©1929--2008 by Jack Ragsdale
Quotation: “The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today [1949] is the real source of the evil.” Albert Einstein (1949)
Who is this cheeky feller who dares to speak so abusively of our socio-economic system? Anarchy indeed! More on that rapscallion later. In America we know that Socialism is a dirty word, but Where goeth Capitalism?
Over the years, predatory Republican-style capitalism has put the United States through the wringer. Cabot Lodge, a master obstructionist and his fellow Republicans in the Senate frustrated Woodrow Wilson in his struggle to advance the cause of world peace by having our country join the League of Nations. Their same obstructive tactics are now being used in an attempt to wreck President Obama’s forceful effort to shorten this depression. Their oft-repeated, insipid complaint, “it won’t work,” coming from men who caused this debacle, is a hollow response to mass unemployment and catastrophic need.
The supposed Magic of Republican capitalism is no longer. Indeed, the high ideals of the founders of the Republican Party barely survived the Lincoln administration. President Grant surrounded himself with crooked businessmen. Republican Presidents McKinley, Harding, Nixon and George W. Bush carried on that tradition of party sleaze and corruption.
Capitalism has a fastidious aversion to regulation. In our societal relationships, be they commercial or human, we adhere to a body of law. At the instance of American business, Congress removed the common sense rules put in place in the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. As a result, the unrestrained financial community became awash in un-saleable junk mortgages and guarantees of entities certain to fail. 2009 became 1929 “all over again.”
In the ‘29 meltdown, Republican President Herbert Hoover stood fast in his determination to do nothing. Capitalism “would cure itself.” In WWI, under President Wilson’s order, Herbert Hoover successfully rescued millions of starving Europeans from wartime famine. In his years as our president, he adamantly refused to act to relieve the distress of his fellow Americans. With the nation’s grain elevators full of wheat for which there were no buyers, Hoover said: “No one has yet starved” but that was not so: “…people in Arkansas rioted, demanding food for their children.” “A mob stormed a grocery store in Oklahoma City, after the mayor rejected their petition for food.” Hoover waited for “market forces” to restore our economy. With enough wheat on hand to feed America’s hungry, Hoover stood fast in his determination to let capitalism work. A year into his presidency, on March 3, 1930, he declared: “All evidences indicate that the worst effects of the crash on employment will have passed during the next sixty days.” That year 1350 banks failed and the next, 2294. Twelve million were unemployed. With silos full of wheat and outside them, an excess of harvested grain rotting on the ground, President Hoover procrastinated: “let the system cull out the losers,” he declared.
These quotations are all taken from Timothy Egan’s book The Worst Hard Time. “On the giddy ride up [to 1929]” he wrote, “there had been no cop, no regulator to enforce the basic rules of an American economy that had become the world’s biggest casino. Real estate in Florida, oil in Texas, wheat in Kansas…stocks on Wall Street—they all had their time when gravity was willed into oblivion.” Nor is this book without its black humor. We are told how The National Farmers Holiday Association urged folks to strike—not to buy or sell anything on a certain day. But the country was doing exactly that already —without money people were not buying and not selling.
In the election of 1936, the conservative Republican candidate was Alf Landon, governor of Kansas. Roosevelt took every state except Maine and Vermont. Turning again to Egan’s book: “Late in his life, Landon was asked about [Roosevelt’s] New Deal and its lasting effect on the country.” He replied simply: ‘it saved our society.’”
After 2001, those wild 1920s were the model for George W. Bush’s administration—no regulation of business. A compliant Republican Congress, with Democrats eagerly aiding, eliminated the regulators so foxy American finance could guard the henhouse. The result: Depression struck again in October, 2008.
