General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: FCC Proposes Groundbreaking Free Public Wi-Fi Throughout United States; Mobile Companies Protest [View all]Peace Patriot
(24,010 posts)...but it greatly alarms me how the "New Deal" has been unraveled in recent decades, and, due to corporatization of the public airwaves and of virtually all news, information, opinion and entertainment, and the triumphs of nutballs and loss of history education in our schools, so many people DON'T EVEN KNOW what the "New Deal" was and what it did.
Point to many and probably to most good things in our country, and you will find their origin in the "New Deal"--whether it is labor rights and protections, civil rights, the public education and library systems, all the basic infrastructure of modern life, any notions we still have of "the Commons," of the "common good," of majority rule, of the equality of persons whether rich or poor, of the fair treatment of military veterans, of government's obligation to protect the poor majority from the rich assholes who would rob them blind, and much more--those four terms of the "New Deal" were THE seminal era in the creation of the U.S. as a modern, progressive country. The rich and the corporate have been trying to destroy that great legacy ever since Reagan--including obliterating any memory of it.
So I felt a bit touchy about a failure to attribute the Rural Electrification project to FDR and the "New Deal"--as if to say, anybody might have done it. It WOULDN'T have happened without them, and things would be even worse in our rural areas, and, as a consequence, in our urban areas, than they are now. They also did it right, hooking up everybody for free, and using co-operatives and government-paid workers to get it done. This is true of so many "New Deal" projects--that they not only did the impossible but they did it right--that it's impossible to name them all. Think, for instance, of the local and state histories that would not have been written, and all the documentation of those histories that would have been lost forever, but for "New Deal" jobs programs, which employed unemployed and starving writers to write those histories, as well artists and other talented specialists, in addition to manual laborers for roads, bridges, public buildings and other infrastructure. The "New Deal" saved our soul as a nation, as well as developing it physically and restoring it economically.
I really hate all this Ayn Rand "Wall Street" propaganda, that glorifies the individual rich bastard and tries to make us forget that we are A COMMUNITY and that we are happiest and more prosperous when we build things TOGETHER for the common good, pooling our talents and using our COMMUNAL money--our FAIR taxes--in the way it should be used, "of, by and for" the People.
Sorry for the rant. Sorry for the sarcasm. Yes, I agree with you (except for the "whoever it was" .