Two hundred thirty-five years ago, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia voted to declare independence from Britain. From our very earliest days, this country has been involved in a heated debate about our collective soul, a foundational debate about what we stand for and what kind of people we want to be. Our founding fathers had a dream, but there were people who were afraid to change and wanted to rely on the traditions and rulers that were in place. Then as now, the debate raged over equality and democracy and the nature of tyranny, over whether we were indeed one people with equal opportunities and rights or whether the elites should be able to do whatever they want.
From those terribly risky early days, when the odds were so steeped against us winning the revolution and then forming a new kind of democratic government that would last, we have had a hell of a run. We've survived and prospered as a country through some very shaky early days, through a horrendous civil war just barely won, through a Great Depression, through the terrible threat of Hitler and Japan in WWII, to become the most wealthy and powerful country in the world over the last seven decades. But we have come to a juncture serious enough to raise those old foundational questions again.
One of the few things that both progressives and the radical conservatives that control the Republican Party today do seem to agree on is that our nature is at a critical moment, and that if we choose the wrong path, we will begin a period of American decline. Of course, that's where the agreement ends. Conservatives believe if we just end the scourge of government, deficits, taxes, regulation, and dependency on said government, American individualism will blossom anew and our problems will be solved. They are scared that a big government atheist/socialist/Muslim/terrorist dictatorship is just around the corner. They are sure that if we just take all taxes and oversight and barriers to success away from the wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations, and that if those wealthy people and corporations don't have to be bound by any moral strictures like the Golden Rule or a social contract, that they will provide America with all the jobs we need. (Not necessarily at reasonable pay or anything, but still...)
Progressives would put us on a fundamentally different path, because we know that the strength of this country, its heart and soul and economic engine, is a strong middle class. Our grandparents and their parents built the strongest middle class in the history of the world brick by brick, and they built it together with their brains and brawn, not by being trickled down on by the wealthy and powerful. They fought for and won anti-trust laws and common sense banking regulations so that community banks and small businesses would have a chance to compete with bigger businesses, and so we could avoid the kind of financial panics like they had in 1929, and like we had in 2008 after the big banks were deregulated. They organized unions, and bargained for better wages and pensions so that their earnings would keep our economy moving. They won WWII, and when they came home, a lot of them and their children went to college because of the GI Bill and Pell Grants and student loans. They built good public schools and roads and bridges and interstate highway systems, keeping our economy humming. They made sure that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the minimum wage, and Head Start would give seniors, people with disabilities, and the poor a chance at a better life. They made public investments in the kind of research that created the internet, new medicines, and a hundred other inventions that have created economic growth. And they passed civil rights laws that gave opportunity for women and people of color to be fully free to make their great contributions to American society and our economy.
From the Revolutionary War generation to that "Greatest Generation," Americans have never been a cheap and fearful people. We were the ones, after all, who courageously created a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal... a government of the people, by the people, for the people." We made the investments we needed to make for our country to succeed. We acted boldly to create jobs when too many people were unemployed. We reined in wealthy and powerful corporations when they abused the public trust. We ended slavery and Jim Crow, women won the right to vote, we came back from the Great Depression and defeated Hitler, and we built the healthiest and most vibrant middle class-based economy the world has ever known. We didn't do any of that on the cheap or easy, and we didn't do it by kowtowing to the richest among us and hoping they would trickle some of their money down on us.
There is no reason this great nation cannot overcome the wreckage made of our economy by gambling Wall Street bankers and the politicians in their pockets. There is no reason we can't bring back the days when we had plenty of good American jobs with good wages and benefits. But these entrenched special interests have a grip on our throats, and we will have to fight them to get our country back.
Have a great Independence Day. Remember what made this country great, and get ready to fight the good fight to rebuild the American Dream.
Follow Mike Lux on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ProgressiveLux
You go, progressives ! !
To where?
Actually, the thing for progressives to keep in mind goes back a few more years than the Continental Congress - it was the CASE FOR the Revolution in the first place.
That cause was clearly in the British attempts to limit the rights of the Colonies to have their own money system.
First in the 1751 and later 1763 Acts of Parliament to limit Colonial currency functions and later in the Stamp Act and others that required using British-based paper for commerce and then direct taxation - all limiting the freedom of what became America.
So, ultimately, the independence that was garnered FOR the Colonies and their peoples was the freedom from the British money system, a.k.a., monetary independence.
What progressives need today is a vehicle that is truly capable of accomplishing the just ends for our health, education jobs and the environment that we all seek.
That solution is in replacing this Rothschild-British model of a debt-based money system with a public money system of debt-free issuance, letting the bankers get back to banking.
Unfortunately again, 99 percent of truly progressive people do not know that such a system has been proposed in Congress by Dennis Kucinich.
Please have a read here:
http://www.monetary.org/hr6550bill.pdf
and let's have at the second American Revolution.
The Money System Common.
And then as a rich person if any of these questions has passed their minds recently -- do they need a job, need an education -- or more importantly, do they need a meal?
It's a fundamental, bedrock foundation of America, as the author said: "of the people, by the people and for the people", and I'm sorry if I don't see a distinction there that says "only of the affluent and powerful".
Moreover, I firmly believe that I can convince others who demand their freedom from the tyranny of social democracy that such a program is the best possible replacement for the entire social democratic state, even the most Libertarian among us.
It has taken 75 years to gradually erode our freedom. Can we ever get it back?
Most of the mob doesn't want it back; they want to continue getting their boons from the public treasury.
BTW, Social Security and Medicare are not boons, they have been paid for by their recipients. The problem is that our "trusted public servants" have stolen the funds to pay for those programs and spent it on things that would get them re-elected... by the mob.
Many of the early New Deal programs were rejected by the court and then scrapped or re-legislated until they passed SCOTUS muster.
At the same time, there were over 60 proposed Constitutional Amendments in various states of development that would have explicitly granted an overriding economic control over the entire nation to the federal government. And with the overwhelming majorities Democrats had across the country, there is no doubt one would have passed. FDR and Congress actually preferred not to run over the system as such and chose to bear down popular pressure on the Court instead.
It would be a very different country we lived in if FDR and the Democrats had been as interested in consolidating power as some people like to suggest.
- George III
sounds pretty conservative, doesn't it?
-George W
Unfortunately, compromises had to be made, against the advice of such notables as Thomas Paine, or the southern states would not have agreed to join.
Yes, property was highly valued, but not necessarily the vlaue of the property.
Yes, women were excluded....and beatable.
Yes, blacks were considered "less than human".
But the philosophy which emerged from the Enlightenment, a progressive philosophy, did devalue religion and aristocracy. As Diderot noted: "Man will never be truly free until the last king is strangled with the entrails from the last priest".
Aristocracy and religion (natural allies by the way) have survived, and again today are the backbone of repression of Enlightenment values.
Republicans all.
Try not to change actual facts too much.