The View From 1776

A reader wrote to ask how Rush Limbaugh differs from Joseph Goebbels.  Both, said the reader, are hate-mongers.  There isn’t much similarity, of course.  Limbaugh is not a great orator, as Goebbels was.  Nor is he at all the superb organizer and administrator that Goebbels was.

The reader’s question, however, prompted a comparison of Barack Obama, whose announced intention is to revolutionize the United States, and Adolph Hitler, whose announced intention was to revolutionize German society.  Both aimed at socialistic redistribution of wealth to improve the lot of working men and other lower-income groups.  Both imposed control over major industrial groups.

However much we deplore the racist nationalism of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis), we have to give the devil his due.  We are compelled to recognize Hitler and Goebbels as extraordinarily gifted organizers and administrators, as well as outstanding orators.

Obama is a good orator, as his victories in the Democrat/Socialist Party presidential primary and later in the general election proved.  Unlike Hitler, however, Obama flounders without a prepared speech, supported by a teleprompter.  Hitler could mesmerize an audience without notes, speaking to vast numbers, any length from half an hour to two hours, often without even a public address system.  English and American journalists went to his National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi) rallies expecting to hear a buffoon.  Without exception they became entranced as Hitler orated with great logical clarity, finding themselves almost in agreement with him.

Like Obama, Hitler rose to power in the midst of social and economic turmoil.  After World War I, German industry was severely crippled, unemployment was high, and fecklessness of the Weimar Republic’s brand of socialism left the nation in despair.  The conditions that Hitler faced were, in fact, much more severe than anything confronting Obama.

Obama flitted from limited engagement as a neighborhood agitator-organizer to working with Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn to insinuate socialistic messages into the public school curriculum. He managed to get elected to the Illinois legislature and then to the United States Senate, never getting any significant legislation enacted.

His short, dilettantish gesture in the direction of community organization in Chicago’s South Side was his only exposure to executive administration before his coronation as the Nation’s Savior in 2009.  In his first year as president, Obama has concentrated upon speechifying, leaving administrative and legislative responsibilities in the hands of Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid.

In sharp contrast, Adolph Hitler took over a Munich political club with hardly more than 40 members and, in 14 years (including his time in Landsberg prison in 1923-24), built it into the largest and most powerful political organization in Germany.  Hitler was directly involved in every political and organizational move, appointing and directing party leaders, from the neighborhood to the national level.  He was especially effective at the strategic level, foreseeing the path to national triumph of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis).

Goebbels, like Obama, was a neighborhood organizer, though considerably more effective and skilled than Obama. 

Goebbels was dispatched by Hitler in 1926 to Berlin, the heart of German communist support and the seat of the Weimar Republic.  Berlin, like Hollywood and the East and Left Coast metropolises of today, had sunk into a pit of sensual degradation, a degradation so extreme that even the Parisians were shocked at what was exhibited publicly.

Goebbels’s mission was to organize the rag-tag bit of the National Socialist German Workers Party in Berlin and to increase its membership.  He did both things spectacularly well in the face of assaults by street gangs of armed communist labor union members.

A final comparison and, in this case congruence, between Obama and Hitler, as well as the Soviet Union’s Vladimir Lenin, is their recognition that, if socialism is to be imposed successfully, it must become a world-wide phenomenon.  So long as socialist nations are bordered by non-socialist nations, their hegemony always will be threatened by defections and periodic aggressions.  Hence the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union’s continual campaigns during the Cold War to subvert central and eastern-European nations to bring them behind the Iron Curtain of Soviet control.

Hitler’s socialistic vision, like that of Mussolini’s Fascist italy, was nationalistic, aiming to bring all necessary farmland and natural resources under control of the National Socialist German Workers Party in order to insure maximum self-suffiency for Nazi Germany.  Obama’s obsession with “green” jobs and high-cost fuel in the name of energy self-sufficiency is not politically the same as Hitler’s Drang nach Osten, but economically it is of the same stripe.  Ditto Obama’s drive to control the banking business, auto manufacturing, energy production and use, and the nation’s healthcare industry.

