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Armstead

(47,803 posts)
Sat Oct 24, 2015, 01:15 AM Oct 2015

Anyone remember Senator Fred Harris progressive populist 1976 campaign? A Forerunner of Today

Last edited Sat Oct 24, 2015, 08:24 AM - Edit history (4)

I dunno what made me think of the presidential primary of former Oklahoma Sen. Fred Harris. Maybe because it has echoes today in the campaign of Bernie Sanders. I got involved in his campaign. He was one of the people who inspired me back then.

Times were different, but his campaign themes are still relevant.

Harris was a progressive populist Democratic Senator who ran for the nomination in 1976, running against (among others) Jimmy Carter and Birch Bayh. Real grass roots stuff. It was a big field and Harris was out fairly early.

The Democratic Party was at a fork in the road back then to. The economy was on the skids and divided. Unfortunately the Democratic Party took the Right Fork, and thus the way was paved for Greed is Good 1980's, the "Endless Boom of the 1990's" and the Massive Shitstorm after 2000.

He's still alive and kicking, and recently visited Elizabeth Warren on a trip to Washington.

His speech is below. Worth a read.

------------------------
Harris announcement speech:

Both the economy and the politics of our country are in deep trouble. Too few people have all the money and power, and most people have little or none.

Yet, we have a rare chance in 1976 to help return America to its most traditional principle: the right of all of our people to a fair chance and a fair share by their own efforts.

What stands in the way is privilege. Privilege is the issue. It prevents full employment and fair taxes. It drives up prices and corrupts Democracy.

The basic question in 1976 is whether our government will look after the interests of the average family or continue to protect the super rich and the giant corporations.


I am a candidate for President because I want to make a difference in this country. I will enter the Democratic Primary in New Hampshire. LaDonna and I are deeply grateful for the warm friendship and support which we have found in New Hampshire already.

This campaign will be a people's campaign --both in strategy and in beliefs. The strategy is simply this: we will go to the people. The beliefs are these: people are smart enough to govern themselves; and a widespread diffusion of economic and political power ought to be the express goal of government.

Some speak of unifying the Democratic Party. I call for the unity of America, unity around principle and national purpose. We must lower taxes for most Americans and raise them for the Nelson Rockefellers and the J. Paul Gettys. We must stop the EXXONs and the Safeways from using their monopoly power to squeeze out competitors and then overcharge consumers. The government must stop emptying the pockets of those who have to work for a living in order to subsidize the Lockheeds and the Penn-Centrals.

1976 can be the year of the people – because several vital things have occurred.

--Most people now know how they are victimized by money and power. It is tragic that it took Watergate, inflation and recession for some of them to see it. But they now do see it.

--The change in the Presidential campaign financing laws mean that a few rich people won't choose our President in 1976. Federal financing, including federal matching funds in the primaries, together with severe restrictions of contributions and spending, mean that the people now have a fighting chance against the ITTs and the Gulf Oils.

--We have kept the reforms which democratized the Democratic Party. So, no few powerful politicians can annoint a nominee.

It is up to us. The power is in us -- the people of the Country – as our founders intended. I ask Americans to join in this effort to return America to its people. Let’s get to work for America!

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Armstead

(47,803 posts)
2. Frank Church was more a traditional liberal. Harris was more what we'd call progressive
Sat Oct 24, 2015, 01:24 AM
Oct 2015

Church was against the war and was a liberal on many things.

But Harris was the equivalent of Sanders, in calling out the whole power structure and raising the issue of excessive corporate power. He was saying things that were not generally spoken of.

Response to jfern (Reply #1)

 

Armstead

(47,803 posts)
4. Hee also ran in 1972 -- Amazing speech.
Sat Oct 24, 2015, 01:42 AM
Oct 2015

I am a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

My father is a small farmer in southwest Oklahoma. My wife, LaDonna, is a militant woman and an activist member of the Comanche Indian Tribe. Our daughter, Kathryn, is a college senior.

My father has less than a high school education. He works twice as hard as most Americans. He knows he pays more than his fair share of taxes, while a lot of rich people do not. He is a proud man. He has always been able to take care of his own, through hard work. Now, as is true of most small farmers and working men and women, he is worse off economically than he has been since the Depression. Everything he buys costs more, but his own real income is less.

