Salon.com > The Great Depression

Republicans’ balanced budget farce

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 13:56:00 +0000

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) says Senate Republicans will unanimously support a balanced-budget amendment, to be unveiled Wednesday as the core of the GOP’s fiscal agenda.

There’s no chance of passage so why are Republicans pushing it now? “Just because something may not pass doesn’t mean that the American people don’t expect us to stand up and be counted for the things that we believe in,” says McConnnell.

The more honest explanation is that a fight over a balanced-budget amendment could get the GOP back on the same page — reuniting Republican government-haters with the Party’s fiscal conservatives. And it could change the subject away from social issues — women’s reproductive rights, immigration, gay marriage – that have split the Party and cost it many votes.

It also gives the Party something to be for, in contrast to the upcoming fights in which its members will be voting against compromises to avoid the next fiscal cliff, continue funding the government, and raising the debt ceiling.

Five obscene reasons the rich grow richer

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 15:25:00 +0000

If you want to see what’s wrong with America take a good look at the nauseating list of the 400 richest Americans – the Forbes 400. While the economy struggled to create jobs, it was another banner year for the super-rich. They increased their collective wealth by a whopping $200 billion, which is more than enough to provide every student in the country with free higher education.

Meanwhile, the median middle-class family – the one smack in the middle of the income distribution -- saw its net worth (assets minus liabilities) drop from $102,844 in 2005 to $66,740 in 2010 according to the U.S. Census Bureau. So while the richest 400 Americans increased their wealth by 54 percent since 2005, the median middle-class family saw its wealth decline by 35 percent. Welcome to the new American math.

The 47 percent: What FDR fought against

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 13:48:00 +0000

But here is the challenge to our democracy: In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens—a substantial part of its whole population—who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life…

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

But it is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope—because the nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out. We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. - Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937

“Lawless” and the GOP’s fever dream of the past

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:47:00 +0000

“Lawless” is a problem picture, as they say in Hollywood. It’s been through three titles during its lengthy post-production wait for distribution, and despite a cast loaded with talent and hotness (Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, Jessica Chastain, Guy Pearce, Gary Oldman, Mia Wasikowska) is now being dumped on the last weekend of summer, on the presumption that it’s a flop. But much of the problem with this amped-up fable of Depression-era bootlegging in rural Virginia, I think, is the American problem with our own history.

It’s worth noting that this movie wasn’t made by Americans at all, but by a pair of Australians, director John Hillcoat and screenwriter, songwriter and legendary post-punk singer Nick Cave. (They also made “The Proposition,” a similar but more successful “Aussie western.”) Cave’s screenplay takes Matt Bondurant’s historical novel “The Wettest County in the World,” largely based on the exploits of Bondurant’s own grandfather and great-uncles, and treats it as a canvas for Cave’s obsessively Biblical or Faulknerian treatment of American themes. Elevating the story to a grotesque or mythic plane works well at some points and less well at others, but Hillcoat never firmly commits to either documentary-style realism or Coen brothers-style Grand Guignol, and tries to split the difference.

What can we learn from the Great Depression?

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 11:45:00 +0000

So if I want to understand what happened during the Great Depression – and even what the Obama administration is trying to do now – do I have to start by reading John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money?

You’re better off reading Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States, which I think is a better account. Keynes was more contemporary, so maybe had not as much perspective.

This is the argument that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression, prompting Ben Bernanke’s famous apology to the authors. So why does this book need to be read, in your view?

I think it appropriately looks at the monetary financial situation that is at the core of the Great Depression crisis and also the current situation. So they focus on the role of the monetary authority and the banking panics, and you can fit into that the legislative changes – particularly under Franklin Roosevelt – some of which helped the situation. I think the most important of those was the introduction of deposit insurance in 1934, with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The FDIC has really worked in preventing banking panics since that time in the US. I think a lot of the solutions these days involve extending that concept beyond the commercial banks that were at the heart of the financial system in the 1930s, but of course the system has been much broadened since then.