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Fifty years of my life I spent earning a living in various physical labor intense work, sometimes two even three jobs. I was a boomer who with only a high school equivalent was able to eke out a living. I ate the dirt of the earth to save a little money and buy a little house to live in for the rest of my life .I suffered broken bones and crippling injuries and lived in poverty many years of my life.

For 50 years I paid into Social Security while working with the belief the government was doing the right thing. As I aged and became proficient at my labor, I was able to raise the standard of living for my family and paid higher levels of my income into Social Security.

I am now 64, maimed and crippled for the rest of my life. My bones are weary and I am unable to do the heavy labor anymore

Now, my social Security is 60 percent of my monthly income, and I receive a small pension from 15 years of back breaking work in a steel mill.

The Social Security I paid my whole working life is now coming back to me, and I thank God that our government held to the Constitutional value of “‘promote the general welfare.” I was one of the uneducated masses that worked for the good of the country and family and community and did not understand the need for such a great social justice entitlement. Now, I understand, and the U.S. government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt got something right.

Not one person I have talked to has thought cuts to Social Security is the right way to go.  Social Security is not the problem. Sixty percent of our GDP goes to the military. That is what needs to be cut. Stop the wars and let’s put the warriors to work.

William Krebes
Hobart, Ind.
Retired Steelworker, Local 1014, U.S. Steel Gary Works

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David Woolner
Senior Fellow, Hyde Park Resident Historian, Roosevelt Institute.

With unemployment still hovering at over 9 percent nationwide, and with some economists and historians arguing that the present economic crisis should not be referred to as the “Great Recession,” but as the “Great Depression II,” a good deal of anticipation has arisen over what President Obama will propose in his message to Congress on Thursday. Despite widespread Republican opposition to further government spending, many economists and business leaders — not to mention liberal members of the Democratic Party — argue that what the country desperately needs is another stimulus package. A jobs program could provide hope and relief to the millions of long-term unemployed, restore confidence, and stem the U.S. economy’s steady slide back into recession. Even the ever demure Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, has indicated that “putting people back to work” must be made a priority if the country wishes to avoid long-term damage to the economy. (more…)

Harvey J. Kaye

By Harvey Kaye
Rosenberg Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

This past Saturday, April 2, Florida Republicans launched a six-months-long, seven-city “Greatest Generation Tour” in Pensacola’s Veterans Memorial Park. Declaring their intention to recognize and honor the patriotic sacrifices and achievements of those who served the country in World War II—and noting that more than 1,000 of those veterans are passing away each day—state GOP spokesperson Don Salter stated that “we need to show our appreciation before it’s too late.”

Nice words—spoken, I am sure, with the utmost sincerity. And yet I seriously doubt that the Sunshine State Republicans will—or even can—properly recognize and honor the achievements of those whom we have come to call the “Greatest Generation.” It’s not simply that previous celebrations and commemorations have repeatedly failed to fully appreciate what those then-young Americans actually accomplished. It’s also that Republican conservatives—no, let’s face it, reactionaries—essentially have placed the memory and legacy of those who confronted the horrors of the Great Depression and the second World War under siege.

Over and over again, Americans, both right and left, have failed to properly acknowledge how much the men and women of the 1930s and 1940s actually accomplished. Against historical expectations, in the face of powerful opposition, and despite their own terrible faults and failings, those Americans not only rescued the nation from economic destruction, defended it against political tyranny, and turned it into the strongest and most prosperous country on earth, but at the very same time made it freer, more equal and more democratic than ever before. Arguably the most progressive generation in U.S. history, they not only rejected the easy temptations of authoritarianism and isolationism and responded with courage and determination to Franklin Roosevelt’s democratic New Deal and vision of the Four Freedoms. They also subjected big business to public account and regulation, empowered the federal government to address the needs of working people, organized labor unions, fought for their rights, reconstituted the “We” in “We the People,” established a Social Security system expanded the nation’s public infrastructure, improved the environment, and—having imbued themselves with fresh democratic convictions, hopes, and aspirations—went on to fight and defeat Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. (more…)

Robert Borosage

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

How does America dig out of the hole we are in? Surely the focus must be on first principles, how do we recreate an economy that works for working people? With the right talking about a return to the principles of the Constitution, it is worth remembering how Americans thought about first principles coming out of the last great economic calamity.

Today is the 67th anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s historic 1944 State of the Union address that put forth an Economic Bill of Rights for all Americans. (Michael Moore presented to modern audiences in his Capitalism: A Love Story)

Roosevelt spoke as the Great War was drawing to a close. Attention was turning to the transition to peace, with widespread fears about whether the economy would revert to the depression that only the mobilization for war brought to an end. An entire nation had mobilized and sacrificed for war, what would peacetime bring?

