Events and Entropy are in the saddle

by Gary Berg-Cross

Ralph Waldo Emerson is supposed to have said:
"Events are in the saddle and ride mankind." 

It seems an apt image for these eventful times which are riding roughshod over humanity. Just a while ago things were bad enough with Veteran Affair scandals and the Supreme Court riding citizens, especially women, and favoring business, religious & sectarian interests with activist retro decisions. Sure there were climate change issues with a record year of temperature in 2013 and monster storms, but this all seems mild compared to the flood of happenings now. Did I mention Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan? Or someone with guns named Bundy? Sorry I am distracted. One worries that it’s a bit like climate change itself with old weather patterns shifting and new turbulences everywhere. Just a while ago scenes of families and children on our border filled headlines and the sights of the children tugged at our hearts. This has been blown away by new headlines.  The NYT captured only a tiny bit of the tumult and angst with:

A Week of Agony, From Eastern Ukraine to the Gaza Strip

Russia’s asymmetric and opportunistic proxy war in Ukraine has turned into a real war with bombing of cities and shoot downs. Events seem to be evolving to a new form of Cold War which will bring more proxy state battles, red scares and us-against-them reasoning.  The elite adults, our best and brightest, seem inefective again and the populous has lost faith in them.  While it is not yet the floodgate of the  Guns of August, we've just celebrated  the 100th anniversary of Austrian  Archduke's assassination in Sarajevo. Chaos breaths new opportunities for violence and so we see the acute escalation in another asymmetric conflict as the Israeli state bombards areas and tanks “churned into Gaza to hunt down militants raining rockets on Israel.”  

It’s déjà vu all over again with unending and escalating conflicts & crises that can’t be stopped by normal means and we drift into that helpless feeling that events and animosities are in control. Every side sees itself as victims and can justify the carnage. That's not a good long range vision and as they say eventually an eye for an eye culture leaves us blind.

A predictable, percolating fallout of this blindness is that truth and its pursuit becomes the first casualty of conflict.  Conflict is just too important to the conflicted to be covered in an objective way. Sound discussion is silenced by conflicting emotions as the 2014s gets defined as a time when “paroxysms of senseless tragedy that the world cries out for a halt.”  But there seems no easy way to halt events till “We Win!”  Or to consider it another way, peace loses.

I was foolish enough to take a book of readings on Peace for a short

vacation and the contrast between such thinking and curre,nt events was triply upsetting as I wished for more than being at peace but being able to make peace. But then the investment in armaments is much greater than the investments is peace-ments.

In human affairs we’ve had momentous times. Some leading up to war and others following it.  One thinks of WWI and its immediate aftermath which involved the two current hotbed locations of Russian with the communist revolution and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and, as discussed by Paul McGeough its dicing up by Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot. They struck a deal on how to carve up the region should the Ottoman Empire collapse as a result of World War I. Fans included colonizing conservative pols like Winston Churchill:

”The British grabbed Palestine, attempted to set up puppet monarchies in Arabia and in 1921 cobbled together hostile peoples—Kurds and Sunni and Shiite Arabs—into the artificial and unstable kingdom of Iraq, ruled by the imposed Hashemite king Faisal. ….this form of indirect rule was "empire lite" as fashioned by Churchill, then colonial minister. “(see Cambridge historian Catherwood’s Churchill's Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq)

Sure we need pols like Churchill at times that can ride events and like the feeling of control. But they can be invested in their own empires and occupations and associated visions and rhetoric that eventually un-horse us. As further discussed in McGeough's article on Mid-East borders, people are still devising ways of diving the territories up.

It’s the natural course of entropy that trends toward disorder, unless events are in the hands of a intelligent horseman.  So we’d like an intelligent horseman like FDR please. But then we'd need a whole stable of FDRs along with cultural change. Not likely, alas.

