12.01.08
Empire of Depression
Tomdispatch.com
December 1, 2008
Tomgram: Steve Fraser, Empire of Depression
If you want to catch something of the fears and hopes of Americans right now, go to News.Google.com and try searching for a few words. For instance, put in “FDR” — the well-known initials of the man who was president four times and took America through the Great Depression and all but the last months of World War II — and endless screens of references pop up.
The Nation and the National Review have both devoted space to him. Paul Krugman and George Will both thought this was the moment to focus on him. Checking out the headlines you might think that the intervening sixty-four years since his death had simply vanished: (”Will FDR Inspire Obama?” “Obama’s jobs plan could echo FDR’s,” “Clinton’s potential pitfalls seen in FDR’s secretary of State,” Channeling FDR,” “FDR saved capitalism — now it’s Obama’s turn,” and so on); headlines galore, not to speak of that Time Magazine “Obama as FDR?” cover.
Or, if you have another moment, try “the New Deal,” or even the 2008 Obama version of the same,”the new New Deal”; or, if you really want to get a sense of the moment, try “since the Great Depression,” which now seems to be embedded in any article about the present economic situation — as in the “worst crisis since the Great Depression,” or “the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,” or even “the most severe credit crunch since the Great Depression.” It’s a phrase that hovers between horror and euphemism, between the urge to invoke the word “depression” for our moment and an almost superstitious fear of doing so.
Historian Steve Fraser, author of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace, has been writing at TomDispatch about both the Great Depression and the possibility of a modern version of the same for some time. Now, he returns to the dawn of the Rooseveltian era to offer a unique and telling comparison — between FDR’s expansive, experimental “brain trust” and Obama’s new “team of rivals.” In his usual fashion, he raises the truly pregnant question: What kind of new administration could actually get beyond Roosevelt’s era as well as our own staggering disaster, leaving “the bailout state” behind us? Tom
Beyond the Bailout State
Roosevelt’s Brain Trust vs Obama’s Brainiacs
By Steve Fraser
On a December day in 1932, with the country prostrate under the weight of the Great Depression, ex-president Calvin Coolidge — who had presided over the reckless stock market boom of the Jazz Age Twenties (and famously declaimed that “the business of America is business”) — confided to a friend: “We are in a new era to which I do not belong.” He punctuated those words, a few weeks later, by dying.
A similar premonition grips the popular imagination today. A new era beckons. No person has been more responsible for arousing that expectation than President-elect Barack Obama. From beginning to end, his presidential campaign was born aloft by invocations of the “fierce urgency of now,” by “change we can believe in,” by “yes, we can!” and by the obvious significance of his race and generation. Not surprisingly then, as the gravity of the national economic calamity has become terrifyingly clearer, yearnings for salvation have attached themselves ever more firmly to the incoming administration.
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