The great hue and cry among U.S. Americans watching northbound Central American emigrant caravans probably resembles what the North American natives thought as hordes of Europeans from Britain to Spain started arriving some 500 to 300 years ago.
See what I just did? I turned a bunch of poor, brown, mostly Indo-American, emigrants from Central America and Mexico into peers of the august Thanksgivings' Day Puritans and the celebrated Genovese navigator Christopher Columbus.
"This was organized so that the illegal-alien invasion into the country would occur right around the elections in mid-November," exclaimed my Facebook friend Joe Tiernan in a post yesterday early morning (10/18 at 8:33 AM).
Perhaps we might envision a Native American response to the enterprises of Columbus, Purtitans and other European migrations organized without the slightest thought given to the American natives' rules.
A part-Chippewa scholar at Berkeley's essay draws on Desmond Tutu's famous words about European missionaries to offer the following reflection: "When the white man first came to this land, we had the land and they had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them again, we had the Bible and the white man had the land."
“Your mouth is of sugar but your heart of gall,” said more succinctly, the Abenaki leader Atiwaneto to a British official in 1752.
The caravan movement started with an original 1,000-person group in Tapachula, Mexico, this past March. Most of the caravans have been reportedly organized by Irineo Mujica, the Mexican-American director of Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders), who sought for them asylum in the United States for Central Americans fleeing gang violence and turbulent elections.
Out of that experience, in more or less spontaneous local bursts of outrage in response to the separation in the United States of children from parents, still ongoing, in recent months others have started caravans that Mujica and a string of local migrant help centers along the route to Mexico have decided to aid as a matter of humanitarian concern.
Tiernan, a retired television news executive, posted a Reuters story announcing that the governments of Honduras and Guatemala had agreed to halt caravans of would-be Central American emigrants. The emigrants have journeyed from as far south as Honduras to, so far, Mexico — triggering a spate of nervous Trump tweets threatening dire consequences if they try to enter the United States.
One would think Tiernan was waving red flags at a happy herd of Republican bulls. However, his associates, think he is "grossly minimalizing" the politics.
They come with ready-made explanations as well. "[The emigrants] are encouraged to come to America because of our totally insane and mostly unenforced border policies, as well as the decades of dirty politics by Progressives to flood the country with Illegal Aliens," writes one Sabra Merle, from California.
Tiernan himself offers as an explanation against immigration that "European American culture will be a minority culture in America by 2050. America was 85% White in 1965." He does not go so far as to suggest, as Dana Littlefield, a self-described former IT professional at Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, who declares: "Time to start deporting all illegal invaders, put the military on the border, and defend it at all costs."
Lost in all this is current immigration patterns from south of the U.S. border exhibit a combination of push and pull factors. The magnetism of the world's largest and most transparent economy on a per capita basis pulls would-be immigrants, while a combination of economic and political instability, high crime and corruption in their poor home countries pushes them out.
There are always transitory waves caused by events on both sides of the border. Civil war in several Central American countries the 1980s pushed emigrants to the USA. Both the Great Depression and the Great Recession caused massive departures of immigrants to south of the border.
Moreover, every study of the economic effects shows that except for slight job competition with the least schooled Americans, immigrants have a positive effect. Those without papers, moreover, leave billions in tax, social security and medicare contributions, from which they are barred from taking the slightest advantage.
One still is left with at the contrast between the great bemoaning of newcomers today and the North American natives' rumination on shore at the first arrival of Europeans at Manhattan Island.
As it was related to John Heckwelder by "aged and respected" Delawares, Momeys, and Mahicaanni, they wondered: "These arriving in numbers, and themselves viewing the strange appearance, and that it was actually moving towards them, concluded it to be a large canoe or house, in which the great Mannitto [or Supreme Being] himself was, and that he probably was coming to visit them."
Thursday, October 18, 2018
Friday, October 05, 2018
Trump's Great Favor to the Republic
By becoming the obvious boil in the body politic and personifying the most venal characteristics of U.S. plutocrats, Donald Trump has done the republic the enormous favor of stripping bare the power relationships in our society. This is becoming ever clearer with every new outrage as the midterm elections of 2018 approach.
This is one reason that, rather than respond with epithets and anger, the true small-d democrats in the United States must vote against Trump's allies and work to undo the plutocracy in every way. Not for the first time, there is a broad awareness of this reality. We need to defend the civil rights won so far and expand democracy to include economic and social rights.
History teaches us that it is doubtful that the United States was ever a democracy — that is largely an as yet unrealized aspiration.
At its founding, the states, which regulated voting rights, allowed only male, free property owners to participate in electing political decision-makers. By law, this was in theory overthrown with finality by the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a 1972 Supreme Court decision (Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533); however, this is being undone by clever, largely Republican-inspired voter suppression tricks.
Moreover, even among the participating great unwashed, there existed a broad group of Americans of Northwestern European origin who lived in a near-poverty of under-education and underemployment. These Americans directed their resentment not at the wealthy who kept them down, but at the easy marks whose skin was darker and spoke with accents other than their own.
Nor has the United States honestly and deservedly been a land of milk and honey with streets paved with gold for anyone with pluck.
Sure, some younger sons of the English nobility, who inherited nothing, became wealthy thanks to slaves. Also, some landless English, German and Irish people became small farmers thanks to land theft from the natives.
Even the great American bonanza after 1945 came at the expense of a Europe mired in rubble and was merely a temporary accident — rather than the fruit of American know-how"; the broad middle class was a temporary myth, it had never existed before and it is vanishing now. Until the New Deal's and Great Society's mildly heroic soft capitalism, it was sink or swim for everyone and most sank.
The true story of American wealth is more aptly told by a famous epigram of Balzac's: "Behind every fortune lies a crime." The American crimes of slavery, land theft and industrial warmaking made a few very wealthy and these few convinced a broader less fortunate group of "whites" that they shared in the bounty, when they never did.
It's the classic Trump con.
Trump inherited money — we now know that it was more than he should have thanks to tax dodges. His own business acumen expanded that by little more than an ordinary savings account would have yielded — as shown by his now discredited feverish attempts to misrepresent his fortune to financial reporters. Moreover, he has publicly spoken of his own base as "stupid," women as something to grab and ethnic minorities as criminal escaping effective outhouses.
Thank you, Donald Trump. The scales have now fallen off our eyes and we can see the work that remains to be done to make the United States reasonably closer to its historic aspirations and goals. First, let's get rid of you and your allies.
This is one reason that, rather than respond with epithets and anger, the true small-d democrats in the United States must vote against Trump's allies and work to undo the plutocracy in every way. Not for the first time, there is a broad awareness of this reality. We need to defend the civil rights won so far and expand democracy to include economic and social rights.
History teaches us that it is doubtful that the United States was ever a democracy — that is largely an as yet unrealized aspiration.
At its founding, the states, which regulated voting rights, allowed only male, free property owners to participate in electing political decision-makers. By law, this was in theory overthrown with finality by the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a 1972 Supreme Court decision (Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533); however, this is being undone by clever, largely Republican-inspired voter suppression tricks.
Moreover, even among the participating great unwashed, there existed a broad group of Americans of Northwestern European origin who lived in a near-poverty of under-education and underemployment. These Americans directed their resentment not at the wealthy who kept them down, but at the easy marks whose skin was darker and spoke with accents other than their own.
Nor has the United States honestly and deservedly been a land of milk and honey with streets paved with gold for anyone with pluck.
Sure, some younger sons of the English nobility, who inherited nothing, became wealthy thanks to slaves. Also, some landless English, German and Irish people became small farmers thanks to land theft from the natives.
Even the great American bonanza after 1945 came at the expense of a Europe mired in rubble and was merely a temporary accident — rather than the fruit of American know-how"; the broad middle class was a temporary myth, it had never existed before and it is vanishing now. Until the New Deal's and Great Society's mildly heroic soft capitalism, it was sink or swim for everyone and most sank.
The true story of American wealth is more aptly told by a famous epigram of Balzac's: "Behind every fortune lies a crime." The American crimes of slavery, land theft and industrial warmaking made a few very wealthy and these few convinced a broader less fortunate group of "whites" that they shared in the bounty, when they never did.
It's the classic Trump con.
Trump inherited money — we now know that it was more than he should have thanks to tax dodges. His own business acumen expanded that by little more than an ordinary savings account would have yielded — as shown by his now discredited feverish attempts to misrepresent his fortune to financial reporters. Moreover, he has publicly spoken of his own base as "stupid," women as something to grab and ethnic minorities as criminal escaping effective outhouses.
Thank you, Donald Trump. The scales have now fallen off our eyes and we can see the work that remains to be done to make the United States reasonably closer to its historic aspirations and goals. First, let's get rid of you and your allies.
