FDR / New Deal

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primary 8 23 thom foundational

new attn b/c of new Green deal

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uber1

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08

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lnx no

alternet-There's only one way to defeat Trump's billionaires boys club

FILE PHOTO: Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk reacts next to Donald Trump during a campaign rally, at the site of the July assassination attempt against Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 5, 2024.

Thom Hartmann

December 04, 2024

If my hypothesis from yesterday — that Democrats best way to win elections and regain political power is to engage in class warfare against the GOP and the billionaires that fund it — the immediate question is, “How?”

The last century has seen two presidents engage in class warfare in a big and direct way that not only won them multiple elections but also altered the electoral map of America: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. There are multiple lessons to learn from both.

When FDR came into power in March of 1933, the nation was in shambles because of a decade of Republican mishandling of the economy. In the early 1920s, Republican President Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91% down to 25% and loosened oversight of Wall Street.

The short-term result was an explosion of riches at the top, referred to as “The Roaring 20s,” and violent actions against attempts to form labor unions. The longer-term result was the infamous Black Tuesday of October 29, 1929 which kicked off the Republican Great Depression.

President Roosevelt correctly identified America’s morbidly rich, who’d seized control of the GOP after the end of the Taft presidency in 1913, as the cause of the financial disaster and proclaimed that they and their captive Republicans had declared class war against average working class Americans.

ALSO READ: Trump finds a new lawman is who even more lawless than he is

“For out of this modern civilization,” Roosevelt told America, “economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”

He used the language of class warfare; as with all wars, the first step is to identify the enemy. For FDR it was the morbidly rich of his era who weren’t content to just run their businesses and make money but also lusted for the political power they’d been given during the 1920s by Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt proclaimed. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”

He paused for a moment, then thundered, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

The crowd at Madison Square Garden roared when he said that. They knew that Republican politicians had worked hand-in-glove with wealthy industrialists to suppress unions, evade taxes, and accumulate fortunes beyond anything ever seen in America. That the GOP had been running an often-violent class war against them for at least the past decade.

And they were over it. Over the greed, over the theft, and over the self-righteous proclamations that the Constitution protected their avarice. Average working people knew these “economic royalists” weren’t patriots; they were looters, vandals, and political arsonists. FDR gave voice to their anger, disillusionment, and disgust.

“In vain,” Roosevelt said, “they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Republicans had declared class warfare; FDR, like he would later do with the Japanese and Germans, led the charge to fight back and defeat them.

And defeat them he did (even in the face of an assassination attempt); by the end of his presidency, American oligarchs had gone back to doing business and getting rich, largely avoiding politics and keeping their noses clean.

Until, that is, President Nixon put Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court and Powell began the process — from the bench — of turning America back into a full-blown oligarchy like Hoover had done in the 1920s.

The Powell Memo and the Court’s Bellotti decision (written by Powell) set the stage and outline the battle plan for the Reagan Revolution, an all-out declaration of class war against average Americans and the Democrats who’d historically defended them.

In the 1980s, Reagan cut the top income tax rate from 74 percent down to 27 percent (while repeatedly raising taxes on working-class people’s wages, tips, and Social Security), kicking off an explosion of billionaires. He and other Republican presidents and members of the Supreme Court followed up by:

— Ending enforcement of our anti-trust laws and gutting our environmental regulations.

— Killing off our media guardrails like the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time Rule, along with ending ownership limits on newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations and networks.

— Fighting every effort to reduce or end student debt.

— Opposing every program proposed to broaden access to healthcare coverage.

— Attacking our right to vote.

— Privatizing Medicare with the Medicare Advantage scam (Social Security is next).

— Assailing environmental regulations that protect us and our children from cancer and other diseases.

— Going to the mat to defend hundreds of billions in annual subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and its oligarchs.

— Deregulating social media (Section 230), now taken over by rightwing billionaires.

— Packing our courts with reliable toadies for giant corporations and the wealthy.

— Stripping over $50 trillion from the working class since 1981, handing that money to the morbidly rich to stash in their offshore money bins.

— Rejecting every effort to raise the national minimum wage.

— Most recently, Trump congratulated Musk on his union-busting success.

Through this entire period, Democrats have refrained from employing FDR’s class war rhetoric to fight back. Instead, they’ve worked hard to make life better for working class people when in power and tried to limit the damage from Republican proposals and policies when they’re out of power.

This is why Vice President Harris’ claims that Democrats are here for the average person while Republicans want more tax cuts and deregulation failed to catch fire during this past election; there was no rhetoric of warfare. Instead, astonishingly, Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney and kept saying that she’d give Republicans “a seat at the table.”

As billionaire Warren Buffett famously confessed:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

It’s far past time to take the gloves off and start punching.

Democrats have become so rusty, so wary of class warfare, that they haven’t even identified a term or metaphor to describe the rightwing billionaires for whom the GOP fronts.

From Democratic President Grover Cleveland in the 1880s saying the rich had working people under their “Iron heel” to the early 20th century when they were called Robber Barons, Democrats have had names for Republicans and the billionaires who own them.

