Archive for the ‘Progressives’ Category

Letter: Moderates, progressives must fight Trump – NorthJersey.com

Subscribe today for full access on your desktop, tablet, and mobile device.

Let friends in your social network know what you are reading about

Moderate Trump voters and progressives must join to fight the president.

Try Another

Audio CAPTCHA

Image CAPTCHA

Help

CancelSend

A link has been sent to your friend's email address.

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

NorthJersey Published 9:32 a.m. ET Aug. 18, 2017

President Donald Trump(Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

After Novembers election, like many progressive Americans, I spent time trying to understand how voters could see fit to elect a man like Donald Trump into office. While I continue to believe his candidacy was gravely flawed, Ive come to understand that distrust of dysfunctional establishment politics, dismay of a sprawling bureaucracy and desire for a shake-up, ultimately led to his election.

These grievances are real. I believe many including myself have not taken American disaffection seriously enough; that must change.

While these issues are valid, I believe it is clearly time for reasonable Americans to end their support for this particular experiment. We have been subject to deliberate and persistent lies, shunning of scientific fact, vilification of independent news media and a reckless approach towards a deranged nuclear adversary.

Perhaps more alarmingly, our current president has made it abundantly clear he believes racism is to be tolerated, if not celebrated. Pre-election racist stunts like perpetuating the birther movement and branding Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals have given way to unwavering hateful rhetoric and policy since his swearing-in. This hate has the potential to do long lasting harm to our civil society.

I understand it is not easy to admit a mistake, especially in the face of admonition. Regardless, our country needs conservatives and moderates to disavow this malicious leader while progressives welcome them back with open arms and without rebuke.

On the campaign trail Trump said, Im gonna bring people together; you watch.. Lets prove him right.

Eric Fuhrman

Ramsey, Aug. 16

Read or Share this story: https://njersy.co/2xaPrPD

View post:
Letter: Moderates, progressives must fight Trump - NorthJersey.com

Make America Safe Again – HuffPost

Through six months of Donald Trump the progressive resistance has been united by opposition to his policies. The good news is that we have stopped his legislative program. The bad news is that most Americans don't understand what progressives stand for, other than opposing Trump. Now's the time to bring forward an agenda that emphasizes safety.

During the next six months, Trump won't change. He'll continue to lie, bloviate, and feather his own nest. His racism and resentment will become more obvious. And congressional Republicans will careen from issue to issue without challenging Trump or accomplishing anything of significance.

This six-month period provides a golden opportunity for progressives and Democrats, in general, to tell voters what they stand for. So far, the results have been underwhelming.

Democrats have responded with "A Better Deal." (https://democrats.senate.gov/abetterdeal/#.WZGuAHeGOE0) Washington Progressives have their own "Progressive Agenda." (http://www.21stcenturydems.org/index/the-progressive-agenda-in-13-steps/#.WZGiCHeGOE3) Both documents are too complicated. They follow the losing HRC prescription: "when in doubt hand the voter a policy paper."

An affective progressive agenda should contain only a handful of objectives. And, hopefully, one or two memorable phrases.

Affordable Healthcare: The obvious place for progressives to begin is with healthcare. The resistance has beaten back Republican attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Progressives believe in strengthening Obamacare and expanding Medicaid into the 19 states that do not have it.

We should aim higher. Progressives should advocate Medicare for All; a concept easy to remember. We stand for safety through the democratizationof healthcare.

Economic Equality:Most Americans believe the system is rigged. 61 percent feel "the country is headed in the wrong direction." Voters continue to rank "the economy" as the number one problem.

While the stock market is booming and total employment is at record levels, most Americans do not believe capitalism is working for them. Consumer-credit is at near-record levels; Americans carry more than $1 trillion in credit-card debt.

The Progressive Agenda offers a thirteen-point proposal "to restore an economy that works for working Americans. While they are all good important, progressives need to identify one or two memorable ideas that differentiate them from Republicans. Two suggestions:

Feature the slogan: Give America a raise. The Progressive Agenda suggests: "Raise the federal minimum wage, so that it reaches $15/hour, while indexing it to inflation." Republicans have shown no interest in this measure but it's one that resonates with most voters. (A recent poll [http://thehill.com/homenews/335837-poll-bipartisan-majority-supports-raising-minimum-wage] found that 74 percent of respondents favored raising the minimum wage.) Safety through better wages.

