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fatehbaz · 2 months

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On May 28, 1914, the Institut für Schiffs-und Tropenkrankheiten (Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases, ISTK) in Hamburg began operations in a complex of new brick buildings on the bank of the Elb. The buildings were designed by Fritz Schumacher, who had become the Head of Hamburg’s building department (Leiter des Hochbauamtes) in 1909 after a “flood of architectural projects” accumulated following the industrialization of the harbor in the 1880s and the “new housing and working conditions” that followed. The ISTK was one of these projects, connected to the port by its [...] mission: to research and heal tropical illnesses; [...] to support the Hamburg Port [...]; and to support endeavors of the German Empire overseas.

First established in 1900 by Bernhard Nocht, chief of the Port Medical Service, the ISTK originally operated out of an existing building, but by 1909, when the Hamburg Colonial Institute became its parent organization (and Schumacher was hired by the Hamburg Senate), the operations of the ISTK had outgrown [...]. [I]ts commission by the city was an opportunity for Schumacher to show how he could contribute to guiding the city’s economic and architectural growth in tandem, and for Nocht, an opportunity to establish an unprecedented spatial paradigm for the field of Tropical Medicine that anchored the new frontier of science in the German Empire. [...]

[There was a] shared drive to contribute to the [...] wealth of Hamburg within the context of its expanding global network [...]. [E]ach discipline [...] architecture and medicine were participating in a shared [...] discursive operation. [...]

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The brick used on the ISTK façades was key to Schumacher’s larger Städtebau plan for Hamburg, which envisioned the city as a vehicle for a “harmonious” synthesis between aesthetics and economy. [...] For Schumacher, brick [was significantly preferable] [...]. Used by [...] Hamburg architects [over the past few decades], who acquired their penchant for neo-gothic brickwork at the Hanover school, brick had both a historical presence and aesthetic pedigree in Hamburg [...]. [T]his material had already been used in Die Speicherstadt, a warehouse district in Hamburg where unequal social conditions had only grown more exacerbated [...]. Die Speicherstadt was constructed in three phases [beginning] in 1883 [...]. By serving the port, the warehouses facilitated the expansion and security of Hamburg’s wealth. [...] Yet the collective profits accrued to the city by these buildings [...] did not increase economic prosperity and social equity for all. [...] [A] residential area for harbor workers was demolished to make way for the warehouses. After the contract for the port expansion was negotiated in 1881, over 20,000 people were pushed out of their homes and into adjacent areas of the city, which soon became overcrowded [...]. In turn, these [...] areas of the city [...] were the worst hit by the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892, the most devastating in Europe that year. The 1892 cholera epidemic [...] articulated the growing inability of the Hamburg Senate, comprising the city’s elite, to manage class relationships [...] [in such] a city that was explicitly run by and for the merchant class [...].

In Hamburg, the response to such an ugly disease of the masses was the enforcement of quarantine methods that pushed the working class into the suburbs, isolated immigrants on an island, and separated the sick according to racial identity.

In partnership with the German Empire, Hamburg established new hygiene institutions in the city, including the Port Medical Service (a progenitor of the ISTK). [...] [T]he discourse of [creating the school for tropical medicine] centered around city building and nation building, brick by brick, mark by mark.

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Just as the exterior condition of the building was, for Schumacher, part of a much larger plan for the city, the program of the building and its interior were part of the German Empire and Tropical Medicine’s much larger interest in controlling the health and wealth of its nation and colonies. [...]

Yet the establishment of the ISTK marked a critical shift in medical thinking [...]. And while the ISTK was not the only institution in Europe to form around the conception and perceived threat of tropical diseases, it was the first to build a facility specifically to support their “exploration and combat” in lockstep, as Nocht described it.

The field of Tropical Medicine had been established in Germany by the very same journal Nocht published his overview of the ISTK. The Archiv für Schiffs- und Tropen-Hygiene unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Pathologie und Therapie was first published in 1897, the same year that the German Empire claimed Kiaochow (northeast China) and about two years after it claimed Southwest Africa (Namibia), Cameroon, Togo, East Africa (Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda), New Guinea (today the northern part of Papua New Guinea), and the Marshall Islands; two years later, it would also claim the Caroline Islands, Palau, Mariana Islands (today Micronesia), and Samoa (today Western Samoa).

