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RedditToday marks the 75th anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inaugural as President.
On a cold day at the tail of winter, Roosevelt looked out over a nation gripped by Depression, incapacitated by fear, and confronted by threats as grave as any we face today. He spoke, reassuringly, of how we had nothing to fear but fear itself. The New Deal policies he launched transformed nearly every aspect of American political, economic and cultural life. As important, they restored hope, work and a measure of dignity to millions.
It is that spirit of grounded realism and determined idealism that we need to reclaim today. It is that spirit which offers an antidote to those who rule as if they have nothing to fear but the end of fear itself.
As we wait for the results from today's primaries in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont, it's worth asking if the party of Roosevelt can recapture the imagination and nerve to offer solutions on a scale equal to the problems we face?
Tonight, after the voting booths and caucus halls close, we will hear many words. Some will soar and seek to sound themes reminiscent of a time when our social contract was rewoven.
Here are a few words, from that first Inaugural Address, I'd like to hear 2008 variations on this evening: "The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths, The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit....This Nation asks for action, and action now...Our greatest primary task is to put people to work..." (To read the entire text of Roosevelt's first Inaugural Address. click here.)
In the time "it took FDR to deliver those words on a bleak and unpromising day in Washington," writes Richard Parker in our "New New Deal" issue out later this month, "[Roosevelt] described a politics, an economics, and a morality at once--and thereby told Americans how they could and should make change, that he would lead them in doing so, and who would oppose them."
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Katrina vanden Heuvel
Thoughts on politics, current affairs, riffs and reflections on what’s in the news and what’s not--but should be.
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It should be obvious that there is only one candidate who would be willing to associate himself with the words KvdH cites.
It should not be necessary to point out that he is not running as a Democrat.
Posted by john.halle at 03/03/2008 @ 10:52pm
Can "the party of Roosevelt can recapture the imagination and nerve to offer solutions on a scale equal to the problems we face?"
No.
And why would they? They are complicit in creating those problems in the first place because they benefit from those problems. You're asking if the fox can help solve the problem of dead hens. The question is absurd on its face.
And you have already dismissed the one person running who is actually aiming for such imagination and nerve. Which makes your blog post all the more absurd.
What are you smoking, Katrina?
Posted by geezjan at 03/03/2008 @ 11:17pm
I know I live a privileged and rather HAPPY live. And I know the polls say half of all people rate themselves as doing fine but believes most everybody else is not, believing in "The Country going in the Wrong Direction" mantra the MSM feeds us non-stop during election years.
Still, I must be missing out on all the `hard' news, I had no idea, per KvH, ours is a "nation gripped by Depression, incapacitated by fear, and confronted by threats as grave as any we face....."
Posted by Happy at 03/04/2008 @ 12:01am
Posted by JOHN.HALLE 03/03/2008 @ 10:52pm
"It should be obvious that there is only one candidate who would be willing to associate himself with the words KvdH cites.
It should not be necessary to point out that he is not running as a Democrat."
I certainly hope that's because he's not currently running for president, because any other interpretation would be laughable at best.
If you do mean St. John, then you have an extremely warped view of history, FDR, and the current state of the nation. You would be, by that statement, equating a hopeless fear-monger and advocate for wealth over the common man with the greatest reforming president and friend of the American Dream our country has every produced. It would be an insult to the memory of FDR, nor will St. John be able to lift up such a claim without exposing himself for the hypocrite he truly is.
Posted by Stwriley at 03/04/2008 @ 12:30am
Posted by HAPPY 03/04/2008 @ 12:01am
"Still, I must be missing out on all the `hard' news, I had no idea, per KvH, ours is a "nation gripped by Depression, incapacitated by fear, and confronted by threats as grave as any we face.....""
You have an amazing ability, Happy, to willfully misconstrue practically any statement, even when the context is as obvious as the housing meltdown, the tanking dollar, the astronomical national debt, the declining real wages of most Americans, the...well, it would be a work of many hours just to list the economic problems that rise to that level of obviousness, much less any other kind. Yet what Katrina clearly wrote in the line you semi-quoted (what?!?, a right-winger quote-mining?, say it ain't so Joe!) was that this was the nation that FDR faced when he went to his inauguration on 4 March, 1933.
