"These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people." —Abraham Lincoln
"Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail." —Abraham Lincoln
"Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war, in which the folly or wickedness of Government may engage it?" —Daniel Webster
"I am an anti-Imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land." —Mark Twain
"Wall street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street." —Mary Lease (Kansas Populist 1890)
"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." —Jay Gould (19th Century "Robber Baron")
"The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor." —Helen Keller (1911)
22 comments:
You picked some interesting quotes, particuarly Washington and Lincoln. I believe much of Washington and Lincoln's concerns were dealt with early in the twentieth century with the trust busting TR and the rise of unions to counter capital. We live in a very different economic world than they did and than did TR. China could very well dominate us in the not so distant future if we do not get our fiscal house in order.
Thomas Jefferson offered some wisdon on the subject of government and the economy,
When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe .
Thomas Jefferson
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson
It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.
Thomas Jefferson
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
Thomas Jefferson
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.
Thomas Jefferson
PS
Old Tom sounds much like Reagan and the Tea Party with the above quotes. I suspect if he were alive today, he would be more comfortable with the Tea Party then the Democrat Party, which he is credited with founding.
We live in a much more different time than Jefferson, but of course you're not likely to ever acknowledge that, which weakens your position even more.
Jim, I don't understand how can you say that this sounds like Reagan?
"It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world."
Reagan was the first President to rack up more than $200 billion in national debt in a single year and more than $1.7 trillion during 8 years, a great deal of which went to defense spending. Feel free to idolize him for winning the cold war, cutting taxes (in the early years), etc, but he was definitely not opposed to racking up debt.
These are indeed different times from Jefferson's but I believe that his wisdom is timeless. Many acknowledge that the federal and state debt is a problem big enough to damage the US to such an extant that we go the way of post war Britain, sinking because of its outsize debt and social programs to a second rate power.
Tim,
Reagan acknowledged that the debt accumulated in his presidency was a failure. I revere Reagan for his return to the ideals of conservativism, even if he was short on execution. Some believe that the fall of the Soviet Union as a good exchange for the debt. Either way the change in the economic trend line set up the 90's and Clinton's balanced budget.
Oh, so Reagan actually balanced the Clinton budget? Interesting. Or he's somehow responsible for it because of his policies that bankrupted the country? But screaming since the day Obama took office about how all the destruction and damage Bush/Cheney did to the economy was now all Obama's fault is...a reasonable position etc. Same old jive, for an ideologue ideology always trumps reality.
Lally,
You are a very angry man. Have you ever had a reasonble political discussion?
Moving from the high Carter tax rates to the lower Reagan Tax rates was certainly helpful in expanding the US economy. An expanded economy resulted in expanded tax revenues. Of course the lowering of tax rates that result in expanded tax revenue is a concept that modern liberals do not understand. JFK understood it.
JFK reduced taxes that had previously been close to one hundred per cent for the wealthiest "Americans" like him, a reasonable move for that time and those circumstances. Reagan's tax cuts were unnecessary and created the unprecedented gap between the wealthy and the rest of us that Bush/Cheney brought to ever historic levels, and sparked the greatest recession since the Great Depression, until Bush/Cheney topped that as well. The quality of life in almost every Western democracy is now better than ours in almost every category, including health, poverty, life expectancy, education, etc. etc. and especially in a much smaller gap between the rich and everyone else. Reagan began the process of turning the USA into something more like a "banana republic" and as most historians, and subsequent government reports and documents concede, the Soviet Union was collapsing long before Reagan took over and bankrupted the USA by raising military spending on unnecessary weapons and corporate welfare and cutting taxes so that corporate profits and the income of the rich could expand while real wages for the rest of us remained flat and actually went down in many cases. Reagan was one of the most disastrous presidencies we've had in modern times, trumped only by Bush/Cheney. Future historians (unless we become a dictatorship of the rightwing forces, in which case there will no longer be any actual "history" just revisionism, lies, distortions and propaganda as demonstrated every day of the week in the rightwing media etc.) will write that the beginning of the decline of "America" occurred under Reagan's watch and was a result of his policies.
JFK and Carter seem to differ with you. The Carter Doctrine in 1980 recognised the Soviet threat. The Lally restrospective view of history is at least inventive if not accurate.
It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now ... Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus."
– John F. Kennedy, Nov. 20, 1962, president's news conference
To ensure protection of Middle East oil, Carter declared that the United States would consider any attempt by an outside force (the Soviet Union) to gain control of the gulf region an assault on U.S. vital interests that would be repelled by military force if necessary. Consequently, Carter expanded military aid to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, and Pakistan, and went beyond surrogate forces to create a U.S. Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDF).
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/carter-doctrine#ixzz1BVKc3ELa
who said (something like))
"the true patriot's job is to protect the citizens
from their government."
