http://whale.to/a/deserano.html
Some tasty excerpts:
Our favorite Ben Stooge...
Some tasty excerpts:
14.) "As the United States prepared in 1976 to celebrate the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, a group of intellectuals and political leaders from Japan, the United States, and Western Europe, organized into 'The Trilateral Commission', issued a report. It was entitled 'The Governability of Democracies.' Samuel Huntington, a political science professor at Harvard University and a long-time consultant to the White House on the war in Vietnam, wrote the part of the report that dealt with the United States. He called it 'The Democratic Distemper' and identified the problem he was about to discuss: 'The 1960's witnessed a democratic upsurge of democratic fervor in America.' In the sixties, Huntington wrote, there was a huge growth of citizen participation 'in the forms of marches, demonstrations, protest movements, and cause organizations.' There were also 'markedly higher levels of self-consciousness on the part of blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students and women, all of whom became mobilized and organized in new ways…' There was a 'marked expansion of white-collar unionism,' and all this added up to 'a reassertion of equality as a goal in social, economic and political life.' Huntington pointed to the signs of decreasing government authority: The great demands in the sixties for equality had transformed the federal budget. In 1960 foreign affairs spending was 53.7 percent of the budget, and social spending was 22.3 percent. By 1974 foreign affairs took 33 percent and social spending 31 percent. This seemed to reflect a change in public mood: In 1960 only 18 percent of the public said the government was spending too much on defense, but in 1969 this jumped to 52 percent. Huntington was troubled by what he saw:
'The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960's was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private. In one form or another, this challenge manifested itself in the family, the university, business, public and private associations, politics, the governmental bureaucracy, and the military services. People no longer felt the same obligation to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents.'
All this, he said, 'produced problems for the governability of democracy in the 1970's…' Critical in all this was the decline in the authority of the President. And:
'To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War II, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector's Establishment.'
'The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960's was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private. In one form or another, this challenge manifested itself in the family, the university, business, public and private associations, politics, the governmental bureaucracy, and the military services. People no longer felt the same obligation to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents.'
All this, he said, 'produced problems for the governability of democracy in the 1970's…' Critical in all this was the decline in the authority of the President. And:
'To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War II, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector's Establishment.'
82.) From 1973-1974, game show host (Win Ben Stein's Money [1997-present]) and sometime actor (Ferris Bueller's Day Off [1986]), Ben Stein, was a speechwriter and lawyer for Richard Nixon at the White House and then for President Gerald Ford (1974-1977) ("Ben", 2003).
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