When the United States economy was more abundant, it was common for many of those who were affluent to denigrate government entitlement programs. Their contempt stemmed from two major sources: a doctrinaire commitment to an unfettered free market, and a profound objection to the expenditure of taxpayer funds for welfare, Medicaid, public housing, food stamps and other programs.

Many people believe that America is the land of opportunity, where the good life is available to everyone who works hard. They also believe that those who fail do so because of personal shortcomings. The natural corollary is that those who followed the rules and succeeded should not have to forfeit a portion of their hard-earned gains to benefit the losers.

Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board

The present economic collapse has forced a reassessment of this cold-blooded ideology. Alan Greenspan, who served as chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, has been the longtime patron saint of anti-regulatory forces. In a 1994 congressional hearing on the regulation of financial derivatives, Greenspan said, “There is nothing involved in federal regulation per se which makes it superior to market regulation.”

Greenspan also refused to intervene by enacting regulations to temper the subprime mortgage problem. In April 2008, he wrote, “Bank loan officers, in my experience, know more about the risk and workings of their counterparties than do bank regulators.” While Greenspan claimed to have a feel for the financial markets, he seemed to have little understanding of the enormity of human greed.

Wealthy Americans have been concerned for some time that entitlement programs devour more than half of the budget. The mantra of the conservatives has long been to cut taxes, but they are aware that this policy is unwise without commensurate cuts in fiscal spending. Nonetheless, the costs of entitlements have proven to be intractable, and are actually projected to grow.

What was never predicted is that wealthy investors in the auto industry and financial institutions would one day be in line waiting for federal handouts to preserve their assets. Ironically, giving bailout-funded bonuses to AIG executives is sort of like allowing citizens to be on the dole. Perhaps now everyone can see that the role of government is to assure the welfare of all.

One thing to be learned is that greed has no morals. Wise regulations are necessary to hold this demon at bay. A free market system can function well only with restraints on the unfettered expression of greed.

Reprinted with permission from The Bay Street Banner, an African-American run periodical in Boston, Massachusetts.

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On March 25, the AFL-CIO will host author Kirstin Downey who will discuss her new book, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience. The event, at 12:30 p.m., includes a light lunch. Copies of the book will be available for signing. If you’re in Washington, D.C. and can stop by, please RSVP to 202-637-5297. As the review below points out, Perkins’ role in the New Deal has too long been underplayed.

When Frances Perkins stepped into her office as labor secretary, the first-ever woman in a presidential Cabinet, her welcoming committee consisted of this: a huge cockroach.

It’s a fair guess few had a rougher welcome to a high Washington position than Perkins did in 1933. In a splendid new biography of Perkins, The Woman behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience, Kirsten Downey writes:

Some male Labor Department staffers threatened to resign rather than report to a woman.

But as The Woman behind the New Deal vividly recounts, Perkins already had faced much hostility throughout her career. She had braved a vicious mob of Ku Klux Klansmen at a Missouri campaign rally for the Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith. As a New York state’s industrial commissioner, she had spoken with angry strikers and persuaded them to give up their stockpiles of dynamite. (They “delivered loads of explosives in suitcases, bags, even a baby carriage,” Downey reports—and some creative maneuvers by Perkins soon fractured the employers’ unity and brought about a strike settlement.)

She was not someone to be underestimated.

The Woman behind the New Deal describes how, in the 12 years of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, this extraordinary woman not only overhauled a horribly dysfunctional and gangster-ridden Labor Department bureaucracy from top to bottom-this was the least of her achievements-but helped transform the lives of literally hundreds of millions of Americans, a legacy that continues today.

There’s a fair amount of disagreement among historians about who in the New Deal was responsible for which successes. Downey makes a persuasive case that Frances Perkins, more than any other single individual, was the driving influence behind the creation and design of both the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act.

This really means that every senior citizen who gets a regular Social Security check, as well as every worker who depends on the minimum wage, or counts on overtime pay, or files for unemployment comp, owes a huge debt of honor to Perkins.

As if that weren’t enough, she also dramatically cut back child labor, increased workplace safety and expanded the U.S. Conciliation Service.

For anyone interested in the ways of politics, one of the more dramatic stories in The Woman behind the New Deal-and it has plenty of them-is the creation of Social Security. It was a project of breathtaking ambition.

Perkins had begun her career as an idealistic social worker, but she also had sharp political instincts about what Americans would support and what they wouldn’t. So when Social Security was being designed, she rejected systems other countries used in which government funding was the main support of senior citizens. Instead, as Downey points out:

She looked to the insurance model, in which people pay in when they are employed, so that they can get money back when they are not.

That deceptively simple insight made a world of difference. It may well have been the ticket to Social Security’s long-term survival. Roosevelt-who, according to his Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard, “clearly loved and admired” Perkins-understood exactly what was going on. He said Social Security “had been constructed in a way that no future politician would be able to tinker with it because it would be funded by workers’ own contributions.”

In devising Social Security, Franklin Roosevelt, a brilliant and ruthless politician, didn’t always give credit where credit was due. Kirstin Downey, a fine historian and a gifted writer, does.

Yet Downey’s well-balanced account shows that not all of Perkins’s judgments were sound. When her good friend Sen. Robert Wagner of New York wanted to write legislation giving workers and their unions the legal right to collective bargaining with their employers, Perkins did her best to dissuade him. “People may be made to go into the same room, but they can’t necessarily be made to agree,” she told Wagner.

