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Congress Conspires with “Fed” Banksters to Create Endless Interest-Bearing Debt

November 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

“If government becomes ‘independent of politics’ it can only mean that that sphere of government becomes an absolute self-perpetuating oligarchy.” — Murray Rothbard, The Case Against The Fed

“Wall street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.” — Mary ‘Yellin’ Lease, 1895

“A private central bank issuing the public currency is a greater menace to the liberties of the people than a standing army…We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.” — Thomas Jefferson

Even as we get closer to complete economic chaos and bankruptcy induced by a corrupt system of debt-money, we still hear those in congress repeating the catechism of Fed “independence.” In effect, they have pledged to maintain the independence of the privately owned “Fed” - exactly what the great banking historian, Murray Rothbard, called “an absolute self-perpetuating oligarchy.”

Independence from whom? For What? For how long? To what end?

In any case, the independent bank scam enables turning what would be our debt-free national investments into interest-bearing debt slavery. As a result of nearly a hundred years of this monetary servitude, the money mafia game is now on the verge of imploding, both domestically and globally, and taking with it our prosperity, economy and democracy - as well as that of many nations sinking under the same tyranny.

Independence of the “Fed”? Well, it’s independence from the people of course, from democracy, from accountability and morality. It is unaccountable independence from everything right, good, and constitutional while paving the way for taking care of their big bank owners at our expense. It is surely not independent of banking criminals handing themselves trillions. In fact it has become their own exclusive money monopoly and private weapon for their greed and gain and our financial destruction - a truly perverse prerogative now being used to collapse all public power and privatize all public assets.

Too many of the very Congresspersons entrusted with the money and credit powers by the founders in our Constitution continue to turn their backs on this democratic money power — that being the very way out of debt money slavery and everlasting interest upon interest imprisoning all future generations. In effect, these spineless Congresspersons are calling the founders idiots for giving the power of the purse to the most representative body? They might as well be saying exactly that if they continue to support this debt money slavery of a private cartel masquerading as a “government” institution.

Apparently, these same Congresspersons are ignorant of the hundred years of history of the Rothschild “Bank Of England” predation and our Revolution to escape precisely this crushing foreign banking debt-money monopoly. I guess they still think the Boston Tea Party was all about taxes on tea!

Notice that the corporate bankster-owned media is complicit as well, as nary a mention of the public central bank, debt-money, topic occurs in any political debate. In effect, we have allowed a takeover of our media information system by those who would rape us with their unconstitutional money powers. When you have the private power to create money out of thin air you can then come to own everything, and the people nothing.

Too many politicians, economists, and media sycophants alike still repeat this “independent” mantra, a mindless pledge of allegiance to the oligarchy, to the filthy rich and powerful banking families that own our country, our world, and our lives. It is both high comedy and high tragedy to watch these lemming politicians and economists fall all over themselves to say they support Fed independence.

Yet the Fed is clearly not independent of historic banking oligarchies, it is not independent of the self-interest of the Fed’s private owners. It is only independent of the very people the Constitution required it not to be independent from!

In short, Fed “independence” is the scam of the ages, and the people who espouse it are either uninformed, bought off, scared for their positions, ruthless fascists, or any sick combination thereof.

So you think the founders were crazy and wrong not to give a private central bank independence? They were crazy to make our money powers dependent on a Congress re-electable by the people - as opposed to Fed appointments virtually dictated by its big bank owners? With this oligarchic stance you demean your own office. You demean the Constitution. You are not worthy to serve as long as you serve to consign the people to everlasting debt-money slavery. For this you will be reviled by your constituents and your own families for your service to bankers and the ruin they visit upon us.

So, go ahead, run on that platform - i.e., that the founders were crazy and we’re much better off with an oligarchic, Goldman Sachs forever, Fed. Tell your constituents you don’t believe in our Constitutional democratic money powers… and that the big bankers know best. Run on that platform and see if ninety-nine per cent of your constituents are still that stupid.

