Obama to channel TR's "central theme-the primacy of human rights and collective control of wealth.."

[pampango]

History Shines Light on Obama’s Choice to Speak in Osawatomie

http://watchdog.org/12185/commentary-history-shines-light-on-obama%E2%80%99s-choice-to-speak-in-osawatomie/

President Barack Obama will deliver a speech on the national economy at Osawatomie High School at 1 p.m. Tuesday. The venue is puzzling unless you understand a speech there on Aug. 31, 1910, by former President Theodore Roosevelt.

His central theme was the primacy of human rights and collective control of property and wealth. “The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.”

In Osawatomie, Roosevelt said:

“In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. … At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.”

Click here for video about Roosevelt's Osawatomie speech

The populist progressive movement of the early 1900s was a watershed departure from political thought stressing individual rights, as espoused by the nation’s founders, to community or collective rights. From Roosevelt’s perspective the battle against corporate greed needed a singular leader with the concentrated power to sidestep the politics of Congress.

A key component of Roosevelt’s redistribution, called for in Osawatomie, was his proposal for a national income tax.

“The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective — a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.”

Roosevelt, though he was never reelected president, got his wish three years later with ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that instituted a progressive income tax. Most people paid little or nothing, and the original top tax rate was 7 percent. The amendment opened the door for Congress to determine how much citizens should be taxed in the national interest. By 1918 the top income tax rate was ten times higher, 77 percent. In 1944 the top rate climbed to 94 percent.