Stop Me Before I Vote Again

It would mean the empire would turn inward ... for a spell. The New Deal was not internationalist at all.

I'm not talking about the third term FDR -- that guy, the post September 39 FDR was not Mr New Deal anymore, he was CnC OF the world's new hegemony.

I'm talking about the first two terms ... the first deal and then the real deal.

The first deal was in essence ... and I emphasize in essence -- corporatism; i.e. it was Benito Lite. The National Recovery Act was an attempt to massively violate our constitution, our way of doing business and our sense of what made us America -- but that's about all the good I can say for it. As a way to end the Depression it was, on balance, worse than Hooverism -- once one recognizes the part of the first term that was entrained by Hoover's policies and agencies, many of which were kept in a holding pattern by Congressional dems, waiting for the First Coming, so to speak. (BTW there are more then mere shades of Clinton after Bush I in all this.)

Examples of Hoover endeavours that the New Deal implemented include, off the top of my head, the famed Inauguration Day bank holiday declaration, the nest egg of a new economic order, the reconstruction finance corporation, and best of all, the public works administration.

Let me note, by way of parallel-universing, a Hoover II would not have run the ship through its drills so briskly as the Featherduster was wont to, but if instead of Franklin we had had and American Stanley Baldwin, I doubt the bottom line diff would have been all that much in FDR's favor -- through mid-'34 or so.

But at that point Hoover drops into the dustbin, even in his own universe, because FDR pulled off a second deal even as he coasted through his first term without serious political challenges. And this deal was the real deal, the massive course correction that allowed us to build a world class transfer system and industrial union movement -- the measures, in other words, that brought us all we so cherish that's under siege today.

To be continued....

Placebo politics ... all the young dudes try to play that game, and FDR was a master of it, for sure, what with "all we've got to fear...", fireside chats can cure, etc.

"He restored America's respect for itself..." "got America to believe in itself again" -- Tinker Bell in a wheelchair.

Personally, I'm not much into faith healing. This shabby holy hot-air act weighs about as much in Clio's scales as fairy dust ought to. But certainly we have one candidature in today's field already feeding the masses this no-harm policy approach, and that's the candidature of the Obama outfit.

Like their blessed martyred template Mattress Jack, the barrack team digs the obvious "cost effectiveness" of serious high stakes placebo politics -- smoke and mirrors, being, of course, even cheaper than talk.

http://counterpunch.com/dunbar04012008.html

... titled New Deal Nostalgia by one of those new radical rainbow hypenates, Dunbar-Ortiz.

Off the top -- here's a passage striking a bogus brass bell:

"By 1880, a little over fifty percent of the U.S. population was farming, but the proportion declined to seventeen percent in 1940 and then to about two percent today. The decline to 17 percent in 1940 was largely due to New Deal policies to industrialize agriculture. What happened to those who would have become farmers? Were they no longer needed? Growing food remained and will remain a necessity, but large corporations took over the land and displaced individual farmers. Patriotism -- in the form of allegiance to a distant government, with its flag and other symbols, with its wars in distant lands -- has filled the black hole left by the loss of land and a way of life they loved."

"New Deal policies were themselves designed to end subsistence farming. Farmers could have survived with government assistance, but the New Deal allowed banks to foreclose and destroyed surplus food production to maintain high prices, while people were starving. The government could have bought and distributed the food they destroyed ("dumped in the ocean," my father used to say)."

"the Dust Bowl refugees were put to work picking cotton and fruit for agribusiness in California, the Northwest, and Arizona, driving out the Mexican farm workers, until the United States entered World War II, and the Dust Bowl refugees went to work in the war industry. All those angry ex-farmers and wannabe farmers making bombs and fighter planes, whole new generations following in that nasty work, a good many other of them serving in the military, now a business, not a civic duty. They get to drop the bombs and man the guns on the tanks that the others manufacture. Subsistence farmers, small farmers, like peace -- not war that takes away their young sons, and now daughters. Getting rid of them, reducing them to a tiny minority, has made military recruitment and passive acceptance of war much easier than during World War I, when farmers rose up in rebellion, as did workers, against a "war for big business," which all modern wars are."

There's a lesson drawn: "As we search for historical models, it is important that we be fearless in what we draw from them." In this case, according to our radical hyphenate, Howie Zinn sums up the New Deal just right:

"capitalism remained intact. The rich still controlled the nation's wealth, as well as its laws, courts, police, newspapers, churches, colleges. Enough help had been given to enough people to make Roosevelt a hero to millions, but the same system that had brought depression and crisis -- the system of waste, of inequality, of concern for profit over human need -- remained."