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The inaugural journal [...] marked a paradigm shift [...]. In his opening letter, the editor stated that the aim of Tropical Medicine is to “provide the white race with a home in the tropics.” [...]

As part of the institute’s agenda to support the expansion of the Empire through teaching and development [...], members of the ISTK contributed to the Deutsches Kolonial Lexikon, a three-volume series completed in 1914 (in the same year as the new ISTK buildings) and published in 1920. The three volumes contained maps of the colonies coded to show the areas that were considered “healthy” for Europeans, along with recommended building guidelines for hospitals in the tropics. [...] "Natives" were given separate facilities [...]. The hospital at the ISTK was similarly divided according to identity. An essentializing belief in “intrinsic factors” determined by skin color, constitutive to Tropical Medicine, materialized in the building’s circulation. Potential patients were assessed in the main building to determine their next destination in the hospital. A room labeled “Farbige” (colored) - visible in both Nocht and Schumacher’s publications - shows that the hospital segregated people of color from whites. [...]

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Despite belonging to two different disciplines [medicine and architecture], both Nocht and Schumacher’s publications articulate an understanding of health [...] that is linked to concepts of identity separating white upper-class German Europeans from others. [In] Hamburg [...] recent growth of the shipping industry and overt engagement of the German Empire in colonialism brought even more distant global connections to its port. For Schumacher, Hamburg’s presence in a global network meant it needed to strengthen its local identity and economy [by purposefully seeking to showcase "traditional" northern German neo-gothic brickwork while elevating local brick industry] lest it grow too far from its roots. In the case of Tropical Medicine at the ISTK, the “tropics” seemed to act as a foil for the European identity - a constructed category through which the European identity could redescribe itself by exclusion [...].

What it meant to be sick or healthy was taken up by both medicine and architecture - [...] neither in a vacuum.

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All text above by: Carrie Bly. "Mediums of Medicine: The Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases in Hamburg". Sick Architecture series published by e-flux Architecture. November 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

#abolition #ecology #sorry i know its long ive been looking at this in my drafts for a long long time trying to condense #but its such a rich comparison that i didnt wanna lessen the impact of blys work here #bly in 2022 did dissertation defense in architecture history and theory on political economy of steel in US in 20s and 30 #add this to our conversations about brazilian eugenics in 1930s explicitly conflating hygiene modernist architecture and white supremacy #and british tropical medicine establishment in colonial india #and US sanitation and antimosquito campaigns in 1910s panama using jim crow laws and segregation and forcibly testing local women #see chakrabartis work on tropical medicine and empire in south asia and fahim amirs cloudy swords #and greg mitmans work on connections between #US tropical medicine schools and fruit plantations in central america and US military occupation of philippines and rubber in west africa

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thoughtportal · 1 year

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the original print version in PDF https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1976/03/14/107211417.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0

Wells: I am very grateful, Mr. Stalin, that you have taken the time to see me. I recently went to the United States and had a long conversation with President Roosevelt, during the course which I tried to understand the principal ideas that direct his thinking and action.

The British writer IL G. Wells, then 68 years old, met in the Soviet Union with Josef Stalin, who was 55, on July 23, 1934.

In 1922, on his first visit to the Soviet Union, Wells had been very impressed with Lenin and had thought that the chaos reigning in the country could be brought under control only by Lenin and the Communist Party.

But when he returned to England after his interview with Stalin, he was disappointed lie had tried in vain to convince the Russian leader that the United States was in the process of becoming socialist through reformist methods, owing to Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he did not succeed in getting Stalin to renounce the dogma of revolution through the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

(The conversation, excerpted here, appeared in the French magazine L'Express and was translated by Leonard Mayhew for The New York Times.)

Now, I have come to ask you what you are doing to change the world.

Stalin: Not much

Wells: Sometimes I have the opportunity walk around and look at what is happening around me like the man in the street

Stalin: Celebrities like you are never “men the street.” Certainly, only history will decide the real worth of any particular celebrity, but even so, you do not see the world with the eyes of the “man in the street.”

Wells: I don't mean to affect false modesty. What I mean is that I try to see the world in that fashion, rather than through the eyes of political man, a member of a particular political party, or as a statesman.

Nowadays, the capitalists must learn to grasp the spirit of socialism from you. It seems to me that a profound reorganization is taking place in the United States, the creation of a planned—that is, a socialist—economy. You and Roosevelt start from different positions. But isn't there definite kinship between your ideas? In Washington I was struck by the same phenomenon as here: dramatic expansion of the administrative structure creation of numerous organs of state management organization of an omnipotent civil service.