As far as you feeling just fine Happy, I don't doubt that you do. Far to many Republicans and others on the right can sustain their views because they have the wealth to sustain them. The rest of us, the majority of this country, do not. We know that the country is already in recession because we have already felt the pinch. Even careful and thrifty people like my wife and myself, who do not spend money we don't have and are both working professionals, have seen our savings dwindle, our paychecks become more inadequate by the day, and our hopes for a decent retirement vanish into the distant future. The answer that we and those like us don't work hard enough or at the right things is a myth of the right, who seem to believe that all Americans can be wealthy entrepreneurs regardless of the fact that this is a patently impossible fantasy that has no cognizance of basic economics.
FDR realized what the modern Right still has not; that the most fundamental right is that to a decent life without worry for the material necessities. That is what FDR saw as the hope on the horizon when he stood on the inaugural platform to deliver his address, though it is one that has been long delayed by the rearguard actions of those who still cannot conceive that sharing the wealth more fairly is the only tide that raises all boats.
Posted by Stwriley at 03/04/2008 @ 12:59am
Yes, but how would such a New New Deal sustain itself in a globalised world? FDR didn't have China to deal with economically. Money was gold, not strings of 0's and 1's in computers who knows where, and corporations were not yet ambiguous networks of transnational entities. There were no serious constraints on tapping and using the 'free' energy of petrochemicals (remember that clear light crude from Texas?), and the US still had a manufacturing-based economy.
Nude Eel rhetoric, for all its nobility of purpose, no longer fits the circumstances.
Posted by mikecope at 03/04/2008 @ 04:05am
Posted by STWRILEY 03/04/2008 @ 12:30am
The media does its job well. If he's not a Democrat, he must be a Republican.
I'm going to go out on a limb and bet that JOHN.HALLE was referring to Nader, not McCain. But I'm used to the fact that the candidate with truly the most popular platform will be always ignored, if not ruthlessly marginalized, by the two corporate parties and the corporate media, as well as by so-called "liberals" and phony "progressives" like you find here at The Nation.
Posted by geezjan at 03/04/2008 @ 06:46am
We liberals always stand between two choices in election season. Either vote for the candidate we believe in and hope against hope that he or she will prove electable, or vote for the candidate we believe is electable and hope against hope that he or she will turn out to stand for something, after all.
Since our Kucinich is now out of the race -- and please don't blame the Nation alone, there is plenty of blame to go around, and every one of us carries a share of it -- we have no choice now but to project our hopes upon a candidate who is still in the race. It's as simple as that. This, too, is facing reality.
As most of our news media become an echo chamber of unexamined claims, mostly from right-of-center blowhards, it is easy to imagine that words, the medium of both news and nonsense, have more power than they actually do. The words that appear printed in The Nation, though they have an uncommon amount of research and truth behind them, neither make nor break any candidate. They did not bring Kucinich to fall, and they alone cannot transform whoever wins the election of 2008 into the next FDR.
I am nonetheless grateful for the ink that The Nation spared on what so many other media outlets considered to be the two most salient attributes of Kucinich: his fabled unelectability and his belief in UFOs. And I believe it is not altogether a waste of ink (or electricity) to list the attributes of the kind of leader we really need right now, as KvdH has done here, since we can assume that the big campaign contributors have already presented their wish list to the candidates, who will hear nothing else unless we yell at the top of our lungs.
I will of course be happy when election season is over and The Nation can go back to what it does best, which is reporting a lot of the dire news that we need to know in order to make the most responsible decisions we can as voters, given the aforementioned constraints.
Posted by JakobFabian at 03/04/2008 @ 08:31am
Posted by STWRILEY 03/04/2008 @ 12:59am
FDR realized what the modern Right still has not; that the most fundamental right is that to a decent life without worry for the material necessities.
The Constitution (not to be confused with the Bill of Rights) acknowledges 3 rights, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Man has the right to pursue happiness, he is not guaranteed it.
Posted by Downtown at 03/04/2008 @ 08:52am
Ms vanden Heuvel....please.
Hillary or Obama, there is NOWHERE near the national situation of the US in March of 1933.
