A Clear and Present Danger to All of Us: A Warning from Franklin D. Roosevelt

The Concentration of Power in the Trump and Musk Oligarchy

As we enter into what I think will be a very eventful and peril filled 2025, I think that it is to take heed of the warnings of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Roosevelt spoke these words in his Four Freedoms speech. I think they are worth pondering as we go into the second year of the Trump Presidency and the increase of autocratic rule worldwide. Roosevelt said:

“I suppose that every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world — assailed either by arms or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace.”

Sadly a large portion of the American populace neither seems to understand or care about these threats to our Constitution and democratic way of life. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, I will return again to that speech early in 2025, but tonight I wanted to share a couple of other thoughts by him from his Message to Congress on Controlling Monopolies of April 1938 which I think are appropriate for us to ponder at this critical time.

“Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people.

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.

Both lessons hit home.

Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.

This concentration is seriously impairing the economic effectiveness of private enterprise as a way of providing employment for labor and capital and as a way of assuring a more equitable distribution of income and earnings among the people of the nation as a whole.

Roosevelt’s words sound that they could be those of any rational economist, but Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their incoming cabinet of billionaires represent exactly the kind of private power which Franklin Roosevelt warned on 29 April, 1938. For the full text of his speech you can read it here:

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/message-congress-curbing-monopolies

When I read Roosevelt’s words I am concerned. It appears to me that what he spoke then is perhaps even more true now. Over the past decade we have seen the consolidation of power in the hands of the great corporate oligarchs of our time. Now they speeded by the executive actions of the Trump billionaire cabinet and the legislation of the corporate controlled Republican Congress.

His words are a warning to the wise.

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Thank you so much for reading and I hope that we can grow together in the looming peril of the new year.