Koreatown during the L.A. Riots in 1992, 20 years ago.

Since the outset of the Bush Depression in 2008, the standard conservative plan for rescue has been austerity for the masses, an approach tested by Herbert Hoover from 1929-1932 and, recently, by governments in Britain and Greece. In both countries, the results have been a no-growth economy accompanied by riots in the streets, accompanied by teargas and collateral fatalities. In other words, Herbert Hoover all over again.

Source:

The End of Economics: Down Reagan’s Rabbit Hole (via azspot)

Now all we need is an FDR.

danielholter:

ilyagerner:

From TPM:

Don’t worry, American youth: Mike Huckabee has fixed American history. No longer will you suffer under what Huckabee calls “the ‘blame America first’ attitude prevalent in today’s teaching.”

Late Wednesday, Huckabee announced LearnOurHistory.com, a sort of BMG Music Club for what he calls “unbiased” historical lessons for kids. For around $15 each, the company will send you a new animated tale of American history each month, told through the eyes of a gang of time traveling kids. […]

“What we see and hear isn’t always the same as what we read in books, or see on TV,” one girl says in the second video in the series currently available, “The Origins of World War II.”

“So what?” she says. “We know the truth. And that’s good enough for us.”

Matt Yglesias puns that “Some would say the right has a cartoonish view of American history.” Others have rightly pointed out that this is among the more scurrilous comments ever made on the interwebs, since many cartoons are deftly drawn, subtle, and intelligent.

I’ll add that there are not enough facepalms for Huckabee’s description of the current state of history education:

…they’re teaching with political bias that distorts facts for the sake of political correctness. As a result, our national pride and patriotism are in jeopardy.

Secondary school history classes are all about a narrative of national pride and patriotism. It’s true that good social studies courses will discuss uncomfortable moments in our national story, but these are presented as part of a redemptive narrative where the country slowly learns to live out the meaning of its founding ideals. There was slavery, but then came Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. Jim Crow, but also MLK and Rosa Parks. If there’s distortion, it’s in the direction of preserving the heroic narrative of America’s greatness.

Such a staggering disconnect from, you know, reality… it boggles the mind.

19 Facts About The Deindustrialization Of America That Will Blow Your Mind

  1. The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001.

  2. Dell Inc., one of America’s largest manufacturers of computers, has announced plans to dramatically expand its operations in China with an investment of over $100 billion over the next decade.

  3. Dell has announced that it will be closing its last large U.S. manufacturing facility in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in November. Approximately 900 jobs will be lost.

  4. In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero.

  5. According to a new study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, if the U.S. trade deficit with China continues to increase at its current rate, the U.S. economy will lose over half a million jobs this year alone.

  6. As of the end of July, the U.S. trade deficit with China had risen 18 percent compared to the same time period a year ago.

  7. The United States has lost a total of about 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since October 2000.

  8. According to Tax Notes, between 1999 and 2008 employment at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies increased an astounding 30 percent to 10.1 million. During that exact same time period, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations declined 8 percent to 21.1 million.

  9. In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of U.S. economic output. In 2008, it represented 11.5 percent.

  10. Ford Motor Company recently announced the closure of a factory that produces the Ford Ranger in St. Paul, Minnesota. Approximately 750 good paying middle class jobs are going to be lost because making Ford Rangers in Minnesota does not fit in with Ford’s new “global” manufacturing strategy.

  11. As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing. The last time less than 12 million Americans were employed in manufacturing was in 1941.

  12. In the United States today, consumption accounts for 70 percent of GDP. Of this 70 percent, over half is spent on services.

  13. The United States has lost a whopping 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.

  14. In 2001, the United States ranked fourth in the world in per capita broadband Internet use. Today it ranks 15th.

  15. Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.

  16. Printed circuit boards are used in tens of thousands of different products. Asia now produces 84 percent of them worldwide.

  17. The United States spends approximately $3.90 on Chinese goods for every $1 that the Chinese spend on goods from the United States.

  18. One prominent economist is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040.

  19. The U.S. Census Bureau says that 43.6 million Americans are now living in poverty and according to them that is the highest number of poor Americans in the 51 years that records have been kept.

