It wasn't so much a vote as a proclamation of ideology last Thursday when Republicans filibustered Obama's nominee to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The rebuff had nothing to do with the person, Richard Cordray, who even Republican Senator Orrin Hatch said appeared well qualified. Rather, it was part of the GOP campaign to hobble the agency created to safeguard borrowers from dodgy payday lenders and predatory mortgage salesmen.
The GOP thwarts regulatory agencies in order to enforce its "you're on your own" philosophy. That is, each citizen, like an island, fends for himself in a world where the invisible hand of the market serves as regulator. Democrats believe something very different. They espouse the principles set out by President Teddy Roosevelt in his 1910 speech in Osawatomie, Kan., and echoed by President Obama in his address there last week. That is America and Americans are better when citizens work together and watch out for each other, that cooperating invigorates the individual, the economy and the nation, and that primacy is in people and profit is subordinate.
The late Senator Paul Wellstone expressed the essential sentiment most succinctly:
"We all do better when we all do better."
Republicans don't ascribe to that. They want to set up a country where every person is responsible for every aspect of daily life, from ensuring drinking water is safe to reducing workplace hazards. The GOP wants to shred regulations that protect citizens, even eliminate the federal agencies that enforce them. Congressional Republicans have worked to defund the Environmental Protection Agency, a move that would "empower" each citizen to persuade big industrial polluters to limit the particulates, mercury, arsenic, cadmium and lead belching from smokestacks.
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said he'd reverse laws forbidding child labor -- the same regulations Teddy Roosevelt endorsed to keep youngsters in classrooms and out of factories. In a nation deeply concerned about the quality of schools and the quantity of imported oil, GOP candidate Rick Perry plans to close the Education and Energy departments. Republican candidate Ron Paul would abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the organization citizens created to aid fellow Americans who fall victim to natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes and floods.
But that's just the point: Republicans don't believe Americans should help each other -- they should only help themselves. In the GOP view, greed and selfishness aren't sins. They're virtues.
That's a newfangled philosophy for Republicans, however. Wealthy Republican Teddy Roosevelt, a big game hunter and war hero who led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill to win the Spanish-American War, might be expected to be a rugged individualist of the go-it-alone ilk promoted by today's GOP. But he wasn't. He counseled against a cult of individualism, writing:
"The fundamental rule in our national life - the rule which underlies all others - is that, on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go up or down together."The concept is citizens working together for their mutual benefit and the advancement of their nation. American citizenship is not, Roosevelt said in his New Nationalism Address in Osawatomie in 1910, all about individual enrichment:
"Those who oppose all reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism."
That could have come from the mouth of an Occupy Wall Street protester.
Then there's this from Roosevelt in Osawatomie on regulation:
"This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary."
His purpose was to ensure equal opportunity for all people who work hard, he said:
"I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service."
One hundred and one years later in Osawatomie, President Obama reiterated those sentiments. He talked about how in the 75 years after Roosevelt's speech, America moved toward fulfilling the Rough Rider's goals. The nation decreased income inequality and increased opportunity. Hard work paid off, and anyone who strived could succeed. This gave rise to the largest middle class and strongest economy in world history.
But, over the past 25 years, this progress eroded. Income inequality rose dramatically. Simultaneously, opportunity diminished. The middle class shrank as hard work too frequently stopped paying off.
How to restore opportunity and shared prosperity is, Obama said, "the defining issue of our time." Roosevelt sought it through the square deal. Obama called for something similar:
"I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules. Those aren't Democratic or Republican values; 1 percent or 99 percent values. They are American values, and we have to reclaim them."
Obama rebuked on-your-own selfishness and greed, saying each American has a stake in the success of all Americans:
"We are greater together than we are on our own."
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You have it all wrong. While I may not agree on the tack that the current neo-cons are going, there is an aspect that true conservatives believe in:
"We all do better when we all do better, but not because we are forced by a government to do it."
We believe that our money should not be heading up to some big federal pie in the sky with some entity deciding where that money should go. We believe that we should have greater control where our money and resources go to help those on a local level. Democrats seem to think that cooperation doesn't exist without big government managing it, however the history of our country before progressivism proves differently. Communities had only themselves to depend on. And most thrived, forming our towns and cities of today. Charity was more freely given because people wanted to help, not because they were told to help. Neighbors knew each other, and helped each other out.
In an effort to build a new nationalism, as defined by Teddy Roosevelt, progressives have told us to abandon our communities for the sake of the greater nation. Progressives have told us to abandon our neighbors with the promise that the government will take care of them. Progressives have told us to abandon our parents and elderly, that the government will take care of them. Now, Progressives are telling us to abandon ourselves so the government can take care of us as well.
A huge central government, on the other hand, removes morality from the equation by introducing force and coercion and removing personal connections. Just as when a child is forced to "share" under threat of punishment, the moral spirit of sharing and helping is lost when it is accomplished by means of confiscation and redistribution.
It is the very desire of progressives to achieve moral ends by way of amoral government force that is leading to greater selfishness in the world. Our innate desire to share and to be helpful is being beaten out of us by our supposed moral superiors, which only arouses them to call for even greater use of force.
We have learned and evolved since then, that no man is an island. We are all in this together, that is how we built this formerly great society in America. United we stand, and divided we fall.
We have been divided, so we are falling.
Our only chance is for a firm majority of Americans to repudiate the backwards right-wing ideology.
