I have been involved in a discussion over whether or not Abraham Lincoln had ideas that could be classified as socialist.  The other side of the discussion has denied that Abraham Lincoln ever said some of the quotes that I attributed to him.

I decided to see what the web had to say about  Abraham Lincoln  – First Annual Message December 3, 1861.  I leave it up to you to figure out if the American Presidency Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara would post false information.

It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class–neither work for others nor have others working for them. In most of the Southern States a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters, while in the Northern a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families–wives, sons, and daughters–work for themselves on their farms, in their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand nor of hired laborers or slaves on the other. It is not forgotten that a considerable number of persons mingle their own labor with capital; that is, they labor with their own hands and also buy or hire others to labor for them; but this is only a mixed and not a distinct class. No principle stated is disturbed by the existence of this mixed class.

I found this web ad hidden away on Elizabeth Warren’s web site:

Help make this ad go viral. The 1% have the money, but the 99% have the people.

Arm yourself with some knowledge before going on the counter-attack. Make sure you see Elizabeth Warren’s explanation of how ridiculous this attack ad is. Republicans seem to know what is the worst thing they can accuse someone of doing by just accusing them of doing what the Republicans actually did and the person actually fought against.

Facebook makes it extremely difficult to share what Elizabeth Warren said about this ad on her Facebook page, so I will just have to quote it here.

I expected Wall St. to throw everything they had at me in this race; I helped found the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to curb their abuses, after all. But I never did imagine they’d fund an ad attacking me as being their own ally. Watch me discuss the irony of their latest attack on Lawrence O’Donnell last night. What do you think?

Simon Johnson has written about Karl Rove’s Latest Attack on Elizabeth Warren.

Ms. Warren became chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) for TARP, precisely because people in Congress – on both sides of the aisle – trusted her to provide an honest and professional check on the support provided to financial firms.  She did her highest profile work during the Obama administration, bringing relentless pressure on the Treasury and other agencies who just wanted to prop up big firms without any conditions.

What Elizabeth Warren did was “bringing relentless pressure on the Treasury and other agencies who just wanted to prop up big firms without any conditions”  yet “the ad attempts to blame Ms. Warren for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and for bank bailouts.”

When Rove can accuse her of being for something that she fought against tooth and nail, this is something that all the people who know the truth must shout down as loudly as they can.

Remember The top 1% have the money, the other 99% have the people. Start putting in your effort to shout this down.  Use this opportunity to make it very well known what Elizabeth Warren really did.  Make sure that every one knows that the Rove ad is a lie.

Don’t sit idly by while the 1% lie about the most effective advocate of the 99% that we have ever had the chance to elect to the Senate.  If you fall for this lie or don’t help save other people from the lie, how will you look yourself in the mirror?

I’ll try to keep track of some of the items I find on the web that refute the ad.

Ad Twists Elizabeth Warren’s Role as TARP Watchdog – ABC News

What the ad doesn’t mention is that the Congressional Oversight Panel, under Warren, became known for reports that were critical of the way the Treasury Department implemented the bailout program, who received funds, and the lack of transparency.

Warren Strikes Back at Karl Rove on TARP Ad – ABC News

“I can’t find the right words to describe how wrong that is, factually wrong and morally wrong,” Warren told the Boston Herald today. ”Karl Rove is not telling the truth, and I think anyone who is not telling the truth shouldn’t be running ads in this race.”

Elizabeth Warren slaps down Karl Rove, latest attack ad – BostonHerald.com

The poll found that her unfavorable ratings rose by 9 percent due to attack ads.

Brian McGrory: Political mudslinging: A reason to change the channel – The Boston Globe

The latest television attack ad against Elizabeth Warren, a spot funded by an outside group that is so unapologetically cynical, so full of absurd distortions, that it should stand apart from everything else going on these days. Problem is, it fits right in.

Elizabeth Warren blasts ‘ridiculous’ charge in ad by Karl Rove group – The Los Angeles Times

Amazingly enough I had to find out about this rebuttal ad from The Los Angeles Times

Winning the argument – The Washington Post

The ad also alleges — as a negative — that Warren went on a “charm offensive” with Wall Street fat cats. That’s a reference to a Politico article on a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event, where Warren sought common ground with top business figures at a moment when they were furious with her.

Elizabeth Warren versus Karl Rove and the one percent – The Washington Post

But Warren seems determined to hit back hard, and to seize on these attacks to reframe the race on her own terms — as her versus Wall Street and its crew of political henchmen and errand boys.

Super PAC Crossroads GPS takes swipe at Elizabeth Warren’s response to latest ad – Masslive.com

In an interview with the Boston Herald, Warren said that Rove along with then President George Bush helped craft the Troubled Asset Relief Program from the beginning, a claim the PAC disputes.