My mother suffered a stroke three years ago and has been in a coma since then. My father cannot pay my mother's medical bills. And he's hurt and angry about that.

He knows it doesn’t have to be that way.

My wife grew up in a home where Comanche was the first language. She resents the fact that maximum security prisons are mostly peopled by blacks, chicanos, American Indians, Puerto Ricans and poor people. She never believed that George Jackson was shot in the top of the head from a guard tower. Something told her that the Attica hostages didn't die at the hands of the prisoners. She was right.

My daughter wonders why a government that can trace Angela Davis to a motel room can’t stop the heroin traffic. She says aloud what a lot of older people haven’t yet put into words: human values are the most important, and America needs something to believe in.

I have listened to black people in San Francisco, old people in Miami, students in Des Moines, small farmers in Oklahoma, working men and women in Akron, activist women in New York and Vietnam veterans in Albuquerque.

Two strong impressions emerge:

--A lot of people can't believe America has ever been to the moon. That's because they doubt the credibility of government. And because it seems so illogical to them that our nation could spend so much money on space when so many of our people here on earth can't buy medical care.

--Most people don’t believe that it makes much difference what politician is elected. They don't really believe things are going to change.

1972 is a crucial year. America won’t be the same in 1976. I intend to try to turn this country around before it's too late.

People have a right to believe that if they get interested in a presidential campaign things will change.

I believe that a President can call this country back to the greatness that is in us. I mean to try.

I mean to give people a voice through the campaign itself. I intend to hold hearings on the problems of the elderly. I mean to visit the hospital wards with Vietnam veterans. I mean to go into the prisons and to walk the streets where working men and women live. A campaign itself can give power to the powerless. I mean to do that.

We can have a better distribution of income. We can have a better distribution of power. We can have a return to idealism in foreign policy

 

Armstead

(47,803 posts)
5. He's still alive and kicking
Sat Oct 24, 2015, 08:06 AM
Oct 2015
http://www.abqjournal.com/621915/news/activist.html


Harris still advocates the same populist view, a redistribution of wealth and power, that he professed during his two presidential campaigns, detailed in a 1975 Rolling Stone interview with another activist, Tom Hayden. Hayden described the Harris of 40 years ago as someone who “looks and sounds like he’d be more comfortable at a farmers’ market in Oklahoma.”

Harris, who served eight years in the Oklahoma senate, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1964, serving as national Democratic chairman in 1969 and 1970. He served on the Kerner Commission or the President’s Commission on Civil Disorders, a committee convened by President Lyndon Johnson to unearth the causes of bloody race riots that swept the nation in 1967. He sponsored legislation to return Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo, an area sacred to the pueblo, that was signed into law by then President Nixon in 1970.

“I’m still saying now what I was saying then,” he explains over iced tea in a restaurant in Corrales.

In the 1970s, Harris thought a presidential campaign, even an unsuccessful one, could make a difference: “I am especially proud of the fact that I ran for president of the United States and that, doing so, I said exactly what I believed in. One of our campaign slogans was ‘the issue is privilege.’ ”

That issue, stirred again by a new generation in the Occupy Wall Street movement, stems from a belief he held and ended all his speeches with, “There is plenty of money to do what needs to be done in this country, if we take the rich off welfare.”

The gap has widened since then, between those who have and those who don’t. Now, like then, Harris believes the right kind of economic stimulus, such as the kind that brought the country out of the Great Depression and established a robust middle class after World War II, would help. “Did the United States go bankrupt? No, to the contrary. We proved what (economist John Maynard) Keynes said, what my tough cowboy dad said more simply, ‘You have to spend money to make money.’ ”

Eric J in MN

(35,619 posts)
6. A difference between Now and Then
Sat Oct 24, 2015, 08:34 AM
Oct 2015

...is a candidate praising the campaign-finance system.

1976:


--The change in the Presidential campaign financing laws mean that a few rich people won't choose our President in 1976. Federal financing, including federal matching funds in the primaries, together with severe restrictions of contributions and spending, mean that the people now have a fighting chance against the ITTs and the Gulf Oils.


Few would describe the 2015 system as having "severe restrictions of contributions and spending."