Roosevelt argued that the sacrifices made in war demanded a strategy not only for “a lasting peace,” but for “an American standard of living higher than ever before known” — and one that was as widely shared as the wartime sacrifices were:

We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people — whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth — is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure. (more…)

Michael J. Wilson

By Michael J. Wilson
National director, Americans for Democratic Action

Forget the 1994 Elections. Look Way Back to 1934 for the Best Parallels to 2010

We’ve all heard the electoral comparisons to 1994, when the Republicans won 54 Democratic seats and took control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years, while also capturing the U.S. Senate. And while we may not know the results of the 2010 elections — who will win, how many seats will change hands, which party will be control the House and Senate — we do know the magnitude of the challenges facing the nation. However, today’s persistent unemployment, momentous mortgage crisis, and ballooning trade deficit really recall memories of 1934, not 1994.

The Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress in 1929, when the stock market crashed. Their inept response to the downward-spiraling economy opened the floodgates to the Great Depression, and to the Democrats, who swept them from power by 1932. Newly elected Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, was ready to try a new approach. He would use, not restrain, the powers of the federal government to help the millions of Americans that were suffering from the economic catastrophe.

Yet, despite passing sweeping legislation, the Democrats feared big losses in 1934. Unemployment approached 22 percent. The stock market was down 75 percent from its peak. Half the nation’s banks had closed. And 500,000 homes had been foreclosed.

Through most of 1934, Roosevelt, like Obama through most of this year, seemed lost. Roosevelt, “suddenly silent and irresolute, seemed to have lost his touch… The administration appeared to lack coherence in both policy and in strategy,” wrote historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The president faced “the organized business community,” which was determined to halt his agenda, and “the tumult of mass opinion, so ardently stirred by the radicals and demagogues.” (more…)

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

The electorate is bitter and angry. It’s no wonder. Foreclosures rise while Wall Street bankers, whose recklessness caused this grave recession, grab million dollar bonuses. Unemployment is stuck at 9.5 percent, but corporations continue to ship jobs overseas.

The level of acrimony showed itself Monday in Lexington, Ky., when a group of men supporting Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul threw a woman backing Democrat Jack Conway to the ground and stomped on her head.

This is not the hope America voted for in the fall of 2008. Now another election is upon us. On Tuesday, voters can choose candidates capitalizing on bitterness, or they can return to hope and provide time for change to play out. Voters can stay the course with the President whose basic philosophy is a Biblical one – that we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. Or Americans can empower Republicans who believe it’s every man for himself, who espouse the view that a man’s success is his own, and, equally, each man is solely responsible for all of his setbacks.

This midterm election is about how those disparate Republican and Democratic values will play out in legislation. Do Americans want to live in a Republican country that blames individuals for their unemployment in an economy creating only one position for every five jobless workers? Or do Americans want a country that lives by the Democratic philosophy that government must aid, not blame, the unemployed, that it must give a hand up, not a slap in the face, to the suffering?

Hard as it is during troubled times, as difficult as it may feel after some legislative efforts have fallen short of important idealistic goals, let’s build a country of hope, one in which we help our fellow Americans.

That virtuous aim, of course, is the subject of ridicule. Here’s Sarah Palin mocking optimistic Americans at a Tea Bagger event in February, “How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?”

But come out to vote for hope Tuesday anyway; stand up to the malevolent bullies.

What the bullies want is a country where workers are on their own: for health insurance, for income security in their old age, for surviving another Wall Street collapse. For everything.

Unemployment insurance is a good example. Over the past year, the GOP has scorned the jobless, calling them lazy freeloaders. Republicans repeatedly voted against extending unemployment benefits. From the GOP point of view, Wall Street’s crash didn’t cause the economic collapse and high unemployment. No, according to Republicans, each unemployed worker is responsible for his situation, and it’s not the role of government to intervene to help. That philosophy is behind Republican South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer’s comment that the unemployed, like stray animals, should not be fed: “You are facilitating the problem if you give an animal or person ample food supply.”

Come out Tuesday and vote for hope, vote to aid the unemployed.

Wall Street reform is another example of Republican “on your own” philosophy. Before the stock market crash of 1929, the unregulated American financial system whipped the economy in wild boom and bust cycles. The frequent crashes and runs on banks were called panics. In Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, Congress imposed rules on Wall Street and the banking industry. For the next sixty years the economy largely avoided panics. Then Congress lifted the regulations, and the crash of 2008 wrecked the economy. Former President Bush responded by proposing and orchestrating the Wall Street bailout. But his party vigorously opposed re-regulation to avoid another economic disaster. The GOP voted against the legislation restoring protections for the economy, investors and consumers. Republicans believe government has no business policing the free market or interceding for investors and consumers because individuals are solely to blame for everything that happens to them.

