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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DOUG H who wrote (274465)	7/13/2002 6:56:57 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Doug, Get a grip. Face the fact that your President does not have your best interests at heart. He wants to make sure the financial markets remain broken, and that the trust that so many millions put into the markets will remain shattered as long as he's in office. It's time for a change, don't you think? Time for more honesty in our dealings? -R.

To: DOUG H who wrote (274465)	7/13/2002 2:45:47 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 769670

Nice post! Inserting: socialist Wayne Morse: into Google, it is totally interesting what one finds....this was one find, and there is a totally dispicable website listed as well...Things RD seems to believe in....(AmericanStateTerrorism)...but here is one....The LEFT ought to be soooooooooooo proud of these people..............NOT! Fighting Bob La Follette by John Nichols The Progressive magazine, January 1999 thirdworldtraveler.com In March 25, 1921, at the age of sixty-five, Robert M. La Follette Sr. took the greatest risk of his long political career. Four years after he chose to lead the Congressional opposition to World War I, La Follette was still condemned in Washington and in his native state of Wisconsin as a traitor or-at best-an old man whose political instincts had finally failed him. But La Follette was not ready to surrender the U.S. Senate seat he had held since leaving Wisconsin's governorship in 1906. He wanted to return to Washington to do battle once more against what he perceived to be the twin evils of the still young century: corporate monopoly at home and imperialism abroad. The reelection campaign that loomed just a year off would be difficult, he was told, perhaps even impossible. Old alliances had been strained by La Follette's lonely refusal to join in the war cries of 1917 and 1918. To rebuild them, the Senator's aides warned, he would have to abandon his continued calls for investigations of war profiteers and his passionate defense of socialist Eugene Victor Debs and others who had been jailed in the postwar Red Scare. The place to backpedal, La Follette was told, would be in a speech before the crowded Wisconsin Assembly chamber in Madison. Moments before the white-haired Senator climbed to the podium on that cold March day, he was warned one last time by his aides to deliver a moderate address, to apply balm to the still-open wounds of the previous years, and, above all, to avoid mention of the war and his opposition to it. La Follette began his speech with the formalities of the day, acknowledging old supporters and recognizing that this was a pivotal moment for him politically. Then, suddenly, La Follette pounded the lectern. "I am going to be a candidate for reelection to the United States Senate," he declared, as the room shook with the thunder of a mighty orator reaching full force. Stretching a clenched fist into the air, La Follette bellowed: "I do not want the vote of a single citizen under any misapprehension of where I stand: I would not change my record on the war for that of any man, living or dead." The crowd sat in stunned silence for a moment before erupting into thunderous applause. Even his critics could not resist the courage of the man; indeed, one of his bitterest foes stood at the back of the hall, with tears running down his cheeks, and told a reporter: "I hate the son of a bitch. But, my God, what guts he's got." This was the La Follette that his friend Emma Goldman referred to lovingly as "the finest, most inconsistent anarchist" of his time. This was the man so fierce in his convictions that he would risk consignment to political oblivion rather than abandon an unpopular position. The antithesis of the elected officials whose compromises characterize our contemporary condition, La Follette genuinely believed that the inheritors of America's revolutionary tradition would, if given the truth, opt not for moderation but for the most radical of solutions. It was this militant faith in the people that enabled him to win reelection to the Senate in 1922 by an overwhelming margin. And this faith guided the Midwestern populist as he embarked on the most successful left-wing Presidential campaign in American history. Running with the support of the Socialist Party, African Americans, women, organized labor, and farmers, La Follette terrified the established economic, political, and media order, which warned that his election would bring chaos. And La Follette gave them reason to fear. His Progressive Party platform called for government takeover of the railroads, elimination of private utilities, easier credit for farmers, the outlawing of child labor, the right of workers to organize unions, increased protection of civil liberties, an end to U.S. imperialism in Latin America, and a plebiscite before any President could again lead the nation into war. Campaigning for the Presidency on a pledge to "break the combined power of the private monopoly system over the political and economic life of the American people" and denouncing, in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan's resurgence, "any discrimination between races, classes, and creeds," La Follette told his followers: "Free men of every generation must combat renewed efforts of organized force and greed to destroy liberty." La Follette's 1924 crusade won almost five million votes-more than five times the highest previous total for a candidate endorsed by the Socialists. He carried Wisconsin, ran second in eleven Western states, and swept working-class Jewish and Italian wards of New York and other major cities-proving that a rural-urban populist coalition could, indeed, be forged. La Follette declared in a post-campaign article for the national