FDR called them economic royalists. Teddy Roosevelt called them fat cats, malefactors of great wealth, parasites, and plutocrats. I’ve been calling them the morbidly rich, but there’s almost certainly a more evocative phrase out there that could be applied to greedy billionaires by this generation of progressives.

After all, elite conservatives and billionaires haven’t hesitated to use “othering” language in their war against Democrats.

Reagan and Republicans since have called us pointy-headed intellectuals, ivory tower elites, eggheads, limousine liberals, champagne socialists, latte liberals, the wine and cheese crowd, coastal elites, tax and spend liberals, bleeding hearts, do-gooders, tree huggers, environmental wackos, libtards, communists, and even feminazis.

And how do Democrats describe Republicans? “Our friends on the other side of the aisle.”

Screw that. It’s time to declare war.

And war requires a clear delineation between our side and their side, between the good guys and the enemy. Nobody is going to rush to the ramparts against somebody we’re “happy to work with on a bipartisan basis”: as Newt Gingrich taught Republicans in the 1990s and they’ve held to with a religious fervor, there can be no quarter against the other side if you want to take and hold power.

Class war sounds ugly, but it’s exactly what Republicans and their billionaire backers have been waging against working class Americans for 43 years now. It’s damn well time to fight back by declaring a class war of our own.

===

alternet-no lnx

How the morbidly rich are sabotaging the very system that made them wealthy

Thom Hartmann August 19, 2024

Recently, a reporter spoke with one of the chief architects of Project 2025 using a hidden camera and microphone and learned they’re still in tight with Trump, still planning to run his administration if he’s elected, still planning to gut the guardrails America has placed around capitalism over the past 100 years, and even planning to “pull the ladder up” to make it harder for entrepreneurs and small business people to succeed in America.

Their plan relies on a major reinvention of modern capitalism and is being pushed by people suffering from an identifiable metal illness. To see how they’re hoping to pull this off, it’s important and necessary to first understand that there are two types of capitalism: raw and regulated.

Raw capitalism — sometimes referred to as Laissez-faire (“leave alone”) or “unregulated” capitalism — reflects the very essence of predatory activity. As any Libertarian can proudly tell you, the only rule is that no capitalist can commit fraud against another capitalist and the only role for government is to provide a stable currency and a court system to prosecute fraud.

Raw capitalism could be called the law of the jungle; only the strong survive, and those who are the most ruthless and cutthroat end up with all the money and power while everybody else stands on the outside looking in. It favors psychopathy in the executive suite.

A handful of families, typically one for each industry, end up fabulously wealthy while their companies monopolize market sectors to keep new entrants and entrepreneurs out.

Workers, at the bottom of the hierarchy, are screwed: no unions are allowed, wages reflect how desperate working people are, and consumers live in a caveat emptor (“buyer beware”) world where ripoffs are common, food and products are often dangerous, and the environment is poisoned to keep cleanup costs low and thus profits high.

Raw capitalism is how most of the world ran until the first decades of the 20th century. You can read the story of it in most of Dickens’ novels. By the 1880s-1920s era, it had made a handful of families (Rockefellers/oil, Carnegie/steel, Vanderbilt/railroads, Astor/real estate, Armour/meatpacking, Morgan/banking, DuPont/chemicals, etc.) mind-bogglingly rich and succeeded in limiting the middle class to about 10 percent of Americans, mostly doctors, lawyers, and shopkeepers. Everybody else was dirt poor.

Regulated capitalism is an altogether different animal that expands a capitalist system to aid workers and consumers as well as capitalists.

With regulated capitalism, the rules of capitalism are expanded to benefit all of society, rather than exclusively the capitalists themselves. While it was championed in Adam Smith’s books A Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations(1776), and highlighted repeatedly by David Ricardo five decades later, it didn’t really come into fruition until the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. His embrace of Keynesian economics transformed America and, ultimately, the entire free world.

President Roosevelt, when accepting his renomination in 1936, took on the advocates of raw capitalism — which had run the world just four years earlier — head-on:

“[O]ut of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.”

It was a radical separation from the old order, and his audience cheered wildly as they realized FDR wanted to make capitalism, and America, a fairer and more compassionate nation.

“There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.”

He challenged the most powerful men and companies in America, promising to strip them of the power to write laws and control politicians that they’d enjoyed for over a century. He called them out and took them on.

“It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.”

And he pointed out how this corrupt system of raw capitalism had destroyed opportunity in America for average people while making a small group of “princes” richer than the kings of old.

“Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.”

Roosevelt beat the oligarchs and was successful in bringing regulated capitalism to America. His policies included the right of workers to unionize, aggressive enforcement of the nation’s new anti-monopoly laws, high levels of taxation on profits and great wealth, and consumer and worker protections guaranteed by government.

The result was the world’s first middle class that included more than half of all citizens.

Donald Trump, JD Vance, their billionaire donors, six Republicans on the Supreme Court, and Project 2025 have declared war on Roosevelt’s regulated capitalism; they want to turn the clock back to the raw capitalism Gilded Age of the 1920s by stripping regulatory agencies out of government, cutting taxes on the morbidly rich, and ending protections for labor.