***
Late in 1929, Papa and my three siblings were all working. Fifteen years old, I was in school, but our lives had been in turmoil that entire year: my Mother was gravely ill. When my brother arrived from Memphis, he greeted me angrily: “Why haven’t you shaved?” In his annoyance with an inferior being, he took me to Herndon’s barber shop to rid me of the ghastly teen-age fuzz on my face. Seven years older, we had never been friends. My Mother, knowing I was getting on badly with my Father, asked my brother to “take care” of me. Thus, it was that I spent the first six months of 1930 in hell.
When I returned to Atlanta in July, my father suggested to his boss, Mr. Bauknight, that he hire me and his own son to clean the company’s empty watermelon-hauling freight cars that returned daily from the north. The pay was a dollar a day—twelve cents an hour.
At lunch, Tom Bauknight and I—two sixteen year olds, sat with a young black worker, listening wild-eyed and slack-jawed to his erotic tales of Blue Heaven, a gathering place in Atlanta he and his friends patronized.
In the early afternoons up to one hundred people would appear in the Bellwood railroad yard to catch the freight train due to pull out at 3 o’clock. They were of the millions of Americans who traveled the freights seeking relief from the misery of poverty. Mostly men, among them were whole families—women with babies and small children. They stood by open freight cars, bolting to get on board on signs the juggernaut was about to move. The AB&C Railroad, a small line running from Atlanta to the Coast, was a minor property of the giant Illinois Central System,
Capitalistic economics have collapsed our financial system twice in eighty years of my lifetime. That may be just fine for billionaires but it has devastated the middle and lower classes. By actual experience the Republican Party prefers to leave healing to “market forces” which might require twenty or more years to bring about recovery. Since our government belongs to the people and not just the rich, a vigorous effort to restore prosperity is appropriate. Waiting for some ethereal force to come to our rescue is cruel. Both Franklin Roosevelt and Barak Obama chose the active route as the kinder and more likely road to succeed.
***
The mystery author is none other than the great Albert Einstein.
“Why Socialism,” by Albert Einstein, is taken from his book “Essays in Humanism” published in 1950 by The Philosophical Library.
***
Extract from the 3000 word, 8 page essay:
By Albert Einstein
“I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naïve, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
“The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.
Who is this cheeky feller who dares to speak so abusively of our socio-economic system? Anarchy indeed! More on that rapscallion later. In America we know that Socialism is a dirty word, but Where goeth Capitalism?
Over the years, predatory Republican-style capitalism has put the United States through the wringer. Cabot Lodge, a master obstructionist and his fellow Republicans in the Senate frustrated Woodrow Wilson in his struggle to advance the cause of world peace by having our country join the League of Nations. Their same obstructive tactics are now being used in an attempt to wreck President Obama’s forceful effort to shorten this depression. Their oft-repeated, insipid complaint, “it won’t work,” coming from men who caused this debacle, is a hollow response to mass unemployment and catastrophic need.
The supposed Magic of Republican capitalism is no longer. Indeed, the high ideals of the founders of the Republican Party barely survived the Lincoln administration. President Grant surrounded himself with crooked businessmen. Republican Presidents McKinley, Harding, Nixon and George W. Bush carried on that tradition of party sleaze and corruption.
Capitalism has a fastidious aversion to regulation. In our societal relationships, be they commercial or human, we adhere to a body of law. At the instance of American business, Congress removed the common sense rules put in place in the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. As a result, the unrestrained financial community became awash in un-saleable junk mortgages and guarantees of entities certain to fail. 2009 became 1929 “all over again.”
In the ‘29 meltdown, Republican President Herbert Hoover stood fast in his determination to do nothing. Capitalism “would cure itself.” In WWI, under President Wilson’s order, Herbert Hoover successfully rescued millions of starving Europeans from wartime famine. In his years as our president, he adamantly refused to act to relieve the distress of his fellow Americans. With the nation’s grain elevators full of wheat for which there were no buyers, Hoover said: “No one has yet starved” but that was not so: “…people in Arkansas rioted, demanding food for their children.” “A mob stormed a grocery store in Oklahoma City, after the mayor rejected their petition for food.” Hoover waited for “market forces” to restore our economy. With enough wheat on hand to feed America’s hungry, Hoover stood fast in his determination to let capitalism work. A year into his presidency, on March 3, 1930, he declared: “All evidences indicate that the worst effects of the crash on employment will have passed during the next sixty days.” That year 1350 banks failed and the next, 2294. Twelve million were unemployed. With silos full of wheat and outside them, an excess of harvested grain rotting on the ground, President Hoover procrastinated: “let the system cull out the losers,” he declared.