publication he edited, La Follette's Weekly, which would soon be renamed The Progressive, that, while threats and intimidation had weakened the 1924 drive, "the Progressives will close ranks for the next battle." Though he did not live to see it, La Follette would within a decade be proven right. The 1924 campaign laid the groundwork for the resurgence of left-wing populist movements across the upper Midwest - the Non-Partisan League of North Dakota, the Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota, and the Progressive Party of Wisconsin. It spurred labor-based independent political action by New York's American Labor Party and other groupings. And La Follette gave inspiration, as well, to those who swung the Democratic Party to the left in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Harold Ickes Sr., a key aide to La Follette's 1924 campaign, would become an architect of the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, in the words of historian Bernard Weisberger, "completed the elder La Follette's work." Roosevelt acknowledged the inspiration of La Follette. But the Wisconsinite's truest heirs were of a more radical bent-people like his sons, Bob Jr. and Phil, who served respectively as U.S. Senator from Wisconsin and governor of the state; Minnesota's Floyd Olson, who was very possibly the most radical figure ever to govern an American state; author Upton Sinclair, whose 1934 foray into gubernatorial politics borrowed heavily from La Follette's 1924 platform and promised to "end poverty in California"; and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a veteran La Follette partisan who nominated the Senator for President in 1924 with the announcement that "I speak for Avenue A and 116th Street, instead of Broad and Wall." In 1941, when U.S. Representative Jeannette Rankin, Republican of Montana, the first woman elected to the House of Representatives, cast the sole vote against entering World War II, she recalled La Follette's lonely opposition to the First World War. And a full four decades after La Follette's death, the two U.S. Senate votes against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that committed the United States to all-out war in Vietnam came from Oregon's Wayne Morse, a Wisconsin native who had imbibed La Follette's anti-imperialism as a youth, and Alaska's Ernest Gruening, who had served as spokesman for La Follette's 1924 campaign. In the Upper Midwest, La Follette's legacy lives on. As recently as the fall of 1998, Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold made that legacy a centerpiece of his reelection campaign against a significantly better-financed Republican challenger. Feingold, who traces his role as the Senate's leading foe of special interests to his own father's youthful involvement with the Progressive Movement, told supporters on the night of his reelection: "Now we have the chance, 100 years after the great Fighting Bob La Follette, to send a message to Washington.... Out of the Upper Midwest will come political reform, will come political change, will come the principle of one person/one vote once again." What is it about La Follette that has made him such an enduring figure? It comes down to a single idea: America, La Follette argued throughout his political life, cannot live up to its ideals so long as militarism and corporate power warp our democracy. Steeped in the ideals of Jefferson and Lincoln, La Follette developed his revulsion for corporate capital as a young man-taking his cue from Edward Ryan, a fiery Irish radical who rose to the position of chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court during the great populist upsurge of the 1870s. When Ryan spoke to University of Wisconsin students in 1873, young Robert M. La Follette heard the jurist declare: "There is looming up a dark new power.... The enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marking, not for economic conquest only, but for political power. For the first time in our politics, money is taking the field of organized power. The question will arise, and arise in your day though perhaps not fully in mine: 'Which shall rule-wealth or man? Which shall lead-money or intellect? Who shall fill public stations-educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate wealth?"' Those words served as La Follette's mantra as he embarked on a career that would take him to Congress, the governorship of Wisconsin, and the U.S. Senate. La Follette's election as governor came after a decade-long crusade against the timber barons and railroad interests that dominated his own Republican Party. When he took office, he pledged to end the rule of "corporation agents and representatives of the machine," who had "moved upon the capitol." Declaring that "the spirit of democracy is abroad in the land," La Follette successfully pushed the legislature to double taxes on the railroads, to break up monopolies, to preserve the state's forests, to protect labor rights, to defend the interests of small farmers, to regulate lobbying, to end patronage politics, and to weaken the grip of political bosses by creating an open primary system. By the time he was elevated to the U.S. Senate in 1906, La Follette was already a national figure. He soon emerged as a leader of the Senate's burgeoning progressive camp and by 1912 was a serious contender for the Republican Party's Presidential nomination. The fight for the nomination exposed divisions within the progressive camp, however, as La Follette's more radical followers battled supporters of a more centrist reformer who also claimed the progressive mantle: former President Teddy Roosevelt. The Roosevelt/La Follette split grew more pronounced five years later, as the nation prepared to enter World War I. While Roosevelt urged U.S. participation in the war-the position supported by the nation's political establishment-La