"The Shining City on a Hill (myth)" Mario Cuomo

[video=youtube;kOdIqKsv624]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOdIqKsv624[/video]

This speech is new to me and its already one of my all time favorites, I love every piece of it, RIP Mario Cuomo He speaks about how America is actually two cities, a shining city where the rich live, and a dark city where the poor live. He speaks about how trickle-down economics is a cruel system that exploits the poor and how Republicans are dividing America between the rich and the poor. In short, he destroys the entire system Reagan stood for.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mariocuomo1984dnc.htm

"Please allow me to skip the stories and the poetry and the temptation to deal in nice but vague rhetoric. Let me instead use this valuable opportunity to deal immediately with the questions that should determine this election and that we all know are vital to the American people.

Ten days ago, President Reagan admitted that although some people in this country seemed to be doing well nowadays, others were unhappy, even worried, about themselves, their families, and their futures. The President said that he didn't understand that fear. He said, "Why, this country is a shining city on a hill." And the President is right. In many ways we are a shining city on a hill.

But the hard truth is that not everyone is sharing in this city's splendor and glory. A shining city is perhaps all the President sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there's another city; there's another part to the shining the city; the part where some people can't pay their mortgages, and most young people can't afford one; where students can't afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate.

In this part of the city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can't find it. Even worse: There are elderly people who tremble in the basements of the houses there. And there are people who sleep in the city streets, in the gutter, where the glitter doesn't show. There are ghettos where thousands of young people, without a job or an education, give their lives away to drug dealers every day. There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don't see, in the places that you don't visit in your shining city.

In fact, Mr. President, this is a nation -- Mr. President you ought to know that this nation is more a "Tale of Two Cities" than it is just a "Shining City on a Hill."

Maybe, maybe, Mr. President, if you visited some more places; maybe if you went to Appalachia where some people still live in sheds; maybe if you went to Lackawanna where thousands of unemployed steel workers wonder why we subsidized foreign steel. Maybe -- Maybe, Mr. President, if you stopped in at a shelter in Chicago and spoke to the homeless there; maybe, Mr. President, if you asked a woman who had been denied the help she needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire or for a missile we couldn't afford to use.

Maybe -- Maybe, Mr. President. But I'm afraid not. Because the truth is, ladies and gentlemen, that this is how we were warned it would be. President Reagan told us from the very beginning that he believed in a kind of social Darwinism. Survival of the fittest. "Government can't do everything," we were told, so it should settle for taking care of the strong and hope that economic ambition and charity will do the rest. Make the rich richer, and what falls from the table will be enough for the middle class and those who are trying desperately to work their way into the middle class.

You know, the Republicans called it "trickle-down" when Hoover tried it. Now they call it "supply side." But it's the same shining city for those relative few who are lucky enough to live in its good neighborhoods. But for the people who are excluded, for the people who are locked out, all they can do is stare from a distance at that city's glimmering towers.

It's an old story. It's as old as our history. The difference between Democrats and Republicans has always been measured in courage and confidence. The Republicans -- The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail. "The strong" -- "The strong," they tell us, "will inherit the land."

We Democrats believe in something else. We democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees -- wagon train after wagon train -- to new frontiers of education, housing, peace; the whole family aboard, constantly reaching out to extend and enlarge that family; lifting them up into the wagon on the way; blacks and Hispanics, and people of every ethnic group, and native Americans -- all those struggling to build their families and claim some small share of America. For nearly 50 years we carried them all to new levels of comfort, and security, and dignity, even affluence. And remember this, some of us in this room today are here only because this nation had that kind of confidence. And it would be wrong to forget that.

So, here we are at this convention to remind ourselves where we come from and to claim the future for ourselves and for our children. Today our great Democratic Party, which has saved this nation from depression, from fascism, from racism, from corruption, is called upon to do it again -- this time to save the nation from confusion and division, from the threat of eventual fiscal disaster, and most of all from the fear of a nuclear holocaust.

That's not going to be easy. Mo Udall is exactly right -- it won't be easy. And in order to succeed, we must answer our opponent's polished and appealing rhetoric with a more telling reasonableness and rationality.

We must win this case on the merits. We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship to the reality, the hard substance of things. And we'll do it not so much with speeches that sound good as with speeches that are good and sound; not so much with speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that will bring people to their senses. We must make -- We must make the American people hear our "Tale of Two Cities." We must convince them that we don't have to settle for two cities, that we can have one city, indivisible, shining for all of its people.

