From Thom Hartmann's free preview of "Screwed"...FDR after the 1929 recession.

[madfloridian]

I remember my grandparents talking about how they were so devastated. They could not afford health care, often food was hard to come by in the early years. They had their home which they owned, but that was about it. They lived close by to stores in the neighborhood, and they managed to survive. They were luckier than some.

I was reading this chapter of Screwed about the middle class. The first paragraph sounds very much like today.

It is in pdf format.

http://www.mythical.net/screwed/screwed-ch-2.pdf

The Great Depression was the spark that lit the beginnings of America’s second era of a middle class. By 1929, after a series of massive tax cuts for the wealthy by two successive Republican
presidents, the chasm between the wealth of the “investor class”
and that of the working class in the United States was greater than it had ever been. (It again reached these dimensions—for only the
second time in U.S. history—in the autumn of 2005.) The result
was the October 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression
that followed.

.."It took the leadership of President Roosevelt in the 1930s for
the government to again take a hand in creating a middle class, this
time via industrialized labor instead of land. FDR implemented
the two necessary economic ingredients—a classical economic
model and a government-spending stimulus—thereby almost
single-handedly creating the modern middle class.

..."FDR made sure that We the People had money in our pockets
through progressive taxation, Social Security, fair labor laws, the
regulation of business, and the vigorous enforcement of antitrust
laws. In 1935 he pushed through the Fair Labor Standards Act,
which set a minimum wage, and the National Labor Relations Act
(Wagner Act), which protected workers’ right to create a democratic
institution—a union that elected its own leadership—in the
feudal kingdoms of America’s workplaces. People like Mrs. Flores,
sewing Levi’s, were for the first time able to negotiate a living wage.

The next chapter is called The Rise of Corporatocracy. I am only picking a few paragraphs that jumped out at me. I remember Reagan causing the shutdown of the mental hospitals, and everyone was praising him for it. The media did not do its job then either, and we had a new homeless class.

http://www.mythical.net/screwed/screwed-ch-3.pdf

Consider the biggest pocketbook pincher: health care. Many Americans are falling out of the middle class today because they can’t aff ord health insurance. One bad accident, one serious illness,one really big hospital bill, and that’s it—they can’t pay the
bills, so they lose their car and their home and tumble right out of
the middle class.

Back in my dad’s day, that wouldn’t have happened. Most
working people got health care through their employers. Th e big
health-care insurers—Blue Cross and Blue Shield—were nonprofits,
which meant that they just passed on the actual cost of health
insurance to employers. Th e government implemented Medicare
and Medicaid in the 1960s to take care of all the folks who weren’t
insured. Although the system worked imperfectly, overall it was
pretty decent.

But then Reagan deregulated hospitals and much of the rest
of the health-care industry (along with trucking, travel, and a
dozen other industries). Within a decade the system had fallen
apart for all but the wealthiest Americans. Hospitals, which had
been mainly nonprofit, became for-profit and started charging
higher rates. Drug companies realized they could raise prices as
high as they wanted because they had bought out their competitors in Reagan’s merger-and-acquisition mania and no longer have
government looking over their shoulders. Pharmaceutical companies
are now the most profi table business in the United States.
Insurance companies got into the act too, going from nonprofit to
for-profit. Every player in the system started looking to health care
to make a buck. The result was double-digit health-care inflation
rates by 2001.

A new class of homeless, many of them mentally ill, many of them Vietnam veterans.

And any progress that has been made is now being destroyed under this administration.

Here is the page with the free excerpts.
http://www.mythical.net/screwed/excerpts.htm

[Gold Metal Flake]

1. K&R

Read Hartmann.

[illinoisprogressive]

2. thanks for this. I wondered where the health care started falling apart

As a young adult I raged at Reagan but, was never aware he was responsible for the health care system going to hell.
I wondered when and how. I really thank you for this.
I love FDR. During the late 80s as a young woman I got interested in this period and started reading some books on it. My hero became and still is the great man. FDR is like this tower of greatness to me.
After 20 years he still facsinates me and is still my president.

[terisan]

3. Thanks for this but one comment:

The mental hospitals were shut down for good reasons--and not by Reagan.

The mental hospitals were warehousing people, and not providing decent or humane treatment. Many were hellholes. Successful court challenges shut them down.

However many states then provided inadequate community treatment and little or no housing. Reagan showed no leadership.
Patronage, politics, and profit-motive were significant in this. The institutional system provided contracts for services and for construction which were highly politicized. Community services didn't offer the same opportunities.

I think the shutdown of the large mental and mr institutions coincided with the buildup of the institutional prison system we have today. The political patronage continues; the people get screwed.

