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The newest New Deal

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By JOHN REINIERS

More Than Words

Published: October 3, 2009

What goes around, comes around.

An overused phrase — but political ideologies and financial crises are predictably cyclical — a moving circular target. It would help to start this discussion with a look at the transition of the Democratic Party from being predominately liberal in the old-fashioned sense of the term, when I was one, to moving further left and being anti-business.

The irony is that nevertheless, I think of liberal in the European sense of the word as meaning "freedom" or "free country," whereas now it describes those of us who believe in a centrally regulated society with little emphasis on individual freedom, but more of a focus on getting economic benefits to the financially unsuccessful among us through wealth redistribution.

President Barack Obama is decidedly of that view, and has said so. Obama doesn't understand we need to make the pie bigger. He just wants to redistribute what we have. None of this was clear when he was a candidate — thanks to the traditional media's selective reporting. As he said, "The federal government must bring about economic justice ... The civil rights movement lost sight of the political and community organizations and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of power through which you bring about redistributive change."

Obama keeps returning to this theme: Community organizations, power and redistribution of wealth. Whatever happened to good paying jobs?

You can't accuse Democrats of not having any ideas. We are living proof of this, ever since the New Deal ushered in the age of national bankruptcy. We are well beyond the Chapter 11 process of developing a business plan to reorganize and repay all our debts. Obama represents the final shift in our culture, which will move us decidedly left — skeptical about capitalism, socialist leaning with all its spending, secularist and bankrupt.

The New Deal created modern America as we now know it. As I've said before, Obama is following the same scheme that Roosevelt did — except back then bankruptcy was averted by World War II. Many argue that Obama is a Trojan horse to a socialist movement. It sure seems so. It is clear that some of his senior advisers are bent in that direction, as we saw with FDR's inner circle.

This parallel with the FDR era, was best described by John Dewey, who observed way back then, "We are in for some kind of socialism, call it by whatever name we please … There is still enough vitality in the older individualism to offer a very serious handicap to any ... program which calls itself socialism ... [The New Deal?] The older individualism is sufficiently ingrained to obtain allegiance ..." That sounds eerily like the politics of today, but 75 years after the New Deal became mainstream, we don't see much "vitality" in individualism. Many people don't care. They have no interest in, or the ability to understand esoteric theories about the advantages of capitalism or the need for individuals to create wealth for capital investment and jobs. They simply want their share of entitlements.

FDR had his left-leaning senior advisers. (He cut his political teeth as a progressive state senator in New York.) Rexford Tugwell, a member of Roosevelt's "brain trust" — his version of czars — was made Secretary of Agriculture. An agricultural economist, who saw many injustices to capitalism, he went on a Stalin-sponsored tour of collective farms in the Soviet Union. Francis Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor, was a socialist turned Democrat, served 12 years as secretary and is enshrined in the Labor Hall of Fame.

Henry Wallace, FDR's vice president, was called the "greatest socialist capitalist of the 20th century" by Slate. He had been secretary of both agriculture and commerce. In 1944 he failed to receive the vice presidential nomination again. Many have said that this was the closest the U.S. ever came to having a socialist in the White House. He missed being president by 83 days! Harry Truman was nominated. Wallace ran for president in 1948 as a Progressive Party candidate, was endorsed by the Communist Party (USA), refused to expel communists from the party, advocated an end to the Cold War, and coincidentally campaigned for universal government health insurance. (Shades of Obama.)

Obama's exposure to socialism came early in life. His mother was described as a "fellow traveler" by her friends. He has had many well documented socialist connections, admitted attending "socialist conferences" and interestingly referred to a "Frank" in Dreams From My Father," as a mentor of his when a young man in Hawaii. As it turned out "Frank" was Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA.

And by now, even the most ill-informed among us know about Van Jones, a self-described communist in the 1990s who just resigned as "green jobs" adviser to Obama.

The list goes on. The facts about Obama's oddball group of czars — even his past questionable connections over the years — are legion in alternative media. Traditional media, Obama's allies, have kept this information from the public. (This is why the ACORN scandal was such a surprise to Democrats. It was old news elsewhere.) This socialist die was cast during the New Deal, and the same sort of people — some would argue worse — are Obama's presidential senior advisers.

We live in confusing times. The current financial mess, as well as the Great Depression, both here and globally, was created or exacerbated by those greedy denizens of Wall Street, and their allies in financial markets around the planet. They gave capitalism a bad name in the 1930s, which gave rise to fascists, populists and socialists of every stripe.

So here we are, back to the future — to the newest New Deal.

John Reiniers, a regular columnist for Hernando Today, lives in Spring Hill.

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