All the Populism Money Can Buy

Across the country last weekend, there were antiwar demonstrations, modest in turnout, but hopefully a warning to Obama that war without end or reason in Afghanistan, plus 40,000 more troops to Kabul, is not why people voted for him.

  I spoke at our own little rally in my local town of Eureka, Calif. My neighbor Ellen Taylor decided to spice up the proceedings by having a guillotine on the platform, right beside the Eureka Courthouse House steps. Her father was Telford Taylor, chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg,

  When she told me about the plan for the guillotine, I wasn't sure it was a good idea. But Ellen said she wanted to reach out to new constituencies beyond the committed left, and what better siren call than the swoosh of the Avenging Blade? A hundred years ago, people liked to stress the similarities of the American and French revolutions. Mark Twain composed the most eloquent defense of the Terror ever written, in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." But then, after 1917, the French Revolution was seen as the harbinger of Bolshevik excess and it grew less popular.

  Up on the platform I took the guillotine issue head on. Only 666 aristocrats in Paris had been topped versus 1,543 throughout France. The reward: decisive smack on the snout of the land-holding aristocracy; durable popular power for peasants, workers and the petit bourgeois: M. le patron and M. le proprietaire stepped into history.

  Here in America, the corporate class is now entirely out of control, lawless and beyond the sanction of prosecutor, juror or ballot box. If every corporate lawbreaker felt that somewhere along the line the retribution of the guillotine might await them, it would concentrate their minds marvelously and cow them into lawfulness.

  I got some cheers and a charming young hippie, Brooklyn, mother of three, told me she wanted to move to France forthwith. Ellen told the executioner, Michael Evenson, to put the contraption through its paces. She invited the crowd to call out designated victims — CEOs of the major banks, billionaires of note, and Evenson would drop the blade. He hitched the blade up 6 feet and down it came with quite a satisfactory thwock.

  Three days earlier, Goldman Sachs announced $3.1 billion in third-quarter profits, and set aside $5.3 billion for bonuses. Since G-Sachs is only still in business because of public bailout money, the bonus payments really makes people mad. On the whole, Americans aren't keen on axe blades, preferring the lynch mob's rope, but if the target had been the board members of Goldman Sachs, I'm sure they'd make an exception, particularly after Lord Griffiths' remarks were widely quoted this side of the Atlantic. Griffiths, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International, told an audience at St Paul's Cathedral last Tuesday that the public should "tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all. I believe that we should be thinking about the medium-term common good, not the short-term common good ..."

Left and liberal commentators have talked yearningly about a new populist fever raging in the American body politic, prompted by the spectacle of bailouts for bankers but foreclosures and the dole for everyone else.

The Obama administration promptly rushed to cover its left flank by announcing it's planning to impose cuts in executive pay at seven companies with substantial bailout funds. The U.S. senate's parlor populist, Bernie Sanders, dutifully proclaimed that the Obama administration was "taking an important step forward in trying to control the obscene compensation packages of the top executives on Wall Street."

Note the meek qualifier "trying." The truth of the matter is that the Obama team has managed the tricky shot of giving more bailout money to the banks than the cumulative dispensations of all previous U.S. governments, while at the same time not giving any significant debt relief to ruined homeowners, a huge slice of whom are poor, black and Hispanic. Obama is not seeking to reform the financial system, and it would be beyond miraculous if it did since the contrivers of the present mess — Lawrence Summers, et al — were given a welcoming clap on the back by the new president as he stepped into the White House and told them to get on with the job. This amazing bailout for the system — as if Lenin had used the October revolution to restore the Romanovs — has been engineered without significant opposition from organized labor or the left-liberal end of Obama's own party.

Of course, people curse the bankers and their political flunkeys as they watch their 10Ks atomize, their homes go and their jobs disappear to China. They smolder as they watch the parade of Murdoch's demagogues on Fox, flirting and toying with the theme of Obama's assassination. The Obama administration dares to war with Glenn Beck, apparently the only enemy it feels capable of taking on. The gossip site Gawker calls on its readers to turn in all discreditable information about Goldman Sachs executives. The liberal talk host Olbermann calls on his audience to rat out Beck. Neither invitation has thus far yielded any significant harvest.

Alas, American populism needs the octane of cash. During the Clinton scandals, Hustler supreme Larry Flynt wanted his audience to rat out high-ranking Republican sinners. He offered $100,000 cash rewards and the dirt rolled in. Populism has to be cash-based these days. Maybe that was Ralph Nader's point. His first work of fiction, 700 pages long, is titled "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us."

Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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