"When we envisage the New Deal as our model for social change, we are accepting the permanence of capitalism and assuming it can be reformed, and we are separating the state from capitalism, rather than acknowledging that the US state is a plutocracy"

Because its center of gravity, the point this thought field condenses to, exists somewhere between hapless bald earth nonsense, and all or zero noodledom. Premise: we need to suggest refoms that burst the bonds of "the system... be realistic and imagine the impossible."

I suggest we find the boundaries of the real and push them for a burst through. Want a for-instance? The arsenal of democracy is a fine figurative blueprint for a clean green automated production machine for Norte America.

This time we don't build a better death star.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

--Franklin D. Roosevelt, May 1932

* * * * *

Mr. Obama continues to place a premium on deep experience.... "[T]here's going to be no time for experimentation," a member of the Obama foreign policy team said.

-- the latest from Sinai, according to the New York Times

There's nothing paranoid about observing and detailing the relationships in the incestuous, overlapping, interlocking, patronage-laden pseudo-grassroots organizations set up and funded by oligarchs. That's what right wing oligarchs do. It's how they work. It's a highly successful business model. They coach, groom and recruit the model's next generation of managers and middle managers at the universities. Ask any of the believers, nicely, and they'll tell you life is war. Then they'll try to recruit you. They are collectivists in the narrowest, worst sense of the word and feel most comfortable when they're surrounded by people who are "on message". They run a celebrity jackpot for people at the bottom of the organizational food chain and groom the winners. It's perversely meritocratic, cf Joe the Plumber and Rick Santelli, and they get a nasty kick out of horrifying the respectable liberals by shoving the "lucky" contestants in their faces. Pretty standard épater les bourgeois stuff, disgusting too, but it works as well as the magician's patter.

There's no need for them to do anything but start dozens of greater and lesser freak shows. One of them will get momentum and then the pile on begins. If they get impatient, they wind up a jacquerie; usually a keyboard jacquerie. Anything else is at arm's length, with plenty of deniability.

What's appalling is how much bang the oligarchs get for their buck. Talk about force multipliers! That bang relies on a level of accommodation in their opposition that must surely strain the credulity of anyone supporting that opposition. And that strain does in fact show on a regular basis. It's hard to beat liberals for the energy that goes into an accurate audit trail of how the machinery of capitalism works its violent, vicious scams and thefts. They're stakhanovite in their pursuit of it. They have a deep driving need to know how their world works. But that, alas, is as far as it goes, with the laudable exception of an occasional Ralph Nader. They're crippled by the same ghastly sense of propriety that keeps the "small gubmint" punters coming back to the Republican table. The liberals head to the Democratic table, allegedly the table with better odds. What gets to me, on a personal level, is being told it's the only game in town. Of course it is! That's the first problem. The second is that it's also rigged in favor of the house. The third is the defensive ridicule of people who insist that playing is a virtue.

Hey, the system is not broken. It's working. Isn't that a problem?

Would these men get us out of Iraq?

We've seen good emperors before, haven't we? And if they're cut short -- if Clio scripts a Lincoln exit for 'em -- they can carry the hope/hype through to -- "ahhh, what might have been."

Nor him neither, I suspect -- wearin' the purple changes a feller.

If not them, Owen, you cynical red divil you then by Jayzzzus, wouldn't she get us out?

No? Oh, the terrible blight of it all, mates!

In this time of supremely self-made meritorious leaderhood in the White House, I'm reminded -- often -- that it wasn't always worse for our president to be born on third base like boy emperor Bush. One need simply recall the gentlemanly child rentier from Hyde Park, shown above, with a Mom who looks to be as formidable a battleaxe as Georgie's own.

My sense of FDR the "reformer" starts and ends with his risk-taking -- his willingness to advocate a heterodox move -- and his shameless moving-on after a blooper.

In times of severe novelty and crisis, like now, a restless, easily bored, annoyingly overconfident risk-taking spirit is just what the powers that be need at the helm, if they want to keep the smurfs on board -- even if, as with FDR, his fearlessness is the result of a lifetime of consequence-free frolicking.

I've been reading a soft book on the tweener years by some bold ex-broker, and it nicely illuminates Roosevelt the political economist manqué.

The man could be positively spoony on matters economic -- a completely wild and wooly overconfident undereducated amateur who was very often as dead wrong as he was dead certain.

Example:

One of his administration's great early achievements, deposit insurance -- he personally fought it to the last House vote. Yes, reader, he was wrong on deposit insurance! Deposit insurance! And in general, he could be, at best, "lightly conflicted" on the depths of deficit spending

One sees the zigzags as his head plays off his hidebound and blatantly silly schoolmarmish analogies to household finance, against his tireless driving need to "do more till we fully recover".

