CLINTON A NEW FDR?
BY MARK EVANS
Watching the democratic victory celebration on TV the night of the election,
I was struck by the way history seems to repeat itself. The resemblance
between Bill Clinton and Franklin Roosevelt is a parallel that has been
cultivated in the mass media in subtle and sundry ways well before his victory
on election eve. Unfortunately for Bill, the paradigm of FDR is not a very
positive one, as I shall explain.
The parallel between the 12-year period of Republican rule (1920-32) after
World War I and the 12-year period of the Reagan-Bush years (1980-92), exactly
sixty years later, may be more than a coincidence. After nine years of Republican
"prosperity" in the twenties, during which time the rich got richer
rendering the fat from the economy, came the crash of 1929 (engineered by
the Federal Reserve raising the rediscount rate in the spring of that year)
and the inevitable depression.
It then became necessary for Wall Street to engage in a little capitalist
benevolence (it was either that or revolution) by throwing a few of the
rendered bones to the literally starving masses. Thus they ushered in the
patrician, Wall-Street "liberal" Franklin Roosevelt.
ROOSEVELT COOPTED THE PROGRESSIVE VOTE
Campaigning in 1932, Roosevelt vowed to "drive the money changers from
the temple." This meant only one thing: in the language of the common
people, for the benefit of the working class, it was a promise to nationalize
the Federal Reserve Bank (the temple) by nationalizing credit-ending the
practice of the government having to borrow money at interest, instead of
creating it interest-free. Roosevelt had to make this promise because the
populist-socialist contingent of the population, at least 15% of the electorate,
were informed and understood this issue and were the balance of power. Roosevelt
never kept his promise. Upon inheriting a national debt of $16 billion in
1933, he steadily added to the debt under the excuse of "priming the
pump of the economy" (implementing Keynesian economics for the first
time) until, by 1940 the debt stood at $50 billion. By the end of the war,
in 1945, it had reached $250 billion.
We are still paying interest on this dead money. In fact, the American people,
that is, the "taxpayers," have already paid the cost of the war
several times over, but since the bonds that were issued against the debt
were long-term bonds of various terms and since bonds, upon coming due,
are "rolled over," the government must borrow more money at interest
by the same process to pay the interest on the new debts contracted to pay
the interest on the former bonds. We and our children will be paying interest
on the "debt" contracted by fighting World War II for several
centuries. This is the uncelebrated, seldom acknowledged, but very real
legacy of Franklin Roosevelt.
ROOSEVELT'S "BRAIN-TRUST" CAME FROM THE CFR
Roosevelt's "Braintrust" was mainly composed of men culled from
the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York City. "Braintrusters"
at the AAA (the Agricultural Adjustment Administration) forced farmers to
plow under their crops of corn and cotton and to slaughter their herds of
cattle and hogs under the false theory that overproduction had caused the
Depression. This policy was implemented at a time when tens of thousands
of people in America were malnourished and starving. Wall Street meanwhile
made millions by manipulating international commodity markets, importing
butter and cheese from Denmark and beef from Argentina. Thousands of American
farming families continued to lose their farms, and American consumers paid
more for imported products while Wall Street, aided by New Deal policies,
grew fatter.
Roosevelt was also responsible for the Wagner-Paley Act (the WPA), which
ultimately has been used to make all labor subject to government regimentation
and supervision, and the NRA (National Recovery Administration) code, which
cartelized industry in the top-down manner of Mussolini's corporate fascist
state, even while it crushed small businesses by the droves. He was also
responsible for the Social Security System, which regiments labor and dehumanizes
people into integers so that "no one may buy or sell without a number."
The WPA and the NRA were determined to be unconstitutional by the Supreme
Court, even during Roosevelt's first term. Many of the provisions of these
acts are still in force, fraudulently.
Granted, fewer people starved under Roosevelt than under Hoover, and many
of the vast projects that were built during the New Deal were necessary
and good and did put hundreds of thousands of people to work, but the "New
Deal" was a far cry from the "Cooperative Commonwealth" that
the socialists had envisioned.
Indeed, it may be argued that Franklin Roosevelt did more to coopt, preempt,
and discredit the cause or potential for genuine socialism and to destroy
as well as subvert the balance of powers inherent in the Constitution, than
any president in this century. Franklin Delano Roosevelt effectively shipwrecked
the floundering American republic and presided over the final transition
to the Empire phase of American decadence.