Russell Vought was the guy who put Donald Trump's executive order banning the teaching of Black history (“CRT”) and other diversity training for federal employees into place when he was director of the Office of Management and Budget. Now he’s a principal architect of Project 2025 and the lead cheerleader for ending regulated capitalism and reverting to raw capitalism.

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said in the secretly-taped recording. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence.”

In this effort, and the Supreme Court’s recent destruction of the Chevron Deference that authorized regulatory agencies to protect workers, consumers, and the environment, these reactionary (arguably “revolutionary”) Republicans are trying to pull up the ladder so a new generation of entrepreneurs will face a wall of monopolies and other barriers to achieving business success.

They are trying to gut the very system that created a large enough middle class to provide customers for their products, thus making them rich. They want to return us to the era of FDR’s libertarian “economic royalists,” an effort that will impoverish America just as it has every other country that’s tried it (Russia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, etc.).

When psychologist Eric Fromm identified people as having either a “doing” or a “being” orientation, he nailed the personality characteristics of the billionaires and their well-paid toadies who’re promoting this dystopian future for America.

He argued that there’s a specific “hoarder” personality afflicted with a compulsion to constantly accumulate more, more, more stuff. When they’re poor, their apartments fill up with newspapers and tin cans. When they’re rich, their money bins fill up with cash.

In either case, they’re mentally ill and perpetually miserable. If they’re rich enough, their mental illness causes them to mercilessly exploit others for their own gain.

This is the psychology of this generation of wannabee economic royalists, and their plan to replace regulated capitalism with the old laissez-faire system will also destroy the remnants of the American middle class that FDR created.

We can’t let them get away with inflicting their mental illness on the rest of us. Double-check your voter registration and show up this fall!

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an 7 23

on July 4, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt celebrated American Independence Day with a radio address that praised democracy while warning against the dangers of authoritarianism. Dictatorships were plentiful at the time, from Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini, a.k.a. Il Duce, in Italy to Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union. Gen. Francisco Franco had prevailed in the Spanish Civil War, setting up a fascist regime in Madrid.

Only five months after FDR's Independence Day 1941 speech, Pearl Harbor was attacked.

The conservative website The Bulwark honored FDR's address 82 years later by publishing it in article form on July 4, 2023. And by doing so, the conservative website is sending out a warning that democracy is still under attack.

FDR told listeners, "In 1776, we waged war in behalf of the great principle that government should derive its just powers from the consent of the governed — in other words, representation chosen in free elections. In the century and a half that followed, this cause of human freedom swept across the world. But now, in our generation — in the past few years — a new resistance, in the form of several new practices of tyranny, has been making such headway that the fundamentals of 1776 are being struck down abroad. And definitely, they are threatened here."

The architect of the New Deal was referring to the authoritarians of 1941. But FDR's warning could easily apply to the 2023, which finds democracy under attack in parts of Europe, Asia and Latin American as well as in the U.S. The Bulwark, in fact, has published countless articles describing ongoing efforts by the MAGA movement to undermine U.S. democracy — and noting MAGA's affinity for authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

"It is simple — I could almost say simpleminded — for us Americans to wave the flag, to reassert our belief in the cause of freedom, and to let it go at that," FDR said during his address. "Yet, all of us who lie awake at night — all of us who study and study again — know full well that in these days, we cannot save freedom with pitchforks and muskets alone, after a dictator combination has gained control of the rest of the world. We know that we cannot save freedom in our own midst, in our own land, if all around us — our neighbor nations — have lost their freedom…. I tell the American people solemnly that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship."

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hoover called ND bolshevik, later tried to fix his rep

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-july-9-2019/

In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt signed the New Deal, which was meant to save the U.S. economy and give the federal government a bigger role in civilian life and local government. The program was implemented from 1933 to 1939 and was broken down into three goals: relief, recovery, and reform. It all started with what become known as the First 100 Days, the period when Congress passed an unprecedented amount of legislation. The stricter regulations placed on banks, meant to reinstill the citizen’s trust in them, as well as the creation of many new organizations, the most widely known of which is the SSA, are probably the two most notable accomplishments of the New Deal. Today, we talk to Eric Rauchway about the infancy of the New Deal as well as its influence on the modern progressive movement.

Guest: Eric Rauchway is an American historian, author, and professor in the U.C. Davis Department of History. His books include Blessed Among Nations, The Money Makers, Murdering McKinley,and several others, including one based around today’s discussion, Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal. He has also consulted for government and private agencies, including the U.S. Department of Justice, and in addition to his books, has written about history for a variety of publications, including the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times.

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slow on speak ~ AH tho had read MK in german?

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/171833

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/how-the-new-deals-federal-arts-programs-created-a-new-american-history/

eric rosway sp

hearst powerful, AM 1st in 1910's? Hoover called ND bolshy; fdr spoke and read german, read Mkampf in orig? so on to AH early; john garner VP am 1st; partner and I bk by waer sp on lz

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-april-24-2019/

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/what-the-gop-learned-when-the-wealthy-tried-to-overthrow-fdr-and-install-a-fascist-dictator/

In 1933, a group of very wealthy bankers on Wall Street were mortified with FDR. He gave government jobs to many unemployed, ended the gold standard, and was planning on enacting a slew of government programs that would constitute the “New Deal”. Workers would be given the right to unionize, infrastructure projects would be established, and he pitched a pension program for workers called Social Security. For that, he was called a “socialist.” Up to that point, however, his gravest sin was going after the wealthy to pay their fair share. The Revenue Act, which imposed a “wealth tax” on those at the top, increased the tax rate to 75%.