“Professor Warren’s response shows how asleep at the switch she was when the Democrat-led Congress passed the Wall Street bailouts in 2008 and 2009 and put her in charge of overseeing them – more than a year after Karl Rove had left the White House,” Steven Law, president and CEO of Crossroads GPS, said in a statement.

The Democratic led Congress was stampeded by Bush’s Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen a former CEO of Goldman Sachs into passing an emergency measure to prevent global financial collapse. Maybe Karl somehow forgot this.

Rove’s Hit Job for Scott Brown: The Year’s Most Ridiculous Attack Ad – Huffington Post

Karl Rove is spending a lot of money trying to help his close friend Sen. Scott Brown, but his ads just aren’t passing the laugh test. Just last week, an ad from Rove’s Crossroads GPS was saying Elizabeth Warren was too radical because she was so close …

Crossroads: Elizabeth Warren responsible for bank bailouts – CBS News

In a 2009 interview with the Daily Beast, Warren emphasized her opposition to allowing banks to get “too big to fail.”

“There are a lot of ways to regulate ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions: break them up, regulate them more closely, tax them more aggressively, insure them, and so on. And I’m totally in favor of increased regulatory scrutiny of these banks,” she began. “But those are all regulatory tools. Regulations, over time, fail. I want to see Congress focus more on a credible system for liquidating the banks that are considered too big to fail.”

Of the “charm offensive,” the Crossroads GPS ad points to a March 2011 Politico article describing Warren’s efforts to find “common ground” with the Chamber of Commerce and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a consumer watchdog agency created with the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. Warren, who conceived of the CFPB and had at one point hoped to head it, reached out to a number of CFPB critics in an attempt to win over the opposition.

Still, she did not apologize for her pro-regulatory stance.

Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Scott Brown both denounce latest Crossroads GPS ad – MassLive.com

Democratic Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren and rival Republican Sen. Scott Brown‘s campaign have both denounced the latest negative ad released by the Karl Rove backed Crossroads GPS political action committee, although Brown added a barb for the Harvard professor.

“Senator Brown has made it clear that he wishes third-party groups on both sides would keep their negative ads out of Massachusetts,” said Jim Barnett, Brown’s campaign manager. “Regrettably, Professor Warren has cheered on negative attack ads against Scott Brown, and refuses to join his call for outside groups to stop interfering.”

Warren said previously that she believes “a blanket notion that nobody talks except the two candidates is not within the spirit of how democratic elections work.”

Brown, however, called for all outside groups to keep out of the Senate race in Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Warren, Wall Street Shill – Mother Jones

I see that Karl Rove’s PAC unveiled a preposterously deceptive ad yesterday claiming that Elizabeth Warren is unfit for the Senate because she’s….wait for it….too close to Wall Street. Yes, you read that right. Here on Earth Prime, of course, Warren is perhaps one of the financial industry’s most loathed figures. Saying she’s too close to Wall Street is sort of like saying Ralph Nader is too close to General Motors because, you know, he spent a whole year researching a book about the car industry.

Karl Rove Super PAC: Elizabeth Warren Is A Class Warrior AND She’s Too Cozy With Wall Street – Business Insider

Conservatives know that they don’t like Elizabeth Warren, but they can’t seem to decide why.

After weeks of slamming the Democratic Massachusetts Senate candidate as a radical class warrior, Republicans are trying a new line of attack. Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove-funded super PAC, is out with a new ad this week that slams Warren for abandoning the middle class to get cozy with big banks.

A stark reminder of the imbalance of financial power in political campaigns is the story of the Crossroads GPS super-pac in the article Crossroads hits vulnerable Dems with $1 million in new ads.

For Elizabeth Warren supporters, the key paragraph in the story headlined above is,

“But the biggest buy is saved for Massachusetts, where Crossroads has made Democrat Elizabeth Warren a top target of its 2012 election efforts. The group will spend $524,000 to undercut Warren in December.”

Also consider that the Top 1 Percent Control 42 Percent of Financial Wealth in the U.S.. The bottom 99% of the population that has the rest of the wealth doesn’t have the leeway between what they have and what they need for survival as does the top 1%. So the actual disparity between what the 1% can spare to sway elections and what the bottom 99% can spare is even larger than total wealth numbers indicate.

How can the bottom 99% compete with the top 1% for political influence?

As I see it, the title of this article is the clue. The top 1% have the money, the other 99% have the people.

Somehow, we have to turn our advantage in numbers into real political influence.

In a political campaign, the money controls the traditional means of communication which gives the top 1% the advantage in establishing the terms of the debate and national conversation.