As recent events have clearly displayed, however, the truth is that the last thing we need is a continued Fed independence from the people. We need a public central bank owned by the people, responsible to our elected representatives, dedicated to the public interest, free of interest-bearing money creation, and forever free of dependence upon private banking entities for our very future and prosperity.

Source: https://www.activistpost.com/2011/11/congress-conspires-with-fed-banksters.html

Filed Under: Corruption, Federal Reserve, USA

Not Hiring Until Obama Is Gone Is A Symptom Of Broader GOP Ignorance

November 26, 2011 by Leave a Comment

There are occasions that the level of ignorance some people exhibit should cause Americans to be ashamed to live in this country. Republicans have perpetuated a lie that America’s economic malaise is solely the fault of the Obama Administration and their solution is to return to the Bush-Republican policies of deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, and allegiance to Wall Street’s financial corporate agenda that sent the economy perilously close to total collapse. One businessman’s ignorance epitomizes why economic pain and suffering caused by Republican policies continues and why it should engender ire in all Americans.

Last Monday, a photo of a sign posted on a Georgia man’s company trucks went viral on the Internet, and it exemplified ignorance, vindictiveness, and contempt typical of Republican economic policies that many Americans support. The sign read, “New Company Policy: We are not hiring until Obama is gone.” The company owner, Bill Looman, said his message was not political, but representative of his belief that he cannot hire anyone because of the economy; he blames President Obama. In an interview Looman said, “The way the economy’s running, and the way my business has been hampered by the economy, and the policies of the people in power, I felt that it was necessary to voice my opinion, and predict that I wouldn’t be able to do any hiring.” Apparently, Looman subscribes to Republican rhetoric as a matter-of-course and is ignorant of why the economy is stagnate.

Without going into the stupidity inherent in Republican economic policies and to avoid portraying men like Looman as cognitively deficient conservative sycophants, there are a couple of points to make on why Looman is wrong and why the Obama Administration’s jobs plan would benefit moronic dolts like the Georgia business owner.

Looman’s business is U.S. Cranes, LLC., and he said, “Can’t afford it. I’ve got people that I want to hire now, but I just can’t afford it. And I don’t foresee that I’ll be able to afford it unless some things change in D.C.” The President’s jobs plan called for a tiny tax increase on millionaires and billionaires to fund infrastructure improvements that Looman would certainly have benefited from, but Republicans blocked job creation because of their policy of not increasing taxes for the richest 1% of Americans. Looman must suffer from amnesia besides being stupid, because the economic scene was created during the Bush years mainly through deregulation of the financial industry as well as the wealthy’s tax cuts. The economic crash of 2007-2008 was well underway before Obama was elected, and the only recovery since then was the Obama stimulus that saved the auto industry and put millions of Americans back to work.

Republicans claim the economy is not booming because taxes are too high and regulations are burdensome to business, but surveys and polls show that business owners claim it is lack of consumer spending that prevents them from hiring. In fact, taxes are at their lowest rates in sixty years and environmental regulations passed during President Obama’s first two years have not yet come into effect. Looman said unless things change in Washington, he cannot foresee being able to afford to hire new employees. Does he seriously believe that giving the wealthy and corporations more tax cuts will encourage Americans who are losing their jobs, buying power, and their homes to begin spending money they do not have? Either Mr. Looman is a fool, or he has bought into the Republican lies that began during the Reagan administration and have finally borne the fruit conservatives planned thirty years ago.

The changes Republicans have in store if they win the White House and Congress will further enrich the wealthy and remove the last vestiges of the middle class that drive the economy, but the foolish Looman thinks GOP economic plans will drive consumer spending and fill his coffers with untold wealth and treasure. Looman should keep in mind that America has tried the Republican economic disaster for ten years and except for Obama’s stimulus, there has been a steady decline in income and spending for the sector that drives the economy; the middle class. Willard Romney’s grand economic scheme is giving $6.7 trillion in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans who have not shown any interest in creating jobs…in America.