Tuesday, September 11, 2018
Lessons Unlearned 17 years after 9/11
Nothing invites rebellion and doubt more than the ritual and the dogma of the American Civic Religion's new Holy Day, September 11.
I remember September 11, 2001. I was working two blocks from the White House when news started arriving. However, the idea of the alleged military heroes and the supposed patriotic meaning that is widely spread today rings hollow and false.
First of all, let's recognize that the attackers committed a crime but were never subjected to anything resembling justice under the U.S. Constitution, in part because they were willing to die in furtherance of their purpose. Instead, international goodwill toward Americans was squandered by the fake arms industry "patriots" who lined their pockets inflicting "vengeance" on Afghanis and Iraqis — over a million of whom were killed — who had nothing to do with the crashing planes in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Second, the Twin Towers were artless slabs that destroyed the classic Manhattan skyline with the Empire State Building as its topmost point in a central location. I was born in Manhattan and that skyline was one of the first things I knew. Long before 9/11, I regarded the World Trade Center as an eyesore. If there is an icon for 9/11, the towers are not it. Moreover, the professionals who died in the various buildings were not heroes. Most of them were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many were bond traders, thus not exactly worshipers of anything but Mammon.
Third, the fact that any unarmed plane could crash into the Pentagon without the slightest interference is a monument to the stupidity and overall incompetence of the U.S. military. The event told the world what idiots we are to spend gazillions on it. A few guys with box-cutters could destroy the building without meeting a single counterattack. As a consequence, the thousands of Americans who signed up to kill Afghanis and Iraqis were chumps — 9/11 vets, get what you were promised while you can because the guys who promised you lollipops are about to take them away.
As to real heroes, I propose the Flight 93 passengers, who saved the United States from government by presidential fiat alone, under no less that George W. Bush, unquestionably the second worst president we have ever had. The plane is known to have been on a trajectory headed straight for Capitol Hill. As for one-man rule, this is not mere surmise: the Dubya White House sent Congress a message within days of 9/11 asking for extraordinary powers to act in case Congress was attacked. The legislative branch wisely declined.
But there is an anti-hero who should be studied. Mohammad Atta, the on-site leader of the hijackers, exhibited a moral and philosophical consistency and cogency, and even an asceticism and conviction sadly lacking among American leaders at the time and since. To Atta, the United States was the cause of much suffering in the Middle East. We can debate whether his view was correct — it hasn't been seriously examined: why did they think what they thought? — but given such an opinion, what he did was consistent with his beliefs. Moreover, it was brilliantly planned and executed.
In considering the possible grievances that people in lands far away may have against the United States — meaning the government, mostly, and its most deluded followers — 9/11 offers an intriguing paradox. On September 11, 1973, with CIA collusion and U.S. military and financial support, Chile's military overthrew the elected president of that country, Salvador Allende, a democratic socialist. Might not the Chileans who were subsequently terrorized by their government see with some sympathy the claims of aggrieved Muslims from a vastly different culture many years later?
In sum, we still need to learn the real lessons of 9/11, which I fear the current pageantry and slogans only dim.
I remember September 11, 2001. I was working two blocks from the White House when news started arriving. However, the idea of the alleged military heroes and the supposed patriotic meaning that is widely spread today rings hollow and false.
First of all, let's recognize that the attackers committed a crime but were never subjected to anything resembling justice under the U.S. Constitution, in part because they were willing to die in furtherance of their purpose. Instead, international goodwill toward Americans was squandered by the fake arms industry "patriots" who lined their pockets inflicting "vengeance" on Afghanis and Iraqis — over a million of whom were killed — who had nothing to do with the crashing planes in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Second, the Twin Towers were artless slabs that destroyed the classic Manhattan skyline with the Empire State Building as its topmost point in a central location. I was born in Manhattan and that skyline was one of the first things I knew. Long before 9/11, I regarded the World Trade Center as an eyesore. If there is an icon for 9/11, the towers are not it. Moreover, the professionals who died in the various buildings were not heroes. Most of them were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many were bond traders, thus not exactly worshipers of anything but Mammon.
Third, the fact that any unarmed plane could crash into the Pentagon without the slightest interference is a monument to the stupidity and overall incompetence of the U.S. military. The event told the world what idiots we are to spend gazillions on it. A few guys with box-cutters could destroy the building without meeting a single counterattack. As a consequence, the thousands of Americans who signed up to kill Afghanis and Iraqis were chumps — 9/11 vets, get what you were promised while you can because the guys who promised you lollipops are about to take them away.
As to real heroes, I propose the Flight 93 passengers, who saved the United States from government by presidential fiat alone, under no less that George W. Bush, unquestionably the second worst president we have ever had. The plane is known to have been on a trajectory headed straight for Capitol Hill. As for one-man rule, this is not mere surmise: the Dubya White House sent Congress a message within days of 9/11 asking for extraordinary powers to act in case Congress was attacked. The legislative branch wisely declined.
But there is an anti-hero who should be studied. Mohammad Atta, the on-site leader of the hijackers, exhibited a moral and philosophical consistency and cogency, and even an asceticism and conviction sadly lacking among American leaders at the time and since. To Atta, the United States was the cause of much suffering in the Middle East. We can debate whether his view was correct — it hasn't been seriously examined: why did they think what they thought? — but given such an opinion, what he did was consistent with his beliefs. Moreover, it was brilliantly planned and executed.
In considering the possible grievances that people in lands far away may have against the United States — meaning the government, mostly, and its most deluded followers — 9/11 offers an intriguing paradox. On September 11, 1973, with CIA collusion and U.S. military and financial support, Chile's military overthrew the elected president of that country, Salvador Allende, a democratic socialist. Might not the Chileans who were subsequently terrorized by their government see with some sympathy the claims of aggrieved Muslims from a vastly different culture many years later?
In sum, we still need to learn the real lessons of 9/11, which I fear the current pageantry and slogans only dim.
Thursday, July 26, 2018
The Human Crisis
We are always in crisis. Things around us, and even ourselves, are changing in unexpected ways. We find the present troubling because it never quite conforms to our hopes and dreams.
Instead of climate change and autocracy, we could be facing the black plague and feudal lords. It's just a matter of century.
It always seems we are on the edge of doom. We are. Our self of yesterday has died and at the end of the day today's self will become history.
Crisis comes from the Greek krinein, to decide. We are always deciding to take the next breath. Or not.
Trump may yet serve, as a foil, to awaken the greatest egalitarian movement the United States has ever seen. Or not. Climate change may usher in the most careful and generous resource use in history. Or not.
This is fraught with uncertainty, for we must always face the decision: do we go on or give up?
In the end, the present is the only time in which we decide to act and be.
Instead of climate change and autocracy, we could be facing the black plague and feudal lords. It's just a matter of century.
It always seems we are on the edge of doom. We are. Our self of yesterday has died and at the end of the day today's self will become history.
Crisis comes from the Greek krinein, to decide. We are always deciding to take the next breath. Or not.
Trump may yet serve, as a foil, to awaken the greatest egalitarian movement the United States has ever seen. Or not. Climate change may usher in the most careful and generous resource use in history. Or not.
This is fraught with uncertainty, for we must always face the decision: do we go on or give up?
In the end, the present is the only time in which we decide to act and be.
Wednesday, April 04, 2018
Dan Rather vs Sinclair
I hate to break it to all the people enraged by Sinclair Media anchors reading a script criticizing “fake stories”: the lowest common denominator in news reporting was reached by television (and radio) decades ago. Sinclair is merely the laziest version of an intellectual void called broadcast news; it is broadcast, but it merely summarizes what a few people decide should be told as news.
You will never see news that embarrasses an advertiser, or seriously calls into question capitalism or even the Constitution. All the biases of society are affirmed: non-whites are criminals a priori, whites make mistakes; women are emotional, men are rational; and so on.
I have been an economic journalist focusing on unemployment and poverty for more than three decades. I have fired and hired reporters. I have edited news.
A journalist is not someone who reads a collection of facts in front of a camera from a script someone else has written. Anyone can do that in bed with the newspaper.
A journalist is someone who goes out and finds news, then reports on it, by finding a balanced variety of sources to provide as even-handed a story of what happened in the time allotted before the deadline. Ben Bradlee, a man whose personal ethics and privilege were questionable but whose journalism was not, called journalism "the first rough draft of history." That's what it is.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post, to name the two most famous investigative reporters of our time, spent hundreds of hours finding, obtaining, then poring through excruciatingly boring documents to find the chain of corruption that unseated Nixon. That's reporting!
In contrast, most broadcast news reporters are generally airheads. They have one go-to question they parrot at every news conference: "What do you feel about [topic or event]?" I shall never forget the dumb blonde at a press conference who, cameraman in tow, asked an economist how he felt about the unemployment rate. Who cared what the guy felt? Joblessness is not about the feelings of economists. This is why their nickname is "twinkies" (blond on the outside, fluffy on the inside).
