When Will Government Get Out Of Our Lives?—Socialism In Clear View
Above is a picture I took two days ago in Cincinnati’s Eden Park.
Look at all the ways government intrudes in our lives.
Government tells us we are at the corner of Alpine and St. Paul.
Maybe we feel we are someplace else.
The government just wants us to think we are at the corner of Alpine and St. Paul.
Government tells us this is a one way street.
What about hard-working, English-speaking, tax-paying Americans who want to go another way down this street?
First they tell us what we can do in our very own cars. Next they will harvest our organs for a United Nations organ bank.
The government wants us to stop at a certain place on the road.
What if this is not the place we wish to stop?
Should not free citizens be able to employ their superior knowledge of traffic management to know just the right place where they should stop?
Government says we can not turn left between noon and ten on Sunday.
Where is that restriction in the Constitution?
Sunday is the sabbath. What if God directs me to turn left at Alpine and St. Paul in the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday?
If you look at the top of the stone wall near the pole of the traffic sign, you see that the stone wall was built by the New Deal Works Progress Administration in 1941.
Socialism.
When will the Cincinnati Tea Party come to tear down this wall and build a new one with citizen-volunteer labor?
How have the people of Cincnnati allowed this socialism to stand in clear view for 70 years?
When will government get out of our lives?
( Photo copyright 2011 by Neil Aquino)
Donation To Democratic National Committee—Consider What You Can Do As Election Nears
Above you see Franklin Roosevelt Action Figure, Andrew Jackson Action Figure, and George W. Bush Action Figure . They are standing with a $50 money order that they bought at the supermarket, and are going to send to the Democratic National Committee.
F.D.R.A.F. says that Health Care Reform is as close to a New Deal program that we going to see in our corporate owned nation. He reminds that HCR, among many helpful things, ends lifetime limits on policies, stops the practice of kicking people off insurance because they sick and offers free immunizations to kids. (Read about Health Care Reform on your own.)
Andrew Jackson A.F. says that in his day, slavery was expanded and Indian removal was aggressively pursued all in the name of expanded democracy and liberty. He says he would have done something about it all, but for the fact that he was in favor of all the bad things taking place. Old Hickory says that in our day, the so-called Tea Party and the Republican Party use talk of expanded democracy and liberty to empower the rich even further and to make sure that millions won’t have access to health insurance. (A good to book to learn about the “evolution” of democracy in the first half of the 19th century is The Rise of American Democracy–Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz. )
George W. Bush A.F. says that many of our problems are indeed his fault.
The donation does not change my view that the Democratic Party sometimes ignores the poor and urban voters who are often it’s most reliable supporters.
Nor does it mean that I’m any less frustrated with President Obama‘s failure to communicate effectively for progressive values.
But we are where we are, and we must move ahead past the upcoming election.
The Republican Party has from the moment President Obama took office said no to everything he has proposed. They never had any intention of saying anything other than saying no.
They have said no regardless of the severity of the recession, regardless of the millions without health insurance and regardless of the reality of climate change.
They don’t appear to care about the severity of these problems.
I suggest that you please consider what you can do to help Democratic candidates in the weeks ahead.
After the election is done, there will be plenty of time to discuss what comes next.
What Is America?—How Should America Be Defined?
What is America? How should America be defined?
America is the idea and the fact of a strong federal government over the lesser powers of the states as written in our United States Constitution. The Constitution was in many ways a response to failure of the Articles of Confederation and the incompetence and corruption of state legislatures.
America is Emancipation and the victory of freedom over states rights treason in our Civil War.
America is the expanded economic freedoms and opportunity of the New Deal.
America is the hopeful progress of the Great Society and the Civil Rights Movement.
These are the things that define America.
It is a story of progress, of ever-expanding freedom, and of an always widening definition of what it means to be an American.
If America ever becomes something else than the progress we see detailed above, then it will no longer be America.
What Is The Subconscious Mind?
For many years I had a recurring dream that I was in the Brown University Bookstore on Thayer Street in Providence, Rhode Island. (Above you see a picture of the Brown University Bookstore I took last year. The store is the grey building on the left. To the right is Thayer Street.)
After some years of this dream, I began to think about this place during my waking hours.
As long as the dream went on, I never figured out why I was having the dream.
As a kid I often went to the Brown U. store. Last summer, in Providence for the first time in 20 years, I went into the bookstore for first time since maybe 1980. I’ve not had the dream since I went into the store last year.
In the past couple of months, I’ve had a new recurring dream. I dream I’m in parts of Providence that I knew as a kid, but did not see when in Providence last summer. I’ve now had this new dream three times.
Though I lived in Providence for my first 13 years, I consider Cincinnati, Ohio my hometown far more than Providence. Cincinnati is where I lived the 18 years after Providence. Yet its Providence I keep dreaming about.
I think this is in part because I visit Cincinnati twice a year and have only been to Providence once in the past 20 years. I think if I did not regularly see Cincinnati, I would dream of that city as well.
In any case, all this got me to thinking about the subconscious mind. What is the subconscious mind?
A New York Times article from 2007 says it is something that guides your actions more than you realize. It says our minds respond in ways we don’t fully control in response to clues and triggers. For example, if we see a briefcase we may become more competitive.
Past that article, what I found by poking around on the internet—perhaps reflecting a subconscious view that I don’t really want to know what is lurking in my mind—was nothing very solid.
There is a lot of stuff about using your so-called subconscious mind to quit smoking or become rich. Other web pages had a New Age feel. New Age stuff is fine for people who go for all that–But it does not do so much for me.
