One Helluva Post (Reposted as a Challenge for BOG Members to Add More to It)
An Incoherent Harper's Essay Suggests There's No Difference Between Obama and Republicans Repost:By ProSense - March 13, 2014
Left-wing naivete about right-wing radicalism
BY MIKE KONCZAL
A Democratic president’s economic agenda is a failure, lost to business class acquiescence, the embrace of austerity, and an overall lack of vision.
This was the conclusion of The New Republic, summarizing Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal in May 1940. Though there were “extraordinary accomplishments” to acknowledge, the magazine understood that the New Deal was a “failure in the central problem.” That central problem was the economic question, and there, the Roosevelt administration had “fail to discover or apply a genuine remedy for the stagnation of our economy and for unemployment.” Beyond the failure of vision, it “heeded business advice, at least in part, by trying to cut recovery expenditures” and engage in other forms of austerity... In other words, being disappointed in Democratic presidents is what opinion editors refer to as “evergreen” content. It’s always ready to go, and always applicable with a built-in audience. With this in mind, political scientist Adolph Reed has a cover story in the latest Harper’s, Nothing Left (ungated), making the case against President Obama and for the idea that liberalism is currently exhausted.
Much of the text is focused on the well-rehearsed argument that President Obama is much more conservative than people understand... But Reed is making an argument that goes beyond the current Democratic Party, and there are three points worth exploring further.
Reed: “With the two parties converging in policy…”
This is the kind of stuff that drives liberals up the wall, and for good reason. The two parties at this point are pushing two very different, ideological visions of the role of the state and the market. Ignore, for a second, cuts and expansions. Conservatives want to privatize Social Security, while liberals want it to remain a public program. Conservatives want to turn Medicare into a coupon to buy health insurance on exchanges, while liberals want to use Medicare’s footprint to control health-care costs. Liberals see a greater role for the federal government, for instance in absorbing the costs of a major expansion of Medicaid. Conservatives want to turn everything over to the states where it will be easier to starve and replace with private control. These aren’t minor differences... States taken over by conservatives have waged an all-out war on workers, reproductive health, and public goods. Meanwhile liberal states and cities have moved to expand paid sick-leave, minimum wages, and reproductive health. Even the so-called culture wars have a hard economic edge. Reed dismisses feminism as a set of fake cultural politics. Yet health-care reform has eliminated “woman” as a pre-existing condition, and minimum wage hikes, which disproportionately benefit women of color, and equal pay are in the forefront...
Reed: “...the areas of fundamental disagreements that separate (the two parties) become too arcane and too remote from most people’s experience to inspire any commitment, much less popular action.”
No. Just a casual glance out the window shows that the differences in policy have created massive popular actions. From the Tea Party organizing against expanding access to health-care and efforts to fight the recession, to undocumented workers organizing to pass immigration reform, the actual differences in play get people on the street.
There’s a genuine issue here for liberals. One positive thing that the New Republic saw in the New Deal back in 1940 was the idea that the changes in social insurance and labor laws were self-enforcing, and that “it is improbable that these more permanent changes will be or even can be destroyed by any new administration.” (They were half-right; labor was decimated seven years later under Taft-Hartley.)
More at link:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116962/adolph-reeds-harpers-essay-about-obama-naive-about-tea-party
ProSense's sigline:
...the American story is one of perfectibility and striving for ever-greater fidelity to our ideals -- it is a journey from colony to republic, from slavery to freedom, from sexism to suffrage, from stark poverty to shared prosperity.
I am posting this exactly as ProSense did with some format changes. It's great food for thought. Democrats have been victims of our own success. What was accomplished by the New Deal and whatever progressive legislation since then, led to more freedom and prosperity for many Americans. They got busy with their lives, leaving the maintenance of what were considered as 'self-enforcing' programs to other folks. Who could possibly disagree:
Well, the Tea Party and the Libertarians disagree most vehemently, for one thing. Leave out the top of the graphic where it says voting created those things. They got out and voted to end them. That is their platform, NO to all of those things most take for granted, which few nations in the world could equal at the time they were enacted, and even then we saw we could do better.
But many didn't vote and now we are fighting the Koctopus upclose. The idea that such things could be swept away shocks most Democrats and others who believe '...these truths to be self-evident...' that they are great things created by a united populace for their good.
Too many are still lulled into thinking about what the right has been doing with the phrase,'They can't do that!' Oh, no, they can, and will, and have been doing it since before FDR got in office, during his term, after it and they never stopped. Why should they?
Time is on their side, an and so is the money. It's not ours, as far as this goes. In the 50's the RW filled local school boards to restrict content and pushed the John Birch Society memes during the Cold War, to their great profit; in the 60's won national elections; in the 70's took over state houses in blue regions, in the 80's committed crimes to get the White House again and consolidaed their organizations and funded RW religions to make them a potent force; in the 90's they shut down the federal government and tried to impeach the POTUS, paralyzing his agenda until he gave in, they took over media venues and created PNAC, ready for their coup.
Where were Democrats?
They were where they always are, like Obama, hard at work to keep running 'the gigantic vessel that is the United States of America.' It's a full time job and the pay and the hours are not that great, either. It's much easily for the RW, as Keith Olbermann said:
Standing up for the powerless is not the same as standing up for the powerful. (11/01/2010)
They are being paid handsomely for what they are doing to us. So they will never stop.