Now, we will have no chance to do that if what comes out of this convention is a babel of arguing voices. If that's what's heard throughout the campaign, dissident sounds from all sides, we will have no chance to tell our message. To succeed we will have to surrender some small parts of our individual interests, to build a platform that we can all stand on, at once, and comfortably -- proudly singing out. We need -- We need a platform we can all agree to so that we can sing out the truth for the nation to hear, in chorus, its logic so clear and commanding that no slick Madison Avenue commercial, no amount of geniality, no martial music will be able to muffle the sound of the truth.

And we Democrats must unite. We Democrats must unite so that the entire nation can unite, because surely the Republicans won't bring this country together. Their policies divide the nation into the lucky and the left-out, into the royalty and the rabble. The Republicans are willing to treat that division as victory. They would cut this nation in half, into those temporarily better off and those worse off than before, and they would call that division recovery.

Now, we should not -- we should not be embarrassed or dismayed or chagrined if the process of unifying is difficult, even wrenching at times. Remember that, unlike any other Party, we embrace men and women of every color, every creed, every orientation, every economic class. In our family are gathered everyone from the abject poor of Essex County in New York, to the enlightened affluent of the gold coasts at both ends of the nation. And in between is the heart of our constituency -- the middle class, the people not rich enough to be worry-free, but not poor enough to be on welfare; the middle class -- those people who work for a living because they have to, not because some psychiatrist told them it was a convenient way to fill the interval between birth and eternity. White collar and blue collar. Young professionals. Men and women in small business desperate for the capital and contracts that they need to prove their worth.

We speak for the minorities who have not yet entered the mainstream. We speak for ethnics who want to add their culture to the magnificent mosaic that is America. We speak -- We speak for women who are indignant that this nation refuses to etch into its governmental commandments the simple rule "thou shalt not sin against equality," a rule so simple --

I was going to say, and I perhaps dare not but I will. It's a commandment so simple it can be spelled in three letters: E.R.A.

We speak -- We speak for young people demanding an education and a future. We speak for senior citizens. We speak for senior citizens who are terrorized by the idea that their only security, their Social Security, is being threatened. We speak for millions of reasoning people fighting to preserve our environment from greed and from stupidity. And we speak for reasonable people who are fighting to preserve our very existence from a macho intransigence that refuses to make intelligent attempts to discuss the possibility of nuclear holocaust with our enemy. They refuse. They refuse, because they believe we can pile missiles so high that they will pierce the clouds and the sight of them will frighten our enemies into submission.

Now we're proud of this diversity as Democrats. We're grateful for it. We don't have to manufacture it the way the Republicans will next month in Dallas, by propping up mannequin delegates on the convention floor. But we, while we're proud of this diversity, we pay a price for it. The different people that we represent have different points of view. And sometimes they compete and even debate, and even argue. That's what our primaries were all about. But now the primaries are over and it is time, when we pick our candidates and our platform here, to lock arms and move into this campaign together."

I cant think of a better speech, and this is only half of it!!

 

I'm am scarcely surprised that you are in love with a speech based in the main on liberal mythology that is so revoltingly antithetical to the facts of the matter.

 

I love how you addressed the issues he brought up


not.

 

It's never surprising when a right-winger denies the truth that Reaganomics, trickle down, supply side economics, or whatever moniker they choose to hang on it is a dismal failure. They can cite no example where this unsustainable system has succeeded.

In fact, states like Kansas that have initiated total immersion into supply side nonsense are again proving what has been evident nationally since the middle 1980s. Reaganomics was a scam then, still is, and always will be. How many decades will it take the right wing to understand this fact?

 

I'm glad you liked the speech, Manifest. But, it does raise the question about why the leftists are so eager to create the evil dark cities of the poor and keep them there.

 

