Posted inPolitics: National

Difficult days ahead

Despite all the progressive wishing away, the election of a doctrinaire right-wing Republican to Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat is a calamity and a sign of calamities to come. The implications are national and international. Yes, Martha Coakley was a weak candidate who ran an inept campaign. Sure, the economy is bad and the party in power always suffers. And, yeah, the Obama and progressive voters stayed home in large numbers (this is to be comforting?). Meanwhile, the White House, said to be "blindsided" and "in disarray," seems to have interpreted the special election as an excuse to tack even more to "the center," i.e. the right.

We've got difficult days ahead.

Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt had failed in his first term: failed to enact meaningful legislation to immediately address the suffering of Americans and bring some fair play back to the republic; failed to take on, with relish, the "economic royalists"; failed to connect, in a visceral way, with Americans suffering from the Great Depression; failed to be wiley, cagey, downright dishonest in pursuit of his goals; failed to surround himself with a cadre of brilliant, independent, highly competent lieutenants, and failed to be willing to experiment with almost anything but a continuation of the Republican policies that had caused the Depression. Communism was popular, fascism perhaps even more so thanks to the seeming success and popularity of Mussolini. It was especially potent in the hands of populist demagogue Huey Long. The forces of reaction, although in disarray, still commanded great wealth and also had fascist sympathies. "Dictatorship" was a good word at the time.

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Posted inUncategorized

Breaking the greed compact

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial
monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism,
sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a
mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by
organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Sound familiar? Those were Franklin Roosevelt's famous speech in 1936, where he also said, "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united
against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their
hate for me, and I welcome their hatred." In reality, FDR always had to backtrack to keep from antagonizing capital too much. On the other hand, he led a nation in the 1930s that was on the verge of repudiating capitalism for what then seemed viable alternatives of fascism or communism.

Early 21st century America is reveling in easy populist anger over bonuses paid out to the very AIG executives who did so much to collapse the economy. But I wonder if they have Roosevelt's understanding of these "old enemies of peace"? And what will they do about it? If things really change, it will be because Wall Street did something far worse than break the social compact. It broke the greed compact.

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Posted inUncategorized

President Hoover and Depression thinking

I feel the need to come to the defense of Herbert Hoover, if for no other reason than this fundamental misreading of history will only set us up for costly mistakes in the future. The left long has labeled George W. Bush "President Hoover" for presiding over a historic economic crisis. Now the meme has been picked up by the right, as well.

Yet to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, President Bush, you're no Herbert Hoover. Among the differences: Hoover (1874-1964) was a self-made man, who worked his way through the new Stanford University, made a fortune as a brilliant engineer, then gained international acclaim for coordinating relief for refugees in World War I. Although a Republican, Hoover came from the party's Theodore Roosevelt progressive wing. He was mistrusted by Calvin Coolidge, and for good reason. Hoover wanted to move away from the rapacious capitalism of the 1920s to an ethic that embraced the common good and the obligations of business to society. He was a product of his time of scientific and engineering wonders: The Great Engineer, who could bring pragmatic, fact-based solutions to governing.

Unfortunately, Hoover was elected in 1929, not 1912 — the era in which his worldview had been shaped. After the great crash and with the gathering depression, Hoover was overwhelmed. His administration launched the greatest expansion of government intervention in the economy up to that point, including programs and ideas that would live on in the New Deal. Yet it did little good as unemployment reached a staggering 25 percent and Americans were forced into shantytowns they called Hoovervilles.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Don’t get depressed — Get mad

Here’s my advice to Obama supporters: Turn off the television. Put away the depression. Get mad and get active. The race is far from over unless there has already been a stealth coup in this country — a subject for a future column. The Republicans are the party that wrecked America — and McCain and Palin are Republican to the core. They’re counting on Americans to be stupid and easily manipulated. Obama is counting on us to be smarter than that, to be Americans, a people who once were never "easily led" by demagogues.

I don’t trust the corporate media, especially the electronic kind. I don’t trust the polls. They are trying to game the outcome. The "economic royalists," to use FDR’s term, were never going to give up power easily — nor was the military industrial complex. I never doubted that the conservative base would come "home" eventually, or that this would be a close election. And there’s the elephant in the room: will enough white Americans vote for a black man?

It’s interesting to recall that, unlike many other democratic countries, America once had two mass parties. Republicans and Democrats had liberal and conservative wings. In 1936, for example, Gov. Alf Landon was a liberal Republican challenging FDR, and might have made a race of it had not his campaign been co-opted by the reactionaries in the GOP.

Now only one mass party remains: the Democrats.

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