protection from the fears and ravages of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
a high-quality basic education sufficient for the needs of a modern society, and ongoing higher education if needed or desired.
President Truman attempted to pass universal health care legislation after the war (1946), but, lacking FDR's charisma and gravitas, found himself opposed not only by Republicans but by conservative southern Democrats (the Dixiecrats). The betrayal of FDR's ideals was cemented the following year, when the Republican-dominated 80th Congress passed the Taft-Hartley anti-labor Act, overriding President Truman's veto. This occurred when the "Dixiecrats" (many of whom, like Strom Thurmond, would join the GOP after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965) joined their Republican brethren in both Houses to provide the required 2/3rds majority to override the veto. The passage of Taft-Hartley crippled the National Labor Relations (or Wagner) Act, which, as co-sponsor Fred A. Hartley, Jr. stated at the time, "points the way to correcting other errors of the government in the 1930's," including the Social Security Act. (The New National Labor Policy, Fred A Hartley, Jr.: New York, Funk and Wagnalls, 1948, p. xvi.)
A Gross Ignorance of History
In the Western Democracies today, government economists are imposing austerity plans upon their populations, in spite of the evidence of history that cutting spending during an economic downturn, plus the failure to impose higher taxes on wealthy citizens and corporations to finance an expansion of the economy, is a certain recipe for economic disaster. No nation in world history has ever pulled itself out of an economic downturn by cutting spending. The only way out is to grow one's way out.
Talk show host and author Thom Hartmann has on many occasions called our laissez-faire free-market capitalism a cancer that consumes its host until it kills both the host and itself. An examination of pre-World War I Europe and America, and of the same entities at the end of the 1920s, demonstrates that this is neither a false nor exaggerated comparison.
If America's pitiable economic management under Herbert Hoover were not enough to prove this point (see my September 4, 2012 OpEdNews article "Keeping Them Honest" for more on that subject), the examples of Germany and Great Britain during 1930 and 1931 should send warning signals that even a conservative ideologue cannot ignore.
I will quote from Mark Ames's January 25, 2011 AlterNet article, "Stop the Austerity Craze! Massive Budget Slashing Can Lead to Economic Disaster, Violence and Repression." [I have Anglicized the German names for the sake of OpEdNews's web-page editor, which can't handle umlauts, and placed changes for clarity in brackets.]
Ames writes: "The Depression was just spreading around the globe, and [Chancellor] Bruening, backed by Germany's industry titans, believed Germany would only recover with a strong currency, which he tethered to the gold standard, and a balanced budget [achieved] through brutal cuts in wages, pensions and unemployment benefits, and hikes in taxes and fees. Bruening learned austerity as a doctoral student at the London School of Economics--which nurtured and promoted "free-market" whores like Friedrich von Hayek and the 'Austrian School' that are still being piped out to us through major outlets like the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the libertarian press.
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