Follette emerged as the leading foe of a war he described as a scheme to line the pockets of the corporations he had fought so bitterly as a governor and Senator. La Follette personally held up the declaration of war for twenty-four hours by refusing unanimous consent to Senate resolutions. From the Senate floor, La Follette argued: "We should not seek [to] inflame the mind of our people by half truths into the frenzy of war." He painted the impending conflict as a war that would benefit the wealthy of the world but not the workers, who would have to fight it. And he warned: "The poor . . . who are always the ones called upon to rot in the trenches have no organized power.... But oh, Mr. President, at some time they will be heard.... There will come an awakening. They will have their day, and they will be heard." Those words sounded treasonous to some, and La Follette's constant efforts to expose war profiteers only heightened the attacks upon him. He was targeted for censure by the Senate, portrayed in Life magazine as a stooge of the German Kaiser, and denounced by virtually the entire media establishment of the nation-including the Boston Evening Transcript, which announced, "Henceforth he is the Man without a Country." As mounting domestic oppression sent more and more anti-war activists to jail, La Follette emerged as their defender, berating his colleagues with the charge that "Never in all my many years' experience in the House and in the Senate have I heard so much democracy preached and so little practiced as during the last few months." His critics declared that La Follette would never again be a viable contender for public office. And yet, less than four years after the Armistice, running on a platform that explicitly recounted his opposition to the war and his opposition to imperialism, La Follette won reelection with more than 70 percent of the vote in Wisconsin. And two years later, he earned one out of every six votes cast for the Presidency of the United States. The 1924 Presidential campaign was the last for La Follette. Within a year, he was dead. Not long after the Senator's passing, my great-grandfather and the other members of the Blue River, Wisconsin, village board renamed one of the handful of streets in their tiny community "La Follette." I make it a point to walk that street every year. I go not merely to honor the most courageous political leader this nation has ever produced, nor even to recognize the movement that my great-grandfather and so many like him saw as the way to reclaim democracy for the people. As one who has reported for too many years on too many political compromises, I go because I know that, more than any other leader in American history, La Follette understood this country's promise. And I go because I know that, so long as we keep his vision alive, that promise may yet be kept.

To: DOUG H who wrote (274465)	7/13/2002 2:48:57 PM
From: KLP	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

And here's another "socialist" history that his " saint wayne morse" believed in.... LID On September 12, 1905, a small group of socialists (under the leadership of Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Clarence Darrow) met at Pecks Restaurant in NY City. Out of this meeting came the Intercollegiate Socialist Society - although the Fabians of England had urged that the word socialist be kept out of view. The Intercollegiate Socialist Society was founded for the stated purpose of "promoting an intelligent interest in socialism among college men and women...and the encouragement of all legitimate endeavors to awaken an interest in socialism among the educated men and women of the country." (1,4) The Rand School of Social Science, formed by Fabian socialists, became the NY headquarters of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Harvard was selected as the primary center for nourishing and spreading the virus of socialism. By 1915, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society had chapters on 60 college campuses. (1) The 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia stimulated a ferment of activity among socialists in the United States. Some, like John Reed (Harvard, 1910), joined the Bolshevik movement outright. While some American Fabians retained their cover of respectability and sympathized secretly with the Bolsheviks, others abandoned deception, and helped form the communist party of the United States (September, 1919). The socialist bloodbath in Russia, and the activities of American socialists, stirred such angry reaction in the United States that American Fabians tardily took the advice of their British friends - to push the word socialist into the background. In 1921, the ntercollegiate Socialist Society became the League for Industrial Democracy (LID); but its purpose did not change. (4) LID remains the oldest socialist organization in the United States - a parent group of other fronts which have been set up since, spreading the poison of socialism, badly contaminating thought streams of the entire nation. Below are names of a few prominent individuals who are, or were, influential in LID. CFR after a name indicates membership in the Council on Foreign Relations; ADA means membership in Americans for Democratic Action; ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union: Roger N. Baldwin - Founder and head of ACLU Charles A Beard - historian Daniel Bell - labor editor, Fortune John K. Benedict - professor, Union Theological Seminary, CFR Andrew J. Biemiller - former U.S. Representative, founding member of ADA, now AFL-CIO official Carroll Binder - editor of the Minneapolis Tribune Ella Reeves ("mother") Bloor - communist party official (deceased) Ralph J. Bunche - UN Under Secretary General, NAACP official, CFR, ACLU James B. Carey - Secretary/Treasurer, AFL-CIO, ADA founder Everett R. Clinchy - first President, National