A Gentleman’s view.

#1 The Census Bureau says that 43.6 million Americans are now living in poverty and according to them that is the highest number of poor Americansin 51 years of record-keeping.

#2 In the year 2000, 11.3 percent of Americans were living in poverty. In 2008, 13.2 percent of Americans were living in poverty. In 2009, 14.3 percent of Americans were living in poverty. Needless to say the trend is moving in the wrong direction.

#3 In 2009 alone, approximately 4 million more Americans joined the ranks of the poor.

#4 According to the Associated Press, experts believe that 2009 saw the largest single year increase in the U.S. poverty rate since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959.

#5 The U.S. poverty rate is now the third worst among the developed nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

#6 Today the United States has approximately 4 million fewer wage earners than it did in 2007.

#7 Nearly 10 million Americans now receive unemployment insurance, whichis almost four times as many as were receiving it in 2007.

#8 U.S. banks repossessed 25 percent more homes in August 2010 than they did in August 2009.

#9 One out of every seven mortgages in the United States was either delinquent or in foreclosure during the first quarter of 2010.

#10 There are now 50.7 million Americans who do not have health insurance. One trip to the emergency room would be all it would take to bankrupt a significant percentage of them.

#11 More than 50 million Americans are now on Medicaid, the U.S. government health care program designed principally to help the poor.

#12 There are now over 41 million Americans on food stamps.

#13 The number of Americans enrolled in the food stamp program increaseda whopping 55 percent from December 2007 to June 2010.

#14 One out of every six Americans is now being served by at least one government anti-poverty program.

#15 California’s poverty rate soared to 15.3 percent in 2009, which was the highest in 11 years.

#16 According to an analysis by Isabel Sawhill and Emily Monea of the Brookings Institution, 10 million more Americans (including 6 million more children) will slip into poverty over the next decade.

#17 According to a recently released Federal Reserve report, Americans experienced a $1.5 trillion loss in combined household net worth in the second quarter of 2010.

#18 Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.

#19 Median U.S. household income is down 5 percent from its peak of more than $52,000 in 1999.

#20 A study recently released by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College University found that Americans are $6.6 trillion short of what they need for retirement.

How anyone can look at those numbers and think that things are about to “get better” absolutely boggles the mind.

It is time to wake up.

Things are not going to get better.

Things are only going to get worse.

The United States is rapidly becoming a nation where poverty is absolutely rampant.

As poverty continues to spread, crime will not be far behind.

Meanwhile, the international community wants to impose a global tax on us so that they can “redistribute” even more of our wealth around the world.

The following was just reported by CNSNews.com….

I was a victim and for the perpetrators of abuse, the show goes on!

Jamal Parris Speaks Out Against Bishop Eddie Long.
Jamal Parris, one of the four men that have accused Bishop Eddie Long of sexual coercion, has spoken out for the first time.
Parris, 24, was contacted by FOX 5 I-Team reporter Dale Russell who traveled to Colorado in hopes of speaking with the oldest of Bishop Long’s accusers.
Russell caught Parris leaving a local grocery late Sunday night and reports that while Parris was at first reluctant to speak, he eventually told a story of “love, anger, and desire to protect other young men.”
Parris told that Long became a “father-like figure” to him who lavished money, cars, jewelry and trips on his private jet, that eventually b turned him into a “slave“ to a man he loved.
“You finally have a father that you’ve always wanted for and always dreamed of,” Parris said. “He would just walk away from you if you don’t give him what he wants. So you end up turning into something you never thought you would be, which is now a slave to a man that you love.”
“So, while the media and the rest of the people around the city, around the country look at us like how could grown men let another man touch him, what you have to understand is this man has manipulated us since childhood,” Parris explained. “This was our father and we loved him.”

He also denies allegations that he and the other three men are trying to blackmail the Bishop for money and calls the claims “ludicrous.”
“We would have to be the craziest kids in the world to want to come out and admit to another man touching on us publicly,” said Parris. “To really believe this is about money would be absolutely ludicrous.”

He also added one final shocking claim during the interview, detailing nights when he would cry and try to wash off the Bishop’s scent after being abused.
“I cannot get the sound of his voice out of my head…I cannot forget the smell of his cologne. And I cannot forget the way that he made me cry many nights when I drove in his car on the way home, not able to take enough showers to wipe the smell of him off of my body.”

