The Threat of U.S. Fascism: A Historical Precedent

[vernarial]

That's not what I'm saying at all, Mazer. But the people who profit the most from war aren't the usual entrepreneurs. They are the usually the supremely wealthy and those in power, often one and the same. Like the movers and shakers in the military industrial complex. And not all entrepreneurs are just in it for the profit, for that matter. The point of disagreement is that the American people and American businesses are different, in my opinion. The main function of business is to earn a preofit for the most part. The main function of the people is to live and try to create a better life. (or something like that).
So you said the miltary industrial complex got us out of the depression and wars, and I say it's the blue collar workers who work for the military industrial complex and other businesses(of course) who got us out of those situation. Maybe I'm just arguing symantics here. So I see what you mean, because you include the worker in the overall picture of the military industrial complex and business. I separate the worker from the ruling class that actually runs the military industrial complex and alot of big conglomerate corporations.

@ Albed
Hard working americans usually get jobs, and don't give them. I don't see where, in that quote you gave from me, I said anything to give you the impression that I meant hard working americans give themselves jobs. But since you asked, some hard working americans are wise and frugal, and after a period of working for the man and saving up money, they can start their own business thus giving themselves a job.

[albed]

One of the biggest aspects of the great depression was unemployment; hard working americans without jobs.

It's hard to see just how those hard working americans without jobs ended the depression but you apparently can and I'd like you to explain.

[vernarial]

About 80% of americans were still working during the great depression. There wasn't an absolute lack of Jobs during the Depression. And there is very little growth in my country without the hard work of the laborer(or slaves earlier in US histroy). Just because government and corporations run the show, doesn't mean they can get anything done without the worker. Govenment and industry can create jobs, but who is gonna do them? So maybe you see it as FDR saved the country with the New Deal. But the Depression continued several more years after it was introduced. I think it was the fact that a majority of hard working americans continued to go to work and pay taxes and not panic.

[Sinner]

Please find me a link showing 80% of Americans still were working during the depression. I think you are master of the obvious here. No shit corporations and businesses need workers, and get this, workers need people willing to take the risk of starting businesses so they have jobs. They do go hand and hand don’t they???????

Bottom line, it was WWII, which got North America out of the depression. Why? Because after Pearl Harbor America went into “Total War” Millions of men enlisted into the Military which created jobs at home. There was a labor shortage in the USA and most of jobs were filled by women, blacks, and students. Did you know there was no cars built in the USA from 1942 until 1945? You know why? Because the assembly lines were building airplanes, tanks, ships, etc for the war. The United States built over 100 carriers of all types during the war, and over 100,000 aircraft. People were investing money into War Bonds, people had money, and the depression was over. The savings gave America a boom until the 80’s. That was when the USA went from the world’s largest creditor to the largest debtor. The United States emerged form the war as the supreme world power. In 1945, it possessed the largest navy in the world, a huge, technically advanced army, and enough money to bankroll the world's rebuilding through the Marshall Plan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan


So Vern, Did WWII pull America out of the depression? Could the Military industrial complex exist without businesses and business owners?

[albed]

Originally Posted by vernarial

About 80% of americans were still working during the great depression. There wasn't an absolute lack of Jobs during the Depression. And there is very little growth in my country without the hard work of the laborer(or slaves earlier in US histroy). Just because government and corporations run the show, doesn't mean they can get anything done without the worker. Govenment and industry can create jobs, but who is gonna do them? So maybe you see it as FDR saved the country with the New Deal. But the Depression continued several more years after it was introduced. I think it was the fact that a majority of hard working americans continued to go to work and pay taxes and not panic.

Seems things are getting more complicated since you posted-

It was the hard working american men and women who got us out of the depression and through the wars.

Maybe there's a lot more to economics than your commie indoctrination class told you.



Anyway here's a good little read analysing causes and effects of government actions relating to the great depression.

None of America’s depressions prior to 1929, however, lasted more than four years and most of them were over in two. The Great Depression lasted for a dozen years because the government compounded its monetary errors with a series of harmful interventions....