Stalin: The United States has a different objective from ours in the U.S.S.R. Theirs was born of their economic difficulties; it is based on the present economic crisis. The Americans want to overcome the crisis on the basis of private capitalist initiative, without changing the economic base. They are trying their utmost to limit the disorder and losses caused by the existing economic system.

Wells There are great differences among capitalists. Some think only of profits, others are ready to make sacrifices. Take Rockefeller a brilliant organizer, who has given an example of how to manage the sale of oil that is worthy of imitation. Or Ford granted, he thinks of nothing but himself, but isn't he passionate organizer of production from whom you also draw lessons?

Stalin When I speak of capitalists who aspire only for profit and gain I do not by any means intend to say that they are beyond serious consideration, that they are incapable of doing anything worthwhile. Many of them have great talent for organization, something I would not dream of denying. We Soviets learn much from the capitalists.

But if you are talking about who are ready to remake the world, it is impossible to find them amid those who, body and soul, serve the cause of profit. We are at opposite poles from such people. You talk about Ford. Certainly, he is a gifted organizer of production. But don't you know his attitude toward the working class? Don't you know how many workers he can throw out of work without a thought? The capitalist is bound to profit and no power on earth can free him from the bond.

Capitalism will not be destroyed by “organizers of production” or the technical intelligentsia only by the working class.

Clearly, this would not be the case, if we could with a single stroke cut the bond that ties the technical intelligentsia to the capitalist world. But that is utopian. How many among the technical intelligentsia would choose to break with the capitalist world? What do you think? Are there many such people for example in England or France? No, very few volunteer to break with their masters and begin the reconstruction of the world

Besides, we cannot lose sight of the fact that in order to transform the world one must have the power to do so. It seems to me, Mr. Wells, that you seriously underestimate the question of power that it does not enter into your thinking.

What can the best‐intentioned people do, they cannot pose the problem of taking power, and do not have power in their hands? In the hest of situations they can lend assistance the new class that will take power but by themselves they cannot transform the world. For that task there must be a large social class

to replace the capitalists and become masters, as the capitalists have been.

The working class fits that description.

The transformation of the world is a vast, complex, painful process. A massive cause demands a massive class.

Wells: Yes But a great voyage demands captain and a navigator.

Stalin: Exactly but a great voyage first of all demands a great vessel. What is a navigator without a ship? A man without a job.

Wells: The great vessel is mankind, not any one class.

Stalin: You Mr. Wells, start from the principle that all men are good. I never forget that there are many evil men. I do not believe in the goodness of the bourgeoisie.

Wells: Not long ago, I was invited to a dinner of the Royal Society, the most important scientific society in England. The president's speech argued in favor of social planning and scientific government. Your propaganda about the class struggle does not take account of this fact. States of mind change.

Stalin: Yes, I know, and it is explained by the fact that capitalist society is today trapped in dead end. The capitalists are searching for, and are unable to find, a way out of the crisis that would be compatible with the privileges and interests of their class. They could escape on all fours but they cannot find a way out they can use with their heads high and without affecting the vital interests of capitalism.

Wells: Mr. Stalin, you know what revolution is, indeed you know it from practical experience. Do the masses ever rise by themselves? Don't you think that it is a constant that all revolutions are the work of a minority?

Stalin: To carry out the revolution there must indeed be a revolutionary minority. But the most talented, committed and energetic minority will be powerless unless it receives the support, least the passive support of millions of people.

Wells: I am familiar with Communist propaganda in the West and it seems to me that, under present conditions, it sounds like an old‐fashioned theme, to the degree that it propaganda for violence. Propaganda for overturning the social regime by violence was appropriate when we were dealing with unrestrained tyranny in one form or another. But today the note of insurrection seems to me to be out of date.

Stalin: No the replacement of one social regime by another is a complex and lengthy revolutionary process. It is not a spontaneous process, but a struggle a process tied to confrontation between the classes.

Capitalism is rotten to the core, but not like a tree that has rotted to the point where it ready to topple of its own accord. No, the revolution, the replacement of one social regime by another has always been a struggle indeed struggle to the death.

The difference between Communism and capitalism: Under capitalism it is dog‐eat‐dog under Communism, it is just the reverse.