And the vast majority of this has all happened since Reagan. You know, the one who said cutting taxes on the rich would create jobs. I guess he was right, jobs were created. Just not in the USA.

Civilizations rise, decay and die. Time, as the ancient Greeks argued, for individuals and for states is cyclical. As societies become more complex they become inevitably more precarious. They become increasingly vulnerable. And as they begin to break down there is a strange retreat by a terrified and confused population from reality, an inability to acknowledge the self-evident fragility and impending collapse. The elites at the end speak in phrases and jargon that do not correlate to reality. They retreat into isolated compounds, whether at the court at Versailles, the Forbidden City or modern palatial estates. The elites indulge in unchecked hedonism, the accumulation of vaster wealth and extravagant consumption. They are deaf to the suffering of the masses who are repressed with greater and greater ferocity. Resources are more ruthlessly depleted until they are exhausted. And then the hollowed-out edifice collapses. The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. The Mayan elites, after clearing their forests and polluting their streams with silt and acids, retreated backward into primitivism.

As food and water shortages expand across the globe, as mounting poverty and misery trigger street protests in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, the elites do what all elites do. They launch more wars, build grander monuments to themselves, plunge their nations deeper into debt, and as it all unravels they take it out on the backs of workers and the poor. The collapse of the global economy, which wiped out a staggering $40 trillion in wealth, was caused when our elites, after destroying our manufacturing base, sold massive quantities of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities to pension funds, small investors, banks, universities, state and foreign governments and shareholders. The elites, to cover the losses, then looted the public treasury to begin the speculation over again. They also, in the name of austerity, began dismantling basic social services, set out to break the last vestiges of unions, slashed jobs, froze wages, threw millions of people out of their homes, and stood by idly as we created a permanent underclass of unemployed and underemployed.

The Mayan elite became, at the end, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright notes in “A Short History of Progress,” “… extremists, or ultra-conservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.” This is how all civilizations, including our own, ossify and die. The signs of imminent death may be undeniable. Common sense may cry out for a radical new response. But the race toward self-immolation only accelerates because of intellectual and moral paralysis. As Sigmund Freud grasped in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and “Civilization and Its Discontents,” human societies are as intoxicated and blinded by their own headlong rush toward death and destruction as they are by the search for erotic fulfillment.

The unrest in the Middle East, the implosion of national economies such as those of Ireland and Greece, the increasing anger of a beleaguered working class at home and abroad, the growing desperate human migrations and the refusal to halt our relentless destruction of the ecosystem on which life depends are the harbingers of our own collapse and the consequences of the idiocy of our elite and the folly of globalization. Protests that are not built around a complete reconfiguration of American society, including a rapid dismantling of empire and the corporate state, can only forestall the inevitable. We will be saved only with the birth of a new and militant radicalism which seeks to dethrone our corrupt elite from power, not negotiate for better terms.

The global economy is built on the erroneous belief that the marketplace—read human greed—should dictate human behavior and that economies can expand eternally. Globalism works under the assumption that the ecosystem can continue to be battered by massive carbon emissions without major consequences. And the engine of global economic expansion is based on the assurance that there will always be plentiful and cheap oil. The inability to confront simple truths about human nature and the natural world leaves the elites unable to articulate new social, economic and political paradigms. They look only for ways to perpetuate a dying system.

Source: Chris Hedges, This Time We’re Taking the Whole Planet With Us (via mohandasgandhi)

AMERICA’S GOVERNMENT - PART II

blissandzen:

arewepayingattention:

Reagan loved to say this, too.  Government does nothing well?  Free enterprise built America?  All government does is take money from productive citizens and give it to freeloaders?

Many Americans believe all this and more, because they’ve been fed this line for generations.  To accept this as truth requires a complete ignorance of American history… ignorance which rich and powerful beneficiaries of anti-government ideologies are only too happy to provide.

What has government actually done to build America?  Here is a partial list…

1) built the first National Highway in the 1790s, the “Highway to Empire”

2) built the canals allowing “western” agriculture (western NY, OH, IL etc.) to expand by reaching eastern markets

3) cleared out the Indians for white settlement, (I’m not saying all of this is good.)

4) gave away 160 million acres of free land as homestead grants.

