What does Houston stand for if not the oil industry? Houston benefited from its nefarious alliance with the Motor City, Detroit, to marginalize U.S. environmentalism, destroy public transit and subjugate every oil producing nation by bribing their sheikhs and dictators to sell out their citizenry.
We already saw one kind of retribution in 9/11. Now Mother Nature has joined the cause.
Just as the auto industry's Detroit — the one place in which Martin Luther King, Jr., felt unfettered hate — was allowed to decline and die after the city's African-American poor exploded against inequality in 1967, Houston is now feeling the effect of climate change among the anti-Mexican Texas kickers.
Auto and oil industries, allied sectors and a few of their most suborned politicians conspired to destroy public transit (see the 1947 conviction of General Motors for conspiracy to destroy electric tramway systems) and prevent environmental measure that, in the 1970s might have stopped and reversed climate change. Even a Republican, the notorious Richard Nixon, recognized the need for environmental action by establishing the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.
Now it's too late. Climate change is irreversible, we can only soften the blows. The electric streetcar is gone. The Arab world is seeing the worst passions inflamed by deep and justified resentment at the exploitation, and now endless war, wrought on their countries by the West.
That is why Houston is flooded.
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
Sunday, August 27, 2017
Created Equal?
So we're in the late 18th century and early 19th. We have a tripartite government (with executive, legislative and judicial branches). Supposedly, the principles that led to the start of the new nation, the supposedly united former colonies called states, were that all people were "created equal" to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
But wait. Women could not vote. Nor could slaves nor Indians. Nor could even all white men. Those who were serfs, or "indentured," did not have a vote. Even among free men, only those who had property, meaning assets such as land or a business, could vote. So the USA began essentially as an agrarian oligarchy, which literally means, in its Greek roots, "rule of the few."
In the year 1776, a Scotsman named Adam Smith wrote a book titled The Wealth of Nations. Smith was a moral philosopher engaged in the then-new field of study called economics (which means literally the study of the management of a household). Applied to entire societies, Smith was interested in political economy, which he viewed as "a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator [with the twofold objectives of providing] a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people ... [and] to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue for the publick services."
This is one way to examine society. In short, I will be touching on the later development of sociology and psychology. In this way we can ask, how have Americans worked to secure their survival at each stage? How did they organize their society? What have they been like as people? How have who they were, what they did for a living, the institutions they favored and the personal way of living make them into what we try to understand today as one nation?
This is the second in a series of entries on the development of ideas that made the United States and the economic, social and political issues Americans debate, posted under the label WeHoldTheseTruths.
But wait. Women could not vote. Nor could slaves nor Indians. Nor could even all white men. Those who were serfs, or "indentured," did not have a vote. Even among free men, only those who had property, meaning assets such as land or a business, could vote. So the USA began essentially as an agrarian oligarchy, which literally means, in its Greek roots, "rule of the few."
In the year 1776, a Scotsman named Adam Smith wrote a book titled The Wealth of Nations. Smith was a moral philosopher engaged in the then-new field of study called economics (which means literally the study of the management of a household). Applied to entire societies, Smith was interested in political economy, which he viewed as "a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator [with the twofold objectives of providing] a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people ... [and] to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue for the publick services."
This is one way to examine society. In short, I will be touching on the later development of sociology and psychology. In this way we can ask, how have Americans worked to secure their survival at each stage? How did they organize their society? What have they been like as people? How have who they were, what they did for a living, the institutions they favored and the personal way of living make them into what we try to understand today as one nation?
This is the second in a series of entries on the development of ideas that made the United States and the economic, social and political issues Americans debate, posted under the label WeHoldTheseTruths.
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