Thom Hartmann: The Plot to Destroy America -- and What We Can Do to Stop It

November 11, 2013  |  The following is an excerpt from Thom Hartmann's new book, THE CRASH OF 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It [3] (Twelve Books, 2013). 

There are very few Americans still alive who heard President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in March 1933, address the nation as he was being sworn into office. Which is why many Americans today believe that when FDR famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was talking about World War II. But Roosevelt said that long before Hitler had even fully consolidated his own power in Germany.

Instead, the fear—and the war—was here in America. He was speaking of the Great Depression.

The week of his inauguration, every state in the country closed their banks. The federal government couldn’t make its own payroll. A quarter of working-​age Americans were unemployed— some measurements put it at a third— and unemployment in minority communities was off the scale.