Showing posts with label FDR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FDR. Show all posts
Friday, August 19, 2011
Living Outside the American Dream
The Tea Party doesn't have a national headquarters or unofficial governing body. Nor is there a reliable count of its members, because there is no formal way for adherents to sign up. It is a collection of unrelated local groups: six people gathered in the living room to talk and complain over whiskey and soda.
Indiana has 72 such affiliates, many named after Johnny Appleseed. Name variations often include the phrase “small government”. The local groups buy Tea Party golf balls, Tea Party cigars and children's coloring books.
Loosely bound for serious political combat, this unimpressive group has 60 members in the US House of Representatives where they exercise their leverage in the Republican Party to change the focus of the nation from the crisis of widespread unemployment to cutting taxes and balancing the federal budget
Only a few months ago, the consensus in Washington, in the media, in the Democratic Party and in the White House located the American crisis and in the vast and growing need to create jobs for the millions of Americans living outside the American dream. This humanitarian goal has been replaced by the bankers’ issues: balancing the federal yearly budget and reducing the long-term federal deficit. A serious jobs program would put funds in the hands of the poorest. The current national dialogue does not include a serious jobs program to increase production and put funds in the hands of the unemployed. An effective program for deficit reduction would cut the military budget, increase taxes on the wealthiest and limit US military adventures around the world
The Tea Party agenda fits the ideology of the Reagan Republican Party supporting military intervention abroad and opposing social intervention for the unemployed at home. The masses of American workers are disappointed in the motivation of the Democrats that moves them to switch priorities from Social Security to deficit reductions, from a massive jobs program similar to the Roosevelt New Deal to a banker support program
What happened to Obama? In this moral and economic crisis, the media cry out in virtual unison, expecting the president to rescue his constituency as headlines scream, “As corporate profits rise, workers income declines.” As unemployment staggers the nation and social programs are cut, there is no FDR in this administration, so stop looking for one.
Monday, November 30, 2009
One Third of the Nation
One Third of the Nation
By Jerome Grossman
On January 20, 1937, in his Second Inaugural Address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said “I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
Roosevelt, the wealthy aristocrat, was defending the economic and social policies he had introduced in 1933 in relief of the dire condition of the American worker. His New Deal established the federal government's responsibility for protecting farmers, workers, and the unemployed while actively regulating the economy to prevent another crash.
To avert national collapse, Roosevelt introduced legislation that he had worked for as governor of New York: minimum wage to lift purchasing power for those with bottom incomes; laws strengthening workers right to unionize thus raising incomes; unemployment insurance to avoid starvation; Social Security providing minimum income for the aged; farm policy guaranteeing a fair return to family farmers.
In retrospect, the Great Depression is a staggeringly unique event. But today's economic numbers show today’s workers in similar distress with about the same percentage of the population hurting, their situation made barely tolerable only by the Roosevelt reforms and initiatives.
Today the official unemployment rate is 10.2%. However, the unofficial rate accepted by most economists is 17.5%, the difference composed of workers employed part time in their regular jobs, those employed below their level of experience and training, discouraged workers unemployed for such a long period that they are no longer looking for work, and those formerly employed by businesses that have collapsed or moved abroad, etc..
Based on the 17.5% unemployment rate, figuring only one worker to a family, the number of unemployed are about 27 million workers. Assuming that each unemployed worker is the breadwinner for a family of four, the number of people “ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished”, is approximately 100 million, about the same percentage of our current population of 300 million as the “One Third of the Nation” described by Roosevelt.
Roosevelt and the social workers around him who helped make policy, Frances Perkins, Harry Hopkins, Harold A. Ickes, farmer Henry Wallace, focused on relief for “The Forgotten Man.”. They saved the banks from bankruptcy while installing serious regulations but spent most of their energies and assets on the workers. Today President Obama says his $787 billion stimulus is working but where are all the jobs? Since taking office, his administration, in contrast to the Roosevelt administration, has studiously avoided paying people to go to work, which could be accomplished by subsidizing private-sector employment or by creating new government paid jobs. There are programs in some states that financially compensate employees who cut their hours to prevent broader layoffs at their companies. Unemployed workers could be paid for going back to school to further their education and to learn new skills. The list of creative activities to support and improve the workforce is endless and requires only the will and orientation of the president’s advisers who seem to be more worried about Wall Street and banks “Too Big to Fail.”
Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the president’s chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers are not oriented in the same direction as Roosevelt’s Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins, and that's a pity.
