I almost feel bad that your side is beginning to loose and your ideology is being completely discredited now by both history and current economic problems. Then again mostly I am sad that Milton Friedman died before he could see this economic collapse – seeing Greenspan say that his ideology was flawed was some consolation though.

I could counter your claims. How exactly was manufacturing declining in the 60s when US capitalism was on the Keynesian model and unionization was much much higher than it is now? How come unionization rates and wages have decreased for 30 years and yet auto industry is bankrupt? But what good will it do? You’re like the woman at the McCain rally believing that Obama is secretly Muslim.

I do agree on one thing: people should fight for what’s best for them – in fact that’s what this article was implying: Obama won’t make things better for workers if left to his own devices and the needs of capitalism, but fighting back from below and could force him to make concessions.

Before capitalism, there wasn’t a middle class.

Those of you who think wealth and prosperity can be legislated by politicians who are short-sighted, power hungry, and incompetent will be in for a shocking surprise when we have a repeat of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.” Many may not like their jobs under capitalism, but millions more have lost their lives under totalitarian regimes.

Many liberals think FDR and The New Deal are the gold standard in government. It isn’t – It’s the the bottom of the toilet. Ask yourself this:

Why is the government bankrupt with $40 trillion in debt? Because of the New Deal programs and Keynesian deficit spending.

Why is the auto industry bankrupt? Because of the New Deal and its overwhelming preference for”unions” AKA cartels. US automotive pays double for its labor than the rest of the auto industry.

Why is manufacturing dead in the US? Because of the New Deal and it’s ilk that legislated and taxed them to death.

Wealth and prosperity comes from people doing what’s best for them, not government officials who think they know what’s best for you.

Entrepreneurialism has its value as do small community based and owned businesses and cooperatives. These belong to a place and people and serve the community. The role of public governance is, and should be to subsume all monopolies. Monopolies must be put in and maintained within the public domain. These should never be (or have been) for-profit businesses. These are the commons and they must be de-privatized.

That is neither socialism nor capitalism. Neither FDR (and his symbol) nor the Democratic Party (and its current branding) were then, nor now capabable of doing this work…at least they have failed over the last 200 years they have shared most of the power.

Until corporations are and their predatory nature is undone, the issue of boom and bust, speculation and endless war will be forever with us.

Thanks!

It could probably be said with justification, however, that the famous book by James Agee and Walker Evans had more to do with the accepting the main features of the New Deal by the wealthy of America, than any other book ever written.

This is the lesson I hope that people could bring to bear on our current situation. The bigness group was led by Rex Tugwell and the Brains Trust. They enacted programs like the NRA, which was cumbersome, ineffective, tolerant of monopoly power and came to be pretty unpopular, eventually being (appropriately) over-turned by the Supreme Court.

The breaking-up-of-economic-power faction was led by Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, who as head of the Harvard Law school groomed countless idealistic lawyers who manned the Roosevelt ramparts. Their work brought us the Securities and Exchange Commision, the Glass-Steagall Act and what may have been the greatest confrontation with entrenched power, the Public Utilities Holding Companies Act.

When every day we are getting fleeced by corporations that are “too big to fail”, the breaking up of concentrated economic power ought to be our loudest battle cry and a fairly easy case to make.

Roosevelt went to war, the US is at war in two countries when this happened. The underlying energy crisis did not exist in the 1930s. The GDP didn’t even exist. The GDP is the fallacious indicator that keeps this financial insanity going – it grows as people’s circumstances worsen.

It’s understandable that people look to compare, but history only offers a sense of the unknown future; it tells us something about a general trend but it cannot speak to NOW.

Like FDR, Obama seems to want to maintain the status-quo (filling his staff with Clinton neo-liberals and DLC people), but I don’t think he will be able to because of how severe this crisis is.

The big x-factor is how the dynamic between the high hopes and expectations for “change” combined with the severity of the crisis will play out. In the 1990s, liberals with hopes in Clinton became cynical and simply threw their hands up. This time I don’t think that will happen because people feel that momentum is on their side now rather than on the side of christian conservatives and neo-liberals; also the problems are so much more severe that people will have to fight back to protect their homes from foreclosure and jobs from being cut.