[img]583|left|||no_popup[/img]After President Obama took the oath of office, the Chairman of the Fed went to him and said, “If you don't do something by Monday, our economy is going to collapse.”
This was a gift from the Republican party. These people are not hiding the last Republican President and vice president for nothing. Under George W. Bush, the nation was losing 800,000 jobs a month. Just ask yourself: Who was the last Republican President who didn’t drag America under a bus?
The GOP: A 100-Year Record of Swindling the People
In 1921, eight years before the Great Depression, Republicans took over the helm of this nation for 12 years. During that time, there were three Republican administrations, the first being Warren G. Harding.
History remembers Harding's administration for one thing more than anything other, scandal. During his presidency the Teapot Dome scandal erupted. His was considered the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States, until Nixon, then Reagan, finally Bush's.
In 1923 came Calvin Coolidge, the President Ronald Reagan most admired. Coolidge's policies of large tax cuts, allowing business a free rein, and encouragement of stock speculation contributed greatly to the impending market crash and the Depression.
Herbert Hoover came to power in 1929. During his administration, the stock market crashed. In spite of the fact that by 1933 the unemployment rate was at 33.3 percent with 16 million people out of work, the Republican Hoover just sat, thinking that the economy eventually would rejuvenate itself. Some 15,000 World War I veterans marched on Washington, demanding to be paid what they were owed by the government. Hoover called in federal troops to throw them off government property.
A Different Attitude
In1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a liberal Democrat, was elected overwhelmingly. He immediately surrounded himself with a group of the finest minds in the country, including Columbia professors Adolph A. Berle, Jr., Rexford G. Tugwell, and Raymond Moley, known as the “Brain Trust.” After assembling these men and others, he went about the business of developing a New Deal for working class people.
The New Deal had two components, to help the economy to recover from the effects of the Depression and give relief to the American people, insuring they never again would be placed in total destitution.
To heal the economy, Roosevelt created programs that regulated business, controlled inflation, and brought about price stabilization.
To bring relief to the people, he signed the National Labor Relations Act, guaranteeing workers the right to collective bargaining. He created the Social Security Administration to guarantee workers a form of income once they became too old. He signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which protected workers rights and set a minimum wage for workers.
With his New Deal in place, Roosevelt not only led the country out of the worst Republican-generated, crisis America has faced, he went on to lead the free world in victory over Hitler in World War II. This ushered in the most sustained prosperity that the world has ever known.
A Lesson Learned or Ignored?
One would think that conservatives would have seen the light. Their passion to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the middle and lower classes seems to supersede all logic. From the moment the New Deal went into place, conservatives were determined to dismantle it. The closest they have come started during the Reagan administration with supply side economics. The battle still is raging in Washington as we speak.
Supply side economics was a scheme hatch by USC economist Arthur Laffer and the Reagan crowd. It was supposed to cut the deficit and balance the budget. The theory: If you cut taxes for business and people in the upper tax brackets and deregulated business of nuisances such as safety regulations and environmental safeguards, the beneficiaries would invest their savings into creating new jobs.
That way money eventually would trickle down to the rest of us. The resulting broadened tax base not only would bring down the deficit, but subsidize the tremendously high defense budget. When the plan was first floated, even George H.W. Bush, Reagan's vice president, called it “voodoo economics.”
Reaganomics (or supply side economics) sought to undo safeguards from the Roosevelt era and return to the business environment of Coolidge nearly 60 years before. What happened was more Coolidge-like than intended.
Businesses did not follow the plan President Reagan said they would. Instead of ploughing the money into expansion and new jobs, many invested in wild schemes and stock market speculation.
A Twisting Pretzel Plan
One scheme, the leveraged buyout, involved buying up large companies with borrowed funds secured by the company's assets, then paying off the loan by selling off the assets of the purchased company. This practice cost taxpayers their industrial base. The bottom fell out of the stock market on Monday, Oct. 19, 1987. The Dow-Jones average fell 508.32 points, the greatest one-day decline since 1914-15.
What about Ronald Reagan's promise to balance the budget and lower the deficit? By the time he left office, he was the most prolific spender in White House history and grew the deficit more than all of his predecessors combined. What was the Republican solution? One was Newt Gingrich’s infamous Contract with America, a capitol gains tax cut for the rich.
