The creation of false opposites has been a long-standing obstacle to human progress. From the ancient pleasure-seeking Epicureans who argued against the logic-heavy Stoics of ancient Rome to the war of “salvation through faith vs works” that schismed western Christianity, to the chaotic emotional energy driving the Jacobin mobs of France whose passions were only matched by the radical Cartesian logic of their Girondin enemies; humanity has long been manipulated by oligarchs who knew how to set the species to war against itself. Although these operations have taken many forms, the desired effect has always been the same: divide-to-conquer bloodbaths which drowned out the saner voices of Cicero (executed in 44 BCE), Thomas More (executed in 1535 CE), or Jean Sylvain Bailly (executed in 1793 CE).
Great article!e...assuming you're correct, I'm learning a few things here. As I understand it, you don't think FDR adopted Keynesian economics but had Hopkins and his team improvise and devise specific solutions to the problems of the time in order to circumvent the Federal Reserve and Wall Street opposition. Can you give us some sources? Also, this is the first time I heard Warren Harding had any kind of economic policy, so should we infer that there was a major shift in the Coolidge administration?
I have to dispute some of Matt's selections for people to admire in this article.
To begin with, Lincoln was not a great president, though many Americans continue to be brainwashed into believing he was. How could he be? He started the worst conflict in US history only months after being elected in 1860. And he would foster the very same principals that Alexander Hamilton attempted to imbue into the early American nation but never could due to the adherence to Jeffersonian thought on how a federal government should operate. And Hamilton was as close to a monarchist as one could get in the new nation .
To view Alexander Hamilton positively, one must then agree with the modern neoconservative economics, which have done nothing to help any nation prosper since their implementation starting with the Reagan years.
Unlike what people believe, Lincoln was a "corporatist" who was a disciple of Henry Clay and his American System. Lincoln's background demonstrates this from his origins as a very successful corporate lawyer for the railroads, which as a result, he became the leading corporate attorney in antebellum America as a result of his successful defenses of these corporations. He also became very wealthy as a result.
Unlike the original concepts that The Founders had envisioned, which was a confederation of states under a very limited federal government, which also was expected with the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789, Lincoln destroyed this construct with defeat of the South in 1865.
Lincoln instead wanted a very strong federal government, which the corporations also wanted so they could make profits off of the expected contracts with such a government. All of this came under the somewhat ambiguous term of "internal improvements", which The Confederacy abhorred since it was in their view the lynchpin to governmental corruption. This is why The Confederate Constitution disallowed such a construct among other refinements that were implemented to thwart corruption on a national level. This also included the abolition of The Supreme Court, which today actually makes law instead of simply acting as a legal advisor to Congress as it was meant to do. There are numerous books that have been written over the years that discuss this issue.
Ellen Brown's work, which I very much admire, is actually directed towards state public banking, not at the federal level, though a national public bank would be of great value to the nation.
Unfortunately, even Henry Clay's idea for such a banking system never actually caught on. Between the complete destruction of the South during Reconstruction and the politics of the subsequent years, such a federal public bank never really gained much traction given that an entire region of the US economy was literally divorced from any possibility of developing itself with any such funding a national bank could provide it. It wouldn't be until the 1970s and the 1980s that the South would start to emerge from the horrendous conditions that the War for Southern Independence and subsequent Reconstruction fostered upon it.
Lincoln was in reality, the precursor to everything we are suffering from in the US economy today. His centralized government became quickly corrupt under the Grant Administration.
The South understood a lot of this and fought against the northern encroachment on their closely held beliefs of their own state sovereignty. The South went to war with the North to prevent northern industrialists from living off their profits while contributing nothing back to the region. Up until the war the South was far more profitable with their agrarian lifestyle than the North was with its growing industry. However, the South, under the guidance of De Bow who formed the "De Bow Business Review", had itself started to industrialize with the help of other southern industrialists. However, even by 1860 such industrialization had yet to encroach on southern culture.
