Al Smith Attacked FDR in 1936. 
"The New Deal is socialism in poor disguise," said the envious, contentious Al Smith. "I won't stand for them to want to march under the banner of (Andrew) Jackson or (Grover) Cleveland." This was
the counterattack that FDR risked when he used Harold Ickes and others to attack the rich, elite men whom he dubbed "economic royalists" (right) as he prepared to fight class warfare in the election in 1936. FDR knew what he was doing, borrowing from the class baiting remarks of the charming, strange demagogue Huey Long (who remained a threat until his assassination in Baton Rouge). The frail Republicans pushed back with energetic men such as the wildcatter Alf Landon of Kansas, who sounded like FDR in his state inaugural speech: "I think... government power must increase." Landon overtook Herbert Hoover and Bill Borah at Cleveland to become the GOP nominee. FDR used the economic royalist attack at the 1936 Philadelphia convention: "These privileged princes have created a new despotism and fastened it on the American people...the New Deal is the analogue to the Declaration of Independence... better the occasional faults that lives in the spirit of charity...this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny..." FDR won a landslide built upon cunning, passionate, articulate class warfare rhetoric: "Nine crazy years at the ticker, and three long years at the bread lines..." "They (the economic royalists) are unanimous in their hatred of me, and I welcome their hatred..."
Joe Biden and Barack Obama Begin the Drumbeat.
The president's remarks against the $18 billion of bonuses paid to the Wall Street bankers in 2008 are smart, accurate politics. Joe Biden recognizes the genius and joins in. So does Andrew Cuomo, the attorney general in New York, who will seek to get back the $4 billion
that the suddenly suspect and surrounded John Thain paid his Merrill Lynch employees in reward for losing $27 billion year long. And now Rudy Giuliani recognizes the potency and makes a contrarian argument that if the bonuses are banned it will hurt New York's economy. Rudy is running for New York governor, against the troubled tenure of David Paterson; so perhaps his pro bonus argument can prosper at the GOP convention. Elsewhere, the president and vice-president have it right. Class warfare works, and works doubly and triply well during a financial crisis. It is the spirit of Huey Long, the ghost of FDR, the long lost legacy of frontier heroes like Daniel Boone and Andrew Jackson and Davy Crockett. Plutocracy always loses at the polls. And Mike Bloomberg is running for re-election, so he best get right his remarks about "economic royalists." This may be difficult, because he is a plutocrat and because he is now entertaining the idea of raise sales taxes.
Bloomberg proposed several measures, including an increase in the sales tax from 8.375 percent to 8.75 percent, in an effort to balance the budget. Bloomberg has already slashed $3.7 billion in spending since last year, an administration official said.
Divide and conquer. When the British ran their first census of the Indian population in 1881, the following were the categories they considered: religion, civil condition, birth place and language, occupation and education. Such information in the hands of politicians is never benign. Take “religion”, for example. Before checking the box either Muslim or Hindu (or other), all Indians were Indians. After each Indian had checked the appropriate box, the whole was fractured into “religious communities”. In the hands of unscrupulous politicians, these fragments would then be made to compete against each other, which weakened the whole, giving the ruling organ – in this case the British – greater leverage over its subjects. The same holds true for any such category that divides a people into groups.
It is a politician’s job to divide us and to thus build a base for himself with the greater part of the shattered whole. This, simply put, is what politicians do - like fishes swim and bees sting. The anti-plutocracy argument is equally bogus, but effective. It can and will be abused by the very people who have the resources to mount the argument to begin with. The rest simply fall in line, conveniently forgetting the effectiveness of their advantage when they could rely on greater numbers to make their point..
I think you and John know that I am all for government staying out of business. However, if someone other than a government official had criticized Thain's office renovation, I'd have to agree with the criticism 100%. It's not so much a matter of "Look at the baubles this person has while the rest of us are starving"; it's more "How can he spend so lavishly when his business is failing?" He doesn't have the interest of the business first. Just like Blago didn't have the interest of the people of Illinois or the U.S. Senate, first.