Beyond my wariness of what I read in Wikipedia—And I do appreciate Wikipedia for all the pictures I use on this blog that I get from that source—I find myself wondering how we can well-define something that takes place in our subconscious. How can anyone know for sure?
I’d like to think that right now in my subconcious mind some type of dinosaur fight is taking place—
Here is the defintion of subconcious from The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
” Of or pertaining to, existing in, the part of the mind which influences actions etc. without one’s “full” awareness.”
I think this is as close as we are going to get to a good definition.
Your subconcious mind is present in some respect and it is messing with you in someway. If all it is doing is making you have a dream about a place you left a long time ago, you’re likely getting off lucky.
( Here is a link to information about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Maybe those of who reached this post via a search engine question will have thoughts of all the good FDR and the New Deal accomplished planted in your subconscious when you are deciding in the future how to vote.)
As Roosevelt Acted To Stop Farm Foreclosures, So Must Government Help Distressed Americans Today
I’ve been reading The Coming of the New Deal by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. This book, published in 1959, was the second of three titles in Professor Schlesinger’s The Age of Roosevelt series.
Described in the book is Franklin Roosevelt’s response in the first weeks of his administration to problem of farm foreclosures. I’m less interested on the specifics of the program—I know little of farms or banking—than I am in the fact that the actions detailed here took place at all. These are things that took place within the first weeks and months of the Roosevelt administration in 1933.
( Above is a picture of a dust storm in the Depression-era Dust Bowl farm crisis. The farm is in Stratford, Texas. The photo is from 1935. Here is some history of the Dust Bowl and of farming in the 1930’s)
From The Coming of the New Deal—
“The mortgage question was causing more immediate unrest than anything else;, and the administration had already moves with vigor to relive the situation. At the end of March, Roosevelt reorganized the hodgepodge of federal agricultural credit instrumentalities into a single new agency, the Farm Credit Administration….It’s powers confirmed by the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act and supplanted in June by the Farm Credit Act, FCA refinanced farm mortgages, developed techniques for persuading creditors to make reasonable settlements, set up local farm debt adjustment committee, and eventually established a system of regional banks to make mortgage, production, and marketing loans and to provide credits to cooperatives. It loaned more than $100 million in its first seven months–nearly four times as much as the total of mortgage loans to farmers from the entire land-bank system the year before. At the same time, it beat down the interest rate in all areas of farm credit…Though anger still rumbled in the farm belt, FCA gave every evidence of getting at least the emergency debt problem out of the way.”
The response to the problem of farm foreclosures reported In New Deal are such a contrast to the go it alone ethic of recent years. It reminds us that government has a role to play in our economy and in our society.
In the days ahead, as we recover from the current financial crisis, let’s recall that government action has served us well before and is needed again to take us back to prosperity.
Hopefully, larger Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, and a new Democratic President, will lead the way. Hopefully, our newly elected political leadership will have the courage and imagination to try new ideas and ask the American people to see that we are all connected in this life.
Here is some very good history of the New Deal.
Here is a history of New Deal agricultural programs.
President Roosevelt’s first Secretary of Agriculture, and future Vice President, Henry Wallace, was an interesting figure. American Dreamer–The Life And Times Of Henry A. Wallace by former Iowa Senator John Culver and John Hyde is a good book on Wallace and Depression era agricultural programs.
( Below is an Iowa farm foreclosure sale from the 1930’s)
Many Presidents Have Died Early In Their Terms—President Palin
When a President has died in office, it has often been quite early in his term. This has often made a big difference in American history.
This is the Texas Liberal Election Fact of the Day.
The first President to die in office, William Henry Harrison, expired just a month into his term. Harrison died in 1841. President Harrison, at 68 the oldest President to that point, was a Whig. His Vice President, John Tyler, was a representative of the Southern planter class picked to help balance the ticket and not in full agreement with the Whig mainstream. As President, Tyler pursued policies, such a veto of a national bank, that greatly distressed Whig leaders such as Henry Clay.
President Zachary Taylor passed on in 1850 after serving just 17 months of his term. He was succeeded by Millard Filmore.
Abe Lincoln’s (above)1865 assassination occurred just a month into his second term. His Vice President, Andrew Johnson (below), who had not been Lincoln’s first term VP, had very different views than Lincoln on Reconstruction, and how the South and Southerners should be handled after the Civil War.
Here is a stark difference between the person elected President and the person elected Vice President. The United States got one month of a great President and just under four years of a terrible President. And black folks got a century of Jim Crow.
James Garfield was shot in the first year of his term in 1881. He died a few months later. Garfield’s successor, Chester Arthur, might well have been an improvement. President Arthur sought Civil Service reform and was surprisingly independeant despite a reputation as a machine politician.
William McKinley was shot and killed in the first year of his second term in 1901. McKinley’s Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, who like Andrew Johnson had not been the first term VP, was a very different man than McKinley.
Franklin Roosevelt was shot at in 1933 in the time between his election and inauguration. Roosevelt’s Vice President-elect, John Nance Garner was far more conservative than F.D.R. You might never of had a New Deal if Garner had become President instead of Roosevelt.
Roosevelt would later die in the first weeks of his fourth term. Vice President Harry Truman who had not been VP in the first three F.D.R terms, took the White House and did a pretty good job.
Also, Ronald Reagan was shot and seriously wounded in his first year as President in 1981.
Let’s say you are less than a hardcore Republican, yet are still considering voting for 72 year old John McCain. American history shows us that you may feel you’re voting for Mr. McCain, but that what you really may get is President Sarah Palin.