Harry Truman said, "There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know." Unfortunately, to do this article justice, I had to cover a lot of history of the GOP, before and during WWII. So I'm afraid it is long. But it also points out that the GOP has not changed tactics in the last seven decades, only refined them. People Like Eisenhower tried to make them honest, but it's not in their souls.

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FDR signing Lend-Lease Bill "World-Telegram photo by Ed Palumbo" donated to the Library of Congress

Keeping Them Honest

By Richard Girard

"This is no war for domination or imperial aggrandisement or material gain. . . . It is a war . . . to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man."

Sir Winston Churchill Speech, September 3, 1939, to the House of Commons, on that day's declaration of war against Germany by Britain and France.

"There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know."

Harry S. Truman President. Quoted in: William Hillman, Mr. President, part 2, chapter 1 (1952).

Normally I don't do requests. The last one I did was " Bomb Power: A Review of Garry Wills Newest Book ," for Professor Thomas Farrell of the University of Minnesota-Duluth--who is a frequent contributor here at OpEdNews--in March of 2010. When a full Professor of English Writing challenges you to do something like a book review, you do it. I think I got an A- out of it, (ROTFLMAO). All joking aside Professor Farrell, thank you; you are one of the small number of people I have "fanned," and I look forward to your in-depth review of books in every way but one: your reviews invariably lengthens my already long reading list. If you have not read any of Professor Farrell's articles or reviews, please do yourself a favor and do so.

Previous to that, I received a request from a cousin to do an article on national health care. The result was my October, 2009 article " Like Band Aids for Chest Wounds ." This is the same cousin who earlier this year thanked me profusely for my article " Making Sex a Crime ," saying that I had--purely by accident--done a large portion of her research for an oral presentation in an upper level biology and health class that she was taking. She also wished that everyone on the left and the right would read my article, because it did an excellent job of exploding the myths and misapprehensions about sex work and trafficking in the United States, as well as the rest of the developed world with facts and figures, not guesses and assumptions. (Yes, I do have an ego, and I love when my friends and family stroke it, almost as much as I like it when complete strangers do.)

This time around, the request came from a retired Air Force officer who is now teaching at a small college in Northern Idaho. (I will for the sake of his privacy, not give out either his name or the name of the college.) In July of 2007, this gentleman sent me an e-mail, and asked if he could use my OpEdNews article, " Rights, Powers, Privileges, and Responsibilities ," for his philosophy of ethics class. I of course, very flattered by his request, granted my permission. We have continued our correspondence for the last five years, and he is on the very short list of friends and family members who get a copy of a new article before OpEdNews publishes it. Last month, he sent me an e-mail that stated the following:

"For the past few days, I've been watching Ken Burns' 'The War.' I thought it was amazing and very worthwhile. Have you seen it? With your extraordinary knowledge of American politics and history it would be great to have heard a political as well as cultural commentary of the 1941-1945 years to pace the other story/stories."

An article of this type requires a great deal of research, in order to make sure that not only are my facts are correct, but I can also cite where I got those facts, as well as tie it in to what is going on in our country today. So I can't do this one in ten days or two weeks: I have to wait for interlibrary loans, etc., to do it right. I hope you will find it worth the wait.

I am a great believer in the concept that the past is prelude. To quote then Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, in a speech given at Arlington National Cemetery on November 11, 1965, "Today we know that World War II began not in 1939 or 1941 but in the 1920's and 1930's when those who should have known better persuaded themselves that they were not their brother's keeper." Our political troubles today likewise have similar foundations in our past, laid down by men (and a few women, but mostly men) who could not be convinced that wealth, power and the control of people's private lives was something that should not only be limited, with Constitutional checks and balances in place, but generally rejected if this constitutionally limited, democratically elected, representative republic--or as we shorten its description in modern times, a representative democracy--were to continue to grow and prosper for another century. A tyranny of a minority is worse than that of the majority, because a majority can be convinced to change their minds with cause, and the smaller that minority, the more egregious and unchanging is the tyranny that insinuates then itself in our everyday lives.

President Dwight Eisenhower, in a speech broadcast January 28, 1954, stated that, "Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage." As with any profession, knowledge is required if one is to be competent in the performance of one's duties. We must know not only how the system actually works, but the historical forces and actions that led to why the system works the way it does, especially when the system operates in a manner different from, or even contrary to, the way it is supposed to theoretically work. In the case of the United States, many of those inconsistencies can be attributed to the historical time period from the decade prior to the Second World War until its immediate aftermath.

