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The New Deal in Reverse
How the Obama Administration Ended Up Where Franklin Roosevelt Began
By Steve Fraser
On March 4, 1933, the day he took office, Franklin Roosevelt
excoriated the “money changers” who “have fled from their high seats in
the temples of our civilization [because...] they know only the rules of
a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision and where there is no
vision, the people perish.”
Rhetoric, however, is only rhetoric. According to one skeptical
congressional observer of FDR’s first inaugural address, “The President
drove the money-changers out of the Capitol on March 4th -- and they
were all back on the 9th.”
That was essentially true. It was what happened after that, in the
midst of the Great Depression, which set the New Deal on a course that
is the mirror image of the direction in which the Obama administration
seems headed.
Buoyed by great expectations when he assumed office, Barack Obama
has so far revealed himself to be an unfolding disappointment. On
arrival, expectations were far lower for FDR, who was not considered
extraordinary at all -- until he actually did something extraordinary.
The great expectations of 2009 are, only a year later, beginning to
smell like a pile of dead fish with new rhetoric -- including
populist-style attacks on villainous bankers that sound fake (or
cynically pandering) when uttered by Obama’s brainiacs -- layered on top
of the pile like deodorant. Meanwhile, the country is suffering through
a recovery that isn’t a recovery unless you happen to be a banker, and
the administration stands by, too politically or intellectually
inhibited or incapacitated to do much of anything about it. A year into
“change we can believe in” and the new regime, once so flush with power
and the promise of big doings, seems exhausted, vulnerable, and afraid.
A year into the New Deal -- indeed a mere 100 days into Roosevelt’s
era -- change, whether you believed in it or not, clearly had the wind
at its back.
full:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175205/tomgram%3A_steve_fraser%2C_a_tale_of_two_presidents__/
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