Free Republic

Eighty years ago, Germany’s former conquerors rejected wrecking the defeated nation as too harsh. But now Germany is willfully pastoralizing, disarming, deindustrializing—and destroying—itself. Less than a year before the end of World War II, then U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau drew up a nightmarish plan to punish postwar Germany. After the serial 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II—along with the failed Versailles peace treaty of 1919—the Allies in World War II wanted to ensure there would never again be an aggressive Germany powerful enough to invade its neighbors. When the so-called Morgenthau Plan was...

We should have lost the Venona Transcripts, intercepts of Soviet cold-war espionage activity. Word came down from the FDR White House to kill the Venona program, perhaps under the influence of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau who had an important assistant in secret-Communist Harry Dexter White. As it was the military officials responsible for the intercepts continued to accumulate them and the accuracy of Senator Joseph McCarthy's estimates of Communist infiltration of the State Department would ultimately be confirmed nearly to a "T". Military Intelligence revealed itself in that instance not to be an oxymoron. Every shift of the Joint Chiefs...

Debate on HR 4213 Remarks by Representative Tom McClintock House Chamber, Washington, D.C. July 22, 2010 M. Speaker: Anyone who has experienced firsthand the quiet panic that stalks every waking hour of an unemployed family knows how frightening and debilitating is chronic unemployment. You watch your savings evaporate, you see your children going without the material things their friends enjoy, and you count down the months or even weeks until you won’t be able to make that crucial rent or house payment. That unemployment check is a lifeline in such times, and I fully appreciate and understand how desperately an...

One evening in the 1930s, a 13-year-old named William Troeller hanged himself from the transom of his bedroom in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. William's father was laid up in Kings County Hospital awaiting surgery for an injury he'd suffered on the job at Brooklyn Edison. A federal jobs program was paying William's older brother Harold for temporary work. But the amount wasn't nearly enough to make ends meet. Gas and electricity to the family's apartment had been shut off for half a year. Harold told a New York Times reporter that both hunger and modesty had driven William to act. "He was...

Barack Obama and the FDR-Great Depression Mythby Michael Fumento (more by this author) Posted 11/26/2008 ET The cover of Time magazine has Barack Obama photoshopped into Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous convertible, complete with oval-shaped glasses and cigarette holder held between the teeth. “The NEW New Deal,” The cover reads. Surely many who voted for Obama saw him as potentially the new FDR, the man to lead us out of hard economic times. But they’ve been misled, for even FDR wasn’t FDR. He is a quasi-mythical creature who not only didn’t end the Great Depression but probably greatly prolonged the...

May 1939, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau testified: "We are spending more money than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. ... I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. ... I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... and an enormous debt, to boot."

The circumstances of today's $700 billion bailout are eerily similar to those of FDR's New Deal, and today's Pied Pipers are playing the same bipartisan, power-grabbing tune. "It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury Department spokeswoman told Forbes.com concerning how the figure of $700 billion was arrived at for the financial bailout package. "We just wanted to choose a really large number." Choosing a "really large number" helps, of course, if one is trying to convince the American public that the nation is facing a really large emergency, and that the government must be given really large...

“Morgenthau, after being in charge of this economic debacle called the New Deal, finally sort of exploded in 1939 and said, ‘We are spending more money than we have ever spent before, and it does not work,” quoted Folsom. “‘I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt, to boot.”