As I looked back on the history of American politics leading up to and during the Second World War, I discovered that many of the forces and tactics that the Republicans and other conservatives arrayed against FDR and his New Deal, are very the same ones that they are being used to oppose Barack Obama today.

Herbert Hoover, our Thirty-first President, is emblematic of many of these problems, although he was not directly responsible for the October 1929 Stock Market Crash that most economists agree marks the start of the Great Depression. That honor belongs to Andrew Mellon, the Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, who was the American government's primary culprit in Black Tuesday. Mellon argued for and Congress reduced taxes for the rich (who at the time were the only one's paying the income tax), and colluded with financial and banking concerns to bypass Federal anti-trust and other laws that allowed unchecked manipulation by Wall Street to run rampant in America's financial markets. (This sounds strangely familiar.) Recent history has taught us again that if our wealthiest citizens are not taxed sufficiently to prevent their engaging in financially dangerous speculations--whether it is wildly speculative Wall Street trading and the Florida Land Boom of the 1920's, or the credit default swaps and derivatives trading in the last decade--they will create a financial bubble that, when it bursts, takes the rest of the economy with it. Secretary Mellon resigned his Treasury post, and went on an art buying tour of Europe in 1932, just ahead of a Congressional investigation into his collusion with Wall Street and other financiers.

It was Hoover's actions after the Crash, however, which insured that we were not getting out of the financial hole that had been dug for us at any time in the near future. He started a number of public works programs, like the Hoover Dam, which would have helped America's economy, by causing its money supply to grow--despite the hoarding of money by the rich--if Hoover had not also attempted to balance the Federal Budget at the same time, which caused a deflationary reduction of available money during the recession that immediately followed the Crash. Deflation plus a recession is the textbook definition of a depression. Today's Republicans and oligarchs still have not learned this basic economic lesson, more than eighty years after the Great Depression. [Or perhaps they have, and they are hoarding money until they get: 1) Obama the Black Man out of the White House; 2) the American people become so desperate that they will take any job, even if it doesn't pay enough to support themselves or their family. Always remember: the oligarch's primary goal is to destroy all aspects of the New Deal, including the minimum wage.]

Hoover's biggest mistake came from promoting the now infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which the President signed into law on June 17, 1930. This legislation was passed over the objections of 1028 American economists, who petitioned Hoover and the Congress to not pass the bill, or sign it into law. This led to a tariff war among the industrialized nations of Europe and North America, which damaged the economic situation of the poor, working, and middle classes (as well as the economies) of those nations far more than it did the rich, when the industrial nations of Europe and Canada followed America's lead.

Herbert Hoover is reckoned by many historians to be our greatest Secretary of Commerce. As a willing puppet for America's financial and manufacturing firms, there can be no doubt as to his ascendancy. However, he is in my opinion our third worst President, right after James Buchanan and George W. Bush. Buchanan did nothing to try and stop the Civil War, still the greatest single disaster in American History. George W. Bush took a budget surplus, and by: 1) needlessly expanding the size of the Federal Government with the Department of Homeland Security after September 11, 2001; 2) involving us in two foreign wars for no good reason, without paying for them; and then, by giving tax cuts primarily to his main constituencies -- "the haves and have mores," doubling our national debt; 3) George W. Bush, through both his personal and his Administration's inattentiveness (for which he is still responsible, because as the sign on Harry Truman's desk said when Truman was President, "The Buck Stops Here" ) to the financial sector; saddled his successor, Barack Obama, with the worst economic crisis this country has seen since the Great Depression. At least Hoover didn't double the national debt for FDR. For these reasons, Hoover only places third on my all-time worst Presidents list.

President Hoover was and is a perfect example of the Republican Party's historic long-term lack of vision, as well as the narrowness of that vision. As the then head of General Motors, Charles "Engine Charlie" Wilson, stated during his Senate confirmation hearings as Secretary of Defense (in January 1953), "For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country." Or as it has come down to us through the last sixty years, "What's good for (insert name of giant American conglomerate of your choice), is good for America." Hoover bought in, heart and soul, to the primacy of the oligarchs and their giant corporate surrogates over the needs and best interests of the American people as a whole. To someone like Hoover, or "Engine Charlie" Wilson, or Paul Ryan, or Mitt Romney, whatever is good for the oligarchs must automatically be good for the rest of the country, and the World.

If I was as myopic in real-life as these gentlemen are in real-life economics, and its effects on the average American, I would be legally blind. Because something is good for the wealthiest members of a society does not mean that it is good for the other members of that society. Ask the peons of Mexico.