The second suggestion is adopt the slogan: Make Capitalism work for everyone. One of the unnoticed sections of "A Better Deal" is the section on "Cracking Down on Corporate Monopolies" (https://democrats.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/A-Better-Deal-on-Competition-and-Costs-1.pdf) which states:

This break up monopolies stancerepresents a dramatic change from previous Democratic platforms. It differentiates progressives from Republicans and is an issue that resonates with voters in general -- for example, a 2015 poll found that a majority of Americans favored breaking up the largest financial institutions.

Of course there are many other issues that could be featured in a progressive agenda; among these are climate change, immigration, reproductive rights, and criminal justice to mention only a few. Rather than add another issue to the three already mentioned, it would be more productive for the progressive agenda to focus on values.

The place to start is withsafety.

America is a great country but American democracy is not working for everyone. We need look no farther than the Charlottesville violence, or the number of voters that believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, to understand that Americans are not satisfied with the status quo.

Donald Trump won the presidency because his slogan, "make America great again," resonated with more voters than did Hillary Clinton's slogan, "stronger together."

Trump's slogan, "make America great again," was interpreted by many of his supporters as, "let's return to the fifties when America was number one in the world and white men called all the shots." Clinton's tepid slogan was interpreted as "let's keep doing what Obama has been doing," an endorsement of the status quo.

Progressives need an effective alternative to "make America great again." Make America safe again. This reflects the reality that because of economic inequality and Donald Trump, most Americans are fearful. They fear for the future because the economy is not working for them and they do not have adequate healthcare, education, or housing. Many Americans fear for the future because of climate change.

In addition, the Charlottesville violence reminds us that many Americans are fearful because of the color of their skin, or their gender/sexual orientation, or their religion or country of origin. Donald Trump has brought bigotry and hate into the mainstream. He has legitimized the politics of resentment.

It's time for progressives to stand up to Trump's hate-filled conduct and proclaim to all Americans:We will make America safe again.

The Morning Email

Wake up to the day's most important news.

See the article here:
Make America Safe Again - HuffPost

Victor Davis Hanson: Progressives overlook faults of today’s tycoons – The Columbus Dispatch

Progressives used to pressure U.S. corporations to cut back on outsourcing and on the tactic of building their products abroad to take advantage of inexpensive foreign workers.

During the 2012 election, President Obama attacked Mitt Romney as a potential illiberal "outsourcer in chief" for investing in companies that went overseas in search of cheap labor.

Yet most of the computers and smartphones sold by Silicon Valley companies are still being built abroad to mostly silence from progressive watchdogs.

In the case of the cobalt mining that is necessary for the production of lithium-ion batteries in electric cars, thousands of child laborers in Southern Africa are worked to exhaustion.

In the 1960s, campuses boycotted grapes to support Cesar Chavez's unionization of farm workers. Yet it is unlikely that there will be any effort to boycott tech companies that use lithium-ion batteries produced from African-mined cobalt.

Progressives demand higher taxes on the wealthy. They traditionally argue that tax gimmicks and loopholes are threats to the republic.

Yet few seem to care that West Coast conglomerates such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Starbucks filtered hundreds of billions in global profits through tax havens such as Bermuda, shorting the United States billions of dollars in income taxes.

The progressive movement took hold in the late 19th century to "trust-bust," or break up corporations that had cornered the markets in banking, oil, steel and railroads. Such supposedly foul play had inordinately enriched "robber baron" buccaneers such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan.

Yet today, the riches of multibillionaires dwarf the wealth of their 19th-century predecessors.

Facebook, with 2 billion monthly global users, has now effectively cornered social media.

Google has monopolized Internet searches, and modulates users' search results to accommodate its own business profiteering.

Amazon is America's new octopus. Its growing tentacles incorporate not just online sales but also media and food retailing.

Yet there are no modern-day progressive muckrakers in the spirit of Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris and Lincoln Steffens, warning of the dangers of techie monopolies or the astronomical accumulation of wealth. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook are worth nearly $1 trillion each.

In the Obama era, the nation received all sorts of progressive lectures on the downsides of being super-rich.

Obama remonstrated about spreading the wealth, knowing when not to profit and realizing when one has made enough money. He declared that entrepreneurs did not build their own businesses without government help.

Yet such sermonizing never seemed to include Facebook, Starbucks or Amazon.

The tech and social-media industries pride themselves on their counterculture transparency, their informality and their 1960s-like allegiance to free thought and free speech. Yet Google just fired one of its engineers for simply questioning the company line that sexual discrimination and bias alone account for the dearth of female Silicon Valley engineers.

What followed were not voices of protest. Instead, Google-instilled fear and silence ensued, in the fashion of George Orwell's "1984."

On matters such as avoiding unionization, driving up housing prices, snagging crony-capitalist subsidies from the government and ignoring the effects of products on public safety (such as texting while driving), Silicon Valley is about as reactionary as they come.