By Jerome Grossman
On January 20, 1937, in his Second Inaugural Address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said “I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
Roosevelt, the wealthy aristocrat, was defending the economic and social policies he had introduced in 1933 in relief of the dire condition of the American worker. His New Deal established the federal government's responsibility for protecting farmers, workers, and the unemployed while actively regulating the economy to prevent another crash.
To avert national collapse, Roosevelt introduced legislation that he had worked for as governor of New York: minimum wage to lift purchasing power for those with bottom incomes; laws strengthening workers right to unionize thus raising incomes; unemployment insurance to avoid starvation; Social Security providing minimum income for the aged; farm policy guaranteeing a fair return to family farmers.
In retrospect, the Great Depression is a staggeringly unique event. But today's economic numbers show today’s workers in similar distress with about the same percentage of the population hurting, their situation made barely tolerable only by the Roosevelt reforms and initiatives.
Today the official unemployment rate is 10.2%. However, the unofficial rate accepted by most economists is 17.5%, the difference composed of workers employed part time in their regular jobs, those employed below their level of experience and training, discouraged workers unemployed for such a long period that they are no longer looking for work, and those formerly employed by businesses that have collapsed or moved abroad, etc..
Based on the 17.5% unemployment rate, figuring only one worker to a family, the number of unemployed are about 27 million workers. Assuming that each unemployed worker is the breadwinner for a family of four, the number of people “ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished”, is approximately 100 million, about the same percentage of our current population of 300 million as the “One Third of the Nation” described by Roosevelt.
Roosevelt and the social workers around him who helped make policy, Frances Perkins, Harry Hopkins, Harold A. Ickes, farmer Henry Wallace, focused on relief for “The Forgotten Man.”. They saved the banks from bankruptcy while installing serious regulations but spent most of their energies and assets on the workers. Today President Obama says his $787 billion stimulus is working but where are all the jobs? Since taking office, his administration, in contrast to the Roosevelt administration, has studiously avoided paying people to go to work, which could be accomplished by subsidizing private-sector employment or by creating new government paid jobs. There are programs in some states that financially compensate employees who cut their hours to prevent broader layoffs at their companies. Unemployed workers could be paid for going back to school to further their education and to learn new skills. The list of creative activities to support and improve the workforce is endless and requires only the will and orientation of the president’s advisers who seem to be more worried about Wall Street and banks “Too Big to Fail.”
Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the president’s chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers are not oriented in the same direction as Roosevelt’s Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins, and that's a pity.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Put another Frances Perkins on the Obama Team
Put another Frances Perkins on the Obama Team
By Jerome Grossman
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked Frances Perkins to be his Secretary of Labor in 1932, she said she would accept only if he would support her social justice agenda: Federal relief and large-scale public works programs to help victims of the Depression, federal minimum wage and maximum hour’s law, a ban on child labor, and unemployment and old age insurance. The New Deal was born. These were revolutionary goals for the time, but Roosevelt agreed. “I suppose you are going to nag me about this forever”, he said. And she did, acting as his conscience when Roosevelt faced difficult political problems with his progressive agenda.
Perkins, born in Boston, raised in Worcester, Massachusetts in a middle-class Republican family, attended Mount Holyoke, majored in chemistry and physics, but a course in political economy changed her life. Sent into local mills to report on the lives of the workers, she was so moved by the experience that she became a social worker and reformer. She helped Jane Adams in Chicago's Hull House; worked with immigrants in Philadelphia, studied sociology and economics at Columbia before working for the Consumer’s League. Heavily influenced by the fatal fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City, she became a key reformer for worker safety, was appointed by New York Governor Alfred E. Smith to the powerful State Labor Board. When FDR succeeded Smith in 1929, he named her head of the entire department...
Her role in the famous first 100 days of the FDR presidency has been under appreciated. She was the strongest advocate for a federal relief program, led the development of the plan that was implemented, persuaded FDR to support large-scale public works despite his skepticism, fought for the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Allied with Eleanor Roosevelt, she was effective in pushing her very political president to live up to his liberal reputation. Her imprint was so large that political opponents took to calling the FDR administration the Perkins New Deal. And she accomplished all this while being harassed as a liberal and the first woman Secretary of Labor.
President Barack Obama assumes office at a similar time of crisis: instability is in the air, large segments of the population are hurting, relief is needed at every level, unemployment is rising, banks are failing, and Wall Street has lost the confidence of the public. Relief and change are required, especially new approaches to rescue the workers at the sustenance level from the Hoover-like policies of George W. Bush.