This intentionally cultivated myopic view is combined with the conservatives' historical distrust of, and disdain for, the common man. To quote Edmund Burke in his 1756 monograph, A Vindication of Natural Society , "The whole business of the poor is to administer to the idleness of the rich." Conservatives have long known that they must keep the poor quiet, as well as ignorant, if they are to successfully "keep them in their place." Organized religion--especially one like Calvinism, which states that the rich are the elect of God, or a literalist fundamentalism, that demands an absolute adherence to a denomination's "literal" interpretation of the Bible--is one method the One Percenters have used historically to help keep the poor in their place. Another method is to use racism and other forms of bigotry and divisiveness to divide the non-rich so that they fight against each other, rather than oppose the rich. As the Gilded Age robber baron Jay Gould once said, "I can hire half the poor to kill the other half."

Today, the oligarchs have become aware that they also have to keep the poor "just poor enough," so that the poor do not have enough money to combine their funds for an effective political movement. At the same time, they have learned you cannot have the poor so destitute that they become desperate, and decide it is time to revolt, kill the rich, and take their wealth. People who are a little bit hungry do not foment a revolution; those whose children are starving will man the barricades in an instant. As French artist Marcel Duchamp once stated, " Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes." ( Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, chapter 4; edited by Pierre Cabanne, 1967.) For many of the poor, it is what some of us call discretionary income, which differentiates between a human being living in poverty, and a member of the working or lower middle class.

As I first stated in my February 15, 2011 OpEdNews article, " The Ghost of Ancient Hellas ," I believe that the Greek philosopher Aristotle discovered the answer for the best form of government almost twenty-five centuries ago, including the who, where, and how of the economic classes that should dominate it:

"Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes [poor or rich], or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant"The reason [for failure of these states when established] is that the middle class is seldom numerous in them, and whichever party, whether the rich or the common people [poor], transgresses the mean and predominates, draws the constitution its own way, and thus arises either oligarchy or democracy [mob rule]." Aristotle, Politics, Book IV, Chapter 11; translated by Benjamin Jowett.

Why is a political community whose ruling power base is the middle class so superior to the rule of either the oligarchs or the poor?

First, the middle class's investment in the nation's material wealth is neither too little, as is the case with the poor, nor too much, as is the case of the rich. They understand, from their own life experience, that there are times that the sacrifices of material things must be made in order to achieve a goal for the long-term greater good. The poor, who have known nothing but want and sacrifice, have a difficult time understanding the need for further sacrifice once they have attained power. The wealthy, having never known real want, and having had all of their needs and many of their desires met for their entire lives, cannot understand why any sort of sacrifice might be called for by themselves.

Second, the middle class understands that their stewardship of the nation and its institutions is a privilege: a privilege they they have earned, and of which they are justly proud, but a privilege none the less. They understand what Thomas Jefferson was writing of when he stated that the Tree of Liberty requires the blood of patriots and tyrants once every twenty years or so if it is to remain healthy.

Both the poor and the rich have--in my mind--the misfortune to believe that their stewardship of the nation and its institutions, as well as the subsequent rewards, are something that is inherent and automatic. For them, it is a right that they are owed, not a duty and privilege that they have earned.

A note: throughout American history, there have been politicians who have transcended the class they were born into: both members of the poor (including Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower); and the oligarchs (including Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy), who have become staunch defenders of the need for the middle class. There are also those who have turned their back on their middle class roots (Ronald Reagan and Herbert Hoover come to mind), and served the oligarchs and their selfish agenda.

In the recently published volume of his biography, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath (edited with an introduction by his official biographer George F. Nash; Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University; 2011) , President Hoover is quite clear in stating his belief that we should have let Hitler and Stalin slug it out, once the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. In Hoover's opinion, we should have stayed out of the war against Germany by any and all means possible until one dictatorship had destroyed the other. Given Hoover's unremitting hatred and unalloyed suspicion of the Communists, I am certain that he was rooting for, and believed that, the German's would win, but at such a cost that Germany would no longer represent any danger to the rest of the World.