And, while I vehemently opposed and still oppose TARP, given that the public is spending money to bail these people out, that makes it doubly outrageous. The moment the BofA accepted TARP money, they are now public employees to some degree - and have an even higher moral responsibility to act in the best interest of the public. I hear it said over and over that they had no choice but to accept TARP money, but I disagree: they could have resigned, or brought a lawsuit in Federal Court, or done something. But, they accepted it; they accepted the mantle of public employee; and now I want them running their business as I run mine: functional furniture, nothing more. Anything more than that is an insult to the taxpayers and to the shareholders.
If on the other hand BofA and Merrill Lynch had been showing a nice profit through all this, then pay the guy a billion a month for all I care (although I do agree with the IRS' limits on reasonable executive compensation for deduction purposes, but that is another matter.)
To summarize my point, class warfare is a terrible thing but being an insensitive idiot like Thain is an even worse thing.
Well the GOP went to see the wizard took ask for aspine and some cajones. They pulled back the curtain and saw that he was not the Wizard was not in Kansas anymore or that there was a unicorn Somewhere over the Rainbow.
The yellow brick road did not lead to the Emerald City or the Castles in the Sky (Davos, Fortress Investments raises its moot not allowing withdrawals from its hedge funds many with CASTLE in its name and they snookered Vancouver the host of the 2010 Winter Olympics into building majestic sky resorts ala Davos).
The wizards and warlords of the Olympic DAvos and Aspen were not Zeus but mere mortals who crafted the rules that they did not apply to themselves. Geithner, Daschle, Rangel be not perturbed because you belong to a different class the one that rules.
Great to see the high altitude of Davos did something to the Turkish Prime Ministers brains. Hey weren't the Greeks and the Turks fighting over Cyprus a few years ago. Maybe he should vacation in Cyprus and check out a little ship there.
Although its nice to see the Czech PM who is serving as EU chair this year pour some is on Al Gore's inconvenient Truth. Maybe Gore can help the folks in Kentucky if Fema ain't doing the job.
The Bank of America board is looking to possibly replace Ken Lewis as CEO since he did not due sufficient due diligence on acquiring Merrill Lynch and Countrywide (Friends of Angelo- Chris Dodd). Did he know of the $4 billion in bonuses that Thain was giving to his Merrill cohorts who lost $27 billion. Did Timmy Tax cheat see it. But do not fret Mack at Stanley gives his emploees a stuffed EEyore as a souvenir.
Why should we fret about class warfare. At the World com and Tyco trials we discovered that the corrupt CEO's got preferential treatment in getting IPO shares. Or that Goldman proclaimed that dot com boom over when its pipeline of too good to be true ipos was completed. Or currently that the Madoff enablers thought that Madoff was front running.
The yeloow brick road will lead to the circus where we will see the The New PT Barnum( Snake oil salesman sell us a potion to cure all our ills). I see a lot of jack asses lining up for it.
The only thing he does not realize was that the last circus that had a big tent collapsed and all the elephants suffocated in it.
This new circus is trying to pitch a new tent, but the unions are debating the work rules, the lawyers are creating regulations, Peta is complaing about cruelty to animals, and Annie Oakley could not get a gun permit. But they got their 527 or 504 designation and had Daschle lobby for them.
Unfortunately, JB is right -- class warfare works, even in America, but only as long as a critical mass of voters identify themselves as the rightful moral victors of the class struggle. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, "to the victor belongs the spoils," but the true genius of FDR-type class warfare politics is to provide a quintessentially self-interested Jacksonian sentiment with an self-pitying moral basis of alleged "social injustice" that transforms this homely old saw into the contemporary clarion that "to the VICTIM belong the spoils." And who among Democratic constituencies -- especially in today's American politics, where victimization is king -- do not consider themselves oppressed or offended by someone or something -- e.g., slavery, racism variously defined, sexism, Wall Street, George W. Bush, etc.?
