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franklin delano roosevelt
90 Years of Social Security: A Time for Celebration and Action
While we wish we could do nothing but celebrate, the history of Social Security shows that we must always defend the program from those who would privatize or outright eliminate it.
Aug 14, 2025
Social Security turns 90 years old this week! President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the program into law on August 14, 1935, as insurance against what he called the “hazards and vicissitudes” of life. For a federal program to endure for 90 years and maintain an extremely high level of popularity among the American people is truly extraordinary.
As FDR’s grandson, Jim Roosevelt, put it, “A cake with 90 candles on it would probably be dangerous, but the 90-year success of Social Security should be celebrated in any way possible.”
While we wish we could do nothing but celebrate, the history of Social Security shows that we must always defend the program from those who would privatize or outright eliminate it. These forces have been at work ever since Social Security was enacted. President Roosevelt’s Republican opponent in the 1936 elections, Alf Landon, called Social Security “a fraud on the working man.” Some things never change.
This year, we already have seen unprecedented interference from the Trump administration in the workings of the Social Security Administration (SSA) as part of a phony campaign against “fraud.“ Severe cutbacks in SSA staff and reckless policy changes have made it harder for Americans to access their earned benefits, giving rise to a grassroots ‘Hands Off Social Security’ movement.
The only scheming around Social Security is coming from the White House and its allies in Congress.
Trump’s Treasury secretary revealed the administration’s real agenda when he said that savings accounts for children contained in the president’s Unfair, Ugly Bill were a “backdoor for privatizing Social Security.“
Rampant misinformation and myths about Social Security (spread mainly by the political right) are designed to undermine public support for the program. Both US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” This is the same team who told us that 150 year olds and 300 year olds are somehow collecting benefits. The only scheming around Social Security is coming from the White House and its allies in Congress.
Fortunately, knowledge is power. That is why we produced a new documentary film about the 90-year history of Social Security, a program born in the Great Depression that is equally crucial today as a lifeline for seniors, people with disabilities, and their families.
The documentary, Social Security: 90 Years Strong, was produced through a grant from AARP and is available for download by advocates and community members who would like to hold their own screenings. As the film reveals, Social Security came into being—and lives on—for a reason: It is part of the fabric of American life and must be preserved for the future.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
“Social security is an earned benefit,” says Tracey Gronniger of Justice in Aging, one of the key interviewees in the film. “People work for their entire lives and pay into this program—and we have to make sure that it’s there for them when they are ready to retire or they become disabled.”
Former Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) closes out the documentary with the powerful plea: “We have to save Social Security. We have to secure it. We have to make it live for future generations.”
The film features appearances by several other notables, including Jim Roosevelt, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), Nancy Altman (Social Security Works), Bill Arnone (formerly of National Academy of Social Insurance), Kathryn Edwards (Labor Economist), and Giovanna Gray Lockhart (Former Director, Frances Perkins Center).
FDR’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, who was a prime mover in the creation of the program, probably said it best: “Social security is so firmly embedded in the American psychology today that no politician, no political party, could possibly destroy this act and still maintain our democratic system.” Food for thought, indeed.
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'The American People Do Not Want Oligarchy': Poll Shows Trump's Approval at Historic Low at 100-Day Mark
A whopping 72% of respondents said that they believe it is "likely" that Trump's policies will cause an economic recession in the short term.
Apr 28, 2025
As U.S. President Donald Trump nears the 100-day mark of his second term, a recent ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll shows that his approval rating now sits at a historic low of 39%, a nadir that prompted one prominent progressive to remark that the negative public sentiment comes as "the resistance is just beginning."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has mounted a highly successful "Fighting Oligarchy" tour across America in recent months, highlighted the findings of the poll on Sunday and wrote: "The American people do not want oligarchy, authoritarianism, or attacks on Social Security, Medicaid, or the VA," speaking of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
The poll, which conducted a random national sample of 2,464 adults in English and Spanish between April 18-22, found discontent among voters when it comes to Trump's handling of multiple policies issues, particularly on the economy.
A whopping 72% of respondents said that they believe it is "likely" that Trump's policies—such as sweeping tariffs—will cause an economic recession in the short term.
What's more, 53% say the economy is worse since Trump took office and 62% said that the prices for things they rely on have gone up.
Trump's overall approval on immigration policy, one of his core campaign issues, is also less than 50%. When it comes to his handling of immigration—an area where Trump has moved to roll back birthright citizenship, deported U.S. citizens, and invoked a rarely used wartime authority to deport Venezuelan nationals to a megaprison in El Salvador, among other measures—his approval rating sits at 46%, according to the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll.
Additionally, over 55% of Americans say Trump is "going too far" when it comes to seeking to expand the power of the presidency, closing federal agencies, laying off federal employees to reduce the size of government, and taking measures agains this political foes.
Overall, his approval among Americans has dipped from 45% positive in February to 39% positive on the eve of the 100-day mark, which is on Tuesday.
According to The Washington Post's analysis of the poll results, Trump's approval at 100 days in both of his terms is lower than any other president's at or near the 100-day mark "since polls began." Polling data on this question stretches back to former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's (FDR) third term, per the Post, when his approval rating was at 68% at the 100-day point. ABC News' write up of the poll results says that "Trump has the lowest 100-day job approval rating of any president in the past 80 years."
Some have drawn parallels between Trump and FDR, whose first 15 weeks in office in 1933 were dominated by a push to work with Congress on economic recovery and relief for working people, the first phase of what's known as the "New Deal." However, historians have noted that in substance the two could not be more different.
In reporting piece published Monday, the Post noted that Roosevelt's push in the first 100 days led to major new laws, while Trump largely relies on executive order.
"Roosevelt spent an awful lot of time trying to craft constitutional justifications in legislation, and draft it in such a way that the courts might accept it," Anthony Badger, a historian and author of FDR: The First Hundred Days, told the Post. "He wasn't trying to do it by executive order."
The historian and author Eric Rauchway told CNN recently that substantively Trump's policies are the "opposite of the New Deal."
Trump "seems to be taking apart regulatory mechanisms. He seems to be drawing down public investment in a variety of areas, including the arts and so forth. He seems to be, as far as I can tell, diminishing resources sent to the Social Security Administration, which of course is the central piece of the New Deal’s proto-welfare state," Racuhway told the outlet.
In a similar vein to Sanders, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote Monday that Trump's actions in his first 100 days serves as a call to mobilization and to "loudly and boldly sound the alarm."
