Free Republic

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California voters this fall may have the chance to answer a question of deep interest to politicians around the United States: will populist appeals to "tax the rich" resonate more than pragmatic arguments for budget-balancing solutions? Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, has all but staked his governship on a tax hike ballot initiative consisting of temporary increases in sales and income taxes. He has positioned the measure as a practical and necessary move to combat chronic budget deficits .. By contrast, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT), the smaller of two statewide teachers unions, last week...

Sorting out the Progressive movement and its constituent ideologies can be difficult in that the very term “progressive” is burdened with contested meanings. Rather than work along lines agreeable to presently out-of-office politicians hoping to regain power by denouncing long-dead Progressives, we begin with some deep background. One portent of Progressivism is found in the Liberal Republican movement of the 1870s. Prone to Paris Commune panics, distressed by strikes and labor trouble, such reformers as Charles Francis Adams (descended from John Adams), Francis Amasa Walker (Boston laissez-faire economist and Indian manager), and E. L. Godkin (Anglo-Irish editor of The Nation)...

Senators--mostly Democratic, but not exclusively--are incensed at China's artificially low currency, which reduces the value of its exports to the US, and increases American firms' propensity to source overseas. Taken as an isolated phenomenon, this costs the US manufacturing jobs. Critics of China specifically, and global sourcing generally, are reluctant to recognize the domestic benefits flowing from outsourcing, e.g., lower domestic consumer prices; money flowing to more efficient and competitively advantageous domestic uses thereby creating jobs in new growth industries. Neither do they care that a stronger Chinese Yuan will merely shift the venue of sourcing, not its incidence. The...

The other day our sister newspaper, the Gloucester County Times, reported on a raid at a fraternity house at Rowan University where — get ready for a shock — some college kids were drinking. About 100 of the kids were underage and will face charges. Believe it or not, that incident has its roots in the same problem that led to the controversy over the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska. That problem lies in the way the federal government distributes highway funding: poorly. It’s obvious in the case of the bridge that would have connected the city of Ketchikan,...

With her recent attacks on "corporate crony capitalism" and the "permanent political class," Sarah Palin is telling supporters she is indeed running for president. But in 2016, not 2012. There is likely no mileage in running a late-entry campaign now. And Palin believes that Republicans could lose in 2012. The reason? The party's indebtedness to those crony capitalists and their retainers in the political class. Her recent speeches make the case why the GOP leaders for the nomination -- Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney -- are too tied to this problem to be the solution...

As the presidential election campaign starts to occupy more and more of the airwaves someone should carry a counter and click every time the word ‘folks’ is uttered by a candidate. Even better would be how that final count would compare to the number of times a candidate would use a word like ‘citizens’ (at least citizens in a positive, civic light, not only in comparison to illegal ‘aliens’). In the opening chapter of her very relevant book The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby laments the ever widening usage of the words like ‘folks’ and ‘troops’ in American social...

(CNN) -- The other night, having a few beers with a conservative friend, I mentioned how hacked off I was that there hadn't been a wholesale denouncement of the likes of Donald Trump and Sarah Palin from conservative politicians and opinion-makers. To be sure, many, many, many, many have denounced both -- but I think a chorus as simple and clear as a Cee-Lo Green song is deserved. It should be unanimous and unmistakable. (The past 48 hours should make it pretty easy to dump on Trump.) My buddy, though, responded with an (almost) perfect analogy. He said: It's kind...

RUSH: Movies, books, television shows. The left owns it. He's trying to introduce pop culture conservatism to the fans of pop culture, and so you think Trump might do this. Now: What is Trump saying that might cause people who live in the pop culture to have, say, a favorable view of what you and I believe? It's not a trick question. I want to know what you really think. CALLER: Well, I think he's bringing credence to the conservative mentality. If they like him as an icon, they recognize his success, they feel like he's a happening guy, and...

