Amen and well said. One of Nixon's vastly under-rated crimes was scuttling FDR's Bretton Woods system. Our current travails can be traced to many things, but fundamentally it gets back to Nixon and Schultz killing Bretton Woods in '71 (OK, Viet Nam before that certainly didn't help). That set the trajectory for all neo-liberal experiments that followed: currency speculation post-Bretton Woods, deregulation in all its forms (trucking, airline, utilities, financial), union busting, creation of the oil spot market, Reagan's tax cutting, tariff cutting and deficit ramp up, Greenspan's creation of derivatives, repeal of Glass-Steagal, Dot Com bubble, Y2K bubble, rise of the Hedge Funds, Shrub's tax cuts and war spending, mortgage bubble and perhaps a few other things that are not coming to my 53 year old mind at the moment.

In other words, most of FDR's reforms, which had laid the basis for a long wave of economic growth, were jettisoned, and the wealth that had been built up from the mid 30's to the late 60's started being systematically looted.

So, from the broad outlines of how FDR did it, updated for today's situation, we can take the following actions to begin to turn things around (or failing that, see civilization itself unravel before our eyes). Start with a new Pecora Commission. Investigate and prosecute the treasonous pirates who caused the meltdown. Re-instate Glass-Steagal (put a wall between chartered banks and investment banks). Put a whole lot of banks into receivership; write off the bad assets (ALL of the derivatives - then outlaw them) and release the banks back into the wild. Temporarily freeze foreclosures during this process. Shut down the Fed, and/or subsume it under a new National Bank. As Hamilton did post-Revolutionary War with the State's debts, monetize our debt thru the Bank, creating credit targeted (only) for massive investments in needed infrastructure. Raise tariffs to historical norms to protect what little manufacturing capabilty we have left, and nurture it back - we will need huge amounts of steel, concrete, skilled and semi-skilled workers, engineers, etc. We will have to have a lot of white collar folks switch to blue collars.

Some very powerful people will fight this to the last (the grandsons and grand-daughters of FDR's "Economic Royalists"). But they must finally be entirely defeated or they will destroy the nation's institutions and usher in fascism, as they tried to do in the coup attempt against FDR, recounted by Smedley Butler.

Still, it is true that the New Deal failed to bring the Great Depression to a close. Andrew Rich

How many countries, if any, had as deep and as prolonged a depression as did the United States?

The problem with the New Deal was its fecklessness, never willing or able to establish one policy and stick to it. Maybe there wasn't one policy that would have worked; we'll never know.

And it's that kind of instability that I'm afraid Obama's likely to wind up with.

The nice thing about "Liquidate! Liquidate! Liquidate" is that it's quick; it's honest (no moral hazard); it works; and although it's painful -- a judgment call, here -- it's less painful than a decade of depression.

Proliferation of Lies About FDR -
Lyndon LaRouche, Jr. delivered these remarks from his webcast speech on Feb. 11, 2009.

Freeman: The next question comes from someone who is part of the economic advisory board for the President, and who is also a very prominent Roosevelt scholar. He says: "Mr. LaRouche, as I'm sure you are aware, President Obama has repeatedly been forced to defend FDR's pre-war policy from those individuals who insist that the New Deal was a failure, and that, in fact, the only thing that got the United States out of the Depression was the Second World War. From a policy standpoint, I find this to be completely absurd. The truth of the matter is that the United States would have never been in a position to fight and to win the Second World War, had it not been for FDR's pre-war policy. From the standpoint of being an historian and an FDR scholar, I find this to be absolutely offensive. However, I do think that it is important to take the question up, since it is now being spread about so widely. Could you please comment on your own assessment of President Roosevelt's pre-war policy, and also what it is that motivates these people to launch this kind of attack?"

LaRouche: This is a very interesting question, and it has a rather simple answer, but it requires some explanation to understand what we're talking about.

On the day after Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt moved toward war, and assumed war powers. Under these conditions, certain Wall Street and Chicago interests, which had been the supporters of Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, up to that point, sort of deserted their offices and moved over to new premises, and continued with the same equipment.