"The U.S. Constitution is in peril. Civil and human rights are being trampled upon. The economy is in disarray," wrote Reich. "At this rate, we won't make it through the second hundred days."
Reich suggested that that answer is for Americans to speak out and urge lawmakers in Congress, both chambers of which are currently GOP-controlled, to launch impeachment proceedings against Trump.
"Americans must be mobilized into such a huge wave of anger and disgust that members of the House are compelled to impeach Trump (for the third time) and enough senators are moved to finally convict him," he concluded.
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Why Is It Happening Here? And Why Now?
In the early 1970s the corporate elite, conservatives, and neoliberals launched what became a 50-year-long class war from above against the hard-won rights of working people in all their American diversity.
Apr 18, 2025
In early April, historian Harvey J. Kaye made these remarks at a conference in Barcelona, Spain. Common Dreams has published the transcript with his permission.
In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. elections, I wrote an article titled “Who Says it Can’t Happen Here?” I opened with these words:
Donald Trump’s candidacy and now, presidency, have resurrected a public discourse not heard in this country since the Great Depression—an anxious discourse about the possible triumph in America of a fascistic authoritarian regime over liberal democracy. It’s a fear that the popular writer Sinclair Lewis turned into a 1935 bestselling novel titled It Can’t Happen Here—although, as Lewis actually told it, it sure as hell could happen here in the United States.
However, it did not happen. At least, it did not happen then. Nor did it happen in 2017. But it is happening now.
Why? Arguments vary. Journalists, editorial writers, and all too many academics—so many of whom are actually liberal and progressive Democrats—say it was due to either the Democratic Party’s failure to effectively communicate the truth about the economy or working-class racism, sexism, and generally low cultural standards. What they ignore is that the making of the “crisis of democracy” began five decades ago in the 1970s.
What Americans never heard in the mainstream media was any reference to the 50-year-long class war and culture war campaigns waged by the corporate elite, conservatives, and neoliberals against the democratic achievements of what we might call the Long Age of Roosevelt from the 1930s through the 1960s. They never heard talk of how those forces subordinated the public good to private greed; laid siege to the hard-won rights of workers, women, and people of color; enriched the rich at the expense of everyone else; hollowed out the nation’s industries and infrastructures; produced a devastating recession and lethargic recovery; and pushed the environment to the brink.
So, I offer two questions. Why did it not happen in the 1930s? And why is it happening now in 2025? The short answers are:
First: It did not happen in the 1930s because in 1932 American voters elected the Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to the presidency and effectively launched the most progressive decades in American history. Call it the Long Age of Roosevelt—an age that extended from the 1930s through the 1960s.
Second: It is happening now because in the early 1970s the corporate elite, conservatives, and neoliberals launched what became a 50-year-long class war from above against the democratic achievements of that Long Age—that is, a class war versus the hard-won rights of working people in all their American diversity.
All of which poses a critical third question. What should the answer to the first question teach Democrats and other anti-fascist Americans about responding to the answer to the second question?
The only way to confront a mortal national crisis and save American democratic life is to do what Americans, with all of their faults and failings, did in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1930s and 60s.
Popularly known as “FDR,” Roosevelt was essentially an American aristocrat—but despite that, he rejected the “Gilded Age” order with its ever-intensifying concentration of wealth and power and its widening extremes of rich and poor. He did so because that order was denying the nation’s revolutionary promise of “a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and a democratic government of “We the People” to the vast majority of Americans.
He had entered politics in 1910 as a progressive reformer. And yet, during the next 20 years, he became not just a liberal in the American sense, but actually a social-democrat and even something of a radical. (Though he never used either word to describe himself.)
He had long worried about what conservative political rule might do to America. And in the shadow of the worst economic and social catastrophe in the nation’s history, he truly feared it would lead to some kind of authoritarianism.
However, he knew U.S. history and he recognized how earlier generations had confronted and prevailed over mortal national crises in the American Revolution of the 1770s and the Civil War of the 1860s, that is, by radically transforming the country. Knowing that, he wrote in 1930, “There is no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation.”
In his 1932 campaign against the incumbent president, conservative Republican Herbert Hoover, he projected a “New Deal” involving an impressive array of policies and initiatives to not only combat the depression, but also empower working people with economic security and freedom. As Roosevelt would say, “Needy men are not free men.” In fact, he audaciously suggested an Economic Declaration of Rights to redeem and renew the promise of the Declaration of Independence.
As FDR saw it, the only way to truly secure and sustain American democratic life was to progressively enhance it.
Which is exactly what he and a generation of Americans would do. They didn’t simply reject authoritarianism. They phenomenally improved the economic and physical state of the nation and—at the very same time—radically enhanced American freedom, equality, and democracy.
Moreover, encouraged by FDR himself, working people did more than take up the labors of the New Deal. They actually pushed him to go even further than he may ever have planned to go—and together they initiated revolutionary changes in American government and public life.
Consider this. They subjected capital to public regulation and raised the taxes of the rich. They legislatively empowered government to address the needs of working people and the poor (which included advancing industrial democracy). They organized and, in their millions, joined labor unions, consumer campaigns, and civil rights organizations to both fight for their rights and advance the “We” in “We the People.” They established the Social Security system. They built schools, libraries, post offices, parks, and playgrounds all over the country. They vastly expanded the nation’s public infrastructure with new roads, bridges, tunnels, and dams (and provided electric power to almost a million farms.) They repaired and improved the national landscape and environment. And they energetically cultivated the arts and refashioned popular culture.
All of which seriously antagonized capitalists, and led the richest men in America to organize the Liberty League and spend great sums of money trying to portray FDR as a communist and thereby prevent his reelection in 1936. But they utterly failed to secure popular support.
Roosevelt did not ignore their efforts. He famously said, “I welcome their hatred.” Indeed, when accepting his party’s nomination for a second term, he delivered the most radical speech in American presidential history. Speaking to a stadium crowd of 100,000 and millions more national radio, he said:
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.
I absolutely love that speech, and American working people loved FDR. One Southern textile worker spoke for the majority of his class when he wrote to Roosevelt, saying, “[You are] the first man in the White House to understand that my boss is a son of a bitch.”
Still, for all of the humor, FDR took the anti-democratic threat seriously. In 1938—just before the midterm congressional elections— he went on radio and warned:
As of today, fascism and communism—and old-line Tory Republicanism—are not threats to the continuation of our form of government. But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then fascism and communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land.
