Wake Up, America, It Ain’t 1895
I had two interesting responses to my article on Baltimore and the decay of America and because my energy level is very low now as I begin treatment for cancer allow me to respond briefly.
One friend asks why you believe that Romney and Ryan have answers for fixing America. Because America must decide whether it is going to be a society of productivity, making new things and wealth, or merely looting and passing around the ruins of Rome. A city like Baltimore will not be rebuilt by taking money to lower living standards in the suburbs but by creating great, new enterprises that produce goods and services people want.
Another polite reader put the following in the nicest possible way — I’m not being sarcastic — don’t the Republicans and Romney just represent nineteenth century plutocratic greedy capitalism dressed up as free enterprise? Millions of Americans believe this and unless they change their minds America will not change.
Yes, that evil Romney who wants to buy another 100 Rolls Royces not like those modest-living Kennedys, Gores, and all the rest, including a serious Democratic presidential candidate who betrayed his cancer-stricken wife after making a fortune on rather questionable legal actions. And I seem to recall a great lionized hero who — let’s face it there’s no doubt, murdered a poor young working-class woman and left her to drown without ever paying for his crime. Sure there are bad conservatives and bad Republicans, corrupt and immoral people, but for goodness sake you aren’t treating them as great tribunes of the masses, as the friends of the exploiters, as they line their pockets from yours.
It’s time to rethink the reality we live in.
Mr. Rubin–I continue to keep you in prayer during your treatment. Having been a preacher (now a hospital chaplain) for 28+ years, I “like your style” when you write of making a brief response.
Seriously, as you write of the builders of empire (often, sadly, with no trickle-down effect!) I think of one of my great heroes–Teddy Roosevelt. Though some of his foreign policy may have been suspect, he was truly someone born, in the same vein as what was spoken to encourage Esther–”…for such a time as this”.
He modeled, in my mind, a kind of compassionate conservatism that decried the sort of de-humanizing capitalism of late 19th & early 20th century America (and, a topic for another day, his approach to saving America’s majestic natural wonders–a balance between a wilderness preservation ethic (“unspoiled and untouched”) and one of wilderness-conservation (“multi-use”).
Thank you for your continued brilliant analysis of our culture and history. Obviously, the surgery and treatments have a physiological effect, but your heart and mind are strong as ever!
Posted the below at the Baltimore essay a few minutes before you posted this follow-up,
That this will be seen by those whose POV comes from the MSM and academia as the ravings of a right-wing nut rather than passionate common sense is another symptom of our crisis.
Impressive to see that, in addition to national security issues, you do social issues so well. You are a switch hitter.
I pray that a restful Shabbat speeds your recovery along.
Perfect encapsulation.
Too bad we are losing our critical mass of critical thinkers.
I still have hope America will snatch victory from defeat in November.
All the best to you Barry.
I really believe the simple moral person of 1895 had more common sense that the average highly educated(brainwashed)amoral American today and could spot a weasel more readily than an Obama voter can today.
Another very important and critical factor influencing America’s imminent collapse is how this nation with evil motives keeps stabbing Israel in the back For this latest Obama caper, http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/159239#.UDe2LcGPVKZ
I sense a strong and swift retribution from above on this nation.
Seven years ago shortly after the arrogant President Bush forced P.M. Sharon to drive fellow Jews from their land and homes for his bogus peace New Orleans and surrounding area was hit by Hurricane Katrina which drove 10 times as many Americans out of their homes.
I am here in N.W. Florida watching Hurricane Issac closely because I understand the times and what ‘Issac’ means.
“Because you disdained all my counsel,And would have none of my rebuke,
I also will laugh at your calamity;I will mock when your terror comes,
When your terror comes like a storm,And your destruction comes like a whirlwind,When distress and anguish come upon you.”
