COLUMN LEFT : Throw the Rascals Out; Then What? : Anger will not produce real change unless it’s backed by a political movement.

Amid the rubble of the failed budget deal, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell declared Monday, “We reap the bitter harvest of 10 years of national self-indulgence.” Other accomplices in the package rejected by the House of Representatives redoubled their calls for “necessary sacrifice” by the American people.

The people said hooey, and the people were right. The failed package required only selective sacrifice, from which the rich were exempted. There’s been no national self-indulgence over the last 10 years, only the indulgence of a class that launched a smash-and-grab raid on the Treasury more than a decade ago.

As the Democratic leaders capitulated in the final days of the secret budget negotiations, the package tilted in a savagely regressive direction: not just the hike in Medicare premiums and deductibility and in consumption taxes, but--at the onset of a recession!--such cruelties as requiring that laid-off workers wait two weeks before collecting unemployment.

President Bush’s on-again, off-again agonies Tuesday about whether to raise the top marginal tax rate to 32% (it was more than 75% in the days of Comrade Nixon) in exchange for a capital gains tax cut only underscore Bush’s sympathies for the rich.

The majestic contours of the smash-and-grab have been swelling since the 1970s (no need to blame it all on Reagan, Bush and the Republicans). Since then, the income of the richest one-fifth of the population has risen by 33.2%, of the top 1% by 95.1%. The income of the bottom 60% fell. Between 1979 and 1989, capital income (from rents, dividends and interest) rose by 66.2%. Real hourly wages fell by more than 9%. Pensions, health insurance and paid time off dropped by 13.8%.

One more set of figures from Lawrence Mishel and David Frankel’s “State of Working America,” recently published by the Economic Policy Institute: The average American CEO earned a pretax $308,200 in 1979 and a pretax $612,800 in 1989. The post-tax figure for 1979 was $153,900 and in 1989, $429,100.

Such, in statistical form, is the political culture that shaped the budget package finally rejected by legislators cowering under the abuse of their constituents. Such are the ingredients of the popular fury that handed the neo-Nazi David Duke his surprisingly large though losing vote in Louisiana and, more significantly, gave the more respectably racist John Silber his stunning victory in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Massachusetts.

Angry people will strike out with such weapons as are available to them, and effective weapons are hard to come by in a country run under one-party rule in the interests of the rich and the corporate. One weapon, tested already in Oklahoma and scheduled for a vote in California on the November ballot, is term limits for elected officials and politicians. Throw the rascals out. It’s pretty clear that Pete Schabarum’s Proposition 140, with its shotgun six-year legislative limit, would land the state even more deeply in the arms of the lobbyists and corporate interests in which it already reposes. Proposition 131, the liberal alternative, has more appeal. Limited merely to 12 consecutive years in office, state legislators wouldn’t, as with Proposition 140, just be a bunch of chickens led around by seasoned lobbyist foxes. With $3 in public matching money for each $1 in small donations raised within the district, it would give the little guy a bit more clout.

So Proposition 131 could be a powerful, constructive weapon for angry people. But what would all those prospective new legislators, some of them presumably burning with zeal to reform a corrupted system, actually do? It’s the same question one can ask about the admirable Proposition 128, “Big Green.” Suppose it wins? Then where is the mass movement to ensure that its provisions don’t get beached in protracted court fights; to sustain its challenge to present economic assumptions about what costs and benefits should be?

You can’t make any substantive political change without a political movement and, in the end, without a political party. In Canada there is that third-party alternative to the Liberals and Conservatives--the social-democratic New Democratic Party. Last month, angry voters in Ontario, Canada’s industrial heartland, kicked out the ruling Liberals and handed power to the self-declared socialist Bob Rae.

There’s no New Democratic Party here, but if people are not to turn in desperation to the hate-mongers like Silber or Duke, the 1990s will have to see the forging of populist, radical grass-roots coalitions. Without such collective purpose and sanction, the consequences of term limits will be nothing but bipartisan business as usual, as symbolized by the budget package in Washington or Monday’s pillow fight between Dianne Feinstein and Pete Wilson.