TheMillerCircle.org

At a time when all Americans should be asking the question:

FDR & The New Deal (from The Independent)

what would FDR do?–the Republicans and Democrats have treated the initials FDR as if it were a four letter word. Not so for the British. Yesterday, The Independent had, as its front page article, a historical account of FDR and “The New Deal” which seems more appropriate for us as a topic of discussion, as we head ever deeper into the unchartered waters of financial risk. This is clearly the worst financial crisis we have confronted since the Great Depression. And, while the soup lines are still small, many middle class Americans wonder whether they might wind up joining that line sometime soon. With today’s news the AIG byout, it is apparent that public financial commitments to a crumbling Wall Street are growing still, in exponential-like fashion. Wall Street has hit Mainstreet USA rather hard in the last few months and there are indications that public debts created by the failed housing market and the AIG insurance policies for stock market credits, will grow considerably, as the large snake of continuity in the investment schemes becomes increasingly visible. But the fact that phrases such as “FDR” and “The New Deal” are still no-no in American politics tells you something about the success of the right-wing in making Democrats uncomfortable referring to the only past history we have ever had that successfully dealt with our most serious economic meltdown. Until The New Deal was introduced in the 1930s, we had depressions about every 20 years until the mother of all depressions began in 1929. But after The New Deal was implemented and we went through WW II, we did not have a serious economical collapse until the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980s, which was attributed to the removal of regulatory control over the Savings and Loan institutions, free market style. It is the cowboy capitalists who are the true enemies of a stable economy and it was FDR who saved capitalism from the capitalists. Now they are back, but in a new toxic form, with meltdown prospects that make our own economy seem small in comparative scale to the dimensions of the risk. FDR often defended the use of the word “socialist” and “socialism” by saying something to the effect that if “they want to call us socialists for what we have done, then we are all socialists.” Obama sometimes bites around the edges, but he has yet to swallow. So far, we have socialized the risks of Wall Street: when are we going to socialize the gains?