Herbert Hoover got it right . . . .

"The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They're too damned greedy." HH hasn't fared too well in the popular memory, and historians have only begun to reverse that trend.

But with this one quote he got it absolutely, positively right. Today's plutocrats controlling the Republican Party are of one mind with those of Hoover's time, who plunged this nation into the Great Depression. Good came out of the Depression, of course -- economic and stock market reforms, public works projects, and most of all we got the first great increment of a social "safety net" in the form of Social Security. President Franklin Roosevelt is often belittled by those on the right who claim that his policies did not rescue America from the Great Depression -- World War II did. But what was World War II? Only the greatest public works program, with deficit financing, that America had ever seen.

Our social safety net was fleshed out three decades later by another Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, a man of many faces. Yes, he got us into Vietnam (or further into that war), but he also used his leadership skills -- "Let us reason together" -- to get Congress to pass the "Great Society" programs, Medicare and Medicaid, along with profound reforms in the political sphere, such as the Voting Rights Act.

It's all this that the present Congress, dominated by "take no prisoners" conservative Republicans, would like to erase from American society. Their wealthy benefactors who fund their political campaigns have no need of a social safety net. And their GOP puppets are faithful to those archaic, bankrupt doctrines of the Laffer Curve and "trickle down" economics. The plutocrats are revered by the political right as the "job creators," and in the GOP it is an article of faith that tax breaks for this class will result in more robust economic growth.

It's a lie, of course. They want to reproduce the failed Kansas experiment on a national scale. The only true job creators are the robust middle and working classes, who have historically driven the growth of the American economy. These economic classes are dwindling in number, having been deprived of their deserved proportional share of increasing GDP since the 1970s. This is exactly what the wealthy investor class wants, of course. And as the Laffer Curve and "trickle down" fail to generate enough revenue to offset the lost revenue from the tax cuts, the GOP will righteously become the "deficit hawks" and solemnly inform the rest of us that, sadly, the social safety net is no longer affordable thanks to a swelling deficit. All the GOP can offer in exchange is support for the social issues so dear to the base -- opposition to gay marriage, hostility to immigrants, and respect for white supremacy and the "Lost Cause."

This is the future the plutocrats want for us. I pray for a backlash.