Yes, FDR and those whom Americans would come to call the “Greatest Generation” left much to be done—especially regarding race and gender. But they had equipped themselves to defeat fascism overseas in the 1940s and learned how to democratically rebuild the nation.
Furthermore, the democratic upsurge of the 1930s did not cease during the war years. Americans continued to organize and enlist in labor unions, consumer campaigns, and civil rights organizations.
Encouraged by all that they had accomplished, Roosevelt called on Americans to envision an America and a world characterized by four fundamental freedoms, the Four Freedoms: Freedom of Speech and Worship and Freedom from Want and Fear—which became a theme of the war effort.
And in his 1944 State of the Union Address, he articulated his fellow citizens’ postwar aspirations by proposing an Economic Bill of Rights to include a right to a job at a living wage; a comfortable home; medical care; a good education; recreation; and economic protection during sickness, old age, and unemployment. A proposal that was enthusiastically embraced by the American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the National Farmers Union, and all the leading civil rights groups.
But Roosevelt did not assume they could easily secure it. Thinking of the corporate bosses, he predicted the likelihood of fierce “right-wing reaction.” But he also warned—in words that should speak loudly to Americans today—“If such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920’s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.”
FDR won a fourth presidential term in 1944, but passed away in April 1945. Still, the Age of Roosevelt did not come to end. As much as capitalists, Republicans, and Southern Democrats made the most of the Cold War to obstruct the further advance of democracy and social democracy, a generation of Americans, and their children, would not forget what they had accomplished. And in the 1960s, Americans witnessed a new democratic upsurge challenging every aspect of national life.
Pushed by the resurgent activism, and inspired by FDR’s New Deal and vision of the Four Freedoms and Economic Bill of Rights, President Lyndon Johnson called for the making of a Great Society and a War on Poverty. A liberal Congress led by Greatest Generation veterans moved to enhance American democratic life.
Congress passed historic civil rights, voting rights, and fair housing acts, and a major reform of the nation’s immigration law. It also made healthcare a right for the elderly and the poor, significantly expanded educational opportunities for children and young people, and enacted laws and created agencies to clean up and make the environment, marketplace, and workplace safer (EPA, OSHA, CPSC). At the same time, the Supreme Court guaranteed and strengthened the constitutional separation of church and state and moved to liberate women to control their own bodies. Plus, many state governments built new schools and universities and, in the Northern and Western states, expanded industrial democracy by granting collective bargaining rights to public workers.
That’s why it didn’t happen. Now to why it’s happening now.
All of this terrified Southern white supremacists, political and religious conservatives, and corporate bosses—and in the early 1970s they were mobilizing to not just counter the democratic surge but also reverse the democratic achievements of the Age of Roosevelt.
Though a series of crises, most notably, defeat in Vietnam, an Arab oil embargo, and an economic recession, shook up Americans, polls showed they remained committed to social-democratic ideals. In fact, workers were staging strikes on a scale not seen since the late 1940s. Yet not only did the Democratic Party fail to mobilize them, younger, prominent Democratic politicians such as Coloradan Gary Hart—soon to be known as neoliberals—were turning against the FDR tradition and the New Deal coalition in favor of engaging professionals, women, and minorities.
Meanwhile, corporate executives, already feeling under siege by federal agencies and labor unions, were experiencing a “profits squeeze” due to the emergence of foreign competition (especially from Germany and Japan). Which led key figures to call on their class comrades to wake up, join together, and launch what the British Marxist political scientist Ralph Miliband would call a “class war from above” against government regulation, taxes, labor unions, and what they referred to as the “adversary culture” of environmental and consumer-rights groups, college students, the media, and university intellectuals.
Soon enough, old and new business organizations from the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Business Roundtable and the Trilateral Commission (whose members included the future Presidents Republican George H.W. Bush and Democrat Jimmy Carter), undertook major advertising, public relations, and lobbying campaigns calling for deregulation, lower taxes, and reducing the size of government—all in favor of “free enterprise.”
We have endured 50 years of creeping authoritarianism and may well now suffer a fascist-like regime because the Democrats, the once-upon-a-time party of FDR, has forgotten what he said.
At the same time, they not only set out to destroy the labor movement by means both legal and illegal (via union-busting consultants and lawyers), but also to invest in pro-business think tanks, public intellectuals, and both Republican and Democratic politicians. And prominent “super-rich” reactionaries funded efforts to mobilize Christian evangelicals around “culture war” questions like school prayer and abortion and white working people around calls for “law and order.”
If all that was not enough, corporate bosses were moving their operations South and overseas to avoid state regulations, taxes, and union wages. Communities suffered; unions were broken; and wages and benefits were frozen, reduced, or lost. To try to survive, workers, who could not vote to raise their wages, began to vote all the more for conservative politicians who promised to cut taxes.
Unions and environmental and consumer rights groups sought to defend and advance democratic achievements, but the Democratic President Jimmy Carter called for “austerity” and liberating business and turned his back on labor and the environmental and consumer movements in favor of cutting government programs, lowering taxes, and deregulating capital—which effectively paved the way for the so-called “New Right” Republican presidency of Ronald Reagan and the age of neoliberalism.
The story of the ensuing decades is that of continuing class war from above and neoliberalism. Of course, we expected it from capital and conservative Republicans. But what Carter the Democrat started, the next Democratic President, Bill Clinton, pursued aggressively. He too betrayed labor by pushing Congress to enact the North American Free Trade Agreement that further devastated American manufacturing in the Northern states. That was just the start. He deregulated the communications industry, enacted a mass incarceration crime bill, ended “welfare as we know it,” (a.k.a Aid to Families with Dependent Children—which began with FDR), and further deregulated banking. When the next Democrat President, Barack Obama, won the White House in 2008 he not only did not fight for the EFCA (Employee Free Choice Act) which would have made it far easier to create a union.
He also failed to prosecute Wall Street bankers for possible crimes that led to the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Obama pushed through a healthcare bill, the Affordable Care Act, that gave huge concessions and profits to the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries, and attempted to push through a bill creating a Trans-Pacific Free Trade Partnership.
At the same time, in state after state, conservatives have acted to override or circumvent a woman’s right to choose by enacting laws intended to make abortions almost impossible to secure. In state after state, Republicans have sought to suppress the votes of people of color, the poor, and students by enacting voter ID laws. And after years of trying, they finally succeeded in getting a conservative Supreme Court to disembowel the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Plus, in state after state, the corporate and conservative rich have smashed labor unions and effectively suppressed the voices of workers by enacting so-called right to work laws—even, as in Wisconsin in 2011, rescinding the collective bargaining rights of public employees.
