I call it the Republican Depression because from 1921 until 1932 we had 3 consecutive Republican administrations, Warren Gamaliel Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover who all had the support of a Republican majority in both the Senate and Congress for those 12 years. (67th Congress, 68th Congress, 69th Congress, 70th Congress, 71st Congress)
Sound familiar? The Republican held congress have done the exact same thing that the depression era congress did, they deregulated, they threw money away, they had crony capitalism all which directly led to the 1929 Great Depression.(104th Congress, 105th Congress, 106th Congress, 107th Congress, 108th Congress, 109th Congress)
By 1929 the bubble had grown out of control and Robert Lamont the commerce secretary tried to quell fears with statements like.
"Secretary Lamont and officials of the Commerce Department today denied rumors that a severe depression in business and industrial activity was impending, which had been based on a mistaken interpretation of a review of industrial and credit conditions issued earlier in the day by the Federal Reserve Board."
- New York Times
Again, sounds a bit familiar, G.W. Bush, John McCain and all their mouth pieces have been repeating this mantra for more than 1 year "The fundamentals of the economy are still strong"
Now they are asking for a bailout of Wall Street and the Bankers just as Hoover did in 1931.
Their plan in 1931 was to liquidate the frozen bank assets. The prominent real-estate men of the time propagandized that it is all about how the plan would operate. The plan was to change the business conditions so that real-estate could improve. They believed this plan would stop the downward plunge of the markets, which it did not! Aren't we hearing that now from all the pundits today?
So, the Federal Reserve issued acceptance notes against real-estate securities in hopes of stabilizing their values and Herbert Hoover created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to dump large amounts of taxpayer money into the banking system to unfreeze mortgages as a result of the housing bubble that burst between 1927 and 1929 and he also gave tax breaks to the bankers and other financial sectors.
Yesterday, the Senate added tax cuts for these crooks just as Hoover had done. The Senate only trying to bribe votes from Congress put more than 100 billion dollars extra of pork into a bill (subsidizing a wooden arrows company) that is supposed to save our economy. What a bunch of nut balls.
The far Right Wing Neo-Conservative movement of the Republican Party has given us 20 years worth of deregulation, non-enforcement of the existing regulations and laws to the point that corruption spread from Washington D.C. to Wall Street and now because none of them had done their jobs in the past, we are expected to bail them out of bad debt and bad legislation, with more bad debt and more bad legislation.
What does history teach us about that action? Listen to Thom Hartmann speak to the happenings of the time in more detail here in this video.
As you listen to him reading the headlines of that time you will hear much of the same arguments pro and con being brought to the floor of the Congress today.
History teaches us all that they had enacted.... DID NOT WORK.
However, we DO know what actually works.... and what must be put forward are the actions that were taken in 1933 for the THE NEW DEAL such as suggested here in this video by Kucinich and others in Congress. Had these ideas been enacted as the Progressive Republicans and the Liberal Democrats of the time wanted under Hoover, it would have saved years of suffering for the people of this Nation.
I keep hearing from the Democratic representatives that supported this in the Senate and are going to support it in the Congress that doing nothing is out of the question and from Democratic supporters that their representatives do not know what else to do to solve this problem. Looking at it with that perspective tells me that you "the representative" should not be in that position to make these types of decisions and if you are a supporter you need to read more and learn from the past and hold your representative responsible for their actions.
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