The other point is; who is Looman punishing by not hiring new employees? Obviously, he follows the lead of vile Republicans who are hell-bent on sending more Americans into poverty to protect the wealthy and corporations. A change in Washington will finally send the economy into depression that Republicans have worked tirelessly to achieve for the past two-and-a-half years and unless Looman is part of the 1%, he will lose his business to the policies he supports. It is possible that Looman is just an ignorant dolt who regurgitates Republican and Koch brothers’ rhetoric, because he did not articulate how or why President Obama has caused slow economic growth. Whatever Looman’s reasons for blaming the economy on President Obama, they are wrong. It is still unbelievable that a company that operates cranes used in infrastructure projects blames his business’s slowdown on the President who has tried to put Americans to work rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure.

It is impossible to feel anything other than abject contempt for men, like Looman, who blindly follow Republican talking points as if they are the word of god. Reality and economic experts have verified over and over again that the economy is in shambles because of Bush-Republican policies of financial deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. It is unlikely that Looman and his ilk will ever achieve a level of economic understanding of why the economy is making a slow recovery, and it is further proof that many conservative business owners are just as stupid and contemptible as the Republicans who caused the economic disaster in the first place.

Mr. Looman is entitled to his opinion, but he is not entitled to perpetuate lies and misinformation he gleaned from the Heritage Foundation and the RNC. The message Looman is really spreading is that he is a foolish moron without the slightest hint of economic understanding and almost certainly a Republican sycophant. Like nearly all Republicans, instead of thinking or observing for himself, Looman depends on other ignoramuses to do his thinking and it informs why conservatives repeat the same economic errors at their own peril and are the reason economic recovery cannot proceed. If the change he desires comes to pass, Looman’s business will come to a screeching halt and he will have no-one to blame but himself and his inability to think or remember that Republicans crashed the economy between 2001 and 2008; eight years before President Obama took the oath of office.

Source: https://www.politicususa.com/en/not-hiring-obama-gone

Filed Under: Employment, Financial Crisis, Politicians, USA

The Shocking Truth About The Crackdown On Occupy

November 26, 2011 by 3 Comments

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class’s venality

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that “New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers” covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that “It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk.”

In New York, a State Supreme Court Justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on “how to suppress” Occupy protests.

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

I noticed that rightwing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors’, city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

The mainstream media was declaring continually “OWS has no message”. Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online “What is it you want?” answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, “we are going after these scruffy hippies”. Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women’s wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the “scandal” of presidential contender Newt Gingrich’s having been paid $1.8m for a few hours’ “consulting” to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies’ profits is less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congress people are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists’ privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can’t suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organised Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.

Source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/25/shocking-truth-about-crackdown-occupy

Filed Under: Occupy, Police, Politicians, USA

“Rising” to Empire, Falling from Grace

October 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

By on October 26, 2011

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

This panegyric to what is commonly called “American Exceptionalism” could have been composed by any of a number of GOP-aligned media figures, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, or their legions of local imitators. Those words were actually spoken by Madeleine Albright in 1998, when she was the Clinton administration’s Secretary of State. She was defending the U.S. role in enforcing an embargo on Iraq in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991.

Albright had memorably addressed that issue in a different fashion three years earlier during an interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes.

“We have heard that a half million children have died,” observed interviewer Leslie Stahl. “I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Without challenging the statistics, or displaying even a tremor of remorse, Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price-we think the price is worth it.”

By reconciling Albright’s statements we learn that when “we have to” impose policies that result in the avoidable death, through starvation and disease, of hundreds of thousands of children, “it is because we are America…. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

For some reason, the self-styled seers and visionaries who defended the Iraqi embargo didn’t foresee how that policy, coupled with decades of U.S. meddling in the Middle East, would cultivate and nurture the seeds that bore murderous fruit on September 11, 2001.