But personnel defines policy and Obama’s liberal instincts cannot be implemented by appointees from the center, by definition. To achieve a national consensus, Obama’s selected helpers come from the center of U.S. politics, few from labor, almost none from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, some from the Republicans, most of them veterans of the Clinton and Bush administrations.
Obama needs advisers and appointees like Frances Perkins, people committed to rescuing the masses of Americans, whose horizons are not limited by corporate bailouts, who are willing to take approaches outside the conventional wisdom, ideas that will find ways to extend the benefits of the richest country in the world to all Americans. Obama understands this approach, the Perkins approach to social and political problems. He has repeatedly said that if he were constructing a health-care system for America from scratch, it would be single payer. Yet his multiple advisers are not even considering a single payer plan, not even putting a single proponent on the health care team.
Louis Gerstner, the former chief of IBM, praises Obama but criticized the way the White House handled restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler. “Who did we pick to figure out how to fix the automobile industry? We picked two investment bankers. It’s sort of like asking the arsonist to run the fire department.”
If Obama had Frances Perkins on his team, the president's proposals would be quite different.
By Jerome Grossman
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked Frances Perkins to be his Secretary of Labor in 1932, she said she would accept only if he would support her social justice agenda: Federal relief and large-scale public works programs to help victims of the Depression, federal minimum wage and maximum hour’s law, a ban on child labor, and unemployment and old age insurance. The New Deal was born. These were revolutionary goals for the time, but Roosevelt agreed. “I suppose you are going to nag me about this forever”, he said. And she did, acting as his conscience when Roosevelt faced difficult political problems with his progressive agenda.
Perkins, born in Boston, raised in Worcester, Massachusetts in a middle-class Republican family, attended Mount Holyoke, majored in chemistry and physics, but a course in political economy changed her life. Sent into local mills to report on the lives of the workers, she was so moved by the experience that she became a social worker and reformer. She helped Jane Adams in Chicago's Hull House; worked with immigrants in Philadelphia, studied sociology and economics at Columbia before working for the Consumer’s League. Heavily influenced by the fatal fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City, she became a key reformer for worker safety, was appointed by New York Governor Alfred E. Smith to the powerful State Labor Board. When FDR succeeded Smith in 1929, he named her head of the entire department...
Her role in the famous first 100 days of the FDR presidency has been under appreciated. She was the strongest advocate for a federal relief program, led the development of the plan that was implemented, persuaded FDR to support large-scale public works despite his skepticism, fought for the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Allied with Eleanor Roosevelt, she was effective in pushing her very political president to live up to his liberal reputation. Her imprint was so large that political opponents took to calling the FDR administration the Perkins New Deal. And she accomplished all this while being harassed as a liberal and the first woman Secretary of Labor.
President Barack Obama assumes office at a similar time of crisis: instability is in the air, large segments of the population are hurting, relief is needed at every level, unemployment is rising, banks are failing, and Wall Street has lost the confidence of the public. Relief and change are required, especially new approaches to rescue the workers at the sustenance level from the Hoover-like policies of George W. Bush.
But personnel defines policy and Obama’s liberal instincts cannot be implemented by appointees from the center, by definition. To achieve a national consensus, Obama’s selected helpers come from the center of U.S. politics, few from labor, almost none from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, some from the Republicans, most of them veterans of the Clinton and Bush administrations.
Obama needs advisers and appointees like Frances Perkins, people committed to rescuing the masses of Americans, whose horizons are not limited by corporate bailouts, who are willing to take approaches outside the conventional wisdom, ideas that will find ways to extend the benefits of the richest country in the world to all Americans. Obama understands this approach, the Perkins approach to social and political problems. He has repeatedly said that if he were constructing a health-care system for America from scratch, it would be single payer. Yet his multiple advisers are not even considering a single payer plan, not even putting a single proponent on the health care team.
Louis Gerstner, the former chief of IBM, praises Obama but criticized the way the White House handled restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler. “Who did we pick to figure out how to fix the automobile industry? We picked two investment bankers. It’s sort of like asking the arsonist to run the fire department.”
If Obama had Frances Perkins on his team, the president's proposals would be quite different.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Gambling with Other People's Money
Gambling with Other People's Money
By Jerome Grossman
I am a Democrat. I support Barack Obama. I have made substantial contributions to the party and to Obama. I am dismayed that John McCain is actually leading Obama in the presidential race in the national polls and in the Electoral College. If the Democrats cannot win the presidency after eight years of Republican incompetence, President Bush's unpopularity, the foreign and military failures, the rising unemployment, then they ought to find another line of work, fold the party, and let another group take over.