Due to the continued freewheeling fiscal policies of conservative Republicans between 1986 and 1989, spanning the presidencies of Reagan and Bush Sr., the Fed had to pay off the depositors of 296 institutions with assets of over $125 billion.
In 1988 Silverado Savings and Loan collapsed, costing the taxpayers $1.3 billion. It was headed by Neil Bush, brother of George W. The investigation alleged that he was guilty of “breaches of his fiduciary duties involving multiple conflicts of interest.” The issue was settled out of court with Bush paying a mere $50,000 settlement.
The Lincoln Savings and loan scandal of 1987 involved Sen. John McCain. The case was similar to the one currently playing out on Wall Street. McCain was among a group of senators dubbed “The Keating Five.”
A decade before, investor Charles Keating had moved to Arizona to run the American Continental Corp. In 1984, shortly after Reagan’s push to deregulate savings and loans, Keating bought Lincoln. He engaged in risky investments with the depositors' savings. By 1989, the parent company Keating headed went bankrupt. Twenty-one thousand investors lost their life savings, totaling $25 million. Most were elderly.
Having received a million dollars from Keating in illegal campaign contributions, gifts, free trips and other gratuities, the Keating Five – which included four Democrats, John Glenn, Don Riegle, Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini – attempted to intervene in the investigation.
Later they were admonished to varying degrees by their Senate colleagues. Keating was convicted of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy. He was sentenced to a 10-year term in state court and 12 by a federal judge. He later pleaded guilty to certain felonies in exchange for a sentence of time served.
The George W. Bush administration caused close to a million people to die uselessly in an illegal war in Iraq, robbed the American people blind, while his fumbling ignited the longest war in American history in Afghanistan. Bush greed came close to sending the nation into another depression.
After all of their efforts to deplete the national treasury, they are unanimously voting against every piece of legislation the Democrats propose to repair the damage they caused. They have the audacity to claim that they're doing it because they are concerned about deficit spending.
They are against affordable health care for families; against any spending to put Americans back to work; against extending unemployment insurance to relieve the burden of the unemployed. They also oppose strong legislation to prevent the financial community from being able to rob the people in the future.
What they really want is to maintain the status quo, making sure that the people suffer until next month’s election so they will have a chance to regain power and raid the treasury again. That is their only agenda.
This is not just political rhetoric. Here is the activity of the Republican Congress who ran in the 2010 election on the claim that their No. 1 priority was to bring economic relief, and create jobs for the American people:
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History is clear. Conservative Republicans don't mind spending money. They do not want to spend it on those who need it. Remember, they are the party of Alexander Hamilton, a founding father who believed only those who owned property should even be allowed to vote. He said:
“All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born. The other, the mass of the people… The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government.” Debates of the Federalist Convention (May 14-Sept. 17, 1787.)
Let's set the record straight. Franklin Roosevelt, that not only brought the nation back from the Great Depression and saved the world from Hitler, his New Deal gave us the greatest prosperity we have known. Fifty years later, the New Deal allowed him to reach back from the grave to save the nation from Ronald Reagan.
Not that the liberal Democratic philosophy corners the market on what is in the best interest of the nation. Both parties have enjoyed illustrious moments.
This is one of those defining issues in politics that determines whether this is to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, or a government where the citizens are nothing more than disposable resources for big business.
The Democratic party always has drawn a line, but in recent years the liberal philosophy has become so distorted even Democrats are distancing themselves from their own political philosophy.
What makes America great are those dramatic moments in politics when one person has the courage to defend, protect, and save the people from disaster. The annals of modern history show it was a bleeding heart liberal who always stepped in and became a hero.
Historians will record that there is nothing more honorable in American politics than a bleeding heart because their hearts bleed for America.
Eric L. Wattree is a writer, poet and musician, born in Los Angeles. A columnist for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Black Star News, a staff writer for Veterans Today, he is a contributing writer to Your Black World, the Huffington Post, ePluribus Media and other online sites and publications. He also is the author of “A Message From the Hood.”
Mr. Wattree may be contacted at wattree.blogspot.com or Ewattree@Gmail.com
