FDR saved democratic capitalism, Bush-McCain destroying it
As the American industrial nation was sinking deeply in the late 1920s and very early 1930s, one of the greatest presidents in U.S. history fortunately came on the scene, Franklin D. Roosevelt. By instigating social democratic changes in the U.S. he literally saved the U.S. economy. Today he is heralded for many "firsts" in our history, but too many other innovations have been forgotten. All of Western European democracies have adopted many of FDR's ideas, and France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, etc. are now flourishing economies as social democracies. And the standard of living in those countries is higher than for most Americans. Each has a universal, national health care system, and their citizens cannot imagine the gross unfairness of what we have in the U.S.
Your parents and grandparents had their lives dramatically changed for the better with the introduction of Social Security and other social innovations. Unfortunately, today we have neocons and a president who want to change this and privatize Social Security. These same right-wingers tell us the federal government cannot run things related to economics and social democracy. They seem to amazingly overlook the fact that Social Security and Medicare, two government-run programs, function smoothly at low overhead. The only problems arise when conservatives try to tweak it. And the neocons are certainly unable to do much with the American economy. Look what they have done to the mortgage industry [again], the "laissez-faire" stock market greed, and all the materialistic-grubbing capitalists who want to accumulate as much for themselves as possible, and to hell with the rest of the people. And so they continue to push for corporate welfare for themselves and begin to prey on each other. Left to their own devices, the corporate behemoths devour everything they can...EVERYTHING. The biggest welfare system in America is for corporations.
The one thing that right-wing capitalists took out of the FDR era was that World War II blossomed the industrial economy of the U.S. through tremendous spending on the military-industrial complex. After the War, a Republican president and leading general in World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower, warned us about the creeping scavengers in the military industrial corporate cartels that he knew all-too-well. Remember, Eisenhower was a great general and Republican president! Woe to us who did not heed his warning.
When you hear right-wingers yell "Liberal!" you know you are going to hear a scathing denunciation of all things decent in America. You have to give them credit, they did manage to demonize that word, liberal. But just like 1932, we must face the fact that our economy is hurting, the vast majority of Americans are worse off than 8 years ago, we have had 8 years of gross greed for corporate giants, we are being priced out of health care, and even the idea of morality and fairness are lacking in this neocon environment. Lies have become the standard equipment of the president to communicate with Congress and the American people.
It is time to once again look for someone to get us out of this economic malaise, to right the ship, to restore democracy, to stop torturing people, to remember it was our Founding Fathers who guaranteed us habeas corpus, to stop snooping on average Americans, to stop spending like a drunken sailor and creating astronomical budget deficits, to stop looking for wars and invasions to fatten the coffers of the military-industrial giants, and for goodness sake, to stop the resident of the White House from lying over and over and over.