Wielding rapier-sharp wit, Sarah Palin slices her opponents, although some don't notice she's drawn their blood. That's because Palin delivers verbal stabs with down-home charm. Using folksy faux-cuss words that Joe Six-pack swears by, she gets “darn” agitated at the “dang” liberals whose truth is “bullcrap,” which makes for “bass-ackwards” politics. “How's that hopey-changey stuff workin' out for ya?” she sarcastically asks. Palin speaks and acts like a populist. Populism is a form of political persuasion in which the little guy's voice is pitched against East Coast elites. Populism thrives when its leaders effectively pit “The People” against unions, Wall...

.. most analysis of the Tea Party movement ignores history and sees the Tea Party as something new and rather bizarre. Yet the Tea Party is a form of populism - a perennial feature of American politics and perhaps one of its defining characteristics. American populism has its origins in the broad-based and fissiparous movement that emerged from the 1850s onwards. It reached its high point in the 1890s with the formation of the People's Party, which challenged the duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats but declined rapidly as a formal movement thereafter. Yet, like an event of nuclear fission,...

The biggest challenge facing Republicans in the 112th Congress is not Barack Obama. It is not Harry Reid and the Democrat-controlled Senate. It isn't high unemployment, repealing ObamaCare, the threat of Islamism and shariah in America, the deficit, or the looming insolvency of several (mostly blue) states. These, broadly speaking, are symptoms. The disease is socialism or, at the very least, a pervasive socialistic mindset. According to a February 2010 Gallup poll, "61% of liberals say their image of socialism is positive" and "53% of Democrats have a positive image of socialism." Overall, 36% of Americans view socialism favorably. Winston...

Does anyone remember when the liberal intellectuals decried populism coming from the likes of Glenn Beck and other conservatives that was aimed at the direction the country is going under the leadership of President Barack Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress? Throughout 2009, that so-called "bottom-barrel demagogy," as Troy Patterson called it in an post for Slate one year ago, was the focus of much consternation from the intellectual class that resides in the Northeastern U.S. corridor. One example was a critique of the Rick Santelli call that inspired the Tea Party movement, which John Dickerson called "impassioned, scattershot, and ultimately...

I noticed in the last few days that Mitt Romney has warned ominously about "the temptations of populism." In an interview with the Boston Globe, Romney says: “The populism I’m referring to is, if you will, demonizing certain members of society: going after businesspeople, going after Wall Street, going after people who are highly educated, people who are CEOs,’’ Romney said in an interview. “That kind of ‘All of our problems are due to that group’ is something that is unproductive.’’… “Populism sometimes takes the form of being anti-immigrant, and appearing anti-immigrant, and that likewise is destructive to a nation...

<p>BURBANK, Calif. — Sarah Palin says she's going to play Tina Fey in an upcoming Las Vegas show.</p>

In a vacuum there’s nothing newsy about this, but 2012 isn’t a vacuum. We’ve talked before about the developing narrative: Palin vs. anti-Palin, “true conservatives” vs. centrists, blue-collar vs. white-collar, and … populists vs. “elitists.” With Beck having brought down the house at CPAC and the GOP in the grip of tea party fee-vah, why oh why would a potential nominee spritz cold water on populism? Branding, dear boy, branding: As Mitt Romney sets out this week to promote his new book, “No Apology,’’ he is also auditioning for a rapidly disappearing role in American politics: a politician who is...

At the tea parties here in glamorous Queens we make sure we serve genuine Devonshire clotted cream with the scones and we keep our pinkies carefully extended while lifting the delicate porcelain cups to our lips, but a very different kind of Tea Party has my friends in the upscale media and policy worlds gravely concerned. To hear them talk, all the know-nothings, wackadoo birther wingnuts, IRS plane bombers, Christian fundamentalists out to turn the US into a theocracy, the flat earthers and the racists have somehow joined together into a force that is as politically formidable as it morally...

