A Big Chicken Comes Home to Roost

FDR, the man the right loved to hate, the man whose commemorative coin (the dime) often got painted red by his demonizers, the man anti-Semites called Rosenfeld, is seen by many historians as having in fact "saved capitalism." The neo-con revision of his legacy, however, is that the steps he took were unnecessary, that everything would have eventually corrected itself in our then crippled system if market forces had been allowed to play out. What the arguments being made before the Supreme Court right now richly illustrate is that the compromises Roosevelt was forced to make in order to keep the masses of the 1930s from getting out their pitchforks and still keep the country from the dread fate of turning into a European social democracy, (read socialist state), contained the seeds of the eventual destruction of even so sacrosanct an innovation as social security.

It is more than likely that the Supreme Court will strike down the so-called individual mandate in President Obama's health bill. There is even a strong possibility that the court will overturn the entire bill. But the consequences may be more far-reaching than that. If the court finds that governments cannot force citizens to make investments in their own future, it will not just be the health bill and social security that will fall, but the very concept of government having a role in health, education, housing, and a host of other aspects of our lives that we have taken for granted since the 1930s..

When FDR implemented his New Deal, the ruling classes saw in the existence of the Soviet Union a real and present danger to their very existence. When, in 1991, the U.S.S.R. collapsed, right wing ideologues sensed a historical opportunity to forward their agenda without opposition. Carpe diem became the call of the day. There would never be another such window of opportunity in which to roll back the advances made by the working classes. There was no longer an alternative system to turn to.

What the current debate proves is that half-way measures are always dangerous. The right is striking at the weak underbelly of liberal programs, programs that have always tried to moderate between complete laissez-faire capitalism, with its constant threat of pushing the working classes too far and into the streets, and socialism, the philosophy which has as its core tenet that governments have the responsibility of representing all of the people in a society. If the right gets its way, ironically, it may be planting the seeds of its own destruction.

The Mason-Dixon Line is Now at the Canadian Border

Although in an earlier post (The Hologram of a Republican Party) I argued that media coverage of the Republican primaries were giving us a skewed (and depressing) image of currently prevailing American values, some recent news stories have served to remind us of how it is not just the deep South or the Bible Belt that has a problem with race, science, religion, economics and foreign policy. As NPR reported this morning, large percentages of the American public--from the Candian border to the Rio Grande, can now be counted on, for example, to disbelieve the theory of evolution and the president's affiliation with Christianity. For once smug Northerners, (those perhaps whom Newt Gingrich calls the Northern "elites"), the hard to accept reality is that our problems are at bottom national problems, too widespread to be relegated to a benighted Southland. Let us not forget that the good people of Pennsylvania sent Rick Santorum to the U.S. Senate.

The story that has triggered a good deal of soul-searching about who we are as a people grows out of the killing of a young Black boy, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. When the president went on the record by noting that, if he had a son, his son would likely look just like the boy who was killed, we were guaranteed a tempest. While, on the one hand, the Trayvon Martin incident is an ugly reminder of a period when lynchings were common in the South and Black Codes prevailed, an honest Notherner will also be reminded not just of the controversy surrounding the stop-and-frisk laws being employed in New York City, but also the Sean Bell case or even the incident involving Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.

Unless young people today are fortunate enough to be the recipients of an exceptional education, there are no doubt millions of young Americans who are not just ignorant of what slavery and post-Reconstruction terror under the Black Codes looked like in the South, they will also have no way of knowing that discrimination and terror against Black Americans was not exclusive to the South. And, with regard to more recent history, they will not be aware of the sea change that took place in American politics after the Civil Rights Laws of the 1960s saw the almost overnight abandonment of the South's Democratic Party, (the so-called Dixicrats), with Southern conservatives becoming Republicans, ironically the party of the abolitionists during the Civil War period. Hundreds of American cities were in flames during the "burn, baby, burn" episode of the 1960s. Combined with literally millions of anti-Vietnam war protesters taking to the streets, the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, (the year the world ended), and, twelve years later, the disffiliation of much of the white Northern working class in the Reagan Democrat phenomenon essentially gave us the political landscape in which we now all live.

Prior to the Black liberation movement of the 1950s and 60s, the U.S. had come to be viewed internationally as cousin to the South African apartheid regime. Among the memorable events of 1968 was the issuance of the Kerner Commission report which concluded that "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." Although much has changed in the ensuing forty-five years, and the report unsurprisingly generated a lot of conservative opposition, many would argue that even the presence of a Black man in the White House cannot alter the fundamental reality of the U.S. as a deeply divided society. The Mephistophelian bargain struck by the white working class was to forfeit many of the gains it had made in the twentieth century--its union strongholds, its standard of living, its urban life style, and more--for assurances that they would be protected from an expanding Black insurrection or the imposition of a truly integrated society. In this bargain lies the key to the oft-posed question, "Why does the working class so often vote against its own interests?"