Just imagine, the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt hasn't been able to claim the economic issue in this time of crisis. Obama cites as his models for the current emergency the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy when America is trembling over the memory of the1929 stock market crash and the ensuing depression. Republican President Herbert Hoover said that “prosperity was just around the corner” but President FDR instituted radical reforms to restrain the bankers and protect the depositors.
In many ways, the current banking collapse echoes the business and ethical practices of the 1920s when Wall Street and the banks operated under the slogan “anything goes”, especially when it came to gambling with depositors’ money.
After the big bust in 1929, after the 1932 election that swept Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party from power, Roosevelt and the Democrats in Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act that prevented US commercial banks from doing investment-banking business. Repeal of Glass-Steagall, in 1999 when Democrat Bill Clinton was president, allowed commercial banks to enter the securities business and to compete with companies like Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch (may they rest in peace)……..
The model proved hard to manage particularly when virtually every financial institution gave its officers stock options that encouraged the riskiest investment strategies like packaged consumer debts, mortgages, credit card advances, student loans, etc.. Overexpansion of real estate broke the investment bubble and put the entire US banking system in jeopardy.
Why doesn't Obama offer a version of tough FDR regulation? Why doesn't he tell the voters that this is a repeat of an earlier experience, that the government must seriously regulate and restrain the bankers to save the rest of us from their appetites? Perhaps it is because Obama has the same business advisor as Bill Clinton, the same seer who engineered the end of Glass-Steagall, Robert Rubin, once at Goldman Sachs, more recently of Citigroup.
The soul of the Obama campaign is wrapped in the invocation of change. I believe he means it but is held back in applying it to current policies by fear of getting too far ahead of the electorate. But the voters are ahead of him on this issue. They are frightened about losing their savings and their jobs. They want him to clean up the banks, to keep their savings safe, to restrain the gambling with other people's money. And restoration of some form of Glass-Steagall might even win Obama the election.
By Jerome Grossman
I am a Democrat. I support Barack Obama. I have made substantial contributions to the party and to Obama. I am dismayed that John McCain is actually leading Obama in the presidential race in the national polls and in the Electoral College. If the Democrats cannot win the presidency after eight years of Republican incompetence, President Bush's unpopularity, the foreign and military failures, the rising unemployment, then they ought to find another line of work, fold the party, and let another group take over.
Just imagine, the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt hasn't been able to claim the economic issue in this time of crisis. Obama cites as his models for the current emergency the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy when America is trembling over the memory of the1929 stock market crash and the ensuing depression. Republican President Herbert Hoover said that “prosperity was just around the corner” but President FDR instituted radical reforms to restrain the bankers and protect the depositors.
In many ways, the current banking collapse echoes the business and ethical practices of the 1920s when Wall Street and the banks operated under the slogan “anything goes”, especially when it came to gambling with depositors’ money.
After the big bust in 1929, after the 1932 election that swept Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party from power, Roosevelt and the Democrats in Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act that prevented US commercial banks from doing investment-banking business. Repeal of Glass-Steagall, in 1999 when Democrat Bill Clinton was president, allowed commercial banks to enter the securities business and to compete with companies like Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch (may they rest in peace)……..
The model proved hard to manage particularly when virtually every financial institution gave its officers stock options that encouraged the riskiest investment strategies like packaged consumer debts, mortgages, credit card advances, student loans, etc.. Overexpansion of real estate broke the investment bubble and put the entire US banking system in jeopardy.
Why doesn't Obama offer a version of tough FDR regulation? Why doesn't he tell the voters that this is a repeat of an earlier experience, that the government must seriously regulate and restrain the bankers to save the rest of us from their appetites? Perhaps it is because Obama has the same business advisor as Bill Clinton, the same seer who engineered the end of Glass-Steagall, Robert Rubin, once at Goldman Sachs, more recently of Citigroup.
The soul of the Obama campaign is wrapped in the invocation of change. I believe he means it but is held back in applying it to current policies by fear of getting too far ahead of the electorate. But the voters are ahead of him on this issue. They are frightened about losing their savings and their jobs. They want him to clean up the banks, to keep their savings safe, to restrain the gambling with other people's money. And restoration of some form of Glass-Steagall might even win Obama the election.
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