Why, then, do these companies earn a pass from hypercritical progressives?

Answer: Their executives have taken out postmodern insurance policies.

The new elite are overwhelmingly left-wing. They head off criticism by investing mostly in the Democratic Party, the traditional font of social and political criticism of corporate wealth.

In 2012, for example, Obama won Silicon Valley by more than 40 percentage points. Of the political donations to presidential candidates that year from employees at Google and Apple, more than 90 percent went to Obama.

One of the legacies of the Obama era was the triumph of green advocacy and identity politics over class.

No one has grasped that reality better that the new billionaire barons of the West Coast. As long as they appeared cool, as they long as they gave lavishly to left-wing candidates, and as long as they mouthed liberal platitudes on global warming, gay marriage, abortion and identity politics, they earned exemption from progressive scorn.

The result was that they outsourced, offshored, monopolized, censored and made billions without much fear of media muckraking, trust-busting politicians, unionizing activists or diversity lawsuits.

Hip billionaire corporatism is one of the strangest progressive hypocrisies of our times.

Victor Davis Hanson is a historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

author@victorhanson.com

Read the original here:
Victor Davis Hanson: Progressives overlook faults of today's tycoons - The Columbus Dispatch

What’s So Generous about Spending Other People’s Money? – National Review

The popularity of Democratic Socialism is rising, and more and more people are viewing it as a generous, compassionate alternative to cruelty of capitalism.

As The Week notes, membership in Democratic Socialists of America has more than tripled in the past year, and last weeks conference in Chicago was by far the largest ever. There are many reasons for this and the likability of Bernie Sanders, especially compared withthe likability of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, is certainly part of it.

But another part is the way that progressives routinely portray their economic platform as being morally superior. The holier-than-thou branding is everywhere; just think about how often progressives accuse economic conservatives of wanting to kill sick people, just because they believe that the free market can solve problems. The ultra-liberal are the generous ones, the ones who want to give you things like health care. The conservatives are the mean, old ogres who want to take those things away.

The popularity of the Democratic Socialists seems to suggest that these kinds of tactics are working, and I have just one question: Just how in the hell do so many people seem to believe that its generous to spend other peoples money?

Let me clear this up for the people who dont seem to understand: Progressive politicians are not people who are going to give you health care, because in order to give something, then it has to be yours to give awayin the first place. Think about it: If your boyfriend were to surprise you with dinner and a present, then youd probably be quite happy and thank him for giving you those things. But if you found out that your boyfriend had actually paid for those things using your credit card? Well, then youd probably think much less of it, and maybe youd remind him that the only way that that could count as giving would be if he were nineand you were his mother. People who advocate for progressive politicians are not advocating gratitude; theyre advocating for big government, plain and simple.

Believing in the ability of big government to solve problems doesnt make you any better than the people who believe in shrinking government to solve them; it just means that you have a different view of economics. And the politicians who promise to give you health care, welfare, and other benefits in exchange for votes arent really promising to give those things at all; theyre promising to take resources from others in order to fulfill their promises, without ever having to feel the pinch themselves.

Its going to be incredibly difficult to find solutions to these sorts of problems unless we all acknowledge that everyone is, in fact, looking for them. There isnt just one ideological group who wants people to be healthy and prosperous; literally anyone who is not a sociopath wants that. Its just that one group believes that the best way to do that is to take other peoples money and let the government distribute it. Democratic Socialism is not generosity, its a political view and one that has historically had outcomes more despicable than heartwarming.

READ MORE: Jeff Sessions Threatening Reporters is Not OK So, Were Whipping Water into Journalists Faces Now? Chicago Students Will Need Govt. Approval Before Graduating

Katherine Timpf is a National Review Online reporter.

See the article here:
What's So Generous about Spending Other People's Money? - National Review

Progressives Use Violence to Whitewash History – Patriot Post

Louis DeBroux Aug. 16, 2017

The awful violence this past weekend in Charlottesville is the inevitable culmination of the Lefts goal of achieving the complete eradication of opposing viewpoints. Whitewashing history (pardon the pun) and engaging in political violence are tools to that end.

As the Dallas Morning News observantly noted, History is not easily compartmentalized. It isnt simply right versus wrong, black versus white, or blue versus gray. But theres an entire crowd of folks who want to do just that because they believe it is all those things, and most egregiously, they believe there is an individual right for all to go through life unoffended.

Dr. Lee Cheek, senior fellow of the Alexander Hamilton Institute, concurred, noting, The events in Charlottesville have no connection to understanding the political traditions of the American South, and everything to do with battles among professional ideologues without any attachment or knowledge of the historical situation.