Race may not explain everything about American life. It may seem unrelated to foreign policy matters, the military industrial complex or the greed of laissez-faire capitalism that has been given license to indulge itself, but the fact is that the "race card" is still being played, and played quite effectively. It has empowered some of the darkest elements in on the American political landscape, and, for that, it is not just Southerners who are to blame.

Our Amorphous Constitutional Protections

The image to the left is not a weapon currently employed by the U.S. military; it is a drone conjured up by the creators of the "Terminator" films. As is frequently the case with science-fiction, that film turned out to be far more prophetic than most viewers could have imagined at the time. Brian Lehrer, on his NPR show here in New York, has hosted a discussion of the constitutionality of using drones to "take out" U.S. citizens said to be enemies of the state without any formal charges being brought against them or being given the benefits of a trial. In the course of this morning's program, Jack Goldsmith, a former member of the Bush administration argued that citizens who are victims of such attacks are being given due process; it's just a question of how one defines what a citizen is due. (It depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is?) The argument is further made that these executions have been given the approval of the U.S. congress.


What we are witnessing is a classic example of the paradox of "Locke's Socks," a mind experiment in which one begins with, let us say, a white sock and, then, by a series of seemingly modest alterations, perhaps a red thread here, a green thread there, we go through enough of these iterations of the sock to entitle us to ask the question, "is it still the same sock?" It is interesting that members of the right wing, who usually pride themselves on being "strict constructionists" when it comes to our constitution are unphased by the liberties presently being taken with the venerated document.


Flawed as the American constitution may be, citizens of just about every political persuasion have, for the most part, taken for granted its protections. The most egregious devaluation of those protections clearly took place during the Bush regime, but there have, of course, been precedents in our history. One need not go as far back as Lincoln during the Civil War or FDR during World War II to find that the U.S. government is capable of using war-time conditions to suspend constitutional rights. On the other hand, most Americans reeled back in horror as Bill Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, found it was permissible to have U.S. Army tanks blast their way into an encampment of trouble-makers occupied by women and children in Waco, Texas.


What has made the recent use of drone attacks so chilling is that they are being utilized by a president who, as a candidate, appeared opposed to the use of terror, suspension of the right of habeus corpus and summary execution. President Obama's falling into line with Bush administration protocols could be written off as just one more disappointment in his actual as opposed to promised performance were it not for the fact that it seems to conjure up the unmistakable impression that there are forces determined not only to bring us back to nineteenth century economic conditions, but political conditions as they existed before the signing of the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century.


For this citizen, there is little comfort in being told that Congress has given its approval to a particular course of action, or, given its present cast of characters, the approval of the Supreme Court. And, although there were a handful of government lawyers who had the integrity to resign rather than compromise what they saw as the actual mandate of the constitution, the Bush administration made clear that it is far from impossible to find lawyers in Washington who will sign off on just about anything a president requests. (There was slight solace indeed for German Jews who were told that good, stolid German judges had found no basis for objecting to their treatment at the hands of the Third Reich.)



What does not often get expressed is the fear that the slippery slope we are presently on will one day have drones flying over Mid-Western plains or the corridors between skyscrapers in our big cities searching out pronounced enemies of the state. Once inured to overseas assassinations, will some Americans be desensitized to the prospect of taking out dangerous rabble rousers protesting some future "austerity program" designed to protect the prerogatives of the one percent?

The Hologram of a Republican Party

The inception of a Republican presidential primary season that begins almost a year and a half before the election takes place is an elaborate magic act, a set of mirrors and lasers projected into every nook and cranny of the media and designed to distract the electorate from the underlying and fundamental fact that this is a party whose primary mission is to dismantle government and impose an as yet unimagined array of austerity measures. The longer this show goes on, the more distance there is from the reality of how Republicans actually behave when they take office. Had an election taken place in the immediate aftermath of the paralysis the government experienced throughout 2010 and 2011, there is a good chance that the voting public would have come out in large enough numbers to throw the curs out of both the halls of congress. And it is about numbers. Turnout in the Republican primaries has been low in almost every state, not really a surprise when the choice is from a slate that consists of an erstwhile moderate Republican pretending to be more reactionary than he is (in an effort to energize the one constituency among Republicans that still cares, namely, the ultra-right Evangelical types who co-opted [in what has become typical Republican newspeak] the Tea Party label from a group of colonial rebels their inborn Tory inclinations would have had them opposing in the 1700s), a young man whose eyes are red-rimmed with the rapture, a has-been pseudo-intellectual from the 1990s who can barely contain his rage, and an affable country doctor who wants to crucify the country on a cross of gold. European observers, it is said, are either mystified or amused at the character and caliber of the men this country considers suitable for so powerful an office.

Though it seems to fly in the face of reason, I await another rabbit pulled from a Republican silk hat. This year’s Sarah Palin may still be, (barring some as yet undisclosed skeleton that would preclude his having a run at the presidency), Chris Christie, the current governor of New Jersey. Those who discount him because of his weight or his somewhat coarse style overlook the intelligence and deftness this former federal prosecutor displayed in imposing his austerity measures on the state of New Jersey. It is possible that none of the present candidates will go to the Republican National Convention with the required number of delegates to gain the nomination. There is a real possibility that we will be treated to a deadlocked convention and will see a “Draft Christie” movement emerge. Such drama would serve to electrify the now depressed and moribund Republican Party.