Hoover may have been correct about a Nazi victory over the Soviets. Certainly, Stalin was seriously considering a negotiated armistice with Hitler in early October 1941, which would have ceded the Ukraine (including the Crimea), Byelorussia, Eastern Poland, and the Baltic States in exchange for a peace treaty. Hitler (in the unanimous opinion of every historian and military expert I have ever read) stupidly diverted Army Group Center from its assault on Moscow to aid Army Group South in its attack on the Ukraine, giving Stalin the time he needed to strengthen the defenses around Moscow. By the time the Nazis renewed their assault on Moscow in November, Stalin had brought hundreds of thousands of veteran troops from his Far Eastern commands in Siberia (having learned from his master spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, that Japan had no intent of attacking the Soviets in the Far East) to reinforce Moscow, and then launched a series of massive counterattacks when the German attack stalled in the December snows.

However, even with the extraordinary bravery of the peoples of the Soviet Union, and Stalin's willingness to bear losses that would make any Western leader blanch (e.g. 20+ million dead between June of 1941 and May of 1945, one-eighth of the Soviet Union's pre-1939 population) it would have been, without the military aid provided by the Americans and British from the outset of the war between Hitler and Stalin, very unlikely if the Soviet Union would have survived, or if they had, they almost certainly would not have been at the gates of Berlin in April, 1945. More than 360,000 trucks, 12,000 tanks, 10,000 locomotives, nearly 40,000 rail cars, plus radios, aircraft, food, uniforms, boots, telephone wire, and all of the other mat é riel that makes modern war possible, were received by the Soviets from their American and British allies. By the end of the War in Europe in May 1945, two-thirds of the trucks and one-half of the tanks in the Soviet active combat inventory were either American or British made. (John Mosier, Cross of Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German War Machine 1918-1945, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2006; p.202)

The British and Americans performed an equally valuable service for the Soviets when they started the Strategic Bombing Offensive in 1942. It was the second front that Stalin kept demanding, just not in the form that he desired. Hitler's Luftwaffe was forced to bring thousands of fighters back to Germany to ward off the American and British bombing raids against the German heartland, rather than protecting the Wehrmacht against the Red Air Force. By the middle of 1943, the bombing offensive had insured that the Red Air Force always had local air superiority over the Red Army's offensive operations, and by the end of 1943, total air superiority over the entire Russian Front. This gave the Red Army a tremendous operational advantage against the Wehrmacht, because it required the Nazis to disperse their forces for counterattacks rather than concentrate them for maximum effectiveness, or face a mauling by the Red Air Force. It also helped to put pressure on Hitler until the American and Royal Navies could win the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-Boats, a prerequisite to an effective invasion of France by ground forces sufficient for the task.

The primary problem with Hoover's idea of letting the dictators fight it out was this: Hitler and the Nazis were not that far from breaking the British Eighth Army in Egypt in the Spring of 1942. When Fritz Todt, Hitler's Minister of Armaments, died in a plane crash in February 1942, he was replaced by Albert Speer, a far more capable and dangerous man who had Hitler's confidence, immediately oversaw a large increase in German war production. Without Hitler declaring war on the U.S. after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Germany would have had additional reserves that it could call upon for both Fall Blau, the assault on Stalingrad and the Caucasus in the summer of 1942, as well as an effort to take Malta and reinforce Rommel's Panzer Army Afrika in Egypt in the spring and early summer of 1942.

Without Malta, it would have been impossible for the Royal Navy and Air Force to effectively intervene against Rommel, and prevent him from being resupplied and reinforced in North Africa. Reinforced, and with some sort of proper supply line beyond the borders of Libya, Rommel could have easily taken Egypt and secured the Suez Canal. Once across the Suez Canal, Rommel would have easily destroyed the light British forces (fewer than three divisions) in Palestine and Jordan, and then moved quickly to secure the oilfields in the Mosul region of Iraq, solving Hitler's petroleum problem for the foreseeable future. This strategy would have also turned the Mediterranean into an Axis lake, and possibly brought both Turkey and Spain into the war on the side of Germany against the Soviets and the British.

Meanwhile, without the impetus of a war with Germany, the Manhattan Project does not have the priority that it did with the Nazis as an enemy. Because of this, Heisenberg and the Germans probably develop the A-bomb before the United States. If the United States enters the war against Hitler even one year later, there is probably no Soviet Union west of the Volga River, and maybe none west of the Ural Mountains. With the raw materials of Greater European Russia to command (including the oil fields of Baku and Maikop), Nazi control of all of Europe becomes a fact, not a historian's "What If?" scenario, and the invasion of France a practical impossibility.

Having read President Hoover's book, I now understand where Pat Buchanan gets his crazier ideas about the Second World War. (See my September 22, 2009 article " Hysterical Fantasy , " for more on this subject.) Rose-colored glasses? Definitely rose-colored welder's goggles.