[illinoisprogressive]

4. The shut down of the mental hospitals were tragic in one respect,

there was no net for them. They released them to the street to fend for themselves and to this day many do not get the treatment they need and live homeless.
It is tragic how they did this. There should have been a half stop, a net for them. It is criminal.

[madfloridian]

5. Many were NOT "warehousing" people.

Many were giving kind loving care to those who had no other way to get it. That was partly what you say and partly a tale told like many told today...to get the government out of the hospital business.

I remember a lot of the anger, and I remember a lot of the people just bragging about how wonderful Reagan was. He did not believe the government owed anything to its people. I do. I think a government has an obligation to help those who have exhausted all other means.

You are partly right, but so am I.

[terisan]

14. Give names of any public long term institutions that were giving great care

I would be interested in researching. I was active in this field in the 1970's. All the institutions I knew of were cash-strapped, provided poor health care and little or no services. Class action lawsuits which started in the 1960s, cited use of cattle-prods, straight jackets, and other coercive measures. (Alabama was a famous one). Visiting hours were curtailed so that families had little access and the public often had little knowledge about conditions. The professional and ward staff to patient ratios precluded decent care. Often these institutions were supported by medicaid or medicare funds, states collected the federal dollars and the feds did not enforce decent standards.

I myself observed such things as an individual held naked in acell for over a year, people with bloody bruised heads from banging them on tiled walled (self-stimulating behavior because they were locked in wards with no activities), medical experimentation on children for developing hepatitis vaccine for the military, children dying needlessly from dysentery. Usually these places had visitor boards of appointed citizens who usually reported that services were great. I could go on for hours.

I knew many staff people who were kind and loving but they were operating within a system over which they had little or no control. Similar to the troops in Iraq.

I am truly interested in knowing of any LTC institution-for mentally ill or mentally retarded, that you can cite as being top quality. I visited an institution in Germany in the late 1980s that may have been ok--but it was totally open campus and residents had complete freedom of movement in an, out, and about. I could visit any part of it. It was transparent.

I haven't yet seen anything like that here.

Again, let me know as I am interested in researching.

[dhill926]

6. yep....

and as a result, many mentally ill homeless roam the streets today. They need help and guidance, and get none. It's a national disgrace.

[charlie]

7. It isn't altruism that oughta motivate

concern for middle class welfare among the rich, but plain old bottom dollar self-interest. A broad contented middle class is what keeps them from swinging from lampposts. They can choose to be rich in an America with a civil society and clean, safe, well-maintained streets, or they can be ultrarich and ride in security retinues between gated compounds. Their choice. They're choosing stupidly.

[madfloridian]

8. And from Ch. 1, The Lie of the Free Market.

http://www.mythical.net/screwed/screwed-ch-1.pdf

The Lie of the “Free” Market
Listen to the right-wing pundits—the people I call the cons—and
they will tell you something completely diff erent. They suggest
(and some actually believe) that a middle class will naturally spring
into being when the kingdoms of corporate power are freed from
government restrictions.

The way to create good jobs, according to the cons, is to “free”
the market. When business gets to do whatever it wants, they say,
it will create wealth, and that wealth will trickle down to the rest of
us, creating a middle class. The cons’ belief in “free” markets is a bit like the old Catholic
Church’s insistence that the Earth was at the center of the solar system.

The free-market line is widely believed by those in power, and
those who challenge this belief are labeled heretics—and it’s wrong.
Here’s a headline for these cons who are masquerading as
economists without having studied either economics or history:

There is no such thing as a “free” market.
Markets are the creation of government.
Governments provide markets with a stable currency for
financial transactions. They provide a legal infrastructure and a
court system to enforce the contracts that make the market possible.
They provide an educated workforce through public education,
and those workers show up at their places of business after
traveling on public roads, rails, and airways provided by the government.
Businesses that use the “free” market are protected by
police and fi re departments provided by the government, and they
send their communications—from phone to e-mail—over lines
that follow public rights of way maintained and protected by the
government.

I have not read Hartmann before, but he makes things simple to understand for me....I am most certainly not very learned about economic things.

[NotGivingUp]

9. Thom is great! You can listen to him M-F at whiterosesociety.org noon - 3

I've learned a lot from Thom.

[madfloridian]

13. I often turn off Franken on XM and stream Hartmann.

I think he is great. I do refuse to listen when he gets the Ayn Rand types on.

[NotGivingUp]

15. Yeah...they can get a little irritating!

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

10. The government's role in markets is a very important point

Without the government there to provide a medium of exchange to to provide legal protections, the seller would not know if he would be paid for his goods or robbed.

[ourbluenation]

12. He's on Quake radio everyday...it's the bay areas air america station. n/t

[The Witch]

11. I met him last night

and babbled like an idiot :-)