About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

#economic conditions and trends #article #HG Wells #Stalin #USSR #communism #Communist Party #capitalism #history #interview #1930s #new york times #archives #economics #economy #revolution

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royalninja · 5 months

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probably a very stupid shower-thought-y train of thought;

people tend to give advice about what to do with your life kind of on the assumption that things as they are now will continue indefinitely. like, certain careers, or market expectations. but, for the last century or so it really feels like every decade is substantially different from the ones before and after it.

what i want to know is, what if you COULD plan your life around one specific time frame and just live through that over and over? what decade, from 1900 to now, would be the best one to live through on loop and experience as a kid, teenager, adult, senior citizen?

ignoring the usual shit about time travel, this isn't a time travel question this is about looking for the decade with the best quality of life across your whole life. just assume that when 19X9 ends it jumps back to 19X0 and you keep living your life roughly unaffected.

#text #maybe not 1900s but im not too certain on what life was like there #definitely not 1910s with the war #1920s seems like itd be decent maybe? good economy in the us at least #1930s is the depression #40s is the other war #50s onward feels significantly harder to say #i think everyone everywhere started going insane in the 60s

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kkaylium · 9 months

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Not my current interest being the Great Depression lol.

I find it curious and wonder how new the idea of “credit” was at the time, as it seems at least part of the issue was people buying stocks with money they <i>did. Not. Have. </i> like….. we know now that is a bad idea, but did the people in the 1920’s know? I can’t say.

However. Like everything in CAPITALISM seems to go, of course the rich dudes decided “hey we can buy each others stock and make it look more valuable!” But bitch that didn’t work!

But also, mass panic (although I hesitate to place blame on the average person) didn’t seem to help. Like…. Don’t take out loans to invest in the stocks and then freak out the second the stocks look a little scary???? Don’t invest money you DONT HAVE????? But also fuck the rich that tried to pay to pretend the stocks were fine?????!!!!!!! OMG -____-

I can’t even conclude this, as I have yet to finish re-researching this piece of history I thought I knew so well when I was 12 lol.

Also, wtf, it took a WORLD WAR to fix this?!?!

Why on earth did humans invent money what the hell.

-____-

Might follow up later - we’ll see XD

#depression #Great Depression #history #1929 #circa 1929 #economic #economy #economic collapse #whyyyy #why is history like this #i wish i had a time machine #banks are stupid #stock market #stock market collapse #circa 1930 #humans and money should not exist in the same timeline #money is fake #fuck

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memoriae-lectoris · 8 months

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When a woman had to seek work because her husband lost his job, this threatened the “modern” ideas of masculinity and marriage that most men had come to embrace over the previous two decades. Unemployed men often lost their sense of identity and became demoralized. Many turned to drink. Tempers flared at home. It is not surprising, then, that the experience of the Depression undercut the societal support for working women that had emerged in the early years of the twentieth century. Children raised in Depression-era families associated a working mother with high levels of family tension, with their father’s failure rather than their mother’s success.

Hostility toward working women was especially sharp if a woman’s husband also had a job. Many people believed such families were double-dipping into an already shallow pool of work. The U.S. Economy Act of 1932 prohibited the federal government from employing two people from the same family.

Despite the act’s gender-neutral language, nearly all the fifteen hundred people fired in its first year were women. Twenty-six American states passed laws explicitly prohibiting or limiting the employment of married women in various fields. By 1940 more than three-quarters of the school systems in the United States refused to hire married women as teachers.

#book : marriage a history #usa #culture #sexism #misogyny #Economy Act #1920s #1930s #1940s #20th century #great depression era #alcoholism #abuse #work

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charlesoberonn · 3 months

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I love (and by that I mean hate) that we've known since the 1930s that government investment in welfare, infrastructure, and industry helps the economy as a whole while subsidising megacorporations and giving rich people tax cuts hurts it.

But for 40 years between 1981 and 2021 no president has actually done that in earnest because Reagan and his right-wing friends around the world convinced everyone that the opposite is true. That government is the problem.

Hopefully this changes soon and doesn't repeat.

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i-am-dulaman · 2 years

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Okay I'm riled up about this rn so time for a history of economics lesson (rant) from me, a stranger on the internet

I'm a communist, I hate capitlism, so lemme just put that out there. But capitlism had its moments. Even marx had some praise for parts of capitlism.