Many network news anchors may have once been reporters. Although if they were broadcast reporters, they were really in show biz from the start. You don't really think radio and television actually goes out to find out anything, do you?
Dan Rather was a small-town wire service stringer for almost 8 years. It may not have been famous or groundbreaking work, but that was legitimate journalism. Then he became a sports newscaster. Imagine the investigative reporting involved in saying who passes the ball to whom! After that, he was almost continuously an on-the-air TV figure who got lucky and was in the right places at the right time. At best, he read the news script and edited two or three words of it before airing. That's not journalism.
The actual reality of television and radio news is that they are, at best, headline services that provide shapeless, emotion-stirring stimuli read by people with mellifluous voices and handsome faces and makeup. In the seconds you hear one TV news lead with generalities aimed to make you happy, sad or angry, you could read at least three detailed print paragraphs with lots of actual and necessary facts needed to think and make decisions.
Print journalism is dying because Americans don't want to read and think. They want fluffy entertainment that requires no thought and all the hard thinking done for them and spoon fed by telegenic actors who look serious but don't really know what they are talking about.
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
Cinderella Goes to the Ball On Her Own
In response to my last post, a reader suggested an inverted one, in which the thorns become roses and the crows fly off as butterflies: so here there are no fairy godmothers. The life I had beginning with my days, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti memorably put it in his poem "Dog" (click here), when I was "a real live barking democratic dog."
Indeed, I was once a real, live soaring freedom-seeking teenager. The 1931 film "The Front Page" inspired me to consider journalism as a career and a bout in the university newspaper confirmed this vocation beyond anything I had studied. I did not major in journalism but in political science, specifically international affairs, but journalism was where I felt I soared.
It was, after all, the era of Woodward and Bernstein, and Washington, D.C., was my home town. Even as a university student in frigid Canada, I could dream at the typewriter, although I mostly wrote about Latin America because ... "write about what you know."
My writing, then and now (I think), had a way of "soaring," according to my good friend and older colleague, Charlie Ericksen. Founder of Hispanic Link, Charlie kept me in the journalism game while I was an in-house writer for the U.S. conference of bishops. His group was a peculiar news organization that began as a column syndication service, later a newsweekly, that unfortunately did not survive his retirement not very long ago.
However, while I was drafting a national pastoral letter that all the U.S. bishops ultimately approved, meaning that a sitting pope had to chance a glance at possibly one of my words (popes have to approve such things), Charlie accepted me writing about a variety of ideas about the U.S. Hispanic identity. Stuff that came out in newspapers across the country.
With a little imagination I was for a while a kind of Hispanic James Reston. (Who? The British-born James Barrett Reston, nicknamed "Scotty," an American journalist between the mid-1930s and early 1990s, who was so senior when I started that his columns adorned the op-ed pages of The New York Times.)
Married and with two young boys to feed, I eventually had to set my sights on a more prosaic career in specialized publishing for a weekly on employment and unemployment. We covered the labor market and the poverty joblessness inflicts, including the vast panoply of strategies, services, policies, programs, proposals and research on ways to lift people chronically unemployed into the Eden of a working life.
In the meantime, I managed some extracurricular writing, op-eds in The Washington Post, occasionally carried by the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald and other related papers, mostly on Hispanics.
The U.S. Jesuit magazine America ran some news analyses of mine on welfare reform and topics I covered in my work. In one story (click here) I revealed that I coined the phrase "welfare-to-work program" in the 1980s. Then a friend and colleague made my name known to their book review editor, who was looking for a reviewer who could read economic and social works intelligently.
Clerics and churchy people talk a great game about "blessed are the poor" but most don't understand economics or social sciences worth spit. It was my good fortune to have studied social sciences (I had a major in sociology until I switched to political science, fleeing a subject called statistics) and in my work I had learned to grasp a poverty coefficient almost as well as Corrado Gini (look him up). Maybe I exaggerate a bit on that last one.
One of my early contributions (click here), which came at the 40th anniversary of the War on Poverty, was a little gem that was badly mangled in editing. For example, I had written "Johnson successor Ronald Reagan" meaning that Reagan was a successor of LBJ's. They changed it to "Johnson’s successor, Ronald Reagan," which makes it sound as if I never heard of Richard Nixon. America magazine really needs better copy-editors. (During the Nazinger papacy, America was overrun by conservative Jesuit clerics, as hard to believe as that may sound, and I haven't published a comma there for years.)
Meanwhile, at work, I rose to my level of incompetence, getting promoted to managing editor of the weekly. Later, the firm that published my weekly, which was a subsidiary of the venerable Bureau of National Affairs (eventually swallowed whole by Bloomberg), gained its independence from BNA as a result of a spat with the congressional Periodical Press Gallery that I had a hand in. I became executive editor.
Twenty years ago I purchased the company through a very leveraged transaction and became president (and CEO, a term I detest). One of the things about being president of a small corporation of 10 employees is that you have all the legal obligations of the head of General Motors, without an army of lawyers and accountants to advise you and help you do it. I taught myself business; another feat.
However, as I told some of my Argentine friends, I didn't quite get to be president of the United States, but I did become president in the United States. Hey, it's something.
Of course, as I lucked out to be in an industry that has been decimated by the Internet, over the years the enterprise dwindled so that eventually I was a corporate one-man band running a staff of 2 and 2/5ths, myself included. However, even that was a kind of triumph.
All my competitors have long vanished. My publication survived because at its helm sat someone like me who could learn to do the accounting, marketing, write and edit articles, layout a publication and write programs to keep up some basic electronic distribution systems. Not many like me around.
My retirement on Dec. 29 has started a new phase in which I am turning my other blog into a book, revising my 500-page family history, all still hoping that one day I will leave a mark.
Just as with Ferlinghetti's dog, I see myself "head cocked sideways at streetcorners as if he is just about to have his picture taken for Victor Records." In my case, however, I am being photographed flashing a V, for Victory herself.
Indeed, I was once a real, live soaring freedom-seeking teenager. The 1931 film "The Front Page" inspired me to consider journalism as a career and a bout in the university newspaper confirmed this vocation beyond anything I had studied. I did not major in journalism but in political science, specifically international affairs, but journalism was where I felt I soared.
It was, after all, the era of Woodward and Bernstein, and Washington, D.C., was my home town. Even as a university student in frigid Canada, I could dream at the typewriter, although I mostly wrote about Latin America because ... "write about what you know."
My writing, then and now (I think), had a way of "soaring," according to my good friend and older colleague, Charlie Ericksen. Founder of Hispanic Link, Charlie kept me in the journalism game while I was an in-house writer for the U.S. conference of bishops. His group was a peculiar news organization that began as a column syndication service, later a newsweekly, that unfortunately did not survive his retirement not very long ago.
However, while I was drafting a national pastoral letter that all the U.S. bishops ultimately approved, meaning that a sitting pope had to chance a glance at possibly one of my words (popes have to approve such things), Charlie accepted me writing about a variety of ideas about the U.S. Hispanic identity. Stuff that came out in newspapers across the country.
With a little imagination I was for a while a kind of Hispanic James Reston. (Who? The British-born James Barrett Reston, nicknamed "Scotty," an American journalist between the mid-1930s and early 1990s, who was so senior when I started that his columns adorned the op-ed pages of The New York Times.)
Married and with two young boys to feed, I eventually had to set my sights on a more prosaic career in specialized publishing for a weekly on employment and unemployment. We covered the labor market and the poverty joblessness inflicts, including the vast panoply of strategies, services, policies, programs, proposals and research on ways to lift people chronically unemployed into the Eden of a working life.
In the meantime, I managed some extracurricular writing, op-eds in The Washington Post, occasionally carried by the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald and other related papers, mostly on Hispanics.
The U.S. Jesuit magazine America ran some news analyses of mine on welfare reform and topics I covered in my work. In one story (click here) I revealed that I coined the phrase "welfare-to-work program" in the 1980s. Then a friend and colleague made my name known to their book review editor, who was looking for a reviewer who could read economic and social works intelligently.
Clerics and churchy people talk a great game about "blessed are the poor" but most don't understand economics or social sciences worth spit. It was my good fortune to have studied social sciences (I had a major in sociology until I switched to political science, fleeing a subject called statistics) and in my work I had learned to grasp a poverty coefficient almost as well as Corrado Gini (look him up). Maybe I exaggerate a bit on that last one.
One of my early contributions (click here), which came at the 40th anniversary of the War on Poverty, was a little gem that was badly mangled in editing. For example, I had written "Johnson successor Ronald Reagan" meaning that Reagan was a successor of LBJ's. They changed it to "Johnson’s successor, Ronald Reagan," which makes it sound as if I never heard of Richard Nixon. America magazine really needs better copy-editors. (During the Nazinger papacy, America was overrun by conservative Jesuit clerics, as hard to believe as that may sound, and I haven't published a comma there for years.)
