"Obama defames the tradition of FDR Democrats, who are the life-long party stalwarts devoting their lives to state and local politics; fund raising, door knocking, lit dropping, serving on committees, volunteering, rallying and fighting for down-ticket Dems. For the first time in my life, I have no enthusiasm for any of this. FDR Democrats stand for jobs, unions, affordable homes, a living wage and public education. FDR Democrats understand the importance of protecting the commons, our infrastructure, shared responsibility, and the need for a social safety net. FDR Democrats stand up for civil rights and the interests of working people, women and children." Raunchydog
FDR and the New Deal http://tinyurl.com/43tp7y <http://tinyurl.com/43tp7y> With the election of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt as president in 1932, national public policy was about to take a hard swing to the left. His New Deal social programs, aimed at combating the Depression, were about to give the Department of Labor and Industry some new tasks and expand its role in many of the old ones. The result, within a decade, would be a tenfold growth of the department staff. But the Depression had already made itself known at L&I in many ways. One was that the department found an increase in the number of fly-by-night employers who set up shop, attracted job-seeking workers, and then disappeared before paying them. Other companies, short on capital, cut corners on safety and frequently, the first person to be laid off in a downturn was a safety engineer. Squeezed for cash, some companies illegally began to stop carrying workmen's compensation insurance, a fact that showed up when their injured employees filed claims. In 1933 and early 1934, the department found 3,470 uninsured companies. Only about 1,500 of these could prove that they did have coverage, did not need coverage under the law, or quickly arranged coverage when threatened with prosecution (Pennsylvania Labor and Industry in the Depression, Special Bulletin 39, 1934, 107-8). Another problem was a sudden influx of job applicants registering in January 1934 when the federal government launched the Civil Works Administration, an early public-works project that became one of many under Roosevelt. The number of registrations on hand at the thirteen state employment offices, which were designated to handle some registrations for the federal program, shot up from 248,064 in December 1933 to 451,526 the next month, and continued rising to a total of 899,551 in June 1934. The federal government directed the state to give preference to applicants on relief and to veterans, and required the state to place applicants in CWA positions within forty-eight hours. Fortunately, the federal government provided funds to boost the size of the employment staff temporarily, from 84 to 563. In addition to placing more workers than ever before, the employment bureau also continued its function as a clearinghouse for labor. When twenty-seven silk workers lost their jobs in Erie, the bureau's Reading office found that a demand existed for that skill in Reading and notified the employer, who hired the workers and transported them to Reading (Ibid., 30-33). Another development was that Congress on June 6, 1933, passed the Wagner-Peyser Act, which converted what had been a skeleton U.S. Employment Service (fewer than one hundred offices in forty-eight states) into a higher-profile agency in the US Department of Labor, providing funds for a joint federal-state job service system. Five years later, the system was switched to full federal funding, with the states continuing to manage staffing and administration. [Photo of FDR signing Social Security Act.] President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the original Social Security Act on August 14, 1935, setting in motion the legal framework for unemployment compensation programs. Library of Congress photo, Social Security Administration Content Last Modified on 7/27/2004 1:06:08 PM [25]