Even worse, President Obama and the Democrats can easily go from strength to strength here because they have clearly mastered one of Saul Alinsky's most critical political insights. To radicalize the American public -- no matter what might be the case elsewhere in the world, including Western Europe -- the "community organizer" must present -- or misrepresent as necessary -- the socialist program as tailored to the "real economic interests" of the Great American Middle Class. In other words, instead of the vinegar of classical Marxist doctrine that denounces and thus alienates the bourgeousie as the oppressors of the poor, Alinsky taught that they can only be effectively caught -- "organized" -- in support of a transformative, radical political-economic program by the honey of shared victimhood between the middle class and the welfare class.
So, here's the next strength -- redefining "the American middle class" to include -- rather than to set at loggerheads -- the average Joe the Plumber American taxpayer in the same victim class, usually referred to as "working families," as the tax-consuming, usually non-working welfare class.
And who are the ones who victimize this "American middle class" redefined as millions of helpless victims of "structural" social injustice?" Now things get a bit cloudy with the Southside Messiah and his acolytes, but there will be some level of income -- $250,000, $200,000, $42,500, whatever -- declared by the Democrat Party's Robespierres as the moral dividing line between the virtuous and the evil. But it is becoming increasingly clear that the investor class -- as opposed to the wage earners and welfare consumers -- will be demonized as the social culprits, despite their key role in driving America's economic prosperity, especailly since 1980.
Accompanied by a tax policy that frees the majority of Americans from paying any federal income tax at all -- note the continued and deceptive emphasis on straight earned income -- and sweetens the pot with: an occasional handout check or two; the chimera of "free" socialized medical care; the cap-and-trade hysteria that will supposedly "save the planet" from the alleged global warming caused by the "greed for profit" of that same evil capitalist class, and we have before us a perfect storm of appeals to the gullible Great American Middle Class multi-faceted sense of moral guilt that Saul Alinsky cannily appreciated, and that Barack Obama and Company may well be playing upon today, to the utter economic and political destruction of the Republic as we have known it.
I didn't hear the show tonight because of the Super Bowl. Despite not having a favorite going in, it was an exciting game. Afterwards, I checked the site and found your comment. Very nicely constructed to accurately reflect our current mood - if, perhaps, somewhat overly pessimistic. I can understand that. I myself waver between optimism and pessimism several times a day. I guess that makes me bipolar.
Tonight, I'm optimistic. Watching the Super Bowl made me realize that we can still rally and fight and turn it around when it counts; that we can still allow ourselves be inspired by the heroics of the few; that even the feeble grunts of the likes of Bruce Springsteen can be effectively drowned out by the overwhelming expression of passionate participation in our national pastime: the joyful celebration of (core) values that transcend politics.
I now know, when push comes to shove, we "will not go quietly into the night". We will never stoop to being labeled victims of circumstance. We will get up as often as it takes and dust ourselves off and mount our offensive until we can say with certainty, "We have vanquished the foe and expelled him from our “shining city on the hill”; we have parried successfully and countered his lies with the truth about America. We have secured this blessed land for yet another generation which we have instructed well to continue the fight (should this become necessary).
Let no one stand in our way; not politicians, not bankers; not academics nor the talking heads that spin like Linda Blair's. The truth is the truth; a win is a win; a spade is a spade. What’s right is right; what’s wrong is wrong. As long as we can keep the basics straight, we cannot fail.
Peter:
Thank you for your comment, especially since I didn't mean to come across as totally pessimistic. So, if I did so inadvertently, I'm glad you pointed that out.
Actually, all I was trying to say was that The Messiah and his little helpers are following a "gameplan" that has proven all too successful in the past, to continue your Super Bowl imagery. (It certainly was a great game yesterday, especially in the fourth quarter.) Yet, I agree with you that this fact does not of itself assure them of victory, although stopping their depredations will certainly be an uphill struggle. To use football terms once more, after dominating us statistically in the first half, the Obama team are letting us "hang around," so that we're in position to stage a fourth quarter rally to beat them. Very tough to do -- just ask the Cardinals -- but not impossible, especially if Republicans and sensible Democrats can hang together.