Excellent post. Wonderful platform upon which to build your discussion. But I’m prejudiced – I can hear Bessie Smith singing it as I write.
As you state, FDR was a lot more out-there on the left than people knew. Or know. I read a speech he gave, I think at Cornell, in which he decried the fact that people with a lot of wealth could employ it as they saw fit, rather than with an eye to the common good. Sound familiar?
I have felt for about the last ten years that things were not good and there was a reckoning awaiting. Things were just too frantic. My little shotgun double in New Orleans, for which I paid 32K in 1996, was suddenly “worth” about 120K in 2004. Huh? And the job creation numbers – they were announced not with glee but seemingly with a sense that disaster was again averted.
It was like driving a car at redline: one little piece of grit in the oil pump and the engine explodes.
And it did.
This may be a profound event, possibly on the order of the breakdown of the Roman empire.
