Fifty Years Ago

Fifty years ago.  I remember being in the Tube Room at the ATO House at Stanford where we all were watching the vote returns for the California 1968 Presidential Primary.

Robert Kennedy had campaigned in the Sac Joaquin Valley the previous week and several of my fraternity brothers had driven to see him. I was going to go, but something came up.

My best friend went.  He related that he was literally overcome with the charisma of Kennedy.  He said that he felt he had just seen the next President.

We both were Juniors and were entering our Senior year.  For all of us this meant our deferments were over and the “green” awaited us.   At the time 200 plus bodies were being sent back home from Vietnam.  Mortality for 21 year olds was a real possibility, or Canada or whatever.  It was not a good time to be young in America.

Dr. King has been assassinated a few weeks before, rupturing our integrated fraternity for reasons I have previously disclosed, splitting the country into riots and exposing the true nature of white supremacy.

It was already a very bad time, when someone ran to the podium just as we were leaving the Tube Room and announced that RFK had been shot.

We sat in stunned silence.  At first the reports were the wounds were not fatal, but by morning Kennedy was gone.

Again, it happened again!  The echoes of JFK’s assassination roared in our ears.    Many of us who were in college had been motivated by JFK’s ask not challenge.  Many of us made our career decisions, to serve our country, in many different ways based on that challenge.  I did, my best friend did...

And now RFK was gone.  And Nixon and Humphrey stood as instant favorites for the Presidency; the position that held the future of the Vietnam War in their hands.

There was no doubt that both would not stop the war.  Nixon said he would; we all knew he was a liar.  Humphrey said the same things, so had LBJ.

A wave of gloom swept over the campus, as anti-war demonstrations got more violent and widespread.

And the negativity and cynicism that is Trump grew in our hearts.

I have characterized the ‘deplorables”  of my generation as some  disgruntled Vietnam Vets, old retirees now, who long ago realized their government was corrupt and lied to them.  The war protestors already were saying that; and had mysteriously “flipped” into anti-tax conservatives taking out their anger over the war on schools and mental health hospitals.  In future years Vietnam Vets would go so far as to throw their medals back in Washington D.C., something that had never happened before in American history.  Anti-government fatigue crystallized into right wing fanaticism.

And that cynicism persisted up to and through the 2016 election.  Once people lose faith in their government it is easy for demagogues to twist that anger into getting themselves into power.

WWI vets in Germany fueled the fascist Nazi growth and helped Hitler take over the country.  Their beef was that the Treaty of Versailles unfairly blamed Germany for WWI and the reparations that ruined Germany’s economy and led to a worldwide depression, fueled Hitler’s rise to power.

The cynicism and anger against the Vietnam War, the repressed history that eventually proved the American government lied to its citizens, fueled everything from the war protests, the civil rights riots and the tax revolt that elected a right winger, Reagan , to power.

Fascism, incredibly, that Roosevelt had rallied the nation against, began to rise in America of all places!

And even the election of a African American could  not stop it, as Vietnam era baby boomers, vets and protestors, made cynical by the lies the government, reacted in a backlash and elected a Hitler ‘want to be’ as President.

The moderation of American Politics that had characterized  political discourse in the country since the Civil War, broke into armed camps of right and left.  

With the Cold War over, the anger crystallized into delegitimization of government period, local and state politics deteriorated into stark conflict, winner take all, and even voter suppression as white supremacy again built in power.

The result is the politics of today, as the Republican Party is all white; white fascism as its base now; and the Democratic Party is diverse with people of color as its base.  The lines are driven to the ground through flags of extremism.

This division is reminiscent of the divisions in American in 1859, when the Whig Party broke into pieces and the modern Republican Party was born, sparking a Civil War between the abolitionism Republican Party and the Slavery Democratic Party.

Is that possible today?  You bet it is.  As long as the anger and mistrust continues to be fueled by that damned war and baby boomers can still vote, the cynicism continues from the now right wing Vietnam Vet and unlikely hippie to the anti-war leftist hippie who gave up on democracy a long time ago.

Many of my hippie friends converted to right wing fascism a long time ago, joining those on the left who both hate what’s left of American democracy.

That leaves the rest of us, the young and those of us who know better, who know that fascism is the enemy, that government is still necessary  and needs to be reformed not discarded; who have read about the Weimar Republican and know the dangers of fascism and remember the warnings that Roosevelt made many years ago: that fascism was the end of times if it was allowed to live.

I have always mourned more than celebrated my country.  The sins of America are original and historical ranging from the most brutal slavery in history to the genocide of an entire race of people; Native Americans.

But it also the home of the most democratic experiment in democratic decision making in the history of man; the experiment in classic liberalism that has lasted the longest of any since Greece.

And it is in real trouble; led by a “Make America Great Again” movement that is fascist to its core.