Meanwhile, at work, I rose to my level of incompetence, getting promoted to managing editor of the weekly. Later, the firm that published my weekly, which was a subsidiary of the venerable Bureau of National Affairs (eventually swallowed whole by Bloomberg), gained its independence from BNA as a result of a spat with the congressional Periodical Press Gallery that I had a hand in. I became executive editor.
Twenty years ago I purchased the company through a very leveraged transaction and became president (and CEO, a term I detest). One of the things about being president of a small corporation of 10 employees is that you have all the legal obligations of the head of General Motors, without an army of lawyers and accountants to advise you and help you do it. I taught myself business; another feat.
However, as I told some of my Argentine friends, I didn't quite get to be president of the United States, but I did become president in the United States. Hey, it's something.
Of course, as I lucked out to be in an industry that has been decimated by the Internet, over the years the enterprise dwindled so that eventually I was a corporate one-man band running a staff of 2 and 2/5ths, myself included. However, even that was a kind of triumph.
All my competitors have long vanished. My publication survived because at its helm sat someone like me who could learn to do the accounting, marketing, write and edit articles, layout a publication and write programs to keep up some basic electronic distribution systems. Not many like me around.
My retirement on Dec. 29 has started a new phase in which I am turning my other blog into a book, revising my 500-page family history, all still hoping that one day I will leave a mark.
Just as with Ferlinghetti's dog, I see myself "head cocked sideways at streetcorners as if he is just about to have his picture taken for Victor Records." In my case, however, I am being photographed flashing a V, for Victory herself.
Friday, February 16, 2018
If She Had a Magic Wand
Offered the image of a fairy godmother's magic wand giving me the life I would want to have had, I decided to take up the challenge.
I wish I could look back on a life of accomplishment. The dictionary tells me that accomplishment means bringing something to completion, doing so successfully to the point it is an achievement or having acquired a skill or expertise.
Thinking about it, I did none of the three. Sure, I have brought to completion some repetitive or routine tasks. I have bathed and eaten to completion.
I have written an article to completion (or have I?); for the many years I was my own chief editor I may have thought the article was complete, but it wasn't. No one told me otherwise; indeed, so few people have ever commented on anything I have written that I might as well never have written anything. Maybe nobody read anything I wrote.
I have attempted novels that turned out to be terrible and meaningless. I have written a family history its intended readers could not bring themselves to read. I have been writing a book on Christianity I realize I am morally and academically unqualified to even attempt. Aquinas called his work "straw" at the end of his life; I have written nothing worth a comma in the Summa Theologica.
I would have liked, also, to have done some tangible good. I can think of endless things I have done that were plain wrong, morally or practically. I can point to nothing I did that is a good I performed. Oh, sure, I spawned two children who are fine grown men, thanks to their sane mother. I may have gotten up in a crowded bus to give an elderly lady a seat. I gave street beggars money. I assure you, I am no Albert Schweitzer bringing modern medicine to the hinterlands of Africa.
I would have liked not to have my many character flaws, including my temper and my depression. People might be drawn to me, as I see them drawn to others. Instead I repel almost everyone.
I could wish to have skipped many misadventures but that would make me even more pointless, useless and selfish. What if I achieved nothing and did no good after an idyllic childhood, instead of my own? At least I can fall back on plain bad luck, to some extent (I did not live in a Calcutta slum, so I can't call myself that unlucky, either).
The terrible thing is that I am of an age in which my capacities are waning and nothing awaits me but death. I am not going to make up for a useless, pointless, selfish and disagreeable life ever. My chances are all gone.
I would gladly have stepped in the path of those bullets at the school in Florida or Connecticut or wherever. My death in place of that of promising children might at least have had some redeemable value.
I wish I could look back on a life of accomplishment. The dictionary tells me that accomplishment means bringing something to completion, doing so successfully to the point it is an achievement or having acquired a skill or expertise.
Thinking about it, I did none of the three. Sure, I have brought to completion some repetitive or routine tasks. I have bathed and eaten to completion.
I have written an article to completion (or have I?); for the many years I was my own chief editor I may have thought the article was complete, but it wasn't. No one told me otherwise; indeed, so few people have ever commented on anything I have written that I might as well never have written anything. Maybe nobody read anything I wrote.
I have attempted novels that turned out to be terrible and meaningless. I have written a family history its intended readers could not bring themselves to read. I have been writing a book on Christianity I realize I am morally and academically unqualified to even attempt. Aquinas called his work "straw" at the end of his life; I have written nothing worth a comma in the Summa Theologica.
I would have liked, also, to have done some tangible good. I can think of endless things I have done that were plain wrong, morally or practically. I can point to nothing I did that is a good I performed. Oh, sure, I spawned two children who are fine grown men, thanks to their sane mother. I may have gotten up in a crowded bus to give an elderly lady a seat. I gave street beggars money. I assure you, I am no Albert Schweitzer bringing modern medicine to the hinterlands of Africa.
I would have liked not to have my many character flaws, including my temper and my depression. People might be drawn to me, as I see them drawn to others. Instead I repel almost everyone.
I could wish to have skipped many misadventures but that would make me even more pointless, useless and selfish. What if I achieved nothing and did no good after an idyllic childhood, instead of my own? At least I can fall back on plain bad luck, to some extent (I did not live in a Calcutta slum, so I can't call myself that unlucky, either).
The terrible thing is that I am of an age in which my capacities are waning and nothing awaits me but death. I am not going to make up for a useless, pointless, selfish and disagreeable life ever. My chances are all gone.
I would gladly have stepped in the path of those bullets at the school in Florida or Connecticut or wherever. My death in place of that of promising children might at least have had some redeemable value.
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
As of December 29
"As of Dec. 29, 2017, I will no longer be working for [publishing company] or [specialized economic publication]. If you wish to reach me with a personal message, please email me at [email]."
When you're setting up something like that up it's almost like writing your own obituary. If you're retiring and letting go of a company you headed for decades and a publication you wrote for longer, it might as well be.
On my last week, a think tank sent me a canned email in name of a wonk I knew -- how my inbox used to bulge with press releases and urgent messages from advocates! I had picked her brain about technical matters that I was writing about. She'd done well taking over the duties of a famed economist, I wrote her, and later in a high-level federal position. She replied thanking me and wished me well even though she probably did not really remember me.
As for me, not one professional who actually knew me remarked on my departure.
"The graveyards are full of indispensable men," said Charles DeGaulle, himself having laid claim to the title once or three times. Truman said it best about my city: "If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog."
Frankly, my kind of journalism was never glamorous. No Kardashians. No sex. No violence. No rock and roll. The company continues, the publication goes on. My "battleship of a desk" as one editor put it -- emptied of my ephemera -- remains in use.
Me? I'm just an dispensable man, writing for my pleasure on my laptop, in the public library.
When you're setting up something like that up it's almost like writing your own obituary. If you're retiring and letting go of a company you headed for decades and a publication you wrote for longer, it might as well be.
On my last week, a think tank sent me a canned email in name of a wonk I knew -- how my inbox used to bulge with press releases and urgent messages from advocates! I had picked her brain about technical matters that I was writing about. She'd done well taking over the duties of a famed economist, I wrote her, and later in a high-level federal position. She replied thanking me and wished me well even though she probably did not really remember me.
As for me, not one professional who actually knew me remarked on my departure.
"The graveyards are full of indispensable men," said Charles DeGaulle, himself having laid claim to the title once or three times. Truman said it best about my city: "If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog."
Frankly, my kind of journalism was never glamorous. No Kardashians. No sex. No violence. No rock and roll. The company continues, the publication goes on. My "battleship of a desk" as one editor put it -- emptied of my ephemera -- remains in use.
Me? I'm just an dispensable man, writing for my pleasure on my laptop, in the public library.
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
Did God abuse Mary?
As inevitable as mistletoe and the Tannenbaum, the argument about Mary’s virginity has been brought up by news of theologian Kyle Roberts’ new book, A Complicated Pregnancy: Whether Mary Was a Virgin and Why It Matters.
The author is a professor of public theology and church and economic life at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, a school with essentially Calvinist affiliations near Minneapolis. His work attempts to be a new scholarly examination of the claims concerning Myriam of Nazareth, or what in some theological circles is known as Mariology. I have not read the book, so I have to rely on a Religion News Service interview of the author, a piece that is flippantly titled “Flunking Sainthood.”
What emerges is that Roberts is clearly wrestling with a literal belief in the asexual conception of Jesus. This is a problem that might bedevil evangelicals and fundamentalists, but need not and does not present a major problem for the majority of Christians. In fact, Roberts grapples with a bit of a straw man.
The gospels are trying to convey orthodox teaching of the Christian faith as held by non-evangelicals and non-literalists: Jesus of Nazareth was born divine, an unusual circumstance conveyed by way of a literary shortcut described as “born of a virgin.”
