Only Capitalism is as Stake!

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The war on Wisconsin
by Michelle Malkin
Now is the time for all good tea partiers to come to the aid of Wisconsin. Fiscally conservative leaders in the Badger State are under coordinated siege from Big Labor, the White House, the liberal media and the judiciary. The yearlong campaign of union thuggery, family harassment and intimidation of Republican donors and businesses is about to escalate even further. This is the price the Right pays for doing the right thing

Democracy in Danger: The Origins of European Technocracy
Richard Griffiths
This quotation from President Roosevelt's 1933 Inaugural Address seems very familiar to us almost 80 years later. But it is not just in anti-banking rhetoric that our two periods have a great deal in common. Many of the more serious political reactions to the great recession of the Thirties find their counterparts in the present day, too. And perhaps there are lessons for us to learn from some of the mistakes of that earlier generation. Foremost among these is the lesson of the danger to democracy created by knee-jerk reactions to the crisis…… The temptation towards authoritarianism was experienced even in the United States, seen by many as the epitome of democracy. As Roosevelt put it, in his 1933 Inaugural Address:

I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption. But in the event that Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis — broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency.

Small wonder that Harold Nicolson, hearing that speech on the radio at a house in the US, should have said to his garrulous hostess, who kept talking during it: "Mrs Strachey, do you realise that your new President has just proclaimed that he will, if need be, institute a dictatorship?"