Cuomo inspired but did little for New York
By Fredric U. DickerJanuary 2, 2015


I covered Mario Cuomo when he was New York’s secretary of state, lieutenant governor and governor for nearly 20 years, for three news organizations, and what a strange, infuriating and ultimately tragic experience it turned out to be.
To nearly all who knew Mario Cuomo well, he was an underachieving enigma — brilliant yet indecisive, accomplished as a lawyer yet riddled with self-doubt as a politician, an initially popular governor who was eventually booted from office for failing to use that popularity to lead New York in a direction that would have made this a better state.
Early in Cuomo’s service as lieutenant governor, Robert Morgado, Gov. Hugh Carey’s longtime chief of staff, startled me with the observation that Carey was convinced there was “something odd with Mario” — that he was arrogant, angry and often resentful toward those he worked with in public life.
As the years passed, I heard dozens of others close to Cuomo, including some who worked with him every day, echo Morgado’s words.
Mario Cuomo was one of the nation’s greatest orators, but his sometimes-dazzling speeches — like his keynote to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in 1984 — almost always lacked answers to the problems they addressed.
Cuomo insisted he was a believing Roman Catholic, but then he went to war with his church on the theologically crucial issue of abortion.
He was someone who claimed to have foresworn political labels but was actually a quintessential political liberal and, usually, proud of it.
People who knew him well often joked that Mario Cuomo was someone who was ready with a question for every answer.
He was called New York’s “Hamlet on the Hudson’’ because of a painful penchant for delaying — usually in the grips of agonizing indecision — virtually every important decision he had to make, most famously on whether he would run for president in 1988 and in 1992, years when the Democratic nomination could have been his for the seeking.
Cuomo, a brilliant and accomplished lawyer in his pre-political life, reinforced that “Hamlet’’ image when he repeatedly told friends he was comfortable serving as a defense lawyer even in cases involving accused murderers but could never be comfortable as a prosecutor because, he said, he never would feel sure enough that someone was guilty and therefore deserving of punishment.
While Cuomo could be charming in one-on-one conversations, could show a remarkable degree of caring when dealing with individual human tragedies, and could put aside ideological differences to help political adversaries — including the New York Post in the early 1990s, when it faced severe financial difficulties — he could also be arrogant and even cruel, browbeating opponents, abandoning longtime allies, and even turning on his own son and one-time key political adviser, New York’s current governor, Andrew.
Cuomo presided over the state’s highest office during the Reagan/Bush era, and because he was such a strong proponent of traditional liberal values — higher taxes to fund state spending on social programs, opposition to the death penalty, an unrelenting defense of abortion rights — he became a darling of the political left and of many in the national media.
But his legacy as governor was anything but positive.
Gov. Mario Cuomo raised literally hundreds of state taxes to fund ever-expanding social programs and developed fiscal gimmicks, including the notorious scheme to “sell’’ the Attica Correctional Facility back to the state to pad public revenues so he could spend even more.
Cuomo rejected a chance to end the hugely expensive tolls on the New York State Thruway and he literally destroyed, under pressure from environmental activists, the Long Island Lighting Co. and its $5 billion Shoreham nuclear power plant, saddling Long Island residents to this day with some of the highest utility costs in the nation.
Mario Cuomo presided over the widening loss of upstate jobs, industry and population, of which he was well aware. Either because he didn’t know how to address the problem or because, more likely, a deep streak of fatalism left him believing there was nothing he could do about it, the problem has continued to this day.
Although he didn’t initially realize he was doing so, David Garth — Cuomo’s longtime friend and political guru, who, coincidentally, died just a few weeks ago — encapsulated Mario Cuomo’s failures as governor a few months before he was turned out of office in 1994.
Garth was overseeing Cuomo’s bid for a fourth term and he was pressed at the Democratic nominating convention by several reporters to name some of the governor’s accomplishments during his term in office.
After several seconds of cold silence, a clearly uncomfortable Garth responded, “Haven’t you seen the new rest stops on the Thruway? They’re really something.’’
Such a singularly meager legacy from 12 years in office explained why a few months later, Cuomo — the great liberal champion who might very well have become president — was defeated by a little-known freshman state senator and former mayor of Peekskill, one George Elmer Pataki.


I suppose that Cuomo was Obama's role model as to how to govern.

 

Yes. The scum POS was your prototypical divider of people by class. Funny how the POS never called out LBJ for ruining black lives with the social heroin of generational welfare who is infamous for saying "I’ll have those (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)s voting Democratic for the next 200 years". And nowhere did the POS Cuomo mention how many working people did better and how many jobs were created or how many blacks did better under Reagan. Garbage like Mario ignores how his pathetic party kept people enslaved to the govt teat with the phony embezzlement known as the war on poverty.

And the POS had the nerve to say that democrats speak for minorities?

http://tinyurl.com/kexsrnm

http://tinyurl.com/kpzvkso

Oh and BTW, JFK was a supply sider. He also voted against the CRA of 1957.

 

But I did you see. To the extent that he blames it all on Republicans and trickle down economics it is a myth as if those things exist in a vacuum. Governments do not build houses but they do pass rules and regulations that make them far more expensive per square foot. Governments do not build cars but they do create rules and regulations that make them vastly more expensive and not infrequently more dangerous into the bargain. The same is true for a whole host of other things.

 

Wow, you are actually against house and car regulations? Wow, just wow.