John Doe: Ladies and Gentlemen, I am the man you all know as John Doe. I took that name because it seems to describe -- because it seems to describe the average man, and that's me -- and that's me. Well, it was me -- before I said I was gonna jump off the City Hall roof at midnight on Christmas Eve. Now, I guess I'm not average any more. Now, I'm getting all sorts of attention, from big shots, too -- the mayor and governor, for instance. They don't like those articles I've been writing. D.B. Norton: You're an...

A brilliant scene from the end of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", when Jeff Smith, after 23 hours of talking sense to the nation, gets hit with 50,000 phony telegrams demanding that he resign. If this scene doesn't move you, then you have a stone heart and a leather soul!

I have attended several local tea party gatherings (and addressed a couple of them). There is one document that is ubiquitous at these events: the Constitution for the United States of America.[iii] People hand out copies of the Constitution like hors d'oeuvres that are served at ... a de rigueur tea party. At one tea party, I helped a women lug a couple of cardboard boxes filled with pocket-sized copies of the Constitution into the hotel conference room. We sat the boxes on a folding table next to the dais for the speakers. "I only bought a thousand copies. You...

Gordon Brown said on Wednesday the world’s leading economies were close to agreeing a global bank tax, amid hopes in Downing Street that a deal can be concluded at the G20 summit in Canada in June. Mr Brown believes that opinion has shifted decisively in favour of a globally co-ordinated tax after President Barack Obama’s move last month to raise $90bn (£57.7bn) from a US bank levy. Gordon Brown The tax could cost the financial services sector tens of billions of pounds a year. The prime minister has strongly advocated some kind of charge on banks. “I’m interested in the...

<p>It was a "populist night," Yale Law School professor and longtime New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse wrote of Barack Obama's State of the Union address. The president denounced "bad behavior on Wall Street" and called for "a fee on the biggest banks." He said he wanted to take "$30 billion of the money Wall Street banks have repaid" and give it to community banks. He denounced CEOs who reward themselves for failure and bankers who put the rest of us at risk for their own selfish gain. He denounced "insurance company abuses." He called for higher taxes on "oil companies, investment fund managers and those making over $250,000 a year."</p>

It was the first good week of the new year for President Obama. On Wednesday, his Treasury Secretary survived a grueling grilling on Capital Hill, while the next day Ben Bernanke, his nominee for Fed Chairman, was approved by the Senate -- in a squeaker of a vote. But the best news came last, on Friday, when the Commerce Department reported that the economy grew at a robust 5.7 percent annual rate as we closed out last year. For the White House the news seemingly couldn't have come at a better time. That's because word of the best economic output...

For 40 years there's been a consensus view at the Davos World Economic Forum that globalization's increasingly free cross-border flow of ideas, information, people, money, goods and services is both irreversible and a powerful force for prosperity. As with meetings of the G7 group of industrialized nations, there was broad agreement on the proper role for the state in the performance of markets. Sure, a French cabinet official and an American investment banker might spar over the relative merits of state paternalism and Anglo-Saxon labor laws, but the bargaining table was still reserved for champions of Western-style free market capitalism....

The president's anti-Wall Street rhetoric is not good for the economy, and may hurt his party politically. The problem with fires is that they can blow in any direction. Consider the White House, which is seeing a backdraft from the anti-Wall-Street flame it has been dousing with gasoline. His agenda on the ropes, President Obama made a calculated decision to pivot to populism. The Massachusetts Senate race highlighted a fed-up public. The White House strategy: Channel that anger away from itself and to easier targets. Its opening shots were a new tax on banks, new restrictions on banking activities, and...

When Scott Brown was elected to the Senate in Massachusetts, it was because he rode a “wave of voter frustration” (Associated Press) and “capitalized on voters’ disaffection with the status quo” (New York Times). “Anger” and “antipathy toward federal-government activism,” more than support for Brown, drove Massachusetts’s voters to go with the Republican (Washington Post). When Oregon voters approved tax increases on corporations and families making over $250,000, however, it was because the voters had finally decided to “behave like responsible adults” (Newsweek). It showed that Beaver State voters had bravely “gnawed back fears of tax hikes” (The Olympian) and...

