Everything Old is New Again

           Still hearing a lot of commentary on the election, some ludicrous, some Chicken Little"ish", much of it bitter. For many young first time voters this has been a bitter lesson in what Dr. Henry Kissinger called Realpolitik. Many seem to think this is new. It isn't. Some think Mr. Trump is not bright, which has a germ of truth, but he is by no means the worst we've ever elected (Warren Harding, John  Tyler, James Buchanan to name several as bad or worse). He is not the most moneyed in the sense of entitled classism (George H.W. Bush, heir to an opium fortune, is in that seat). many are actively mourning the events of yesterday through a short and foggy lens without the perspective of history, so here goes!  

          Let's cut to the chase here, the beginnings of much of what we see now as race/class friction trace back to the post Civil War Jim Crow South. It also manifested itself in the North after the Great migration of the WWI period. It is, and has been, racist in many ways. Believing Adam Smith was right led to the unregulated free market greed of the Robber barons. Believing "white was right" was stated overtly in hate speech by the KKK and behind boardroom doors for decades afterward by the Morgans, Rockefellers and others.

           There was modest reset of sorts in the first progressive era, but post WWII, the balance of distribution of resources started to shift away from us having what we needed to us having to buy from other nations what we needed. Coincident with this was the renewed zeal of labor unions which began demanding not only fair, but exorbitant wages and moreover concessions, to make the products now being made with other people's raw materials. The blatant corruption in some major unions led to a sense of general public willingness to reverse the gains of the late 30s in favor of "right to work" legislation. It became more and more apparent that as pensions and medical coverage became the highest percentage of the manufacturer's cost for a new car, that something was awry. In fact it was simply the balance of the earth's resources and our high labor cost on one hand balanced against our desire to buy things cheaply. We bitch because no one manufactures TVs in the USA anymore when in fact if they did, it would double the price of them. We complain about the lack of manufacturing jobs here, but we buy import cars and shop Walmart for Chinese bargains, sold under a smiley face sign!

           The parents of those dissatisfied Detroit inner city kids used to work at Ford, GM and Chrysler, but those jobs are elsewhere in most cases. In the absence of tariffs, imports will always undersell domestic products. With tariffs, costs will go up, living standards down. This is partly due to one of the great American industries - advertising, whose job is to make us (all of us) believe that we need things we just really want. The other Drugs, makes health care grossly expensive, Meanwhile the large commercial banks keep the rich, rich but not by investing in American manufactures for the previously stated reasons. That in a nutshell (ok, a nutshell and a half) is the chronology, the rest is confetti. In truth, the Clinton and Trump economic outlook isn't really much different. The real irony is that if the election had gone differently the other side would most likely be singing the same litany with different names attached. The pronunciation might be better, but.......!

          There were those with vision who hoped for better in the late 1800s. The following is from an 1892 campaign speech  by Tom Watson, white Georgia congressman:

"The crushing burdens which now oppress both races in the South will cause each to make an effort to cast them off. They will see a similarity of cause and a similarity of remedy. They will recognize that each should help the other in the work of repealing bad laws and enacting good ones. They will become political allies, and neither can injure the other without weakening both. It will be to the interest of both that each should have justice. And on these broad lines of mutual interest, mutual forbearance, and mutual support the present will be made the stepping-stone to future peace and prosperity."

 Some of us, me included,  hoped the 60s civil rights  movement might herald that occurrence, but alas it was sidetracked after 1968 by the Republicans and the Lee Atwater/Richard Nixon "Southern Strategy"

          A more strident call for not only racial, but  for gender and economic fairness as well, was sounded by Mary C. Lease, Kansas populist, in an 1890  speech called "Wallstreet Owns the Country":

"This is a nation of inconsistencies. The Puritans fleeing from oppression became oppressors. We fought England for our liberty and put chains on four million of blacks. We wiped out slavery and our tariff laws and national banks began a system of white wage slavery worse than the first. Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. The West and South are bound and prostrate before the manufacturing East. Money rules, and our Vice-President is a London banker. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.

           The political parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us. We were told two years ago to go to work and raise a big crop, that was all we needed. We went to work and plowed and planted; the rains fell, the sun shone, nature smiled, and we raised the big crop that they told us to; and what came of it? Eight-cent corn, ten-cent oats, two-cent beef and no price at all for butter and eggs-that's what came of it. The politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Overproduction, when 10,000 little children, so statistics tell us, starve to death every year in the United States, and over 100,000 shopgirls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for the bread their niggardly wages deny them... We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the foreclosure system wiped out... We will stand by our homes and stay by our fireside by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the government pays its debts to us. The people are at bay; let the bloodhounds of money who dogged us thus far beware."

Everything old is new again.