Besides his shaky grip on massive deficit budgeteering -- the key to the recovery -- he was also way wrong on -- well, the list is endless. But here's what's important: his apparent working rule was, "keep punching".

And he sure did that. He followed his instincts till they blew up in his face and he took chances like he was "on the booze", as Keynes remarked. And in a pinch, where his personal idiosyncratic notions failed to guide him, he'd follow someone else's sexy-sounding hunch.

And if that flopped too, if he suffered a knockdown, he jumped to his feet and threw the opposite punch. Punch punch punch! Keep punching! In rapid crisscrossing combinations.

Take gold pricing and the hallowed gold standard: FDR was no Cleveland democrat. He was a de facto "debaser and repudiator" by deepest inclination. And he had no sense of the sacred cow when it came to the price of gold or its alleged "spinal necessity" at the center of any "sound" monetary system.

Nope. One of his first acts in office amounted to taking us off the "procrustean gold standard". In a move worthy of Nixon at his best, Roosevelt "suspended" gold exports. And in a followup move well beyond Nixon's best, a month later before the much anticipated "world economic conference", he allowed the old free-silverist remnants in the House to slip in an amendment authorizing the president to devalue the dollar against gold by up to 50%, and issue a slew of "unbacked dollars."

Man, did this bit of policy send central bankers worldwide into a frenzy, scrambling for advantage while solemnly proclaiming the need for "currency stabilization".

Franklin went on to torpedo the conference itself that summer, with pre-emptive strikes that scotched any chance at a return to gold. Such bankster-type sober moves he waved off, like some louche Moses, as "a specious fallacy".

Brilliant, brilliant moves -- moves he could no more defend "theoretically" than he could have written the Phenomenology Of Spirit.

Actually, that's not quite right. FDR did have a Merlin. Consider my favorite move against the "good as gold dollar".

After he sank the banksters' worl confab, during the next few months King Frank spent the better part of each morning personally buying gold on Uncle's behalf.

Why? For the same reason he did everything else that first year -- so he could raise the price of cotton, timber, coal, steel and corn.

Enter here his guru. Ever the gregarious frat-boy, Frank always had a confederate in these escapades, and in this case it was an agricultural economist from a what Franklin surely considered a second-tier university -- namely, Cornell. The chap's name was George Warren -- bless him.

After an exhaustive study of 213 years of commodity price moves, George claimed to have unearthed the secret origins of the trajectory of commodity prices in nothing less than the rate of increase in the supply of -- gold.

Now as the great Pauli might say, this theory isn't even important enough to be usefully wrong. But homely as it was, this notion and his confidence in himself ultimately led to yet another official indignity aimed at the sacred cow.

Backstory: as everyone recalls, commodity prices had taken a jagged course down and down since 1930, and by '33 were in the deepest smelliest of dumpsters -- all of 'em, across the board, and of course farm mortgages and other such productive borrowings hadn't adjusted their principal values or payments commensurately, so producers were getting pretty badly squeezed.

Now enter the Warren theory of absolute commodity prices and -- you end up with Uncle's prez buying up the magic shiny glowing shit with freshly produced greenbacks.

Was this wrong headed? Well no, it was harmless enough. But did it work? Why yes it did, in one way. It raised the price of gold, causing international currency markets to continue to roil like cheap foil, and yes, it made the respectable financial community in this country and beyond furious -- in my book that oughta count as a home run or two right there -- but no, it prolly had next to zero effect on long-run farm relief, let alone industrial relief.

But as a sample of FDR's contempt for well-heeled authority and for contemporary academic orthodoxy, this adventure was part of a process of bold experimentation in a time of failed theory.

So at the end of the day, yes yes yes.

His aim was correct: to reduce our small producer debt burden we needed -- and got -- producer price inflation.

Keynes would shortly (1936) come up with a theory that led to a straighter more powerful way to accomplish this than a gold price tinker, or for that matter FDR's bigger Gyro Gearloose effort, the NRA.

Roosevelt was a bit like Squire Western in Tom Jones: off in his methods, but he kept groping for his target and punching away, and of course, most importantly, he hardly ever had a problem changing his views swiftly, without the least sense of shame.

Why not keep a bold posture amidst a world of smoking failures?

"He was just a well-intended amateur" -- like this nation's founding planters. This rentier gentleman policy dabbler, with the political kinetics of an alley cat, had a bred-in-the-bone advantage over his merit class "peers":

You couldn't shame him -- even, or especially, when he had a mind to betray his class. And least of all by citing "a recent Harvard study".

Alas, merit rex Obama, on the other hand....