Scott Brown's victory and Obama's falling poll numbers were virtually undeserved gifts to a Republican party that for the most part spent the year on the sidelines, benefiting from grassroots activism without actually doing much about it. It's little wonder that Michael Steele is widely hated or that there's talk of a third party. But to fix the Republican party, it's important to understand what is behind its malaise. 1. The Republican Party is Conservative - I don't mean conservative in the sense of socially conservative or fiscally conservative, but being risk averse and when in doubt sticking to the...

Their party was out of ideas and out of office. It had grown preposterously out of touch, a caricature of economic irresponsibility and elite, Washington-dinner-party values. Then along came Bill Clinton to return Democrats to the political center and teach them how to win. For the party seared by McGovern, Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis, the birth of the "New Democrat" in 1991 was a renaissance. Clinton was not afraid to march over the traditionally Republican ground of tax cuts, deficit reduction, and welfare reform to advance the Democratic party from its Dark Ages. In its founding documents, the Clinton-inspired Democratic...

Taxes: On the eve of President Obama's first State of the Union address, two Democratic congressmen are advising him to extend the Bush tax cuts instead of letting them expire. Now that's a stimulus. We hear that the administration is considering taking a more populist tack as it sails the choppy political waters of 2010. Some of President Obama's plans reportedly include several tax tidbits for the "middle class," including a doubling of the child care tax credit for families below $85,000 in income, and $1.6 billion for child care and a cap on student loan payments. Such transparent populism...

Responding to the unprecedented loss of a Massachusetts Senate seat to Republicans, the White House has responded not with conciliation, but with a more aggressive public image.Chief political adviser David Axelrod has completed a striking "rebranding" of the cool, rational President Barack Obama. Unnamed administration sources indicate that Obama will focus exclusively on populist issues until the November midterm elections."Voters are understandably angry," according to one official. "They need to see Democrats as the party that punishes Wall Street, regulates fat-cat bankers and insults pick-up trucks," one adviser said...

Like so many good narratives, political stories often unfold along simple lines but invite multiple, at times conflicting, interpretations. And so it happened last week. First came the upset victory by Scott Brown, a Republican, in the special Senate election in Massachusetts, widely deemed a populist uprising and symbolized by the mile-weary pickup truck that became a feature of Mr. Brown’s campaign. Only two days later, the Supreme Court, in a more sweeping ruling than many expected, undid the bipartisan campaign finance reform of 2002, freeing corporations, labor unions and other organizations to spend unlimited sums at election time. President...

A prominent Republican senator said Thursday that President Obama is seeking to spark “class warfare” with increasingly populist rhetoric and a series of regulatory measures aimed at Wall Street. “I think they think if they can create enough animosity toward Wall Street and corporate America, they get into this traditional sort of Democrat rhetoric and tap into the populist anger out there,” Sen. John Thune, South Dakota Republican, told The Daily Caller. “For Democrats to be successful they’ve got to create a sense of class warfare and an us versus them mindset.” Obama on Thursday proposed new limits on banks’...

Can we all just get along? President Obama says he's fed up with "obscene bonuses" on Wall Street. The Congress is in an uproar. And new numbers from the front page of The Wall Street Journal today are stoking this mob mentality to feverish proportions. Yet the actual metrics in the Journal story raise a key question: What’s all the screaming about? Wall Street’s total compensation simply isn’t out of control. And the pay critics, in their pious, get-tough crackdown, are only ensuring a new round of outrage when some of these banks recover. First, some key numbers (rounded up)...

WASHINGTON—Democrats' last-minute scramble to salvage the special U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts is offering the first test of a populist pitch that party strategists hope to take to other campaigns this year. Central to the strategy is the new White House plan to tax big banks as punishment for their role in the financial crisis. President Barack Obama announced the proposal Thursday amid reports that financial institutions bailed out by the government are enjoying healthy profits and paying generous bonuses, and as a bipartisan commission began hearing testimony on banks' role in the economic crisis. But events Friday in Massachusetts...

