Is Obama Trying to Dismantle Roosevelt's New Deal? [View All]

[Octafish]

Our good friends at TomDispatch.com (courtesy Alternet.org) ask a most pertinent question:

Is Obama Trying to Dismantle Roosevelt's New Deal?

By Steve Fraser, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on February 11, 2010, Printed on February 11, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145641/

On March 4, 1933, the day he took office, Franklin Roosevelt excoriated the "money changers" who "have fled from their high seats in the temples of our civilization they know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision and where there is no vision, the people perish."

Rhetoric, however, is only rhetoric. According to one skeptical congressional observer of FDR's first inaugural address, "The President drove the money-changers out of the Capitol on March 4th -- and they were all back on the 9th."

That was essentially true. It was what happened after that, in the midst of the Great Depression, which set the New Deal on a course that is the mirror image of the direction in which the Obama administration seems headed.

Buoyed by great expectations when he assumed office, Barack Obama has so far revealed himself to be an unfolding disappointment. On arrival, expectations were far lower for FDR, who was not considered extraordinary at all -- until he actually did something extraordinary.

The great expectations of 2009 are, only a year later, beginning to smell like a pile of dead fish with new rhetoric -- including populist-style attacks on villainous bankers that sound fake (or cynically pandering) when uttered by Obama's brainiacs -- layered on top of the pile like deodorant. Meanwhile, the country is suffering through a recovery that isn't a recovery unless you happen to be a banker, and the administration stands by, too politically or intellectually inhibited or incapacitated to do much of anything about it. A year into "change we can believe in" and the new regime, once so flush with power and the promise of big doings, seems exhausted, vulnerable, and afraid. A year into the New Deal -- indeed a mere 100 days into Roosevelt's era -- change, whether you believed in it or not, clearly had the wind at its back.

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/news/145641/is_obama_trying_to_dismantle_roosevelt%27s_new_deal_

It's not just Social Security I'm worried about.