Conference of Christians and Jews, now head of Conference on World Tensions (World Brotherhood, Inc.), CFR George S. Counts - author, educator Max Danish - editor of Justice, Garment Workers Union Official, ADA founder Babette Deutch - writer, mother of Adam Yarmolinsky John Dewey - "father" of progressive education (deceased) Paul H. Douglas - Democrat Senator from Illinois, former professor at University of Chicago, ADA founder, ACLU David Dubinsky - head of Garment Workers Union, head of NY Liberal Party, ADA founder, CFR W.E.B. DuBois - communist party member, official of NAACP, author (deceased) George Clifton Edwards, Jr., - Judge, Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ADA founder Morris Ernst - chief attorney for ACLU, NAACP official, ADA founder Samuel A. Eliot, Jr. - author, educator James Farmer - head of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) Felix Frankfurter - former Harvard professor, Supreme Court Justice, CFR, ACLU (deceased) Lewis S. Gannett - author, editor of NY Herald-Tribune, NAACP official, CFR Sidney Hook - author, educator Quincy Howe - author, radio commentator Hubert H. Humphrey - Vice President of the United States, founding member of ADA, CFR Jacob K. Javits - Republican senator from NY, ADA, CFR Nicholas Kelley - retired VP of Chrysler Corporation, CFR William H. Kilpatrick - educator (deceased) Freda Kirchwey - publisher of The Nation Corliss Lamont - Franklin Roosevelt's secretary while President Joseph P. Lash - UN correspondent for the New York Post, former intimate of the late Eleanor Roosevelt, ADA founder Harold J. Laski - professor, Harvard University and London School of Economics (deceased) Owen Lattimore - author, educator, alleged communist, CFR Herbert H. Lehman - retired investment banker, former Democrat Governor of NY and former U.S. Senator, ADA founder, NAACP official, CFR, ACLU (deceased) Max Lerner - writer, professor of American Civilization, Brandeis University Alfred Baker Lewis - President of Union Casualty Company, NAACP official Trygve Lie - First UN Secretary-General Walter Lippmann - author, columnist, CFR, ACLU founder Robert Mors Lovett - author, educator Jay Lovestone - founder of U.S. communist party, now International Representative for AFL-CIO George Meany - President, AFL-CIO Wayne Morse - Democrat Senator from Oregon, ADA official Will Maslow - Director, Commission on Law and Social Action, American Jewish Congress Lewis Mumford - author, CFR A. J. Muste - official of National Council of Churches Reinhold Neibuhr - Vice President of Union Theological Seminary, ADA founder, CFR Harry A. Overstreet - author, educator, official of United World Federalists Victor G. Reuther - Assistant to Walter Reuther Walter P. Reuther - President, United Auto Workers, Vice-President of AFL-CIO, ADA founder, official of United World Federalists Eleanor Roosevelt - ADA founder (deceased) Harold O. Rugg - author, educator Stanley Ruttenberg - Director of Research and Education, AFL-CIO William L. Shirer - author, radio commentator, CFR George Harry Soule, Jr. - educator, long-time editor of The New Republic Monroe Sweeland - editor of Oregon Democrat, ADA founder Norman Thomas - long-time head of socialist party Alexander Trachtenberg - communist party official (deceased) Rexford G. Tugwell - Roosevelt "brain-truster" H. Jerry Voorhis - ADA founder, former Democrat Representative in Congress from California, Executive Chairman of Cooperative League of America, United World Federalists member Harry F. Ward - professor emeritus of Union Theological Seminary James Wechsler - editor of New York Post, ADA founder Charles Zimmerman - Vice-President of Garment Workers Union, NAACP official ACLU Having found that Americans could be led to support socialist causes only if socialism were falsely called something else, American socialists created many fronts which appealed to some emotion or prejudice of factional groups in the population. Leadership and tactics of socialist fronts came largely from the parent group, League for Industrial Democracy. For example, Roger N. Baldwin, prominent in LID, was one of the initial founders of a socialist front which ultimately became the American Civil Liberties Union. In a letter to a socialist agitator, Baldwin said: "Do steer away from making it look like a Socialist enterprise....We want also to look [like] patriots in everything we do. We want to get a good lot of flags, talk a good deal about the Constitution and what our forefathers wanted to make of this country, and to show that we are really the folks that really stand for the spirit of our institutions." (1) Formed in the spring of 1917, the Roger Baldwin group was first called American Union Against Militarism. It pretended to be a pacifist organization, devoted to defense of all who objected to the draft during WWI; but, in reality, it was a legal wing of the socialist movement. Jane Addams, Adolph A. Berle, Max Eastman, Norman Thomas, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise were among prominent socialists who joined Roger Baldwin in founding American Union Against Militarism. On November 1, 1917, the organization became the National Civil Liberties Bureau. It had enormous influence during WWI, because: (1) it received support from individuals such as Walter Lippmann, Felix Frankfurter, Frederick Keppel, Colonel Edward Mandel House; and (2) it received money from the Carnegies. (1) On January 12, 1920, the National Civil Liberties Bureau was reorganized as American Civil Liberties Union, under the guidance of Roger N. Baldwin, Felix Frankfurter, Louis F. Batons, William Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Jane Addams, Arthur Garfield Hays, Robert Morss Lovett, A. J. Muste, Norman Thomas, Harold J. Laski and others. (1) Batons, Foster and Flynn were prominent officials of the American communist party. davidicke.net