The Economic Reckoning

It won’t work....it won’t work...it will cause a disaster.

I didn’t do Facebook back in 2005-06 when Bush, flush with actually  winning the Presidency, he lost the election in 2000 but the electoral racist college gave the Presidency to him, along with a right wing Supreme Court;   I wrote the same words in letters to the editor.

I only took a couple economics classes at Stanford and CSU Sacramento, but studied political economy in depth otherwise.  And mega economics (nation state level economic decisions) is rife with examples of the folly of what our good ole Republican Party just did.

First of all, an economic stimulus law in a growth spurt economy is nuts.  It will lead to inflation quickly.  Protectionist laws on top of that is the same recipe for disaster that we endured in 1929.  

The conventional wisdom of the 1920s and before, was that government should not interfere with the economy, with the notable exception of President Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to break up monopolies (a Republican by the way).

Otherwise Republicans AND Democrats had a hands off policy so income taxes, which were not started until 1916, were not viewed as consequential to the national economy.  

Tariffs were THE major tax source of the government prior to and including the 1920s.

And nobody understood the corrosive effects these protectionist taxes had not only on the global economy (they did not believe such a thing existed) but on the national economy (which nobody understood nor wrote about). It truly was a very different time.

So tariffs were high, since the income tax was so low, it hardly mattered.  Remember too the American Defense industry was virtually non-existent in the 1920s.  

 The world was repulsed by the losses of WWI, so all countries virtually dismantled their militaries.  This meant government spending was practically non-existent.

The air mail wing of the U.S. Postal Office was one of the major spenders of the federal tax dollar...that was it!  

There was no social security, no Medicare, no Air Force, no dam system or TVA.

None of it.  And the accepted notion was high tariffs, since the income tax was seen as a small contributor to government spending, was the main source of the paltry federal government revenue.  Many states spent more than the federal government.    

But, and this a a big exception, there was debt that has accumulated from WWI that had to be paid off.  But America was practically a no federal revenue country, so the debt hung around the neck of the country from 1919, when WWI ended, to 1929.  It was serviced by borrowing from federal banks (there were such things) and by tariffs that began a to irritate and damage recovering economies in Europe and importantly Japan.  Neither source of revenue were even close to paying off what wasn’t even called anything...the concept of a national debt was non-existent.  The federal government actually had balanced the budget every year with the notable exception of WWI.  

That caused tariffs to be radically raised to pay off this debt that many didn’t even understand.  But balancing the debt was something they knew, so they jacked up tariffs to prohibitive levels.  

Because of these tariffs, Japan to feed its economy turned away from the United States and began to attack China.  The real reason for this was to gain access to oil reserves in Northern China to fuel Japan’s growth.  Japan virtually stopped trading with the United States, as did many other nations.  The wheat agricultural industry, that had boomed during WWI because wheat fields in Russia were cut off by the war, was killed by these high tariffs, as countries raised up their taxes on imported wheat to offset the high tariffs the United States was charging.  

This started a precursor of the Great Depression in the farming industry (a big part in those days of America’s economy) and a wheat depression that began in the early 20s.

This warning light in the economy was totally ignored.  Everyone was too busy making fortunes in a Wall Street totally unregulated casino like gambling system, that made millionaires out of middle class fools, who bet on the cum all the time.

And the United States hardly noticed, as it reveled in post war recovery, with absolutely no ability to regulate or even watch the national economy.  It simply was not done.

And then, 1929 happened.  Suddenly the huge economic bubble that had been funded by gambling and wholesale borrowing on collateral that didn’t exist burst.  The high tariffs that had virtually totally funded the government had damaged the recovering economies of Europe and Asia and led to unrest and anger; especially in Germany.  And the debt of WWI still was not paid off. It was an anchor around the neck of the country’s real economic growth.  

So two things happened at once:  1.  Global economic depression 2. The rise of Fascism in Germany, Spain, Japan and Italy.  

And the United States had ten years earlier, in its “Make America Great Again” (they called it America First) retreated into isolationism by not joining the League of Nations and crippled other countries with its high tariffs. 

This was economic isolationism that was a major cause of WWII.  

And the bubble burst.  The deficit spending both private and public that had been driving the false affluence of the 1920s stopped on a dime; plunging the United States and the world into a Great Depression that lasted over 10 years.

Only the spending and mobilization of the most destructive war in human history changed the economic disaster of the 20s.

And we are doing it again...High tariffs and cuts in government spending that has always led to Depression (not Recession) in not only the United States but in the world.

So we are now embarked on the same self destructive path we entered in 1929.

Get your coffee cans out, put your money into it, cause its coming!  

And add to that the inevitable run out of gas and oil, caused by simply using it all up too fast, and you have the perfect storm of an economic/politically and social storm called fascism.  We are living on borrowed time.

