Questioning the New Deal

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Ellis Washington, J.D.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=79649
Department of Political Science
Faculty Adviser, Political Science Association
The day I took fire from 'Obama'
Posted: November 01, 2008
1:00 am Eastern
© 2008
Unlike the boring, scripted debates we see on TV, this debate will be a no-holds-barred, knock down, drag out political brawl where ALL relevant policy issues about each candidate will be on the table.
~ Ellis Washington, Mock Presidential Debate flyer, SSU, Oct. 29, 2008
Invitation to a real political debate
Last Wednesday at Savannah State University
, where I teach law and political science, I organized a political forum called, "Mock Presidential Debate – Obama v. McCain." Barack Obama was played by my colleague Kevin Hales (professor of history); I played Sen. John McCain.
The political debate was a smashing success. We had over 250 students and about 15 faculty and staff participate. Several faculty members even brought their entire class. We also had a TV crew from the local Savannah affiliate WSAV that filmed the entire political forum.
To encourage students, administration, faculty and staff to attend, I sent out the following announcement:
ATTN: ADMINSTRATION, FACULTY, STAFF & STUDENTS OF SSU
On behalf of the Political Science Association at Savannah State University, I would like to formally invite the entire SSU family to attend an interesting and unique political forum – a Mock Presidential Debate – between BARACK OBAMA (represented by professor Kevin Hales [History Department] & JOHN MCCAIN (represented by professor Ellis Washington [Political Science Department]).
Professor Leonard McCoy [Political Science Department] will be the moderator along with student moderators Chelsea White and Sheila Adu Poku.
Unlike the boring, scripted debates we see on TV, this debate will be a no-holds-barred, knock down, drag out political brawl where ALL relevant policy issues about each candidate will be on the table.
See the attached flyer for further details regarding the Mock Presidential Debate.
PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD AND SEE YOU ALL ON WED. AFTERNOON AT 1:00!
Peace,
Ellis Washington, J.D.
Department of Political Science
Faculty Adviser, Political Science Association
(Column continues below)
Of course, I knew going in that I was a marked man, that participation in this presidential debate would be a great challenge that would put my intellectual, political and spiritual capacities to the test – yet like a lamb to the slaughter, I embraced my destiny.
'Why do you want to be president of the United States?'
This was the opening salvo of this political beat down. In order to set the proper tone, I knew my answer must be strong and unequivocal. I said in part:
The blood that flows throughout my veins is not red; it is red white and blue! I am an American. I believe in American exceptionalism. My grandfather and father were both decorated admirals in the U.S. Navy, fought fascism and bled for this country. I served six years in Vietnam, five and a half years as a prisoner of war of the dreaded Vietcong where I was almost continually tortured. I want the best leadership
for America … and that's why I want to be president of the United States of America!
(Stunned silence)
Although most of the questions from the SSU student body were passionate, earnest and intelligent, the overall tone was hostile, even antagonistic against the character I played, Sen. John McCain, and against the Republican Party. Surprisingly, some of the students braved the jeers and asked difficult questions to Sen. Barack Obama, while others nodded approvingly when I spoke like they were saying, "Professor Washington, I'm with you; I just can't say so publicly."
At the beginning of the debate, many questions centered on domestic issues, particularly the welfare state and how Obama promised a tax cut for 95 percent of Americans, free health care, dental care, child care, prenatal care, college education, job training, mortgage assistance, free gas for your car and free oil to heat your home, etc.
When I could take no more socialist propaganda from Obama and his youthful minions (many of them my own students), I launched into an extemporaneous tirade, which I paraphrase below:
What is wrong with you people?! How long will you allow your minds to be shackled by Big Government liberalism and the Democratic Party? In the early 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised you a "New Deal" and got your forefathers hooked on the drug of welfare and government handouts. In the 1960s, LBJ gave you the "Great Society" and over $5 trillion dollars in new welfare spending to fight what LBJ called his "War on Poverty," yet poverty over the past 40 years has grown exponentially. Even worse, there is a poverty of the spirit that is particularly acute in the black community that remains undiagnosed and unacknowledged … even to this day.
Ladies and gentlemen, when will you say I don't need your welfare, your universal health care, dental care, Social Security, food stamps and government cheese? I'll buy my own cheese. [Slams fist on the table] "GET OFF THE DAMN PLANTATION!"
(Stunned silence, followed by a crescendo of jeers)