Later, Perkins noted, “I did all that I could to slow the idea down.” Several major union leaders were at least as skeptical at she was.

Fortunately, Wagner didn’t listen to them. He pushed forward with the National Labor Relations Act, still known as the Wagner Act and eventually won some support from most of the trade unionists and from Perkins herself (”she tepidly testified in support of the bill,” according to Downey). Wagner’s legislation turned out to be the strongest Bill of Rights that American workers have ever had in the workplace.

But if Perkins was initially wrong on the National Labor Relations Act, she was magnificently right on just about everything else.

It’s peculiar that “a woman whose intelligence, compassion, creative genius, and fierce loyalty made her an exceptional figure in modern American history,” as Downey accurately describes her, is nearly unknown today.

Yet Perkins was little known even at the height of her considerable power. Eleven years into her career as Secretary of Labor, Collier’s magazine published an article that, in Downey’s phrase, “squarely identified the New Deal as a Frances Perkins creation”-and yet the title of the article was “The Woman Nobody Knows.”

Perhaps The Woman behind the New Deal will help change that. One can hope that in addition to being a gripping read and a well-crafted biography, it will finally bring to Frances Perkins some of the attention and gratitude and admiration she never had in full measure and always deserved.

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There’s a woman in Chicago… She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands.

– President Ronald Wilson Reagan (1976)

… This legislation provides an historic opportunity to end welfare as we know it and transform our broken welfare system by promoting the fundamental values of work, responsibility, and family.

– President William Jefferson Clinton (August, 22, 1996)

All I’m trying to do is restore some balance to our economy so that middle class families who are working hard – they’re not on welfare, they’re going to their jobs every day, they’re doing the right things by their kids –they should be able to save, buy a home, go on a vacation once in a while.

– President Barack Hussein Obama II (March 18, 2009)

It’s unclear what possessed President Obama’s intimation at welfare recipients as lazy, selfish, uncaring bums, but the suggestion that they are not “working hard,” or “doing the right things by their kids,” is a cruel and mean one. The characterization of poor single-mothers, who coincidentally live a life dependent on food stamps and other government subsidies, as irresponsible narcissists is surely no new phenomenon. One need only look to Ronald Reagan, two decades ago, and find ample relief in his infamous description of financially-disempowered Black and Brown females as, Welfare Queens. Obama’s high-fiving of the ‘Great Communicator’ is, sadly, unsurprising, for one who has praised Reagan at every step possible.

In the heat of the ’08 presidential campaign, last year, Obama couldn’t contain his admiration for the man whose economic policies successfully demolished the dignity and dreams of a whole generation of people: “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” Obama went further in his praise of Reagan, for eliminating “the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s.” A couple of days back, on St. Patrick’s Day, Obama again drew inspiration from the man many—and they are certainly in no short supply—have compared to the devil, on numerous occasions.

Whether Obama understands this or not, the demonization of welfare recipients has to STOP! As long as the narrative of laziness remains affixed to the character of this group, the right-wing’s war on poverty (the war to perpetuate it) would have foot soldier in the White House—an ally in the most powerful man in the world. Another notion, as it relates to Welfare, that deserves death by a thousand execution squads, is the premise that Black and Brown single mothers are the major recipients, and thus, welfare is but another Affirmative Action-esque ‘handout,’ which must be eliminated, to enforce personal responsibility on these communities. Every legitimate study shows that White women are, in fact, the overwhelming beneficiaries of welfare programs. This detail is not meant to bash economically handicapped White women, but rather, to put to bed, once and for all, the lies concocted by the right-wing, in attempts to abolish the safety net which has held many families intact, for the last few decades.

In 2000, when Obama enacted a run for Congressman Bobby Rush’s Congressional seat, the then-relatively unknown State Senator sought to convince inner-city Chicago constituents, which Rush represented, that he was not the Ivy League, Harvard educated, Hyde Park snub Rush’s campaign had depicted him as. Unfortunately, the charge stuck to him, like a lapel pin, and many Black and Brown residents had a hard time seeing the faces of their struggle in Obama’s eyes and promises. Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther, won handsomely, and without breaking a drop of sweat.

Obama might not have to worry about those claims lingering any longer, but, as every politically-astute observer knows, old ghosts come haunting back—chickens come home to roost. If Obama keeps up his antics of lambasting poor Black mothers for feeding their kids Popeyes Chicken remnants for breakfast, and asserting that a “good economic development plan for [the Black community] would be if we make sure folks weren’t throwing their garbage out of their cars,” it wouldn’t be such a tough sell, next election cycle, for his opponents to argue that, perhaps, the populist President isn’t so populist after all! It might not be so hard to propose that Obama, himself the child of a food-stamps recipient, has forgotten were he came from.

Obama’s remarks, though intensely troubling, might be just the wake-up call progressives could have only dreamed of. In the mid-‘90s, when Bill Clinton fulfilled his solemn vow to “end welfare as we know it,” many Clinton supporters were unable to reconcile the actions of the then-popular president, to the promises—of equality for all—he had made on the campaign trail. In his reflective book, Death Blossoms, political prisoner and prophetic leader, Mumia Abu Jamal described Clinton’s “legislative obscenity” as a “chilling” plot, drafted to dash “the hopes of millions of the poor, all in order to protect his political ass.” Brother Jamal, as always, was right on target, and the question now looming larger than ever, is if Obama might be considering a relative “legislative obscenity,” which might come in handy, in the event of a need to “protect his political ass.” The prospect might look improbable, but history informs us of the moral obligation to remain combat-ready at all times.

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