There have been movements from the bottom up: Wisconsin Rising, Occupy, The Fight for $15, the Moral Monday Movement, the anti-fracking and block-the-pipelines campaigns, and Black Lives Matter. They raised hopes, but they failed to garner the active support of the Democratic Party.
Notably in 2015 one major poll showed that the majority of Americans wanted radical change. Yes, RADICAL change. But the Democratic Party both in 2016 and 2020 found ways to deny the most radical candidate, Bernie Sanders, the nomination. I truly believe Bernie could have beaten Donald Trump both times. But working people, the working class, was, to put it mildly, really fed up with the party that had once been the party of the American working class, that had worked to empower labor and the working class.
Polling continually shows that the working class wants what FDR proposed in 1944. And yet neither party is speaking to working class aspirations. The Republican Party has been speaking to and rallying working-class anxiety and anger. The Democrats have been speaking to professional and upper-middle-class concerns.
We have endured 50 years of creeping authoritarianism and may well now suffer a fascist-like regime because the Democrats, the once-upon-a-time party of FDR, has forgotten what he said: “As of today, fascism and communism—and old-line Tory Republicanism—are not threats to the continuation of our form of government. But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then fascism and communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land.”
What should the answer to the first question teach Democrats and other anti-fascist Americans about responding to the answer to the second question? That the only way to confront a mortal national crisis and save American democratic life is to do what Americans, with all of their faults and failings, did in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1930s and 60s. Act to radically enhance American freedom, equality, and democracy.
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Last Night the Cord Connecting Us to FDR Was Snapped
Everything is up for grabs now, including the basic entitlement programs that defined the New Deal. It’s time to look for where the next huge realigning New Deal-sized thing will come from.
Nov 06, 2024
I am, of course, sad.
I had hoped, almost more than I let myself really feel, that America was about to elect a smart Black woman president of the United States, moving us further down the path that we have haltingly followed throughout my life. Instead, quite knowingly, we elected someone who stood for the worst impulses in our history. I think the next four years—and perhaps longer—will be very hard on many fronts. One is the concern of this newsletter, climate and energy, where we can expect the oil industry to have carte blanche.
But I actually think the message and the moment is much deeper than that. What happened last night was that the cord that stretched back to FDR snapped. It had been badly frayed, especially in the Reagan years, but the Depression and World War II had been such deep and defining events that the formula that got us through them—a kind of solidarity at home and abroad—more or less held. No more.
Everything is up for grabs now, including the basic entitlement programs that defined the New Deal. (If you haven’t read Project 2025 this would be a good day to start). In foreign policy terms it’s all far more complicated, and has been from Vietnam through Gaza—but today is a bad day to be Ukrainian, Taiwanese, or a Palestinian on the West Bank. Can things get worse? I think they can, and I think we will find out, here and around the world. But I don’t think it will last either, because the promises on which this new MAGA order are built are mostly nonsense.
And I also think the sun rose this morning—there was a leaden sky in the Green Mountains of Vermont when I went out to walk the dog, but I could sense the sun behind it.
And in that sunrise there is for me the hint of where that next huge realigning New Deal-sized thing will come from. The reshaping of our energy system—to cope with climate change, and to reflect the rock-solid fact that we live on an Earth where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun—may offer, if we are clever and good-hearted, a new basis on which to remake the world.
More local, more peaceful, less controllable by oligarchs and plutocrats. I don’t know if we can make it—the headwinds are stronger than they were yesterday—but I know we can try. And I know that only this project is big enough in scale to give us a real chance at a fresh start.
That’s what this community will continue to focus on, and I’m glad you’re a part of it.
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For Freedom and Against Fear: From FDR to Kamala Harris
Advocating a platform that both protects and expands freedoms, the Democratic nominee has donned the mantle of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Nov 03, 2024
On Tuesday evening October 29, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at the Ellipse, supplanting—with unifying oratory— Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric that prompted an attack on the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. Advocating a platform that both protects and expands freedoms, Harris has donned the mantle of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
During the 2024 Democratic National Convention, most media interpreted the repetition of “freedom” as a reclamation of that word from the Republican Party. But what I heard was FDR’s "Four Freedoms Speech," and I still do. That speech was President Roosevelt’s State of the Union address presented to a joint session of Congress on January 6, 1941. Yes, precisely 80 years prior to Donald Trump’s Outrage on the Ellipse and inside the selfsame Capitol Building where MAGA followers tried violently to usurp power. In addition to defining democratic freedoms, Roosevelt denounced dictatorial tyranny in his address, making his words from that January 6th resonate today as a rebuttal to Trumpism.
Before naming freedoms that unite and protect people, Roosevelt painted a picture of the irrational fears that divide. Unlike most State of the Union Addresses, FDR concentrated not on the internal condition of our union but on threats to all democracies. The President broadened his framework because he spoke at a dire moment: Hitler had conquered most of continental Europe and was terrorizing England. In the speech, Roosevelt never names Hitler and Nazism or Mussolini and Fascism but speaks of “dictators” and “tyranny,” making his warnings easily applicable to our own time.
Roosevelt emphasized that dictators succeed by attacking “…the democratic way of life …[with] poisonous propaganda to destroy unity and promote discord,” a prescient portrait of Trump’s language. Autocrats do not offer policies for debate in a public forum; instead, they fill their audience with fear. “Fear” already had a prominent position in Roosevelt’s rhetoric. He had powerfully laid claim to that word in his first Inaugural on March 4, 1933 when he proclaimed that “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror….” In 1933, fear resulted from the Great Depression—a fear of unemployment, of homelessness, of starvation, of bank failure. By 1941, that fear had extended to “…assailants [of democratic life] still on the march.” Fear remains today, and Trump uses it to promote a mythic past with restricted liberties, which provides a narrative to the MAGA mythology.
FDR realized that fear obstructs progress and, in his January 6th, 1941 address, cautioned that it “… paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Paralyzes!
FDR spoke from intimate experience of how paralysis limits motion. As an antidote, FDR prescribed expanding freedoms. His 1941 State of the Union defined four broad and basic human rights, now known as Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. While FDR’s first two Freedoms were established in the First Amendment, the latter two, “from want” and “from fear,” evoked either the expansions granted by his New Deal (such as Work Projects, Unemployment Insurance, and Social Security, all of which alleviated both want and fear) or FDR’s intentions for further augmentation (such as increased medical coverage, job opportunity, and pay equity). Roosevelt believed his “vision [was not for] a distant millennium… [but] attainable in [his] own time….” Part of what makes his address painfully relevant today is that many of Roosevelt’s goals for further rights remain unfulfilled in this new millennium.
