Much like how, if you decided that boots are actually a type of hat, then fedora’s are actually shoes.

Did Carmen Miranda wear fruit?

January 26, 2008 at 7:13

The fact is, your bias against reality will cost you readers. Here in the Heartland, we love freedom our president and our troops, unlike you traiters.”

I don’t read the comments here very often. Is the non-spelling moron quoted above a resident troll?

But.. so I’ve read it, and I really have only one question. Can’t you call Goldberg something else than Pantload?

“You just blew my mind.”

Reloading before posting might be a good idea.

Sorry, Scott, if my post rankles, but it’s how I read the review. After looking a bit closer at the source, I can see that it may have been a more honest attempt to distance a somewhat more thoughtful brand of old school conservatism from the painful assault on logic that the movement has become. It still doesn’t quite work for me, but that’s hardly surprising, me being me.

I had a better post, but Firefox ate it, and my recall just ain’t what it used to be.

However, this gave me an idea: a letter-writing campaign, in which we try to slip emails through Goldberg’s net, praising his books in the most ludicrous yet believable way possible, hoping that he publishes it, and then later, at some point, we can all take credit for contributions.

To work! May we revel in fake wingnuttitude!

or just needs to point out that he, personally, is such a flaming authoritarian that even fascism is not far enough to the right to suit his tastes .

Now that I’ve gotten that witty comment off my chest, I’ll go back and actually read HTML’s latest tome. With a yellow highlighter, no less.

Barton Bernstein made a well-supported argument to this end in the ’60s.

And when you contrast FDR’s policies with the truly radical ones of the early 1930s — Long, Sinclair, Townsend, Coughlin, etc. etc. — it’s easier to appreciate that he humanized the laissez-faire capitalism of the 1920s and allowed it to survive, rather than have it overthrown by a revolution from below.

My fellow Brooklynite, Dr. Howard Zinn, does this explicitly. He also does a great job of describing “Self-Help in Hard Times”, some of which dadanarchist has also done well here.

They are much more willing to intervene in a fundamentally un-laissez faire manner – but never for the sake of helping the people, as FDR intended, but solely for the sake of preserving their almost-fetishistic belief in the infallibility of markets.

That’s the defining contradiction of the modern ‘conservative’ (i.e. nihilisticly reactionary crypto-fascist) movement. They perform all manner of economic distortions, from wasteful ‘abstinence-only education’ to ‘faith-based’ government in general, and all the way to needless war, whilst screaming about how great the ‘free’ market is when it hurts the poor. Wingnut welfare is the private expression of this economic meddling, rewarding the worthless for being closed-minded. Their production of Mr. Goldberg and his turdload of a book is the inevitable, degraded outcome of their wingnut welfare policies. This book is the perfect vehicle for us to stick it to their fascistic tendencies. Like everything else they do, it has the opposite effect of what they intended, but they lack the honesty to admit this. Modern neocon wingnuttery is ultimately self-destructive, but too destructive overall to allow us to let it burn out naturally. Flaming this bag of crap ‘book’ is a great way to go. Keep piling on the Goldberg posts!

In this regard I disagree with Appleman somewhat – the people did begin to organize to save themselves, and this self-organization scared the shit out of many members of the middle and business classes.

When I was younger and a more doctrinaire Marxist, I wrote a long paper on the Unemployed People’s movement in Seattle in the years immediately following the 1929 crash. It wasn’t spectacular, but I gleaned from my research some interesting observations on the genesis of the New Deal.

But let me state that the example of Washington can’t be extrapolated out to the rest of the country.

Each winter, beginning with 1930-31 and up into FDR’s inauguration were increasingly grim. Annoyed by the treatment (notably, that poverty was a moral failing of the individual) meted out by charity groups like the Salvation Army (or Starvation Army, as Orwell quipped) and just to get by, people began to organize in Seattle. Ex-Wobblies, members of the De Leon wing of the Socialist party, trade unionists and some Communists began to spontaneously organize neighborhood councils to deal with hunger, evictions, distribution of firewood, labour bourses and other forms of grassroots organizing.

They collected – like Food Not Bombs today – food that had been discarded by restaurants and groceries and set up food kitchens as well as rationed pantries to distribute food to the unemployed. They collected firewood, coal and other means for heating. They actively resisted evictions. They found what few jobs they could and tried to distribute them to the benefit of the maximum number of people. Eventually, the local groups federated into a city, and eventually, country-wide organization.

At first most business people were indifferent, though annoyed by the resistance to evictions as violating the sacrosanct law of property. However, in late 1931 the Unemployed Councils first captured a number of seats on the City Council, and then began to talk about opening up their own workshops and factories, by occupying abandoned factories and producing for themselves in collectives (a la Argentina post-2001). They also spoke of diverting city funds to buying food to feed the population. More troubling still, they formed alliances with hard-luck farmers east of the Cascades, to barter labor and manufactured goods from the cities, in exchange for produce. There was discussion of establishing a state-wide council of workers and farmers. Needless to say, if you were middle-class, things were starting to get scary. In 1932, the Secretary of Education (if I remember correctly) made a joke at a dinner party where he asked god to bless the 47 states and the People’s Republic of Washington.

So what happened? Well, two forces, from the radical left and the Democratic Party broke up this experiment in economic democracy.

First, Communist militants involved in the movement, who had risen to positions of influence in the largest local councils, with directions from the national executive, changed the direction of the Unemployed Councils from one of mutual aid and self-help to political protest. Less energy was invested in gathering necessities, forming alliances, or establishing parallel economic institutions, and more was directed to applying direct political pressure. The CP had had some success with this in the New York City unemployed movement. In Seattle it had the opposite effect. Moderate socialists and the anarchist-minded ex-Wobblies either quit or were purged. Large amounts of the membership followed them out of the organization. The councils were reduced to a Communist militant hardcore.

Second, by this time, New Deal funds had begun to flow into local and state coffers, and professional bureaucrats of charity took over. Money was poured into the traditional organizations like the Salvation Army and other professional and religious charities to distribute food. The government bought food from the farmers, severing the link between the councils and hard-up farmers. And of course money became available in an effort to put people back to work. The Seattle bourgeoisie was, at least at first, happy to have the government take on charity operations if it meant that councils would dissolve and the talk of revolution, and bad memories of 1919 General Strike, could be put to bed.

Anyway, that’s my little tale of the Great Depression and New Deal.

Hoover, it seemed to me, by his liberal orthodoxy was a greater danger to the continued existence of capitalism than FDR and his Keynesian willingness to fiddle around with the economy. If Hoover’s approach had persisted, things like the Seattle Unemployed Councils would have continued to grow and spread.

I always thought the problem with modern conservatism was that they had learned too much from the case of FDR and Hoover. They are much more willing to intervene in a fundamentally un-laissez faire manner – but never for the sake of helping the people, as FDR intended, but solely for the sake of preserving their almost-fetishistic belief in the infallibility of markets.

It’s tempting to think of how history would have flowed if Hoover had won his later battle with FDR; our modern analysis shows the New Deal as having little effect on the Depression, with economic output falling in the late 1930s. My grandmother, who had a college degree from Drexel, always credited FDR with stopping a totalitarian revolution in the United States, by giving people hope. We’ll never know, but thinking about these thinks has value. All of it derived from the doughiest pantload of a book! We mock the wingnuts best when we learn from their folly.