Anyone who reads history realizes our best years were after the war, when unions were strong, when manufacturing was here, when consumers rebuilt lives after the war, when taxes were the highest on those who gained most from America's freedoms, what changed? Americans became spoiled and isolated and businesses and the wealthy fought the New Deal and Great Society with money, education, and think tanks that do anything but think. And guess what, the education worked, the entitlement worked and no longer did America live up to its principles. Good stuff below for the reader of history.
"Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them." Tony Judt 'Ill Fares the Land'
This is Your Story - The Progressive Story of America. Pass It On.
"A great transformation of American politics began during the years that Ronald Reagan was in the White House. This might not, at first, have appeared the likely outcome of his two administrations. Conservative activists (the same ones who would in later years celebrate Reagan as a saint) struggled during the 1980s with various disappointments: as president, Reagan did not end abortion, he met with Soviet leader Mikhail Corbachev, and he failed to eliminate the welfare state or even notably shrink government bureaucracies. And the enthusiasm within the business community that followed his election did not last long, as the economy sank into a deep recession, with unemployment rising to nearly 10 percent in 1982. As the manufacturing belt began to rust over, political conflicts between industrial companies desperately seeking subsidies and protection and those businesses that were able to thrive in global free markets grew more heated and intense. Tensions erupted between the owners of stock - newly confident and aggressive about using their financial power to compel management to do anything to raise returns - and career corporate executives. Today, the economic changes that began during the 1980s have an air of inevitability about them - the advent of globalization, the shift to a service economy. But at the time these transformations proved devastating to many of the manufacturing companies that had once most vociferously protested the New Deal.
And yet over the course of the decade the old skepticism toward business that had been born in the Great Depression and reawakened for a new generation in the Vietnam era finally began to disappear. The economic transformations of the decade would be interpreted through the framework of the free market vision. The 1970s campaigns to revive the image of capitalism among college students bore fruit in the 1980s. Universities created new centers for the study of business themes such as entrepreneurship. Students in Free Enterprise, a group started in 1975 to bring students together to "discuss what they might do to counteract the stultifying criticism of American business," thrived on small college campuses, funded by companies like Coors, Dow Chemical, and Walmart (as well as the Business Roundtable). The group organized battles of the bands, at which prizes would be doled out to the best pro-business rock anthems, helped silkscreen T-shirts with pro-capitalist messages, and created skits based on Milton Friedman's writings, which college students would perform in local elementary schools. In the workplace, the decline of the old manufacturing cities of [he North and Midwest and the rise of the sprawling suburbs of the Sunbelt metropolises marked the rise of a new economic culture, dominated by companies such as Walmart and Home Depot and Barnes & Noble." Kim Phillips-Fein ('Invisible Hands')
"The ideologue of the left is no more liberal than the ideologue of the right, for neither believes in humility before the facts and logic, respect for the experience and views of others, and the importance of making a supreme effort to avoid irrationality. Reactionaries and revolutionaries betray conservatism and liberalism alike. Those who move with some tentativeness and uncertainty as experience and judgment guide them to the best and wisest conclusions of which they are capable, they alone deserve to be called liberals and may claim that name with pride."
Procedure or dogma: the core of liberalism by John Silber - The New Criterion
"If history teaches us anything about politics it is this: Given enough time, liberals always win. The US was forged in liberalism, and has become more liberal with each generation.
The leftward movement has seldom been smooth or consistent, but it has been unstoppable." Keith A. Pickering
Is there a Liberal Media Bias? | US Message Board - Political Discussion Forum
Is there a Liberal Media Bias? | US Message Board - Political Discussion Forum
i wonder if these poor 423,000 were counted in 8,000,000 "immigrants".., who really are illegal aliens. 