In the first decade of this century they stole the office of POTUS with an all out media, state and local criminal conspiracy to disenfranchise many, and threatened to kill Democrats, went full throttle with their wars, 'starving the beast' or as they bragged, reducing the the government until it was 'small enough to drown in a bathtub' which means killing a baby; and bragged that when they left the White House in 2008, 'there wouldn't be enough power left to turn the lights on.'
Their outrages have not ceased in this decade. They have much more planned and their only obstacle is the party of FDR, which has been battered as workers and women and minorities always have been.
Unfortunately, I was the only reply and the only Rec to that thread. It will never rise up again as the DU software doesnt permit older posts to nudge new ones down on the page. Her replies to herself are good, and I'll post them in a minute.
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While the New Deal did much to lessen the worst affects of the Great Depression, its measures were not sweeping enough to restore the nation to full employment. Critics of FDR's policies, on both the right and the left, use this fact as a reason to condemn it. Conservatives argue, for example, that it went too far, and brought too much government intervention in the economy, while those on the left argue that it did not go far enough, and that in order to be truly effective, the Roosevelt Administration should have engaged in a far more comprehensive program of direct federal aid to the poor and unemployed. But the New Deal's greatest achievements transcend mere economic statistics, for in a world where democracy was under siege, and the exponents of fascism and communism flourished, the New Deal offered hope and restored the faith of the American people in their representative institutions. It also transformed the federal government into an active instrument of social justice and established a network of laws and institutions designed to protect the American economy from the worst excesses of liberal capitalism.
http://www.rooseveltinstitute.org/policy-and-ideasroosevelt-historyfdr/new-deal
http://books.google.com/books?id=vC5HJloBWugC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA159#v=onepage&q&f=false
Report: Wall Street’s Opposition to Dodd-Frank Reforms Echoes Its Resistance to New Deal Financial Safeguards
Bedrock Consumer Protections Once Were Flogged as ‘Exceedingly Dangerous,’ ‘Monstrous Systems’ That Would ‘Cripple’ the Economy
WASHINGTON, D.C. – As the nation approaches the first anniversary of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, opponents are claiming that the new measure is extraordinarily damaging, especially to Main Street. But industry’s alarmist rhetoric bears striking resemblance to the last time it faced sweeping new safeguards: during the New Deal reforms. The parallels between the language used both then and now are detailed in a report released today by Public Citizen and the Cry Wolf Project.
In the decades since the Great Depression, Americans acknowledged the necessity of having safeguards in place to prevent another crash of the financial markets, including the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and laws requiring public companies to accurately disclose their financial affairs. Although these are now seen as bedrock protections when they were first introduced, Wall Street cried foul, the new report, “Industry Repeats Itself: The Financial Reform Fight,” found.
“The business community’s wildly inaccurate forecasts about the New Deal reforms devalue the credibility of the ominous predictions they are making today,” said Taylor Lincoln, research director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division and author of the report. “If history comes close to repeating itself, industry is going to look very silly for its hand-wringing over Dodd-Frank when people look back...”
In fact, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is designed to prevent another Wall Street crash, which really made it tough on everyone by causing massive job loss and severely hurting corner butchers and bakers, as well as retirees, families with mortgages and others. The Dodd-Frank law increases transparency (particularly in derivatives markets); creates a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to ensure that consumers receive straightforward information about financial products and to police abusive practices; improves corporate governance; increases capital requirements for banks; deters particularly large financial institutions from providing incentives for employees to take undue risks; and gives the government the ability to take failed investment institutions into receivership, similar to the FDIC’s authority regarding commercial banks. Much of it has yet to be implemented...
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/07/12-0
Elizabeth Warren:
There is no question that Dodd-Frank was a strong bill—the strongest in three generations. I didn’t have a chance to vote for it because I wasn’t yet in the Senate, but if I could have, I would have voted for it twice.
http://www.warren.senate.gov/files/documents/AFR%20Roosevelt%20Institute%20Speech%202013-11-12.pdf
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024656032#post1
ProSense's sigline:
...the American story is one of perfectibility and striving for ever-greater fidelity to our ideals -- it is a journey from colony to republic, from slavery to freedom, from sexism to suffrage, from stark poverty to shared prosperity.
"When will America be ready to elect a progressive president running on a progressive agenda?
My response: Never
Congress will never be 100 percent progressive and the ankle biting of any President will continue.
In Obama's case, people on both sides seem to believe he was elected King, one side expecting him to act that way, and the other pretending he's acting that way.
If Congress had been more progressive, even in 2009, there would have been a lot more advancement of a more progressive agenda.
In 2009, if there were no Blue Dogs/DLCers in the House and Senate, there would have been a public option and quicker path to single payer. There would have been a climate change bill, creating millions of jobs and upgrading the infrastructure.
Unfortunately, the House is now in Republicans' hands. Unless there is significant change, in 2016 anyone elected President is going to be dealing with a right-leaning Congress.
If the President-elect is a progressive, he/she will spend the time giving pretty speeches and will have less to show for it because the expectations will be even higher.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024649592#post9
ProSense's sigline:
...the American story is one of perfectibility and striving for ever-greater fidelity to our ideals -- it is a journey from colony to republic, from slavery to freedom, from sexism to suffrage, from stark poverty to shared prosperity.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024656032#post2
Our work will never be finished, we are, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, a work in progress. It is the conservatives who want the world to be written in stone, with them at the top of things.
Fellow BOG members, please tell me what you can add to the list at the OP and her later posts.
I have the time!