21-07-2013, 06:30 PM
(This post was last modified: 22-07-2013, 01:23 AM by Nathaniel Heidenheimer.)
Hello, here is my broad question: Was Kennedy beginning to "Go Economic Populist" AROUND the state Dem. "machines" in '1963.
The word "populist" is an EXTREMELY loaded term especially during McCarthyism, Which the early 1960s WAS and WAS NOT [ this ambiguity and misunderstanding is richly cultivated, IMO] but, amazingly, even more so in 2013, when plutocracy is everywhere [in its own way].
Now what might have made JFK think he could go round machines and their uber-handlers, the golden part of Gilded Age? TV.
TV moved sideways, unlike the siloed internet.
TV, as the Civil Rights movement was showing, could dial direct, across state lines showing the granny in Sac the blood in Birmingham. If that was not controlled by the Robber Barons, no telling where it might lead.
Now look again, at JFK's airport comments in El Passo, June 5th 1963. The short but stand-out remark was that the greatness of a country should be measured by "the well-being of its people" How often do you see that in Cold War America?
Was JFK becoming willing to sacrifice, to some extent state pol infrastructures in order to use TV to dial more direct, using more working class aimed themes to compensate for the whites he was going to lose in the South? Was he beginning to fight black and white with Green?
That could be dangerous, and could never be an absolute break with state pols. But what else was the child like shenanigans about seating arrangements in the Dallas parade showing other than "this gulf cannot be breached the old way, gotta dial direct"?
That's not war time footing. That was part New Deal Dem rhetoric reemerging for this first time since the 1930s . Only THIS time there was a huge difference. The racial factor that had been used to keep wages down, was changing.
At the forefront was JFK's use of the UAW, which as Jim D. pointed out on an old BOR show last year, was a watershed mark in US labor history, because NOW when the gov, threatened to support labor it was threatening the Jim Crow income inequality ramifications that went with it , and income issues were the raison detre of Jim Crow to begin with. I really wish Jim would go further into this UAW trap door that he touched on, because it was RFK 's use of UAW in 68 ... that really began to effect the entire national labor picture, leading to a pantry and a plane-crash. The Kennedys and the murder of Jim Crow Labor terrain, was the Altoona Curve of the Democratic Party, and that real history threatens our current plutocracy more than anything, because it shows all to clearly how the Democrats abandoned the working class. With the contrast of JFK, RFK, and MLK with Walter Reuther, nobody can have any illusions at all about today's Deal! Democrats, who are paid mutes in the trumpet of dissent. This is history, weaponized.
The word "populist" is an EXTREMELY loaded term especially during McCarthyism, Which the early 1960s WAS and WAS NOT [ this ambiguity and misunderstanding is richly cultivated, IMO] but, amazingly, even more so in 2013, when plutocracy is everywhere [in its own way].
Now what might have made JFK think he could go round machines and their uber-handlers, the golden part of Gilded Age? TV.
TV moved sideways, unlike the siloed internet.
TV, as the Civil Rights movement was showing, could dial direct, across state lines showing the granny in Sac the blood in Birmingham. If that was not controlled by the Robber Barons, no telling where it might lead.
Now look again, at JFK's airport comments in El Passo, June 5th 1963. The short but stand-out remark was that the greatness of a country should be measured by "the well-being of its people" How often do you see that in Cold War America?
Was JFK becoming willing to sacrifice, to some extent state pol infrastructures in order to use TV to dial more direct, using more working class aimed themes to compensate for the whites he was going to lose in the South? Was he beginning to fight black and white with Green?
That could be dangerous, and could never be an absolute break with state pols. But what else was the child like shenanigans about seating arrangements in the Dallas parade showing other than "this gulf cannot be breached the old way, gotta dial direct"?
That's not war time footing. That was part New Deal Dem rhetoric reemerging for this first time since the 1930s . Only THIS time there was a huge difference. The racial factor that had been used to keep wages down, was changing.
At the forefront was JFK's use of the UAW, which as Jim D. pointed out on an old BOR show last year, was a watershed mark in US labor history, because NOW when the gov, threatened to support labor it was threatening the Jim Crow income inequality ramifications that went with it , and income issues were the raison detre of Jim Crow to begin with. I really wish Jim would go further into this UAW trap door that he touched on, because it was RFK 's use of UAW in 68 ... that really began to effect the entire national labor picture, leading to a pantry and a plane-crash. The Kennedys and the murder of Jim Crow Labor terrain, was the Altoona Curve of the Democratic Party, and that real history threatens our current plutocracy more than anything, because it shows all to clearly how the Democrats abandoned the working class. With the contrast of JFK, RFK, and MLK with Walter Reuther, nobody can have any illusions at all about today's Deal! Democrats, who are paid mutes in the trumpet of dissent. This is history, weaponized.