All liberal-progressive-socialist leaders, from Auguste Comte to Marx and Lenin, to Obama have exhibited a strong faith that reified laws of history are moving us inevitably toward a socialized world hegemony under the tutelage of liberal-progressive intellectuals.  That doctrine anticipates a world of peace and harmony when income and property shall have been equally distributed around the globe.  As in Lenin’s vision of socialism, when the political state, through whatever methods may be necessary (for instance, ramming Obamacare through Congress via reconciliation) shall have succeeded in reshaping human nature into the New Soviet Man (from each according to ability, to each according to need), government will simply wither away and the whole world will be one big happy family.

James Madison spoke to that sort of utopian theorizing in the Federalist Papers, when he noted that, if men were angels, no government would be necessary.  But experience and prudence suggested the need for auxiliary precautions.

The following op-ed piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s online edition.

Dissecting the Real Cost of ObamaCare
The President’s own chief Medicare actuary says the Senate and House bills are bending the cost curve up.

By Congressman Paul D. Ryan

The following are remarks made by Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, about the cost of the House and Senate health-care bills at President Obama’s Blair House summit on health care, Feb. 25:

Look, we agree on the problem here. And the problem is health inflation is driving us off of a fiscal cliff.

Mr. President, you said health-care reform is budget reform. You’re right. We agree with that. Medicare, right now, has a $38 trillion unfunded liability. That’s $38 trillion in empty promises to my parents’ generation, our generation, our kids’ generation. Medicaid’s growing at 21 percent each year. It’s suffocating states’ budgets. It’s adding trillions in obligations that we have no means to pay for . . .

Now, you’re right to frame the debate on cost and health inflation. And in September, when you spoke to us in the well of the House, you basically said—and I totally agree with this—I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits either now or in the future.

Since the Congressional Budget Office can’t score your bill, because it doesn’t have sufficient detail, but it tracks very similar to the Senate bill, I want to unpack the Senate score a little bit.

And if you take a look at the CBO analysis—analysis from your chief actuary—I think it’s very revealing. This bill does not control costs. This bill does not reduce deficits. Instead, this bill adds a new health-care entitlement at a time when we have no idea how to pay for the entitlements we already have.

Now let me go through why I say that. The majority leader said the bill scores as reducing the deficit $131 billion over the next 10 years. First, a little bit about CBO. I work with them every single day—very good people, great professionals. They do their jobs well. But their job is to score what is placed in front of them. And what has been placed in front of them is a bill that is full of gimmicks and smoke-and-mirrors.

Now, what do I mean when I say that? Well, first off, the bill has 10 years of tax increases, about half a trillion dollars, with 10 years of Medicare cuts, about half a trillion dollars, to pay for six years of spending.

Now, what’s the true 10-year cost of this bill in 10 years? That’s $2.3 trillion.

[The Senate bill] does [a] couple of other things. It takes $52 billion in higher Social Security tax revenues and counts them as offsets. But that’s really reserved for Social Security. So either we’re double-counting them or we don’t intend on paying those Social Security benefits.

It takes $72 billion and claims money from the CLASS Act. That’s the long-term care insurance program. It takes the money from premiums that are designed for that benefit and instead counts them as offsets.

The Senate Budget Committee chairman [Kent Conrad] said that this is a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.

Now, when you take a look at the Medicare cuts, what this bill essentially does [is treat] Medicare like a piggy bank. It raids a half a trillion dollars out of Medicare, not to shore up Medicare solvency, but to spend on this new government program.

. . . [A]ccording to the chief actuary of Medicare . . . as much as 20 percent of Medicare’s providers will either go out of business or will have to stop seeing Medicare beneficiaries. Millions of seniors . . . who have chosen Medicare Advantage will lose the coverage that they now enjoy.

You can’t say that you’re using this money to either extend Medicare solvency and also offset the cost of this new program. That’s double counting.

And so when you take a look at all of this; when you strip out the double-counting and what I would call these gimmicks, the full 10-year cost of the bill has a $460 billion deficit. The second 10-year cost of this bill has a $1.4 trillion deficit.

. . . [P]robably the most cynical gimmick in this bill is something that we all probably agree on. We don’t think we should cut doctors [annual federal reimbursements] 21 percent next year. We’ve stopped those cuts from occurring every year for the last seven years.