This is not meant to be a scientific statement.
Most of what science knows about birth today — which is not all that is knowable by a very long shot — was unknown to the authors of the gospels. Importantly, until the 1830s no one even knew about the existence of the ovum, let alone DNA. The prevailing understanding at the time of Jesus and all the way to the time of Presidents Jackson, Polk and Van Buren, was that the sperm was a “little man” that was implanted in the womb, which was merely a passive receptacle.
This understanding explains a lot about the thinking on a huge range of sexual topics — and the status of women — over that period and earlier.
It’s what the gospel writers “knew.”
Given such an understanding, the literal meaning of the gospels’ text in Matthew and Luke (Mark and John have no birth narratives) is that Jesus came from a divine “little man/sperm” that was placed in Myriam’s womb by God. The idea of a sperm and an ovum, let alone the resulting zygote, would never have occurred to any of the evangelists.
However, the gospels are not literal documents, not newspapers providing facts. They are literary texts aiming to convey to believers a theological message. Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives make use of the “science” of the day, appeal to a customary Greco-Roman literary device that accompanies the birth of an important figure with portents. Lastly, they draw on Isaiah 7:14, the prophecy of a virgin giving birth, which was probably meant to convey the unusual character of the Messiah.
The divine origin of Jesus the Christ is also put quite distinctly and poetically by the gospel of John (1:1,14a): “In the beginning was the Word … and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” No conception, no birth mentioned. This is particularly odd since John reputedly took care of Mary after the crucifixion. Tradition has it that the widowed Mary lived with John in Ephesus.
All of this is distinct from the facts of Jesus’ birth as scholars know them, which follow.
Jesus was probably born around the year 6 BCE (an oddity resulting from a calendar miscalculation). According to some of the earliest sources, the birth occurred in the summer, possibly July or August. Arguably but not definitively, the evidence suggests his mother may have had several other children. There is no factual evidence concerning the conception of Jesus.
The notion of Mary ever virgin is not implicitly and indisputably a gospel message. The phrase “ever virgin” referred to Mary is first attested in the 4th century, far from any contemporaries of Mary or Jesus. Also, it is unrelated to the origin of Christian views concerning chastity and marriage.
I align with the view of Elaine Pagels, in her book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity. She proposes, with some evidence, that the early Christian view of chastity as a virtue emerged as a proto-feminist attempt by Christian women to avoid marriage as prescribed by imperial Roman law, which in effect made the wife the property of her husband. This, in turn, has little to do with the apostle Paul’s statements on sex, which were heavily influenced by a combination of his rabbinical training and his personal shock at the common behavior in Greece, which was not entirely dissimilar to current sexual social mores in North America.
In sum, we know extremely little about Jesus’ actual birth as a matter of fact and nothing about his conception. For God, however, nothing is impossible; if God wanted to swell in a human born from a virgin, it could happen science notwithstanding because God is lord of science and the world. The teaching of the virgin birth is merely about the original divinity of Jesus: he was born God, of God directly, and did not become God in some way.
Finally, to bring it back to the topic of the day, Luke 1:34-38 provides a virginal conception that is consensual. In verse 34 Mary asks: “How can that be, since I have no knowledge of man?” The angel replies in 35: “The Holy Spirit will come upon thee, and the power of the most High will overshadow thee. Thus this holy offspring of thine shall be known for the Son of God.” Then in 38, Mary says: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be unto me according to thy word.” Consent!
The author is a professor of public theology and church and economic life at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, a school with essentially Calvinist affiliations near Minneapolis. His work attempts to be a new scholarly examination of the claims concerning Myriam of Nazareth, or what in some theological circles is known as Mariology. I have not read the book, so I have to rely on a Religion News Service interview of the author, a piece that is flippantly titled “Flunking Sainthood.”
What emerges is that Roberts is clearly wrestling with a literal belief in the asexual conception of Jesus. This is a problem that might bedevil evangelicals and fundamentalists, but need not and does not present a major problem for the majority of Christians. In fact, Roberts grapples with a bit of a straw man.
The gospels are trying to convey orthodox teaching of the Christian faith as held by non-evangelicals and non-literalists: Jesus of Nazareth was born divine, an unusual circumstance conveyed by way of a literary shortcut described as “born of a virgin.”
This is not meant to be a scientific statement.
Most of what science knows about birth today — which is not all that is knowable by a very long shot — was unknown to the authors of the gospels. Importantly, until the 1830s no one even knew about the existence of the ovum, let alone DNA. The prevailing understanding at the time of Jesus and all the way to the time of Presidents Jackson, Polk and Van Buren, was that the sperm was a “little man” that was implanted in the womb, which was merely a passive receptacle.
This understanding explains a lot about the thinking on a huge range of sexual topics — and the status of women — over that period and earlier.
It’s what the gospel writers “knew.”
Given such an understanding, the literal meaning of the gospels’ text in Matthew and Luke (Mark and John have no birth narratives) is that Jesus came from a divine “little man/sperm” that was placed in Myriam’s womb by God. The idea of a sperm and an ovum, let alone the resulting zygote, would never have occurred to any of the evangelists.
However, the gospels are not literal documents, not newspapers providing facts. They are literary texts aiming to convey to believers a theological message. Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives make use of the “science” of the day, appeal to a customary Greco-Roman literary device that accompanies the birth of an important figure with portents. Lastly, they draw on Isaiah 7:14, the prophecy of a virgin giving birth, which was probably meant to convey the unusual character of the Messiah.
The divine origin of Jesus the Christ is also put quite distinctly and poetically by the gospel of John (1:1,14a): “In the beginning was the Word … and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” No conception, no birth mentioned. This is particularly odd since John reputedly took care of Mary after the crucifixion. Tradition has it that the widowed Mary lived with John in Ephesus.
All of this is distinct from the facts of Jesus’ birth as scholars know them, which follow.
Jesus was probably born around the year 6 BCE (an oddity resulting from a calendar miscalculation). According to some of the earliest sources, the birth occurred in the summer, possibly July or August. Arguably but not definitively, the evidence suggests his mother may have had several other children. There is no factual evidence concerning the conception of Jesus.
The notion of Mary ever virgin is not implicitly and indisputably a gospel message. The phrase “ever virgin” referred to Mary is first attested in the 4th century, far from any contemporaries of Mary or Jesus. Also, it is unrelated to the origin of Christian views concerning chastity and marriage.
I align with the view of Elaine Pagels, in her book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity. She proposes, with some evidence, that the early Christian view of chastity as a virtue emerged as a proto-feminist attempt by Christian women to avoid marriage as prescribed by imperial Roman law, which in effect made the wife the property of her husband. This, in turn, has little to do with the apostle Paul’s statements on sex, which were heavily influenced by a combination of his rabbinical training and his personal shock at the common behavior in Greece, which was not entirely dissimilar to current sexual social mores in North America.
In sum, we know extremely little about Jesus’ actual birth as a matter of fact and nothing about his conception. For God, however, nothing is impossible; if God wanted to swell in a human born from a virgin, it could happen science notwithstanding because God is lord of science and the world. The teaching of the virgin birth is merely about the original divinity of Jesus: he was born God, of God directly, and did not become God in some way.
Finally, to bring it back to the topic of the day, Luke 1:34-38 provides a virginal conception that is consensual. In verse 34 Mary asks: “How can that be, since I have no knowledge of man?” The angel replies in 35: “The Holy Spirit will come upon thee, and the power of the most High will overshadow thee. Thus this holy offspring of thine shall be known for the Son of God.” Then in 38, Mary says: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be unto me according to thy word.” Consent!
Thursday, October 26, 2017
The original America First movement
“America First” were the two most surprising words to come out of President Trump’s mouth in his inaugural speech Jan. 20, 2017. Only the Los Angeles Times that day noted that it was “a phrase with an anti-Semitic and isolationist history going back to the years before the U.S. entry into World War II,” but the Anti-Defamation League had already asked Trump to drop the phrase during the campaign.
In addition to being the infancy of modern U.S. liberalism, the 1930s and early 1940s were a notable time for racism and anti-Semitism. The Depression spurred many whites to engage in parades by the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings; like Germans, some Americans scapegoated Jews as well as Blacks for their misfortunes.
The America First Committee started in September 1940 to oppose U.S. entry into World War II. At its peak it had 800,000 members in 450 chapters. The group swept up youths who were later notables, including future President Gerald Ford and future conservative writer William Buckley. It was a false-flag “pacifist” movement whose real aims became transparent over time.
The group’s leading spokesman was aviator Charles Lindbergh, known for his sympathies toward the Nazi regime. In a 1939 article in the Reader's Digest, Lindbergh wrote, “We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.” Later, in a Des Moines speech delivered on Sept. 11, 1941, he declared, “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.”