5) began public higher education by building land grant colleges

6) built the transcontinental railroad

7) brought water to the West, allowing CA, AZ, NM, etc. to exist.

8) created the mass middle class after World War II with GI mortgage and education programs

9) built the interstate highway system

10) created the market for desktop computers with Pentagon bulk purchases.  (That’s how Ross Perot made his fortune.)

11) made the Internet possible with government satellites.

These are all things the “free enterprise” private sector could not or would not do.  Government’s role has always been to build the infrastructure for prosperity, thereby allowing individuals and businesses to grow.  This anti-government rhetoric so poisonous in our midst today is cheap, self-serving and, if you know our history… unAmerican.

I would add:

12) Ended bank robbery as a profitable crime, by making it a Federal offense and turning the FBI on them.

13) Ditto for kidnapping.

14) Gave the elderly a chance at something besides living with and off their children with Social Security.

15) Invested in basic scientific research for years, which eventually created the Space Age and too many technological innovations to count.

16) The FAA, which made safe air travel possible and popular.

17) The FCC, which brought nationwide radio and television.

18) TVA and the Rural Electrification Program which brought reasonably priced electricity to the vast majority of the country, especially including all the red states.

19) Gave a national franchise to the Bell System, which required reasonably priced phone service to those same red states.

20) The SEC, which for 70 years prevented the implosion of the financial system which immediately began after the agency’s oversight mission was gutted in the late 90s.

21) USDA inspectors, who let us be reasonably sure we were eating food that wouldn’t kill us, again until the agency’s oversight capability was gutted in the late 90s.

22) The US Mint, without whom we’d all have to swap currency at every state line. I kind of enjoy knowing my money’s worth the same in California as it is here.

The next time you meet a “self-made” rich conservative, ask where it would be today without all of the above.

fyeahblackhistory:

The Kushite kings of Egypt and Sudan

Egypt’s 25th Dynasty often gets overlooked in the history books, mostly because it was black African, but the pharaohs of that dynasty regarded themselves as Egyptians and did a great deal to put Egypt back onto the political map of the 8th century BCE Middle East.

The Bible tells the story of how Jerusalem was menaced by the Assyrians, but how, by a miracle, they got up and left before the city fell. The Bible says that the miracle was accomplished by the Egyptian Army coming up to help and although this was accepted in the past, 19th century scholars ignored the idea, because they had realized that any Egyptian army of the period would be led by the black Nubian 25th Dynasty pharaohs - and 19th century Europeans had a very low opinion of black Africans, even when they ruled Egypt for 100 years!

Real history does not lie!!!!!!!

Read about their feats in the bible 2Kings 19:35 & Isaiah 37:36,

Click link for more

The Kush empire (sometimes referred to as Nubia) was vast & powerful, and existed before Upper & Lower Egypt were unified.

Leveraging Inequality

THE United States experienced two major economic crises over the past 100 years—the Great Depression of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2007. Income inequality may have played a role in the origins of both. We say this because there are two remarkable similarities between the eras preceding these crises: a sharp increase in income inequality and a sharp increase in household debt–to-income ratios.

Are these two facts connected? Empirical evidence and a consistent theoretical model (Kumhof and Rancière, 2010) suggest they are. When—as appears to have happened in the long run-up to both crises—the rich lend a large part of their added income to the poor and middle class, and when income inequality grows for several decades, debt-to-income ratios increase sufficiently to raise the risk of a major crisis.

Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Health Insurance -In 1798

The ink was barely dry on the PPACA when the first of many lawsuits to block the mandated health insurance provisions of the law was filed in a Florida District Court. The pleadings, in part, read -

The Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate, either directly or under threat of penalty, that all citizens and legal residents have qualifying health care coverage.

It turns out, the Founding Fathers would beg to disagree.

In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed - “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.

Keep in mind that the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating this Act as many of its members were the drafters of the Constitution. And when the Bill came to the desk of President John Adams for signature, I think it’s safe to assume that the man in that chair had a pretty good grasp on what the framers had in mind.

The n-word speaks to a society that casually dehumanized black people. Slave is just a job description! And it’s not even accurate, in the book Jim is no longer a slave; he ran away! Twain’s point is he can’t run away from being a nigger!

Source: Larry Wilmore

(Source: thedailyshow.com)