In 1929 during Republican, Herbert Hoover’s administration, the stock market crashed - much like under the Bush Administration - starting the Great Depression, but back then there was no Barack Obama to come to the rescue or mitigate the damage early on. So in spite of the fact that by 1933 the unemployment rate was at 33.3% with 16 million people out of work, the Republican, Herbert Hoover, just sat, thinking that the economy would eventually rejuvenate itself. Much like the Republicans of today, Hoover and his Republican Party had absolutely no compassion for either the plight of the American people, or America’s veterans who had put their lives on the line for this country.
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During Hoover's administration, 15,000 WWI veterans marched on Washington demanding that they be paid what they were owed by the government. Hoover responded by calling in federal troops to throw these ex-servicemen off government property.
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The conditions were horrific during the Great Depression. There was no such thing as Social Security, so when a person became too old or weak to work and had no income, they had to depend on their children for support. That meant instead of a husband and wife only having to support themselves and their children, which was tough enough during those times, they also had to support their parents. So three generations of a family could be living in one household - and in many cases, the parents of both the husband, and the wife, were living with the family.
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But that began to change during the Great Depression when Democratic President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, came out against the corporations and to the aid of the poor with his "New Deal for the American People." With the “New Deal,” Democrats ushered in workers’ rights. They created Social Security so the elderly wouldn't have to go to the "Poor House" or become a burden on their children when they became too old to work.
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The Democrats also created unemployment insurance so people would have something to fall back on if they lost their jobs, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set rules of conduct for corporations that allowed workers to work with some semblance of dignity. The new law set a minimum wage, overtime pay, child labor standards, and many other regulations protecting workers.
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Prior to the FLSA corporations could work employees for as many hours as they liked, and they often set wages so low that families had to send their children to work just to survive - and many of those children were maimed or killed because they had to work under the most horrific conditions, such as in coal mines and the like.
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In addition, there was no such thing as Medicare or Medicaid, so when one of grandparents became ill the medical costs would devastate the entire family. These conditions kept lower and middle-class families in such dire need of funds that they had to accept whatever crumbs the business community chose to throw at them - and remember, at that time there was no Fair Labor Standards Act or unions to protect a worker’s rights, or a minimum wage, so businesses could treat the worker anyway they wanted, and pay them whatever they wanted.
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They could work an employee 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no overtime, and no paid vacation. In addition, since there were no child labor laws, if your boss didn’t think you were being productive enough, he could insist that you bring your children in (as young as 9 years old) to assist you if you wanted to keep your job. Then if you protested, he could fire you on the spot, in which case, your entire family - sick grandparents and all - would be thrown out on the street, because there was no such thing as unemployment insurance.
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As a result, in many cases the entire family, including the children, had to work long, hard hours under sweatshop-like conditions in coal mines and the like, which in many cases led to the death and/or maiming of young children. So in a very real sense, the Great Depression era workers lived under a form of slavery - the one difference was, they had to go out and find their own housing.
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Think back to the "Little Rascals" we use to watch as kids, and how ragged they were, or the cartoons we use to watch, where a landlord would come to the door (always portrayed in a black suit) and would tell a begging and crying mother that she had one more day to come up with the rent or she and her family would be thrown out in the snow. That was an accurate portrayal of the way people lived in those days, and those are the conditions that the conservative Republican agenda would restore in America today, and as we speak they are well on their way to accomplishing. At this very moment the Republican majority in congress is trying their very best to take healthcare away from the poor and working class in order to finance a massive tax cut for the rich.
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Think about it - while the GOP comes up with various pretexts to explain their actions, they are oppose to the minimum wage, they would cut unemployment insurance, "modify" Social Security, they’re against Affordable healthcare, they’re leaving no stone unturned to abolish unions, they’re blocking every jobs bill that comes before them, and in spite of record corporate profits, their corporate cronies are sending jobs out of the country and keeping unemployment high until the American working class caves in and accepts a lower standard of living.