America's Isolationists before World War II were driven by two separate but equal forces. The first of these was the memory of the unremitting slaughter of the First World War (Approximately 53,000 American combat deaths in six months of actual fighting in the trenches of France). The other was the unremitting hatred of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the foreign policy beyond the Western Hemisphere that his policies represented.

Herbert Hoover's hatred for Franklin Roosevelt, his foreign policy, and all that the New Deal represented is palpable in Freedom Betrayed. FDR can do nothing right, from the recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933 (which Mr. Hoover's book implies was part of a carefully orchestrated, subversive plot by Moscow to use the "socialist" New Deal as the means to destroy American laissez-faire capitalism, which--like many modern Republicans--Hoover equates with freedom), to the disaster at Pearl Harbor. In the end, it comes across to me as the bitter words of a bitter old man, who cannot believe he lost to a cripple.

After December 7th, most general histories of the Second World War present the United States rising as one people to destroy the Axis powers. Unfortunately, this is not true.

Although men like Charles Lindbergh quickly changed from isolationist to patriot, not everyone was so accommodating. Here are some examples:

• The automakers demanded the right to make a limited number of cars for sale to the public, expecting to be able to take advantage of the new millionaires they were certain the war would bring. Roosevelt's War Production Board not only disabused them of that notion, but the work of Senator Harry Truman and his Special Senate Committee made certain that the corrupt practices that had created 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires during the First World War (See Marine Major General Smedley Butler's 1935 booklet "War is a Racket," for more on that phenomenon.), were not repeated in the Second.

• The Mafia sank and burned the French ocean liner S.S. Normandie while she was berthed in New York harbor. They got concessions, including the release of Lucky Luciano from prison, and his transport to his native Sicily after Operation Husky took that island from the Italians and Germans.

• Philadelphia's transit workers went out on strike over the promotion of black men to the position of bus driver. The U.S. Army sent in 10,000 troops, arrested the ringleaders, and threatened the transit workers with immediate conscription into the military. This quickly ended the strike.

• A similar strike in the shipyards of Mobile, Alabama, led to a separate but equal ship construction facility for the skilled black workers when the white workers refused to work beside or for the "Nigrahs" (to use the most polite term the white shipyard workers called them in the segregated South), and the blacks refused to work at only "unskilled" labor positions.

Nor were these disruptions to the war effort limited to the nation outside of Washington D.C.. Petty political bickering, and sometimes flagrant, intentional disruption of war planning, was heard in the halls of Congress, the newly built Pentagon, and even the White House itself. Many of the Republican and Dixiecrat politicians--conservative Southern Democrats who often voted with the GOP, who would temporarily form the segregationist States' Rights Party in the 1948 election, and finally join the GOP as part of the Nixon's "Southern Strategy" after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965--made political statements in 1944 that are still finding echoes in our political discourse almost seventy years later.

Every would-be Machiavelli in our nation's Capitol, both in and out of uniform, were certain that they had "The Plan" that would end the war in six months, with virtually no effort, and even less cost, or one that would take care of all of America's Post-war problems, or negate the need for a fourth election for FDR in November 1944. These included:

• The attempt by the GOP and Dixiecrats to deny American servicemen and women their right to vote during the 1944 election, in much the same way today's GOP is trying to deny the elderly, minorities, and young people their right to vote today: they knew the servicemen and women were most likely to vote for the Democratic Party. (Stanley Weintraub; Final Victory: FDR's Extraordinary World War II Presidential Campaign; Da Capo Press, 2012; chapter 8, "The Service Vote;" pp. 201-216.) They were correct in their fear: the three million-plus military absentee ballots favored FDR by some forty percentage points over Dewey.

• Just like today, the GOP raised far more political campaign money for Dewey in 1944, than the Democrats raised for Roosevelt (Weintraub, ibid, pp. 174-8).

• The Republicans once again spoke openly of FDR and his New Deal programs as the road to Communism for the United States (Weintraub, ibid., pp. 172-3.) President Roosevelt in one of his national radio addresses called out the Republicans on the use of these tactics, stating that the GOP seems to have stolen the idea from one espoused by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf . Paraphrasing here, "Hitler wrote to never use the little lie: always use the Big Lie, and repeat it loudly over and over again until people begin to believe it." (Recording of the speech on Thom Hartmann's radio show, three times during the Republican National Convention last week.)
  