“It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.”[2] People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.”

F.D.R.

Reprinted from Thoughtcrime @ downwithjugears.blospot

Get That Worthless Nigger Out Of The White House

With each passing day I become more and more enraged that such a stupid, worthless coon is in the White House for God’s sake! He’s a global embarrassment and a very high security risk for the nation itself.

Seldom have I run across such an arrogant, conceited, yet utterly stupid ghetto buck masquerading as a human. He’s the perfect definition of “uppity nigger.” It’s like when blacks shave their heads to look more human. If they went around with their natural nappy head of nigger hair, white women would be much less likely to look upon them as human, and they’d get a lot less white women. Blacks do their level best to hide who they really are, even to the point of wearing western Caucasian suits. But it’s like putting a dog turd in a hotdog bun. One bite tells it all.

Obama is the same way. He dresses and talks like a white man, but thinks to the core like a nigger pimp. It’s all about him.

This retard knows the Obamacare act is a flop. He knows it’ll bankrupt our dying economy, but he’s a nigger, and niggers are incapable of admitting their mistakes or faults. Never happen. He wants what he wants and to hell with the rest of us and the country. He’s mad now, because the entire nation is against him on this, but he plans on forcing it through anyway, walking over the top of everyone, abusing his authority yet again.

Since the very first day this coon took office, he has proven every last rotten thing I’ve ever said about blacks. He has displayed every one of their vilest traits, down to his total greed, self-centeredness, egomania, and inability to tell the truth about anything.

And like all blacks with money, he got it through illegitimate means. Obama was financed by enemies of this country and of you and me. He lives in a posh, multi-million dollar estate with no visible means of support. He has millions in the bank and did so, long before he was in politics, yet his family was and is ghetto poor, and he has never worked at any job that paid more than the average wage. He got an Oxford education, yet nobody knows who paid for it. He was a member of a radical black, white hating church for over twenty years, and yet is in reality a fanatical Muslim that hates this country and everyone in it.

The mystery behind this buck only deepens the more you dig. Another key mystery is how he ever got on the Presidential primary ticket in the first place. An unknown junior Senator from the most corrupt state in the union (and the state with the most blacks as well…coincidence there? I think not) who was put before dozens of senators that were decades his senior and had much more political clout than he
did.

And yet the Democratic party gave this dark horse the green light, and poured more money into his campaign than the last two Presidential campaigns combined. (Or someone did, anyway.) The powers behind the curtain wanted this monkoid in the White House, and I don’t think it was simply to further the Democratic party.

They have an agenda, an important one, which they plan on implementing within the time frame he is in office. Whatever that agenda is, they have been grooming this evil simian for the job since childhood.

He was taught to speak proper English, to speak well in public, and to handle himself in high places. He was given vast amounts of money and educated in the best schools and universities. All this for a stupid nobody coon from Kenya.

No, there’s much, much more here than meets the eye, and the American people should be afraid, very afraid.

History has taught the wise among us…not the average man (because it’s obvious the average American is incapable of intelligent thought, otherwise Super Chimp would have never been elected in the first place)…that any time a black is put in any position of power, he automatically abuses it as far as he can take it. It’s in their very makeup to behave this way.

Blacks cannot handle authority. It’s like handing the keys to the crack box to a ghetto nigger. He can’t help himself. He’ll gorge until he overdoses. Perhaps this is exactly what they are counting on. He’s already taken a hammer to a sick and dying economy, and is still beating on it to satisfy his nigger ego. He boasted recently that he was going to “leave his mark on history, no matter what the cost.” Yes, he actually said that. That should tell even the most idiot among us that they’ve made a horrendous mistake by putting him in power.

For years I’ve railed against blacks and their many faults and evils, and I’ve been called every kind of bigot and hate monger in the book. Not only liberals and blacks hate me, but quite a few of my own people as well, because even they have swallowed too much of the liberal poison that has been deliberately planted in their minds from birth, which has twisted their thinking processes beyond the capacity to make clear-headed decisions any longer. My own people have become just as dangerous as the enemy…as planned.