Millions of Southerners are proud of their heritage for reasons that have nothing to do with slavery. They revere Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who stated in 1856, five years before the commencement of the War Between the States, Slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country. Lee is heralded as a brilliant military strategist who served America faithfully in the Mexican War and as Superintendent of West Point. However, when called upon by President Abraham Lincoln to lead Union forces against the seceding South, he declined, incapable of bearing arms against his family, friends and home state. He accepted the commission as commander of Confederate forces in order to defend his beloved state of Virginia. Following the war, Lee worked tirelessly to convince his fellow Southerners to seek peace and reconciliation.

None of this matters to the Left, though. There is no understanding of the complexities of history, no appreciation for context. Slavery has existed throughout human history, regardless of color or nationality. In fact, there are more people enslaved worldwide today than ever before, including slavery practiced by Muslims. Mohammad owned slaves. One wonders if American progressives will now call for banning all things Islamic.

Indeed, how far will this go? Historical monuments of the Confederacy are being removed in Memphis, Lexington, Baltimore, New Orleans and elsewhere to appease angry leftists. These fascists even desecrated an Atlanta monument dedicated to unity and reconciliation.

Violent leftists have rioted in recent years in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Chicago, Ferguson, Charlotte, Berkeley, DC, Oakland and other cities, destroying businesses, setting cars on fire, and dragging people from their cars and beating them, declaring their right to do so because of past and current injustices such as hearing words they dont like.

As detestable as the KKK and white supremacists are, they have a right to speak and to peaceably assemble. Our First Amendment was written specifically to protect unpopular speech, and we show our own intolerance by silencing those with whom we disagree. The violence in Charlottesville would not likely have occurred had not the leftist agitators shown up looking to pick a fight, though the murderous Nazi thug is obviously responsible for his own actions.

So again we ask, how far does this go?

Do we eliminate all monuments to Democrat/progressive hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who opposed anti-lynching legislation, turned a blind eye to the Nazi eradication of Jews, and imprisoned 100,000 Japanese-Americans? What about progressive icon and racist Woodrow Wilson, who re-segregated the federal workforce?

Progressives have already declared war on Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, who owned slaves but sought to prohibit slavery in the newly formed nation. They now call for taking down the Jefferson Memorial.

Even Lincoln, author of the Emancipation Proclamation, is not immune to leftist hatred. The Lincoln Memorial was desecrated Tuesday. Is that because Lincoln, a staunch opponent of slavery, was willing to save it in order to preserve the Union, or because he also believed in the superiority of the white race?

If we truly want to rid our nation of its shameful history regarding racism, lets start by abolishing the racist Democrat Party. After all, it was the Democrats who waged war to preserve slavery, founded the KKK, enacted Jim Crow laws, and fought against Republican efforts to pass the Civil Rights Act.

Democrat President Andrew Jackson owned slaves and signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

It was Harry Truman who wrote to his wife, I think one man is just as good as another so long as hes not a ner or a Chinaman.

It was the Democrat Party that praised Senator and former KKK Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd until his death a few years ago, a man who filibustered the Civil Rights Act for 14 hours. It was Lyndon Johnson, a virulent racist but a political pragmatist, who told two Southern Democrat governors his signing of the Civil Rights Act would have those ners voting Democrat for 200 years. And its Johnsons Great Society that has yielded todays urban poverty plantations, where blacks slaughter other blacks without too much notice from the Leftmedia.

What about Bill Clinton, whining of the upstart Obama, A few years ago, this guy would have been carrying our bags? Or the absolute devotion of Democrats to Planned Parenthood, founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger for the express purpose of exterminating blacks through abortion and sterilization? According to Tuskegee University, the KKK lynched 3,446 blacks in 86 years. Planned Parenthood is a white supremacists dream, killing more blacks in two weeks than the KKK killed in a century. And the Democrat Party fights to ensure that $500 million a year in taxpayer funds is funneled to Planned Parenthood to kill all of those black babies.

Surely we could at least agree to remove the Seattle monument to Vladimir Lenin? Anyone? Anyone?

How far do we go? Are we willing to engage in violence and oppression of opposing viewpoints? If so, then Charlottesville will only be the beginning.

Footnote: Longtime friend of The Patriot Post, distinguished George Mason University professor Walter Williams, has issued erudite warnings about the consequences of historical ignorance here and here, including the removal of historic markers to Confederate generals and the rewriting American history.

Read the original here:
Progressives Use Violence to Whitewash History - Patriot Post