We all call this, here in Washington, the doc fix. Well, the doc fix, according to your numbers, costs $371 billion. It was in the first iteration of all of these bills, but because it was a big price tag and it made the score look bad, made it look like a deficit . . . that provision was taken out, and it’s been going on in stand-alone legislation. But ignoring these costs does not remove them from the backs of taxpayers. Hiding spending does not reduce spending. And so when you take a look at all of this, it just doesn’t add up.

. . . I’ll finish with the cost curve. Are we bending the cost curve down or are we bending the cost curve up?

Well, if you look at your own chief actuary at Medicare, we’re bending it up. He’s claiming that we’re going up $222 billion, adding more to the unsustainable fiscal situation we have.

And so, when you take a look at this, it’s really deeper than the deficits or the budget gimmicks or the actuarial analysis. There really is a difference between us.

. . . [W]e’ve been talking about how much we agree on different issues, but there really is a difference between us. And it’s basically this. We don’t think the government should be in control of all of this. We want people to be in control. And that, at the end of the day, is the big difference.

Now, we’ve offered lots of ideas all last year, all this year. Because we agree the status quo is unsustainable. It’s got to get fixed.

It’s bankrupting families. It’s bankrupting our government. It’s hurting families with pre-existing conditions. We all want to fix this.

But we don’t think that this is the . . . the solution. And all of the analysis we get proves that point.

Now, I’ll just simply say this. . . . [W]e are all representatives of the American people. We all do town hall meetings. We all talk to our constituents. And I’ve got to tell you, the American people are engaged. And if you think they want a government takeover of health care, I would respectfully submit you’re not listening to them.

So what we simply want to do is start over, work on a clean-sheeted paper, move through these issues, step by step, and fix them, and bring down health-care costs and not raise them. And that’s basically the point.

Obama Urges Straight Up-or-Down Vote on Constitution
by Scott Ott for ScrappleFace
(News Fairly Unbalanced.  We Report.  You Decipher)

(2010-03-04) — In an effort to break through bipartisan opposition and public discontent with his latest health insurance reform proposal, President Barack Obama today called on the Senate to “take a final, straight up-or-down vote on the U.S. Constitution.”

“The real obstacle to approval of my health care reform plan is this ancient charter of negative liberties that says what the states and the federal government can’t do to you,” President Obama said, while standing among a group of physicians dressed in white lab coats and fellow constitutional scholars in white powdered wigs.

While the president didn’t use the word ‘reconciliation’ — a parliamentary maneuver allowing majority party leaders to pass bills without tiresome and time-consuming debate — he made his intentions clear.

“The Constitution deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote that the Bush tax cuts received,” Mr. Obama said. “Once we break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, we’ll have no problem passing this historic health reform legislation.”

The president assured members of Congress that, “the American people expect us to lead”, and that few would miss the nation’s governing charter when it’s gone.

“It’s not like they have time to read the Constitution or the Declaration anyway,” he added, “what with all the great new shows on TV, and funny stuff on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.”

That mantra of change is based upon the presumptuous worship of human reason, requiring relentless destruction of the social customs and institutions that constituted Western Christian civilization, in the hubristic faith that intellectuals can perfect human nature and society. 

Liberal-progressive ideology that dominates today’s Democrat/Socialist Party necessarily denies our Creator God, substituting materialistic causes within our physical world.  Darwinian evolutionary doctrine, along with the Marxism that so happily grasped Darwinism as proof of its political materialism, are direct outgrowths of French Revolutionary ideology.  And they are fundamental constituents of today’s liberal-progressive ideology.

For a fuller exposition of that proposition, read Liberalism and the Search for the Ground: Another Visit with Eric Voegelin in the Brussels Journal.

See also Gnostic Education, an earlier post on this website that summarizes Professor Voegelin’s characterization of modern gnosticism, as well as its implementation in the educational policies espoused by President Obama’s close friends and political advisors Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

• FEBRUARY 8, 2010, 6:59 P.M. ET
How the Plaintiffs Bar Bought the Senate
Citizens Unitedmight break its political stranglehold.

By JAMES R. COPLAND
The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to permit independent campaign expenditures by corporations has led to a good deal of hysteria about money and influence in politics.

But for those, like me, who view factions as inherent in democracy, the decision was welcome. Labyrinthine campaign-finance laws serve mainly to entrench incumbents and empower those special interests either exempted from regulation (i.e., the institutional media) or best able to navigate the maze of rules. Among the latter group, no lobby has been more empowered than the legal profession—specifically the trial lawyers.

