It has been used on the model of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s scam to win the midterm elections in 1934. Obama and his scam artist could not quite put things together like Roosevelt and his party hacks did. Therefore Obama failed where Roosevelt succeeded in his scam and now Obama wants a second chance.
Anyone who thinks Roosevelt’s so-called brilliant planning ended the depression simply does not know their history. The evidence clearly shows Roosevelt’s incompetence prolonged the depression. The historical records are clear on this.
We realize that some historians from the beginning have painted over the shortcomings of Roosevelt and still continue to do so today.
Burton Folsom, Jr. is one of the more recent historians that have taken a new look at Roosevelt. In the first chapter of this book “New Deal or Raw Deal?” he addresses “The making of the myth: FDR and the New Deal”.
Mr. Folsom points out that:
“After almost two full terms of Roosevelt and the New Deal, here are Morgenthau’s [Morgenthau was Roosevelt’s Secretary of Treasury] startling – his confession – spoken candidly before his fellow Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee:”
“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I have just one interest, and if I am wrong … someone else can have my job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises…. I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started…. And an enormous debt to boot!”
Folsom points out (page 6) that:
“Fortunately, the league of Nations collected data from many nations throughout the 1930s on industrial production, unemployment, national debt, and taxes. How did the United States compare with other counties? The answer: in all four of these key indexes the U.S. did very poorly, almost worse than any other nation studied. Most nations of Europe weathered the Great Depression better than the United States did.” The footnote indicates the source as “World Economic Survey: Eight Year, 1938/39 (Geneva: League of Nations 1939), 128.”
In his revised and updated edition of “The Leaders We Deserved – (And A Few We Didn’t)”, Alvin Stephen Felzenberg tells us (Page 209/10) that:
“While the Great Depression was a worldwide phenomenon, the Unites States was among the last countries to recover from its ravages. Democratically elected governments in other market-oriented countries pursued policies different from Roosevelt’s and experienced recoveries well in advance of the United States.”In a footnote we are told that:
“Sweden, for instance, abandoned the gold exchange standard in 1931 in favor of a monetary policy of stabilizing domestic prices (similar to what the Federal Reserve pursued under Alan Greenspan) and government deficit spending until the economy recovered. In Sweden, real GDP exceeded its predepression level by 1934, and the Swedish unemployment rate fell below its predepression level by 1936. The United Kingdom and the Netherlands fully recovered by 1937.”
Gene Smiley in his book “Rethinking the Great Depression” on page 162/63 tells us:
“What failed in the 1930s were governments, in their eagerness to direct activity to achieve political ends – ends that were often contradictory. Attempts to stop international financial markets from working through the gold standard brought on the depression. Government efforts to reshape American society to fit the visions of a new administration and Congress made the recovery agonizingly slow and in 1937-1938 helped create a depression within a depression. It has taken us a long time to begin to understand these costly lessons of the 1930s.”
In his book “FDR’S Folly – How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression” (Introduction page viii) Jim Powell points out that:
“Curiously, although the Great Depression was probably the most important economic event in Twentieth-century American history, Stanford University’s David M. Kennedy seems to be the only major political historian who has mentioned any of the recent findings. ‘Whatever it was,’ he wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Freedom from fear (1999), the New Deal ‘was not a recovery program, or at any rate not an effective one.’”Powell continues:
“It’s true the Great Depression was an international phenomenon – depression in Germany, for instance, made increasing numbers of desperate people search for scapegoats and support Adolf Hitler, a lunatic who couldn’t get anywhere politically just a few years earlier when the country was still prosperous. But compared to the United States, as economic historian Lester V. Chandler observed, ‘in most countries the depression was less deep and prolonged.’ Regardless whether the depression originated in the United States or Europe, there is considerable evidence that New Deal policies prolonged high unemployment.”
In the Kennedy book mentioned above we also find on pages 361 and 362 that: “In March 1938, even as Roosevelt groped for policies to right the economy and save the New Deal, Hitler annexed Austria to the German Reich.”
Kennedy goes on to inform us that:
“It was against this backdrop of gathering global menace that Roosevelt spoke to the nation in a Fireside Chat on April 14, 1938, to announce at last the request for increased spending that constituted part of his hesitant and contradictory response to the deepening American economic crisis. ‘Security is our greatest need,’ the president intoned into the microphones on his White House desk. Then he alluded to the Nazi ingestion of Austria just a month earlier: ‘Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations,’ he said, ‘not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tied of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership in government.’ Some listeners might have wondered if he was not talking about his own government and his own leadership. ‘History proves,’ Roosevelt concluded, ‘that dictatorships do not grow out of strong successful governments, but out of weak and helpless ones.’”
“Yet Roosevelt himself stood before the world in 1938 as a badly weakened leader, unable to summon the imagination or to secure the political strength to cure his own country’s apparently endless economic crisis. In the ninth year of the Great Depression and the sixth year of Roosevelt’s New Deal, with more than ten million workers still unemployed, America had still not found a formula for economic recovery.”
In 1938 there was - 10,390,000 people unemployed and the unemployment rate was 18.91 percent. That can be found here.
It is time for the people of this Great Nation to wake up before it is to late!
The Historian Gordon W. Prange wrote the great book “At Dawn We Slept – The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor.” If the people of this Great Nation do not wakeup and come to their sense, fifty years from now someone is going to be writing a book titled “At dawn we Slept – The Untold Story of Barack Hussein Obama and the incompetent United States Congress.”
We are told in the introduction on page ix that: "Prange believed that there were no deliberate villains in the Pearl Harbor story." In that instance we agree. In the present situation we are not so sure.
At the present it is far to early to make a determination like that. However, whatever future historians reveal, one thing is self-evident even at this early stage. The ultimate responsibility for what happens remains with the people of this Great Nation.
This is our opinion, what is yours. You can contact us at wetrack@windstream.net
Have a nice day.
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