The irony of it is that all they have to do is look at the facts and events all around them to see I’m right about everything, but the indoctrination is just too deep. I can’t reach them, and neither can the truth. This is a tragedy beyond measuring. It’s like trying to save a rabid dog while it’s trying to bite you.

But I continue the fight and shrug off their insults and accusations, because there’s one thing that neither they, nor the enemy have that I do, which is the most potent weapon on earth; the truth. We all need to watch Obama and his henchmen very closely, and be ready to react in a moment’s notice. That’s because whatever his plan is, he hasn’t put it into play yet. But if his track record is any indication, it’s going to be nasty. Really, really nasty.

If at all possible, this ape must be removed from power as soon as humanly feasible. He was, and is a threat to the survival of this very nation and a treasonous dog. His grip on us is already to the point where it resembles an African junta in frightening ways. To even espouse his removal can get you arrested.

Because also like all nigger dictators, his guilty conscience makes him a paranoid. He knows he deserves a bullet, and he’s terrified someone will give it to him. I hope and pray that some miracle occurs before this monster has a chance to follow the orders of his backers, whom I can pretty well guess are Jews.

One thing we should all keep in mind at all times is that this ape hates us, and is working to destroy us. So are his masters. Whether or not a shot has been fired is moot. This is a war, and it’s a real one. Countless white lives have already been lost in this fight for control of our destinies, and it’s only the beginning.

Obama may be a lot of things, but the only thing that matters is that he’s our mortal enemy. And if you don’t treat him as such, you deserve everything he does to you. Stop trying to appease those that hate you and be men. The enemy is on the move, and he is preparing to strike. Will you be ready for him, or will you be just another stupid sacrificial lamb that looks on in dumb surprise as he’s loaded into a cattle car to be executed?

There is no such thing as equality, civil rights, or diversity. Never was, never will be. Stop living in a fantasy world and prepare for war, or it will devour you for your stupidity.

-The Lone Haranguer

Private Banking business has betrayed this country.

1) Wachovia Launders $380 Billion in Drug Money

The financial crisis is full of complex schemes and indecipherable acronyms, but the most astonishing alleged fraud of the entire mess is pretty straightforward: Wachovia allowed Mexican drug cartels to launder $380 billion of drug money through its bank, repeatedly looking the other way and ignoring internal whistleblowers who alerted them to the problem.

This was a clear violation of federal law, but Wachovia appears to be getting away with it. The Justice Department is not seeking an indictment against the company, out of fears that it could destabilize financial markets. Instead, it’s reached a “deferred prosecution agreement” — effectively a settlement — in which the bank agrees to pay $160 million and promise to never, ever launder drug money again.

Pretty light penalty for, you know, laundering drug money. The fine amounts to about one-half of one-hundredth of a percent of the drug money that DOJ says passed through the bank. Outside the too-big-to-fail world, getting caught laundering billions of dollars in drug money doesn’t just earn you hefty fines, it plants you in jail.

And Wachovia wasn’t alone. According to the U.N., laundering drug money was common during the darkest days of the financial crisis, as faltering banks sought to get their hands on any money they could find — regardless of where it came from.

2) Chamber of Commerce Launders AIG’s Lobbying Cash

Money laundering has been very profitable for Wall Street, and not just drug money. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a lobbying front-group for a lot of powerful corporations, and some of its most aggressive members are Wall Street titans. A watchdog group has filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service accusing the Chamber and notorious AIG kingpin Maurice “Hank” Greenberg of tax fraud. Greenberg was ousted from AIG in 2005 amid a massive accounting scandal, but not before helping to establish the insurance giant’s ridiculous credit default swap wing, which would destroy the company only a few years later.

Greenberg and the Chamber are accused of abusing a charity in order to hide millions of dollars in lobbying expenditures by AIG. In 2003, a foundation handled by Greenberg gave $5 million to the charitable wing of the Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber operates a charity called the National Chamber Foundation. The next year, Greenberg’s foundation gave another $10 million to the Chamber’s charity. In 2003 and 2004, 80 percent of the National Chamber Foundation’s budget was coming from Greenberg and AIG. The charity’s main function was to serve as a front for AIG lobbying.