To ordinary people not blessed with Albright’s oracular insight, it seemed obvious that some variety of murderous blowback would be the inevitable product of a foreign policy that featured deliberate mass starvation punctuated with bombing raids. However, the custodians of permissible opinion have decreed that history began on the morning of 9/11 – that nothing the U.S. government did prior to that date has any organic connection to the motives and actions of those who carried out the attack (at least as that attack is described in the officially sanctioned narrative). To suggest that Washington’s policies had some relationship to anti-American sentiment in the Middle East is to commit a grave blasphemy against American Exceptionalism – the official creed of the ruling Establishment, irrespective of party.

What makes America exceptional, from this perspective, is not the blessings we have been allotted by Providence, or the individual liberties promised by our country’s founding documents. America is exceptional because of the power of the government that rules us, as manifest in its ability to kill people in distant lands.

That view, once again, is not limited to bellicose left-wing internationalists like Albright. On several occasions, Rush Limbaugh – who, like fellow late-blooming militarist Dick Cheney, had “other priorities” when he was of draft age during Vietnam – has related an anecdote about witnessing a military fly-over during a Super Bowl in the 1980. Aroused by the spectacle to the point of rapture, Limbaugh (by his own account) was moved to exclaim, “How can you see something like that, and be a liberal who hates your country?”

Offensive as it would be to both Limbaugh and Albright, a compelling case can be made that their reflexive militarism is a repudiation of our country’s founding principles. The Framers of the Constitution, painfully familiar with the uses to which large military establishments could be put, never intended for the united States of America (in Congress assembled) to have a standing, centralized army. While they did have the lamentable intention of creating a consolidated central government — and pretty clear ambitions for territorial expansion to the West — they did not entertain grandiose ambitions of policing the world.

The most admirable members of the Founding Generation understood that love of country was not measured by one’s enthusiasm for government-inflicted bloodshed. That’s why Washington’s Farewell Address emphasized both adequate provision for defense and the compelling necessity to avoid entanglement in the affairs of other countries.

“Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be,” observed John Quincy Adams in his 1821 Independence Day Address. “But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” (Emphasis added.)

Unlike the supposedly far-seeing Madeleine Albright – who couldn’t foretell how her arrogant endorsement of genocide in 1995 would help catalyze the enmity that led to the devastating 9/11 assault six years later – Adams displayed uncanny foresight in describing the degenerate state of American “patriotism” today, 190 years after he delivered his warning against interventionism: “Patriots” today celebrate force, not liberty.

Today, what Adams and his generation called “Independence Day” is simply called the Fourth of July. Rather than being a celebration of individual liberty, the “Fourth” has become an annual orgy of militarism, often involving saturation-level barrages of propaganda in the form of televised war “movie marathons” and military parades that wouldn’t be out of place in Pyongyang.

Lest it be forgotten, Independence Day originally commemorated an act of insurrection against the “legitimate” government – an incomparably powerful globe-spanning empire on which the sun never set. The men who committed that act of rebellion would probably consider it perverse that they are “honoured” by public rituals extolling the imperial power of a government that is more corrupt and oppressive – by several orders of magnitude – than that of George III.

America was unique because of its origins in principled rebellion against lawless rule, and because of a set of founding political instruments that, while imperfect, did provide individuals some protection against government aggression. Those traits that are typically celebrated as tokens of “American Exceptionalism” – an interventionist foreign policy; a Chief Executive with unqualified power to kill, imprison, and torture people at whim; a badly overgrown military establishment – are, in a specific sense, un-American.

A commercial republic in which both citizens and their elected representatives are governed by law, and individual liberty is regarded as the highest political good, would be truly exceptional. A sprawling empire ruled by a corrupt oligarchy that plunders both the national treasury and the resources of distant lands is actually quite commonplace.