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Keeping unemployment high served a valuable and useful purpose, both back then, as it does today. The scarcity of jobs not only gives the rich business community leverage over the working class, but it keeps us divided and at one another's throats. In addition to that, today it provides an endless supply of young American men and women to be used as canon fodder for military adventurism. What do you expect them to do? We certainly can’t expect them to send
their children to foreign lands to die for the country.
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Dying for this country is no longer for the "rich and wellborn," that’s for the "little people." Then,
when your children come back home maimed and broken from their service to the country, the GOP has absolutely no compassion for them. Just like with Herbert Hoover, they call them deadbeats and a burden on the nation for having to beg for food stamps, and then throw them off the premises. And that’s in spite of the fact that when most of the GOP - like Dick ‘five-deferment’ Cheney, and Donald Trump, who also got five deferments - were called upon to serve the nation, they evaded the draft to avoid having to fight in Vietnam. The GOP only love our troops as long as they can carry a weapon. Yet, they're always waving the flag.
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That's why after President Roosevelt brought relief to the people with what Republicans refer to as “big government, socialist programs,” the Democratic Party began to become associated with the common man, and the Republican party embarked upon a single-minded mission that has lasted to this day, to reverse those "bleeding heart liberal" policies and return America to what had previously been the status quo - suffering and abuse.
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The True Conservative Philosophy
In order to understand the GOP’s true motivation, you have to understand the philosophy of the establishment conservative as oppose to the sanitized philosophy that they present to the American people. Alexander Hamilton was one of the founding father’s of fiscal conservatism. He said the following during the Federalist Convention of 1787:
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"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and wellborn, the other the mass of the people.... The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government."
Debates of the Federalist Convention (May 14-September 17, 1787).
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In short, Hamilton suggested that if you weren't "rich and wellborn," he didn’t think you should be able to either vote or hold office, and many people who control the GOP today are still of that mindset. So what many rank-and-file Republicans and social conservatives fail to understand is, they’re being used. The corporatist (or fiscal conservatives) don’t care any more about them than they do Blacks, Hispanics, women, or gays, and when they are done with them, they’re going to discard them like a soiled Tampon, because the GOP’s ultimate goal is to turn America into a corporate feudalist society and lower the American middle-class standard of living to conform to that of the global economy, where workers only make as much a week as many upper middle-class Americans spend on lunch per day - and that goes for whether you’re Black, White, liberal, or conservative. If you’re not "rich and wellborn," you’re the enemy. So contrary to popular belief, we're not in a race war - race is just being used as a
weapon of war - we're currently knee-deep in a class war, and the working class is losing badly.
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But since the majority of the founding fathers chose to establish a Democratic Republic as oppose to a Plutocracy as Alexander Hamilton advocated, those who were of his plutocratic mindset had to keep a low profile in order to preserve their political viability, but they continued to work to change the system to their liking through their wealth, political clout, and ultimately, their employment policies. That’s one of the things that led to the horrendous working conditions for the average American worker prior to and during the Great Depression, and the "Citizens United" decision by our conservative-led Supreme Court has sent us trotting right back down that road.
A "New Deal" For the American People
In 1933 - after 12 years of Republican governance, and 4 years into the Great Depression - the very aristocratic, but quintessential "bleeding heart liberal" Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was elected - and he walk through the door coming to the rescue of the American People, and setting a Democratic tradition in stone in the process. So you see, the Democratic Party was the party of the people long before that had anything to do with Civil Rights. It's just that when Civil Rights became an issue, the party remained true to its tradition and embraced the cause of the underdog.
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That tradition was firmly established by FDR during the Great Depression. As soon as he took office he immediately surrounded himself with a group of the finest minds in the country, including Columbia professors Adolph A. Berle, Jr., Rexford G. Tugwell, and Raymond Moley, known at the time as the "Brain Trust." After assembling these men and others he went about the business of developing a" New Deal" for the working class people of this country, who at that point, were starving in the street. So it says much about the cynical character of the GOP that they could take the American penchant for justice and human compassion and turn it into something to be frowned upon with disdain. That's not who we're supposed to be as a people, so by definition, the GOP attitude toward the common man, is un-American.