  In 2012, the GOP has perfected this tactic far beyond the wildest dreams of Hitler and Goebbels: inventing tales about President Obama not being an American, being responsible for the economic crash of 2008 (when he was a Senator, not President), that President is responsible for the slowness of the recovery when the Republicans in the House and Senate have blocked every jobs bill since the initial stimulus package, one-third of which was tax cuts, not direct government programs for employment. Of course, the One Percenters, the oligarchs, America's aristocracy in waiting if not in fact, have been upset with the Democratic Party ever since President Grover Cleveland described the practices of the "robber barons" of the Gilded Age who controlled the GOP as " the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness," in his fourth annual Message to Congress on Decmber 3, 1888. (For more on this subject, see my February 28, 2011 OpEdNews article, " The Communist Takeover of America .")

• An often stated desire by members of the GOP to concentrate all of America's resources in the Pacific war behind the Republicans' darling and perennial wannabe Presidential candidate General Douglas MacArthur, while doing everything else they could to take all of the credit for the handling of the war away from FDR, just as President Obama is receiving no credit from the GOP for the elimination of Osama bin Ladin and the withdrawal from Iraq. (Weintraub, ibid., especially pp. 59-61, 77-79, 88-96.)

• The nationally dominant Republican press's flagrant and unremitting hatred for FDR, especially Time-Life's Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, and the McCormick Family's chain of newspapers, especially the Chicago Tribune. (Weintraub; ibid; especially chapter 3; pp. 59-84.) It was every bit as nasty and unfair as that inflicted on President Obama by Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp/Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

• Major Albert C. Wedemeyer's leaking of the Army's War Plans against Germany in late 1941 to isolationist Montana Senator Barton K. Wheeler, who then passed the information to Robert F. McCormick whose family owned the Chicago Tribune and a chain of other newspapers. The Chicago Tribune and other papers in the McCormick chain then published this secret report on December 4, 1941 (Weintraub, ibid, pp. 152-3). Given that Hitler declared war on the United States one week later, I think isolationist Senator Wheeler was hoisted on his own petard. This was far worse than anything Bradley Manning and Julian Assange of Wiki Leaks did, directly endangering the operations of the U.S. Military. And yet, neither Wedemeyer (who eventually rose to the rank of General), Wheeler, McCormick nor the McCormick Family's chain of newspapers were punished for their crime, which is treason as defined under the Constitution, "giving aid and comfort to the Enemy."

• There was Conservative opposition from both parties to the G.I. Bill and other Federal programs for the 16 million Americans returning from the War., as well as FDR's Second Economic Bill of Rights. The reasons given included that it would encourage laziness among the returning servicemen and women (Weintraub, ibid, pp. 74-8.). We see this mirrored today in the opposition, led by GOP Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, to a new G.I. Bill for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Congressman Ryan's desire to cut existing programs.

Nor were America's allies always helpful in our conduct of the Second World War. From Churchill's insistence on attacking the "soft underbelly of Europe," to Stalin's insistent demand for the immediate launching of a "Second Front" from January 1942 onwards; Chiang Kai-shek's requirement of a payment in gold before the launching of any offensive against the Japanese (he was much more interested in fighting the Chinese Communists), to General Charles de Gaulle's petulance over the invasion of France; nothing came easy for the United States on the diplomatic front in the Second World War. The lack of cooperation by Pakistan in the war against Al-Qaeda exemplifies the similar problems that President Obama is facing.

It is a testament to the iron will and patient back-door politicking of President Roosevelt, General George Marshall, Admiral Ernest King and their lieutenants, that the war went as well as it did.

Probably the most important political reality that came out of World War II was the beginning of the end of the institutional bigotry and discrimination that had plagued America since its founding. In the foxholes of Europe and the Pacific, over the skies of Germany and Japan, on the surface of every ocean and sea in the World, nearly one-eighth of America's population before the war learned that the different ethnic groups, religious creeds, and even racial preconceptions, which had long been used by the One Percenters in this country to keep those groups divided for so long, had no basis in fact. This change led to: the breaking of the "color line" in professional sports (Marion Motley with the Cleveland Browns in pro football in 1946, Jackie Robinson in Major League Baseball in 1947); desegregation of the military in 1948; the beginning of the post-War desegregation movement, leading to the overturning of the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) by Brown v. The Board of Education (1954), that began in the late 1940's; the election of Catholic John F. Kennedy as our 35th President in 1960; the passage of the XXIV Amendment to our Constitution, outlawing poll taxes in 1964, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In many ways, the culmination of America's four hundred year battle against institutional bigotry and discrimination was the election of Barack Obama as President in 2008.