WASHINGTON (AP) - A senior administration official says President Barack Obama is ready to announce an administration plan to recover Wall Street bailout shortfalls with a bank fee on the country's biggest financial firms. The announcement is expected Thursday. The official was not authorized to discuss the fee publicly. The official said the fee would be designed to recoup as much as $120 billion. That's the most administration officials expect to lose from the government's $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program that bailed out banks, automakers and other financial firms.

Is a Jackson revival under way? I'm referring not to the late King of Pop but to the 19th century populist president whom his opponents called "King Andrew." According to Michael Barone, in the 2010 elections Republicans have a chance to knock Democrats out of as many as three dozen insecure congressional seats in "Jacksonian districts." By itself, this would merely reinforce the identification of the Party Formerly Known as Lincoln's with the white South. But in a time of popular anger over banker bonuses and lobby-hobbled government, the themes of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian populism have appeal far beyond the...

Via Oprah, Facebook and a bus trip that resembled a campaign swing more than a book tour, Sarah Palin reappeared on the national stage last week, minus her governorship and running-mate status, but with a new role as principled “rogue” to add to her previous credits as plain-spoken patriot and hockey mom. Party leaders weigh the benefits and risks of catering to “tea party” protesters like these, who dislike the House health care bill. Whatever else it said about America, her return brought into focus a big question for Republicans as they watched the intense reactions she generated: To what...

As political alliances go, few are more cemented in the public consciousness than the bond between the Republican Party and business. But, upon closer inspection, the GOP–big business relationship doesn't seem so cozy... --snip-- In the Senate, South Carolina's Jim DeMint accuses PhRMA, the D.C. lobbying powerhouse that represents the pharmaceutical industry, of a similar brand of self-serving deal-making. "PhRMA is infamous for sitting down and doing business. As long as they get their drugs sold, they'll support just about any policy." And sure enough, PhRMA reportedly cut a deal with the White House in which the organization promised to...

The economic crisis of the past year, centered as it has been in the financial sector that lies at the heart of American capitalism, is bound to leave some lasting marks. Financial regulation, the role of large banks, and the relationships between the government and key players in the market will never be the same.More important, however, are the ways in which public attitudes about our system might change. The nature of the crisis, and of the government's response, now threaten to undermine the public's sense of the fairness, justice, and legitimacy of democratic capitalism. By allowing the conditions that...

It's good, occasionally, to take a trip down memory lane. It helps to put things into perspective. Hugo Chavez ought never to have been elected president. By rights, he ought to be growing old in a jail cell somewhere. Well, it's been seventeen years, maybe he’d be in a half-way house by now. As an army officer in 1992, he led a military revolt against the legal, constitutional government of Venezuela, and attempted to overthrow the democratically elected president of the time, Carlos Andres Perez. He gambled that once the shooting started, the minister of defense and the rest of...

Want to see what populist-driven liberalism will do for the private sector? Take a gander at the latest comments from Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Frank, who told CNBC Congress had been focusing on executive compensation prior to the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), since “TARP was an infield covering” as he put it, said it’s time for a punitive compensation system to discourage “excessive risk taking.” The Massachusetts congressman was asked by Dennis Kneale on CNBC’s June 10 “Power Lunch” how much executives should be punished if a company loses money...

The ASEAN Plus 3 Summit, which was to take place in the Thai resort of Pattaya, had to be cancelled due to attacks by anti-government protesters. Some 1,000 protesters broke the glass doors to the Royal Cliff Beach Hotel where the summit was to take place and stormed inside, demanding the resignation of the Thai prime minister. The leaders of other Asian countries fled to the roof and escaped by helicopter. Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and a few of the first ladies even shed tears of fear. Scenes usually reserved for action films, and unimaginable at global summits, ended...

