> [Obama, today:]
>
> Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or
> ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but
> this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can
> spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors
> only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not
> just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our
> prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart -
> not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
>
> [....]
>
> As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble
> gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off
> deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us today, just
> as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We
> honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because
> they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in
> something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment - a moment that
> will define a generation - it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit
> us all.
>
> For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith
> and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It
> is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the
> selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend
> lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the
> firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a
> parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.
>
> Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be
> new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and
> honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and
> patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been
> the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then
> is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of
> responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we
> have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not
> grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that
> there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our
> character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
>
> This is the price and the promise of citizenship.
>
> This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us
> to shape an uncertain destiny.
>
> This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed - why men and women and
> children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this
> magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago
> might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you
> to take a most sacred oath.
>
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-obama.html>
>
> [FDR, convention speech of 1936:]
>
> That very word _freedom_, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom
> from some restraining power. In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of
> a political autocracy - from the eighteenth-century royalists who held
> special privileges from the crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege
> that they governed without the consent of the governed; that they denied
> the right of free assembly and free speech; that they restricted the
> worship of God; that they put the average man's property and the average
> man's life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they
> regimented the people.
>
> And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that
> the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of
> governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his
> neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own government.
> Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.
>
> Since that struggle, however, man's inventive genius released new forces
> in our land which reordered the lives of our people. The age of machinery,
> of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass
> production, mass distribution - all of these combined to bring forward a
> new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain
> free.
>
> For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new
> dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over
> material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities,
> new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all
> undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was
> impressed into this royal service.
>
> There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of
> small-businessmen and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the
> American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the
> worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth,
> aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where
> they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.
>
> It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new
> economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over
> government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the
> robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment
> the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average
> man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.
>
> The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of
> their labor - these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were
> imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average
> family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside
> for old age - other people's money - these were tools which the new
> economic royalty used to dig itself in.
>
> Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their
> right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant
> cities.
>
> Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual
> initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for
> free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed,
> became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.
>
> An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men."
> Liberty requires opportunity to make a living - a living decent according
> to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to
> live by, but something to live for.
>
> <http://www2.austincc.edu/lpatrick/his2341/fdr36acceptancespeech.htm>
>
> As FDR's words were marked by the movements of his day, Obama's betray
> their absence today. Breaking the aristocracy of industrial wealth was a
> populist appeal going back generations. Industrial democracy, intimated in
> the line about "industrial dictatorship," was a cause that at the turn of
> the century was invoked by even Louis Brandeis.
>
> After hearing Rick Warren and Barack Obama, it seems I should seek
> forgiveness for the impudent desire to punish and defeat of our financial
> lords. Perhaps their sovereignty, like that of the US government, is comes
> from Heaven.
>
> Shane
>
>
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