Come out Tuesday and vote for hope, vote to protect hardworking Americans against financial fraud and the machinations of powerful, multi-national financial firms.

Health insurance reform provides one of the clearest examples of Republican “on your own” philosophy. The GOP proposed that “reform” consist of granting individuals small tax breaks, about a quarter the cost of health insurance, while revoking breaks given companies that provide health coverage to workers. This, Republicans said, would “free” companies from providing insurance and “free” individuals to choose their own plans. It would have liberated individuals to negotiate coverage and claims payment with giant, sophisticated, lawyer-laden insurance corporations. If an individual got a bad deal, one that enabled the insurer to drop coverage when he got sick, deny coverage to his sick child or raise rates continuously, well, then, that would be the fault of the individual purchaser. Republicans have promised that if empowered, they will repeal the Democrats’ Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Come out Tuesday and vote for hope, vote to support the health insurance reform law that uses the power of government regulation to shield policy holders from insurer abuses, that lowers costs and that enables nearly all Americans to obtain insurance.

Retirees should be “on their own” as well, Republicans believe. Some in the GOP even contend Social Security is unconstitutional. Others want to cut it or privatize it. What privatizing means is getting the government out of the business of collecting Social Security taxes to ensure that all workers receive benefits after retiring. Instead, Republicans want workers to be on their own to invest for their retirement. If there’s another market “panic” – which could happen if Republicans repeal Wall Street reform – and workers lose their “privatized” retirement savings in the crash, the GOP’s response would be that individuals must take responsibility – their loss is their fault.

Come out Tuesday and vote to keep America’s promise to provide basic income security to all elderly citizens. Vote to be your brothers’ and sisters’ keeper and for them to be yours. Vote for hope.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

Dean Baker

By Dean Baker
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Little brothers exist to be abused by their older siblings. The United Kingdom has willingly played the role of abused sibling for the United States for decades.

When our president wanted to launch a hare-brained invasion of Iraq, no one was more outspoken in his support than Prime Minister Tony Blair. Who is our closest ally in our Vietnam-style occupation of Afghanistan? Yep, it’s the Brits again. And now the new Conservative-Liberal government is taking the lead in trying to use government austerity to restore prosperity.

Those of us who oppose austerity in the United States are delighted. The U.K. is jumping out front to lay off public sector workers, raise taxes, and cut government programs and supports across the board. It is doing this at a time when the economy has nearly 8 percent unemployment and considerably excess capacity in almost every sector of its economy.

This drive to austerity comes at a time when the short-term rate set by the Bank of England is 0.5 percent and the rate on 10-year bonds is just 3.0 percent. The timing is also perfectly wrong in that most of the U.K.’s major trading partners are also suffering from weak economies and therefore unlikely to provide strong export markets. Nor are they likely to tolerate a substantial devaluation of the pound against their currency. (more…)

Mitchell Hirsch

 By Mitchell Hirsch
2010 CREDO Mobile/Netroots Nation award for Blog Activist of the Year   

What do I mean? Specifically, the U.S. private sector currently needs substantial, publicly-funded direct job-creation programs in order to get private employers to hire again on the scale needed to significantly reduce unemployment and promote a robust economic recovery.  

It’s an argument that I don’t think has been made, at least not adequately, to help advance the debate in favor of large-scale stimulus to create jobs.  

Part of the problem is the almost religious belief that the private sector, and only the private sector, can be the engine of job creation. As James Kwak wrote recently, in a somewhat different context:  

… the belief that the private sector is the answer to all our problems remains deeply rooted. One might even call it an ideology.  

And the problem is exacerbated by policy makers who ostensibly grasp the need to do more to boost a weak and faltering economy, but undercut that message with utterances to the effect that ‘we’ve done enough’ and ‘government can only do so much’, as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner did recently. Now, Mr. Geithner is a smart man, who we’d hope doesn’t believe in magic. And he’s right, of course, that private investment is needed. But the fact is, it’s not happening. (more…)

Robert Borosage

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

Americans have grown fearful. Most believe, not surprisingly, that the country is headed in the wrong direction. For the first time ever, most Americans believe their children may not fare as well as they have. We spend nearly as much as the rest of the world combined on our military, chasing phantoms across the world. Conservatives in both parties rail about debt and deficits. They line up to support adding another $33 billion in emergency spending for the misbegotten war in Afghanistan, while blocking the $23 billion needed to forestall the layoff of a staggering 275,000 teachers across the country.

