Bfgrn
Gold Member
- Apr 4, 2009
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Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance. Progressives assume we're all in it together: We all benefit from public investments in schools and health care and infrastructure. And we all do better with strong safety nets, reasonable constraints on Wall Street and big business, and a truly progressive tax system. Progressives worry when the rich and privileged become powerful enough to undermine democracy.
Regressives take the opposite positions.
Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today's Republican right aren't really conservatives. Their goal isn't to conserve what we have. It's to take us backwards.
They'd like to return to the 1920s -- before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act.
In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.
Rather than conserve the economy, these regressives want to resurrect the classical economics of the 1920s -- the view that economic downturns are best addressed by doing nothing until the "rot" is purged out of the system (as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary, so decorously put it).
In truth, if they had their way we'd be back in the late nineteenth century -- before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons -- railroad, financial, and oil titans -- ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few.
Listen carefully to today's Republican right and you hear the same Social Darwinism Americans were fed more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: Survival of the fittest. Don't help the poor or unemployed or anyone who's fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.
The regressive right has slowly consolidated power over the last three decades as income and wealth have concentrated at the top. In the late 1970s the richest 1 percent of Americans received 9 percent of total income and held 18 percent of the nation's wealth; by 2007, they had more than 23 percent of total income and 35 percent of America's wealth. CEOs of the 1970s were paid 40 times the average worker's wage; now CEOs receive 300 times the typical workers' wage.
This concentration of income and wealth has generated the political heft to deregulate Wall Street and halve top tax rates. It has bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and captured the House of Representatives and many state governments. Through a sequence of presidential appointments it has also overtaken the Supreme Court.
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Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.
Edmund Burke
One of the key traits of the Progressive is that they are pathological liars. What is a "Progressive"? What do they feel is necessary to hide their economic and political philosophy behind the misnomer "Progressive"? They are Statist, Fascist and Marxist but think they are clever by calling themselves "Progressives".
Mao was a Progressive, so was their Uncle Joe Stalin, how did the Chinese and Soviets progress under them?
Progressive = Liar
In so far as the 1920's. Yes it's the last time Conservatives rules the USA. Thanks to Harding and Mellon they dropped unemployment from 12% to 4% in 18 months. How did Progressive FDR do? How is Progressive Obama doing? That they mentioned the 1920's at all is grudging acknowledgement that they've lost they media monopoly and so they are forced to talk about the 1920's and when they do, they lie.
Big Surprise
Hey Frank, did you glean that from Glenn Beck's Nazi chalkboard?
Here are some words from Mao...
What Mao Zedong said about liberalism
"Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension.
It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads."
Combat Liberalism
While not all conservatives are authoritarians; all highly authoritarian personalities are political conservatives.
Robert Altmeyer - The Authoritarians