The group was funded by Robert E. Wood of Sears-Roebuck and Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, but included the notoriously anti-Semitic Henry Ford and Avery Brundage, chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee, who reportedly blocked two Jewish runners from participating in the U.S. track team at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.
More direct evidence of a Nazi connection emerged at the trial of the aviator and orator Laura Houghtaling Ingalls (a distant cousin of Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder). It was shown that she was a paid Nazi agent, had been receiving about $300 a month (equivalent to about $5,250 in 2017 dollars) from Baron Ulrich von Gienanth, a spymaster while officially second secretary at the German Embassy in Washington. Von Gienanth, testimony showed, encouraged Ingalls to participate in the America First Committee.
The Committee dissolved on Dec. 10, 1941, three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In addition to being the infancy of modern U.S. liberalism, the 1930s and early 1940s were a notable time for racism and anti-Semitism. The Depression spurred many whites to engage in parades by the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings; like Germans, some Americans scapegoated Jews as well as Blacks for their misfortunes.
The America First Committee started in September 1940 to oppose U.S. entry into World War II. At its peak it had 800,000 members in 450 chapters. The group swept up youths who were later notables, including future President Gerald Ford and future conservative writer William Buckley. It was a false-flag “pacifist” movement whose real aims became transparent over time.
The group’s leading spokesman was aviator Charles Lindbergh, known for his sympathies toward the Nazi regime. In a 1939 article in the Reader's Digest, Lindbergh wrote, “We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.” Later, in a Des Moines speech delivered on Sept. 11, 1941, he declared, “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.”
The group was funded by Robert E. Wood of Sears-Roebuck and Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, but included the notoriously anti-Semitic Henry Ford and Avery Brundage, chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee, who reportedly blocked two Jewish runners from participating in the U.S. track team at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.
More direct evidence of a Nazi connection emerged at the trial of the aviator and orator Laura Houghtaling Ingalls (a distant cousin of Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder). It was shown that she was a paid Nazi agent, had been receiving about $300 a month (equivalent to about $5,250 in 2017 dollars) from Baron Ulrich von Gienanth, a spymaster while officially second secretary at the German Embassy in Washington. Von Gienanth, testimony showed, encouraged Ingalls to participate in the America First Committee.
The Committee dissolved on Dec. 10, 1941, three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Monday, October 23, 2017
The New Deal
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was two things: a series of federal programs, projects and reforms enacted in the 1930s and the signature policies that became the core ideas of a U.S. liberal Democratic Party coalition. They combined relief for the unemployed and poor, overall economic recovery and a thorough set of financial reforms to prevent a depression from ever happening again.
When FDR took office on March 4, 1933, he stated his “firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Unemployment stood at about 25%, farm income nationally had fallen by half since 1929 and close to a million nonfarm mortgages had been foreclosed. There was no protection other than what little families, private charity and local governments could offer; when, to top things off, runs on banks occurred, the institutions closed and people lost all their savings.
For relief, FDR got Congress to approve the Social Security Act of 1935, which established a basic right to an old age pension, insurance against unemployment and aid to poor families with children. In 1939, the Administration added the first Food Stamp Program, which fed 20 million people, in addition to boosting the prices of farm products.
Recovery was a vast set of programs, including a public works program to building government offices, airports, hospitals, schools, roads, bridges, and dams in some 34,599 projects, rural electrification, the Forest Service, Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority. In effect, for a time the government became the largest investor and employer in the United States.
Reforms of the financial sector included the Banking Act of 1933, which established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that still protects average checking and savings accounts, and the companion Glass-Steagall Act, which set up firewalls between the banking, insurance and investment industries. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934, set up the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to watch over stock investment activity to keep it transparent and fair.
The three legs of the New Deal stool were designed to interact with one another. Aid to elderly, poor and unemployed people, for example, also served to spur economic activity, as people in need spent out their aid, generating consumer demand and employment. The recovery eased the depth of poverty and unemployment while also generating production and profits. Controls over how profits were invested prevented speculation from wiping out the improvement.
The New Deal did not eliminate capitalism’s boom and bust economic cycles, but it greatly cushioned the effects. The delicate balance required to keep the economy on an even keel was shown in 1937.
The business-leaning Republicans argued that the New Deal was hostile to business growth and spurred strikes caused by the organizing activities of two competing federations that were growing thanks to workers’ fears that without unions they might starve. Buoyed by a return to healthier economic activity by 1936, the GOP in Congress applied the brakes on spending. Unemployment jumped from 14.3% in 1937 to 19.0% in 1938, while manufacturing output fell by 37% from the 1937 peak.
The worst effects of the second downturn in the Depression were technically over by 1939, but unemployment remained high until the U.S. entry into World War II that mobilized many unemployed workers into uniform. After the war, an unprecedented prosperity arose out of the unique historical circumstance that the United States was the only major industrial nation whose infrastructure had not been reduced to rubble.
When FDR took office on March 4, 1933, he stated his “firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Unemployment stood at about 25%, farm income nationally had fallen by half since 1929 and close to a million nonfarm mortgages had been foreclosed. There was no protection other than what little families, private charity and local governments could offer; when, to top things off, runs on banks occurred, the institutions closed and people lost all their savings.
For relief, FDR got Congress to approve the Social Security Act of 1935, which established a basic right to an old age pension, insurance against unemployment and aid to poor families with children. In 1939, the Administration added the first Food Stamp Program, which fed 20 million people, in addition to boosting the prices of farm products.
Recovery was a vast set of programs, including a public works program to building government offices, airports, hospitals, schools, roads, bridges, and dams in some 34,599 projects, rural electrification, the Forest Service, Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority. In effect, for a time the government became the largest investor and employer in the United States.
Reforms of the financial sector included the Banking Act of 1933, which established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that still protects average checking and savings accounts, and the companion Glass-Steagall Act, which set up firewalls between the banking, insurance and investment industries. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934, set up the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to watch over stock investment activity to keep it transparent and fair.
The three legs of the New Deal stool were designed to interact with one another. Aid to elderly, poor and unemployed people, for example, also served to spur economic activity, as people in need spent out their aid, generating consumer demand and employment. The recovery eased the depth of poverty and unemployment while also generating production and profits. Controls over how profits were invested prevented speculation from wiping out the improvement.
The New Deal did not eliminate capitalism’s boom and bust economic cycles, but it greatly cushioned the effects. The delicate balance required to keep the economy on an even keel was shown in 1937.
The business-leaning Republicans argued that the New Deal was hostile to business growth and spurred strikes caused by the organizing activities of two competing federations that were growing thanks to workers’ fears that without unions they might starve. Buoyed by a return to healthier economic activity by 1936, the GOP in Congress applied the brakes on spending. Unemployment jumped from 14.3% in 1937 to 19.0% in 1938, while manufacturing output fell by 37% from the 1937 peak.
The worst effects of the second downturn in the Depression were technically over by 1939, but unemployment remained high until the U.S. entry into World War II that mobilized many unemployed workers into uniform. After the war, an unprecedented prosperity arose out of the unique historical circumstance that the United States was the only major industrial nation whose infrastructure had not been reduced to rubble.
Friday, October 13, 2017
The Great Depression
The third development that shaped the 1930s and contemporary ideas of the economy, society and policy was the Great Depression, the deepest of the 47 economic downturns the United States has experienced since 1785. It began with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which ushered in a 12-year period of mass unemployment and pauperization that affected all western industrial nations.
The stock crash began on October 24, 1929, since then known as “Black Thursday,” when the market lost 11 percent of its value, it intensified on on October 28 (“Black Monday”) when the losses added an extra 13 percent decline and peaked on Black Tuesday, October 29, when the market declined further, another 12 percent and a volume of trading that went unmatched for 40 years, as panic took hold.
Much has been written about the event, perhaps the most dispassionate and succinct presentation for the nonspecialist is The Great Crash, 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith, published long after the smoke cleared, in 1954.
Among the factors that played into the panic, Galbraith explains, was the unrestricted ability to speculate on stocks by borrowing money (known as trading on margin) and a speculative bubble in which investors failed to notice that consumption was beginning to lag behind production. Joseph Kennedy, father of the president, famously recounted that he got out of the market before the crash, when a shoeshine boy offered him a stock tip, his clue that speculation was running amok.
A group of wealthy investors and banks tried to remedy matters and the market briefly regained its value, but another, much longer, steady decline ran from April 1931 to July 8, 1932, when the market closed at the lowest level of the 20th century, with a net 89 percent loss of value for stocks overall. Events in Wall Street caused a panicked run on banks and internationally on the dollar, which was then backed by gold, and business uncertainty led to layoffs.
Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product fell by an estimated 15 percent (worldwide GDP fell by less than 1 percent from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession). U.S. unemployment rose to 25 percent (by comparison, the Great Recession peaked briefly at 10 percent) and in other countries it rose as high as 33 percent.