Guess what? According to U.S. Chamber Watch, that money was turned over to the Chamber’s lobbying arm. At the time, the Chamber was raising tons of money to help reelect President George W. Bush, and AIG was trying to weaken accounting fraud laws. It’s illegal for a tax-exempt charity to funnel money to political operations. If the allegations are true, the Chamber’s charity would be shut down.

3) The $40 Billion Subprime Lie From Citibank and Robert Rubin

As the subprime mortgage market was falling apart in 2007, Citibank was trying to calm investor fears about a total meltdown — just like every other big Wall Street bank. Its chief tactic was to highlight that it had “only” $13 billion in subprime mortgage holdings, repeatedly touting the figure publicly.

The statement was true, if you ignored another $40 billion in subprime exposure that the firm held. Lying to shareholders is a major no-no in Corporate America — it’s considered securities fraud, and people can go to jail for it. The SEC is attempting to settle with Citi, but isn’t recommending criminal prosecutions or even charging individuals with formal wrongdoing. Instead, the SEC wants to fine Citi shareholders $75 million — a total slap in the face to basic conceptions of fairness, not to mention American taxpayers. See, if Citi execs did what the SEC says they did, then they were hurting their own shareholders. As punishment, the SEC wants to impose a fine on those same shareholders, the very parties who were wronged.

What’s more, the U.S. government took a stake in Citi as part of its epic bailout of the poorly managed financial behemoth. Taxpayers are being asked to help foot the bill for wrongs committed by the executives we bailed out. Thanks a lot, SEC.

The SEC has filed documents indicating that both Citi CEO Chuck Prince and board member Robert Rubin knew about the inaccurate statements, but isn’t filing charges against them. The stiffest penalty the SEC wants to impose on a Citi executive under the settlement is a $100,000 fine against Citi CFO Gary Crittenden. Crittenden took home $19.4 million in 2007 alone. I’ll bet he’s really sweating the rounding error on his bonus.

Fortunately, a federal judge has so far refused to sign off on the SEC’s settlement, calling it far too weak given the seriousness of the allegations. The SEC shouldn’t just be seeking huge fines against executives, it should be working with prosecutors on criminal cases.

4) Merrill Lynch: Inventing Fake Demand For Subprime Junk

This beauty of a scandal was uncovered by two investigative journalists at ProPublica. Like much of what happened on Wall Street over the past decade, it’s complicated, clever and totally corrupt.

During the boom years of the housing bubble, Merrill Lynch was top producer of fancy financial products called “Collateralized Debt Obligations,” or CDOs. Thousands of mortgages were packaged together and sliced up into securities called mortgage-backed securities, or MBS. Those MBS, in turn, were cobbled together to create a CDO — creating a byzantine product that former Merrill CEO John Thain now acknowledges was simply too complex to value — even supercomputers couldn’t figure the damn things out.

But creating gimmick securities and selling them to investors wasn’t the scam that caught ProPublica’s attention: shady as it was, just about everybody on Wall Street did that. When Merrill sold its CDOs to investors, it divided the big mess into different tiers, known as “tranches,” reflecting different levels of risk. The riskiest tranche of the CDO fetched the highest price, because it was the most likely to default, while the “safest” tranche fetched the lowest price. But as investors began to worry about the subprime craze in 2006, they stopped ponying up for the risky bits.

But this lack of demand was no problem for Merrill. When it couldn’t offload the tranche from one of these garbage CDOs, it just created a new CDO, and used the new security to buy up the unwanted junk from the old one. The result was a catastrophic daisy chain, in which Merrill was able to keep producing new CDOs by inventing fake demand — all while subjecting itself to dangerous levels of risk. By 2007, a full 42 of the bank’s 92 CDOs included pieces of other CDOs it had previously sold — 46 percent.

Often, two newly created CDOs would simply swap assets with each other. ProPublica says a full $107 billion worth of CDOs were created and traded assets within days.

Merrill wasn’t the only bank to engage in this behavior. According to ProPublica, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Swiss scandal-magnet UBS all did so as well. But Merrill was the leader, packaging the most CDOs and the most CDOs with gimmicked demand. These practices had a significant effect on the real economy — they kept mortgage prices inflated and kept the subprime machine moving, allowing the housing bubble to grow larger and more devastating. The SEC is investigating the practice for evidence of fraud.