Are Sweden, Germany and Holland socialists?
Were the founders of the USA socialists:
"When economic power became concentrated in a few hands, then political power flowed to those possessors and away from the citizens, ultimately resulting in an oligarchy or tyranny." John Adams
"As riches increase and accumulate in few hands . . . the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard." Alexander Hamilton
Thomas Jefferson, "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".
The founders were Locke liberals fighting the Burke conservative 1000 richest families of the British Empire.
The Boston Tea party was against the East India tea company's use of money as free speech to buy tax favors from the British empire.
Everybody that wants this, please raise your hand.
This nation was never meant to be every man for himself. If you want freedom from taxes and regulation, go to Somalia.
And it seems to me as far as less privacy is concerned, that's a conservative wish. The Patriot Act, anti-choice, etc...
FInd me a Republican that's been quoted saying that...ooops time's up. There isn't one.
What's being implied here is that you cannot and will not strike out on your own. The collective will determine who gets what kind of shot and under what circumstances that shot can be taken. Ever how talented, smart, or educated you are, "X" marks the limit of your success. Otherwise, there will be wealth inequality to some degree, and that is forbidden in this scenario.
In the history of mankind, it has never worked. The first colonists here in America almost starved to death with that little experiment. They only escaped starvation by rewarding productive people with the literal fruit of their labor.
And Rush's little propaganda on the first colonists is just that - propaganda.
I'm reading no more into it than is there. It's marxism couched in happy face terms
choose.
Thanks
Politicians and big government solutions are losing support because of their repeated failure. The solutions are either ineffective, destructive or both. They are used to increase the power and wealth of the already powerful without increasing wealth for the rest of us. It is redistributive and most of the redistribution goes from the middle class to the wealthy. That is what government power does. It cannot be fixed by public financing campaigns. This only gives politicians more control of the political process they would decide the rules on who gets to run.
It only can be solved by taking power away from the state. Just the opposite of what is proposed in this article. We need less dependence on government force and more dependence on each.
The reason no one will believe your premise is because you haven't given a solution that corrects the radical right premises, the do not create anything for anyone but further division of money, with a big gap to the middle. the worker is not being respected...and Republicans have a lot of workers, too. Republicans have a lot of people on government aid. Republicans have a lot of people loosing their homes. Republicans have a lot of people who would appreciate a 'trickle down' that hasn't happened for a lot of years.
There will always be the greedy who lust for power. It can not be fixed by a Republican Party who is owned, as much as any other politician by the money powers.
Read again Republican Teddy Roosevelt and see if the goals he talked about are not viable today. If they are, then Republicans of today, need to get on board and work together with the rest of us, for all of us.
No one is saying business is a crime. We are saying what has been done by big business in recent years IS A CRIME.
I think the first part of your response stresses that the Republican politicians are working for powerful special interests at the expense of the rest of us. If this is what you are saying I agree 100%. This is true of (almost) all politicians and the primary reason I want to take power away from the political process.
“There will always be the greedy who lust for power.”
Again I agree 100%. This statement is the definition of a politician.
“...what has been done by big business in recent years IS A CRIME.”
I agree but it would not have been possible without political support and protection. Example: In a world without government support for banks they could never carry the debt load they have today. Investors would have jumped ship years before the risk levels got this big. Big business’s have no power without the support of Washington. They can risk their owner’s capital, but that is all.
The reason agencies like the EPA were created was because we were being poisoned, creating deformed and mentally handicapped children. That's why we need a government—"of, by and for the people."
What you're talking about is a place where the rich and the armed rule over the poor and the weak. We're certainly getting there, but we'll be Somalia if you get your way.
We definitly need a government by and for the people and it should be limited in scope to the few things that benefit to the use of government force.
Polution controll does not happen to be one of those areas. If the polution is severe enough it will be addressed through the courts. If it is not then regulations will be causing more costs than the benefits they provide.
Why do you put so much faith in politically designed regulation and so little trust in the court system with its multiple levels of checks and balances?
At the same time The DNC want to regulate every aspect of our lives, then enforce those regulations selectively to eliminate dissent and enrich their Donors.
Those people who die as a result of selective enforcement are called "statistics" and Democrats use them to justify MORE Government Regulation.
What I see is a 'pragmatic' leader being demeaned and talked over in the media by the clowns.
(sorry for the vision...that is the way I see it)
Enforcing current regulations non-selectively (which no Democrat has ever done), and analzing the outcomes, would prove whether or not we need the regulation in the first place.
As an individual who believes in God, that's the devil's language and that's why I don't vote republican.
"I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules. Those aren't Democratic or Republican values; 1 percent or 99 percent values. They are American values, and we have to reclaim them."
Anyone with any sense at all knows that that statement is true.
Although the above statement is true, I don't think it really reflects the American people however. Generally I read 4 sections daily where the Atheists attack Christians, Blacks accuse whites of being unfair racists and Whites attack Blacks in kind. Heterosexuals hate gays and refuse them equal citizenry, etc. So when you really stop and think about it, the republicans are doing exactly what the American people are doing: hating. The difference is the republicans are more honest about it.
It's all very unfortunate.
I'll let you see for yourself, which Party has more bias toward those they consider "them" or "those people". (Remember....'Getting rid of Obama is my first priority'? while the nation faced the biggest economic collapse in a lifetime)