FDR was by no means any better than Lincoln in many respects. All of his efforts to pull the United States out of The Great Depression actually yielded very few concrete results. This is because even though he put a lot of people back to work, a good portion of that work was done under the national rubric of "internal improvements", none of which actually helped the overall economy. This was because a lot of this work produced nothing the economy could actually use and thus create profits for anyone.
FDR was also as close to a Communist as one could get in the US presidency. He conspired to get the US into WWII with his policies towards the Japanese (though I agree that something had to be done to stop the Japanese encroachment into the Chinese mainland areas.). And once involved, FDR became besotted with Stalin providing him everything he asked for even at the expense of US Armed Forces in the Pacific and British Allies. In the end, despite FDR's fawning over Stalin, the Soviet dictator saw FDR as a complete fool but favored dealing with him since he was so easy to control contrary to his relations with Churchill.
All of this has been well documented in Sean McMeekin's latest publication, "Stalin's War", which relies heavily on new archival research. Corroborating texts have been published over the years, which demonstrate FDR's complicity in getting the US into WWII. But it would be left to Truman to get the US into a near 50 year Cold War with the Soviet Union. Gareth Porter does an excellent job in refuting the myths of Soviet evils in his text, "Perils of Dominance".
Even FDR's own grandson wrote a book on him demonstrating how FDR could be so easily manipulated. And his aid, Harry Hopkins, was a key Soviet in-place asset.
Finally, Germany is consistently lumped in with such earlier Fascist states such as Spain and Italy. The Third Reich was a totalitarian state but it was not Fascist. It had little interest in allowing the corporations run the nation alongside the government and kept the corporations under the government's thumbs through the Board of Manufacturing. The Third Reich was far more interested in rebuilding its own middle class despite the popular histories of this period. One just has to read the diplomatic histories of the Inter-War Period to get a better understanding of this...
If you have not read it already ; " the tower of Basel" by Adam Lebor.
It is about the BIS ( Bank for International Settlement) in Basel (CH) and its role as cental bank of central bankers, sinds it creation, facilitating financing of borth sides of WO II and now busy with implementing digital currency. This project is called " icebreaker" ( from memory and to verify)
Uma matéria esclarecedora! Parabéns e obrigado por nos proporcionar uma abertura tão abrangente dos acontecimentos mundiais, e com indicações de leitura!
Great article!e...assuming you're correct, I'm learning a few things here. As I understand it, you don't think FDR adopted Keynesian economics but had Hopkins and his team improvise and devise specific solutions to the problems of the time in order to circumvent the Federal Reserve and Wall Street opposition. Can you give us some sources? Also, this is the first time I heard Warren Harding had any kind of economic policy, so should we infer that there was a major shift in the Coolidge administration?
I have to dispute some of Matt's selections for people to admire in this article.
To begin with, Lincoln was not a great president, though many Americans continue to be brainwashed into believing he was. How could he be? He started the worst conflict in US history only months after being elected in 1860. And he would foster the very same principals that Alexander Hamilton attempted to imbue into the early American nation but never could due to the adherence to Jeffersonian thought on how a federal government should operate. And Hamilton was as close to a monarchist as one could get in the new nation .
To view Alexander Hamilton positively, one must then agree with the modern neoconservative economics, which have done nothing to help any nation prosper since their implementation starting with the Reagan years.
Unlike what people believe, Lincoln was a "corporatist" who was a disciple of Henry Clay and his American System. Lincoln's background demonstrates this from his origins as a very successful corporate lawyer for the railroads, which as a result, he became the leading corporate attorney in antebellum America as a result of his successful defenses of these corporations. He also became very wealthy as a result.
Unlike the original concepts that The Founders had envisioned, which was a confederation of states under a very limited federal government, which also was expected with the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789, Lincoln destroyed this construct with defeat of the South in 1865.
Lincoln instead wanted a very strong federal government, which the corporations also wanted so they could make profits off of the expected contracts with such a government. All of this came under the somewhat ambiguous term of "internal improvements", which The Confederacy abhorred since it was in their view the lynchpin to governmental corruption. This is why The Confederate Constitution disallowed such a construct among other refinements that were implemented to thwart corruption on a national level. This also included the abolition of The Supreme Court, which today actually makes law instead of simply acting as a legal advisor to Congress as it was meant to do. There are numerous books that have been written over the years that discuss this issue.
