The one thing we have in common with 3749 artists

The thing we really have in common with them is being employed full time in a new deal.. unlike them ours hasn't been brought into existence by Roosevelt.

Today I want to share some really interesting information about the New Deal - and below is a film that we recorded with Hilary taking us through what the Green New Deal is - and particularly the role of artists in it..

The 1930's New Deal came in after the the Wall Street Crash, a crisis that started in the banking sector due to totally wild and crazy stock market investments but which quickly widened and engulfed not only America but Austria, Germany, France, GB, Latin America, Russia the Far East, Australia...

The huge mistakes that almost all the advanced economies made due to the decreased trade from the markets was mostly austerity, straight old simple spending cuts. 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

When Roosevelt was first running for office, his own opinions were much more orthodox and he was pretty much the same as someone like Sajid Javid or Rushi Sunak.. let's say he had a traditional view of free market economics. When Roosevelt actually came to office the national deficit was nearly $3,000,000,000 - or 3B. Between 1933-37 FDR maintained his view of trying to balance this national deficit but he did also begin to see he had to spend money to get people back to work. 

"To balance our budget in 1933 or 1934 or 1935 would have been a crime against the American people" he said. Indeed by spending a lot of money in those years Roosevely got unemployment down from around 25% - 14%

But Roosevelt was itching to get back to orthodoxy and cut spending. This induced a Recession in 1937-8, with unemployment surging. So in 1938 he began listening to Keynes whose central idea was that the government had to have a deficit, and spend a lot of cash to really get things moving again. In her film below -  Hilary goes into more detail. It should help you to understand why we feel that our own new deal project - though a drop in the water, is so important. 

"We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made."

I wish that our politicians today had the ability to open a book once in a while, or just not be so stuck in their totally outdated ideas.. I mean why do artists have to lead the way?