For various reasons, government policies were adopted that ballooned the quantity of money and credit. A boom resulted, followed later by a painful day of reckoning.....

By early 1929, the Federal Reserve was taking the punch away from the party. It choked off the money supply, raised interest rates, and for the next three years presided over a money supply that shrank by 30 percent. This deflation following the inflation wrenched the economy from tremendous boom to colossal bust.....

the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, passed in June 1930...The most protectionist legislation in U.S. history, Smoot-Hawley virtually closed the borders to foreign goods and ignited a vicious international trade war.....

Foreign companies and their workers were flattened by Smoot-Hawley’s steep tariff rates, and foreign governments soon retaliated with trade barriers of their own. With their ability to sell in the American market severely hampered, they curtailed their purchases of American goods. American agriculture was particularly hard hit. With a stroke of the presidential pen, farmers in this country lost nearly a third of their markets. Farm prices plummeted and tens of thousands of farmers went bankrupt. With the collapse of agriculture, rural banks failed in record numbers, dragging down hundreds of thousands of their customers.....

To compound the folly of high tariffs and huge subsidies, Congress then passed and Hoover signed the Revenue Act of 1932. It doubled the income tax for most Americans; the top bracket more than doubled, going from 24 percent to 63 percent. Exemptions were lowered; the earned income credit was abolished; corporate and estate taxes were raised; new gift, gasoline, and auto taxes were imposed; and postal rates were sharply hiked.....

Roosevelt secured passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which levied a new tax on agricultural processors and used the revenue to supervise the wholesale destruction of valuable crops and cattle. Federal agents oversaw the ugly spectacle of perfectly good fields of cotton, wheat, and corn being plowed under. Healthy cattle, sheep, and pigs by the millions were slaughtered and buried in mass graves.

Even if the AAA had helped farmers by curtailing supplies and raising prices, it could have done so only by hurting millions of others who had to pay those prices or make do with less to eat.....

the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), passed in June 1933, which set up the National Recovery Administration (NRA). Under the NIRA, most manufacturing industries were suddenly forced into government-mandated cartels. Codes that regulated prices and terms of sale briefly transformed much of the American economy into a fascist-style arrangement, while the NRA was financed by new taxes on the very industries it controlled. Some economists have estimated that the NRA boosted the cost of doing business by an average of 40 percent—not something a depressed economy needed for recovery.....




/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
The genesis of the Great Depression lay in the inflationary monetary policies of the U.S. government in the 1920s. It was prolonged and exacerbated by a litany of political missteps: trade-crushing tariffs, incentive-sapping taxes, mind-numbing controls on production and competition, senseless destruction of crops and cattle, and coercive labor laws, to recount just a few. It was not the free market that produced twelve years of agony; rather, it was political bungling on a scale as grand as there ever was.

[Mazer]

Originally Posted by vernarial

...the people who profit the most from war aren't the usual entrepreneurs. They are the usually the supremely wealthy and those in power, often one and the same...

...I separate the worker from the ruling class that actually runs the military industrial complex and alot of big conglomerate corporations...

...Hard working americans usually get jobs, and don't give them...

Ah, look at you, making class distinctions. Is that what you think this is about?

[vernarial]

Oh shit. What did I get myself into.

Yes, I am making class distinctions. It is just my commie indoctinated opinion that it all boils down to those that do the grunt work. So, Sinner, you could say that WW2 pulled America out of the depression, but I prefer to see WW2 and an unfortunate event that the american worker(some turned military) was able to handle even after they had suffered through most of the great depression.
I think we are just splitting hairs here. Governments and politicians pass acts and make descisions high up on the hill. What I wanna know is who does the actual work. Now I'm not trying to say that running a country is an easy job. I just believe that the average worker is more important to the sucess of a nation in almost every endeavor. So you say the MIC(military industrial complex) carried us out of the depression and through the world war and the cold war after that. I say the American worker. Thats why I was trying to make a distinction between business and people. Of course there is a sort of sybiotic relationship there, but I think the worker would survive without business, but the business would not survive without the worker.

All right. No need to fret. Now that I've thrown this thread way off topic, let's get back to the ruling elite fascists. Take it away, Albed.