Now, Harry Truman, as Senator, was part of this group, and he showed that, after Roosevelt's death. So, what these guys--like the American Enterprise Institute--these institutions today were constituted after Pearl Harbor as new organizations, containing the same intention as the supporters of Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, in the United States and Britain, during the 1920s and 1930s. Up until 1940-41, these guys were hard-core fascists, all of them, including the firm, for example, of Prescott Bush, Brown Brothers Harriman. Brown Brothers Harriman represented American and British interests, Wall Street interests. Brown Brothers was tied to the head of the Bank of England, who was the creator of Adolf Hitler. So these guys, and the Mussolini supporters--of course, Winston Churchill was a great lover of Benito Mussolini; I don't know if they had the same sexual inclinations or not, but anyway, the same kind of thing. So, these guys, who were fascists of the Coolidge variety and the Hoover variety, continued in power in the United States, as on the Supreme Court case, that issue, which was illustrated with that, up until we went into war after Pearl Harbor.

Now, the first thing you have to look at--is like this woman, [Amity Shlaes], who's the leader in this campaign, is tied to things like the American Enterprise Institute--these guys have exactly the same philosophy, economy, and politics, that the Nazi supporters, the Hitler supporters, the Mussolini supporters, had in the 1920s and 1930s. These are the people who were opponents of Roosevelt then.

Now, you've come to a time when this British crowd, the same British crowd, is moving toward a new kind of fascism, a revival of fascism, which is what the Bush Administration really was all about. And that's the problem. So they are lying, as the questioner put it; they're just plain lying. There's no truth to what they're saying. There's no truth to what this notable woman is saying. She's a liar! She's a degenerate.

Now, the other aspect of the thing, which you know--the questioner--is, you know the story of Harry Hopkins. You know the story of how this began, when Britain and Japan were engaged in a treaty to attack and destroy the United States naval fleet, in large degree, on the high seas. And it was at this time, in the early 1920s, that the plan was made, the agreement was made, between Japan and the United Kingdom, to have Japan take out Pearl Harbor as part of this joint British-Japan operation. The pretext of this, was that Japan was brought into the fold of the British Empire during the 1890s, which resulted in Japan, under British direction, launching the China wars, the Japan-China wars of 1895 through 1945. There were some breaks in there, but Japan was at war, and aimed to destroy and break up China, from 1895 to 1945. That was the policy. This policy was a policy which had been set by the British.

The British, of course, had been for Hitler; they had been for Mussolini--until the German Wehrmacht succeeded in taking over France, because of cooperation with the fascist government of France, which invited Hitler in, in effect. At that point, the British saw that the Western Front had been breached. They were very happy to have Hitler going against Russia, against the Soviet Union and other states in Eastern Europe. They were never upset about the killing of the Jews by Hitler--not at all! But when Hitler's forces were in France, and threatening the British fleet with a takeover by getting the French fleet, of taking over the naval power, then the British suddenly became anti-Hitler. Reluctantly, but anti-Hitler, without giving up any of their bad tendencies.

And what happened is, when Roosevelt died--and the British knew that Roosevelt was out to destroy the British Empire as soon as the war was over, and he was--then, the British moved in with their Harry Truman. And Harry Truman was sympathetic to this kind of interest.

So, what you had in this whole period, you had the same financial interests, which are British-linked, come back into power by taking over control, with Harriman and company, for example: Harriman, who had been responsible for Prescott Bush, in financing Hitler. Harriman became a key figure of the Democratic Party, and one of the controllers of the Democratic Party in the post-war period.

So, if one knows the history--as I'm sure the questioner probably knows a good deal of this, and knows the history of these right-wing think tanks, like those centered around Chicago, which were creations of pro-Nazi organizations in the Wall Street community, and Chicago community before--then there's no mystery about what these bastards are doing. They were fascists then, and they're fascists today! And, like fascists, they lie like fascists (not like rugs).

Text Transcript:
http://www.larouchepac.com/node/7966

Fascists, Then and Now, Stalk the FDR Legacy
http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2009/02/22/fascists-then-and-now-stalk-fdr-legacy.html