Roosevelt was accused of being a “traitor to his class”.

Unlike what the GOP says today, Roosevelt wasn’t trying to do any great social experiment. He was trying to pull our nation out of the Great Depression. Unemployment was between 80-90% at several major cities, and those few who were working were being exploited with zero labor protections. FDR took action. He was hated by the rich, and he didn’t care:

The forces of ‘organized money’ are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.

The bankers felt that FDR was going after their money, but they went far beyond just trying to sway the election. Some decided that this whole democracy thing just wasn’t working, and they had to take matters into their own hands. This was a few years before the extent of the horror inflicted by the Nazis had surfaced, and fascism had several believers within the American right.

The bankers plotted a coup against FDR, which would later be called the Wall Street Putsch. The conspirators included a bond salesman named Gerald MacGuire, the commander of the Massachusetts American Legion Bill Doyle, and investment banker Prescott Bush. Yes, that Bush—father of George H.W. and grandfather of W.

They tried to recruit a general named Smedley Butler to their cause. They arranged several meetings and were quite blunt in what they wanted:

The conspirators would provide the financial backing and recruit an army of 500,000 soldiers, which Butler was to lead.

The pretext for the coup would be that FDR’s health was failing. FDR would remain in a ceremonial position, in which, as MacGuire allegedly described, “The President will go around and christen babies and dedicate bridges and kiss children.”

The real power of the government would be held in the hands of a Secretary of General Affairs, who would be in effect a dictator: “somebody to take over the details of the office — take them off the President’s shoulders. […] A sort of a super secretary.”

Unfortunately for the conspirators, the general didn’t bite. In fact, he exposed them at a Congressional hearing as traitors. Initially, Congress and the press treated this whole thing as a joke. However, with Butler’s testimony, along with a reporter who was at one of the meetings, Congress opened an investigation. They found out it was indeed true, but decided not to do anything about it because the plot seemed so far-fetched. No one was prosecuted.

Sadly, this wouldn’t be the last time a wealthy person got away with treason.

The wealthy plutocrats determined they had a problem. As much as the American people were suffering, they believed in democracy. They believed in America, and had contempt for dictatorship. No coup could have worked back then even if Butler had agreed to march on Washington. People wouldn’t have stood for it. So the strategy changed: the kind of Ayn-Randian changes that they wanted could never happen in a democracy. The majority doesn’t want welfare for the rich, denial of healthcare, repeal of the estate tax, or destruction of the social safety net. So democracy itself had to go.

For years, the plutocrats have spent a fortune on campaigns, rightwing media, and astro-turfing groups to cultivate a bizarre authoritarian ideology. I’ve written about the phenomenon of conservative submission before, but I argue that it didn’t happen overnight. It has taken a while, but now a large segment of our population has been utterly convinced that they need to align their beliefs with whatever benefits those at the top. Simultaneously, through constant bombardment from rightwing media, they are fed a steady diet of fear and paranoia about other people. They are told repeatedly that they need a strong leader to save and protect them. These are the ingredients for authoritarianism. For the rich, it doesn’t really matter who the person is, as long as he takes control and gives them what they want.

Has it worked?

According to a study by the University of Massachusetts, the inclination to support authoritarianism is now the most statistically significant trait that identifies someone as a modern, Trump-supporting republican.

Now, when Trump threatens to send the Feds against people on TV who satire him, or threatens to use the military, police, or “biker gangs” against those who speak out against him, these people cheer.

His supporters openly call for dictatorship. They don’t even bother to hide it anymore:

After World War II, what people hated the most was a fascist dictator. Ironic that is exactly what the modern GOP is now demanding. This time, there won’t need to be any ridiculous military coup attempt, but rather just a couple million manipulated morons willing to surrender their rights.

see evangelical 2 billy g

no lnx

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/books/review/one-nation-under-god-by-kevin-m-kruse.html

kazin

Did you ever wonder how “In God We Trust” came to be quoted on every American coin and dollar bill? Or why the Pledge of Allegiance to the most revered symbol of the nation includes an explicit declaration of confidence in the Almighty? Or why the president and members of Congress host a National Prayer Breakfast the first Thursday of each February?

These now utterly commonplace markers of public piety were almost all created during the same decade — the 1950s. Their initial enthusiasts, as described by the Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse, were conservative Protestant ministers and businessmen who hoped Americans would not take their handiwork for granted. They believed the nation badly needed a religious awakening to reverse the depredations of a godless federal state.

“Every Christian should oppose the totalitarian trends of the New Deal,” asserted James W. Fifield Jr., an eloquent Congregationalist pastor from Los Angeles who, during the 1930s, created Spiritual Mobilization, a publicity offensive that joined megachurches like his with vocal, anti-liberal magnates like the Hollywood producer Cecil B. De Mille and J. Howard Pew Jr., the president of Sun Oil. They all believed religiosity, if widely and officially deployed, would be a mighty weapon in the battle against collectivist liberals at home and Communists abroad. As their ally, Billy Graham, preached in 1951 at one of his ever popular crusades, Americans urgently needed to rededicate themselves to “the rugged individualism that Christ brought” to the world.

