President Roosevelt: “We cannot be content if some fraction of our people are ill feed, housed. [View All]

[midnight]

21. These words, written in 1931, were an indictment of the policies of the Hoover administration. They serve just as well as a description of the Obama administration’s response to the economic and social disaster. The failure is not merely that of a president, but of an entire political system and the capitalist economic order that it defends. There remains no small number of liberal Democrats who hope against hope that the administration will suddenly change course and proclaim with appropriate fanfare the second coming of Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” Their dreams are in vain. The corporate and financial oligarchy that dictates policies to the Democrats and Republicans is demanding the application of ever more savage doses of austerity.

22.When American capitalism was approaching the pinnacle of its global power and influence, its leaders acknowledged that the political rights enumerated in the US Constitution were, by themselves, insufficient to guarantee equality and allow the “pursuit of happiness.” In his State of the Union address delivered in January 1944, President Roosevelt declared: “We cannot be content … if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed and insecure.” He stated that it had become “self-evident” that “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” As part of his efforts to refurbish capitalism, which had been so thoroughly discredited by the Great Depression, Roosevelt proposed the adoption of a “second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be guaranteed for all—regardless of station, race and creed.”


26. The history of the American working class is one of difficult and relentless struggle. The story of its slow advance, in the face of the brutal resistance of the capitalist class, is written in blood. From the earliest class battles of railroad workers in the 1870s and the fight for the eight-hour day in the 1880s, to the establishment of mass industrial unions in the 1930s, the working class shed its blood and gave up its martyrs to end the naked tyranny of the employers. In the aftermath of World War II, the great wave of strikes that swept over every sector of industry wrested concessions from employers that led to a rapid rise in living standards. These struggles, in turn, inspired the great battles of African-American workers for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, which found broad support
among working people and youth.http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/sep2010/prog-s02.shtml