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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (14726)	10/1/1999 9:49:00 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Follow-up of my previous post: Cause for Hope? These circumstances are, in their details, unprecedented; but in broad outline we are seeing the reenactment of a story that goes back at least to the beginning of civilization. Those with power are always looking for ways to protect and extend it; and to make it seem legitimate, necessary, or invisible, so that popular protest seems unnecessary or unfeasible. If protest comes, they always try to deflect anger away from themselves. The leaders of the new populist movement appear to have a good grasp of both the current circumstances and the historical ground from which these circumstances emerge. They seem to have realized that, in order to succeed, the new populism will have to: avoid being co-opted by existing political parties heal race, class, and gender divisions and actively resist any campaign to scapegoat disempowered social groups avoid being identified with an ideological category-"communist," "socialist," or "anarchist"-against which most of the public is already well inoculated by corporate propaganda keep the public discussion narrowly focused on the most vulnerable link in the corporate chain of power-the legal basis of the corporation internationalize the movement so that corporations cannot undermine it merely by shifting their base of operations from one country to another. The formation of the new Alliance was announced in an article by Ronnie Dugger in the August 14, 1996 issue of The Nation. In that article, Dugger wrote: "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 and forgot about that organic and controlling issue. I propose that we seize the word Populism back from its many hijackers, 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." [...]