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Tag Archives: stimulus package

Fraternité: Individual Needs and Collective Needs

17 Saturday Sep 2011

Posted by michelinewalker in United States

≈ Comments Off on Fraternité: Individual Needs and Collective Needs

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anti-tax extremism, Bob Schlanger, Canadian boatmen, collective needs, healthy capitalism, individual needs, moderation, Sally Kohn, stimulus package, WordPress

statue 2
 
The Statue of Liberty
(Photo credit: Mrs. Yollis’ Classroom Blog) 
 
 

Liberté Égalité, Fraternité

The tripartite motto of France: liberté, égalité, fraternité started out as bipartite: liberté and égalité.  However, although it lagged behind, it is in no way the lesser third of the motto.

Two days ago, in a blog entitled: “It is the fate of princes to be ill-spoken of for well-doing.”  I suggested that a true democracy demanded equality and that such was also the case with capitalism, as capitalism was originally conceived.  However, I did not make “fraternité” or brotherhood the basis of both a true democracy and healthy capitalism.

Anti-Tax Extremism

Now, if “anti-tax extremism” (Sally Kohn, CNN, September 14th, 2011) militates against both democracy and capitalism, it seems to me that it does so because it encourages runaway individualism, thus negating the importance of collective needs.   For instance, it is legitimate to keep people away from one’s backyard.  But it is also legitimate for people to expect the town or city to keep sidewalks and streets clean.  This is why citizens pay municipal taxes.

Otherwise said, we are all individuals, but we live in a collectivity, hence the importance of brotherhood and the wrongs of ill-conceived and undiluted individualism.  Individualism and collectivism are the two faces of the same coin and any lack of balance between these two jeopardizes a democracy or a republic (France).

Moderation

In Ancient Greece wisdom was moderation and moderation, in the current case, is a middle-course between serving the needs of individuals as well as collective needs.  Problems arise when one goes too far from moderate and reasonable goals.  Extremism must therefore be contained as energetically as terrorism, because terrorism is a violent manifestation of extremism.  As for “anti-tax extremism” (Sally Kohn, CNN, September 14th, 2011), it is unbridled individualism.  It counters the reasonable, the civil and, ultimately, the diplomatic.

John Jacob Astor & the Voyageur

When, after the War of 1812, John Jacob Astor (1763 –1848) was “getting Congress to legislate the North-West Company out of the upper Mississippi Valley,” Ramsay Crooks, his “pupil and successor,” convinced him that “Congress must make an exception in the case of voyageur [Canadian boatmen] when passing a law excluding all foreigners from the American fur trade.”[i]

Crooks also pointed out  that “[i]t will be good policy to admit freely & without the least restraint the Canadian Boatmen.  these [sic] people are indispensable to the successful prosecution of the trade, their places cannot be supplied by Americans, who are for the most part are [sic] too independent to submit quietly top a proper controul [sic], and who can gain any where a subsistence much superior to a man of the interior and although the body of the Yankee can resist as much hardship as any man, tis only in the Canadian we find that the temper of mind, to render him patient docile and perserving [probably persevering].*  It could by that the Canadian boatmen were too “docile,” but they did not misunderstand individualism.

Accountability

The United States is currently experiencing its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, because the previous Republican Administration made injudicious decisions: generous tax cuts for the rich and two unfunded wars.  In other words, Republicans created the economic crisis President Obama is trying to end, and the world remembers.  So the time has come for these hardline Republicans to be held, not entirely, but partly accountable for the harm a Republican administration has caused their nation.

Please note that I am not using the word “punish.”  Punishment is out the question.  Accountability, however, is of a higher and more dignified order.  If these Republicans will not take responsibility for the current state of the US economy and, therefore, not assist President Obama in helping pass the stimulus package their nation requires, the verdict is in.  These hardline Republicans have strayed from a middle-course and, given that the poor and the middle-class suffer, not to mention other economies, one wonders whether or not they have a conscience.

Conclusion

Even anti-tax extremists would fight anti-tax extremism if they could view it as self-serving and as a threat to the health and survival of the nation  as a democracy or res publica, things belonging to the public, including the environment.**

Think about it.

—ooo—

[i] Grace Lee Nute, The Voyageur (St Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1955 [1931], pp. 203-204.

statue 2© Micheline Walker 
17 September 2011
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The Short Term and the Long Term

10 Saturday Sep 2011

Posted by michelinewalker in United States

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Al Gore, democracy, President Lincoln, President Obama's lucidity, putting bread on the table, rescue mission, stimulus package, the world is watching, US Economy, WordPress

Last night, I watched President Obama’s speech and I listened very carefully.

Allow me to underscore the importance of passing the stimulus package that President Obama is recommending and to point out that the funds he requires will be helpful not only in the short term, but also in the long term.  His proposal should be viewed as an investment in the US economy that will benefit future generations.