To catch a glimpse of the America that could have been, it’s useful to pay a brief visit to the period between the end of the War for Independence and the mercantilist counter-revolution in Philadelphia that abolished the Articles of Confederation and created a more centralized constitutional Union.

In 1782, a year after the British surrender at Yorktown and one year before the Treaty of Paris finalized American independence, a former French Lieutenant named J. Hector Saint John de Crevecoeur composed a series of essays entitled Letters from an American Farmer. Six decades before Alexis de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, Crevecoeur devoted his considerable literary gifts to an examination of the question: “What, then, is the American, this new man?”

Unlike Europe, a continent plagued by entrenched elites, there were “no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one” in America, he wrote. The inhabitants of this new-born confederacy of constitutional republics were “a people of cultivators, scattered over an immense territory … united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws, without dreading their power, because they are equitable.” (Emphasis added.)

At its best, the “mild” government to which Crevecoeur referred was self-government; it was the spontaneous cooperation of productive people, rather than the imposed order of a parasitical elite. This state of affairs was hardly uniform throughout the confederation, of course, but that it existed at all was something truly inspiring.

On “Evacuation Day,” November 25, 1783, British troops ended their occupation of New York. In comments recorded by the New York Packet newspaper, a departing British officer expressed a bemused admiration for the Americans, who distinguished themselves by their unwillingness to be ruled:

“Here, in this city, we have had an army for more than seven years, and yet we could not keep the peace of it. Scarcely a day or night passed without tumults. Now we are [leaving] everything is in quietness and safety. These Americans are a curious, original people; they know how to govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them.”

The promise of the War for Independence was the establishment of a system of individual liberty protected by law – and, at least at that early stage, that promise was being kept. That genuinely exceptional America earned the admiration of the world – not because its government possessed the power to murder people by remote control, or annihilate entire continents in a nuclear paroxysm, but rather because its people were free and independent, and its society — although displaying all of the imperfections to which fallen man is heir – aspired to be governed by the Golden Rule.

Tragically, “our” government’s rise to global power has meant our country’s fall from grace.

Source: https://freedominourtime.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/rising-to-empire-falling-from-grace.html

Filed Under: Politics, USA

50 Quotes Americans Should Remember

October 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Many Americans today tend to take the past for granted, and with that, we also tend to take the words of past leaders for granted. We forget what they told us, and as a result we lose our identity, we lose the values that make us who we are. Below is a list of quotes spoken by American leaders, heroes, journalists, and others. You’ll find common themes throughout this list.

These are the messages from the American past that we should all remember if we hope to solve our own problems and bring America forward to a better future. The future that these people envisioned.

1.) “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

~John F. Kennedy

2.) “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” ~Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

3.) “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”

~John F. Kennedy

4.) “The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

5.) “I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.”

~Robert Kennedy

6.) “A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

7.) “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

8.) “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”

~Martin Luther King, Jr.

9.) “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

~Abraham Lincoln

10.) “Ultimately, America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.”

~Robert Kennedy

11.) “It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

~Hubert H. Humphrey

12.) “I believe that there should be a very much heavier progressive tax on very large incomes, a tax which should increase in a very marked fashion for the gigantic incomes.”

~Theodore Roosevelt

13.) “To impose taxes when the public exigencies require them is an obligation of the most sacred character, especially with a free people.”

~James Monroe

14.) “The supreme duty of the Nation is the conservation of human resources through an enlightened measure of social and industrial justice. We pledge ourselves to work unceasingly in State and Nation for … the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use.”

~Theodore Roosevelt

15.) “The laboring classes constitute the main part of our population. They should be protected in their efforts peaceably to assert their rights when endangered by aggregated capital, and all statutes on this subject should recognize the care of the State for honest toil, and be framed with a view of improving the condition of the workingman.”

~Grover Cleveland

16.) “It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.”