Saint Frances (Perkins)

By Gary Berg-Cross

 

Frances Perkins, featured in an earlier blog (2 Progressive Women), is in the news again this spring.  Part of the reason is that her birthday is April 10. Another is that she just won the single-elimination online tourney of Episcopal saint of the year. She beat out St. Luke the Evangelist. But more importantly cut backs to her creation, Social Security, are in the news.

Perkins was a champion of labor & the working poor and the first woman to serve in the cabinet. Besides the Social Security Act she played a large role in the other parts of the safety net- minimum wage, unemployment insurance, the 40-hour work week, occupational safety protections. This was featured recently on MSNBC’s Last Word as “The most important liberal you’ve never heard of.”

As noted by Lawrence O'Donnell she remains unknown to many Americans, partly due to being in FDR's shadow. Yet her words defending and explaining the Social Security Act are worth noting as we hear of plans to cut SS back. And perhaps there is enough of her balanced vision remaining to do the right thing even in tough times.

 

While it is not anticipated as a complete remedy for the abnormal conditions confronting us at the present time, it is designed to afford protection for the individual against future major economic vicissitudes. It is a sound and reasonable plan and framed with due regard for the present state of economic recovery. It does not represent a complete solution of the problems of economic security, but it does represent a substantial, necessary beginning. It has been developed after careful and intelligent consideration of all the facts and all of the programs that have been suggested or applied anywhere…… This is truly legislation in the interest of the national welfare. We must recognize that if we are to maintain a healthy economy and thriving production, we need to maintain the standard of living of the lower income groups of our population who constitute ninety per cent of our purchasing power. The President's Committee on Economic Security, of which I had the honor to be chairman, in drawing up the plan, was convinced that its enactment into law would not only carry us a long way toward the goal of economic security for the individual, but also a long way toward the promotion and stabilization of mass purchasing power without which the present economic system cannot endure....

Speech on the Social Security Act (September 2, 1935). From Frances Perkins, Vital Speeches of the Day (Pelham, NY: City News Publishing Co., 1935), 1: 792-94.

 

Images

From sites linked to in the blog.

 

What was the Case for FDR’s re-election?

By Gary Berg-Cross

One hears FDR and his run for re-election in 1936 being referenced during the 2012 campaign. President Obama's Re-election does mirror FDR's situation in some ways.  FDR took office following a disastrous administration and the economy in crisis.  In 1932 Hoover was still promising better days ahead, but mostly without  specific details on programs or policies that would be different from what had lead to collapse. FDR was more activist and was able to stabilize things and reduce unemployment substantially. The economy was characteristically sluggish and 8 million Americans still were unemployed . As in 2008 the New Deal fiscal stimulus was partially successful and mitigated things. Would people understand and re-elect FDR? It wasn't a sure thing.

US GDP went up as shown in the diagram below, but these are abstract stats. Monthly data for industrial production show a near 3-year collapse under Hoover and conservative economic policies. Things turning around when FDR took office in March 1933. Production rose by 44 percent in the 1st 3 months of the New Deal.  Just after re-election in Nov. 1936, the production had completely recovered to surpass its 1929 peak. Gee, Keynesian economics seems to work unlike trickle down!

And it is interesting to note that New Deal job intervention also provided environmental conservation, highway infrastructure, and rural electrification. Unlike now, the New deal spurred  the union movent with long-range benefits to workers reaching well into the 50s and 60s.

What about campaigns then and now?  Somewhat different but FDR did face criticism & hostility from various points on the political spectrum. There were religio-conservatives like Father Coughlin and Dr. Francis Townsend who had spent 34 and 35 years attacking FDR. They supported Representative William Lemke of the newly formed Union Party in the 1936 election.

