FDR & the Four Freedoms

I have a friend here in FL who came from Wisconsin to do graduate work at USF where she did a PhD in anthropology. She fell in love with FL largely because of the weather & decided that she wanted very much to stay here. Naturally, she's being rewarded for that decision by alternating periods of overwork & underpay with completely inept & abusive management and unemployment. Just a few days ago, she mentioned to me that as an undergrad in Wisconsin, she took a course or 2 from a self-professed Marxian scholar named Harvey J. Kaye who convinced her of the merit of certain aspects of Marxian analysis. I checked with the library here to see if they had any of Kaye's works & found & put holds on 2. The first to arrive & the one I'm nearly finished reading now is The Fight for the Four Freedoms. I like the book & will try to tell you why but first I'll include links to 2 reviews: The Washington Post which considers the book to be little more than propaganda - with some possible justification, and Bill Moyers which is far more favorable towards Kaye's thesis which should not come as a surprise.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-fight-for-the-four-freedoms-what-made-fdr-and-the-greatest-generation-truly-great-by-harvey-j-kaye/2014/05/02/f832f778-c951-11e3-95f7-7ecdde72d2ea_story.html

http://billmoyers.com/episode/fighting-for-the-four-freedoms/

I'm reading the book coincidentally after just having finished Jane Meyer's Dark Money & I want to emphasize that juxtaposition in these remarks. Meyer talks about the advent of a concerted and centrally planned effort of a small number of hyper wealthy plutocrats to subvert the US democratic process to the detriment of civil rights, civil liberties, economic justice, and proponents of progressive politics in general largely by means of carefully targeted expenditures of huge sums of money. Kaye writes of a very similar counter-revolutionary backlash against the progressive policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt beginning during his presidency but accelerating in the years after his death under the presidencies of Harry Truman & Dwight Eisenhower. The similarities in goals and tactics are undeniable. We are not facing a new phenomenon with the Koch Brothers in any way except the leadership & bankrolling of such a small cadre of determined activists. The Fight for the Four Freedoms is well worth a read as a lesson of just how far the progressive movement has regressed since the days of the New Deal. Kaye explains this failure in terms of leaders lacking vision, commitment and energy. There are no surprises among the enemies of progressivism. He cites most if not all of the usual suspects from Lewis Powell to the Kock Brothers to Ronald Reagan & George W Bush but earning a special place on his Wall of Dishonor is Jimmy Carter who Kaye considers the least progressive or visionary of Democratic presidents. Kaye names Carter as the transition figure between the Democratic leadership of the post-FDR years who at least gave lip service to the principles of the New Deal and the Clintons who transformed the party into one FDR would have scarcely recognized or supported. I'll close with a 1948 quote from Max Lerner as cited by Kaye: "The creative capacity itself seems to have gone out of American political life...What strikes me hardest about all this is the terrible waste of history it involves...The worst part of it is that most liberals seem to feel hopeless unless a new Great Depression comes. Can it be true that the greatness of the American people can be evoked only in adversity, and that liberalism in a plant that flowers only among the ruins?"

Some Debating Points for Sanders

I am a little late for tonight, but I want to offer Sanders some debating points. Maybe they will be useful to others also.
1. When it comes to foreign policy, Sanders should be the clear preference. See the great article in The Nation, by Robert English, from the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California! (“Bernie Sanders, the Foreign-Policy Realist of 2016: Of all the presidential candidates of either party, Bernie is actually the most sober and clear-eyed.” http://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-the-foreign-policy-realist-of-2016/?nc=1 ) I hope Bernie had a chance to read it before the debate tonight. Clinton has spent too much of her political life as a hawk – her Iraq vote, her support for the Libyan regime change, her support for NATO expansion right up to Russian borders, her support for a no-fly zone in Syria. Do we ever learn? Sanders is calling for a broad coalition to address the crisis in Syria, and holding back on regime-change policies.
2. When it comes to trade policy, Sanders is the clear choice. Clinton is a long supporter of the US trade agreements, very late coming to reservations on TPP. Sanders has opposed all the trade agreements. In the debate with Clinton, Sanders should hit hard on trade policy and its effect on jobs, especially manufacturing jobs. Specifically, Sanders should promise to renegotiate all the trade agreements to better protect American jobs and to disallow the trade courts the ability to overturn American law.
3. When it comes to regulating Wall Street and breaking up the too-big-to-fail banks, Sanders is the clear choice. Many of the financial institutions are now too big to fail, and Clinton won’t say she will break them up. Who is in a better position to tackle Wall Street, one who accepts millions of dollars from the Street, or one is supported by millions of small donations?
4. Polls for the general election are notoriously unreliable at this early date, but they are uniform and have been for months that Sanders does better against any Republican than does Clinton. Thus, with available evidence, Sanders looks like the best choice for winning the presidency. Hopefully he will choose Elizabeth Warren for vice president, which will put a true progressive on track to become the first woman to be president of the US.
5. Sanders has a progressive vision for the country, and the country greatly needs change. Clinton has no such vision for the country.

Comments on Joseph Stiglitz’ Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity

Joseph Stiglitz’ Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity, published in 2016, updates and fills out the ideas for economic reform presented in Stiglitz’ 2012 book The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. The earlier book explained some of the forces leading to our current economic and political inequality and described the effects of that inequality on our society and democracy. Stiglitz repeatedly made clear that the shift to greater inequality was not inevitable, but was a result of choices. The alternative choices that would lead to a more egalitarian society were also elucidated in that book. The earlier book does have a final chapter outlining another way forward, but that chapter is relatively brief, and many of the ideas that would fit in the chapter are scattered throughout the book.

The newer book has two parts, “The Current Rules” and “Rewriting the Rules”. What are these rules? Stiglitz dispels the myth of the free market, in making it clear that our markets certainly do have rules. The problem is that our current set of rules leads to inequality, in income, wealth, and political power, and because of the latter this situation is self-perpetuating. The section “Rewriting the Rules” brings Stiglitz’ agenda for reform into one place, still fairly compact, but fleshed out from the earlier book’s presentation, and also supplemented by additional items putting his reform agenda clearly in the progressive path. The “Rewriting the Rules” chapter has two parts, “Taming the Top” and “Growing the Middle”. There is not a lot here that is not already included in our Chapter 16 “Transforming Our Society” of We Can Have a Better Country: A Progressive Reader’s Guide, from Stiglitz and other writers, but it is nice to get it as an action agenda, with some additional details. Additions include proposals for a postal savings bank. Many countries have such a system, including Britain, Germany, Japan, and Brazil, and the U.S. had one as recently as 1966. In addition to savings banking, Stiglitz would have this new system create a “debit card available with minimum fees and high protections for consumers.” This card would bring competition to the commercial credit and debit card market. Stiglitz would also “create a public option for housing finance”. In the health care arena, as a counter-balance to that other Nobel laureate Paul Krugman’s position, thrust into the Democratic presidential primary, that a single payer system is ideal but cannot be reached at present, Stiglitz touts a Medicare for All program, a public option in the Affordable Care Act system. This is a reasonable start towards a single payer system.