Kamala Harris has now revived those goals. Her policies heed FDR’s warning against tyranny by amplifying his call to expand liberties. Like President Roosevelt, Vice President Harris believes in democratic progress.
On January 6, 1941, Roosevelt described American history as “…a perpetual peaceful revolution … adjusting itself to changing conditions … [as] today’s best is not good enough for tomorrow.” But now we must recognize that 1941’s tomorrow is today. Harris’s enlarged Freedom from Want includes freedom for reproductive health, home ownership, and caregiving, while her aspirations to protect Americans from gun violence, climate change, and voter suppression fall under Freedom from Fear. Kamala Harris could lead our democracy towards a better tomorrow if we the people show up for our “…rendezvous with destiny,” as FDR also once said. To give her that opportunity, it's up to us to elect her—along with a Democratic Congress—on November 5, 2024.
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Kamala Harris Has a Plan for Home Care—and FDR Would Love It!
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins saved millions of seniors from the poorhouse. Now, Kamala Harris has a plan to save them from another form of institutionalized care, the nursing home.
Oct 25, 2024
Kamala Harris has a plan to expand Medicare to include home care. If Harris is elected president and signs her plan into law, it will be life-changing for millions of seniors and people with disabilities. Importantly, it builds upon President Franklin Roosevelt’s vision for a New Deal for the American people.
Vice President Harris should get enormous praise for her groundbreaking proposal. Long-term care is a looming challenge that’s barely getting discussed. Harris recognizes this challenge and is offering an important solution: Medicare At Home.
Harris’s Medicare At Home plan would expand economic security by creating a new universal benefit, in the grand tradition of President Franklin Roosevelt and his visionary Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins.
In 1934, President Roosevelt considered adopting a comprehensive cradle-to-grave program of economic security. Ultimately, he decided to start more slowly and incrementally with what became the Social Security Act of 1935, which, among many other achievements, created Social Security and unemployment insurance. He recognized that Social Security was too important to risk failure by beginning too ambitiously.
A decade later, in 1944, having just been elected for the fourth time, FDR built on this legacy by calling for an economic bill of rights in his State of the Union address. This so-called Second Bill of Rights would give every American the right to comprehensive economic security, including a first–rate education; guaranteed employment at a living wage – “enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation”; a decent home; “adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health”; as well as “adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.”
He understood, as Vice President Harris does, that people want the right, the ability, and the assistance necessary to age in place, with dignity and independence. In a capitalist system like ours, where working families are dependent on wages, economic security requires insurance against the loss of those wages, which Social Security and Unemployment Insurance provide. That is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Economic security and a decent and dignified life also require getting the care you need, including home care.
Medicare provides health care to Americans over age 65 and people with disabilities, but it has a huge gap: Long-term care. Most people think that Medicare covers long-term care, only to face a devastating shock when they (or a loved one) are in need of care.
Long-term care costs around $100,000 per year, so almost no one can afford it. Currently, the only program that covers long-term care is Medicaid. But unlike Medicare, which is universal, Medicaid is means-tested. As a result, seniors and people with disabilities are forced to “spend down” all of their assets, including property, before they can qualify for long-term care through Medicaid.
Sometimes, people must even divorce their loving spouses in order to qualify for long-term care coverage. And even then, after breaking up families and depleting their nest eggs, they may wind up in a dehumanizing corporate nursing home that exists to exploit patients for profit, because that’s still all they can afford.
In one heartbreaking instance, physicist Leon Lederman was forced to sell his Nobel Prize medal for $765,000 to pay for his care — and he still ultimately wound up in a nursing home.
Medicaid was not enacted as a long-term care program, but that is what it has become by default. And because it was not structured to be a long-term care program, it forces middle class seniors to bankrupt themselves so that they can receive care. It forces seniors and people with disabilities into nursing homes when they are healthy enough to remain at home.
This is a system that is fundamentally broken in this country. But Kamala Harris’s new plan for a universal Medicare At Home benefit would finally begin to change all that.
Those who have responsibilities for aging parents are also often caring for young children. Many other Americans are caring for a spouse while also dealing with their own health challenges. Kamala Harris’s Medicare At Home plan would benefit the entire family. It would empower seniors and people with disabilities who are healthy enough to age in place but can’t afford the care they need to remain at home.
Before the creation of Social Security, it was routine for parents to live with their adult children. Those who did not have children, or whose children were unable or unwilling to care for them, were forced into poorhouses.
FDR and Frances Perkins saved millions of seniors from the poorhouse. Now, Kamala Harris has a plan to save them from another form of institutionalized care, the nursing home.
Her plan is completely affordable because the Biden-Harris administration finally stopped letting Big Pharma rip Americans off. Kamala Harris would pay for this new Medicare At Home benefit, along with adding vision and hearing coverage to Medicare, with the savings from Medicare negotiating lower prescription drug prices. Big Pharma will continue to profit, just not at unconscionably exorbitant rates.
Seniors get to pay lower prescription drug prices, and also receive new hearing, vision, and home care benefits. And the so-called sandwich generation will have more time and resources. Moreover, states will benefit because the proposal will reduce their hard-pressed budgets, which are heavily burdened today by the long-term care costs funded by Medicaid. Harris’s proposal is a win-win for everyone (except for Big Pharma CEOs).
Kamala Harris’s Medicare at Home plan is a big step toward fulfilling Medicare’s promise of a simple, universal benefit. When she signs it into law, it will bring us far closer to the grand vision of full economic security first imagined by President Roosevelt and Secretary Perkins.
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National Monument Pushed for New Deal Leader Frances Perkins, First Woman in Cabinet
A national monument would mean "more people could learn about this incredible woman and the power of government to be a force for good," a member of Congress said.
Aug 08, 2024
The Frances Perkins Center on Wednesday launched a campaign calling for its 57-acre site in Maine to be named a national monument in honor of the trailblazing woman who led former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Labor Department and ushered in some of the most important legislation in the country's history.
Frances Perkins became the first woman to serve in a presidential Cabinet when she was named secretary of labor in 1933. She was instrumental in establishing Social Security, unemployment benefits, a minimum wage, and a 40-hour work week.
Campaigners called for President Joe Biden to designate the site, which is already a national historic landmark, as a national monument, and media reports indicated that he's likely to do so.