Proverbs 1:25-27
Well, 1895 wasn’t 1895 the way most people are taught to view it. America was no workers’ paradise nor land of leisure, but the US working class had among the highest standards of living in the World, a standard of living that had been steadily rising since the beginning of mass industrialization with the Civil War. The economic uncertainties and “hard times” of the period were largely the result of government policy and an unregulated banking and currency system, “Robber Barons” not so much. The part that nobody remembers about the 14th Am. was all that equal protection stuff was just window dressing and a sop to the abolitionists; the real purpose was to guarantee that US war debt, the Civil War was fought almost entirely on credit, was repaid in gold rather than fiat paper and to repudiate Confederate debt. Confederate bondholders didn’t get a haircut, they got decapitated. As silver became more and more abundant in the ’70s and ’80s, the metal value of US coinage became greater than its face value as currency and much US silver coinage went abroad for its metal value. The US stopped making and redeeming silver coinage in ’73 and adopted a pure gold standard. The vagaries of the currency and metal markets caused the decades of economic uncertainty that are mostly seen by modern Americans, if seen at all, through the eyes of Upton Sinclair and other progressives, socialists, communists, and other leftists. Klondike and Alaska gold coming on the market eased the money supply and along with some actions to rein in the worst monopoly abuses, e.g., rail transportation inequities especially, time improved markedly from the turn of the century until first the commodity crash of the immediate postwar period and then the market crash of ’29 and the Great Depression.
A second term Obama will transform us into Venezuela
There’s no evidence that Ted Kennedy murdered Mary Jo Kopechne or deliberately left her to drown. He was a swine, but not that wicked or that foolish.
The most plausible narrative I’ve seen turns on a little-known bit of evidence: another woman’s purse was found in the car.
The suggestion is that Kopechne got drunk and crawled into the back of the car to sleep. (Disgrace for Kennedy – he and young female staffers getting drunk at a party.)
Later, Kennedy and the other woman, both drunk, decide to drive somewhere else and have sex. Kennedy, drunk, runs the car off the bridge into the water. (Disgrace for Kennedy – adultery and drunk driving.)
He and the second woman get out safely, and walk back to the house. Kennedy is now worried that the party, his adultery, and his drunk driving will come out. He and his henchmen at the party start work on the coverup of that. Several hours later, someone says, “Hey, where’s Mary Jo?”
Only then is it realized that she was in the back of the car – and by then it’s obviously too late to do anything about it. At which point the Kennedy team has to invent a second coverup, which we know was grossly implausible – but still better than admitting the truth.
Now that it’s the summer of 2012, haven’t we rehashed much more than enough of the summer of 1969 and all of those irritating Kennedy’s?….including also all of those headline grabbing Kennedy’s of the subsequent years? They supported a whole claque-like industry.
Please leave it.
Ok, so if we accept your theory, which has no more factual basis than the theory that he just took off and left her to die, the only question becomes was it negligent homocide or murder without premeditation; he’s still responsible for her death through either negligence or indifference or by a conscious act.
Since he was named Kennedy, the cops did little or no investigation so there is no way to know objectively that there was another handbag or how long it had been in the car and no way to know if there was, indeed, another woman, a woman who would be an accessory to Kennedy’s bad act. Anyone not named Kennedy would at minimum faced manslaughter charges.
Rich, I heard that exact story many years ago – not long after it happened – from a college friend of mine. His family was deeply involved in Democratic politics. They had been backers of Hubert Humphrey in 1968 so while they were Dems they were not Kennedy idolators. Take it for what it’s worth, at this point we will probably never know the truth. But it does explain some of the odd discrepancies in the narrative.
“And yes, too, there was a time when some redistribution of wealth was needed. That was decades ago, too. Know why? Because working stiffs had to buy all those cars, toasters, refrigerators, and other consumer goods rolling out of the factories. That’s why advertising was a good thing. That’s why America flourished after World War Two.”
The whole world lay prostrate before us, that may have helped a bit too.
But, back to the first sentence. If, as you say, redistribution was justified, so that the lower class could buy the goods they were producing…then, how is redistribution not justified today, when that same lower class, no longer has those jobs?
Many goods are now produced by robots. See Foxconn, installing one MILLION robots, in China!
If redistribution was justified, to prime the pump, so too speak, when the lower class was working, and being paid, to produce the goods…how can it NOT be justifed, when the means of production itself, denies jobs, to those very same people?
Perhaps, we need robot families, to buy all that stuff?
This is the true problem we face. An antiquated economic system, cannot deal with the reality of the new paradise. PEOPLE NO LONGER NEED TO WORK. But, says Economy, if you do not work, you do not get paid!
The basis of our economic system, is morality. A person works, then gets paid, thens buys things produced by another person. This system is breaking down, because there is no longer an “other”! Thus, the insistence that people work, when the very means of production, robots, denies them that work, is immoral.
An immoral economic system will not stand. We must find a moral solution. No amount of tinkering with the deficit will solve this problem.
