Subj : Societal obligations
To   : ALL
From : BOB KLAHN
Date : Wed Feb 16 2011 14:10:54


 Recent online posting.

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 Conservatives or Reactionaries?

 /by Ben Palumbo/,/former staff director of the Democratic House
 Caucus/

 Political reactionaries, epitomized by the factually challenged
 Michelle Bachmann, CPAC darling Allen West, the inimitable
 former, half-term Governor Sarah Palin, and their Tea Party
 allies, hurl the label "socialist" at President Obama in
 connection, above all, with the new health care law. President
 Obama, whose actions may be characterized as having saved huge
 parts of America's so-called free market system, clearly is not
 a "socialist" anymore than Bachmann is "conservative".
 Conservatives, you see, have an obligation to answer the
 question posed by Professor and author Scott Russell Sanders:
 "What do you want to conserve?"


 ...  reflect on a letter written to Charles Dickens by Albino
 Luciani when he was Patriarch of Venice. It appears in a book of
 Albino's letters to others entitled "Illustrissimi". He praises
 Dickens' love of the poor; describes the heartless Scrooge
 before his redemption; and, he quotes Jacob Marley's bitterly
 mournful lament after Scrooge noted that he (Marley) was always
 a good man of business: "Business! Mankind was my business. The
 common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and
 benevolence were all my business..."


 The Venice Patriarch goes on to assure Dickens that things have
 gotten better for the poor and workers since he wrote "A
 Christmas Carol". To what does he attribute the improvement in
 their lives? This is what Luciani wrote: "The workers...in their
 unions and in the various forms of socialism, which have the
 undeniable merit of having been, almost everywhere, the chief
 cause of the workers' upward rise....have advanced and achieved
 much in the areas of economy, social security, culture. And
 today, through the unions, they often manage to make their
 voice heard still higher, in the upper ranks of the government
 where, actually, their fate is decided".  He goes on to say:

 ...

 Yet it is obvious that Bachmann, West, Palin, et al., to the
 extent they actually think about the consequences of their
 name-calling, do not want to conserve any of the things that
 John Paul I believed were great improvements in the lives of
 workers: improvements brought about by unions and "various forms
 of socialism". On the contrary, they want to return the country
 to a time when workers and their families, like those described
 in the letter to Dickens, were helpless in the face of the
 overwhelming economic power of an unrestrained economic elite.
 That is not conservatism; it is oppression and injustice. It was

 ...

 then, it is Obama's progressive policies that most accurately
 reflect this "conservatism" of the American people. By contrast,
 the reactionary rhetorical excesses by the Bachmann-West-Palin
 crowd are designed not to conserve the things that improve
 American lives, but, rather, the power of America's economic
 elite to further enhance their wealth at the expense of those
 very same American workers and their families.

 ...


BOB KLAHN bob.klahn@sev.org   http://home.toltbbs.com/bobklahn

.... Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -AH
--- Via Silver Xpress V4.5/P [Reg]
 * Origin: Doc's Place BBS Fido Since 1991 docsplace.tzo.com (1:123/140)

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