Sharing the wealth

Is Obama a modern reincarnation of Huey Long?

Has the erstwhile socialist dictator of the Pelican State returned in spirit through the medium of our mulatto Leader-elect?

BO likes to speak in abstracts, talking about "the wealth" as if is just there, having willed itself into being. Of course "the wealth" is the sum total of the individual efforts of millions of productive citizens - and it is not the moocher class' "wealth" to take.

It is insightful to compare our future Maximum Leader with the Kingfish.

My opinion on Huey may be unorthodox, but there are many contradictions to observe in the man. Huey was above all an impassioned individual who saw the injustice of the world made by the power elites of his day, a world in which State power existed solely to serve and enrich the aristocrat families while holding the common man down in a stupor of near-starvation. Huey tapped into the logical rage of the working class and rode that tide to power.

But he confused means with ends. He believed that State action was the tool to correct the injustices. In this manner he fell into the eternal trap of statism. By increasing State power, he reduced freedom and made everyone worse off, including himself.

As he settled into the trappings of power and dealt ruthlessly with his enemies, the temptations of corruption and graft became irresistable for himself and his political hangers-on. After his assassination in 1935, the graft lust became a free for all which culminated in the infamous Louisiana Scandals and the resignation and imprisonment of the sitting Governor.

The state's capital investment initatives during this period proved beneficial, in the sense that improved roads, bridges, and better schools were needed to propel Louisiana into the modern world. If you start from a low baseline, any manner of improvement can benefit - this was demonstrated by the early Soviet five year plans which rapidly turned the USSR into a major industrial power (but at incalcuable human costs).

But was it the wisest or most intelligent path for the long term? Today his roads are decaying, his bridges are obsolete and crumbling, and the state's schools are the nation's laughingstock. Would it not have been wiser for Huey to use his power and mandate to clear the field of the old elites and let freedom reign in an environment of pure and free competition?

His venom against large companies such as Standard Oil was partly based in the special favor and treatment they received by the State in return for unearned benefits. But he erred in allowing that attitude to harden into an anti-business and anti-capitalist mentality in general.

Eventually it would come to fruition with the notorious Share the Wealth scheme.

If not for Long's assassination it is very well possible that he could have become Leader himself, the siren song of subsidy falling on very receptive ears in those hard economic times.

It was left to BO to assume that course.

But BO is cut from a far different cloth.

His megalomania was apparent from an early stage. His seemingly permanent ambition has been to seek and attain high power. That goal has now been reached. The ideology that propels him is not a burning desire to help people. It is a burning desire to help himself.

The way to keep and hold power when playing for Team Blue is to advance socialism. It is a naked cash grab, robbing the pockets of the successful to subsidize the losers who gnash their teeth, stomp their feet, and whine how "life's not fair" because they aren't rich and famous and powerful, which they deserve to be, lack of effort to make something of oneself nothwithstanding, because they are just such special people and high status and success is owed to them!

Huey fought the plutocrats of his day. He was assassinated by one of their agents, because he had pissed off so many people in high places that he could not be permitted to live.

That in itself does not make the Kingfish a hero, in light of his other State perpetuated crimes. But somewhere behind the corruption and self-enrichment, there was enough honest rage against the system to have signed his own death warrant.

I predict no such fate for BO. He is part and parcel of the system, a card carrying member of Council on Foreign Relations Team B. All this calls for is a total lack of principle, with one single exception - the State is always right. Like his fascist-inspired campaign "seal", there is nothing there - except a meglomanaical malignant narcissist, ready to "make the world over", in the immortal words of the notorious New Dealer fascist Rexford Guy Tugwell.

I predict hard years ahead.