The Depression was actually two downturns. The first was the slump brought on by the crash, from which the U.S. was beginning to recover toward 1935 thanks to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Then there was a second slump beginning in 1936, brought on entirely by Washington policy when Republicans attempted to cut spending on the programs that were lifting up the economy.
What ended the Depression definitively was the massive government investment in World War II. By 1943 unemployment was at 3 percent. The explanation is simple. Government-financed capital spending rose from 5 percent of all such investment in 1940 to 67 percent by 1943. The United States had found its investor of last resort.
The stock crash began on October 24, 1929, since then known as “Black Thursday,” when the market lost 11 percent of its value, it intensified on on October 28 (“Black Monday”) when the losses added an extra 13 percent decline and peaked on Black Tuesday, October 29, when the market declined further, another 12 percent and a volume of trading that went unmatched for 40 years, as panic took hold.
Much has been written about the event, perhaps the most dispassionate and succinct presentation for the nonspecialist is The Great Crash, 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith, published long after the smoke cleared, in 1954.
Among the factors that played into the panic, Galbraith explains, was the unrestricted ability to speculate on stocks by borrowing money (known as trading on margin) and a speculative bubble in which investors failed to notice that consumption was beginning to lag behind production. Joseph Kennedy, father of the president, famously recounted that he got out of the market before the crash, when a shoeshine boy offered him a stock tip, his clue that speculation was running amok.
A group of wealthy investors and banks tried to remedy matters and the market briefly regained its value, but another, much longer, steady decline ran from April 1931 to July 8, 1932, when the market closed at the lowest level of the 20th century, with a net 89 percent loss of value for stocks overall. Events in Wall Street caused a panicked run on banks and internationally on the dollar, which was then backed by gold, and business uncertainty led to layoffs.
Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product fell by an estimated 15 percent (worldwide GDP fell by less than 1 percent from 2008 to 2009 during the Great Recession). U.S. unemployment rose to 25 percent (by comparison, the Great Recession peaked briefly at 10 percent) and in other countries it rose as high as 33 percent.
The Depression was actually two downturns. The first was the slump brought on by the crash, from which the U.S. was beginning to recover toward 1935 thanks to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Then there was a second slump beginning in 1936, brought on entirely by Washington policy when Republicans attempted to cut spending on the programs that were lifting up the economy.
What ended the Depression definitively was the massive government investment in World War II. By 1943 unemployment was at 3 percent. The explanation is simple. Government-financed capital spending rose from 5 percent of all such investment in 1940 to 67 percent by 1943. The United States had found its investor of last resort.
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
The Black International
In the 1920s, from the Right, there emerged three movements in Europe that were loosely affiliated with one another in what is often called the Black International, after the color of the shirts of the Italian National Fascist Party (their allies, the German Nazis wore brown shirts and the Spanish Falangists, blue).
The three had in common a top-down view of government as commanding society through a single leader and political party that claimed to espouse a path toward restoring the nation to a mythologized greatness in the past. Benito Mussolini in Italy claimed ancient Rome as its heritage, Adolf Hitler in Germany referred back to the ancient Teutonic warrior tribes that brought Rome down and Francisco Franco in Spain basked in the erstwhile glory of the first empire on which the sun did not set.
They were expressly authoritarian and disdainful of elections even as they claimed to embody the popular will. Their economics were corporativist, meaning that they viewed society as made of social and economic blocs such as state-controlled unions, business associations and various interest and affinity groups (women’s groups among them), all of which formed a corporate, or bodily, whole. Their broader philosophy claimed some elements of a distinctly medieval Christianity and traditionalist values.
The three movements opposed almost everything that dismembered the social order and respect for traditional values of what I elsewhere have called “the Cathedral of Europe” — including humanism, the Protestant Reformation’s individualism, the French and American Revolution’s electoral democracy and capitalism and what they viewed as the heir of all these, Communism. Once the theocratic order was jettisoned in the Renaissance, they proposed, it was all downhill.
All three shared striking symbols symbols. Fascists has the fasces, a Latin word for a bundle of rods tied around an ax, which stood for the tightly bound members of the movement who figuratively chopped down whatever stood in the way of their ideas. The Nazis borrowed a turned and swiveled swastika, an ancient Indian religious icon; in Sanskrit the name has three roots “su” (good), “asti” (exists) and “ka” (make), which combined meant the coming to existence of goodness. The Falangists had a set of five arrows linked with a yoke representing the indissoluble union of the five kingdoms of Castile, Leon, Aragon, Granada and Navarre.
Fascists, Nazis and Falangists shared also European supremacist views. Italian Fascists focused on the claimed superiority of Italians over Africans and used it to justify conquests of Libya and Ethiopia. German Nazis claimed that the Germanic races were superior among all Aryans, or European peoples of Indian origin, like the swastika. The Falange was not particularly interested in ethnic distinctions, largely because Spaniards were multiethnic going back to Phoenician outposts in the peninsula in the pre-Roman period; nonetheless Franco himself was fond of the Visigoths of central Spain and their alleged “national love for law and order.”
All three used the scientifically discredited concept of “race” to describe the people they favored, along with those they despised, namely Jews, the Roma and various other groups.
Mussolini came to power in 1922 after a dramatic “March on Rome,” to radically reform a parliamentary monarchy; by 1925 he abandoned all pretenses and imposed one-man rule, subject only to the king, who overthrew him in 1943 when the Allies were at the gates of Rome. Hitler narrowly won a plurality of votes (43 percent) in 1933 and two weeks later had his party enact dictatorial powers with which he ruled until 1945. Franco came to power in 1939 and the end of the Spanish Civil War; he ruled as military dictator until his death in 1975.
The three had in common a top-down view of government as commanding society through a single leader and political party that claimed to espouse a path toward restoring the nation to a mythologized greatness in the past. Benito Mussolini in Italy claimed ancient Rome as its heritage, Adolf Hitler in Germany referred back to the ancient Teutonic warrior tribes that brought Rome down and Francisco Franco in Spain basked in the erstwhile glory of the first empire on which the sun did not set.
They were expressly authoritarian and disdainful of elections even as they claimed to embody the popular will. Their economics were corporativist, meaning that they viewed society as made of social and economic blocs such as state-controlled unions, business associations and various interest and affinity groups (women’s groups among them), all of which formed a corporate, or bodily, whole. Their broader philosophy claimed some elements of a distinctly medieval Christianity and traditionalist values.
The three movements opposed almost everything that dismembered the social order and respect for traditional values of what I elsewhere have called “the Cathedral of Europe” — including humanism, the Protestant Reformation’s individualism, the French and American Revolution’s electoral democracy and capitalism and what they viewed as the heir of all these, Communism. Once the theocratic order was jettisoned in the Renaissance, they proposed, it was all downhill.
All three shared striking symbols symbols. Fascists has the fasces, a Latin word for a bundle of rods tied around an ax, which stood for the tightly bound members of the movement who figuratively chopped down whatever stood in the way of their ideas. The Nazis borrowed a turned and swiveled swastika, an ancient Indian religious icon; in Sanskrit the name has three roots “su” (good), “asti” (exists) and “ka” (make), which combined meant the coming to existence of goodness. The Falangists had a set of five arrows linked with a yoke representing the indissoluble union of the five kingdoms of Castile, Leon, Aragon, Granada and Navarre.
Fascists, Nazis and Falangists shared also European supremacist views. Italian Fascists focused on the claimed superiority of Italians over Africans and used it to justify conquests of Libya and Ethiopia. German Nazis claimed that the Germanic races were superior among all Aryans, or European peoples of Indian origin, like the swastika. The Falange was not particularly interested in ethnic distinctions, largely because Spaniards were multiethnic going back to Phoenician outposts in the peninsula in the pre-Roman period; nonetheless Franco himself was fond of the Visigoths of central Spain and their alleged “national love for law and order.”
All three used the scientifically discredited concept of “race” to describe the people they favored, along with those they despised, namely Jews, the Roma and various other groups.
Mussolini came to power in 1922 after a dramatic “March on Rome,” to radically reform a parliamentary monarchy; by 1925 he abandoned all pretenses and imposed one-man rule, subject only to the king, who overthrew him in 1943 when the Allies were at the gates of Rome. Hitler narrowly won a plurality of votes (43 percent) in 1933 and two weeks later had his party enact dictatorial powers with which he ruled until 1945. Franco came to power in 1939 and the end of the Spanish Civil War; he ruled as military dictator until his death in 1975.
Monday, October 09, 2017
Stalinism
As background, we return to the Soviet Union, where Lenin died in 1924. He was succeeded after a series of complex internal political struggles by Joseph Stalin. The “Man of Steel” ended up as General Secretary of the Communist Party, after expelling Leon Trotsky from the Party; it was a position he held until his death in 1953.