If what we have in the Republican Party at present is a hologram invented with the cooperation of the mainstream media, this is not to say that the last three years of the Obama administration have demonstrated any less political sleight of hand on the part of Democrats. By November of 2008, the Bush administration had been taken over by the permanent government types on the Iraqi War Commission and decades of Republican (and Clintonian) dismantling of economic regulation had thrown the American economy into utter chaos. Conditions were remarkably similar to those that prevailed when Franklin Roosevelt ascended to the presidency after the 1929 Crash and the ensuing depression. Obama’s election was a cri de coeur from the American people. So disappointing was the actual performance of the man the country had chosen as its savior that by the elections of 2010, most voters abstained and essentially by default allowed the so-called Tea Party types to play out a feeble version of a mass movement of the angry and the disenchanted. There would be no universal health care, no restoration—in spite of the ponderous and tepid Dodd-Frank bill—of the regulations introduced during the New Deal to rein in the greed of the speculators, no public works programs, and a stance on the crisis facing American schools that has at its center a generalized freudenschade with regard to the fact that teachers were among the remaining few American workers who still had unions and pensions. The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in the White House did not hesitate to bomb Libya back to the stone age and employs that most chilling of phrases, “we are not taking anything off the table” when it comes to Iran’s insistence on pursuing its nuclear program while remaining mute on the hundreds of nuclear warheads possessed by Israel.

Only the erstwhile communist regimes in Russia and China now fail to go along and take their cue from Washington and its allies in the capitals of Europe. Hayek and Friedman have replaced Marx and Lenin and even John Maynard Keynes. Just as revolutions are spear-headed not by the poor but by the middle class, it takes liberals like Franklin Roosevelt to save capitalism when it is in crisis. We are now, particularly in an era of globalization when conditions are not localized, on new ground. If people are a little tense right now, it is because that ground seems to be shaking.

The Speech that Obama Should Have Made

"The greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression." How many times have we heard these words since the current crisis erupted in 2008? At the risk of imposing on my good readers' patience, I here reproduce Franklin Roosevelt's innaugural address, delivered in the midst of that earlier crisis. I urge you to set aside a few moments and read it in its entirety. It is a fascinating document. Much that FDR said on that Saturday morning of March 4, 1933 has immediate relevance to the economic, social and moral conditions that we live with today, almost 80 years later.

A close reading will also reveal, after the pro forma praise of the U.S. constitution, more than a mere suggestion in the speech that FDR was willing to take on powers that were near dictatorial to get the job done. There is a lot worth considering in this speech, not all of which will make progressives happy. On the other hand, the right wing has spent the last thirty years or more trying to undo the prescription for economic and social justice that what came to be called the New Deal laid out and largely enacted. The great value of this speech is that, for this reader at least, it makes evident why that opposition is still so frenzied.


"I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impel. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.
In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.
More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.
Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.
True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.
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.
Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.
Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.
Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now.
Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.
Hand in hand with this we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land. The task can be helped by definite efforts to raise the values of agricultural products and with this the power to purchase the output of our cities. It can be helped by preventing realistically the tragedy of the growing loss through foreclosure of our small homes and our farms. It can be helped by insistence that the Federal, State, and local governments act forthwith on the demand that their cost be drastically reduced. It can be helped by the unifying of relief activities which today are often scattered, uneconomical, and unequal. It can be helped by national planning for and supervision of all forms of transportation and of communications and other utilities which have a definitely public character. There are many ways in which it can be helped, but it can never be helped merely by talking about it. We must act and act quickly.
Finally, in our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order; there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people’s money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.
There are the lines of attack. I shall presently urge upon a new Congress in special session detailed measures for their fulfillment, and I shall seek the immediate assistance of the several States.
Through this program of action we address ourselves to putting our own national house in order and making income balance outgo. Our international trade relations, though vastly important, are in point of time and necessity secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy. I favor as a practical policy the putting of first things first. I shall spare no effort to restore world trade by international economic readjustment, but the emergency at home cannot wait on that accomplishment.
The basic thought that guides these specific means of national recovery is not narrowly nationalistic. It is the insistence, as a first consideration, upon the interdependence of the various elements in all parts of the United States—a recognition of the old and permanently important manifestation of the American spirit of the pioneer. It is the way to recovery. It is the immediate way. It is the strongest assurance that the recovery will endure.
In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.
If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.
With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.
Action in this image and to this end is feasible under the form of government which we have inherited from our ancestors. Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations.
It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.
I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.
But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.
For the trust reposed in me I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less.
We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of the national unity; with the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious moral values; with the clean satisfaction that comes from the stern performance of duty by old and young alike. We aim at the assurance of a rounded and permanent national life.
We do not distrust the future of essential democracy. The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it.
In this dedication of a Nation we humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one of us. May He guide me in the days to come."