Washington is crazed about debt and deficits, but the real deficit is in fortitude, not finances. Consider the contrast between this country emerging from the Great Depression and World War II and now.

Then our debt was a far greater burden than now — over 120% of GDP. The country had suffered a decade long Great Depression and a global war. The troops were coming home, but the entire economy was mobilized for war. Europe and Japan were devastated. And America was led by Harry S. Truman, a former haberdasher, product of the corrupt Pendergast machine in Kansas City.

But, having won the War, America had the confidence to face its future. Despite the massive debt, Congress passed the GI Bill, educating a generation of veterans. We financed the transformation of military factories to civilian production, investing in the industries — from aerospace to automobiles — that would transform the country. Congress passed subsidies to aid the purchase of homes, stimulating the growth of the suburbs. We passed the Marshall Plan to spur the rebuilding of Europe. A Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a hero of the war, put a lid on military spending, while building the interstate highway system.

With rare exceptions the country continued to run annual deficits and the accumulated debt continued to rise. But the country grew faster, the broad middle class — the triumph of American democracy — was forged, and the debt as a percentage of GDP declined steadily down to less than 32% when Ronald Reagan took office.

None of this was easy or smooth. There were strikes and upheavals. Inflation and unemployment plagued the post-war transition. The Korean War divided the country.
Conservatives at the time were as timorous and noisome as they are now. Led by Ohio Senator Bob Taft, they opposed the creation of NATO. They railed about deficit spending. They waged war on labor unions. They hunted communists at home and abroad, trampling basic liberties in the process. They conjured up preposterous conspiracy theories about treachery within. American politics were even more poisonous than now. And black GIs returning from the war found that their service did not exempt them from the legalized apartheid that still scarred the country.

But a confident America didn’t let the frightened and the crazed get in the way of doing what was necessary to forge a prosperous future. Eisenhower reaffirmed the New Deal reforms. Social Security was preserved; finance remained shackled; top end tax rates stayed at 90%; labor’s right to organize was weakened but not gutted. A confident and broad middle class replaced the extreme inequality that contributed to the Great Depression. We all grew together.

The contrast with the present day is stark. Now as we remain mired in two costly and endless wars, and emerge from the Great Recession, the timorous have taken control. Our national debt — about 90% of GDP — is far lower a burden than it was after World War II, but our deficit in confidence is far higher.

Instead of forging the new economy needed to revive a broad and prosperous middle class, we are focused on balancing our accounts. With states and localities facing crippling budget crises, with school districts shutting down summer school, eliminating after school programs from athletics to tutorials, laying off teachers and increasing class size, the Congress blocks vitally needed bills to provide aid to states, and to put people to work. The president acknowledges a staggering public investment deficit in the foundations of a new economy — in education and training, modern infrastructure, research and development – and then calls for a three year hard freeze on domestic spending, while the military budget continues to rise. Republicans and conservative Democrats join with the banking lobby to weaken financial reform, with big oil to frustrate the transition to new energy, with the insurance and drug companies to sustain an unaffordable health care system.

Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson enlists major foundations to rouse fears about debt, with “entitlements” — meaning Social Security and Medicare as his major targets. The president sets up a deficit commission tasked with balancing the budget, not with defining the foundations of a new economy that would enable us to grow our way out of debt and rebuild a prosperous middle class.

President Obama is far better prepared for this moment than Harry S. Truman was. He has been clear about the need to build a new economy out of the ruins of the old. He has detailed core elements of that task — public investments in areas vital to our future, making the transition to new energy, balancing our trade and making things in America once more, shrinking finance and curbing the casino, empowering workers to gain a fair share of the profits and productivity they help produce, fixing our broken health care system — the source of those terrifying long-term deficits that Peterson brandishes and distorts.

But the president is now in retreat. His call to action has been muddled by pollsters and positioning. Conservatives peddle fear and conspiracies as they did after World War II, but this time America’s leaders are cowed, letting the frightened block the bold measures needed to forge our future.

Needless to say, our current circumstances are far different than those at the end of World War II. Then we were victorious; now we are losing in Afghanistan. Then we were unified; the entire nation had sacrificed in the Depression and the war. Now we are divided, more unequal than ever; and the wars are fought by professionals out of the public consciousness. Then we had pent up private savings from years of wartime rationing; now household debt remains near record levels. Then the rest of the world was devastated; now America faces a surging and mercantilist Asia, an export addicted Germany.