Ellen Brown's work, which I very much admire, is actually directed towards state public banking, not at the federal level, though a national public bank would be of great value to the nation.
Unfortunately, even Henry Clay's idea for such a banking system never actually caught on. Between the complete destruction of the South during Reconstruction and the politics of the subsequent years, such a federal public bank never really gained much traction given that an entire region of the US economy was literally divorced from any possibility of developing itself with any such funding a national bank could provide it. It wouldn't be until the 1970s and the 1980s that the South would start to emerge from the horrendous conditions that the War for Southern Independence and subsequent Reconstruction fostered upon it.
Lincoln was in reality, the precursor to everything we are suffering from in the US economy today. His centralized government became quickly corrupt under the Grant Administration.
The South understood a lot of this and fought against the northern encroachment on their closely held beliefs of their own state sovereignty. The South went to war with the North to prevent northern industrialists from living off their profits while contributing nothing back to the region. Up until the war the South was far more profitable with their agrarian lifestyle than the North was with its growing industry. However, the South, under the guidance of De Bow who formed the "De Bow Business Review", had itself started to industrialize with the help of other southern industrialists. However, even by 1860 such industrialization had yet to encroach on southern culture.
To get a better understanding of southern views of the North, here is a transcript of the 1830 speech given by Whitemarsh B. Seabrook, which shows that southern opposition to northern views was about far more than juts slavery... https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/south-carolina-debates-the-union/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=1a92e47b-8cc8-42f8-b702-7148989ab509
FDR was by no means any better than Lincoln in many respects. All of his efforts to pull the United States out of The Great Depression actually yielded very few concrete results. This is because even though he put a lot of people back to work, a good portion of that work was done under the national rubric of "internal improvements", none of which actually helped the overall economy. This was because a lot of this work produced nothing the economy could actually use and thus create profits for anyone.
FDR was also as close to a Communist as one could get in the US presidency. He conspired to get the US into WWII with his policies towards the Japanese (though I agree that something had to be done to stop the Japanese encroachment into the Chinese mainland areas.). And once involved, FDR became besotted with Stalin providing him everything he asked for even at the expense of US Armed Forces in the Pacific and British Allies. In the end, despite FDR's fawning over Stalin, the Soviet dictator saw FDR as a complete fool but favored dealing with him since he was so easy to control contrary to his relations with Churchill.
All of this has been well documented in Sean McMeekin's latest publication, "Stalin's War", which relies heavily on new archival research. Corroborating texts have been published over the years, which demonstrate FDR's complicity in getting the US into WWII. But it would be left to Truman to get the US into a near 50 year Cold War with the Soviet Union. Gareth Porter does an excellent job in refuting the myths of Soviet evils in his text, "Perils of Dominance".
Even FDR's own grandson wrote a book on him demonstrating how FDR could be so easily manipulated. And his aid, Harry Hopkins, was a key Soviet in-place asset.
Finally, Germany is consistently lumped in with such earlier Fascist states such as Spain and Italy. The Third Reich was a totalitarian state but it was not Fascist. It had little interest in allowing the corporations run the nation alongside the government and kept the corporations under the government's thumbs through the Board of Manufacturing. The Third Reich was far more interested in rebuilding its own middle class despite the popular histories of this period. One just has to read the diplomatic histories of the Inter-War Period to get a better understanding of this...
Thank you. Very interesting article.
If you have not read it already ; " the tower of Basel" by Adam Lebor.
It is about the BIS ( Bank for International Settlement) in Basel (CH) and its role as cental bank of central bankers, sinds it creation, facilitating financing of borth sides of WO II and now busy with implementing digital currency. This project is called " icebreaker" ( from memory and to verify)
Uma matéria esclarecedora! Parabéns e obrigado por nos proporcionar uma abertura tão abrangente dos acontecimentos mundiais, e com indicações de leitura!