Most of us don't remembers something called the American Liberty League (ALL). Prominent Democrats and Republicans joined together to form the ALL. Here is how one history source describes ALL:

 The organization, according to the founders, exists “to combat radicalism, preserve property rights, uphold and preserve the Constitution.” ALL spokesman Jouett Shouse says ALL will fight to preserve “traditional American political values.” According to the Encyclopedia of the Great Depression, ALL was organized by “disgruntled business conservatives, Wall Street financiers, right-wing opponents of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and defeated rivals within Roosevelt’s Democratic Party.” ALL is financed by, among others, industrialists Pierre, Irenee, and Lammot du Pont; former Democratic Party chairman John J. Raskob; financier E.F. Hutton; and executive Sewell Avery of the department store chain Montgomery Ward. Most of the politicians in the organization are Republicans, but these are joined by anti-Roosevelt Democrats such as Alfred E. Smith, who ran for president in 1928. Many ALL members were once part of the Association against the Prohibition Amendment, which fought to re-legalize the US liquor industry. ALL unsuccessfully fights to block federal regulations and additional taxes on business, the creation of public power utilities, pro-labor barganing rights, agricultural production controls and subsidies, New Deal relief and public jobs programs, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Social Security, and other Roosevelt-era programs and initiatives. According to the Encyclopedia, “critics effectively lampooned league members as champions of privilege, ungrateful critics of an administration that had saved capitalism, and vindictive and selfish individuals seeking revenge on a president for betraying his social class.” 
ALL worked diligently, but unsuccessfully, to unseat Roosevelt in 1936, backing Republican contender Alfred M. Landon.

So  by 1936 FDR had lost most of the backing he once held in the business community in part because of his support for the Wagner Act and the Social Security Act.

How did it react? In some of his 1936 campaign speeches FDR’s includes proudly spoke of his accomplishments  and crafted arguments remain powerful today. There are several things in his Madison Sq. garden speech on the eve of the 1936 election that framed what was at stake:

“In 1932 the issue was the restoration of American democracy; and the American people were in a mood to win. They did win. In 1936 the issue is the preservation of their victory. Again they are in a mood to win. Again they will win.”

Win what?  Win what was accomplished the social net established in his 100 days.

Win against whom?  FDR  defended the New Deal. Sure he provided a help to the banking system, but he also imposed  new regulations on them. There was direct aid for the poor, the disabled, the elderly. 

And he seemed to relish the opportunity to take on conservative Republican positions. A central argument was that his New Deal programs had protected the average American against predatory elite – AKA the 1%. FDR was glad to talk about the need for government to serve as a check on Wall Street. Beyond this the New Deal demonstrated a new way of thinking about the role of government, and what US citizens could expect from it. Here are his fighting words on forces that opposed this role:

"Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred."

Here’s another one that might be appropriate for a campaign argument on the role of government in tough times:

We have not come this far without a struggle and I assure you we cannot go further without a struggle.

For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

Perhaps thoughts that are still relevant today and perhaps we will hear some of this before the campaign ends.

More quotes from the speech are available at a Thom Hartmann site.

Image Credit

GDP: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009020603/fdr-failed-myth

A Tale of Two Progressive Women

By Gary Berg-Cross

Like many recent events have reminded me enough of the Great Depression. You don’t have to be economist Paul Krugman to know that the economy of the last 4-5 years bears a resemblance to the late 20s and some of the 30s. They differ in degree but less in kind with a Stock market prices crash, failing banks, stalling manufacturing, large and persistent unemployment, people losing houses and markets stalled. The dismal scene confronting Obama was a bit like what faced FDR with a few wars thrown in early and an opposite that is not apologetic or remorseful about its role in creating and solving the mess. In an open letter to the newly elected President Krugman drew attention to the comparison:

“The last president to face a similar mess was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and you can learn a lot from his example. That doesn’t mean, however, that you should do everything FDR did. On the contrary, you have to take care to emulate his successes, but avoid repeating his mistakes.”