After the Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision affirmed the constitutionality of dollar limits on campaign donations to candidates, plaintiffs attorneys realized they could work within the new rules to increase their political influence. Three years later, the plaintiffs bar set up the Attorneys Congressional Campaign Trust. Its successor organizations have given $33 million in political action committee (PAC) donations to federal campaigns since 1990, according to data gathered by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).

These PAC contributions only scratch the surface. Contribution limits favor those best able to “bundle” donations. The plaintiffs bar, with thousands of well-heeled members willing to write $2,000 checks, is well-situated to play this game. While corporations’ interests are dispersed among hosts of competing tax and regulatory concerns, the trial lawyers have a focused cause: maintaining the lawsuit industry and expanding legal liability rules that lead to more lawsuits.

Since 1990, the sums donated to federal political candidates by lawyers—excluding lobbyists—exceed $1 billion, according to CRP. Lawyers as a group have given more to federal candidates than any other industry or profession. Their ability to keep tort reform out of the health-care reform bills is unsurprising: Congressional campaign contributions by lawyers in the last election cycle were about $25 million more than the combined total of political donations from doctors, pharmaceutical companies, HMOs, hospitals and nursing homes.

While some of these campaign donations come from defense lawyers (who also profit from the litigation status quo) giving by plaintiffs attorneys is far higher per lawyer (16 to 120 times greater, depending on the firm, according to Manhattan Institute estimates), and more tightly focused. Over the current six-year senatorial election cycle, four of the top seven donors to the campaign committee and leadership PAC of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) were plaintiffs firms. Plaintiffs firms were the top two donors to Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D., Ill.).

The first piece of legislation signed by President Obama—the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009—gutted statutes of limitation in employment lawsuits. The first legislative triumph for new Sen. Al Franken (D., Minn.), an amendment to the defense appropriations bill, foreclosed employment arbitration clauses for federal contractors.

Pennsylvania’s Sen. Arlen Specter, now a Democrat, is a longtime trial-bar ally. Mr. Specter has introduced one bill to facilitate more legal fishing expeditions against corporate defendants, by loosening legal requirements for filing baseless claims. He’s introduced another bill to authorize more securities class-action shakedowns by allowing lawyers to sue companies that are customers or suppliers of other companies alleged to have misled shareholders. And he’s introduced still another bill to cut the plaintiffs bar a fat $1.6 billion tax break by allowing the immediate expensing of contingency-fee-litigation expenses. Mr. Specter and his trial-lawyer allies hope to ram these bills through Congress before the November elections.
The late Fred Baron, a prominent Texas asbestos lawyer, liked to boast about the trial bar’s political influence. In 2002, he reacted to a Wall Street Journal editorial that claimed the plaintiffs bar was “all but running the Senate” by saying, “I really, strongly disagree with that. Particularly the ‘all but.’”

Perhaps Citizens United will help to break the trial-attorney stranglehold on national politics through its ownership of Congressional Democrats. For now, the unheralded story of the 111th Congress is how much the current Senate is living up to Baron’s assessment.

Mr. Copland is the director of the Center for Legal Policy at the Manhattan Institute and author of its new report, “Trial Lawyers, Inc.: K Street” (http://www.triallawyersinc.com)

This is a reprint of an essay posted on this website five years ago, on January 26, 2005.  It is timely because of the strangling influence today of labor unions that drove GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and the public employees unions that control state budgets and are pushing big-union states like California, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut toward bankruptcy. 

Many people, even conservatives, will be much offended by the characterization of labor unions as socialistic shock troops.  And it is true that labor unions have improved the lot of their members, bringing factory and mining employees into the economic middle class.

It’s not the improved lives of union members, however, that is the evil necessarily associated with unionism.  It’s both the fact that improvement of union member status is a transfer payment from non-union employees and consumers that impels inflation, and that government regulatory involvement is essential to the process of union extortion.

Let’s stipulate in unions’ favor, however, that absent the extortionate tactics of strikes and boycotts (and in earlier days, violence ranging from physical assault to property destruction and murder), abetted by support from politicians seeking to buy union votes, wages and working conditions of labor might have remained very dismal.  In short, there was a true dilemma: reduce individualism and initiative via collectivization of government power, or see labor’s wages ground down to rock bottom.

