Thursday, October 01, 2015
More nonsense about FDR
The Nation is running a big article on a New New Deal. It's hard to tell what they're actually proposing because the article is a jumble of podcasts, hard-to-read light gray fonts, and poetry. But before they fall into the jumble, they misuse FDR. Polistra has to defend the reality of FDR, so here goes....
When Franklin Roosevelt first conjured a “new deal” for American workers, he was still a candidate. It was June 1932; Roosevelt was accepting the nomination of the Democratic Party. The state of the union was dire. Just as these days we’re shifting to digital, gig-based, flexible work, Roosevelt was witnessing the collapse of the agricultural economy and its replacement by organized industrial work.Both of the supposed 'shifts' are wrong. (1) These days we're NOT shifting to digital gig-based flexible work. A small group of knowledge workers are experiencing that shift, as a brief transitional stage before the corporations outsource the work to India or to pure software. This is not a trend. What we are really shifting toward is WalMart and McDonalds. The hugely valuable MyBudget360 blog has been steadily documenting this ACTUAL trend. (2) FDR wasn't witnessing a sudden shift from agriculture to industry, and his actions were emphatically not designed for such a shift. Ag had been fading, and industry growing, since 1830. The slow fade of ag still continues today, now accompanied by the ferocious murderous scorched-earth destruction of industry by Goldman. What FDR handled was the COLLAPSE OF A BUBBLE IN AGRICULTURE that had begun with Wilson's vast expansion of government food purchases for WW1. And the more obvious collapse of a bubble in stock-driven business, which started after the ag bubble. FDR worked primarily to RESTORE real-value agriculture and secondarily to RESTORE real-value business.
Labels: 20th century Dark Age, the broken circle
¶ 3:08 PM