 

Armstead

(47,803 posts)
7. We backslid since then. The political system has gotten much worse
Sat Oct 24, 2015, 08:37 AM
Oct 2015

That was a reformist period when primaries were new too

 

Bluenorthwest

(45,319 posts)
8. Primaries were not exactly new, Oregon established the first Pres Primary in 1910, 20 States
Sat Oct 24, 2015, 09:43 AM
Oct 2015

adopted the process and 12 retained it until it became national policy in 1968.

 

Armstead

(47,803 posts)
9. Relatively new. I believe first Dem nationwide was 1972
Sat Oct 24, 2015, 09:46 AM
Oct 2015

In any case, not like today where is a standard part of the process that is taken for granted

 

Bluenorthwest

(45,319 posts)
10. Relatively new in some States, in 1972 the Oregon Primary was 60 years old.
Sat Oct 24, 2015, 10:09 AM
Oct 2015

That's not new at all. Some States lag behind, it is still that way. I hope the rest of you get legalized cannabis sooner than 2075....

 

Armstead

(47,803 posts)
11. I'm surprised some stated allow liquor sales
Sat Oct 24, 2015, 10:30 AM
Oct 2015

But the point regarding the political system is that it was being transformed and there were efforts to reform and open up the system.

 

Armstead

(47,803 posts)
12. And a great interview with him. Guy was ahead of his time
Sat Oct 24, 2015, 10:50 AM
Oct 2015

This is an excerpt from an inteview Tim Hayden did with him in Rollig Stine back then. Times were different but it's amazing how relevant it still is. And it reminds me why he inspired me.

If only we'd listened then.....

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/fred-harris-a-populist-with-a-prayer-19750508?page=4

Of course the New Deal was a wonderful thing compared to what we might have got into, but we haven't since then really talked about distribution. And because the subject of the distribution of wealth and power is not an open discussion or goal, then nobody's held accountable for it. So we wind up with the upper one-fifth having 41 percent of the income and the lower one-fifth having about 5 percent which is a slightly worse spread than just before the New Deal started. And of course the distribution of wealth is far more concentrated than that.

Now we've got to talk about those sorts of things under the rubric of economic democracy. We ought to have real debate about how to bring about real economic democracy. A man like Jefferson said you can't have political democracy without economic democracy. That goes back to the founding of the country. We ought to have that, we haven't seen it in 40 years. That's what I propose to force.

....For example, there ought to be a way for everybody in America to have a job as a personal, enforceable right, just like you have unemployment compensation now. And it doesn't matter if three million of you get it or 50,000, everybody gets it, and that's the way it ought to be with a job.


Do you reject socialism? Are you attacked for being socialist?
No, I use their own words against them. I spoke to a Rotary Club yesterday and said, let's cut out this $94 billion in subsidies that we give to Penn Central, Lockheed, the timber interests and the oil and gas people directly or indirectly. Let's abolish the ICC, which won't allow any competition in the transportation industry. These people say they believe in free enterprise—let's give them a very strong dose of it. And then I say, let's implement the work ethic in America, let's start taxing money earned from money heavier than money earned from work, and let's assure that everybody willing and able to work has a job. And I said, it's strange that a lot of these people who say they believe in free enterprise take a very Marxist line when they say that in a capitalist system you can't have full employment. I say I don't agree with that, I believe we can, and I believe we must, if you believe in this system you've got to put people to work in this country. That's the kind of thing they understand.

Now, socialism, I don't know what it means anymore.

Do you know what capitalism means anymore?
No, I really don't, because the kind of capitalism we've got is corporate socialism. It's very much like the zaibatsu system that existed in Japan just before World War II where the interests of government and industry were virtually synonymous. That's what we've got. The last Socialist International, I think, had some problems defining socialism and so do I, but what I'm talking about is a fair distribution of wealth and income and power, and I've got some rather detailed ways to go about that, which do involve some forms of public ownership from time to time.

Public ownership where an industry has completely failed?
Well, coerced monopolies, like utilities. I'd like to make it much easier for the people to own them, or mass transit. I don't see why we should prop up an outfit like Penn Central. If we can't operate a modern railway system in America without public subsidy, then we ought to own it.

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