Several factors in the United States determined the process.  After the industrial revolution spread from England to the United States in the 1820s, there was pressure to expand markets , both domestically and internationally, because building mills and machinery required a large amount of capital funds that had to be recaptured out of growing sales and profits.  The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, connected New York City with the vast farmlands and potential market of the Midwest via the Great Lakes, and made New York City the largest and most important seaport and financial center in the United States.  Cyrus McCormick and others developed by 1834 the modern reaper and other mechanical farming equipment that vastly increased the productivity of farm labor, enabling the Midwest to become the food supplier for the growing East Coast cities.  Then the expansion of railroads, especially after the Civil War in the 1860s, facilitated rapid expansion westward toward California. 

In the huge growth of manufacturing and distribution capacity after the Civil War, industrialists, typified by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, had one guiding principle to business success: continually to reduce unit costs; get the labor, capital equipment, and transportation costs, in Carnegie’s case, per ton of steel, to the lowest possible level.  Make manufactured goods as cheap and plentiful as possible, so that everyone could afford them.

What facilitated low wages more than anything else was the tsunami of immigration that brought more than 20 million poorly educated, non-English-speaking people here from southern and eastern Europe.  Big industry pushed for liberal immigration policies, because of the insatiable demand for labor to mine coal, produce coke and steel, build railroads, and to manufacture the products needed for the burgeoning United States.

Immigrants from Continental Europe, who by the 1870s greatly outnumbered those from the British Isles, came from a social and political environment quite unlike the individualism and constitutional order of England and the United States.  Not all of them were believers in socialism, but most of them viewed property owners as an oppressive aristocracy.  Thus was laid the ground work for later radical labor union and political activity.

In England in the 1820s the trade union movement became much more powerful than was to be the case in the United States for another century.  English trade unions became organized forces agitating for Reform acts to enlarge the voting franchise, which was not an issue here.  From earliest colonial times, more than 90 percent of all adult males were enfranchised to vote in local elections.

In the United States, the preponderance of union activity was among the skilled crafts.  Not until 1880 was there a movement (the Knights of Labor) to organize all of labor into one gigantic union.  The Knights collapsed after several unsuccessful strikes.  At about the same time the predecessor of the American Federation of Labor (AF of L) gathered force, built entirely around crafts unions.  Unlike the British trade unions or the Knights of Labor, the crafts unions had no larger social or political ambitions; they wanted only collective bargaining with individual companies over wages and hours.  There was no significant element of socialist or anarchistic ideology involved.  When early leader Samuel Gompers was asked the objectives of labor, he famously replied, “More.”

The prominent exception was the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W., or “wobblies"), who were political radicals intent upon destroying private ownership and imposing industrial control by workers’ councils.  They engaged in bombing, assassination, and property destruction.  These radicals captured the imagination of east coast intellectuals, California radical politicians, and New York’s Greenwich Village literati.  One of the heroic background figures in Eugene O’Neil’s celebrated play “The Iceman Cometh” is an I.W. W. anarchist.  They were the force behind propagandizing the Sacco-Vanzetti cases in Massachusetts into a world-wide socialist cause, much as the liberal-socialists did with regard to our invasion of Iraq (for details on this vastly overblown case, see TThe Decline of Western Civilization: Explanatory Notes - Part Four).

Between 1900 and the 1914 outbreak of World War I, crafts union membership roughly tripled, to more than 2.5 million.  But there was little unionization among the big manufacturing industries.

The socialization of the union movement came with the New Deal after 1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt took office.  The President had campaigned on the promise to introduce state planning, modeled upon Mussolini’s Fascist Italy and Stalin’s Soviet Union.  His “Brains Trust” of university professors provided the socialistic concepts that were enacted into new Deal legislative programs. 

