying for the last thirty years in this country—“Let’s just help the rich and then the rest of us will enjoy a seven-course dinner, which turns out to be a possum and a six-pack”—let’s spread the prosperity around.
He was a small-business owner. He had the Main Street newsstand in Denison, Texas, a wholesale magazine business. He and my mother ran it, giving us a middle-class possibility. But he never thought that he did that by himself, you know? He knew there was something called the New Deal that was on his side. He was always having to battle the banks, and then ultimately battle Walmart and the chain stores. He knew about the power of the oil lobby down in Austin and the legislature. Now, he thought he was a conservative. But when you talk to him about these issues, he sounded like a William Jennings Bryan radical. He wanted to go get them. And that’s the kind of politics the Democratic Party has to have. Because that’s why the Democratic Party exists. Not to be friends of the corporate interests. Not to represent Goldman Sac
hs. But to challenge those corporate interests on behalf of everybody else.
I heard someone say this morning that the Republicans work for Wall Street and the Democrats are afraid to work against them.
Isn’t that strange? It’s odd to me that we’ve got a president who ran from the outside and won and now is trying to govern from the inside. You can’t do progressive government from the inside. You have to rally those outsiders and make them a force to come inside.
I grew up in Denison, Texas. A small town. I was a small guy. So I learned early on, you should never hit a man with glasses. You should use something much heavier. And our heavy weight is the people themselves. The other side has the fat cats, but we’ve got the alley cats. And we need to organize them and bring them inside. But I’ll tell you right now, the Democrats don’t really organize the grassroots. They’ll say, “Well, write your congressman or send an email or make a call.”
Send $5 on the Internet.
Yeah, exactly. But people are our strength. And we have to organize that strength in strategic ways and in tactical ways. Jesse Jackson said something strong. He said, we might not all have come over on the same boat, but we’re in the same boat now. That’s a powerful political reality. When people grasp that, they can see the possibility of getting together and doing something.
Corporations are here to stay. They do employ millions of people. And many of them do good things in the country, like Mutual of America, which supports this broadcast.
Well, let’s support those that support good things. But let’s also do something else. And that is devise alternatives. There’s a huge cooperative movement in America that you almost never hear about. There are co-ops running some 72,000 businesses today. Most of them are consumer co-ops. There are insurance co-ops. There are health care co-ops. There are food co-ops, of course. There are banking co-ops. There are all kinds of cooperatives out across the country. And those entities have hundreds of millions of people participating in them. Members.