5) Wells Fargo Overdraft Theft

Ever wonder how you managed to rack up such high overdraft fees? Well, there’s a decent chance you didn’t. U.S. banks scored an astonishing $38 billion in overdraft revenues in 2009 — pretty impressive for an industry whose total combined profit was just $12.5 billion that same year. For years, banks have been rearranging the order of their customers’ checking transactions, hoping to push account balances down to zero faster so they can charge more fees.

Say you’ve got $80 in your checking account, and need to pay some bills and run a couple of errands. You spend $30 on gas and another $20 on your water bill. Later, you head to the grocery store and spend $81 — oops! — on groceries. Any reasonable person would believe that the last transaction put you over the edge and earned you an overdraft fee, but megabanks aren’t reasonable people. Instead, the bank automatically processes your $81 purchase ahead of your previous charges. As a result, you do not get hit with one overdraft fee for your groceries, you get hit with three, because your costliest purchase was processed before the others — even though you made the cheaper purchases first.

Now, there’s no reason why banks can’t, say, notify you about your overdrafts before approving them. In the example above, you could have put the tomatoes back on the shelf and saved yourself $39. But reordering transactions is beyond the pale — if bankers did this with their stock options, it’d be called “backdating” and it could land them in a federal penitentiary.

A judge in California has now said that this practice violated state law, and has ordered Wells Fargo bank to return hundreds of millions of dollars in such ill-gotten gains to its California customers. But Wells Fargo wasn’t alone — every major U.S. bank had overdraft programs that worked the same way Wells Fargo’s did.

Reposted From FaceBook post by Molly Swipas.

Teach them well and let them learn:

If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn.
If children live with hostility, they learn to fight.
If children live with fear, they learn to be apprehensive.
If children live with pity, they learn to feel sorry for themselves.
If children live with ridicule, they learn to feel shy.
If children live with jealousy, they learn to feel envy.
If children live with shame, they learn to feel guilty.
If children live with encouragement, they learn confidence.
If children live with tolerance, they learn patience.
If children live with praise, they learn appreciation.
If children live with acceptance, they learn to love.
If children live with approval, they learn to like themselves.
If children live with recognition, they learn it is good to have a goal.
If children live with sharing, they learn generosity.
If children live with honesty, they learn truthfulness.
If children live with fairness, they learn justice.
If children live with kindness and consideration, they learn respect.
If children live with security, they learn to have faith in themselves and in those about them.
If children live with friendliness, they learn the world is a nice place in which to live.

Repost from Facebook by Molly Swipas.

Being in education for 25-plus years, I’ve seen all kinds of bullying, and there’s one factor that is common to all
- a family member, often a parent, is also a bully. A parent or relative could be teasing or taunting another family
member, and kids see that this is allowed.

What has made things a lot worse recently is that now we have a national display of bullying by our congressional
leaders and other groups such as the Tea Party. Kids see grownups holding signs with racist slurs and pictures, and
congressional members calling each other names. What else are kids to think but that bullying is OK, it works for
grownup doesn’t it? Everyone does it. Fox News host and radio shock jocks make tons of money by doing this daily.

Civility has been lost and bullying has taken over in political debate. Maybe the kids of today will be the ones to finally
put an end to these very negative and vicious acts of behavior. I can only hope and pray that they will rise above this
disgraceful practice. Bullying destroys not only the victim, but ends up destroying the souls of the bullies themselves.

A Liberal Definition by John F. Kennedy:

Acceptance Speech of the New York
Liberal Party Nomination

September 14, 1960

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label “Liberal?” If by “Liberal” they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer’s dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of “Liberal.” But if by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.”

But first, I would like to say what I understand the word “Liberal” to mean and explain in the process why I consider myself to be a “Liberal,” and what it means in the presidential election of 1960.

