FDR was bold and progressive, but he left a lot of people out in the cold on Social Security

from Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_%28United_States%29




____ Most women and minorities were excluded from its benefits of unemployment insurance and old age pensions. Employment definitions reflected typical white male categories and patterns.

Job categories that were not covered by the act included workers in agricultural labor, domestic service, government employees, and many teachers, nurses, hospital employees, librarians, and social workers. The act also denied coverage to individuals who worked intermittently.

These jobs were dominated by women and minorities. For example, women made up 90% of domestic labor in 1940 and two-thirds of all employed black women were in domestic service. Exclusions exempted nearly half the working population.

Nearly two-thirds of all African Americans in the labor force, 70 to 80% in some areas in the South, and just over half of all women employed were not covered by Social Security. At the time, the NAACP protested the Social Security Act, describing it as “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.”


. . . just a reminder that most legislative progress has been historically incremental, even with passage of sweeping initiatives. FDR is the epitome of leadership, yet he was as constrained by the politics of his time as our legislators find themselves today. Actually more so today, as FDR didn't have to get 60 votes to advance his initiatives.

Would FDR find DU as hostile to his historic achievement, as many here today regard the President's own historical health law?

Establishing SS buillt an entire new framework from the ground up, which could be built upon.

The POS health care bill PFREVENTS further growth of universal healthcare, it sets in cement the system being based on employer-based private for-profit insurance, and bulds a wall between the public and the most progressive option - that being single-payer healthcare.

There's no fucking comparison.

President's own historical health law?"

What do YOU think he was talking about?

SS was and remains a governmentally administrated entitlement with all that entails. Including the most important distinction, that it is subject to the law that established it.

This bait & switch false equivalency of giving private enterprise the money while it remains private, and therefore outside direct governmental oversight, is a "mistake" that we are only beginning to see hints of the disastrous consequences it will yield.

...and it sets the precedent that government takes an active role in assuring people can afford the coverage. Its far from perfect, but to deny that it establishes a framework that can be built upon is short sighted garbage.

hiring of Blackwater - because, of course, there's an office that Blackwater's abuses can be reported to.

The POS health insurance company welfare bill leaves 30 million people uninsured, and provides NO effective cost controls, so even the 30 million who can now get insureance are not guaranteed the ability to pay for it, or access it.

The only framework that is established is that it is necessary to get your insurance through an employer - which further cripples our economic competitiveness - when it COULD have established the principle that health care (not health insurance) is a RIGHT, that it falls under governmental purview of 'promote the general welfare'.

Instead of regulating private health insurance we should abolish private insurance in any capacity greater than supplemental or cadillac plans. All that private insurance does is make money for the insurance company, and has fuck all to do with providing healthcare.

You keep comparing it to your dream bill, which didn't actually have any chance of passing. You should be comparing it to the previous status quo.

FDR went to bat FOR the people not AGAINST them.