But a funny thing happened on the road to spiritual and political redemption. By the mid-1950s, officeholders and social activists from every point on the ideological spectrum had signed on to the same righteous platform. In 1952, just before moving into the White House, Dwight Eisenhower (who was named after Dwight Moody, the renowned Gilded Age evangelist) told a gathering at the Waldorf Astoria: “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” Only a hardened atheist could object to such an ecumenical bromide. Under Eisenhower, Kruse writes, “the state no longer seemed ‘pagan,’ .?.?. and liberals could present themselves as acting in accord with God’s will too.”Two years later, when Congress agreed to add “one nation under God” to the Pledge, not even the American Civil Liberties Union objected. One lone Jewish representative from Brooklyn, Abraham Multer, did argue that putting God’s name on the currency would not stimulate “one single person to be more religious.” But even he didn’t dare vote against the bill.

Faith-based conflict did not disappear from American politics, of course. During the 1960s and early 1970s, battles over religion in public life were fought with no less vigor and nastiness than those waged over civil rights, feminism and war. Kruse provides a deft narrative about the movement to overturn the Supreme Court’s ban on prayer and Bible readings in public schools, President Richard Nixon’s attempt to make approval of his Vietnam policy seem a sacred duty and the Republican Party’s wooing of white evangelicals. Only the last of those endeavors was successful.

In 1966, Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois spearheaded an aggressive campaign to add a Constitutional amendment permitting school prayer. “They teach the little children sex in the schools,” the Republican leader growled. “They teach them about Communism. They even teach them ballet! Why not God Almighty?” Opinion polls strongly favored his stand. But clergymen from a variety of faiths contended that encouraging children to pray violated the First Amendment and might confuse a faith in God with obedience to their teachers. The Dirksen amendment failed to receive the necessary two-thirds margin in the Senate.

The main event in Nixon’s pro-war religious revival took place on Independence Day in 1970. Billy Graham led a joint rally and prayer service at the Lincoln Memorial to “Honor America.” Graham assured the crowd of 15,000 — and a national television audience — that the Republic’s founding was “rooted in a book called the Bible”; Kate Smith belted out “God Bless America.” But several hundred chanting, mocking, underclad demonstrators managed to distract and anger the crowd, and the occasion did nothing to firm up support for the debacle in Indochina.

Despite the argument Kruse makes beginning with his subtitle, “corporate America” played no significant role in conceiving any of these initiatives — although the hotelier J. Willard Marriott did persuade fellow businessmen to finance Honor America Day. Devout lawmakers like Dirksen and preachers like Graham were quite capable of mustering a God-fearing constituency by themselves. And Graham was not the stalwart right-winger that Kruse, echoing many of his contemporary critics, describes. As Grant Wacker reveals in his excellent new biography of the man, “America’s pastor” admired and was as close to President Lyndon Johnson, an archliberal, as he was to the wily Republican who succeeded him.

Kruse tells a big and important story about the mingling of religiosity and politics since the 1930s. Still, he oversells his basic premise. Americans easily accepted placing God’s name on their currency and in the oath children recite every school day because similar invocations were already routine in public discourse — from the Declaration’s reference to the “unalienable Rights” endowed by the “Creator” to the official chaplains who have opened sessions of the House and Senate with a prayer since 1789. Following the attacks of 9/11, we’ve added the ubiquitous “God Bless America” to bumper stickers, to the ends of political speeches and to many a seventh-inning stretch. As features of what the sociologist Robert Bellah called “civil religion” (a term he borrowed from Rousseau), the familiarity of these practices comforts some without making particular demands on anyone else. Even back in the age of Eisenhower, the A.C.L.U. understood that.

In recent years, those who claim to have inside knowledge of what the Creator wants us to think and do have been more common on the right than on the left. Conservatives blasted President Obama for comparing, at this year’s National Prayer Breakfast, the people who “committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ” with those contemporary Muslims who slaughter in the name of Allah. No serious competitor for the 2016 Republican nomination would quarrel with Ronald Reagan’s 1984 statement that “as morality’s foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related. .?.?. If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we’ll be a nation gone under.”

But which leading progressive in American history would have disagreed with those sentiments? Surely not William Lloyd Garrison or Jane Addams or the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. As Kruse points out, Franklin Roosevelt, that alleged collectivist foe of God, sprinkled biblical references into many of his speeches. In his Second Inaugural Address, Roosevelt even “portrayed himself, rather unsubtly, as a modern-day Moses leading his people out of the wilderness.” In the United States, spiritual mobilization has long been anyone’s game.

For that very reason, the presence of four little words of reverence on the currency is quite unremarkable. I doubt any of the long-dead white men whose portraits appear along with the words would have found them objectionable. They may, however, have wondered why they were necessary.