And by far the most successful form of capitlism was Keynesian economics, as evident by the enormous increase in living standards in those countries which adopted it between the 1930s and 1970s.

What's Keynesian economics? The idea that capitlism can't survive on its own, and must be supported by government spending at the poorest ends of society and taxes at the richest ends of society (essentially the opposite of trickle down economics) as well as strong regulations on certain industries like banking.

It basically started in 1936 with President Roosevelt who was a personal friend of John Keynes (who the theory is named after).

Roosevelt implemented Keynesian economics to great effect; he raised the top tax rate to 94% (he actually wanted a 100% tax rate on the highest incomes, essentially creating a maximum wage, but the senate negotiated down to 94%) and similarly high corporate tax rates, he created the first ever minimum wage, created the first ever unemployment benefit, created social security in America, pension funds, and increased public spending on things like public utilities and infrastructure, national parks, etc. Which created about 15 million public sector jobs.

This ended the great depression and eventually lead to America winning world War 2, after which many countries followed suit in implementing similar policies, including UK, Australia, and NZ (apologies for the anglosphere-centric list here but they're the countries I'm personally most familiar with so bare with me)

Over the next 40 years these countries had unprecedented growth in living standards and incomes, and either decreasing or stable wealth inequality, and housing prices increasing in line with inflation. Virtually every household bought a car and a TV, rates of higher education increased dramatically, america put a man on the moon, and so on.

Then it all abruptly ended in the 80s and the answer is plain and obvious. 1979 thatcher became UK prime minister. 1981 reagan became US president. 1983 the wage accords were signed in aus. 1984 was the start of rogernomics in NZ (Someone link that Twitter thread of the guy who posts graphs of economic trends and points out where reagan became president)

(Also worth noting those last two in NZ and Aus were both implemented by 'left' leaning governments, but they are both heavily associated with right wing policies.)

This marked the beginning of trickle down economics: tax cuts, privatization of publicly owned assets, reduction in public spending, and deregulation of the finance sector. The top tax rates are down to the low 30s in most of these countries, down from the 80s/90s it was prior. Now THATS a tax cut.

And what happened next?

Wages stagnated. Housing prices skyrocketed. Bankers got away with gambling on the economy. Public infrastruce and utilies degraded. And wealth inequality now exceeds France in 1791.

I don't know how anyone can deny the evidence if they see it, but there's so much propaganda and false information that a lot of people just don't see the evidence.

Literally all the evidence supports going back to Keynesian economics but now that the rich have accumulated so much wealth it's virtually impossible to democratically dethrone them when they have most of the politicians on both the right and the left in their pocket.

Unfortunately it was the great depression and ww2 that gave politicians the political power to implement these policies the first time around. Some thought the 2008 crash would spur movement back towards Keynesianism (which it actually did in Iceland, congrats to them), I hoped covid would force governments to now, but nope.

All these recent crises' seem to have just pushed politics further and further right, with more austerity and tax cuts.

I don't really have a message or statement to end on other than shits fucked yo.

#also this is purely talking about the economics side of things #i know pre-80s the social side of politics was fucked despite the increasing living standards #with jim crow laws ans segregation and countless anti-queer laws etc.#and i know you canr seperate the economy entirely from social aspects of politics #but for the purposes of this post this is about the theoretical implications of different forms of capitlism #thats also why im not mentioning the recent descent towards fascism even tho it is closely tied to the economy #anyway #so yeah ive been reading a lot on economics lately #capitlism #economy #Keynesian economics #communism

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months

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Social Security is class war, not intergenerational conflict

Today, Tor.com published my latest short story, "The Canadian Miracle," set in the world of my forthcoming (Nov 14) novel, The Lost Cause. I am serializing this one on my podcast! Here's part one.

The very instant the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, American conservatives (in both parties) began lobbying to destroy it. After all, a reserve army of forelock-tugging plebs and family retainers won't voluntarily assemble themselves – they need to be goaded into it by the threat of slowly starving to death in their dotage.

They're at it again (again). The oligarch-thinktank industrial complex has unleashed a torrent of scare stories about Social Security's imminent insolvency, rehearsing the same shopworn doom predictions that they've been repeating since the Nixonite billionaire cabinet member Peter G Peterson created a "foundation" to peddle his disinformation in 2008:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.O.U.S.A.

