On Aug 15, 9:51 pm, 0baMa0 Tse Dung wrote:


We know now that Government by
organized money is just as dangerous
as Government by organized mob.
--Franklin D. Roosevelt


For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing,
see-nothin-g, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government
but
the government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf
and
three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and
three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three
long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore
that
kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best
which
is most indifferent. --FDR, in 1936, talking about 1920-1932

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest
exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a
superior moral justification for selfishness.--John Kenneth
Galbraith

our state and nation have experienced major declines resulting from
contemporary conservative leaders and their simplistic ideas. their
dour polices regularly fail to connect the dots, let alone comprehend
the space between them.
richard a. swanson

While it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is
true that most stupid people are conservative. ... John Stuart Mill

"The game of Darwinian economics and the enshrinement of market-
miracle
theology is really the systematic looting of the pockets and purses of
the middle class"
Jerry M. Landay of Bristol



I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed
corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial
of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. "
Thomas Jefferson, 3rd US president 1801-1809

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and
causes me to tremble for the safety of my country...corporations have
been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow,
and the money of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by
working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is
aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at
this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever
before, even in the midst of war."

---President Abraham Lincoln

Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred
principles
of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not
be
restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
- Bertrand
Russell

"there is another view, one that may come to the
fore if the recession lingers and millions lose their jobs or homes,
while those who brought on the disaster remain wealthy beyond any
dream available to normal people. "By the time of the American
Revolution there was already a robust plebeian resentment of the
aristocrat as parasite, a privileged nonproducer living off the hard
labor of those he lorded over," Fraser writes. It has not helped that
the financial lords have not always been subtle about their
superiority, as when Jay Gould, the robber baron who ran railroads in
the late 19th century, boasted he could hire one half of the working
class to kill the other half."

"Wall Street had proved itself not only ethically challenged and
dangerously
omnipotent but, more damning than that, omni-incompetent." And he
continues: "During the boom years of the 1920s, the white-shoe world
of J. P. Morgan had accepted credit for the nation's good fortune and
been portrayed as a conclave of wise men. Now, under the new
circumstances of economic ruination, that same world was treated as
criminally irresponsible, pathetic even, an object not only of censure
but of mockery. And there is perhaps nothing more fatal for the life
expectancy of an elite than to be viewed as ridiculous."


Ideas espoused by the Democratic Party have propelled the American
economy
since 1932. Franklin D. Roosevelt used them to enable our economy to
recover from the Great Depression and Dust Bowl years, moving us
through
World War II without major domestic disruption or major inflation, and
moving us smoothly into the post-War years to a level of prosperity
and
growth unapproached in all history. At the same time, we re-built the
economies of England, Western Europe and Japan, turning our enemies
into our
staunchest friends and allies, while setting our economic policies on
a
course that would result, in 1991, in the economic and military
collapse of
the Soviet Union, with Russia now being a firm friend.

No one who has any knowledge of the American economy in the 20th
Century can
do anything but applaud the Democratic Party and long for the
reinstatement
of its economic policies after the disastrous Bush years.

Stanley F. Nelson
Dallas.

"Once you have assisted the elites to get 99%
of the world's wealth into the hands of 1%
of the world's elites, which side of the
wealth divide will you be on?"

``Capitalism sowed the seeds of its own demise because the benefits of
a decade-long boom accrued to capital, with nothing flowing to labor.
Telling workers who hadn't had a decent pay raise for years to tighten
their belts once the good times ended proved disastrous.

The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little
coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated
our economic debate for three decades.
Since the Reagan years, free market cliches have passed for
sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these
ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that
capitalism is ailing.
You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and
deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth
doesn't matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to
"grow the pie" is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces
well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy
is "protectionism."
e.j. dionne


teddy roosevelt

We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things
good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for the
consumers. Wherever in any business the prosperity of the businessman
is obtained by lowering the wages of his workmen and charging an
excessive price to the consumers we wish to interfere and stop such
practices. We will not submit to that kind of prosperity any more than
we will submit to prosperity obtained by swindling investors or
getting unfair advantages over business rivals.

Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to
execute the will of the people. From these great tasks both of the old
parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to promote the
general welfare they have become the tools of corrupt interests, which
use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the
ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no
allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To
destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance
between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of
the statesmanship of the day.

We stand equally against government by a plutocracy and government by
a mob. There is something to be said for government by a great
aristocracy which has furnished leaders to the nation in peace and war
for generations; even a democrat like myself must admit this. But
there is absolutely nothing to be said for government by a plutocracy,
for government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with
"the money touch," but with ideals which in their essence are merely
those of so many glorified pawnbrokers.

"Just another example of the "CONservative movement" screwing over the
American people.

Deregulation is such a canard.

Remember, when a Republican talks about "Free" Markets, they mean

Free of Regulation
Free of Oversight
Free of Competition
Free of Ethics
Free of Morality
Free of Common Sense
Free of Long Term Thinking'



"disinterest in good government has long been a principle of modern
conservatism."
paul krugman


Thoughts from the Great Depression
As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass
consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of
existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to
provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and
services offered by the nation's economic machinery. Instead of
achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by
1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently
produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by
taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers
denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products
that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in
new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in
the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game
stopped.

(Eccles, Marriner S. 1951. Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal
Recollections (New York: Alfred A. Knopf): p. 76

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Economist and author Henry Liu summed it up brilliantly in a recent
article in the Asia Times:
"The collapse of market fundamentalism in economies everywhere is
putting the Chicago School theology on trial. Its big lie has been
exposed by facts on two levels. The Chicago Boys' claim that helping
the rich will also help the poor is not only exposed as not true, it
turns out that market fundamentalism hurts not only the poor and the
powerless; it hurts everyone, rich and poor, albeit in different ways.
When wages are kept low to fight inflation, the low-wage regime causes
overcapacity through over investment from excess profit. And monetary
easing under such conditions produces hyperinflation that hurts also
the rich. The fruits of Friedman test are in - and they are all
rotten."
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Workers voting for republicans 'is' like chickens voting for
Colonel Sanders.
(that includes plucked millionaires too)