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The New Deal had two components - one to help the economy to recover from the effects of the Great Depression, and a second component to bring relief to the American people and insure that they would never be placed in a position of total destitution again. To help heal the economy Roosevelt created programs that regulated business, controlled inflation, and brought about price stabilization; to bring relief to the people, he created job programs (much like the ones the GOP is blocking today), signed The National Labor Relations Act which guaranteed workers the right to collective bargaining, and he created the Social Security Administration to guarantee workers some sort of income once they became too old or sick to work. He also signed the Fair Labor Standards Act which protected workers rights and set a minimum wage for workers.
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With his New Deal in place, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this "bleeding heart liberal," not only led this country out of the worst Republican generated crisis that this country had ever faced, but went on to lead the free world in victory over Hitler in WWII, and then ushered in the most sustained prosperity that the world has ever known.
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"In the 1944 election, during World War II, Roosevelt won a fourth term but suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died in office the following year. Thus, Franklin Roosevelt was the only President to have served more than two terms. Near the end of the 1944 campaign, Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of New York, announced support of an amendment to the Constitution that would limit future presidents to two terms. According to Dewey, "Four terms, or sixteen years, is the most dangerous threat to our freedom ever proposed" - Yeah, and it wasn’t working very well for the Republicans either.
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But as a direct result of their experience with the Republican Party, our grandparent’s generation - the generation that went through the Great Depression, fought WWII, and who we now refer to as "The Greatest Generation” - wouldn't let a Republican anywhere near the White House, and we're seeing why right now with Donald Trump. They re-elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt 4 times, and again, the Republicans had to push for a Constitution amendment to force term limits on the presidency just to get back into the running - and even then, they ended up getting Ike Eisenhower, who was a Republican in name only, and by today's standards would be considered a liberal. In 1957 he sent troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to desegregate Little Rock High School after Arkansas governor, Orval Faubus, blocked the entrance against the “Little Rock Nine,” and as his last act of office Ike warned America to beware of the military industrial complex.
The Republican Agenda And Strategy
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During Civil Rights Movement the Republican Party began to regain some traction as a result of literally millions of racist "Dixiecrats" migrating to the GOP. So the modern Republican Party is now a coalition of three separate constituencies with confluent interests. The first group is made up of traditional conservatives. These are highly patriotic Americans who believe in limited government, the primacy of the people over government, and fiscal responsibility. But the other two groups that have coalesced within the GOP are much more malevolent - international business interests (fiscal conservatives), and social conservatives (the social bigots).
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It is the former of these two, international business, that controls the GOP. It's largely made up of wealthy and single-minded individuals with huge amounts of monetary resources, and thus, political influence - and they use every bit of that leverage to manipulate what has become their citizen army - the social conservatives. These are the people who hate any and everybody who doesn’t look, think, and act like themselves.
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| SOCIAL BIGOTS |
The social conservatives are the people we see armed to the teeth at presidential speeches, disrupting town hall meetings, and fighting against their own interests. In short, these are the "Joe the Plumbers" of the world who are being deluded by corporatist propaganda. Also among their ranks are the diehard racists who are still fighting to promote a segregationist agenda. The GOP has found these people easy to manipulate by simply appealing to their emotions. This is currently Donald Trump's base.
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With the huge migration of social conservatives into it’s ranks, the leaders of the GOP formulated a new strategy - divide and conquer. They use their social conservative army to create anger and division among the working class, and that allows the GOP to attack popular safety-net programs by alleging that it’s being abuse by one group or another that the social bigots hate. Here’s an example of how that tactic works:
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Conservatives have taken the Democratic Party's strength and made it a political liability. First they took the party's penchant for being compassionate toward the plight of the American people and coined phrases such as "bleeding heart liberals" and "tax and spend Democrats." They then played on the frustration of the middle class by tying civil rights legislation, welfare, and crime into one neat bundle as the source of middle class woes; then they attributed all of these problems to what they called the Democrat's tendency to be " bleeding heart liberals." Then once the connection was made between minorities, welfare, crime, and the liberal agenda, it was just a matter of repeatedly hammering that message home.
