Theodore Roosevelt

Two Republican presidents are on Mt. Rushmore - Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. If they were still alive today, would they identify with the current Republican Party? Rooosevelt might; the reason he ran on a third party ticket in 1912 was because he was so disgusted with how his friend William H. Taft took the party away from the progressive reforms of the Roosevelt years, and turned it back into the party of big business. Taft was so unpopular that Roosevelt actually came in second behind Wilson, the first and only time a third party ticket did that well. All of this information was featured last week in Time magazine which profiled Roosevelt as part of a special issue on American history. It was a good read. Too bad we don't have a Roosevelt to protect our interests today. During his last run for the presidency, he championed a minimum wage, social security, and other reforms that were shelved until his distant cousin FDR became President. Teddy as he was called, strongly believed in government protections against the darwinian instincts of large corporations. Today, there is little restraint on big business. The oil companies have reformed themselves into an oliogopoly to control oil prices and artificially constrain the supply of oil to keep prices high. What the oil companies have done of course is not against the law, but it is certainly morally questionable and against the interests of the U.S. public.

The U.S. Congress and the Bush Administration have fallen all over themselves to criticize the New York Times because they chose to run an article detailing how we followed the money trail of terrorists organizations. Of course they did not criticize the Wall Street Journal for doing the exact same thing. But how grevious is it to publicize information that was already readily available on the internet, and which had been mentioned many times since 9/11. Does anyone really think the bad guys aren't aware we trace their financial transactions? Too bad the Bush Administration doesn't save more of their wrath for the oil companies which have not done any of us any favors. In California alone, the increased price of gas cost consumers 30 billion dollars a year. Guess where that money goes - into the pockets of the oil companies and to our so called friends in the middle east who fund the terrorists. Bush is not Roosevelt of course - he is more in the mold of Taft who stacked his cabinet with corporate lawyers. Teddy would not look favorably on a party that cut taxes during wartime, tried to repeal the estate tax, and privatize social security. He would also wonder how Congress saw fit to increase it own salary several fold while denying 7 million of our lowest paid workers an increase in the minimum wage. One thing for sure - we won't be seeing George W. Bush on Mt. Rushmore.