ONE NATION UNDER GOD

How Corporate America Invented Christian America

By Kevin M. Kruse

Illustrated. 352 pp. Basic Books. $29.99.

Michael Kazin teaches history at Georgetown University and is a co-editor of Dissent. His most recent book is “American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation.”

===

https://www.amazon.com/One-Nation-Under-God-Corporate/dp/1501238213

k kruse

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/162368

briley

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Invisible Hands tells the story of how a small group of American businessmen succeeded in building a political movement. Long before the “culture wars” of the 1960s sparked the Republican backlash against cultural liberalism, these high-powered individuals actively resisted New Deal economics and sought to educate and organize their peers. Kim Phillips-Fein recounts the little-known efforts of men such as W. C. Mullendore, Leonard Read, and Jasper Crane, drawing on meticulous research and narrative gifts to craft a compelling history of the role of big and small business in American politics―and a blueprint for anyone who wants insight into the way that money has been used to create political change.

https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Hands-Businessmens-Crusade-Against/dp/0393337669

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new deal lochner

scotus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_switch_in_time_that_saved_nine

gangs of america, lochner, stich in time saves 9

...During his last term in office, Roosevelt proposed a “second Bill of

Rights” that would address issues of economic fairness and security. It

would guarantee the following: the right of all workers to employment

at an adequate wage, the right of farmers to a decent return on their

products, the right of small businessmen to protection from monopolies

and unfair competition, the right of all families to a home, the right of

everyone to education and medical care, and the right

...

After a long period of dormancy, interest in human rights began to

revive in the years leading up to World War II. In 1940 British science

fiction author H. G. Wells penned a modern updating of Jefferson, Lafayette,

and Paine. In the midst of the war, Penguin’s publication H. G.

Wells on the Rights of Man sold thousands of copies and was translated

into thirty languages. Wells had worked out many of his ideas in conversation

with a circle of socialist and pacifist friends that included A.

A. Milne, creator of Winnie the Pooh. His justification for human rights

was a simple one: “Since a man comes into this world through no fault

of his own. . .”

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https://www.alternet.org/deadbeat-millennial-who-really-blame-when-30-something-still-lives-home

... interview Bernie Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver about his book "How Bernie Won," a text that sheds some light on what American liberals actually believe. Specifically, the book argues that modern American liberalism is really an attempt to return to the political ideals embodied in President Franklin Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union address. The section excerpted below is colloquially referred to as the "Second Bill of Rights" and argues not that people should be able to live off others, but rather that anyone who is willing to work should be able to find a job and support himself or herself off of their labor.

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people — whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth — is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however — as our industrial economy expanded — these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights — among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all — regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.

The mischaracterization of millennials at play with the coverage of Rotondo is equally problematic.

While liberals are no more likely than other people to be moochers, millennials are indeed much more likely than previous generations to continue living with their parents when they're still in the 25-to-35 age range. As of 2016, 15 percent of millennials within that group still lived in their parents' homes, by far the highest that number has been in more than 50 years. It's why the term "The Boomerang Generation" has become a thing.

For this, we can thank the Great Recession.

As a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis pointed out earlier this year, Americans born during the 1980s were uniquely vulnerable when the Great Recession began in the late-2000s and have consequently faced unique hardships in coming to their own as adults. People who were in their late 20s or early 30s in 2016 were the only age group that continued to lose financial ground after the recession ended.

"This represents a missed opportunity because asset appreciation is unlikely to be as rapid in the near future as it was during the recent period," the study pointed out. Another section near the end of the report deserves to be quoted in full:

Families whose heads were born in the 1980s are different. They generally were too young to be homeowners during the housing bubble; in fact, only 19 percent of 1980s families were homeowners in 2007. Even by 2016, fewer than 45 percent of 1980s families were homeowners. The predominant type of debt they owe is non-mortgage debt, including student loans, auto loans and credit card debt. Because none of these types of debt finance assets that have appreciated rapidly during the last few years—such as stocks and real estate—they have received no leveraged wealth boost like that enjoyed by older cohorts. The 1980s cohort was unique in falling even further behind its wealth benchmark between 2010 and 2016. Given the prospect of lower asset returns in the future than in the recent past, 1980s families face a formidable challenge in building wealth rapidly enough to reach benchmark levels set by earlier generations.

Despite these economic facts, people who were lucky enough to not come of age during the nadir of the Great Recession still continue to heap unrealistic economic expectations on millennials born in the 1980s.

Earlier this month, MarketWatch became a target of ridicule when it wrote that by the age of 35, millennials should have twice their current salary saved up. This may have been the norm during the Baby Boomer era or for members of Generation X, but for millions of Americans who entered the economy in 2008 or the years immediately thereafter, the notion that this would be feasible is downright ludicrous.

...

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npr coup book

Erologue: A Beleaguered Capital

When dawn broke in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, March 4, 1933, the atmosphere was celebratory, if anxious. Slate gray and ominous, the sky suggested a calm before the storm. Even before the sun rose, more than a hundred thousand people had gathered on the east side of the Capitol. General Douglas MacArthur was in command of the inaugural parade,and he habitually expected the worst. By that morning, American depositors had transferred more than $1.3 billion in gold to foreign accounts, millions of people had been turned away from their banks, and rioting was expected in cities throughout the nation, prompting some state governors to predict a violent revolution.

