I have heard it said we've already done all that which TR's Bullmoose agenda called for -- and to an extent, that's right. Only, since the early 1980s, since Reagan, in fact, we've been steadily UNDOING all that.
Wake up America and learn how to count your own money once again.
No, the former balance we did strike between capital and labor, between laissez faire economics and the public interest -- all that has been overturned by laissez faire corporatists from Reagan to Bush and we are going back to a 19th century model, pre -TR. I am calling for reform to put back into play the balance we had in the post war era up to the Reagan "revolution." That was a far better model of balance than what is going on now.
And the reason is quite simply that both parties are captives of special interests - our entire government is now designed to operate and our tax dollars are collected and spent primarily to benefit private special interests while our troops go without armor, helmets or $20 tourniquets with which to go into combat. We spend more on "national defense" than the entire world combined - but virtually all of the bloated Defense budget is pork to feed the special interest pigs that are eating our lunch.
We need not adopt the specifics of TR's progressive agenda from 1912.
TR's ideas led to social security, medicare, workmen's compensation, child labor laws, and anti-trust enforcement. He wanted complete regulation of our banking system, of corporate finance and corporate behavior.
Had he won in 1912 I feel confident we may well have avoided the Great Depression, for Teddy anticipated it quite clearly in his speech called The New Nationalism and would have enacted just the sort of system that only came into being afterwards to prevent what Teddy said was the unacceptable cycle of American financial panics and depressions caused by laissez faire economics regarding monetary policy.
The specific line items in TR's program are not the point here, do not let the trees blind us and obscure the forest. For example, TR wanted to build a battleship a year, which made sense back then. It was battleship power that won the Spanish American war, that turned the German Kaiser away from invading Venezuela in 1902.
Of course we don't want to build even one battleship -- they were obsolete after air power arose to make them too vulnerable, well before Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 -- which certainly proved the point.
Yes, the specifics of TR's National Progressive Party's platform were indeed written for a very different world but the principles that made it progressive are just as applicable today:
Special interests are not entitled to a single seat in congress, nor a seat on the bench, nor to sit in the White House in secret meetings and dictate to us the price of gas.
Corporations are to serve the public interest or their veils should be pierced and the individuals responsible for their actions must be held personally and financially accountable.
Government must be effective, not bloated by phony programs designed to feed private contractors and drain the budget solely for private gain.
There must be enforcement of all our laws - and independent regulatory agencies of government must not lack for the resources to do an adequate job of it.
Look at the principles, not the line item specifics -- what was TR trying to accomplish?
Read The New Nationalism - a speech where all these principles are laid out clear as day.
Here is where to find the text of TR's New Nationalism:
http://usinfo.state.gov/...
Then let's talk about what our line items would be given those principles.
Some points from that speech and what I think it says to us today:
"We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of property to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of the rights of property as against the rights of men have been pushing their claims too far. The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it."
We need to throw the Abramoff-owned Congressmen out and overturn the system that allows people like that to operate.
"In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. "
What about the increasingly concentrated corporate ownership of the broadcast and print media? Is that in the public interest?
Why do we permit cable companies to charge subscribers money they pay to stations like Fox News whether subscribers watch those channels or not, whether subscribers want those channels in their "packages" or not? Is this in the public interest?
"At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of free men to gain and hold the right of self government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth."
Do we not have enough examples of corrupt corporate greed sucking up federal budget dollars at the expense of the public interest? We can't afford entitlement programs but we can afford corporate welfare?
"this means that our government, national and state, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks today. Every special interest is entitled to justice full, fair, and complete,... For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation."
Much follows from this.. do we know what? Think on that.
Do we not agree that something like ENRON, which cost California alone billions of dollars in unnecessary energy costs, should never have happened?
It isn't enough to send Kenny Boy Lay to jail -- that doesn't feed the bulldog.
Let's get back what they stole.
Teddy thought we eventually will pay a terrible price for our failure to strike a good balance between have and have nots. The terrorism in the world today is an example, even while it is hardly completely our fault. Yet the lack of that balance in many parts of the world leads to instability, revolutionary zeal, and attacks on those justly or unjustly held accountable for that lack of balance. What do we expect when we consume so much of the world's resources while so many do without?
TR said something far sighted that also made me think about those places and those conditions in the world that breed these incomprehensibly fanatical suicide bombers and so-called "insurgents" -- both because it speaks to how our behavior has helped brought those people forth to an extent and also to how careful we need to be in choosing people here at home to fix what's broken, for we could be planting the seeds of yet another era like that I grew up in where American cities where we had what we then called Ghettos erupted in riots and flames and violence every summer:
"If the reactionary man, who thinks of nothing but the rights of property, could have his way, he would bring about a revolution; and one of my chief fears in connection with progress comes because I do not want to see our people, for lack of proper leadership, compelled to follow men whose intentions are excellent, but whose eyes are a little too wild to make it really safe to trust them. "
Look at what Yeats said, for if things truly fly apart and the center cannot hold, "Who knows what rough beast" will "slouch toward Bethlehem to be born?" What kind of messianic leader or leaders will come from our own country to lead waves of unrest, violence and terror as the only response to the crushing burden of disenfranchisement, poverty and ignorance conservative, laissez faire, corrupt corporatism will bring us? What kind of proto-fascist, repressive state totalitarianism will be forced on us to deal with such an actual or even illusory eventuality?
It starts with education, of course, and we're failing.
Here's what TR said about education in that speech:
"we need in our common schools not merely education in book learning, but also practical training for daily life and work"
but we let credit card companies send solicitations to kids in school with no income.
We let banks teach our kids how to get into so much debt they can never get out from under.
We teach everything except what you need to know about being a good citizen, working to make strong communities, staying out of debt, owning a car, a home, insurance, running a household, how to be a good parent.
And then we pay the price for all this and have to clean up the mess made by folks who act like they can't find their rear ends with either hand.
No child left behind? They are all being left behind.
Wake up America, please, before it is too late.