But these are circumstances, not fate. The real contrast is in our confidence. Americans have grown fearful. We doubt our ability to pursue a common purpose. For good reason, we lack faith in our institutions – whether government or business or the banks. But instead of steeling our spine, we are daunted by the obstacles. Bluster substitutes for courage. We focus on balancing our accounts, not forging our future. That is a recipe for decline.

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Robert Borosage and Campaign for America’s Future Co-Director Roger Hickey are co-editors of the book, The Next Agenda: Blueprint for a New Progressive Movement.

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Follow Robert L. Borosage on Twitter: www.twitter.com/borosage

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This piece first appeared on The Huffington Post

Mike Lux

By Mike Lux
Author, “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be”

Conservatives have historically argued against progressive policies on a variety of fronts: the unintended consequences of change, the primacy of the individual over government, the dangers of a growing bureaucracy (or more generically, “big government”), the importance of traditional values and local control, the worry of people growing too dependent on government, etc. With increasing vehemence, though, conservatives have begun to argue that kind-heartedness, compassion, and a sense of community are actually evil: that they lead inevitably to Nazism and death camps.

Political debate has always been hot and heavy in this country, with conservatives swinging hard and heavy and making some pretty wild claims: the pro-British Tories in the 1770s decried the “rats of democracy”; the pro-slavery Southern planters in the first half of the 1800s said that slaves were better off than if they were free; the Social Darwinists said society would be better off if the poor were allowed to starve to death, because their death would improve the gene pool. But the compassion-equals-evil argument didn’t really get laid out in detail until Ayn Rand’s writings, where she actually did argue that people with compassion and concern for others were leeches who drained society of its competitive life blood.

Just as Ayn Rand took the Social Darwinist argument and made it more virulent, the conservative author Jonah Goldberg brought a new, more extreme twist to the argument, literally saying that progressives like FDR were ideological soul mates of Hitler and Mussolini’s brand of fascism. This easily debunked book has become the right’s excuse for accusing everyone arguing for progressive causes of being a Nazi.

Glenn Beck is, of course, the present day leader of the pack when it comes to this kind of invective. Here’s his latest insight on the subject:

This follows an earlier episode (that I wrote about here) where he essentially said that because Nazis and Communists used the words social justice, any churches that use those words are also Nazis and Communists.

The kind of people that Rand, Goldberg, and Beck are attacking — progressives — believe that our economy works better from the bottom-up, that making investments in jobs and education for poor and middle class folks is better for the economy than giving more tax breaks to the wealthy. Progressives believe that giving people some economic security and a hand up in tough times is what a decent society ought to do for its citizens. They believe that paying everyone a living wage, making sure everyone has a good education and decent health care coverage, builds a better, more productive society. Suggesting that these kinds of views lead inexorably toward Nazi death camps isn’t just offensive: it goes against the fundamental cornerstone values of our culture and history. Declaring people who work for kindness and compassion as “leeches” on society twists morality into a pretzel.

This kind of distorted thinking is not only mind-bendingly wrong; it also leads conservatives into truly bizarre policy directions. For example, check out this quote from conservative economist and former Bush administration official Robert Stein:

“Once a country adopts an old-age pension system, it creates an implicit bias against having children. One of the natural reasons for raising children is not just because you like kids, but to take care of yourself in old-age. Once a country gives everybody access to everyone else’s kid’s money, it undermines the natural economic incentive to raise kids.”

Only in Ayn Rand’s selfishness-is-everything fantasy world would someone decide not to have kids because of that $400 a month Social Security check they will be getting someday. Can you imagine a couple sitting around having this conversation?

“Well, honey, I don’t like kids very well, but we’ll need someone to take care of us when we’re old.”

“But, darling, we don’t have to worry about that because we’ll be sponging off the government teat with all that Social Security cash rolling in.”

“Great, dear, I guess I won’t be throwing away those prophylactics after all.”

So let me reassure my conservative friends: the fact that I care about keeping you from starving, freezing to death, and dying due to lack of good medical care does not mean that I eventually want to send you to a death camp. Although I do worry about your sanity a little.

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Michael Lux is the co-founder and CEO of Progressive Strategies, L.L.C., a political consulting firm founded in 1999, focused on strategic political consulting for non-profits, labor unions, PACs and progressive donors. In November of 2008, Mike was named to the Obama-Biden Transition Team. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Political Action at People For the American Way (PFAW), and the PFAW Foundation, and served at the White House from January 1993 to mid-1995 as a Special Assistant to the President for Public Liaison.

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This piece was first published on OpenLeft.com.