Candy of PA 5:28PM November 02, 2008

Iranian top dog: "America should be aware not to put its huge body on top of the suicide bombers' explosive devices"
"The Iranian people hate the US." But surely if we just sit down and chat we can hash things out and reach an understanding.
Meanwhile, the saber-rattling steps up in intensity: "Iran threatens US with suicide bombers," from the Media Line News Agency, October 30 (thanks to James):
Only a few days ahead of the American presidential election, Iranian parliamentary speaker 'Ali Larijani and Supreme Leader Ayatollah 'Ali Khamanai have launched harsh verbal attacks against the United States.
Referring to the US army's attacks in Pakistan and Syria, Larijani said they would not be answered with diplomatic protests.
"The US method and conduct, expressed by this aggression, will only be stopped by a clear-cut and unexpected response, whose grounds were set by the martyr Hussein Fahmida," Larijani said during a parliamentary session on Wednesday.
Fahmida was 13 when he detonated an explosive device he carried on him, destroying an Iraqi tank during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.
"America should be aware not to put its huge body on top of the suicide bombers' explosive devices," Larijani said.
On the same day, Khamanai said the differences between Iran and the US were far beyond differences of opinion.
"The Iranian people hate the US… [because of] the various plots the US government has hatched against Iran and the Iranian nation for the past five decades," Khamanai said.
The Supreme Leader added that any nation that would not honor Iran's identity and independence would have its "hands cut off."...

airforce69 of 9:24AM October 31, 2008

Thursday, October 30, 2008 2:22 PM
DUBAI — An al-Qaida leader has called for President George W. Bush and the Republicans to be "humiliated," without endorsing any party in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, according to a video posted on the Internet.
"O God, humiliate Bush and his party, O Lord of the Worlds, degrade and defy him," Abu Yahya al-Libi said at the end of sermon marking the Muslim feast of Eid al-Fitr, in a video posted on the Internet.
Libi, one of the top al-Qaida commanders believed to be living in Afghanistan or Pakistan, called for God's wrath to be brought against Bush equating him with past tyrants in history.
The remarks were the first comments from a leading al-Qaida figure referring, albeit indirectly, to the U.S. elections. Muslim clerics often end sermons by calling on God to guide and support Muslims and help defeat their enemies.
In 2004, al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden issued his first video in more than a year just days before the elections to deride President Bush and warn of possible new September 11-style attacks.
Bin Laden made little mention of Bush's Democratic challenger John Kerry, telling Americans: "Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands and each state which does not harm our security will remain safe."

doug of PA 8:41AM October 31, 2008

FDR ended the depression he helped extend by killing 400,000 Americans. Some New Deal.
Peace-and-prosperity-promising Democrats always bring war.

Koblog of CA 11:29PM October 30, 2008

Ever ask why Obama is the preferred candidate among most UN members? Simple reason, they want a U.S. that is weaker, more like them. They know that Obama will reduce our military might and make us less able to deal with thugs who oppress and steal from their people and plot against the U.S. They know Obama knows nothing of foreign policy and will enact policies that ultimately will help our enemies make gains that will take decades to reverse. They know that Obama will increase our marginal tax rates and thus reduce our economic competitiveness and ability to attract talented individuals to our shores. Yes, an Obama presidency means a weaker U.S., and much of the world likes that. If you believe, however, that a strong U.S. is the last best hope of mankind, you’ll put a patriot and doer like John McCain in the White House.