Members of Congress from Maine came out in strong support of the proposal.
Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) said in a statement that the designation would mean that "more people could learn about this incredible woman and the power of government to be a force for good."
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) also supported the push to honor Perkins.
"Her commitment to ensuring hardworking families have the resources to succeed and thrive is still felt today throughout the nation," he said.
"[The designation] would not only be a tribute to her incredible legacy, but also a testament to the leadership and resolve of so many Maine women following in her footsteps," he added.
Frances Perkins’ leadership radically improved the lives of everyday workers – her story deserves a permanent home in the @NatlParkService. Join NPCA in calling on @POTUS to designate the Frances Perkins Homestead a national monument! https://t.co/8uf58hI0jZ
— National Parks Conservation Association (@NPCA) August 8, 2024
Perkins was born in Massachusetts in 1880 and lived much of her adult life in New York and Washington, D.C., but came from a Maine family and spent time there throughout her life—she owned the house that's now home to the Frances Perkins Center, in the small town of Newcastle on the Damariscotta River, from 1927 until her death in 1965.
Perkins witnessed firsthand the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Greenwich Village in 1911—one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history, which left 146 workers dead, and an event she made reference to for the rest of her life—and was appointed to lead a New York City safety committee. She successfully pushed for a wide range of workplace health and safety reforms in the city that became a model elsewhere.
Perkins later became a New York state official, and when Roosevelt became the state's governor in 1929 he made her the industrial commissioner, with oversight over the state labor department. Four years later, when he became president, he again tapped her to run labor affairs. Unionists initially opposed Perkins' appointment because she didn't have a union background, but they grew to support her.
One of only two Cabinet members to serve for Roosevelt's entire 12-year tenure, Perkins was a tireless advocate for workers rights who gave a huge number of speeches across the country, some of which were aimed at encouraging union organizing.
Most notably, Perkins organized the drafting of both the Social Security Act of 1935, which included unemployment compensation, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which banned child labor, established a federal minimum wage, and required overtime pay for employees working more than 44 hours a week. (Two years later, it was changed to 40 hours a week.)
"If you had a weekend, you can thank Frances Perkins," Stephanie Dray, the author of a historical fiction novel about Perkins, told the Portland Press Herald, Maine's leading newspaper. "If you or anyone you ever loved has collected Social Security benefits, you can thank her. If you're a child who got to go to school instead of to work in a factory, you can thank her. She's just everywhere around us."
Perkins' crucial place in U.S. history has been largely overlooked, like that of many women. Only about a dozen national monuments out of more than 100 in total honor women. Biden in March issued an executive order calling for more recognition of women's history, and the push for the Perkins monument is seen by many as fitting perfectly into that initiative.
Biden has so far named five new national monuments and expanded four others. The president has the authority to do so under the Antiquities Act of 1906, aimed at protecting lands and waters. National monuments are "intended to preserve at least one nationally significant resource," whereas national parks generally cover a larger area and have a wide variety of resources worth protecting, according to the National Park Service.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that Biden plans to agree to the Frances Perkins Center's proposal and make the site a national monument, citing anonymous sources, though the White House responded by saying that no such decision had been made.
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Boeing’s Safety Scandal Is an Object Lesson in the Dangers of Stock Buybacks
Boeing, instead of building new airplanes to expand and upgrade their fleet, spent over $60 billion on stock buybacks in the years leading up to the 2019 grounding of their Max fleet.
Apr 17, 2024
A Boeing whistleblower is testifying before Congress today that the 787 has dangerous flaws in the way it’s put together.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s investigations subcommittee that will hear from the whistleblower, told The New York Times he has heard:
Repeated, shocking allegations about Boeing’s manufacturing failings [that] point to an appalling absence of safety culture and practices—where profit is prioritized over everything else.
Profit?
The last year that Boeing invested in creating a new jet airplane from scratch was 2004. While it costs around $7 billion to develop a new plane, Boeing chose to save that money by “upgrading” their 737 line to the infamous 737 Max, which has now killed hundreds of people.
But just between 2014 and last year, Boeing showed a profit of over $95 billion. If they didn’t spend that money on improved safety, new products, or paying their workers better, where did it go? Follow along…
It’s time to declare the 43-year Reagan Revolution’s neoliberal experiment a failure, and outlaw or heavily tax the share buybacks that are one of its most visible markers.
Just as an example, let’s say you and I owned a publicly traded corporation with 100 shares that sold for $100 each (yes, it’s a very small corporation!). You own 10 shares ($1,000 worth of stock), I own 10 shares (ditto), and the general public owns 80 shares. The notional stock value of the company is 100 shares times $100 each, or $10,000.
So, how do you and I increase the value of our stock so we can sell some or all of it (or borrow against it) for a profit?
The way businesses have traditionally increased the value of their shares—all the way back to the invention of the modern corporation when Queen Elizabeth I chartered the East India Company on December 31, 1600—has been to grow the company.
Develop new products. Build new airplanes or widgets. Open new stores. Invest in a sales-force or advertising campaign. Expand manufacturing capability or open new factories. Improve employee productivity and retention with better pay and benefits.
But what if there was a way to make our stock price go up without any real work on our parts? No need to develop new products, open new outlets, increase worker pay, or sell a single extra widget?
Turns out, there is. All we have to do is take some of the company’s profit this year into the public marketplace (the stock exchange we’re listed on) and “buy back” from the public, say, 20 shares for $100 each and “retire” or, essentially, destroy them.
Instead of 100 shares, our company now only has 80 shares, but it’s still worth $10,000. Which means each share magically went from a price of $100 to a price of $125! ($10,000 divided by 80 = $125 per share.)
The value of your and my investment in our company each went from $1,000 to $1,250 without either of us having done anything other than executing that stock buyback: if we sold our stock today we’d show an instant profit of $250 each. All our other stockholders are happy, too, because their stock also went up in price.
Back in 1934 when, in the wake of the epic stock market crash of 1929 caused by insider trading, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and put Joe Kennedy in charge of it, one of Kennedy’s first actions was to largely outlaw these kinds of stock buybacks, labeling them “stock price manipulation.”
(My late friend Gloria Swanson, who knew both Kennedy and FDR well, told me over dinner in her New York apartment in the early 1980s that FDR told her he appointed Kennedy head of the SEC because, she said, imitating FDR’s voice, “It takes a crook to catch a crook.”)
