I liken FDR's New Deal to Henry Ford's visison of paying his workers

[KlatooBNikto]

$5 a day so they can become his customers. Look what Ford did and look at what FDR did!

[AP]

1. Ford was no progressive, but he knew he was selling a product that was so

expensive that he needed a wealthy middle class if he was going to sell anything.

Today we have credit cards so retailers are not all that interested in a happy, wealthy middle class which would demand fairer treatment in the labor market.

[Beam Me Up]

2. Not to mention that the dollar is now backed only by our military's

ability to keep a big corner of the OIL market under our OILagarchy's control.

[punpirate]

3. In the case of FDR's New Deal...

... some parts of it endure, but it's gradually being chipped away. The effects of $5/day lasted not nearly so long. Ford said in March, 1931, "These are really good times, but only if you know it. The average man won't really do a day's work unless he is caught and cannot get out of it." Essentially, Ford blamed the Depression on the poor.

Ford was laying off thousands by then, and Ford, with a personal wealth at that time of over $200 million, refused to pay into an unemployed workers' fund, which prompted the so-called March, 1932, Ford Hunger March, in which Ford's private police shot and killed five people and injured two dozen.

In fact, despite what Ford said about wanting his workers as consumers, the real motivation behind the $5 per day plan was that Ford had instituted many of Frederick Taylor's efficiency ideas, along with some ideas he adapted from one of the most brutal industries in the country at the time--meat-packing plants. In the year between his introduction of the revised assembly line in 1913 (which increased manufacturing speed twelvefold) and his introduction of the $5 day in 1914, the turnover rate in his plants grew to 380 percent. So, he'd effectively found a way to increase the work his employees did by several times. The $5 day was principally to staunch the flow of workers out of his plants.

Cheers.

[K-W]

4. Henry Ford was practically a Nazi.

And I think his economic liberalism is largely overstated.

[chieftain]

5. The growth of the American Middle Class is rooted in those

concepts and the rise of labor unions. It was accelerated by the GI bill and is threatened by the resurgence of cro-magnon Republicanism led by the neandrethal Bush/Cheney regime.

[5thGenDemocrat]

6. I'm reading a biography of Henry Ford right now

"The Legend of Henry Ford" by Keith Sward (1948).
Sward argues that Ford didn't so much pay the $5/day so the workers would also be customers, but because Detroit was a booming industrial center. It was a good way to keep trained employees from bolting over to Packard or Briggs or Budd or one of the other hundreds of shops in the city.
Too, it kept labor problems to a minimum. And not every employee got paid the $5 -- it was a special bracket which required following several of Ford's moralistic rules -- such as no smoking or drinking and maintaining a good domestic situation at home. Many (perhaps most) of the workers at Ford never got the big bucks.
John
It is now 40 days, 22 hours and 32 minutes to FUNDAY. Hope to see one and all here. Beer's on me.

[K-W]

7. All ceo's claim to be helping thier employees.

The idea that Henry Ford did anything but make the choice that was most profitable is silly imo. He had nothing to do with the socioeconomic conditions that made it more profitable. Giving powerful people credit for history is a bad habit for a democratic society.