The tenor of the “Brains Trust” thinking was exemplified by one of its prominent members, Rexford Guy Tugwell, a Columbia University economics professor.  In a 1932 essay, “The Principle of Planning and the Institution of Laissez Faire,” he wrote:

“...The disasters of recent years have caused us to ask again how the ancient paradox of business - conflict to produce order - can be resolved; the interest of the liberals among us in the institutions of the new Russia of the Soviets, spreading gradually among puzzled business men, has created wide popular interest in “planning” as a possible refuge from persistent insecurity...... Most of those who say so easily that this is our way out do not, I am convinced, understand that fundamental changes of attitude, new disciplines, revised legal structures, unaccustomed limitations on activity, are all necessary if we are to plan.  This amounts, in fact, to the abandonment, finally, of laissez faire.  It amounts, practically, to the abolition of “business.”.....But it would certainly be one of the characteristics of any planned economy that the few who fare so well as things are now. would be required to give up nearly all of the exclusive perquisites that they have come to consider theirs of right, and that these should be in some sense socialized..... Furthermore we shall have to progress sufficiently far in elementary realism to recognize that only the federal area, and often not even that, is large enough to be coextensive with modern industry; and that consequently the states are wholly ineffective instruments for control.

“....Planning also implies adjustment of production to consumption; and there is no way of accomplishing this except through a control of prices and of profit margins.... New industries will not just happen as the automobile industry did; they will have to be foreseen, to be argued for, to seem probably desirable features of the whole economy before they can be entered upon....”

Another prominent New Dealer was Harvard lawyer David E. Lilienthal, appointed by President Roosevelt to head the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).  In “TVA: Democracy on the March,” he wrote:

“This is admittedly a grave defect of planning by the businessman.  For his legitimate object, namely a profitable business, is not necessarily consistent with the object of society, that is, a prosperous and happy people..... Here is the life principle of the democratic process - an awakening in the whole people of a sense of this common moral purpose.  Not one goal, but a direction.  Not one plan, once and for all, but the conscious selection by the people of successive plans.”

Mr. Lilienthal did his best for “a prosperous and happy people.” TVA was certainly not businesslike; it never made a profit, despite a Federally-granted monopoly in its geographic area, the benefits of below-market interest rates on debt, and without the necessity facing private businesses to amortize capital costs of its huge hydroelectric dams, generators, and power-distribution lines.  It has always survived only on annual supplemental appropriations in the Federal budget.  TVA is a true Soviet planning “miracle;” a state enterprise that could never survive in the real world on its own.

But, how to get from the theoretical ideas of planners to implementation in the real world?

Politically and economically, the New Deal’s answer was mass organization of labor, which would both get out the voters for liberal-socialism, bringing traditionalist Congressmen to heel, and would be powerful enough, with Federal backing, to force big business to its financial knees.

President Roosevelt therefore made labor unions central to the New Deal.  John T. Flynn, an economist and syndicated columnist at the time, described it this way in “The Roosevelt Myth:”

“There were men around the President at this time who saw the tremendous possibilities of organizing labor as a political force.  They knew the history of the labor movement in England, which had grown so great that it completely wiped out the old Liberal party as a political force.  They believed that something like that could be done in America and they wanted the President to use his vast powers and great funds to encourage the formation of labor into a great political force.  To do this it was necessary to enlarge the field of labor organization.”

Between 1935 and 1938, workers in mass-production industries like automobile manufacturing were organized into the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), of which the auto workers’ union was run by members of the Communist Party, Walter and Victor Reuther.  With the backing of the New Deal, they engaged in sit-down strikes and other tactics to shut down production entirely and to take physical control of business facilities for weeks at a time.  Their tactics were legitimated by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, popularly known as the Wagner Act. 

This legislation made socialized control of labor into a Federal policy.  One of the New Deal’s primary aims was to restore full employment, and what better mechanism to employ than organized labor, newly equipped with Federal mandates that business bargain on union terms, with a Labor Relations Board eager to punish businesses that got out of line.

John L. Lewis, head of the coal miners union and chairman of the CIO, delivered a radio address in July, 1936, titled “Industrial Democracy in Steel.” The occasion was a series of militant strikes to organize the steel industry.  Declaring war on the steel industry and Wall Street, Lewis said,

“He is a mad man or a fool who believes that this river of human sentiment, flowing as it does from the hearts of these thirty millions, who with their dependents constitute two-thirds of the population of the United States of America, can be dammed or impounded by the erection of arbitrary barriers of restraint.  Such barriers, whether they be instrumentalities of corporate control, financial intrigue or judicial interdict, will burst asunder and inevitably destroy the pernicious forces which attempt to create them.... No greater truth, of present day significance, was ever stated by a President of the United States, than the declaration made by President Roosevelt in his speech at Franklin Field to the effect that America was really ruled by an economic dictatorship which must be eliminated before the democratic and economic welfare of all classes of our people can be fully realized.”

