Tag Archives: FDR

Obama and Jobs–He Should Look to FDR

Judging by his record of job creation, which has been rather benign during the worst employment drought since the Great Depression, it should be clear by now that Barack Obama is no Franklin Roosevelt. Although he admires the Roosevelt legacy, he seems… Continue reading

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A Dagger To The Heart Of The Democratic Party – Once Bitten, Twice Shy

Barack Obama may have taken the literary triumphs of “Change We Can Believe In” and the stirringly inspirational, “We are the ones we have been waiting for” and turned both poignant sentiments into sharp daggers pointed right at the heart of the Democr… Continue reading

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Can You Teach Emotional Intelligence?

The Secretary of Education isn’t the only one who thinks so. Behind the growing movement for social and emotional learning.In a dimmed classroom in Spanish Harlem’s P.S. 112, thirteen kindergarteners were on a journey through the Woods of Wonder. With … Continue reading

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Is Obama a Reagan Democrat?

To understand President Obama’s policy decisions and personnel choices, it is important to consider his underlying philosophy, which comes more from Ronald Reagan than FDR. Central to Obama’s ideology are the following four elements, all derived from … Continue reading

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What Joe Barton’s Words Show Us About the Republican Party

–And, I still remember, from just two nights ago, he is one of that great historic trio, who consistently votes against every measure designed for the relief of the American people, ‘Martin, Barton & Fish’! –FDR, 1940When Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX… Continue reading

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Tom Friedman Wants to Raise Your Taxes

There are basically two views of the American people.In one, we’re the patriots ready to do whatever it takes for our country. If a crisis requires sacrifices, we won’t flinch when our leaders summon us to make them. We’re the people FDR asked not on… Continue reading

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Facebook Wants to Destroy You

Yahoo! News recently featured a piece on “6 Career-Killing Facebook Mistakes,” covering a range of issues on how potential employees should craft their Facebook profiles considering the far-reaching investigative techniques used by employers. As a graduate student soon to enter the workforce, this is a warning bell I’ve heard often from friends as well as my parents. You name it and I’ve heard it. My wondering whether Canadian “dirty talk” involves Canadians rattling off factoids about Wayne Gretzky’s NHL career during the throes of passion “isn’t funny.” Stating that FDR is my favorite president, and then pondering whether giving him a standing ovation would have offended him, “isn’t going to get me a job.” Of course it isn’t — I can’t network with FDR. He isn’t around anymore.

All of the things listed above are on my Facebook page, and all are in jest. But my jesting should be a source of concern, experts say. One of the first “career-killing-mistakes,” according to the Yahoo! article, is inappropriate pictures. They report that employers “don’t want to see pictures of you chugging a bottle of wine or dressed up for a night at the bar” and that the threshold for which pictures are appropriate should be based on “pictures you wouldn’t want your grandparents to see.” Well, it’s a good thing employers don’t want to see people chugging a bottle of wine while being dressed up, because I sip my bottle of wine (with pinky finger extended, of course) in only my boxers. If the police officers arresting me thought it was funny, why shouldn’t any potential employer?

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A Blunt Reform Redux?

From the outset of his administration, President Obama has been likened to former president and instigator of liberal reform, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So far, this has applied mostly to his devotion to the needs of the worker and his inclination to look to big government programs to solve America’s problems — more specifically, his recent passage of the health care bill, which is comparable to the genesis of Social Security during FDR’s presidency.

A less talked about aspect of FDR’s reform however is his repeal of the Prohibition that kept America dry — at least, on the surface — for the majority of the 20s and some of the 30s. We are all familiar with the image of the underground speakeasy populated by flappers and gangsters, all trying to get their share of the forbidden booze, but not everyone knows that the end of the criminalization of alcohol started with FDR. In 1933, he issued an Executive Order to legalize beer with 3.2% alcohol content, which led to the passing of the Twenty-First Amendment and the formal repeal of Prohibition.

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Systemic Denial

I spent the morning Wednesday at the Time Warner building in New York City, participating in a conference sponsored by the Roosevelt (as in FDR) Institute titled “Make Markets Be Markets.” I don’t often — ok, ever — have the time anymore to go to conferences that I’m not speaking at. But the significance of this subject, and the prominence of the speakers, were too much for me to resist. And so at the crack of dawn, I scrambled to a 6 AM shuttle to make the 8 AM meeting in Midtown.

Everyone recognizes that our nation is in a financial mess. Too few see that this mess is not simply the ordinary downs of a regular business cycle. The American financial system walked the American economy off a cliff. Large players took catastrophic risk. There were allowed to take this risk because of a series of fundamental regulatory mistakes; they were encouraged to take it by the implicit, sometimes explicit promise, that failure would be bailed out. The gamble was obvious and it worked. The suckers were us. They got the upside. We got the bill.

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Scowling Justice, Smiling Justice

Perhaps Justice Alito should just have stayed home. There’s precedent, after all.

In January 1937, only a month before launching his plan to pack the Court, Franklin Roosevelt arrived in the House chamber to deliver the State of the Union address and found, to his surprise, that not a single justice had come to hear him speak. FDR suspected that someone had shown the nine men an advance copy of the speech–in part a lecture to the Court to stop blocking the New Deal–and that they had stayed away out of sheer spite. Disappointed, Roosevelt chided the Court anyway, accusing it of using the Constitution “as a device for prevention of action” instead of an “instrument of progress.” But the justices’ slight stayed on his mind. More than a week later, as he wrote a friend, he took some satisfaction in hearing that they had “at least read the remarks which pertained to them. I hope so!”

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