Exactly so, 999! There is a really disgusting deliberate effort these days to re-write history for political purposes.

Case in point:   I was quite young, but awake and alert during FDR's administration. When I was a toddler, it was FDR's "New Deal," initiating programs such as the WPA and the CCC that put my father back to work. He was a professional man, licensed in the state of Washington, but we were living in California at the time. Dad was unable to practice his profession in that state, so he had to take other work, and there wasn't any! He wound up doing "pick and shovel" work on a road building crew—but it kept us eating and paying the rent! A couple of years later, he got a pretty good job working for the California Department of Agriculture (also receiving New Deal funding), and he was able to save enough so we could return to Seattle and he could go to work at his real job.

And—although there was a mini-dip in around 1937, the Great Depression was essentially over.

What FDR, with his "New Deal," had done was create jobs with his "alphabet soup agencies" and put money in the pockets of people who had to spend it right away on essentials such as food and rent, thus returning money to circulate in the economy. He also initiated a number of regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, to ride herd on Wall Street and curb the kind of hanky-panky that brought about the Great Depression in the first place.

While all this was going on, the Republicans were screaming their heads off, accusing FDR of being a "Socialist" or a "Communist" and, in general, shitting themselves down both pantlegs.

And contrary to what some people claim, FDR was trying to keep us out of the wars in Europe and Asia, but at the same time, supply aid to beleaguered countries like England and China. Japan's big bitch with the United States was that the U. S. put an embargo on our shipping war materiel to Japan, which they would then turn around and use on the Chinese (remember the "rape of Nanking?"). Japan sent a diplomatic mission to Washington, D. C., and while negotiations were going on, Japan sucker-punched us at Pearl Harbor.

I get really disgusted at the people who claim that Roosevelt got the country out of the Great Depression by starting World War II!!

World War II was well under way before the U. S. was drawn into it by being attacked.

("But FDR provoked the Japanese to attack us!" Yes, by refusing to sell them materials that they would then turn into weapons to use on China! The Japanese were kinda pissed about that.)

Other aspects of the New Deal were such things as Social Security, so people who were too old to work would not have to go to "poor houses" or "poor farms" (there were such things!) and could live out their lives with a measure of security.

The Republicans have been gnashing their teeth over the New Deal all this time. And Reagan was one of the first to start systematically dismantling it by doing such things as appointing Wall Street wonks to the SEC and people from the pharmaceutical companies to the Food and Drug Administration. Systematically, as the cliché has it, by "putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop." And Bush started a move to "privatize" Social Security" so the Wall Street bunch could get their meat-hooks onto it.

What the country needs right now is someone like FDR. He may have been in a wheelchair from polio, but he had more backbone that a whole regiment of the current sorry batch of Democrats.

I had high hopes of Obama, but—

(Just read Stringsinger's post before posting this, and he's got the right of it.)

If I were younger, I would move to one of the more civilized countries. Probably one on of the Scandinavian countries. They have all this stuff sorted out, and lo! it works! No extremely rich, no one is living in poverty, excellent single-payer health care for all, universal education, the elderly can live out their years in security and comfort--and the Vikings are long gone! They are not trying to plunder and dominate the rest of the world like some countries I could name. And on a "happiness and contentment" index of the citizenry, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark are right at the top of the list.

"Oh, but they're Socialist!!"

Oh, really? Well that's a helluva lot better than our current direction:   we're hurtling toward Corporate Feudalism.

(Grump! Snarl! Growl! Hiss!)

Don Firth