Are things bad? Sure. A war that drags on, a budget deficit still out of control (though I know you don't care anymore than right-wingers like HAPPY do about it), and recession and housing crunch.
But we are NOT at 20-25% unemployment and a Midwest starting to resemble the Gobi.
Incremental changes?...maybe. More under Obama, less under Hillary, none under McCain. But a "New New Deal"?....forget it.
Posted by Mask at 03/04/2008 @ 08:54am
The 1932 Democrats were trawling for the votes of a couple of million Socialists and Communists, not millions of centrist Republicans and Independents with delusions of individualism who believe Class Struggle is something the Antichrist thought up in the Book of Revelations.
Saving Capitalism from Ralph Nader doesn't inspire the same level of rhetoric. Incipient psychopathic buffoons like Chavez and sclerotic autocrats like the Castros make it easy for the Right to demonize Left ideas. Compromised populists like Edwards, trivialized Social Democrats like Kucinich and Gravel are cropped out of the visuals.
So if you're waiting for a Democrat to call for the end of Corporate Personhood or exclusive public financing of political campaigns, carry plenty of oxygen and energy bars.
Posted by JFHill at 03/04/2008 @ 08:55am
the two most salient attributes of Kucinich: his fabled unelectability and his belief in UFOs.----Posted by JAKOBFABIAN 03/04/2008 @ 08:31am
How many primaries did Kucinich win? How many did he get 2nd place? How many did he get 3rd place or 4th place?
If Democrats wouldn't support him, why would the general voting populace?
Sorry....his unelectability was no "fable".
Posted by Mask at 03/04/2008 @ 08:56am
It should not be necessary to point out that he is not running as a Democrat.
Posted by JOHN.HALLE 03/03/2008 @ 10:52pm
Jackass.
Posted by Dr Decibels at 03/04/2008 @ 09:59am
I'll get back to you with an answer after Congressional Dems capitulate on FISA reform....
Posted by sdz at 03/04/2008 @ 10:00am
Posted by DR DECIBELS 03/04/2008 @ 09:59am
Doc, why are you calling a Nader supporter a "jackass"?!?!?!?
Posted by Mask at 03/04/2008 @ 10:32am
Posted by GEEZJAN 03/04/2008 @ 06:46am
"The media does its job well. If he's not a Democrat, he must be a Republican.
I'm going to go out on a limb and bet that JOHN.HALLE was referring to Nader, not McCain. But I'm used to the fact that the candidate with truly the most popular platform will be always ignored, if not ruthlessly marginalized, by the two corporate parties and the corporate media, as well as by so-called "liberals" and phony "progressives" like you find here at The Nation."
Well, that didn't take long...
I didn't mention Nader because I don't consider him a real presidential candidate, despite his "announcement." He's running with no intention of winning (and this is by self-admission), he has negligible support even from fairly radical progressives like me (and since you're relatively new here, ask some of the old hands how radical I can be), and is actually harming the issues he advocates for by making himself the focus rather than what really matters.
I honor Nader's past contributions, but he's lost himself in the swamp of his own ego and struck on trying to revive his past glories. Does he put forward some fine ideas? Sure, but he also makes sure by his own actions that those will be dismissed out of hand because of the way he pushes them. He's done more to discredit progressivism than any other current figure, so I also dismiss him out of hand; not because I don't like many of the issues he advocates for (quite the opposite) but because he's making them even harder to get into practice.
As for your little comment about the MSM, you'll find that that really doesn't fly here. There's hardly a one of us here, left or right, that trusts conventional media outlets as far as we can throw them. Most of us look to a wide variety of sources for what we know and believe and I at least apply a healthy dose of skepticism to anything.
Posted by Stwriley at 03/04/2008 @ 10:49am
Doc, why are you calling a Nader supporter a "jackass"?!?!?!?
Posted by MASK 03/04/2008 @ 10:32am
At first I thought he meant McCain, but it works either way.
Posted by Dr Decibels at 03/04/2008 @ 10:59am
Posted by DR DECIBELS 03/04/2008 @ 10:59am
Not disagreeing....a lot of Naderites are jackasses (delusional and/or egotistic ones)...
just strange that YOU would say that!?!?