In short, having set forth my view — I hope for all time — two nights ago in Houston, on the proper relationship between church and state, I want to take the opportunity to set forth my views on the proper relationship between the state and the citizen. This is my political credo:

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man’s ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

I believe also in the United States of America, in the promise that it contains and has contained throughout our history of producing a society so abundant and creative and so free and responsible that it cannot only fulfill the aspirations of its citizens, but serve equally well as a beacon for all mankind. I do not believe in a superstate. I see no magic in tax dollars which are sent to Washington and then returned. I abhor the waste and incompetence of large-scale federal bureaucracies in this administration as well as in others. I do not favor state compulsion when voluntary individual effort can do the job and do it well. But I believe in a government which acts, which exercises its full powers and full responsibilities. Government is an art and a precious obligation; and when it has a job to do, I believe it should do it. And this requires not only great ends but that we propose concrete means of achieving them.

Our responsibility is not discharged by announcement of virtuous ends. Our responsibility is to achieve these objectives with social invention, with political skill, and executive vigor. I believe for these reasons that liberalism is our best and only hope in the world today. For the liberal society is a free society, and it is at the same time and for that reason a strong society. Its strength is drawn from the will of free people committed to great ends and peacefully striving to meet them. Only liberalism, in short, can repair our national power, restore our national purpose, and liberate our national energies. And the only basic issue in the 1960 campaign is whether our government will fall in a conservative rut and die there, or whether we will move ahead in the liberal spirit of daring, of breaking new ground, of doing in our generation what Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson did in their time of influence and responsibility.

Our liberalism has its roots in our diverse origins. Most of us are descended from that segment of the American population which was once called an immigrant minority. Today, along with our children and grandchildren, we do not feel minor. We feel proud of our origins and we are not second to any group in our sense of national purpose. For many years New York represented the new frontier to all those who came from the ends of the earth to find new opportunity and new freedom, generations of men and women who fled from the despotism of the czars, the horrors of the Nazis, the tyranny of hunger, who came here to the new frontier in the State of New York. These men and women, a living cross section of American history, indeed, a cross section of the entire world’s history of pain and hope, made of this city not only a new world of opportunity, but a new world of the spirit as well.

Tonight we salute Governor and Senator Herbert Lehman as a symbol of that spirit, and as a reminder that the fight for full constitutional rights for all Americans is a fight that must be carried on in 1961.

Many of these same immigrant families produced the pioneers and builders of the American labor movement. They are the men who sweated in our shops, who struggled to create a union, and who were driven by longing for education for their children and for the children’s development. They went to night schools; they built their own future, their union’s future, and their country’s future, brick by brick, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and now in their children’s time, suburb by suburb.

Tonight we salute George Meany as a symbol of that struggle and as a reminder that the fight to eliminate poverty and human exploitation is a fight that goes on in our day. But in 1960 the cause of liberalism cannot content itself with carrying on the fight for human justice and economic liberalism here at home. For here and around the world the fear of war hangs over us every morning and every night. It lies, expressed or silent, in the minds of every American. We cannot banish it by repeating that we are economically first or that we are militarily first, for saying so doesn’t make it so. More will be needed than goodwill missions or talking back to Soviet politicians or increasing the tempo of the arms race. More will be needed than good intentions, for we know where that paving leads.

In Winston Churchill’s words, “We cannot escape our dangers by recoiling from them. We dare not pretend such dangers do not exist.”

And tonight we salute Adlai Stevenson as an eloquent spokesman for the effort to achieve an intelligent foreign policy. Our opponents would like the people to believe that in a time of danger it would be hazardous to change the administration that has brought us to this time of danger. I think it would be hazardous not to change. I think it would be hazardous to continue four more years of stagnation and indifference here at home and abroad, of starving the underpinnings of our national power, including not only our defense but our image abroad as a friend.

This is an important election — in many ways as important as any this century — and I think that the Democratic Party and the Liberal Party here in New York, and those who believe in progress all over the United States, should be associated with us in this great effort. The reason that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson had influence abroad, and the United States in their time had it, was because they moved this country here at home, because they stood for something here in the United States, for expanding the benefits of our society to our own people, and the people around the world looked to us as a symbol of hope.

I think it is our task to re-create the same atmosphere in our own time. Our national elections have often proved to be the turning point in the course of our country. I am proposing that 1960 be another turning point in the history of the great Republic.

Some pundits are saying it’s 1928 all over again. I say it’s 1932 all over again. I say this is the great opportunity that we will have in our time to move our people and this country and the people of the free world beyond the new frontiers of the 1960s.