Reconstruction Finance Corporation

Rick Perry’s Assault On FDR’s New Deal: Unconscionable!

Ronald Leave a comment

The last time that a major party Presidential candidate went after the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt with such zeal as Texas Governor Rick Parry has done in his recent book and during his presidential campaign was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential campaign, and anyone who knows political history knows that Goldwater suffered the worst percentage defeat ever to Lyndon B. Johnson, who went on to expand and improve on the New Deal with his Great Society.

Hopefully, the same scenario will happen if Rick Perry is Barack Obama’s opponent, and we will see Obama improve on Lyndon B Johnson, which he certainly has more than anyone since then, certainly more than Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton!

Perry not only has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme”, even though it has always paid out for 75 years, and is well funded to 2037, and only needs a little tinkering to sustain itself into the long range future, similar to what it received in the famous Ronald Reagan-Tip O’Neill deal of 1983.

Perry also criticizes in his book “Fed Up”, published last year, all of the government agencies created during the New Deal, including three public works agencies that created worthwhile jobs during the New Deal (the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration); the nation’s agency to watch over the stock market and Wall Street (the Securities and Exchange Commission); an agency which took the American South out of dire poverty and provided electricity, which private enterprise had not done (the Tennessee Valley Authority); an agency started by President Herbert Hoover to help keep business afloat during the Great Depression and continued by FDR (the Reconstruction Finance Corporation); an agency which helped keep farmers going during the worst times in agricultural history (the Agricultural Adjustment Administration); and also a denial by Perry that the New Deal lowered the unemployment rate, which in actual fact went from 12-13 million at the beginning of 1933 to a little over 6 million in 1939!

Perry has utilized misrepresentation and misconceptions, and pure lies and demagoguery, while forgetting his own poverty stricken past! Is there anything worse than pure hypocrisy and deception in the name of his corporate masters, who support his campaign for President?

The Republican Party Again Doing What They Are Best At: Self Destruction!

Ronald Leave a comment

The Republican Party has suicidal tendencies since the years of the Great Depression.

When the Great Depression began in 1929, the party in Congress refused to abandon laissez faire economics, and some even fought President Herbert Hoover’s attempt to provide some public works projects and federal aid through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

During the New Deal years of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the party stood in the way of reform and change and continued to decline.

As World War II came on, most Republicans were isolationists who failed to see the threat of Fascism and Nazism.

As World War II ended, Republicans set out to to weaken labor unions and set back the New Deal, and after two brief years in control of Congress in 1947-1948, they lost control and saw Harry Truman stage an upset victory in the Presidential campaign.

The party pursued the Joseph McCarthy anti communist agenda in the late 1940s and early 1950s, undermining America’s effort in the Korean War, but with a popular World War II general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, they were given another chance in 1952, and won back control of Congress, but with their conservative agenda, lost control again after two years.

From that point on, the party failed to gain control of Congress for 40 years in the House, and 26 in the Senate, and after six years of a divided Congress under Ronald Reagan, lost the Senate again in 1986 and for the next eight years.

Despite Eisenhower’s personal popularity, it did not transform into party control after two years, and while Richard Nixon won over a divided Democratic Party in 1968, he could not translate his victory into a Republican majority, and Watergate damaged any hope again of a soon to occur change in party loyalties and success.

Ronald Reagan managed a divided Congress with Republican control of the Senate for six years, but again it did not change party loyalties and success in the long run, and the party was bitterly divided during the administration of George H. W. Bush, with Pat Buchanan helping to divide the party and lead to the defeat of Bush in 1992.

Then in 1994, the Republicans gained control of Congress for the next twelve years, but Bill Clinton, despite personal problems leading to impeachment, was able to control much of the political agenda.

After the Republicans won the battle over Florida’s electoral votes with George W. Bush in 2000, it seemed as if finally they had become the majority party, but September 11, two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the economic collapse of 2008, took away any gains it seemed that the party had made.

While they won the House of Representatives in 2010, the emergence of the Tea Party Movement has now destroyed any chance of Republican success, as again they are seen as obstructionist in so many ways, and public opinion polls still see the party as to blame much more for the economic recession we are suffering through, rather than to hold Barack Obama accountable.

With an image of negativism, concern only for the rich and powerful special interests, isolationism, corruption, and obstructionism, the Republican Party is again in the process of committing political suicide, and relegating itself to minority status in American politics!