By The River

I went over to the State Library in Harrisburg this morning to look up some old news clips. To my surprise and then shock, the librarians were in mourning. They told me it is likely that Gov. Rendell, the scourge of culture, will either close the library entirely or reduce it to a caretaker staff. They were called into a meeting recently and told employment would be cut from 57 to 7.

It is an outrage that Rendell would even consider closing the State Library, the largest library in south central Pennsylvania. But then, the Democrat in Name Only has also announced he will end the Governor's School for the Arts, a summer program started by liberal Gov. Shapp in 1973 that has turned out writers like the immensely talented Alice Sebold. But even apart from the stars, it is a haven for artistic students from small towns across the state, especially those in the more benighted rural areas where the arts are looked upon with suspicion or contempt.

But back to the State Library, which was started not by Gov. Shapp but by Benjamin Franklin and has been in its current location, the Forum Building, since the late 1920s. The library was busy this morning, as it often is. Not as busy as on a Saturday, when the working adults come to do their genealogy research. But not bad, all things considered. The State Library houses an unparalleled collection of newspapers on microfilm from around the state, dating back to the 19th and in a few cases the 18th centuries. It is immensely valuable to researchers of all types.

To trash this collection, or give it away piecemeal, would be something a barbarian would do. But then, Rendell is from Philadelphia and his set believes we're all hicks here anyway.

Let's be clear on one thing. The choice is not between eliminating the State Library and Governor's School and helping the poor. The choice is between saving what is good and sparing big business from a modest tax increase to help close the budget deficit. Rendell, DINO that he is, has chosen to surrender to "no tax" Senate Republicans who haven't absorbed the lesson of the last election rather than fight for a modest tax increase.

Does Rendell really want to drive suburban former Republicans back to the GOP? Because that could happen if they come to believe that Democrats are nothing but the barbarians at the gate.

Posted by David at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Desperate to stop an Obama New Deal and the likelihood it would cement Democratic control of government for a generation, rightwing conservatives have taken to attacking the man who created the first New Deal, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and claiming that no matter what your parents or grandparents may have told you, the first New Deal was a useless fraud.

Think of their ballsy effort as a distant cousin to Holocaust denial. Thirty years ago, when survivors of the Great Depression were everywhere, no one would have dared to make that argument. Someone who tried to say up was down and east was west and FDR only made things worse would have been laughed out of town. But as time passes, witnesses die off. The general public knows less and less about day-to-day life in the Depression, and is vulnerable to the half-truths of the right. The right needs to debunk the New Deal through any means necessary, because it was the most successful program of leftist government in American history. Was it perfect? No. But it put many people back to work, empowered labor unions, and gave America Social Security and welfare for the poor among other things. It created the great American middle class.

The intellectual leader of this effort to deny that the New Deal accomplished anything is Amity Schlaes of the always conservative Wall Street Journal editorial staff. Schlaes argues in her book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, and in this Washington Post op-ed article, that everything Roosevelt did made the Great Depression worse.

I'll leave it to economists like the Nobel winner Paul Krugman to refute Schlaes' economic accusations against Roosevelt. I'll confine myself to her distortions of Roosevelt's record reforming the utility industry, which I have studied at length for a future book.

Schlaes says there were private companies "ready to supply power to the rural unwired." That would have come as a big surprise to any number of farmers in Pennsylvania and Maryland, where the giant Associated Gas & Electric Co.--it served customers in 26 states--evinced little or no interest in providing electricity unless the farmer agreed to pay for the line himself. Only the wealthiest of farmers could afford this. It was why Roosevelt and the Rural Electrification Administration created rural electric co-ops. My own father remembers the day when electricity arrived at his father's farm in northwest Iowa.

Here's another howler: Schlaes writes, "In 1935, Roosevelt signed a utilities law that so restricted private capital raising that it was known as the "Death Sentence Act." Actually, the "death sentence" provision of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 was a ban on most utility holding companies that spread across state lines. They had to be broken up, and were for the most part.

Huge utility holding companies like Associated Gas & Electric, which morphed into General Public Utilities Corp. of Three Mile Island fame after 1945, had kept electricity prices high through bad management and stock fraud. These behemoths often escaped effective regulation because individual states couldn't regulate the entire company. And some, like AG&E, were little better than criminal enterprises. Howard Hopson, the leader of AG&E, indeed went to prison in 1940 for massive stock and accounting fraud. He specialized in selling his crappy stocks and bonds directly to mom and pop investors. Their pitiful pleas for recompense largely fell on deaf ears after the company went bankrupt.

I could go on and on. Roosevelt did what needed to be done to get America back on track. He is often credited with preventing a Communist revolution in America, which many feared would happen in the depths of the Great Depression. Ironically, he saved American capitalism from itself, just as Barack Obama will in this new century and new crisis.

Posted by David at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)