Army machine guns and sharpshooters were placed at strategic locations along the route. Not since the Civil War had Washington been so fortified. Journalist Arthur Krock likened the climate to "that which might be found in a beleaguered capital in wartime." Armed police guarded federal buildings, and rumors swirled that Roosevelt was going to appropriate dictatorial powers and imposemartial law. But if he had ever really entertained such a notion — as unused drafts of an inaugural address indicated — he abandoned it. Despite efforts made by William Randolph Hearst, Walter Lippmann, Bernard Baruch, and others to convince him of the necessity for a benevolent despot to seize control of the country, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was unswayed.

Hearst, the nation's most powerful publisher, went so far as to produce a Hollywood movie —Gabriel Over the White House, starring Walter Huston — to instruct both Roosevelt and the American public how to succumb to dictatorship. Even though Italy's Benito Mussolini and Fascism were enormously popular and highly regarded in America at the time, Roosevelt distrusted autocracy, did not believe that one could count on a benevolent dictator to remain so, and, especially, maintained an absolute commitment to the U.S. Constitution. "We could have had a dictator ... and we would have had one but for the President himself, to whom the whole idea was hateful," a U.S. Army general later said in a speech at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Instead, Roosevelt determined to incite the public to action rather than to capture extra-constitutional authority for himself. He wanted not to assume enhanced powers, not to take advantage of a quavering nation to elevate his own stature, but rather to ignite the citizenry to banish apathy and recapture a spirit of confidence and achievement. He sought not to issue comforting bromides — as his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, had done incessantly — but to raise a battle cry, a call to arms for Americans to overcome their fear and march bravely into the unknown. His overarching message: If they had lost faith in themselves, he would restore it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Recovery_Administration

The National Recovery Administration was a prime New Deal agency established by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) in 1933. The goal was to eliminate "cut-throat competition" by bringing industry, labor, and government together to create codes of "fair practices" and set prices. The NRA was created by the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and allowed industries to get together and write "codes of fair competition." The codes were intended to reduce "destructive competition" and to help workers by setting minimum wages and maximum weekly hours, as well as minimum prices at which products could be sold. The NRA also had a two-year renewal charter and was set to expire in June 1935 if not renewed.^[1]

In 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that the NRA law was unconstitutional, ruling that it infringed the separation of powers under the United States Constitution. The NRA quickly stopped operations, but many of its labor provisions reappeared in the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act), passed later the same year. The long-term result was a surge in the growth and power of unions, which became a core of the New Deal Coalition that dominated national politics for the next three decades.

The NRA, symbolized by the Blue Eagle, was popular with workers. Businesses that supported the NRA put the symbol in their shop windows and on their packages, though they did not always go along with the regulations entailed. Though membership to the NRA was voluntary, businesses that did not display the eagle were very often boycotted, making it seem mandatory for survival to many.

Background:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

As part of the "First New Deal," the NRA was based on the premise that the Great Depression was caused by market instability and that government intervention was necessary to balance the interests of farmers, business and labor. The NIRA, which created the NRA, declared that codes of fair competition should be developed through public hearings, and gave the Administration the power to develop voluntary agreements with industries regarding work hours, pay rates, and price fixing.^[2] The NRA was put into operation by an executive order, signed the same day as the passage of the NIRA.

New Dealers who were part of the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw the close analogy with the earlier crisis handling the economics of World War I. They brought ideas and experience from the government controls and spending of 1917–18.

In his June 13, 1933 "Statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act," President Roosevelt described the spirit of the NRA: "On this idea, the first part of the NIRA proposes to our industry a great spontaneous cooperation to put millions of men back in their regular jobs this summer."^[3][4] He further stated, "But if all employers in each trade now band themselves faithfully in these modern guilds—without exception—and agree to act together and at once, none will be hurt and millions of workers, so long deprived of the right to earn their bread in the sweat of their labor, can raise their heads again. The challenge of this law is whether we can sink selfish interest and present a solid front against a common peril."^[3][4]

Inception:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Director Hugh S. Johnson on the cover of Time Magazine in 1933.

The film industry supported the NRA

The first director of the NRA was Hugh S. Johnson, a retired United States Army general and a successful businessman. He was named Time magazine's "Man of the Year" in 1933. Johnson saw the NRA as a national crusade designed to restore employment and regenerate industry.

Johnson called on every business establishment in the nation to accept a stopgap "blanket code": a minimum wage of between 20 and 45 cents per hour, a maximum workweek of 35 to 45 hours, and the abolition of child labor. Johnson and Roosevelt contended that the "blanket code" would raise consumer purchasing power and increase employment.

To mobilize political support for the NRA, Johnson launched the "NRA Blue Eagle" publicity campaign to boost his bargaining strength to negotiate the codes with business and labor.