Oh yeah, Sinner. I got the 80% from the wiki on the great depression, but I may have mispoken. There were times during the depression that the number was less than 80%. I was reading the Wiki on the Recession of 1937, and that was where I got that figure. They actually said unemployment "jumped from 14.3% in 1937 to 19.0% in 1938". I rounded up to 20% to get my 80% figure of employment.

[multi]

First New Deal, 1933–1934

Roosevelt's "First 100 Days" concentrated on the first part of his strategy: immediate relief. From March 9 to June 16, 1933, he sent Congress a record number of bills, all of which passed easily. To propose programs, Roosevelt relied on leading Senators such as George Norris, Robert F. Wagner and Hugo Black, as well as his own Brain Trust of academic advisers. Like Hoover, he saw the Depression as partly a matter of confidence, caused in part by people no longer spending or investing because they were afraid to do so. He therefore set out to restore confidence through a series of dramatic gestures.

FDR's natural air of confidence and optimism did much to reassure the nation. His inauguration on March 4, 1933 occurred in the middle of a bank panic, hence the backdrop for his famous words: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."[16] The very next day he declared a "bank holiday" and announced a plan to allow banks to reopen. However, the number of banks that opened their doors after the "holiday" was less than the number that had been open before.[17] This was his first proposed step to recovery.
Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother depicts destitute pea pickers during the depression in California, centering on Florence Owens Thompson, a mother of seven children, age 32, March 1936.
Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother depicts destitute pea pickers during the depression in California, centering on Florence Owens Thompson, a mother of seven children, age 32, March 1936.

* Relief measures included the continuation of Hoover's major relief program for the unemployed under the new name, Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The most popular of all New Deal agencies, and Roosevelt's favorite, was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which hired 250,000 unemployed young men to work on rural local projects. Congress also gave the Federal Trade Commission broad new regulatory powers and provided mortgage relief to millions of farmers and homeowners. Roosevelt expanded a Hoover agency, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, making it a major source of financing to railroads and industry. Roosevelt made agriculture relief a high priority and set up the first Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). The AAA tried to force higher prices for commodities by paying farmers to take land out of crops and to cut herds.

* Reform of the economy was the goal of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933. It tried to end cutthroat competition by forcing industries to come up with codes that established the rules of operation for all firms within specific industries, such as minimum prices, agreements not to compete, and production restrictions. Industry leaders negotiated the codes which were then approved by NIRA officials. Industry needed to raise wages as a condition for approval. Provisions encouraged unions and suspended anti-trust laws. The NIRA was found to be unconstitutional by unanimous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court on May 27, 1935. Roosevelt opposed the decision, saying "The fundamental purposes and principles of the NIRA are sound. To abandon them is unthinkable. It would spell the return to industrial and labor chaos."[18] In 1933, major new banking regulations were passed. In 1934, the Securities and Exchange Commission was created to regulate Wall Street, with 1932 campaign fundraiser Joseph P. Kennedy in charge.

* Recovery was pursued through "pump-priming" (that is, federal spending). The NIRA included $3.3 billion of spending through the Public Works Administration to stimulate the economy, which was to be handled by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Roosevelt worked with Republican Senator George Norris to create the largest government-owned industrial enterprise in American history, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built dams and power stations, controlled floods, and modernized agriculture and home conditions in the poverty-stricken Tennessee Valley. The repeal of prohibition also brought in new tax revenues and helped him keep a major campaign promise.

Roosevelt tried to keep his campaign promise by cutting the regular federal budget, including 40% cuts to veterans' benefits and cuts in overall military spending. He removed 500,000 veterans and widows from the pension rolls and slashed benefits for the remainder. Protests erupted, led by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Roosevelt held his ground, but when the angry veterans formed a coalition with Senator Huey Long and passed a huge bonus bill over his veto, he was defeated. He succeeded in cutting federal salaries and the military and naval budgets. He reduced spending on research and education—there was no New Deal for science until World War II began.

