The Liberal Value of Serving the People vs the GOP value of serving the corporate lobby and the wealthy.

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From FeedBlitz.com Book Review:
Take This Job and Ship It
How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America
By Senator Byron L. Dorgan
Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press
New York, 2006

I feel strongly that some important American values are being sacrificed in order to find the lowest-priced gallon of mustard or twelve-pack of underwear.

The role of government is to help create a society beneficial to people. People are the priority. Not corporations. Certainly commerce plays a huge role in the betterment of any great society, but any society that forgets that its primary purpose is to serve the people cannot ever be great.

We are engaged in more than an academic debate over philosophy. I believe this to be a contest for the soul of a great nation, with immense ramifications for the entire world. It is about values.

The preceding is a clip from Senator Byron Dorgan's book "Take This Job and Ship It". This clip really sums up what is happening in this country with the corporate lobby controlling the Congress and the White House.

The "brain dead" politicians that are selling out America are not only the rubber stamp Republicans that are in lock step with the White House on these many "immoral" trade deals that are selling out the American worker and the American family, but include the Republican clone Democrats from the Democratic Leadership Conference (DLC)!

These turncoat Democratic politicians that are more concerned with their corporate lobby contributors than the American people include Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Ben Nelson, Senator Mary Landrieu and of course Senator Joe Lieberman.

As Senator Dorgan says the primary purpose of any great society is to "serve the people". And prior presidents such as Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson bought into that philosophy and as a result this nation and this society became the envy of the world and the superpower that it is today.

If you look at the past principles of the Democratic Party, it seems as if the Party was built around this basic principle of primarily serving the people. Now if you feel that this is a "liberal" or "far left" view you are more than welcome to describe me with that term and I'll wear it with pride. The Republicans have managed to turn liberal into a derogatory label as far as they are concerned. But if you look at the underlying principle of "serving the people" I can't understand why we "liberals" don't proudly stand up and say Hell Yes I'm a Liberal when these Repugs try to "talk down" to us.

Now let's look at the underlying principle of the Republican Party, forgetting Lincoln, which they seem to do most of the time, from presidents Hoover, Nixon, Regan, Bush I, Bush II and I'll throw in that champion of the WTO, NAFTA, the Chinese Trade Agreement and the DLC, President Bill Clinton. The underlying principle that they seem to build their Party around is the idea of serving corporate greed. They may call it "Free Trade", "Free Market", Globalization or whatever the buzzword of the day is, but it is still service to the large corporations and the extremely wealthy of this country at the expense of the common people.

Now it seems as if in the last decade and a half that the Republicans have convinced many people to vote against the common good which consists of serving ALL the people instead of just the wealthy few. They have done this by convincing these voters to either believe that they must be greedy and become part of the ownership society (and to hell with everybody else) or that they can eventually become part of the upper class of American society because the upward mobility in the USA is by far the greatest in the world. But this is no longer true as the people in 7 other countries in the world have a greater chance for upward mobility than we do here in the US. And o-by-the-way these countries are all progressive socialist societies in Europe. They have also convinced people to vote against their personal interests by using fear tactics (The Evil Empire, the Axis of Evil, the War on terror, etc) and divisive issues like reproductive rights and homosexuality.

Now the "Centrist", Republican clone, DLC Democrats such as the Democratic politicians mentioned above, feel that they can get in on the corporate dole by becoming just another shill for corporate American and the wealthy and to hell with the people they are supposed to serve, to hell with the Democratic Party and to hell with the traditional Party "liberal" values. This is what they feel is a winning "centrist" position and they have the corporate controlled MSM to solidify that claim. All they have to do is to buy into the same "talking points" that the Rovian Repugs are trumpeting and vote along with the rest of the corporate shills and they will retain their cushy seat in Congress and keep the cash rolling into their campaign coffers and into their pockets:.....Money is power (e.g. Rupert Murdock fundraising for Hillary Clinton. Don't you think that he expects payback for that?)!!!

Now let's look at Joe Lieberman. I watched his debate with Ned Lamont the other day. And it seemed like Senator Lieberman wanted to hammer time and time again on his "liberal" record. But if you look at his voting record you will find as Ned Lamont said, "he has never found a trade deal that he didn't like." These include the following corporate written agreements: The WTO, the Chinese Trade Agreement, NAFTA, CAFTA, the Jordon Trade Agreement and the just passed Oman Trade Agreement. Every one of these agreements have been a sellout to the principal of the betterment of the American society and to enable the corporate exploitation of a foreign workforce (e.g. slave labor in Jordon, the Marianas Islands and Oman). He also has voted for almost every bill that is somehow beneficial to corporate America, such as The Bankruptcy Bill, the bill limiting corporate liability for injury due to defective products, the Transportation Bill (Filled with pork) and the Cheney cabal written Energy Bill with billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies for Big Oil.

Joe Lieberman and the MSM say that the Democratic Primary in Connecticut is being fought over one issue...Iraq. I agree that this is a huge issue and I support Ned Lamont and other Democrats that are calling for a withdrawal of our "occupation" forces from that poor country. But I say that the Primary is being fought for the liberal values of the Democratic Party; namely that the purpose of government is to serve the people! I don't think that neither Joe Lieberman nor the "centrist" DLC Democrats buy into that concept.

I hope that the American electorate gets the message this November and votes in a government "of the people, by the people and for the people" and gets us back to the basic values that the founding fathers and the Democratic Party thought that this democratic experiment called the United States of America should embrace.

Shayne Munger
Riverside, CA

P.S. The following is a song clip from the Song in the Closing Credits of the Documentary "Harlan County U.S.A." sung by folksinger Hazel Dickens. It was found in the July 17/24 2006 issue of The Nation in an article called "Harlan County Blues" by Erik Reece.

The power wheel is rollin' rollin' right along
And the government will keep it goin' goin' strong.
So working people get your help from your own kind
Your welfare ain't on the rich man's mind.

It summarizes the mine worker's struggle against a big corporate power company back in 1973.

I feel that we have the same struggle now against all of corporate America and their political shills in both the Republican and Democratic Parties. And people "your own kind" are the American workers, families and friends who embrace this "liberal" ideal of government for the benefit of ALL the people.

Authors Website: www.pda-for-riverside-county.com

Authors Bio:
A "liberal" And Proud of It!!

Member Temecula Valley DFA, PDA, Democrats.com, Moveon.org and others.