After World War II, the United States of America finally began to live up to its potential as a representative democracy, just as it was taught to students in their High School Civics class. No longer was government the preserve of a bunch of tired, white, rich, reactionary males, who believed that taxation was theft, and that life should be lived by their version of the Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules. At long last, we were beginning to live up to the ideals of Thomas Jefferson, ideals that he had expressed in a letter to his son-in-law, Edmund Randolph, in 1799:

"The whole body of the nation is the sovereign legislative, judiciary, and executive power for itself. The inconvenience of meeting to exercise these powers in person, and their inaptitude to exercise them, induce them to appoint special organs to declare their legislative will, to judge and to execute it. It is the will of the nation which makes the law obligatory; it is their will which creates or annihilates the organ which is to declare and announce it"The law being law because it is the will of the nation, is not changed by their changing the organ through which they choose to announce their future will; no more than the acts I have done by one attorney lose their obligation by my changing or discontinuing that attorney." (The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson; Memorial Edition, volume 10, page 126; 1904.)

Jefferson's dream for the United States was one ruled by a broadly enfranchised, educated middle class of property owning farmers and tradesmen, all of whom enjoyed equal justice under the nation's laws. He did not, or would not see that the world was changing, and that farmers and craftsmen, working their own farms and shops as the primary means for the common man to make a living and accrue wealth, was fading into the past. The Industrial Revolution and its large-scale facilities of mass production appeared in their place, changing the basis of wealth from property to the capital generated by excess labor. Education was becoming more important than ever, and the protection of the human rights of workers in the workplace were becoming equally, if not more important, than the property rights of the owners of the factories and manufacturing plants, because of the fact that it was their excess labor that generated the new wealth of capital in its many forms. (Jefferson; op. cit.; Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787, (Forrest version) volume 6, page 392; Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813, (*) volume 13 page 254 ; Thomas Jefferson to Francois de Marbois, 1817, volume 15, page 130; Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. volume 13, page 396; Thomas Jefferson: " Notes on Virginia," Q.XIX, 1782, volume 2: page 229; Thomas Jefferson to John Dickinson, 1801, volume 10, page 217.)

Abraham Lincoln, and cousins Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, all recognized that a basic change had taken place, and that a new form of middle class, other than the traditional yeoman farmer and small shopkeeper that had made up the majority of that class for nearly twenty-five centuries, must be established. America's new middle class is based upon a more equitable sharing of the capital derived from the workers' excess labor by the workers themselves. This "new" middle class's wealth would be based on a combination of the income of their job, the stability of that job's existence, plus the job's benefits, and whatever money that they could invest after their basic needs as an individual and those of their family were met. This new definition of wealth will exist not only as property, but also as savings and other investments in a stable, i.e., regulated, nationwide financial system.

FDR, with his New Deal and Second Economic Bill of Rights, proposed in his annual Message to Congress on January 11, 1944 (see my December 16, 2009 OpEdNews article, Morality, Rights and Health Care , for more on this; as well as Robert Borosage's January 11, 2011 Campaign for America's Future article FDR: The Second Bill of Rights ; or if you want to study the subject in depth, read Cass R. Sunstein's superb book The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever ; copyright 2004.), would have domestically pushed our Constitution to its very limits. FDR's successors, beginning with Harry Truman, faced with nuclear weapons and the Cold War, unwittingly pushed us past those limits in another direction: the permanent National Security Emergency State (See David C. Unger, The Emergency State: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs ; The Penguin Press, New York, 2012; especially pp. 50-62.), a course that President Truman would deeply regret later in his life. (See David McCullough, Truman , 1992; p.990)

You cannot begin to balance a government's budget when the nation is in the middle of an economic recovery: only after the economic recovery is fully achieved can you begin to consider the balancing of the Federal Government's budget. Nor can you balance a budget solely by cutting programs: the the government's income from taxes must be increased by raising taxes for those who can best afford to pay them, as well as by employing more workers . This invariably means your wealthiest citizens and corporations. The nations in Europe that are currently suffering the most from the continent wide recession, are those who have been forced to adopt, or have adopted of their own volition, the most stringent austerity programs. Greece is an example of the first, the United Kingdom the second.

It makes simple logical and moral sense: your wealthiest citizens and corporations make the greatest use, directly and indirectly, of government institutions and programs: the courts; law enforcement; fire safety; roads; utilities; air, sea, and rail transport; print, broadcast, and cable media; communications, etc., they have all been paid for or subsidized by the taxes of the American population as a whole. Every one of these public services and private economic sectors that exist today, either currently or in the past, are or have been part of, or were created by, or were otherwise substantially assisted in their creation and/or growth by, one or more governmental organizations.