Thus, from 1934 until the Reagan Revolution, American businesses grew the value of their stock by growing the value of their companies. It made America the leader in industrial manufacturing, innovation, and R&D. Sam Walton started Walmart with the slogan, hung as giant banners over his stores and echoed as the title of his autobiography, “100% Made in the USA.”
With that innovation and business expansion, we developed lifesaving new drugs, the transistor and integrated circuit, put men on the moon, and produced more patents than every other country in the world combined.
Today, though, we’ve lost that distinction: China produces more patents than the U.S., and it takes massive government subsidies to get companies to develop new products like chips or electric cars.
Boeing, instead of building new airplanes to expand and upgrade their fleet, spent over $60 billion on stock buybacks in the years leading up to the 2019 grounding of their Max fleet. Just between 2013 and 2019 they bought back an astonishing $43.5 billion in shares.
Not one penny of that money did anything to increase the value of Boeing: instead, it simply manipulated upward the price of their stock, as the purchased and retired shares vanished from the marketplace per the example I opened this article with.
Because most of the company’s senior executives got most of their compensation in stock rather than pay (to avoid the corporate loss of tax deductibility on salaries over $1 million), the benefit went primarily to Boeing’s executives and stockholders. Regular salaried and hourly employees were left out of the equation altogether, as was much of the ability to grow the company.
In fact, to free up money to pay for stock buybacks to feather the nests of the company’s senior executives and shareholders, the company restrained pay increases for regular employees, cut back on quality control employees, and created the kludge of the jerry-rigged 737 Max 8 and 9 planes.
According to data compiled by William Lazonick and the Academic-Industry Research Network from Boeing’s 10-K SEC filings, in the 20 years from 1998 to 2018 the company bought back $61 billion worth of stock, representing 81.8% of all profits. When you add the dividends paid to shareholders during that same period, the amount was 121% of its profits.
In other words, the senior executives appear to have spent the past few decades looting the company for their own benefit.
And Boeing isn’t alone in this: Virtually every American exchange-listed company is doing the same, which is a main reason why American worker pay and innovation have both been so stagnant for so long.
Apple, for example, has bought back $467 billion in their own shares since 2012, rather than invest in manufacturing facilities and decent worker pay here in the U.S. Facebook bought back over $50 billion of their own stock just in 2021, making Mark Zuckerberg the richest millennial in America, controlling over 1/50th of all millennial wealth.
In the nine years leading up to 2021, the S&P 500’s 474 corporations spent $5.7 trillion buying back their own stock: That’s more than half their total income. Further gutting their ability to pay their employees well or develop new products, they paid another $4.2 trillion in dividends to shareholders, representing 41% of their net income.
And the problem is equally pervasive among companies listed on the Dow and the NASDAQ.
How did it come to this?
It started with Reagan’s putting John Shad—the vice chairman of the monster investment house E.F. Hutton—in charge of the SEC, which regulates monster investment houses.
Shad wasted no time in deregulating stock buybacks, instituting in 1982 what’s now known as “Rule 10b-18” that made stock buybacks explicitly legal for the first time since 1934.
Since then, share buybacks have become the most personally profitable business scam CEOs and senior executives can run against their own employees, companies, and communities.
When Reagan and Shad made this change in 1982, the average compensation of CEOs was around 30 times that of their average employee. CEO’s often lived in the same communities as their workers, or in a just slightly more upscale part of town.
Today CEO compensation is between 254 and 10,000 times the average employee, depending on the industry, and CEOs live in palatial estates with servants’ quarters, yachts, and private jets; most of that increase in their annual income is the result of their companies’ repeatedly executing stock buybacks over the past 40 years.
Corporate CEOs call this “maximizing shareholder value” and claim it’s how capitalism is supposed to work. But Adam Smith never anticipated such a thing, would have called it a scam, and he would have been right.
As more and more CEOs got in on the hustle since Reagan legalized it in the 1980s, it’s come to account for much of the 40-year explosion in the price of publicly traded stocks.
Dow Industrials are shown between 1900-2019.
Investors don’t complain because they’re making out well, too (and 84% of all stock in America is owned by the top 10%).
After all, why spend money on improving the company—or even on routine maintenance and safety—when you can personally cash in just as effectively by simply using your company’s revenues to engineer a new stock buyback scheme every year?
As William Lazonick wrote for The Hill in 2018:
Most recently, from 2007 through 2016, stock repurchases by 461 companies listed on the S&P 500 totaled $4 trillion, equal to 54% of profits... Indeed, top corporate executives are often willing to incur debt, lay off employees, cut wages, sell assets, and eat into cash reserves to “maximize shareholder value.”
It’s all done, Lazonick notes, to facilitate share buybacks.
Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) have all written about this, decrying stock buybacks and offering specific proposals to tax or even outlaw them. (Biden put a 1% tax on them with the Inflation Reduction Act, a breakthrough, but it should probably be at least 40% to have any impact.)
It’s time to declare the 43-year Reagan Revolution’s neoliberal experiment a failure, and outlaw or heavily tax the share buybacks that are one of its most visible markers. Joe Kennedy knew what he was talking about when he criminalized them, even if he was a crook.
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How Biden Can Win on the Economy: Stop Mass Layoffs
The federal government awards approximately $700 billion per year in federal contracts; what if the Biden administration added one simple clause: “No compulsory layoffs.”
Apr 09, 2024
President Joe Biden trails former President Donald Trump by 20 points in the key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin when people are asked who “is best able to handle the economy,” according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll.
To many pundits this makes no sense. During the Biden administration unemployment has been near all-time lows, wages have been rising, and, after a spurt, inflation has been falling. The Wall Street Journal poll also showed that most people say they personally and their states are doing well economically.
Robert Reich, who I greatly respect, tells us not to worry. “There’s always a time lag,” he wrote recently in his newsletter, “between when the economy turns positive and when voters begin to feel more positive about an administration.” He estimates it will take another three to four months for the voter vibes to catch up with the good economy, just in time for the election.
If a corporation takes taxpayer money, it should not be laying off taxpayers.
Economist Paul Krugman blames the disconnect on partisanship: Republicans believe that when a Democrat is in the presidency, the economy must be doing poorly. He urges progressives to celebrate the Biden achievements. “The truth is,” he warns, “the U.S. economy is a remarkable success story. Don’t let anyone tell you that it isn’t.”
Well, I’m about to do just that.
I fear that Reich and Krugman may be underestimating a devastating economic problem that the Democrats have ignored for more than a generation: mass layoffs. And this is a problem that will not go away by November.
