Yep, the World Has Changed

You all remember how things were back a few years ago?  I'm afraid we'll be thinking how good those days were some years from now.

I'm not holding out any hope that the old paradigm is going to return.  It really can't, because like the Soviet system there's a fatal flaw in the theory, but it's only going to go kicking and screaming every step of the way.

The last thirty years have shown us just what happens when you let Wall Street, so-called "free enterprise", run things.  When Wall Street crashed the system big time resulting in what we now call the First Great Republican Depression, we got a president that took on the banksters of his day, overthrowing their power and implementing policies that favored working people greater than has ever been seen in this country. In his acceptance speech to the Democratic Convention in 1936, his "Rendevous With Destiny" speech, FDR spelled out what he considered the greatest threat to the nation that he was calling on Americans to turn back:

I cannot, with candor, tell you that all is well
with the world. Clouds of suspicion, tides of ill-will and intolerance
gather darkly in many places. In our own land we enjoy indeed a
fullness of life greater than that of most nations. But the rush of
modern civilization itself has raised for us new difficulties, new
problems which must be solved if we are to preserve to the United
States the political and economic freedom for which Washington and
Jefferson planned and fought.

That very word freedom, in itself and of
necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. In 1776 we
sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy - from the
eighteenth-century royalists who held special privileges from the
crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without
the consent of the governed; that they denied the right of free
assembly and free speech; that they restricted the worship of God; that
they put the average man's property and the average man's life in pawn
to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they regimented the people.

Since that struggle, however, man's inventive genius
released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our
people. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity;
the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution - all
of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new
problem for those who sought to remain free.

For out of this modern civilization economic
royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon
concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of
corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and
agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers -
the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal
service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many
thousands of small-businessmen and merchants who sought to make a
worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were
no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and
progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their
generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic
scheme of things.

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged
princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached
out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism
and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new
mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their
property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the
problem that faced the Minute Man.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they
received, the conditions of their labor - these had passed beyond the
control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial
dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the
small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age - other
people's money - these were tools which the new economic royalty used
to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the
rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was
decreed by men in distant cities.

Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by
monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great
machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted.
Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged
enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are
not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living - a living
decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man
not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once
had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small
group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control
over other people's property, other people's money, other people's
labor - other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer
free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of
happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American
citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The
collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election
of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is
being ended.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded
that political freedom was the business of the government, but they
have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They
granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to
vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect
the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Today we stand committed to the proposition that
freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is
guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal
opportunity in the market place.

These economic royalists complain that we seek to
overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is
that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American
institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they
seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness
they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as
always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not
subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the
over-privileged alike.

Welcome back.

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