We’ve had too like of both emulation and error avoidance and as Krugman (and others) have pointed out the “recovery” economic conditions today bear a strong resemblance to the 2^nd economic dip of 1936-37 with slowly growing output, some prices rising, and unemployment still very high. The government cut back its fiscal stimulus before there was a full recovery which locked in high unemployment for years. Krugman, an unabashed supporter of FDR’s New Deal, is good on the history but understand what Krugman was writing about I picked up a library copy of Adam Cohen’s Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Day that Created America. It’s a timely narrative that provides a picture of Roosevelt’s first Hundred Days through the biographic eyes of an inner circle of five men and one woman. I learned something about each of them (e.g. committed liberals Henry Wallace, Harry Hopkins, along with conservative Lewis Douglas) and their relationships but was particularly struck by his female appoint – Elizabeth Warren. Wait it wasn’t Elizabeth Warren it was Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a cabinet position – Secretary of Labor. It’s just that Frances reminds me of Elizabeth. As they say Frances Perkins is no longer a household name, but many see her as one of the most influential women of the 20th century if only because of the ways she found to help people through government problems. Cohen provides a vivid portrait of Frances Perkins arriving in Washington in 1932 by train with no one to guide her to the days’ events or means to get there. With gritty determination she pulls a Department together and works to sway the president to back large-scale public work programs. This was difficult since FDR had an anti-dole oriented to the projects. Hopkins, Perkins, and Wallace worked together on the progress idea that government, especially in times of crises, should take an active role in improving the lives of its citizens - workers, the poor,youth, the unemployed, and farmers. A conservative Douglas at Treasury backed a Hoover like approach favoring, low taxes, laissez faire economics, and small government. While Douglas one the early battles the latter part of the 100 days belongs to the progressives. In his introduction, Cohen neatly sums up this up:

"While the public story line of the Hundred Days was about how Roosevelt, through his eloquent public statements and legislative initiatives rallied a desperate nation, behind the scenes his advisers were battling over what shape the New Deal would take. Perkins, Wallace, and Hopkins worked with members of Congress, farm leaders, union officials, and other progressives to promote their agenda. Douglas worked with business leaders and other conservatives to pull Roosevelt in the opposite direction. In the first month of the Hundred Days, through the passage of the Economy Act, Douglas’s side prevailed. For the rest of the Hundred Days, Perkins’s side did. While Douglas won the early battles, Perkins, Wallace, and Hopkins won the war."

Perkins and the Progressive team were able to win FDR’s support for progressive legislation that launched massive public works projects. Over time these created millions of jobs for unemployed workers. As a new type of Secretary of Labor, one not under the thumb of bosses, she advanced work for all workers. But she also invigorating the labor movement. Perhaps her greatest monument was creating Social Security. This and her other successes like unemployment compensation, child labor laws, and the forty-hour work week still provide the basis for a social safety net.

Which brings me back to Elizabeth Warren who seems to combine the same degree of pluck, competence number of skills including management and PR along with a vision of what needs to be done. Like Perkins her vision and role is challenged by conservatives. Like Perkins she has crafted ideas and helped with legislation (Dodd-Frank reform law) about how federal agency that can protect people and help in times of crisis, In Warren’s case it is protecting consumers from flawed financial products – the type of thing that got us into our problems such as predatory sub-prime mortgages. Like Perkins she has the ear of the President and some in Congress who she has lobbied to turn her vision into a reality. Like Perkins she can recognize talent and attract it take on hard jobs. She also recognizes non-talent in the merely political and recognizes the damage it can do And now, working inside the Executive Branch she is busy setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which should come to life soon. We can only hope that she like Francis Perkins will be working inside a long time.

For more on Frances Perkins see Kirsten Downey’s biography of Frances Perkins The Woman Behind the New Deal. For more on the similarities between these two women see What Would Frances Perkins Do? Who? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/10/13/629459/-What-Would-Frances-Perkins-Do-Who

The author notes:

“Both were direct speakers; both fought single-mindedly to protect the American people; both did so without thinking of personal gain or fame. And now we can add one more similarity: both were short-shifted out of positions of leadership in their own creations for political efficacy.”