These quotations are all taken from Timothy Egan’s book The Worst Hard Time. “On the giddy ride up [to 1929]” he wrote, “there had been no cop, no regulator to enforce the basic rules of an American economy that had become the world’s biggest casino. Real estate in Florida, oil in Texas, wheat in Kansas…stocks on Wall Street—they all had their time when gravity was willed into oblivion.” Nor is this book without its black humor. We are told how The National Farmers Holiday Association urged folks to strike—not to buy or sell anything on a certain day. But the country was doing exactly that already —without money people were not buying and not selling.
In the election of 1936, the conservative Republican candidate was Alf Landon, governor of Kansas. Roosevelt took every state except Maine and Vermont. Turning again to Egan’s book: “Late in his life, Landon was asked about [Roosevelt’s] New Deal and its lasting effect on the country.” He replied simply: ‘it saved our society.’”
After 2001, those wild 1920s were the model for George W. Bush’s administration—no regulation of business. A compliant Republican Congress, with Democrats eagerly aiding, eliminated the regulators so foxy American finance could guard the henhouse. The result: Depression struck again in October, 2008.
***
Late in 1929, Papa and my three siblings were all working. Fifteen years old, I was in school, but our lives had been in turmoil that entire year: my Mother was gravely ill. When my brother arrived from Memphis, he greeted me angrily: “Why haven’t you shaved?” In his annoyance with an inferior being, he took me to Herndon’s barber shop to rid me of the ghastly teen-age fuzz on my face. Seven years older, we had never been friends. My Mother, knowing I was getting on badly with my Father, asked my brother to “take care” of me. Thus, it was that I spent the first six months of 1930 in hell.
When I returned to Atlanta in July, my father suggested to his boss, Mr. Bauknight, that he hire me and his own son to clean the company’s empty watermelon-hauling freight cars that returned daily from the north. The pay was a dollar a day—twelve cents an hour.
At lunch, Tom Bauknight and I—two sixteen year olds, sat with a young black worker, listening wild-eyed and slack-jawed to his erotic tales of Blue Heaven, a gathering place in Atlanta he and his friends patronized.
In the early afternoons up to one hundred people would appear in the Bellwood railroad yard to catch the freight train due to pull out at 3 o’clock. They were of the millions of Americans who traveled the freights seeking relief from the misery of poverty. Mostly men, among them were whole families—women with babies and small children. They stood by open freight cars, bolting to get on board on signs the juggernaut was about to move. The AB&C Railroad, a small line running from Atlanta to the Coast, was a minor property of the giant Illinois Central System,
Capitalistic economics have collapsed our financial system twice in eighty years of my lifetime. That may be just fine for billionaires but it has devastated the middle and lower classes. By actual experience the Republican Party prefers to leave healing to “market forces” which might require twenty or more years to bring about recovery. Since our government belongs to the people and not just the rich, a vigorous effort to restore prosperity is appropriate. Waiting for some ethereal force to come to our rescue is cruel. Both Franklin Roosevelt and Barak Obama chose the active route as the kinder and more likely road to succeed.
***
The mystery author is none other than the great Albert Einstein.
“Why Socialism,” by Albert Einstein, is taken from his book “Essays in Humanism” published in 1950 by The Philosophical Library.
***
Extract from the 3000 word, 8 page essay:
By Albert Einstein
“I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naïve, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
“The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.
posted by Jack Ragsdale @ 9:25 AM
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