Thom Hartmann: The Plot to Destroy America -- and What We Can Do to Stop It

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http://www.alternet.org/thom-hartmann-plot-destroy-america-and-what-we-can-do-stop-it

The following is an excerpt from Thom Hartmann's new book, THE CRASH OF 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It (Twelve Books, 2013).

There are very few Americans still alive who heard President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in March 1933, address the nation as he was being sworn into office. Which is why many Americans today believe that when FDR famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was talking about World War II. But Roosevelt said that long before Hitler had even fully consolidated his own power in Germany.

Instead, the fear—and the war—was here in America. He was speaking of the Great Depression.

The week of his inauguration, every state in the country closed their banks. The federal government couldn’t make its own payroll. A quarter of working-​age Americans were unemployed— some measurements put it at a third— and unemployment in minority communities was off the scale.

While Herbert Hoover, when campaigning against Roosevelt in 1932, had denied there was hunger in America, and said, “Even our hoboes are well fed,” the truth was that the single largest “occupation” at the time among Americans was “scavenger”: people following food trucks and trains, catching the bits that fell off, or doing what we today call “Dumpster diving.”

[chervilant]

1. A cultural infection?

In his First Inaugural in 1933, FDR alluded to the “rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods” who had “failed.”

He told the nation, “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.”

He added, “True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money.

“Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence.

“They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”

Roosevelt understood that while genuine kings and theocrats had been pushed to the fringes of the world in the century and a half since the American Revolution, the forces of plutocracy—economic rule by the very wealthy—hadn’t really gone anywhere. And they’d been running amok during the previous decade.

By 1936, Roosevelt had a name for them: the “Economic Royalists.” Eight years later, against the backdrop of World War II, FDR’s vice president, Henry Wallace, referred to these plutocratic forces as “Fascists.”

During our Revolution, they were called “Loyalists” and “Tories.”In the early days of our new nation, they eventually called themselves “Federalists” and were led by America’s second president, John Adams, and our first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton.

Early on, they were rather benign; the real cancer came as the nation became richer.

By the last half of the nineteenth century, during the Gilded Age in America, the newspapers called them the “Robber Barons.”

Today, these forces of the very wealthy are often simply referred to as “the 1 percent” (even though they actually represent a much smaller number than that—a tiny fraction of the top 1 percent of Americans, economically).

Regardless of their name, their rise to power has always been a harbinger of impending collapse.

That economic 'behavior' is cyclical is an oft ignored and seldom understood reality. That capitalism -- by definition -- creates scarcity and extreme wealth disparity is a reality the uber wealthy (and their economic sycophants advisors) work very hard to obfuscate.

[marmar]

2. k/r