Basing its article on the failed ides of FDR, our most socialist president, The Blade revisits Roosevelt's showy, populist idea of creating a "second Bill of Rights" giving Americans a "right" to a job. The Blade calls FDR a "forward-looking president" and extols the unAmerican specifics of his plan as a solution for today's problems, even making it seem as if U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is calling for the revival of this onerous new "Bill of Rights."
Nearly 65 years ago, a forward-looking President Franklin Delano Roosevelt— searching for recovery of the economy and looking toward the end of a global war on two fronts — presented to the country his idea of a second Bill of Rights dictating the right of all Americans to have jobs, adequate medical care, food, shelter, and education.
The only thing Franklin D. Roosevelt was looking "forward" to was votes. Roosevelt was not a learned man, nor one of great intellect, but he was a genius on getting votes (his failed bid for VP in 1920 aside). Even his Social Security plan -- an idea originally invented in socialist Germany in 1881 -- was nothing but a grab for votes, as he readily admitted. Roosevelt once said his Social Security plan was "never a problem of economics. They were politics all the way through."
Despite FDR's failures, the Toledo Blade urges Barack Obama to take up these anti-American, communistic principles.
Today, when Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama returns to Toledo, The Blade, on its front page, asks Mr. Obama a simple question: Do all Americans who want to work have the right to a job where they live?
Let me answer that for you, Blade: NO. No one is owed a "right" to a job. In order to assure that faux "right" government will have to take over all businesses and dole out jobs to the people. This is not an American principle, but one closer to full blown communism.
The Blade next proves it doesn't have the first understanding of the vast differences between 1944, when FDR floated the second Bill of Rights plan, and today. In 1944 the country had just begun to climb out of The Great Depression and the pain of that time still weighed heavily on most Americans. Few people then realized that FDR's policies were responsible for prolonging the depression, but even with most Americans fooled into thinking FDR was their savior, his cynical measure was a non-starter.
On the other hand, today we are nowhere near being in the same sad economic shape we were in during The Great Depression. In that time unemployment was extremely high. In 1940, for instance, that rate soared to 14.6 percent and in the years just prior it was even worse. (23% in 1932, 21 % in 1934, 19% in 1938, etc.) Keep in mind, those figures in the 1930's and 40's didn't include women as they were not generally considered a part of the work force then. By our reckoning today, those numbers would have been far higher.
Even though claims that we are in as bad a time now as we were during The Great Depression are little else but hyperbole, the Blade thinks differently.
The similarities of the challenges of the 1940s and today have not gone unnoticed.
In today's bad-news economy, many believe the 32nd president's ideas should be invoked again.
Just who is this "many"? We aren't told by the Blade, naturally. It is just a claim made with no supporting proof offered. This is just another case of the “some say” or “experts think” nonsense that we get in the press all the time.
And, of course, we get the canard that FDR somehow saved the country from The Great Depression.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Roosevelt created the New Deal to provide relief for the unemployed, economic recovery, and to reform the country's economic and banking systems.
More and more, though, modern economists and historians are realizing that the acclamations that are so often bestowed upon Saint FDR are little else but hero worship, Democrat spin and lies. Jim Powell, author of FDR's Follies, does a fantastic job demolishing the FDR myth and quotes Pulitzer Prize winning author David M. Kennedy as saying: "Whatever it was, the New Deal was not a recovery program, or at any rate not an effective one."
As columnist Mark Steyn recently joked, it was FDR that put the “Great” in The Great Depression because for the rest of the world it was just a depression.
Some of the ideas that FDR included in his massive take over of the U.S. economy in the inaptly named Second Bill of Rights were as follows:
- The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
- The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
- The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
- The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
- The right of every family to a decent home;
- The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
- The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
- The right to a good education.
Again, the only way to assure these impossible "rights" is to eliminate privately owned businesses. And this is exactly what the Toledo Blade is suggesting Barack Obama do once he takes the White House. And with the extensive socialist background that Barack Obama has, we should all fear that he just might like these anti-capitalist ideas quite a lot.
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