Robert Reich wrote an article for the June 30, 2010 issue of The Nation magazine, " Unjust Spoils ," in which Professor Reich restates what he wrote in his book Aftershock (2011), using figures he gathered from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: the United States has gone from having the richest one percent receiving nine percent of the nation's income in the late 1970's to twenty-three-and-one-half percent today. This is roughly the same level the nation had in 1929, at the start of the Great Depression. But as Professor Reich points out, while their percentage of the nation's income has gone up more than two-and-one-half times since the 1970's, their tax rates--not to mention actual taxes paid--have plummeted. This fact has led us today, as Warren Buffet so thanklessly pointed out, to a tax system where Buffet pays a lower percentage of his income in Federal Income Tax than his secretary does.

This cannot continue.

In the the thirty-two year period from 1949 to 1980 inclusive, the top One Percent of our population never earned more than 12.8% of our nation's income. Other than the most sycophantic fans of Ayn Rand, anarcho-capitalist libertarians, and the most sociopathic financiers, I do not know of anyone who would not agree that those were better days for our country as a whole than today. The only way that this can be done is to have a national income tax system that rewards the long term creation of new jobs within the United States, and penalizes those who take short-term profits at the cost of the well-being of America's citizens, the American economy, and American national security.

As President Lincoln pointed out in his First Annual Message to Congress (December 3, 1861), "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." Franklin Roosevelt created the circumstances by which the New American Middle Class--derived from its farmers, laborers, and factory workers--could be expanded to a size that could control the American political system, albeit imperfectly, and against tremendous opposition by the oligarchs, for three decades. Those three decades were the most prosperous for the American people as a whole in our nation's two-hundred and thirty-five year history. It required a concerted effort by our nation's pseudo-aristocracy, beginning with the memo written by soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell to the head of education for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971, to undo the never quite fully realized system desired by President Franklin Roosevelt. FDR's system was--and is--a system where those most truly responsible for this nation's greatness: those who fought and those whose fathers, and grandfathers, and aunts and uncles, and cousins, brothers, and sisters gave their last full measure of devotion fighting the Nazis in Europe, the Japanese in the Pacific, the "Communist Menace" in Korea and Vietnam, and fighting the new threat of terror around the world--are also the ones given the most power and responsibility in shaping our nation's destiny.

Today's "Great Recession" has many similarities to the Great Depression of the 1930's. The wealthiest Americans are again hoarding their wealth, rather than spending it to get America working again, demonstrating to one and all their unpatriotic placing of self ahead of what is best for their country. They are using their wealth in a selfish attempt to create what is in effect a permanent one party state, favorable to the oligarchs, and a hereditary aristocracy based on wealth, not a dynamic aristocracy based on merit, just as they were attempting in the 1920's and early 1930's, up until the moment they planned a coup against FDR. (See my September 10, 2010 OpEdNews article " The Daft-Heartless Act ," for more on this story, and sources for further reading on the oligarchs attempt to actively subvert the U.S. Constitution, and overthrow the Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt.) Unfortunately, the only way to break loose that money, other than seizing it outright, is to rewrite the Federal tax code in such a way that it rewards investors for reinvesting their money here in the United States in active ventures, not passive investments, that employ American citizens, while penalizing those who hoard their money, or invest it in foreign ventures.

We are faced with a choice in this year's election nearly identical to the one our parents and grandparents faced in 1944: we can choose Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, and watch them--probably using tactics similar to those described by Naomi Klein in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine --quickly consolidate the One Percenters' political and economic hold over this country by using some manufactured disaster as an excuse to finish destroying the social safety net that started with FDR and Social Security; or we can choose Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and elect the most progressive House and Senate candidates we can possibly find to stop the oligarch's takeover.

We must also take control of the Democratic Party at the local and state level (as the Tea Party has the GOP), end the two party domination of our electoral process that is at the heart of so many of our political problems today, force our politicians to create the changes in our laws needed to overturn the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United (and with luck and hard work, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad , 1886; see my May 12, 2010 OpEdNews article " Against the Corporate State ," as well as Thom Hartmann's excellent book Unequal Protection for the underhanded way in which corporations in America achieved "personhood") , and at long last restore control of our government to the only people in whose hands it is truly safe--We the People.

It is time for us to at long last make the dreams of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt our nation's reality.

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'