Obama: Dear kind anti-American world, America has been terrible for 232 years. Even my wife was ashamed to be an American until recently, last November to be specific. I’m king now, my wife is proud of American for the first time in her life, and I’m with you on the subject of “bad arrogant America” and that horrible man, George Bush. We all hate America and Bush. We can build upon this common ground. For the first time in world history, you can now like and trust America, because I’m not George Bush. I’m going to tax the American people...

If international terrorists, theocratic thugs and communist dictators like you, that’s a bad thing in America An anti-America trash talking tour might gain you rock star status in some parts of the world, but how will Americans feel about it back home? The Dixie Chicks got off easy, with smashed CDs on American streets and plummeting record and ticket sales that left them on the entertainment industry unemployment line back home. Obama may not get off that easy…

I've cobbled together some excerpts about Huey Long that may demonstrate where America is heading as a result of Obama's populist politics...read more Expect nothing less than these great results under Obama's populism. Simply put, the ends are inevitable. History proves that. Liberals love to point to Long's policies and tell you how great they were. What they won't do, however, is point you to the long-term results of those policies. They simply won't. It is far better for them to maintain their demented view of a failed utopia than to acknowledge reality.

Last night, for the first time, I watched the movie, The Fugitive, from start to finish. The film is about a surgeon, falsely accused and convicted of murdering his wife, who escapes during a prison transfer, and is pursued by a US marshall. For Chicagoans, the film is one of the great movie portrayals of the city. But I now believe the classic moment in the movie comes in the 82nd minute. Harrison Ford, playing the falsely accused doctor, Richard Kimble, tries to lose himself from his pursuers by joining in the St. Patrick's Day Parade. This parade always draws...

Remember the word "covet", as in "shall not"? Envy is a deadly sin. It is a deliberate decision to ignore our shared humanity and favor, instead, things we can't take with us. Inducing someone else to commit a deadly sin is an even worse act. Class envy, albeit one of the two foundations of the modern Democratic Party's soul (identity politics being the other), is very divisive and fuels mob rule. It is a tool that exploits happy people who were previously neither aware of their forced group membership nor of their antipathy toward other groups. It is a tool...

"We must teach our children to hate," Vladimir Lenin instructed his education commissars. The Bolshevik godfather declared that hatred was not only "the basis of communism" but "the basis of every socialist and Communist movement." Class envy has been a defining staple of the left for centuries, from the frenzied mobs leaping around the French guillotines to the Soviets to, well, the new masses circling AIG executives today. The difference is merely the degree of response -- a question of socially acceptable force or violence. Historically, this behavior is both foreign and antithetical to the American experience. Unfortunately, modern Americans...

Taking advantage of the populist revolt against Wall Street and the American International Group Inc. bailouts, House Democrats have passed a vengeance tax on TARPed financial firms that amounts to a 90 percent marginal tax rate on bonuses. This is being done in the name of AIG outrage, and nobody wants to defend the insurance company - including me. The financial-products division helped blow up the global credit system, and it shouldn't be rewarded. Yet one wonders about this 90 percent tax rate. If it passes the Senate, will it ever be repealed? This could be the ultimate class-warfare spread-the-wealth...

This is the Democratic Party's moment, its power now greater than any time since the mid-1960s. But do not expect smooth sailing. The party is a fractious group divided by competing interests, factions and constituencies that could explode into a civil war, especially when it comes to energy and the environment. Broadly speaking, there is a long-standing conflict inside the Democratic Party between gentry liberals and populists. This division is not the same as in the 1960s, when the major conflicts revolved around culture and race as well as on foreign policy. Today the emerging fault-lines follow mostly regional, geographical...

Only months after the 2008 primaries, most Americans probably don't remember Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul. But that doesn't mean the conservative populism they championed during their campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination is as fleeting as their dark-horse candidacies. Since rank-and-file House Republicans began criticizing October's Wall Street bailout, a growing faction of the GOP has been channeling the country's rage at Corporate America with us-versus-them rhetoric and appeals to economic patriotism. And they are getting help from a Democratic Party whose actions often imply subservience to Big Money. Recall that the majority of House Democrats voted to ratify...