~Theodore Roosevelt

17.) “Today’s so-called ‘conservatives’ don’t even know what the word means. They think I’ve turned liberal because I believe a woman has a right to an abortion. That’s a decision that’s up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders or the Religious Right. It’s not a conservative issue at all.”

~Barry Goldwater

18.) “The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

~Thomas Jefferson

19.) “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

20.) “Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.”

~John F. Kennedy

21.) “America was established not to create wealth but to realize a vision, to realize an ideal – to discover and maintain liberty among men.”

~Woodrow Wilson

22.) “If capitalism is fair then unionism must be. If men have a right to capitalize their ideas and the resources of their country, then that implies the right of men to capitalize their labor.”

~ Frank Lloyd Wright

23.) “I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education.”

~Thomas Jefferson

24.) “While I am a great believer in the free enterprise system and all that it entails, I am an even stronger believer in the right of our people to live in a clean and pollution-free environment.”

~Barry Goldwater

25.) “Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.”

~Hubert Humphrey

26.) “In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up or else all go down as one people.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

27.) “As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.”

~George Washington

28.) “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

29.) “Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost.”

~Ronald Reagan

30.) “Only a fool would try to deprive working men and working women of their right to join the union of their choice.”

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

31.) “We establish no religion in this country. We command no worship. We mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are and must remain separate.”

~Ronald Reagan

32.) “Taxes, after all, are dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

33.) “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

~Dwight Eisenhower

34.) “The Social Security Act offers to all our citizens a workable and working method of meeting urgent present needs and of forestalling future need. It utilizes the familiar machinery of our Federal-State government to promote the common welfare and the economic stability of the Nation.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

35.) “Few nations do more than the United States to assist their least fortunate citizens–to make certain that no child, no elderly or handicapped citizen, no family in any circumstances in any State, is left without the essential needs for a decent and healthy existence. In too few nations, I might add, are the people aware of the progressive strides this country has taken in demonstrating the humanitarian side of freedom. Our record is a proud one–and it sharply refutes those who accuse us of thinking only in the materialistic terms of cash registers and calculating machines.”

~John F. Kennedy

36.) “But let us begin. Now the trumpet summons us again – not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need – not as a call to battle, though embattled we are – but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”- a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.”

~John F. Kennedy

37.) “We all agree that neither the Government nor political parties ought to interfere with religious sects. It is equally true that religious sects ought not to interfere with the Government or with political parties. We believe that the cause of good government and the cause of religion suffer by all such interference.”

~Rutherford B. Hayes

38.) “The divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a tax upon the whole community.”

~James A. Garfield

39.) “You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.”

~Harry S. Truman

40.) “I think that being liberal, in the true sense, is being nondoctrinaire, nondogmatic, noncomitted to a cause but examining each case on its merits. Being left of center is another thing; it’s a political position. I think most newspapermen by definition have to be liberal; if they’re not liberal, by my definition of it, then they can hardly be good newspapermen.”

~Walter Cronkite

41.) “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level – I mean the wages of decent living.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

42.) “Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.”

~John F. Kennedy

43.) “For all my years in public life, I have believed that America must sail toward the shores of liberty and justice for all. There is no end to that journey, only the next great voyage. We know the future will outlast all of us, but I believe that all of us will live on in the future we make.”

~Edward Kennedy

44.) “We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.”

~Dwight D. Eisenhower

45.) “Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our government to give employment to idle men.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

46.) “The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.”

~Noam Chomsky

47.) “The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands – the ownership and control of their livelihoods – are set at naught, we can have neither men’s rights nor women’s rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.”

~Helen Keller

48.) “I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.”

~Oliver Wendell Holmes

49.) “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.”

~Barry Goldwater

50.) “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

~Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

You’ll notice that the quotes by American politicians were not solely from one end of the spectrum. Quotes from Democrats and Republicans were included.

There are even quotes from our Founding Fathers. Certainly there are more quotes that could be added as is the case with lists of this kind.

But the fact remains that we must remember the words of our past and keep them with us as America carves out its future.

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