Let me explain.  If you could prevent the death of the 1,500 or more people who died when the Titanic sank, would you sit in complete inertia or would you enter into a rescue mission even if it meant taking risks?

So it is at present with the United States of America.  President Obama is asking his nation to engage in a rescue mission, in which he is doing his duty as President.  In the short term, approving another stimulus package may, to some, seem ill advised, but it truly isn’t.  This stimulus package is in fact necessary.  For instance, would Americans consider saving money by not providing former President Bush and President Obama with the personal security they will need during this weekend’s commemoration of the brutal events of 9/11.

There will be a cost surely, but protecting Presidents is part of running a nation.  And, as I have noted, one should look not only at the short term issues, but also at the long term benefits of the stimulus package that President Obama is requesting.  The  stimulus package will be an investment in the US economy and, at the moment, the US economy requires the biggest financial boost it has needed since the Great Depression or otherwise face a truly dreadful and unacceptable alternative:  perdition.  In fact, is there an alternative?

Under the previous Republican administration, the US sought “dominance” and now, to quote Al Gore (The Assault on Reason, Penguin Books, p. 160), it must seek the “preeminence” it once had and rally behind its leader.

Make no mistake, the world is watching, particularly China, and the world will not willingly allow the US to disintegrate because some narrow-minded Tea Party members are fabricating electoral opportunities engineered to sabotage President Obama’s upcoming re-election campaign.  The current Republican Congress dallies on passing necessary spending bills, hoping it can impute the harm they are causing on the current administration and, thereby, bring it down at the next election.  That is no way to seek power, if power is the appropriate term, and it will not work.  Not only is the nation watching, but, given new technologies, the world can tell easily and immediately that the Tea Party is obviously playing silly and frivolous Nixonian games.

In fact, as I have written in a previous blog, if the world still has any confidence in the United States, it is largely because the current administration can be trusted.  The world has little regard for the likes of Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Arianna Huffington, Ann Coulter and their ilk.  They and other hardline Republicans are being ridiculed everywhere, except within the narrow confines of their dogmatic meeting places.

The world knows, in other words, that a previous administration dipped into the average American’s purse and that, when there was no money left, it made a hole in the bottom of the purse.  And the world also knows there was no need for two wars during which the United States of America saw fit to torture prisoners, in blatant violation of the Geneva Convention.  Most of the prisoners it tortured were apparently innocent of any wrongdoing.

There are times when Presidents must take extraordinary actions.  But former President Bush should have known “just how far one can go too far” (Jean Cocteau, quoted in a previous blog).  With all due respect, former President Bush went too far.

However, let former President Bush live out his retirement in comfort and dignity.  9/11 led to a great many short-sighted actions.  It was a horrible and destabilizing event.  But there were consequences, and one should think of the consequences.  As a result of the former President’s actions, America now has a staggering national debt.  Nevertheless, allowing this debt to impede proper stewardship in Washington would be injudicious, and not mildly so, but in the extreme.

Why should the current administration not do its work because a previous administration blatantly misappropriated the Clinton surplus it had inherited?  The stimulus the current administration is asking for is money needed to provide the services that the nation needs.  It is not money the current administration will use recklessly.  It is money needed to run a country, in other words, the money needed to put food on the table of American families, not only now but, hopefully, for a very long time:  i.e. the long term.

Therefore, please think of the long-term benefits of investing in the United States of America’s economy and pass this stimulus bill.  And also pass an extension of the Transportation Bill as well as an extension of unemployment benefits.

There are some fine Republican representatives.  Actually, I saw one rise and applaud during the President’s address, but there were far too many, the majority, who sat looking like wax museum versions of themselves.  The world saw these lifeless individuals, but it has been reassured that the President will now go to the people and the people need jobs and stability.  They will listen intently to him.

Democracy is not an easy form of government.  It requires vigilant and informed citizenship.  It requires citizens who will take their fate into their own hands and no longer elect into office representatives who do not care about the nation, self-serving representatives.  There has to be change and change there will be.

Let me quote Mr Gore once again.  Al Gore writes that “[w]hen Lincoln declared at the time of our [the fledging nation] greatest crisis that the ultimate question being decided in the Civil War was ‘whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.’ (p. 159)”

President Abraham Lincoln, writes Gore, was “not only saving our Union, but also recognizing the fact that democracies are rare in history.  And when they fail […] what emerges in their place is another strong-man regime. (p. 160)”  Make it official:  the Civil War is over, there is no slavery nor segregation, the United States is leaving Iraq responsibly, and the United States has elected to the Presidency a gentleman who did not once look at notes when he addressed the nation?  Try it yourself.  President Obama’s lucidity is amazing.

In the short term, the amount of stimulus money the current administration requires to save the nation may seem high.  But in the long term, that amount of money will seem much smaller. History will put the stimulus package in the context that will give it its proper dimensions, and give it sense.

A good nation, the most powerful nation on earth, has to have a soul, a conscience, and must, therefore, ensure the country is operative.

September 9, 2011

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