RECYCLING ROOSEVELT INDICATES THE
BANKRUPTCY OF CAPITALISM
The resurrection of the Roosevelt myth at this time, in the wake of the
debacle of the Reagan-Bush era, should shed light on the limitations of
the political/historical lexicon capitalism has left at its disposal. The
behavioral scientists who man the think-tanks and massage the erogenous
zones of the body politic are clever, but they are men with limited historical
resources. They have begun to resemble the piano player who is able to play
only three notes. There are only so many structures one can build with a
small set of Lego blocks. The resurrection of the myth of Roosevelt at this
time is, in reality, a sign of the bankruptcy of the system itself. Various
political analysts, such as Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, and Michael Parenti,
have commented that, despite all appearances, we really only have one political
party in the United States, the party of Big Business. This has been true
for many decades. Back in 1934, speaking to a Farmer-Labor gathering in
Rochester, Minnesota, my grandfather, Walter Liggett, stated essentially
the same thing: "The two major parties are the two wings of the same
bird of prey."
Although a considerable segment (probably the majority) of the Left were
ultimately taken in under the aegis of the New Deal in the late thirties,
a significant, if smaller number of the more discerning heads on the Left
were not seduced by Roosevelt's famous charm. The discerning continued throughout
FDR's reign to regard FDR correctly as a capitalist and not, as he was alleged
to be, a "class traitor" to the patricians whose interests he
truly served. The simple ones were generally deceived by the device of the
United Front, which was used cynically by the establishment as a ruse for
getting the Left to join the New Deal bandwagon, by establishing an alliance
of the Democratic Party with the Communist Party, USA and various socialist
elements to "fight" fascism.
Domestically, a lot of hoopla was made over the importance of the United
Front. Meanwhile, Roosevelt himself and his Wall Street cronies, many of
whom posed as Democrats, were actually busy doing business clandestinely
with Hitler and selling scrap metal to the Japanese imperialists, thus setting
the stage for World War II. Roosevelt balked at actually implementing the
United Front on an international level when he repeatedly refused to send
aid to the Spanish Republic.
ELEMENTS OF LEFT & RIGHT AGREE ON FDR
George Jackson, a political prisoner and a serious Marxist-Leninist, who
was set up and murdered by the State in a gun battle in San Quentin in 1970,
wrote with penetrating clarity in Blood in My Eye that Roosevelt and the
New Deal were, in reality, the manifestation of corporate fascism in America.
Starting at the opposite end of the political spectrum, the right-wing academic
and self-confessed advocate of Von Misian economics, Antony C. Sutton, who
as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, had access to
the marvelous resources of the library in the dark tower, came to the same
conclusion in his book Wall Street and FDR, Part 2 of his Wall Street Trilogy,
which displeased his superiors at the Hoover because he said too much and
for which he was dismissed. The truth is that the one party, the business
party, by means of its two wings, has been pursuing a single agenda for
most of the twentieth century. This agenda is simply the maintenance of
the financial and business interests of the power elite by means of their
managed hegemony over the dialectic, through cultivating, nurturing and
tax-farming the national debt, in which they have a primary fiduciary interest.
This has been achieved by cultivating confusion, ignorance, and division
amongst the masses.
When you are able to grasp the simple truth that the "National Debt"
is not something "we owe to ourselves" (FDR's words), but is actually
the property of the bond-holding class (who own the controlling stock of
the banks which hold the debt), you have acquired the key to understanding
the reason for the apparent disparity between the policies of the two major
parties and the actual continuity of economic policy, no matter which party
is in power. The wars, depressions, the dole, the "New Deals"
interspersed with phases of "conservative" Republican monetarist
austerity (all financed by Keynesian deficit financing) appear as a comprehensible
continuum, when one achieves the correct historical overview.
The decade of the thirties was a dynamic period, a vital period, whose potential,
regrettably, exceeded its performance by nine yards. That the social scientists
are gearing up the nineties to be a kind of rerun of the thirties is pretty
clear to those with eyes to see. What this means to the social scientists
is another period of radical reorientation and regimentation of the downwardly
mobile, needy end of the social classes under the guise of "New Deal"
type reforms. No basic restructuring of the institutions of monopoly capitalism
are contemplated by the social scientists, however, and indeed none shall
be forthcoming unless the movement that is on the ground as "an informed
electorate" reaches the level of economic consciousness at the critical
mass that the movement in the thirties failed to achieve.