Historian Clarence B. Carson noted:

At this moment in time from the early days of the New Deal, it is difficult to recapture, even in imagination, the heady enthusiasm among a goodly number of intellectuals for a government planned economy. So far as can now be told, they believed that a bright new day was dawning, that national planning would result in an organically integrated economy in which everyone would joyfully work for the common good, and that American society would be freed at last from those antagonisms arising, as General Hugh Johnson put it, from "the murderous doctrine of savage and wolfish individualism, looking to dog-eat-dog and devil take the hindmost."^[5]

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kpfa boost rev billy g for libertairianism kpfa 9/21/16 10 am

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-september-21-2016/

With Kevin M. Kruse, professor of History at Princeton University in New Jersey. He is the author or co-editor of several books, his latest is One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America.

About the book:

One Nation Under God tells the story of how in the middle of the 20th century, corporate titans and evangelical activists created the pervasive myth that America was, is, and always will be a fundamentally Christian nation.

As Kruse argues, the belief that America is fundamentally and formally a Christian nation originated from corporate opposition to FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s.Corporations from General Motors to Hilton Hotels bankrolled conservative clergymen, encouraging them to attack the New Deal as a program of “pagan statism” that perverted the central principle of Christianity: the sanctity and salvation of the individual. Their campaign for “freedom under God” culminated in the election of their close ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952.

In Eisenhower’s hands, a religious movement born in opposition to the government was transformed into one that fused faith and the federal government as never before. During the 1950s, Eisenhower revolutionized the role of religion in American political culture, inventing new traditions from inaugural prayers to the National Prayer Breakfast. Meanwhile, Congress added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and made “In God We Trust” the country’s first official motto. With private groups joining in, church membership soared to an all-time high of 69%. During this moment, Americans began to think of their country as an officially Christian nation.

But as Americans moved from broad generalities to the details of issues such as school prayer, cracks began to appear. Religious leaders began to reject this “lowest common denomination” public religion, leaving conservative political activists to champion it alone. In Richard Nixon’s hands, a politics that conflated piety and patriotism became sole property of the right.

Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how the unholy alliance of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics to this day.

*The New Deal: A Modern History*, by Michael Hiltzik,

http://www.amazon.com/New-Deal-Modern-History/dp/1439154481/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1316983458&sr=1-1#reader_1439154481

===

The most famous of these organizations was called The American Liberty League and it was heavily financed by leaders at DuPont, General Motors and other corporations. The problem was that it seemed like very obvious corporate propaganda. As Jim Farley, the head of the Democratic Party at the time, said: "They ought to call it The American Cellophane League, because No. 1: It's a DuPont product, and No. 2: You can see right through it."

So when they realized that making this direct case for free enterprise was ineffective, they decided to find another way to do it. They decided to outsource the job. As they noted in their private correspondence, ministers were the most trusted men in America at the time, so who better to make the case to the American people than ministers?

On the message the ministers conveyed

They use these ministers to make the case that Christianity and capitalism were soul mates. This case had been made before, but in the context of the New Deal it takes on a sharp new political meaning. Essentially they argue that Christianity and capitalism are both systems in which individuals rise and fall according to their own merits. So in Christianity, if you're good you go to heaven, if you're bad you go to hell. In capitalism if you're good you make a profit and you succeed, if you're bad you fail.

On the Rev. James FifieldThe New Deal, they argue, violates this natural order. In fact, they argue that the New Deal and the regulatory state violate the Ten Commandments. It makes a false idol of the federal government and encourages Americans to worship it rather than the Almighty. It encourages Americans to covet what the wealthy have; it encourages them to steal from the wealthy in the forms of taxation; and, most importantly, it bears false witness against the wealthy by telling lies about them. So they argue that the New Deal is not a manifestation of God's will, but rather, a form of pagan stateism and is inherently sinful.

He takes over the pastorate at the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, an elite church, literally ministering to millionaires in his pews. It's got some of the town's most wealthy citizens — the mayor attends service there, [Hollywood filmmaker] Cecil B. DeMille. He tells these millionaires what they want to hear, which is that their worldly success is a sign of heavenly blessing. He has a very loose approach to the Bible. He says that reading the Bible should be like eating fish: We take out the bones to enjoy the meat; all parts are not of equal value. Accordingly, he disregarded Christ's many injunctions about the dangers of wealth, and instead preached a philosophy that wedded capitalism to Christianity.

On Fifield's "spiritual mobilization"

"Spiritual mobilization" is his effort to recruit other ministers to the cause. So he is serving, in many ways, as a frontman for a number of corporate leaders. His main sponsors are Sun Oil President J. Howard Pew, Alfred Sloan of General Motors, the heads of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, they all heavily fund this organization. But what Fifield sets out to do is recruit other ministers to his cause. Within the span of just a decade's time, he has about 17,000 so-called minister representatives who belong to the organization who are literally preaching sermons on its Christian libertarian message to their congregations, who are competing in sermon contest[s] for cash prizes and they're doing all they can in their local communities to spread this message that the New Deal is essentially evil, it's a manifestation of creeping socialism that is rotting away the country from within. Instead they need to rally around business leaders and make common cause with them to defend what they call "the American way of life."

http://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/396365659/how-one-nation-didnt-become-under-god-until-the-50s-religious-revival

https://www.c-span.org/video/?326503-4/when-government-helped

richard wolff econ update interview

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Trudy Goldberg - Living New Deal

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