By Ralph Nader at Nader.org:
Before the electoral year of 2012 slinks into history, it is worth a comparative glance back to the electoral year of 1912 to give us some jolting perspective on how degraded our contemporary elections, voter performance and election expectations have become.
One hundred years ago, workers were marching, picketing and forming unions. Eugene Debs, the great labor leader and presidential candidate that year, spoke to outdoor labor rallies of 100,000 to 200,000 workers and their families gathered to protest low wages and working conditions.
Farmers were flexing their muscle with vibrant political activity in progressive parties and organizing farm cooperatives, through their granges, and pushing for proper regulation of the banks and railroads.
On the presidential ballot were Republican incumbent William Howard Taft, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party’s choice former president Theodore Roosevelt. Taft would be repudiated for being far too populist and too critical of corporations by today’s Republican Party. He favored national, not state, charters for “national corporations.”
The Democrats were committed to their platform of 1908 which asked “Shall the people rule? Is the overshadowing issue which manifests itself in all the questions now under discussion.” The context was shaped by the giant corporations (“called the trusts”) and their lobbies in Washington, which had to be curbed. The Supreme Court in 1911 had just ruled to break up the giant Standard Oil trust.
You can go ahead and post it. An occasional Milnes article/update is not a problem imo. Say no more than one per month.
For some reason Milnes’ e-mails were going to a SPAM folder in my inbox. Today I found a whole bunch of his e-mails and as a fact on December 30, a day before this was posted, Milnes wrote a very interesting piece that succinctly stated his viewpoint and actually moved beyond the Progressive Era. I was planning to post an article on it knowing it would be thought-provoking for the readers, but Paulie, if you’d like to post it let me know and I’ll forward it to you.
I’m willing to post one for him (but no more than that) if someone who doesn’t have him blocked on email feels like forwarding it to me.
I am sure Robert Milnes would have several comments about this article if he were allowed to post at IPR.