 

You are so angry, calm down. First of all, "Democrat" does not equal "liberal", ever heard of a Dixiecrat? Those are southern conservative Democrats, so googling "25 racist comments by Democrats" is worthless especially because it will only be Right wing websites it links you too. Malcolm X before he died started to believe in integration and acceptance of white people he even left the Nation of Islam, guess who wanted those same things as him? Liberals, not conservatives, Malcolm X himself admits this many times. He says the conservatives are wolfs and openly try to kill blacks. He also says the police force is flooded with ex-klansmen, something im sure you would deny nonstop being the fascist you are.

You pretend its all about "jobs jobs jobs!!" nothing else matters except for jobs, well guess what, slavery was a job too, so simply giving everyone a job is not necessarily a good thing, especially if you have to get rid of minimum wage. This notion that the only thing that matters is "JOBS!!!" is pure propaganda, a job without a living wage is largely useless. Obama has created a ton of jobs but guess what, they are all very low wage jobs so its not exactly "great" news. If he created a bunch of middle class jobs that would be nice, but he didnt, and thats exactly what Republicans wanted.

 

Did you even listen to the speech? Republicans promote social darwinism, survival of the fittest, THAT is what creates the two cities between the "strong" and the "weak", not helping people. The idea that helping people actually harms people is so incredibly Orwellian I cant believe so many morons believe it.

 

Income and racial inequality being consistently worse in Democrat cities and congressional districts makes blaming Republicans harder with each passing year. It was easy to reject the facts during an economic crisis and a Republican Presidency but people are increasingly looking for more tangible things today.

 

Billions of dollars are being spent on massive propaganda campaigns to push this idea of trickle-down economics, undoubtedly that much money being spent is going to have massive effects on the populations mentality. Either we counter balance it with more money, which we dont have, so either we have to scare them like we did in the early 1900's into thinking there will be a Socialist Revolution or we sit back and watch our population become brainwashed by uber billionaires who run the world, literally.

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Large cities tend to be Democrat owned, rural towns tend to be Republican owned, dont you think that has something to do with why the places Democrats own tend to have more poverty/violence etc? Of course it does, but continue spreading your propaganda, have fun.

 

It's violence and inequality per capita, not as net or gross figures.

 

I just checks both threads on the topic of Cuomo since his demise. Hoping that conservatives here could show some restraint and decorum in their criticism for a couple of weeks and then trash the man. I'll have to say, that in fact they did just that. Virtually every poster with policy driven or ideological criticism, managed to refrain from flaming for a decent interval. I sure hope liberals can do the same on a later occasion. I feel pretty strongly that no matter how much we think the internet world needs us to 'set the record straight', we don't need to do it within the first days or week following a death. There is plenty of time to call the newly departed nasty names and remind the world of scandals and smears when feelings of sadness and loss are not as fresh.

 

Again, that is because liberals live in huge cities and conservatives live in small towns. Of course there will be less problems like this in small towns and exaggerated problems in huge cities.

 

You are joking right?

You must not know how to read if you think conservatives have been being nice to him, "Virtually every poster with policy driven or ideological criticism, managed to refrain from flaming for a decent interval." Absolute bull(*)(*)(*)(*)

 

That was a disrespectful nasty post. but it is also past the time frame I set as my standard. The service is past and we had some time to pay our respects in a thread, without significant flaming, unless you saw posts like this one that proceeded this thread here. the ones I read dealt with what they perceived to be lousy ideas not a lousy man.

 

It is not past your time frame, your time frame was "a couple of weeks", which is at least two weeks, its barley over one week.

 

Wow I meant days!

Here is the my original post on this very topic in august I think that describes my thought process. http://www.politicalforum.com/showthread.php?t=369191&page=5&p=1064165647#post1064165647

 

Fair enough, my apologies

 

Yet liberals want everyone to live in huge cities, which by your logic would only expand the problem to more people if these issues are a natural extension of being in a city.

What's really happening is the low income housing and welfare subsidies are creating minority-only sections of town. Never having any reason to leave their heavily subsidized enclaves, the minorities there focus upon petty local conflict and hedonism, which naturally causes heavy crime rates.

 

Wow


Yeah, you guys will NEVER get the minority vote being racist bastards like that, have fun destroying your party you wont be around much longer especially once we let more immigrants in.

 

I'd love to hear your explanation for why big cities, typically run by Democrats for decades, have higher per capita inequality and crime.

 

For obvious reasons, being overcrowded, huge array of different cultures, expensive housing, traffic jams, etc. Are you really saying small towns and big cities should have exactly the same amount of crime and inequality? What a ridiculous notion, pure semantics.