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Posted by Maureen Donohue
on December 30, 2008, 10:39 am
76.15.70.229
I am happy to see that there is still a Liberal Parry blog. Shocked actually. It seems everyone has forgotten what the Liberal Party has done for this country. I am so happy to see the word "Liberal" again. I've never been comfortable with "Progressive" which always seemed a chicken-hearted defense word used to justify an ideology that should need no defense.
I signed up with the Liberal Party in 1965 when I turned 21. Why would I belong to the other choices? Republicans - who had already bought the banks and most major corporations and thought "separate but equal" was moral? Democrat like the good ole boy politicians of the South who saw no problem with assassinating college students who dared to enter their sacred grounds?
Conservative like my mother's rich friends who believed McCarthy had never harmed the career of on artist or writer not to mention the careers of many talented Americans who dared raise a protest?
Of course we had the option of being an Independent which spared us criticism from any group. Independent meant you were seducible material and would be wooed by all sides for your vote.
Studying history and Philosophy it becomes apparent that "Liberal" throughout history was a term that defined careful thinkers who worked to improve the human condition - these were people who thought "outside the box." You did not stand there like a sheep and accept outrageous repressive conditions.
In the sixties there was still an aura of civility which has been carefully destroyed by the likes of a Texas exterminator who found out that, if he wanted to continue using poison he'd have to get political. To the likes of Tom DeLay Liberal was not an ideology but a dangerous movement that had to be turned into a sexually promiscuous, druggie, Communist loving, family destroying, and heavy taxing simile. He wasn't the first but by the time he and Rove got finished self respecting Liberals were dodging the word and mumbling chicken-shit “PPP..Progressive. I’m really a Ppp..progressive.”
I watched this happen. Liberals in New York State got comfortable. We adopted Guliani. Shrewd Liberal Party members through off the embarrassing milk toast mantle of "Liberal" and joyfully joined the money and power of the already enfranchised. I myself enjoyed the dinners at the Waldorf Astoria although I remember feeling as if I were at a funeral as I surveyed the politicking going on around me.
But the damage was done. Most of the Liberals I knew hardly remembered the courage and history of "Liberals" who fought war, class injustice, racial prejudice, horrendous housing, voting rights and access to free college.
It shocks me to talk to young women and realize that they have no memory of interviewing for a job and being asked if they are using effective birth control or whether or not they have a reliable family member to watch their child when they are at work.
They have no memory of the fact that CUNY was free to all students who kept a decent grade in their classes. My father, my mother, her sisters and many of my friends attended FREE university. It was free for 50 years until 1976 and, despite mud slinging false accusations that you could go there and hang out and still not be charged, it provided some sort of equitable access to a better life for many Americans. When I went it was full of Vietnam Vets and returning housewives who took advantage of the "open enrollment" program to get on and improve their lives. When tuition was instituted the people most affected were those vets and the housewives who had incomes (albeit not their own - usually spouses) that were too high to qualify for grants. The incomes were too high for grants but barely enough for those with spouses and children.
I am waiting for some of the people of my time who retreated in the face of the savage onslaught on "Liberal" to wake up and see what has happened.
We have allowed this country to become a third world economy buying 3 times as many finished goods as we send out raw materials. We buy stuff we don’t need from stores that abuse their workers.
Media has corrupted out children and our schools. Text book companies and "principal schools" for twenty year olds who don't know their asses from their elbows are sucking up the funds that are needed to provide a decent public school education for all of our children.
Governor Patterson talks about a Wall Street restoral as if this were a credible idea. He defended the outrageous bonuses paid CEO’s by saying that our budget depends on the taxes on those billions of dollars. The man is blind in more ways than one.
How about spreading those billions around to every NYS worker – all the ones unemployed and not even on our rolls? How about a fair division of wages which, when taxed would probably bring in even more tax dollars as there would be no clever tax dodges included in the income tax statements.
There will be no Wall Street recovery for at least 5 years maybe more. Brilliant economists like Greenspan forgot the Louisiana Purchase debacle and the fact that you can't keep selling assets for many times over their basic physical value. If a home is worth $150,000 you can't issue promissory notes for a million which is what has been done and it's been done to credit card debt as well. That disaster is about to hit the fan.
We will have to enact tariffs and start actually making products in America (not in the Mariannas where we employ slave labor). The Chinese will have to start paying their workers more just so they have a customer that has the ability to buy anything they make.
All of us will pay more. And we will desperately need social programs to help with the outrageous health programs we have, Welfare work that's not minimum wage and sending older sickly recipients out to broom sweep our parks, employment offices that are not a joke - where their only value is that they actually employ people to turn away and humiliate job applicants.
This will be painful re-constructions closer to the reconstruction of the South after the Civil War. And I hope we will not fall into the common practice of engaging in a war to boost our economy. The temptation to give people work building scatter bombs for us and Israel is not a satisfactory outcome. We need a LIBERAL party to help set things straight. Let's stop pussyfooting about.
Thanks
Thank you very much for the refresher on what it means to be a Liberal. Now, if only people would listen.
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