Posted by Mask at 03/04/2008 @ 11:17am
As in 1933, the nemesis of the American worker is not 'Free Trade', whatever that is, but oligopoly. The failure of oligopoly today, while not as spectacular as that of 1933, has the same cause: the inherent tendency of oligopoly to squeeze the economic life out of the workers whose productivity, spending, borrowing and saving uphold the 'free market' economy.
Posted by samcrossett at 03/04/2008 @ 11:20am
Posted by DOWNTOWN 03/04/2008 @ 08:52am
"The Constitution (not to be confused with the Bill of Rights) acknowledges 3 rights, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Man has the right to pursue happiness, he is not guaranteed it."
And how, pray tell, is a citizen to maintain his/her right to life and liberty without the material necessities? Is someone dying because they don't have health insurance not an infringement on their right to live? Is not the requirement to work two or three jobs so as not to starve an infringement on the liberty of that individual, who otherwise might be able to make different choices that would actually be in "pursuit of happiness"? Economic libertarianism is not freedom for all, it is freedom for some at the expense of others who can do nothing to counter their disadvantage.
Now that that's out of the way, I'll move on to an historical point that you rather seem to have missed as well; what exactly is in the Constitution. The three rights you cite are, of course, nowhere to be found in the Constitution [constitution.org], since the phrase comes from the Declaration of Independence [yale.edu]. There is almost no mention in the Constitution itself (again, excluding the Bill of Rights [constitution.org] and subsequent amendments) of any individual right, with two exceptions. The first is the prohibition in Article I, Section 9, clause 2:
"The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."
The second is also a strengthening of the common law rights that the Revolution had been about, contained in the entirety of Article III, Section 3:
"Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attained."
Beyond that, you need to look to the Bill of Rights and the subsequent amendments if you want explicit statements of rights. This is not to say that I don't think "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are rights, but for their inclusion you'll have to look to the 9th Amendment and it's guarantee that:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
If you're going to attempt to make Constitutional arguments, you'd best try and read the document first and know what you're talking about. Perhaps some of the old hands here might have warned you that I'm an historian, but I don't doubt some of them also rather enjoy seeing me cut apart bad historical arguments. You might save yourself some embarrassment next time and do a bit of study before you tap out statements that prove you have no idea what you're talking about.
Posted by Stwriley at 03/04/2008 @ 11:47am
just strange that YOU would say that!?!?
Posted by MASK 03/04/2008 @ 11:17am
Ralph served a good and proper service to the country.
Then came election year 2000.
Posted by Dr Decibels at 03/04/2008 @ 11:53am
Posted by SAMCROSSETT 03/04/2008 @ 11:20am
"As in 1933, the nemesis of the American worker is not 'Free Trade', whatever that is, but oligopoly. The failure of oligopoly today, while not as spectacular as that of 1933, has the same cause: the inherent tendency of oligopoly to squeeze the economic life out of the workers whose productivity, spending, borrowing and saving uphold the 'free market' economy."
Well said Sam!
This is indeed the crux of the problem. It still amazes me that those at the economic top-end seem incapable of realizing that their own wealth and prosperity cannot continue to exist without the prosperity of those lower down the ladder. The Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties should have been warning enough about what happens when we stop spreading the wealth around, but apparently success makes most people incapable of learning from the past.
The question is, how do we solve this and achieve the great goal of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" for all? There are many answers that have been proposed (and many of you here have your favorites, I don't doubt) but I think the best idea so far is a UMI (universal minimum income.) Take a look at this article [bostonreview.net] by Philippe Van Parijs, a solid primer on and argument for a UMI. It's one of the most workable and sensible proposals for solving a host of our current economic and social problems while maintaining our Constitutional system and the extending the full range of our freedoms.
Posted by Stwriley at 03/04/2008 @ 12:10pm
Posted by MIKECOPE 03/04/2008 @ 04:05am
"Money was gold..."
Actually Mike, it was Roosevelt that took us off the gold standard...in 1933.
