"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."
It sounds as if the oligarchs had learned nothing in the twenty-two years since Grover Cleveland sent his Fourth Annual Message to Congress.
In fact, I can categorically state that they have learned nothing in the last one hundred years either.
Ariana Huffington has written that we are living in an era of socialism for the rich, and the worst sort of dog eats dog capitalism for the rest of us. In fact, the actions of the oligarchs over the last thirty years to establish Karl Rove's "permanent Republican majority," is nothing less than a blatant attempt to establish a one party state, every bit as immoral, and every bit as wrong for this country as the " the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness," that President Cleveland described, and the Republican Party practiced, during the Gilded Age. And it will prove no different in the end from the one party states established by Fascist Italy, Falangist Spain, or Stalinist Russia, except in their underlying--and never truly adhered to--philosophies.
I believe that Karl Marx's insightful comment, when he was confronted with the excesses of the Communards of Paris in 1871, is appropriate here: "If that is Communism, then I am not a Communist."
I will echo Marx's statement: If what I described above is free market Capitalism, how can anyone be a free market Capitalist?
The conservatism of both Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk--which is based upon a profound distrust of the common man--stands in direct contradiction to the beliefs of our most important American thinkers, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, and both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. Burke's idea that "The whole business of the poor is to administer to the idleness of the rich;" should be as alien to anyone who loves freedom as the surface of Mars. (see Burke's A Vindication of Natural Society, 1756.) Burke saw no middle class: only exploiter and exploited.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
8
8
8