Barry Stern of VA 9:21PM October 30, 2008

From a liberal democratic consensus, many American historians in the past two decades have praised the Roosevelt administration for its non ideological flexibility, and for its far ranging reforms. To many historians,particularly those who reached intellectual maturity, during the depression, the government's accomplishments, as well as the drama and passion, marked the decade as a dividing line in the American past.
Franklin D. Roosevelt recalling the bitter opposition to welfare measures and restraints upon business, many liberal historians have emphasized the New Deal's discontinuity with the immediate past. For them there was a "Roosevelt Revolution," or at the very least a dramatic achievement of a beneficent liberalism which had developed in fits and spurts during the preceding three decades.
Rejecting earlier interpretations which viewed the New Deal as socialism or state capitalism, they have also disregarded theories of syndicalism or of corporate liberalism. The New Deal has generally commanded their approval for such laws or institutions as minimum wages, public housing, farm assistance, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Wagner Act, more progressive taxation, and social security.
For most liberal historians the New Deal meant the replenishment of democracy, the rescuing of the federal government from the clutches of big business, the significant redistribution of political power. Breaking with the new administration, according to these interpretations, marked the end of the passive or impartial state and the beginning of positive government, of the interventionist state acting to offset concentrations of private power, and affirming the rights and responding to the needs of the unprivileged.
From the perspective of the late 1960s these themes no longer seem adequate to characterize the New Deal. The liberal reforms of the New Deal did not transform the American system; they conserved and protected American corporate capitalism, occasionally by absorbing parts of threat ending programs. There was no significant redistribution of power in American society, only limited recognition of other organized groups, seldom of unorganized peoples. Neither the bolder programs advanced by New Dealers nor the final legislation greatly, extended the beneficence of government beyond the middle classes or drew upon the wealth of the few for the needs of the many. Designed to maintain the American system, liberal activity was directed toward essentially conservative goals. Experamentalism was most frequently limited to means seldom did it extend to ends. Never questioning private enterprise, it operated within safe channels, far short of Marxism or even of native American radicalism's that offered structural critiques and structural solutions.
All of this is not to deny the changes brought by the New Deal the extension of welfare programs, the growth of federal power, the strengthening of the executive, even the narrowing of property rights. But it is to assert that the elements of continuity are stronger, that the magnitude of change has been exaggerated. The New Deal failed to solve the problem of depression, it failed to raise the impoverished, it failed to redistribute income, it failed to extend equality and generally countenanced racial discrimination and segregation. It failed generally to make business more responsible to the social welfare or to threaten business's pre-eminent political power. In this sense, the New Deal, despite the shifts in tone and spirit from the earlier decade, was profoundly, conservative and continuous with the 1920s.
By training and experience, few men in American political life seemed better prepared than Hoover to cope with the depression. Responding promptly to the crisis, he acted to stabilize the economy and secured the agreement of businessmen to maintain production and wage rates. Unwilling to let the economy "go through the wringer," the President requested easier money, self liquidating public works, lower personal and corporate income taxes, and stronger commodity stabilization corporations. And if you can hear McCain with out the hype this is what I think he is trying to get across for his plan or ideas.

Candy of PA 5:57PM October 30, 2008

Is there a Welcome sign for internet trolls here somewhere?
It strikes me as odd that a number of people take the time to post insults after each one of his columns. "Your history professors must have been awful," says one, and then there's the person who posts in multiple areas about Barone's being "kicked off" the McClaughlin Group. If people think Barone is wrong, or dumb, or personally objectionable, why are they even bothering to read his columns? I know I would be hard pressed to find anything on the Daily Kos that I would NOT find dumb or objectionable -- so guess how much time I devote to reading, much less posting, there? That's right, ZERO. Did these trolls never have mothers who told them, "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all?"

Pete of 1:42PM October 30, 2008

"The statement that the New Deal was politically repudiated, based on the 1938 midterms, is laughably dishonest. Roosevelt carried 46 of 48 states in 1936 and won a bigger percentage of the popular vote than Ronald Reagan ever won."
good thing WWII came along, or we might still be in a Depression.
And today, a sizable percentage of the public believes an even greater econmic fool than Roosevelt. But at least FDR had enough sense to stand up to Hitler.

notafool of 1:14PM October 30, 2008

"Without the FDIC, most people's bank accounts would have been STOLEN already. Without Social Security, millions would be homeless elderly beggers."
Maybe yes, maybe no.
Regardless, 2 programs that have survived out of dozens is hardly evidence of overwhelming success.
As others have stated, the Depression is generally thought to have lasted longer than it might have without the unprecedented government intervention. Only WWII stopped it.
The enormous downside is the still-active myth that government can solve all economic woes. This has been disproven so many times that it's a joke.
Yet we still have fools like Obama willfully seeking to throw the country into another Depression.

notafool of 1:07PM October 30, 2008

The statement that the New Deal was politically repudiated, based on the 1938 midterms, is laughably dishonest. Roosevelt carried 46 of 48 states in 1936 and won a bigger percentage of the popular vote than Ronald Reagan ever won.

Tom S. of MD 9:31AM October 30, 2008