Roosevelt also kept his promise to push for repeal of Prohibition. In April 1933, he issued an Executive Order redefining 3.2% alcohol as the maximum allowed. That order was followed up by Congressional action in the drafting and passage of the 21st Amendment later that year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankli...3.E2.80.931934


Oh yeh ..the topic

The two dozen crooks that tried to pull off this coup against FDR were allowed to freely devise the corrupt system of government that run the country now.

The shocking results of the investigation were promptly scotched and stashed in the National Archives. While the coup attempt was reported at the time in a few newspapers, including The New York Times, the story disappeared from public memory shortly after the Congressional findings were made available to president Roosevelt.

how the fuck did that get to happen?

[malvachat]

Maybe you should all read,
"The ragged trousered philanthropist"
Then decide on a point of view.

[Nicobie]

Originally Posted by malvachat

Maybe you should all read,
"The ragged trousered philanthropist"
Then decide on a point of view.

hehe

[multi]

[albed]

Originally Posted by vernarial

Oh shit. What did I get myself into.

Yes, I am making class distinctions. It is just my commie indoctinated opinion that it all boils down to those that do the grunt work.

So you think of horses, steam engines, diesel engines and robots as a class? Kind of odd and it shows how dated your commie indoctrination is, but give them a big cheer.

Originally Posted by vernarial

So, Sinner, you could say that WW2 pulled America out of the depression, but I prefer to see WW2 and an unfortunate event that the american worker(some turned military) was able to handle even after they had suffered through most of the great depression.
I think we are just splitting hairs here. Governments and politicians pass acts and make descisions high up on the hill. What I wanna know is who does the actual work. Now I'm not trying to say that running a country is an easy job. I just believe that the average worker is more important to the sucess of a nation in almost every endeavor. So you say the MIC(military industrial complex) carried us out of the depression and through the world war and the cold war after that. I say the American worker. Thats why I was trying to make a distinction between business and people. Of course there is a sort of sybiotic relationship there, but I think the worker would survive without business, but the business would not survive without the worker.

You seem just like the dumb racists dividing people into groups and judging theirs to be superior. What's a worker who's not working? What's a worker who starts his own business? Have you ever ventured out into the real world? You wouldn't be able to tell a worker from a business owner if they were both kicking you in the head. And they both would because you're such a warped idiot. America isn't divided into those stupid "classes" Marx bitched about 150 years ago and if you pulled your head out of your ass for 30 seconds you might realize that. But you got indoctrinated with propaganda instead of educated with reality and you "prefer to see" things the way you've been told to instead of the way they really are so you're destined to be a bitter loser thinking you're barred from being successful because you aren't in the right "class" instead of knowing that intelligence, courage and effort could get you wealth just like anyone else in the free, classless american society.

Originally Posted by multi

Oh yeh ..the topic

The two dozen crooks that tried to pull off this coup against FDR were allowed to freely devise the corrupt system of government that run the country now.

how the fuck did that get to happen?

It'll always be a mystery to you because your fucked up little brain just can't distinguish between what it wants to be true and what really is true.

[multi]

so are you saying it didn't happen then ?

I think you might be the one that is deluded

fucking idiot... you think you can just pass that off as some sort of statment... get you head outa ya arse ya fool

[multi]

The difference between FDR and his Republican antagonists was far greater than the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats today. Today's Democrats have internalized and identified with the interests of those whom they should be actively mobilizing the population against. The Republocrats are now all of them heir to the fascist instincts inherent in the ruling elite. Republican elites manifest this in their policies as the party in power; Democratic elites evidence their unsavory class heritage by railing ritualistically against the Republicans even as they betray their fed-up constituencies by supporting the fundamental policies of their alleged "opponents".

It certainly is starting to look that way

[albed]

Go to a psychiatrist multi and show him all the stupid conspiracy bullshit you're so fond of rolling in like a pig in muck and if he's compentent he'll diagnose you as a classic paranoid schizophrenic.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/par...hrenia/DS00862

People with paranoid schizophrenia hold untrue beliefs (delusions)

If you're really interested in learning the truth about something you'll go to websites from reputable organizations and universities instead of the stupid crackpots you get your bullshit from. But I don't think you're interested in the truth.