Stalin was unusual in that he had been an Orthodox seminarian and a bank robber, albeit justified as raising funds for revolution. Under the Soviet Union’s power structure, in which government carried out decisions made by the Party in its members-only meetings, he didn’t become formally head of state — premier of the USSR — until 1941.
Stalinism is the kind of rule that became standard in the USSR and its satellites. Overtly it advocated rapid industrialization; the theory of “socialism in one country,” displacing the goal of international revolution with that of expanding the Soviet system; a centralized state control of every imaginable social activity; collectivization of agriculture.
Less overtly Stalinism generated a system of control that was as old as Tsarism and under Leninism had originally been devised during the Civil War, in which Stalin played an important role. This went from neighborhood committees to defend the revolution, to the various incarnations of the Soviet secret police — the Cheka, in 1937 NKVD and after Stalin the KGB — which were small bureaucracies to “purge” the Party of “deviationists,” until peasants refused in the 1929 to play along with collectivized farms, causing food shortages and eventually famine.
Then came a series of “Great Purges,” or broad based attacks first against peasants, then technical and professional workers when the economy failed, ultimately to allegedly Tsarist military officers. To house those who were not dispatched with the classic bullet to the back of the head — estimates of the slaughter go as high as 60 million — Stain established the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor whose acronym in Russian is GULAG.
Marx warned against revolutions in backward countries such as Russia, stating that they would degenerate into what he called “the Asiatic mode of production.” Not even Lenin, who recast a lot of Marx, ever envisioned Stalinism, argued Trotsky, who eventually fled to exile in Mexico, where an assassin killed him with an ice pick.
In opposition outside the USSR, Trotkyists formed the Fourth International — to rival the Communist Third, which had been set up against the socialist Second — and have argued that Stalinist USSR was neither socialist nor Leninist but a bureaucratized state controlled by a ruling caste, the Party’s Nomenklatura (or list of notables). The second was Maoism, in uneasy alliance with Stalinism, yet critical of putting Soviet interests above world revolution; Castro’s Cuba and North Korea are somewhere between Stalinism and Maoism.
Stalin was unusual in that he had been an Orthodox seminarian and a bank robber, albeit justified as raising funds for revolution. Under the Soviet Union’s power structure, in which government carried out decisions made by the Party in its members-only meetings, he didn’t become formally head of state — premier of the USSR — until 1941.
Stalinism is the kind of rule that became standard in the USSR and its satellites. Overtly it advocated rapid industrialization; the theory of “socialism in one country,” displacing the goal of international revolution with that of expanding the Soviet system; a centralized state control of every imaginable social activity; collectivization of agriculture.
Less overtly Stalinism generated a system of control that was as old as Tsarism and under Leninism had originally been devised during the Civil War, in which Stalin played an important role. This went from neighborhood committees to defend the revolution, to the various incarnations of the Soviet secret police — the Cheka, in 1937 NKVD and after Stalin the KGB — which were small bureaucracies to “purge” the Party of “deviationists,” until peasants refused in the 1929 to play along with collectivized farms, causing food shortages and eventually famine.
Then came a series of “Great Purges,” or broad based attacks first against peasants, then technical and professional workers when the economy failed, ultimately to allegedly Tsarist military officers. To house those who were not dispatched with the classic bullet to the back of the head — estimates of the slaughter go as high as 60 million — Stain established the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor whose acronym in Russian is GULAG.
Marx warned against revolutions in backward countries such as Russia, stating that they would degenerate into what he called “the Asiatic mode of production.” Not even Lenin, who recast a lot of Marx, ever envisioned Stalinism, argued Trotsky, who eventually fled to exile in Mexico, where an assassin killed him with an ice pick.
In opposition outside the USSR, Trotkyists formed the Fourth International — to rival the Communist Third, which had been set up against the socialist Second — and have argued that Stalinist USSR was neither socialist nor Leninist but a bureaucratized state controlled by a ruling caste, the Party’s Nomenklatura (or list of notables). The second was Maoism, in uneasy alliance with Stalinism, yet critical of putting Soviet interests above world revolution; Castro’s Cuba and North Korea are somewhere between Stalinism and Maoism.
Friday, October 06, 2017
Reaction
The Russian Revolution also prompted a reaction in the United States, known as the first Red Scare, roughly between 1917 and 1920, which involved some mass hysteria fanned by newspapers stoking the flames of fear and virulent anti-immigrant sentiment. The latter was related the nationality of leftist activists, who were mostly relatively recent arrivals from Germany, Poland and Italy.
Then, in 1919, the government got its excuse for massive repression. Galleanists, or followers of violent insurrectionist and anarchist Luigi Galleani, sent some 36 letter bombs between April and June 1919 to leading government officials and businessmen, but also law enforcement officials. Although only two people were injured (only 8 actually exploded, 16 were sent back for insufficient postage), the Justice Department launched a series of massive raids under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.
The Palmer raids, as the campaign is known, was also an excuse to go after new Mexican immigrants. Ironically, they were mostly the so-called “Cristeros,” who had fled persecution of Christians during the ongoing revolution in Mexico. Palmer deported more than 500 foreign citizens in all; his popularity and political ambitions to succeed Wilson fizzled when he warned of an attempt to overthrow the U.S. government on May 1, 1920, but nothing happened.
In that period, several states also enacted “criminal syndicalism” laws outlawing advocacy of violence in effecting and securing social change, also otherwise restricting free speech. These laws led to aggressive police action against people accused of being left-wing, with no distinction made between communism, anarchism, socialism or social democracy.
One of the notable cases of that era was against Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born American anarchists convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during a 1920 armed robbery in Braintree, Mass., and later electrocuted. The case remained controversial because of the prejudice openly invoked against the accused; ballistic tests 40 years later proved that Sacco was indeed the shooter, but not Vanzetti.
Wednesday, October 04, 2017
Leninism
Lenin’s regime was like an earthquake that set off deep fears within the middle and upper classes of the world, so that for the next 72 years, the Soviet Union remained the bogeyman that every union leader, activist and politician outside Russia could use, for good or ill.
Internationally, Lenin broke almost all the rules. He signed a peace treaty with Germany, effectively bowing out of World War I. More importantly, his government repudiated all foreign debt contract by previous governments or by any Russian entity.
Internally, the new government nationalized all private property — this meant all income-producing property, not personal possessions (clothes, furniture, etc.) and not personal real estate of middle-income people or below. In addition, it nationalized all banks, factories and all business and luxurious property and expropriated all Church property. Wages were raised and the eight-hour working day was introduced. Only agriculture remained initially untouched. Lastly, the Tsar and his family, were executed in July 1918.
The effect of all these measures was electrifying. The Russian revolt inspired a surge by the world Communist movement, which was more or less aligned with the Bolsheviks. In 1918-19 a revolution broke out in Germany, where a short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic popped up. Next door, in Hungary, there were a series of 1918-1920 revolts with heavy Communist involvement. Similarly in Italy, the “biennio rosso” (red biennium) of social conflict between 1919 and 1920 included mass strikes, worker protests and self-management experiments in land and factories seizures by peasants and workers.
For about two years, the western Allies briefly occupied militarily parts of what would soon be called the Soviet Union, until the Reds won the Civil War. In 1922, with the Russian economy near collapse, Lenin reversed course and made a feint to “state capitalism” under his New Economic Policy, which won his government diplomatic recognition in Europe, although the USA would withhold it until 1933.
Internationally, Lenin broke almost all the rules. He signed a peace treaty with Germany, effectively bowing out of World War I. More importantly, his government repudiated all foreign debt contract by previous governments or by any Russian entity.
Internally, the new government nationalized all private property — this meant all income-producing property, not personal possessions (clothes, furniture, etc.) and not personal real estate of middle-income people or below. In addition, it nationalized all banks, factories and all business and luxurious property and expropriated all Church property. Wages were raised and the eight-hour working day was introduced. Only agriculture remained initially untouched. Lastly, the Tsar and his family, were executed in July 1918.
The effect of all these measures was electrifying. The Russian revolt inspired a surge by the world Communist movement, which was more or less aligned with the Bolsheviks. In 1918-19 a revolution broke out in Germany, where a short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic popped up. Next door, in Hungary, there were a series of 1918-1920 revolts with heavy Communist involvement. Similarly in Italy, the “biennio rosso” (red biennium) of social conflict between 1919 and 1920 included mass strikes, worker protests and self-management experiments in land and factories seizures by peasants and workers.
For about two years, the western Allies briefly occupied militarily parts of what would soon be called the Soviet Union, until the Reds won the Civil War. In 1922, with the Russian economy near collapse, Lenin reversed course and made a feint to “state capitalism” under his New Economic Policy, which won his government diplomatic recognition in Europe, although the USA would withhold it until 1933.
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