Child labor laws were condemned by the Conservatives because they said such laws would destroy the nations ability to compete in foreign markets. Maybe you remember seeing photos of little boys in coal-mines and little girls working in cotton mills.
Women's suffrage was condemned because women were considered to be unable to make any serious decisions. Workplace safety laws and the Pure Food and Drug Act were opposed by Conservatives, again because they said it would destroy our ability to compete in the market-place, and that they were interfering with "free enterprise".
The Conservatives called the Social Security and Wagner-Payser Acts "socialist"
They were violently opposed to the Civil Rights Act.
One piece of "Liberal" legislation opposed by the right has had a tremendous positive effect on the nation. If you don't already know, it is the "Veteran's Readjustment Act of 1944" or as it is more commonly called "The GI Bill". If I remember rightly, a couple of million young American veterans were paid by our government to further their educations. The benefits of that piece of this bill to the nation are incalculable. The bill passed Congress by one vote. The Conservatives opposed it. I would bet that you know people who benefited from this bill. Those that did are now in their seventies or eighties, but I'm sure they, also, remember.
The nation has been repaid a million times over for that investment in our veterans. Including by the extra taxes those veterans paid over the years due to the higher income jobs their GI Bill funded educations allowed them to obtain. So, the next time you hear someone sneer at Liberals, you might consider the source and suggest that they take the time to read some history.
Bio: John Ford is a Korean War veteran who finds the unprecedented (in America) evil and duplicity of members of the Bush administration intolerable. The silent complicity of the mainstream press in that evil has driven him to write what they should be writing but aren't. Contact him at
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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
