Anachronistic farmer with dialect hardly indicative of any particular region:
Them city-folk whining 'bout a couple years of depression. Bah! It's been a depression here since the end of the Great War. See this here? Y'know what this is? It's a kerosene lamp. We still don't even have ele'tricity round these parts. While all those yankies and yuppies were off listening to jazz and whatnot in the 20s we were out here with jack shit but what clothes we had left on our backs. S'not like it got any better for us when the rest of the country started falling apart too. And after Prohibition, Kleagles started gone popping up everywhere, talking everyone up 'bout their load of horse manure. Klan keep rising in numbers though. I'd never join 'em myself, but they're scared and the government don't care 'bout em and this is the kinda mess that results in. But by damn, it's only by the miracle of Jesus that I even got left what I do of my farm. Most all the other farmers had their farms foreclosed years ago. I'm one of the lucky ones and I barely got enough to eat for me and all the mouths I'm feeding. Prices of crops are lower than potatoes growing these days. More and more bankruptcies I hear about every day, and all those banks that opened out here usually closing just as fast didn't do it no good. I'm goddam sure as hell pissed at those worthless shitters we call politicians. No ones coming to help us and things just keep getting worse. We tried fighting back and rioting to show them we wouldn't stand for being kicked outta our homes, but the sent the National Guard after us and half of us ended up behind bars by the end of it. Not too many were willing to pick up the pitchforks again after that. The only thing going for us is that even if the plants won't sell for anything, we can at least eat 'em ourselves. We'll be the best fed bunch without a place to live, or even land of our own to eat off soon though, but that won't console my kids much when I tell them the place they grew up ain't ours no more and we got nowhere else to go. I hear the talk is they'll be passing an Agricultural Adjustment Act though I don't know if it will really happen. I don't like the idea of it too much, but if things don't change I might have to live off the subsidies if things don't change around here soon.
New Deal Relevance Sequence
*Fast Forward 80 years*
Really fucking old Anachronistic farmer with dialect hardly indicative of any particular region:
See? I knew it. They gone did it again. Never learn their lesson do they?
Gramm-Leach-Blilely passes in 1999 and repeals Glass-Steagall and then what? Well besides from the Dot-com bubble bursting a year after, but even worse was the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. This is exactly what Glass-Steagall was trying to prevent. Thankfully, not everyone's blind to this lunacy. Investment and deposit banking have to be separate, there's no ifs about it. Unless one day banks stop being corrupt. But as I was saying, there's no ifs about it, but it hasn't been an easy fight. After 2008 some of the people who had smartened up tried.
In 2009 Rep. Maurice Hinchey tried amending the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection to include reenacting Glass-Steagall sections 20 and 32, both dealing with Federal Reserve System banks relation to security-trading firms:
Section 20 prevented any (deposit) banks from affiliating with security-trading firms
Section 32 prohibited commercial bank officers and directors from advising these firms
In the end, the amendment was never voted on by the House.
Later that same year, Senators Maria Cantwell and John McCain introduced the Banking Integrity Act of 2009, which would also reenact sections 20 and 42, but this was also not voted on, but this time by Senate. The strongest modern movement to restore Glass-Steagall is led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, along with Senators Cantwell, McCain, and Angus King. They propose the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act which is still highly contested. The Volker Rule under the Dodd-Frank Act is a half-assed attempt at Glass-Steagall reform that was actually passed. However, it was scheduled to be implemented July 21, 2012 and over a year later, this has yet to occur.