Posted by Stwriley at 03/04/2008 @ 12:23pm
Many thanks, STRWILEY. The UMI is a great idea, although if it's to be implemented globally, it should be to some extent in kind, rather than monetary. After all, FDR didn't just institute AFDC and Social Security, he made infrastructure, like electricity and sanitation, a national priority. Unfortunately, too many less-developed nations are following the Republican paradigm of building military infrastructure at the expense of the public's quality of life.
Posted by samcrossett at 03/04/2008 @ 12:26pm
KvdH's posting and many of the comments here demonstrate a truly remarkable capacity for self-delusion among partisan Dems.
One such is the obligatory pariah status which has been assumed by the Republican frontrunner, the loyalists somehow managing to consign to the memory hole that McCain was Kerry's top choice for VP in 2004.
Those now uttering the shrillest denunciations would have been goosestepping behind the maverick senator had he accepted Kerry's offer, just as they were goosestepping behind Lieberman four years previously.
Four legs good two legs bad. (Or is it two legs good, four legs bad?)
Orwell's term for this was double-think. Here it is taken to a frighteningly pathological level.
Please, get help before you become a danger to yourself or others!
Posted by john.halle at 03/04/2008 @ 12:27pm
Is someone dying because they don't have health insurance not an infringement on their right to live? Is not the requirement to work two or three jobs so as not to starve an infringement on the liberty of that individual, who otherwise might be able to make different choices that would actually be in "pursuit of happiness"? Economic libertarianism is not freedom for all, it is freedom for some at the expense of others who can do nothing to counter their disadvantage.
I respect the quality of your writing here, but I have to disagree with you regarding the idea of economic rights in the constitution. The idea "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" (which one could legitimately infer from the 9th amendment), were conceived as negative rights. That is, persons couldn't be deprived of them by arbitrary government action.
The abuses that the framers were responding to did not constitute the non-existence of poor laws or a social safety net but proactive government restrictions on the market activity and political rights. In that respect, the list of specific complains in the Declaration of Independence is useful. They involve disregard and harassment of the colonial legislatures, exercising control of the colonial executive and judicial organs by control of the appointment process and the establishment of funding for same that was independent of the colonial legislatures and taking active measures to suppress the insurrection of the colonists (this last one always struck me as a bit silly, what did you expect the British to do?). Likewise, the Bill of Rights deals with state action or with judicial rights such as trial by jury and the right to counsel.
The influences don't seem to support the idea of economic rights either. Admittedly it's been some time since I've read either Locke's Second Treatise on Government or Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, but I don't recall the idea of economic rights in either of them.
That doesn't mean that social safety net measures aren't sound from both a moral and a practical standpoint, but I think that you won't find them as rights in our Constitution.
Posted by brunowe at 03/04/2008 @ 1:01pm
Posted by BRUNOWE 03/04/2008 @ 1:01pm
I think the flaw in the thinking is one of temporality.
The Constitution was written in 1787...Karl Marx or even the idea of a "welfare" or "social state" were nearly 50 years later. In the 18th Century, government aid for the poor was purely on a state-by-state basis and mostly church-based, and not even considered to be a Federal mandate.
Posted by Mask at 03/04/2008 @ 1:14pm
Posted by STWRILEY 03/04/2008 @ 12:23pm Actually Mike, it was Roosevelt that took us off the gold standard...in 1933.
Of course - but on the fabled date KVDH mentions, March 4, 1933, it was still gold. I merely mentioned it as an illustration of how conditions are no longer comparable, and new fixes need to be sought.
Posted by mikecope at 03/04/2008 @ 1:51pm
All aboard the KVH 'Entitlement Train' rolling full-steam ahead. Cultural Marxism and/or political correctness is the destination and along the way we will turn Americans into entitlement junkies. We will be leaving behind and bid a fond farewell to personal excellence, and self-accountability. From this point on mediocrity will not only be encouraged, but rewarded. The government will decide what is best for the American people and their children. Why? The American people now demand it by crying for entitlements like crazed junkies needing a fix.
The budget problems we face today are primarily caused by entitlement spending-- There is a need for a social safety net--we have it--I do not believe in destroying it---however, to think that another New Deal is the answer to the problems we face is scary indeed.
