Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes
Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1882-1945, 32nd President of the United States (Democrat, NY), First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This is one of the FDR quotations, which his opponents then, and many conservatives later, characterized as “class warfare.” This type of accusation has in part protected business leaders and those who control wealth from public accountability. Similar business leader resentment was levied against President Obama when he criticized the Bankers and Wall Street leaders whose behavior, in great part, was the cause of the economic meltdown and recession of 2008.
There were few if any consumer protection laws in those days and many wealthy aristocrats made their money by taking advantage of the poor. They were the landowners, bankers, financiers and often the industrialists. Shaw was a sarcastic social critic and this is a typical line he gave his upper class characters. Today, we have more controls on business and finance, and many wealthy business people have gotten that way by providing great value to the consumers and being honest. However, we still have large numbers of wealthy members of society who do make their money from the poor and middle class by unethical and often illegal means. In the aftermath of the Meltdown of 2008. hundreds of thousands of the homes of the working poor and middle class were foreclosed by the major banks forging the legal documentation for the foreclusures. Millions of consumer contracts are issued that even a PhD cannot understand the terms of without special legal and financial training. There is even a legal definition of a salesperson lying to make a sale which is so commonplace that our law excuses it and calls it "puffing". However, there has been over time, improvement over Shaw's era.
Testifying for air power proponent General Billy Mitchell at his court martial, the Congressman described the quality of Mitchell's superiors:
Arguably, for most of American History, most of the “smartest” people contributed to manufacturing, construction, research and development—activities that produce things that are wanted and/or needed. However, Wall Street began attracting and paying for some of the smartest people in the society, who when they engaged in finance—not only contributed less to manufacturing, but began to create highly complex financial instruments and procedures that few people could understand and with which regulators have difficulty understanding. These and the other schemes of financing have been major factors in the economic problems that have beset the economy including the meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent Great Rescission.
During this crises, the taxpayers of America had to bail out most of the largest banks in the country whose profligate investment strategy had squandered their depositors and other customers money as a result of the spiral to reap higher and higher profits until they collapsed with the executives making millions in bonuses when their banks were losing money. They put millions of people out of work, and their greedy policies crashed the housing market and then the same banks evicted millions of families when the banks foreclosed on their mortgages with thousands of bank officers committing felonies in the foreclosure processes. This was to Blankfiein and many of the other leading bankers, “God’s Work”.
This is a very interesting quotation in that right wing parties are usually opposed to any kind of Government ownership and control of business and industry. However, Fascist parties have usually wanted to commandeer business and industry for the central purposes of the dictatorial state. The French National Front Party had its roots in the WWII French Vichy Government—which was allied with the Nazis to bring Fascism and racism to France.
The result was regulation of the banks and the creation of the SEC to regulate the stock market, However, over the years, the regulations were not able to keep up with the sophisticated development of new forms of investments and financial instruments and the financial industry were able to speculate with other people’s money in ways that FDR and his reformers never imagined. Finally, even the regulation that did exist was weakened by the policies of the George W. Bush administration and the combination brought about the Great Recession of 2008 where the profits from excess speculation were privatized and the losses, socialized with the taxpayer and the American worker bearing the brunt while most of the speculators were bailed out and made more money than ever. The Obama administration tried to reform the situation, but was unable to put an end to the legal speculation with other people’s money or of having institutions that were “too big to fail.”
The great scholars were as wrong as everyone else about the Great Depression
Major bankers were not only clueless in the Meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, but they were equally hapless in the Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression thereafter.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. A member of the Democratic Party, he won a record four presidential elections and became a central figure in world events during the first half of the 20th century. Roosevelt directed the federal government during most of the Great Depression, implementing his New Deal domestic agenda in response to the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. As a dominant leader of his party, he built the New Deal Coalition, which defined modern liberalism in the United States throughout the middle third of the 20th century. His third and fourth terms were dominated by World War II, which ended shortly after he died in office.