Technology has given rise to new means of communication. Not only do we have the internet, but many people also have unlimited phone service. That means that postings on the internet and telephone calls to establish contact with people in your area are free of additional monetary cost. What they do cost is person-hours. Nobody has more than 24 hours in a day, so our advantage in numbers of people gives us the advantage of the number of people-hours we have.

What are the ways of using our people hours to maximum advantage?

• Volunteer your time to a campaign
• Make phone calls to other voters and go house to house to urge support for causes and candidates. Such contact has been found to be the most influential means of getting people to vote
• Use the internet
  • Use sharing tools on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, etc. to let the world know about issues and candidates you support.
  • Write comments on articles and posts to indicate your position
  • Create your own web pages – Facebook, Google+, YouTube, blogs and any other means – to promote your issues and candidates.
  • Multiply the effectiveness of other people’s efforts to make their constributions go viral by sharing them, liking them, subscribing to them, +1-ing them, and emailing them to your social network. Don’t just be a passive reader of internet content. Use all means available to make it clear that you are one more person who has read, agreed with, and supported an item on the internet.
  • Use online tools to organize group meetings where interpersonal support for an issue or candidate can be reinforced
• Participate in peaceful street demonstrations that attract media attention
• Attend public political events to demonstrate to others the amount of support a policy or candidate has

To begin practicing some of these ideas, comment on this post to add suggestions, pass it on to others, indicate you like it, +1 it, share it, tweet it, etc.

Thanks to reader LlandaR for bringing this to my attention. I think I probably have another pointer to this buried in my email inbox that I would have eventually read, but when I see an email from Llanda, I read it right away.

This article is featured on the Sturbridge For Elizabeth Warren pages on Facebook and Google+.  You do not need an account on either Facebook or Google+ to see the articles.

As noted there:

For Elizabeth Warren supporters, the key paragraph in the story headlined below is,

“But the biggest buy is saved for Massachusetts, where Crossroads has made Democrat Elizabeth Warren a top target of its 2012 election efforts. The group will spend $524,000 to undercut Warren in December.”

Here is a discussion you won’t find in the lame stream press.

I cannot figure out when this interview occurred. The introduction by Paul Jay mentions the passage by the Senate on Thursday, December 1, 2011. I was under the impression that the legislation is now sitting on the President’s desk waiting for veto or signature. Ray McGovern seems to be saying that it must first go through the House.

If, in fact, it still has to be approved by the House, then we have more time to put pressure on the President to carry out his promise to veto. Until we know the true deadline, it is best to act as if the deadline is today.

If this doesn’t get Wall Street’s attention, I don’t know what will.

The mortgage holders of vacant real estate could go from almost total loss to making at least some money by renting out the home. That they have not done so in three years is not demonstrating an entrepreneurial spirit. If the Occupy movement has to show Wall Street how to be a true capitalist, then let them show the way.

Perhaps I too could claim to provide the intellectual basis for what the OWS movement does. See my June 12, 2011 post Solution to The Housing Market Crash for further details.

I’m not sorry, I just could not resist this one.

I just discovered the ideal replacement for President Obama.

The Obama giving this speech is the one I wish we had elected. This one really knows what the issues are. I bet he wouldn’t appoint the strongest representatives of Goldman Sachs to head all the top monetary and fiscal positions of his administration. I bet he wouldn’t let the major culprits go unprosecuted for three years. He wouldn’t let the regulatory agencies remain understaffed given the huge level of fraud that needed investigation and prosecution.

A guy like this would have been running around the country for the past three years rallying the masses to mobilize to fight the entrenched interests in Washington.

He missed it in this speech, but I bet in the next speech he would be urging movements like OWS to keep up the pressure. He would have noted how the tone of the debate is suddenly shifting in favor of the 99% since the occupations and demonstrations started. The very fact that the country is finally waking up to the idea of the 1% versus the 99% could not have been done without the citizens vigorously protesting.

If he had time, I bet he would have also mentioned that we are not going to waste another cent on trumped up wars. He wouldn’t ignore the evidence from the intelligence agencies so that as President he could lie to the public about some imagined threat that he knows does not really exist.

Maybe in the next speech he could mention that he would reverse the erosion of our civil rights by people who are using imaginary threats to terrorize us into acquiescence.

Where could we find a person like this who would act in office like the person who ran for that office?

I have just figured out the only way that this Obama could regain the credibility he has lost. This must be done before the election if he wants us to vote for him. He must fire everyone in his administration who ever worked for or cooperated with Goldman Sachs. He must show zero tolerance and no mercy for this connection. Anything less, and what he says are just empty words.

I might make an exception for anyone who was a Goldman Sachs whistle blower and helped put Goldman Sachs managers in prison. Oops, for those criteria to be met there would have had to be at least one prosecution and a conviction.