Ths Payne?
it certainly was NOT John Wayne or that other "B" actor (RR)
Jim's point about Carter's foreign policy is well taken. George Friedman’s 10/4/2004 Stratfor book "America’s Secret War" describes in great detail how American foreign policy since WWII lead us into the current conflicts with Al Quada, the Taliban, etc. What I found most surprising about the history is how monolithic U.S. foreign policy has been, even as the White House and Congress switched hands between parties. Republican cheerleaders love to denigrate Carter as a pacifist wimp and Reagan as a cold war warrior, even though Carter served 15 years in the Navy and Reagan... played a soldier in a couple of movies. And Democrats love to think of Carter as the great peacemaker, even though he launched more covert opps than Reagan and spent four years bashing the Soviets in every way possible. In fact, if you had to pick two U.S. Presidents who are most to blame for funding, training, arming and then abandoning jihadists in Afghanistan, it's Jimmy Carter and George Bush, Sr. Reagan just continued the same policies as Carter. But this is the irony of the great red/blue political narrative in the U.S. right now. We have "fiscal conservatives" supporting politicians who run up astronomical deficits. And "unpatriotic liberals" who support politicians who sign every defense contract and covert opp plan that crosses their desks. Despite some very big talk, we are certainly NOT living in an age of idealism.
Tim,
Thanks for the tip on the Friedman Book. I have read some of the Stratfor Reports which seem to have a perspective that is not found elsewhere. I am going to order the book.
PS What line of work are you in?
Tim, the book to read is INVISIBLE HISTORY: AFGHANISTAN THE UNTOLD STORY by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould.
One of my archery buddies just sent me a Daniel Webster quote, which I think goes well with the Webster quote you posted.
Daniel Webster, once said, “There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter: from the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence. I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men and become the instruments of their own undoing.”
Such as issuing specious terror alerts over four years old at the time strategically at the time of the Republican National Covention in 2004.
Of all the quotes in this string, the Daniel Webster one is my favorite. Scrutinize your public servants. Don't sell your allegiance to any political party. Beware of anyone who: wears a flag on their lapel, a peace sign on their shirt, or a crucifix as jewelry; calls opponents "Nazis" or "socialists", or calls himself an "environmentalist." 99% of the time, these people are not what they say they are and just want to dupe you.
And with that said, to answer Jim's question, I'm a copywriter at an ad agency. Hehe.
Michael - Thanks for the book recommendation. I'll check it out. By the way, would love to read a review by you of "Restrepo." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/movies/20restrepo.html
Tim, one of many flicks I intend to catch when I can. INSIDE JOB is another documentary in particular.
Tim,
Well said!
You seem to be well read, insightful and fair minded. From your post I can not descern your political philosophy. I would hazard a guess that you are an independent, but can not tell whether you lean conservative or liberal. That is not a bad thing.
Here is another interesting quote from a Tom Tancredo op/ed piece. I met him during the fall campaign.
"If the Constitution loses its exalted non-partisan status and comes to be viewed as just another camouflage for tyranny, what arguments or principles will restrain citizens from following Thomas Jefferson's admonition in the Declaration of Independence: "Whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."
The progressives' assault on the Constitution, their flagrant disregard for its principles and restrictions, is in truth an assault on the foundations of ordered liberty. If the U.S. Supreme Court agrees with the Obama administration and decides that Obamacare is authorized by the Constitution's Commerce Clause, then there is no limit to what the government may do in any sphere. That decision would give all citizens, Democrat, Republican and independent, reason for sleepless nights."
Tom Tancredo is a former five-term congressman from Colorado and 2008 candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
Read more: Is the Constitution partisan? http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=254081#ixzz1Blzf5Lga
So since the recent healthcare reform bill is pretty much the same one recommended by Bob Dole when he was the Republican standard bearer, does that mean that all people of every political persuasion who don't agree with the extreme right are destroying the Constitution and only the extreme right has the correct interpretation? Hmmm, sounds like the justification that Osama Bin laden, and Timothy McVay (or whatever that homegrown rightwing terrorist's name was, the worst homegrown terrorist attack in USA history and it came from the right) and every other terrorist and assassin in history. So the choice is obvious, the Constitution and the Founding fathers and government by the people or the dictatorship of the extreme right and their dupes like the commenter above. I choose democracy and the laws of the land as based on he democratic process that the Constitution and the Founders created and has proven pretty durable in the face of threats from every direction, but lately almost exclusively from the right that refuses to accept that process as legitimate when it doesn't bring the results it wants.
(PS By the reasoning in the comment about and Tracedro's convoluted argument rightwing citizen would have had the right to overthrow the government over Docial Security and Medicare, which they were more or less advocating when those policies were introduced, thank God more reasonable minds prevailed!).
A Republican advocating government takeover of health care, does not justify it. We have Romneycare the blue print for the Obamacare disaster. Romeycare does not violate the Constitution, since it is a state enterprise. Obama's individual mandate to buy insurance has been found unconstitutional in at least one court. We are obviously headed to the Supreme Court on that one. Obamacare falls of its own weight without the mandate. The good news is that the Romneycare disaster was confined to Massachusetts. If Romneycare is left unchanged it will be following Illinois, CA, NY and possibly NJ into bankruptcy, once the impediments to state bankruptcy are changed. Those changes to the bankruptcy laws are under review as we speak. The rcent drop in price in municipal bonds is reflecting that new risk.
I note that you choose the laws of the land over rebellion. It is good to choose the laws of the land, but they must be based on the US Constitution.
PS Tancredo was quoting TJ, whom most consider to be the founder of the Democrat Party, on destructive government.
By the way, Timothy McVeigh was an advocate for human rights, protesting the murder of women and children at Waco and in the Northwest by the Clinton administration. We know this from his own words. I might add that he was murdering, low life, scum bag for his massacure.
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