In January, 90,309 jobs were cut, according to the Challenger Report. In the high-tech sector, 260,000 workers lost their jobs in 2023, and another 57,000 so far this year. Approximately, 4 million workers have been laid off since Biden came into office.
But wait! Aren’t those job-loss numbers dwarfed by the 14.8 million new jobs created since the Biden inauguration? Won’t that jobs boom soon sink into public consciousness, just as Reich is predicting?
Not likely. That’s because there’s a big difference between finding a new job because you want to and scrambling to find a job because you’ve been laid off. If your factory shuts down in rural Pennsylvania, for example, finding a new job could feel like hell on Earth as you, and a thousand of your former co-workers, scramble for the last jobs at the Dollar Store or Walmart.
You’re not about to reward those in power for the pain and suffering caused by being laid off due to no fault of your own.
In addition to the financial loss, the damage done to laid off workers’ health is considerable. Studies show that:
- Losing your job is the seventh most stressful life event, more stressful than divorce, a sudden and serious impairment of hearing or vision, or the death of a close friend.
- Recovery from the psychological trauma takes two years on average.
- Even for those without preexisting health conditions, the odds of developing a new health condition after being laid off rise by 83% in the first 15 to 18 months.
- Fetal development in pregnant laid off workers can be impaired.
- The risk of suicide, drug addiction, and depression increases.
The U.S. Department of Labor recognizes that “being laid off from your job is one of the most traumatic events you can experience in life.”
If Biden wants to gain more support, he should take a page from Donald Trump and intervene directly to stop mass layoffs. When Trump stepped in and prevented Carrier Air Conditioning from moving a plant to Mexico in 2017, it was widely popular. Finally, a politician stopped a layoff!
Why did Carrier give in? Because of the leverage inherent in the power of the presidency. As the CEO of United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, put it: “I was born at night, but not last night; I know that 10% of our revenue comes from the U.S. government.”
The federal government awards approximately $700 billion per year in federal contracts. What if the Biden administration added one simple clause: “No compulsory layoffs.”
If corporations with federal contracts want to lay off workers, they should have to buy them out. Layoffs would need to be voluntary. The logic is simple: If a corporation takes taxpayer money, it should not be laying off taxpayers. If that’s too much of a restriction, corporations are free to refuse federal contracts and government subsidies.
That would get the attention of working-class voters.
The blowback from corporate America, of course, would be fierce. Biden would be viciously attacked and accused of every socialist sin imaginable. It would take real nerve to let corporations know that they can’t take our tax dollars and then destroy our jobs.
Franklin D. Roosevelt knew exactly what to say in 1936 when faced with these kinds of attacks during his first term as president:
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.
The country may again be ready for that fight. But are the Democrats?
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Andrew Biggs Is An Expert—On Destroying Social Security
Biggs has spent decades trying to take away retirement benefits from Americans, by any means necessary.
Apr 04, 2024
For decades, Andrew Biggs has paid special attention to what he says are “retirement security issues,” but in reality his racket is billionaires’ security issues.
Biggs has a certain reputation. You may not be where Andrew Biggs is politically, but you can respect his consistency: He interprets anything that happens as an excuse to cut Social Security.
In a recent op-ed for The Hill, Andrew Biggs had the gall to attack the credibility of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on retirement issues. That’s rich coming from someone who has made a career of asking ordinary Americans to make do with less in retirement so that billionaires can continue paying almost nothing in taxes.
Andrew Biggs attacking Bernie Sanders on retirement issues is like a fox attacking a farmer on the subject of henhouse management.
It’s accurate to say that Andrew Biggs is an expert in one area of retirement security: destroying it. Biggs has spent decades trying to take away retirement benefits from Americans, by any means necessary. Where to begin?
Biggs played a leading role in former President George W. Bush’s ill-conceived, extremely unpopular attempt to privatize Social Security in 2005.
Biggs has frequently supported means-testing Social Security, advocated for raising the retirement age while casually suggesting (with cruel dismissiveness) that the biggest on-the-job threat for modern workers is “carpal tunnel.” He has testified in front of Congress that Social Security’s earned benefits are too high.
In 2019, Biggs said raising the retirement age would be a good way to give people “a psychic nudge to work longer.” Biggs could not be more out of touch with working people and what they need in retirement.
Andrew Biggs attacking Bernie Sanders on retirement issues is like a fox attacking a farmer on the subject of henhouse management. Spending your life trying to steal something is certainly one way to become an expert on it!
Crucially, Biggs fails to understand Social Security and what makes it such an effective program.
Andrew Biggs desperately wants to turn Social Security into a flat, poverty-level benefit. Biggs sees the popularity and durability of social insurance, and it infuriates him. Why not welfare instead? Why not transform Social Security into something easier for Biggs and his ideological allies to dismantle and drown in the bathtub?
There’s a reason former President Franklin D. Roosevelt said “no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program.”
Andrew Biggs embodies FDR’s pithy and timeless remarks on the false promises of his Republican opponents when it comes to retirement security:
Let me warn you and let me warn the Nation against the smooth evasion which says,
“Of course we believe all these things; we believe in social security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them—we will do more of them, we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.”
But, my friends, these evaders are banking too heavily on the shortness of our memories.
Indeed, Andrew Biggs is banking on the shortness of our collective memories when it comes to Social Security.
Biggs is obsessed with this idea that in Australia and other Anglophone countries, public retirement programs are closer to welfare instead of social insurance. But, Biggs conveniently ignores the history of American politics, where his billionaire friends and their lackeys target and destroy the programs that Biggs wants to turn Social Security into.
That’s baloney. It’s an extremely naive misrepresentation of American politics and how conservatives like Biggs have demonized and attacked welfare.
The most effective, fairest, and politically strongest way to protect and strengthen retirement benefits for everyone is by expanding Social Security and asking billionaires to pay the same rate as the rest of us into the system.
When it comes down to it, Biggs is paid by billionaires to tell lies and try to prevent billionaires from paying more in taxes. No matter the moment, he has only one idea: Working people must make do with less—and like it!
Luckily, even with Washington, D.C.’s, goldfish-length memory, Biggs’s schtick is wearing thin. When he is in a venue where he cannot lie, like a Senate hearing, he is exposed, challenged, and rejected quite quickly and even bipartisanly.
When it comes to Social Security, it is important to remember Andrew Biggs is only an expert in one way, attempting to make the weaker argument the stronger through sophistry and sheer shamelessness. Ignore this man, and everything he says.
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