Whereas the Department of Labor in earlier administrations had been little more than a statistics gathering office, FDR’s Labor Secretary Frances Perkins became one of the most important and powerful counsellors in the New Deal Cabinet.  Miss Perkins was a Bostonian and a graduate of Mt. Holyoke College, as well as one of the young women trained as socialists by Jane Addams at Hull House, the Chicago settlement house.  Her first act upon becoming Secretary of Labor was to disband the committee charged with monitoring illegal aliens who were Bolshevik agents.  According to an admiring 1934 book, “The New Dealers,” one of her top priorities was to cause workers’ wages to replace dividends to shareholders.

Miss Perkins was not favorably disposed toward most of the old line labor union leaders who focused on simply higher wages and fewer hours.  She wanted far-reaching structural changes in business and society, in keeping with her faith in secular socialism as the route to earthly perfection.  She was particularly close to Sidney Hillman, head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union, one of the champions of mass industrial unions.

Shortly before the mass-industries CIO split from the old American Federation of Labor (AF of L) crafts union in 1936, the American Communist Party was ordered by Moscow to infiltrate the AF of L in order to work with the newly organized CIO.  The purpose was to use the CIO faction to foment political revolution.  After the split from the AF of L, the CIO sought help in organizing and recruiting workers.  They found it in the Trade Union Unity League, an arm of the American Communist Party.  Sidney Hillman was not a Communist, but he had no scruples about accepting help from the Communist Party.  President Roosevelt, though aware of the connection, seemed to be concerned only about organizing votes for the Democratic Party.

By 1939, the largest labor unions were in the CIO, which was effectively directed from the White House via Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and her buddy Sidney Hillman.

Hillman became, in effect, the voice of labor within the Roosevelt administration.  By 1944, when President Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented fourth term, he was too sick even to appear at the Democratic Party convention.  When party leaders went to his bedside to ask for guidance in selecting a vice-presidential running mate, Roosevelt informed them that the choice had to be cleared first with Sidney Hillman.

POSTSCRIPT:  By the late 1950s, when Japanese and German manufacturers began penetrating the American market with steel, TV sets, electrical appliances, automobiles, and heavy equipment, labor unions had inflated the wages and benefits of unskilled labor to such heights that American manufacturers were unable to compete.  The devastation was so complete that, by the late 1970s, the Midwestern industrial heartland had become known as “the rust bowl” because of the the abandoned factories that had become the most prominent features of the landscape. 

Obama Doesn’t Care About Health Care Reform
By Robert Good
 
 
Obama doesn’t even care about the well-being of the Democratic Party.  He urges the Democrats on as they put their majorities at risk trying to pass a God-awful bill that the American public doesn’t want.  Comedians have even joked that he is some kind of secret agent of the Republicans.
 
What’s going on?  Obama has bigger fish to fry.
 
While the country has been transfixed by the Congressional and media circus, the action, folks, is elsewhere—and Obama has been getting a lot done.   
 
Ordering KSM tried in federal court.
Extending Miranda rights to the underwear bomber.
Investigating CIA agents who are trying to protect America against Islamic terrorists.
Tasking the CIA with tracking global warming.
Halting construction of America’s missile defense shield.
Cancelling production of the F-22.  (Russia is bringing out its version, by the way.)
Allowing Iran the time it needs to finish developing nuclear weapons.
 
Even if you have not been paying much attention to the news, you may have noticed some of these decisions, and other decisions like them, that Obama has made.  Odd decisions, aren’t they?
 
Or perhaps not.
 
A government take-over of health care and a massive tax on energy to “stop global warming”  may be stalled in Congress, but you have to admit that these loud debates certainly do keep the liberals aroused, the media busy and the country focused on the mess in Congress. 
 
I’ve heard people ask how Obama could spend 20 years in Rev. Wright’s “God damn America” church.  Perhaps that is not the question people need to be asking. 
 
Perhaps the right question is: what if Obama actually shares Rev. Wright’s feelings about America?  What would he do?