“And yes, too, there was a time when some redistribution of wealth was needed. That was decades ago, too. Know why? Because working stiffs had to buy all those cars, toasters, refrigerators, and other consumer goods rolling out of the factories. That’s why advertising was a good thing. That’s why America flourished after World War Two.”
It is a pleasant American myth that Henry Ford paid his men $5/day, far above market, so they could go out and buy his Model T. Ol’ Henry was lots of things but nice guy generally isn’t considered one of them. He paid his men $5/day because he could and still make a profit on the T because men who made a lot more, himself among them, had produced a new and far more profitable production model, the for the day automated, moving assembly line. Men trained to work on that line were worth more than the run of semi-literate ex-farm boys or recent immigrants with no skills that were the run of US labor at the time. Those people continued to be paid as little as could be paid to induce them to show up and perform menial tasks. Even today, the only thing holding up the floor under wages for unskilled labor is the Fair Labor Standards Act.
The FLSA was to my lights the first true redistributionist scheme of the US government and it and Social Security were targeted at two specific problems in the modernizing, industrializing US economy: the need for a portable workforce not tied to the farm and the need to stop the death spiral of wages in The South and Appalachia caused by the race relations paradigm there.
Social Security made it possible for the kids to leave the farm and work in the city factories. Heretofore, some or all of a family’s children were bound to the place to take care of the parents in their old age. This had the natural effect of turning farms into ever smaller holdings which had to be combined with other family holdings or with land acquired by other means to remain productive even at a subsistence level. With the coming of Social Security, the farm could be sold or subdivided and the kids could move on without having to stay to support the parents and keep the place.
The former Confederacy had steadfastly rejected all attempts to much modernize it or to improve its standard of living. There were numerous attempts to introduce industrialization but while some of them turned a tidy profit, there was little improvement in the standard of living in the Southern states racked by poverty, disease, and illiteracy for the simple reason that Southern industry continued to be able to pay as little as possible, and Souther capital refused to either regulate or tax itself. If the workers sua sponte or at the behest of union organizers tried to secure better wages and conditions, the owners had merely to threaten to replace the White workers with Blacks, and the White workers came to heel. Even Davis – Bacon, now the darling of the unionized public constrution trades was initially a very racist law to keep Southern contractors using cheap and often Black labor from competing in the lucrative Northern states or on government funded work. In any event, the minimum wage provisions of the FLSA put a floor under wages in the worst competitive situations; it really had no effect on skilled labor or wages in high cost states. And as much as unions like to brag that they “brought you the weekend,” it was actually the FLSA that set the pattern of the 40 hour week and the seven consecutive day administrative workweek, normally Sunday through Saturday. Oh, and if you’d like some mental gymnastics, figure out how to staff a 24/7 operation without paying enormous amounts of overtime or having lots of part time or intermittent workers, usually jobs people will only take out of dire necessity and keep only until they can find fulltime job with a regular schedule.
In any event, I posit that the bulk of the wealth transfer into the working class came not out of any benevolence on the part of either government or capital but rather because the management, science, engineering, and skilled trades, e.g., machinists and patternmakers, class developed ever more productive means of production which made goods more profitable but which required a more skilled and thus more valuable workforce. We deride the skills of the guy who put the lugnuts on for a whole career but the guy who could do that without making errors that would stop the line was worth a lot more than the guy who couldn’t do it. In short, the creation of the middle class was a top down exercise largely the creation of business though with encouragement and some incentivizing by government. As the Nation became weathier from its agricultural and resource bases, the wealth could be concentrated to build large, complex, expensive, and very productive factories that could develop and keep a trained workforce and pay that trained workforce superior wages while still making a profit. While America had a surplus of unskilled labor, still does, America historically has had a shortage of skilled labor, especially in the late 19th Century up to the second quarter of the 20th Century and there was competition between businesses for the skilled labor which also effected the wages of the less skilled labor. Competition from the cheaper labor South bent the unionized industrial paradigm, foreign competion broke most of that paradigm outside third sector industries, and now automation stands in stark competition to industrial labor in the same way that the owners used blacks in The South and immigrants in The North a century and more ago. The best place to address the competition from automation is in the tax code, but the mindset of the American political class and the “something for nothing” attitude of much of the populace makes it more likely that any solution will be a revisting of the Fair Labor Standards Act in a very socialistic form; see the post above concerning the immorality of our economic system as an example of where the discussion is likely to go.
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