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In addition, conservatives use such tactics as spitting out the word "liberal" as though they were saying rapist. In this way they not only implant a negative attitude toward liberalism in the mind of the voter, but it's said in such a way that the implication is made that it goes without saying that all the negative stereotyping of liberalism is true. In other words, their attitude seemed to suggest, "I could substantiate what I'm saying about liberals, but I don't think it's necessary since we all know what they're like." And since the GOP has been engaged in a brutal assault our educational system for the past 35 years, very few people know enough about past Republican atrocities, or the illustrious liberal tradition, to know the difference. So many of the electorate simply believe what they’re being told by FOX News, and they have absolutely no idea that they’re dancing with the Devil.
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Through these strategies conservatives accomplished three goals with one ingenious stroke - they defined minorities as slovenly criminals, they define liberal Democrats as "soft on crime," and they allowed themselves the freedom to place these thoughts in the American psyche without having to substantiate their facts. Moreover, they accomplish all this in every sound bite, and without seeming to be blatantly racist with the use of just one word, "liberal." In fact, conservatives have been so thorough in their disparagement of liberalism that at this point the word "liberal" is treated like vulgarity, and simply referred to as "the L word." And that is indeed ironic, considering what liberals have done for this country - and more likely than not, for the very grandparents of many of the most rabid liberal haters.
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That’s why we hear remarks from conservatives like, "Black people are wedded to the Democratic Party because they’re being bought with welfare checks," or that "Black people saw Obama as the Messiah." Such statements betray their ignorance, because they obviously have absolutely no knowledge of the Republican Party’s atrocious history, nor the parallel in history between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Hussein Obama - FDR save America from the Great Depression, and Barack Obama prevented a second one from happening. That's why Donald Trump and the Republicans are trying to undo everything that President Obama put into place and erase him from history, but it's not gonna work. In the end, they're just going to destroy themselves, because conservatives have a history of not being able to govern. They're only talent is in obstruction.
REAGANOMICS
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Supply- Side Economics was a scheme hatch by U.S.C. economist Arthur Laffer and the Reagan crowd which was supposed to cut the deficit and balance the budget. The theory behind Reaganomics was ostensibly, if you cut taxes for business and people in the upper tax brackets, and then deregulated business of such nuisances as safety regulations and environmental safeguards, the beneficiaries would invest their savings into creating new jobs. In that way the money would eventually "trickle down" to the rest of us. The resulting broadened tax base would not only help to bring down the deficit, but also subsidize the tremendously high defense budget. When the plan was first floated, even George Bush, Reagan's vice president to be, called it "Voodoo Economics."
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Reaganomics, for the most part, sought to undo many of the safeguards put into place during the Roosevelt era and create a business environment similar to that which was in place during the Coolidge Administration. What actually took place, however, was even more like the Coolidge era than planed.
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GOP SABOTAGING THE HEALTHCARE OF
MILLIONS OF AMERICANS
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Instead of the rich taking their huge tax breaks and investing it into creating new jobs, the money was used in wild schemes and stock market speculation. One of these schemes, the leveraged buy-out, involved buying up large companies with borrowed funds secured by the company's assets, then paying off the loan by selling off the assets of the purchased company. This practice cost the citizens of this country its industrial base. In addition, the bottom fell out of the stock market. On Monday, October 19, 1987 the Dow-Jones Average fell 508.32 points. It was the greatest one-day decline since 1914 - 15 years before the Great Depression.
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And what about Ronald Reagan's promise to balance the budget and lower the deficit? By the time he left office he was not only the most prolific spender of any president, but he also added more to the national debt than all of the other presidents from George Washington to his own administration combined. And what did the Republican Party propose to do about that? One of the Republican proposals was their "contract with America," a capitol gains tax cut -- for the rich.
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So, can a leopard change its spots? Yes it can - and with regard to the Democratic and Republican parties, the leopard has changed its spots in a very big way. But the modern GOP has never been prone to allowing the facts to distort a well-crafted lie. That's why they have such a fierce aversion to a well-educated electorate. An educated and well informed people is the bane of the Republican Party. They depend on an ignorant, bigoted, and emotional base for their very survival.
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Lower cognitive abilities predict greater prejudice through right-wing ideology.
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