This Is 1930. What Are You Going to Do?

[McCamy Taylor]

This is 1930. Unemployment has just shot up to 8.7. A massive failure of banks has lead to a contraction in the nation’s money supply. The Fed keep dropping interest rates to compensate. Democrats have some gains in Congress but they do not control enough seats to be effective, so no legislation can get passed. Hoover is president. That means a whole lot of nothing will be done. By 1932, unemployment is 23.6 percent.

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Timeline.htm

This is 2009. Unemployment has just risen to 7.6. This is the biggest jump in unemployment the nation has seen since the post Vietnam recession of the early 1970s. The Feds have already bottomed out interest rates and bailed out the nations failing banks with billions of taxpayers’ dollars, but that has done little to increase the nation’s money supply. Democrats have made gains in Congress, but Republicans are blocking all legislation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/06/AR2009020601156.html?hpid%3Dtopnews⊂=AR

You do the math.

This page charts the Misery Index aka the US unemployment rate since the days after WWII. Note how the rate goes down under Democratic Presidents and how Republican Presidents’ economic policies cause it to rise. The Reagan-Bush years were especially bad, but they are nothing compared to the economic disaster which Bush-Cheney have created.

Americans have been accused of having no interest in their own history. Europeans portray us as naïve souls who cast off the past and live each day as if the world just began anew. However, the Great Depression changed the lives of everyone who lived through it, and the experience colored the way that those people raised their own families. We saw this in people like Brother Malcolm, Martin Luther King Jr., Walter Cronkite, LBJ, Bill Moyer and a host of other populist, progressive figures who came out of that era. And now we feel that effect again in a second wave of people who came of age in the 1960s and who were influenced by the young adults of the Depression. People like Keith Olbermann and…

Barack Obama.

This is 1930 again. This time we will not repeat history. This time we will act before unemployment rises to 23, and our lives and those of our children and grandchildren are irrevocably changed.