Posted by Len Mosse at 03/04/2008 @ 2:04pm
The rank-and-file Democrats under 45 have all but forgotten FDR. Democratic organizations sponsor J.F. Kennedy, Truman, Jefferson and Jackson dinners around the country. Rarely is there an event celebrating the accomplishments of FDR or Eleanor Roosevelt outside New York State, the Golf Course in Philadelphia or the state park in Georgia. The same ommission applies to Robert F. Kennedy. And, at the state level Depression Era progressive Governors such as Horner in Illinois. There are others to be sure.
Educating the voter through such events keeps the memory alive, not just among educated progressives, but working people, young people and new immigrant citizens.
In 2008 Eleanor Roosevelt's birthday falls on Saturday October 11 just a little over three weeks out from the election. We should march forth toward that date to bring the nation together to remember and to re-establish the Party of FDR.
Posted by tcbagwell at 03/04/2008 @ 3:13pm
Posted by LEN MOSSE 03/04/2008 @ 2:04pm Posted by RIO BRAVO 03/04/2008 @ 4:59pm
Ah, how I love to hear the last dying gasps of the Neo-Con Howling Monkeys!
Posted by Dr Decibels at 03/04/2008 @ 5:04pm
Here is why Hillary should drop out:
BETWEEN THE LINES Jonathan Alter Hillary's Math Problem
Forget tonight. She could win 16 straight and still lose. Mar 4, 2008 | Updated: 11:23 a.m. ET Mar 4, 2008
Hillary Clinton may be poised for a big night tonight, with wins in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island. Clinton aides say this will be the beginning of her comeback against Barack Obama. There's only one problem with this analysis: they can't count.
I'm no good at math either, but with the help of Slate's Delegate Calculator I've scoped out the rest of the primaries, and even if you assume huge Hillary wins from here on out, the numbers don't look good for Clinton. In order to show how deep a hole she's in, I've given her the benefit of the doubt every week for the rest of the primaries.
So here we go: Let's assume Hillary beats expectations and wins Ohio tonight 55-45, Rhode Island 55-45, Texas, 53-47 and (this is highly improbable), ties in Vermont, 50-50.
Then it's on to Wyoming on Saturday, where, let's say, the momentum of today helps her win 53-47. Next Tuesday in Mississippi--where African-Americans play a big role in the Democratic primary--she shocks the political world by winning 52-48.
Then on April 22, the big one, Pennsylvania--and it's a Hillary blowout, 60-40, with Clinton picking up a whopping 32 delegates. She wins both of Guam's two delegates on May 30, and Indiana's proximity to Illinois does Obama no good on May 6, with the Hoosiers going for Hillary 55-45. The same day brings another huge upset in a heavily African-American state: enough North Carolina blacks desert Obama to give the state to Hillary 52-48, netting her five more delegates.
Suppose May 13 in West Virginia is no kinder to Obama, and he loses by double digits, netting Clinton two delegates. The identical 55-45 result on May 20 in Kentucky nets her five more. The same day brings Oregon, a classic Obama state. Oops! He loses there 52-48. Hillary wins by 10 in Montana and South Dakota on June 3, and primary season ends on June 7 in Puerto Rico with another big Viva Clinton! Hillary pulls off a 60-40 landslide, giving her another 11 delegates. She has enjoyed a string of 16 victories in a row over three months.
So at the end of regulation, Hillary's the nominee, right? Actually, this much-too-generous scenario (which doesn't even account for Texas's weird "pri-caucus" system, which favors Obama in delegate selection) still leaves the pledged-delegate score at 1,634 for Obama to 1,576 for Clinton. That's a 58-delegate lead.