Once again that human disaster stalks us all.  The reckoning.....

White Supremacy Wins All the Time Except for the Reckoning

So now the Starbuck’s CEO wants classes to curb the unconscious bias (the new catch phrase) that caused a manager to call the police on African American men who sat waiting for a business meeting in a Starbucks.  White people do that all the time, sit and wait for a friend to join them, but for two black guys..the manager called the police. 

And when the two men complained that they were once again being faced with white cops’  guns, they got testy.  Really?  How would you react?  

I would be livid, just like they were.  But unconscious bias, nice way of saying out and out racism, is he problem so a few In services will fix it.

Fat chance.  

If you look at recent history you don’t have to look long for proof that white supremacy rules in the United States of America.

In 2008 we elected the first African American President.  The FIRST  thing the white leader of the Senate said, who is from the south by the way, is “We are going to make sure he is a one term President”...The FIRST THING.

And then it started.  EVERY law the new President sought to pass, the Senate Republican leader instantly opposed...every one.  Every move the African American President made was attacked.

And a billionaire businessman began a bogus campaign that the African American President was not born in the United States, in spite of a valid birth certificate, and whites throughout the nation  kept claiming that the African American President was illegitimate.  

And that leader of this bogus lying campaign was elected President in eight years..an open white supremacist  was elected President with the electoral college, a device southern colonists used during the writing of the Constitution to unfairly give slave states the power to pick Presidents.

So a minority elected President (Trump got less popular votes than Clinton by millions) was elected President and began the first day dismantling every single accomplishment the African American President had done.

Every single one....

And the CEO of Starbucks wants to have some In services to deal with unconsciously bias?

Bullshit...simple bullshit.   The only way to stop white supremacy is to destroy it.  And it will not be easy.  America just proved that once again. 

America proved that in the very beginning when Andrew Jackson  (whose portrait sits prominently in the White House now) told Chief Justice Marshall that he made his decision let him enforce it (the decision that made the Cherokees the rightful owners of their land); and followed up with the Trail of Tears where most died in a thousand miles trek to the badlands of Oklahoma.  

These same badlands that were again taken from the Cherokee a few decades later because oil was discovered on “Indian Land”.  People who should have been instant millionaires were again dispossessed and shoved off their land.  Violence was used to do this, killing those who didn’t leave.  

America proved that violence is good, with the most brutal system of slavery known to mankind, that a Civil War was fought to end; 600,000 dead.  

And then, rather than repair the societal damage a hundred years of slavery had wrought, a Jim Crowe system was allowed to exist around the fabrication of state’s rights, that brutally lynched thousands of African Americans a year and enslaved them in “legal ways”.  

Meanwhile a genocide was culminated against Native Americans culminating in a state sponsored atrocity in California, the Golden State, because Native American land got in the way of an insane gold rush that destroyed in a few years the entire watershed of California.  

The population of Native Americans in California dropped from 150,000 to about 25,000 in 25 years...out and out genocide.  Bounties were paid for the skins on Native Americans..up to $100 a head.

And an inservice will fix this?

Even progressives, who write articles like this one, are more than unconsciously biased.

I am part Native American...my great great grandfather who was married to a white woman was lynched in Texas in 1859.  His crime...stealing a shod horse (he was the village blacksmith)....his real crime, marrying a white woman.

One more lynching in a state rife with them.  One more victim of white supremacy.

How to stop it?  America doesn’t have it in it...America is a failed state...it is only a matter of time until the reckoning will end us.

And it will come in the “progress” the “greed” that fueled a system of government that masqueraded as a democracy but was actually the most brutal racist regime in human history...that’s right in human history.

And it will end with oil...Oil that fueled “progress”, that drove the earth into a global warming that will kill millions.  But the irony is the greed, the easy success that white supremacy gave white people who “earned” their wealth by stealing it from others or working slaves to death and then subjugating them to a lifetime of poverty , will be the reckoning.

It will happen the first time it dawns on a motorist that their is no more gas.  That the five cars they have in their front drive can’t work anymore.  That the forty miles they moved away from the city center is a long walk; they moved as far as they could away from those terrible people of color.  When they watch in agony as their children starve to death.  As the remaining resources of the world are used to fight one war after another over the remaining drops of oil

And white supremacy will have attained what it always was destined to do...destroy the human race.

And in a million years or so, if artifacts are found, people of color who really started this civilization in the first place, will  read about this disaster and simply kill every person who shows any evidence of white supremacy.   Perhaps when people learn of the end of times white supremacy brought upon us, they will stop it.  No inservice will do it for sure.  

Why, because it is an illness that has no cure...that lives in a tangled web of hate and greed, of rights unfairly taken, of the constant need to put others down, to steal from them, to kill them.....

It is a terminal disease!