Posted by Metteyya at 03/04/2008 @ 6:59pm
We are indeed a nation with several grave challenges facing us, including global warming, which might possibly become an even more prominent life altering experience than we now suspect. As much as I would love to see an FDR-like President return to the White House, I would guess the current candidates are not considering returning to his policies, even though they ushered in the most prosperous middle-class in the world at the time and also became a model for other nations to follow. Instead the current crop shows almost a lack of understanding about why FDR made the changes he did--which is strange because they all were educated precisely because of his programs. After all, weren't they taught that private enterprise always produced products and services more cheaply than the government, even though this is demonstrably not the case? How about when delivering water and healthcare or electricity? Don't you have to ignore the facts to maintain this position? And this is only one small piece of propaganda lurking in their brains ready to spring out at precisely the wrong time. I just don't believe they are ready to discard "truths which aren't really true" because illusions are powerful. Maybe it would be appropriate to credit John Kenneth Galbraith here too. The current generation is less fortunate and unless we do something soon to improve education, America will fall behind and the current wealth patterns will ossify because there won't be enough Americans with new ideas and the ability to reason-through the obstacles they come across--highly educated foreigners will take their place by necessity. Hillary after all only recently started questioning NAFTA, which was pushed through under her husband. While Obama sounds good on the issue, he also seems poised for compromise even when logic dictates a more radical reform. Even his position on healthcare seems obviously destined to fail to bridge the gap for today's medically indigent. Kucinich was really the only candidate who understood what the Democratic Party of the 1930's stood for, although admittedly Edwards seemed also to embrace this path as he progressed through the campaign. McCain? If elected, I foresee a greater use of the words "stubborn" and "irrational" if more war is offered as a prescriptive policy to solve our ills. I wish I could say otherwise. But if America is fortunate enough to find itself with another FDR to grapple with the nearly superhuman effort and intelligence needed to solve our problems, I have to admit, I think Hillary would be the most likely candidate to "fulfill" our mass fantasy.
Posted by Erik at 03/04/2008 @ 9:00pm
Posted by BRUNOWE 03/04/2008 @ 1:01pm
I think you've read a bit too much into what I wrote there, Brunowe. I was not arguing that these were ideas of the founders, but rather showing as logically untenable Downtown's use of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as an argument against social programs, which is a reading that also goes beyond the founders' intent. I am, of course, well aware of the causes of the Revolution, but that was not a part of my argument. I was simply excoriating the bad arguments from the Constitution and Declaration.
Posted by Stwriley at 03/04/2008 @ 9:40pm
Former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once argued, before the advent of monetarism, that:
"under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth... The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit... In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation."
straight from the horsie's mouth. actually, i think a basket of commodities would serve us better than just gold.
Posted by frosty zoom at 03/04/2008 @ 10:07pm
Posted by STWRILEY 03/04/2008 @ 12:59am
....when the context is as obvious as the housing meltdown,...
The so-called "housing meltdown" currently stands at ....the tanking dollar, the astronomical national debt, the declining real wages of most Americans, the...
If you want American manufacturing to slow its decline or to actually grow, a "tanking dollar" would be your wildest dream-come-true.....even as us wasteful Americans cut back buying those cheap `stuff' from Wal-Mart. If Chinese shoes cost $50 a pair in Wal-Mart, perhaps folks will decide shoe fashion or the latest colors, aren't all that important.
The national debt is forever and needs to be serviced. Now that it's really big, maybe politicians will decide NOT to promise Entitlements without ends.
"declining wages"? Guess that explains why even as American families have shrunk in avg. persons per household, our houses have gotten bigger with avg. sq. ft. per capita exploding. If wages are so in-the-dumps, what explains the fantastic growth of Best Buy who doesn't sell any of life's essentials other than appliances...nor Starbucks.......nor Botox....Breast Implants.....cruises......
Even careful and thrifty people like my wife and myself,....have seen our savings dwindle, our paychecks become more inadequate by the day, and our hopes for a decent retirement vanish into the distant future.
I have no idea how you manage your household finances but if your savings are diminishing, maybe you shouldn't be in stocks.....you could be the type where a dollar of loss is far more painful to you than the pleasure a dollar of gain gives you.
by the rest of your comments, you have what I call a low-risk tolerant profile....folks are entitled to a "decent life without worry for the material necessities". I bet you work for some level of gov't.
Posted by Happy at 03/04/2008 @ 10:19pm
Oops, a whole section of my writing got lost.....
....when the context is as obvious as the housing meltdown,...
The so-called "housing meltdown" currently stands at < 2% of loans classified as "noncurrent", about the same leve they were back in 1994-95 and 2002-03. Among SubPrimes, it is of course, higher....this shouldn't be hard to understand and I sure hope I don't need to explain.
Posted by Happy at 03/04/2008 @ 10:22pm