Peterson's go-to tactic is convincing young people that all the Social Security money they're paying into the system will be gobbled up by already-wealthy old people, leaving nothing behind for them. Conservatives have been peddling this ditty since the 1930s, and they're still at it – in the pages of the New York Times, no less:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/opinion/social-security-medicare-aging.html

The Times has become a veritable mouthpiece for this nonsense, publishing misleading and nonsensical charts and data to support the idea that millennials are losing a generational war to boomers, who will leave the cupboard bare:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/opinion/aging-medicare-social-security.html

As Robert Kuttner writes for The American Prospect, this latest rhetorical assault on Social Security is timed to coincide with the ascension of the GOP House's new Speaker, Mike Johnson, who makes no secret of his intention to destroy Social Security:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-10-31-debunking-latest-attack-social-security/

The GOP says it wants to destroy Social Security for two reasons: first, to promote "choice" by letting us provide for our own retirement by flushing even more of our savings into the rigged casino that is the stock market; and second, because America doesn't have enough dollars to feed and house the elderly.

But for the New York Times' audience, they've figured out how to launder this far-right nonsense through the language of social justice. Rather than condemning the impecunious olds for their moral failing to lay the correct bets in the stock market, Social Security's opponents paint the elderly as a gerontocratic elite, flush with cash that rightfully belongs to the young.

To support this conclusion, they throw around statistics about how house-rich the Boomers are, and how much consumption they can afford. But as Kuttner points out, the Boomers' real-estate wealth comes not from aggressive house-flipping, but from merely owning a place to live. America's housing bubble means that younger people can't afford this basic human necessity, but the answer to that isn't making old people homeless – it's providing a lot more housing, and banning housing speculation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

It's true that older people are doing a lot of consumption spending – but the bulk of that spending isn't on cruises to Alaska to see the melting glaciers, it's on health care. Old people aren't luxuriating in their joint replacements and coronary bypasses. Calling this "consumption" is deliberately misleading.

But as Kuttner points out, there's another, more important point to be made about inequality in America – the most significant wealth gap in America is between workers and owners, not young people and old people. The "average" Boomer's net worth factors in the wealth of Warren Buffett and Donald Trump. Older renters are more rent-burdened and precarious than younger renters, and most older Americans have little to no retirement savings:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2023/10/28/the-new-york-times-greedy-geezer-myth/

Less than one percent of Social Security benefits go to millionaires – that's because the one percent constitute one percent of the population. It's right there in the name. The one percent are politically and economically important, but that's because they are low in numbers. Giving Social Security benefits to everyone over 65 will not result in a significant outlay to the ultra-wealthy, because there aren't many ultra-wealthy people in America. The problem of inequality isn't the expanding pool of rich people, it's the explosion of wealth for a contracting pool of rich people.

If conservatives were serious about limiting the grip of these "undeserving" Social Security recipients on our economy and its politics, they'd advocate for interitance taxes (which effectively don't exist in America), not the abolition of Social Security. The problem of wealth in America is that it is establishing permanent dynasties which are incompatible with social mobility. In other words, we have created a new hereditary aristocracy – and its corollary, a new hereditary peasantry:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

Hereditary aristocracies are poisonous for lots of reasons, but one of the most pressing problems they present is political destabilization. American belief in democracy, the rule of law, and a national identity is q function of Americans' perception of fairness. If you think that your kids can't ever have a better life than you, if you think that the cops will lock you up for a crime for which a rich person would escape justice, then why obey the law? Why vote? Why not cheat and steal? Why not burn it all down?

The wealthy put a lot of energy into distracting us from this question. Just lately, they've cooked up a gigantic panic over a nonexistent wave of retail theft:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/31/the-retail-theft-surge-that-isnt-report-says-crime-is-being-exaggerated-to-cover-up-other-retail-issues/

Meanwhile, the very real, non-imaginary, accelerating, multi-billion-dollar plague of wage theft is conspicuously missing from the public discourse, despite a total that dwarfs all retail theft in America by an order of magnitude:

https://fair.org/home/wage-theft-is-built-into-the-business-models-of-many-industries/

America does have a property crime crisis, but it's a crisis of wage-theft, not shoplifting. Likewise, America does have a retirement crisis: it's a crisis of inequality, not intergenerational conflict.

Social Security has been under sustained assault since its inception, and that's in large part due to a massive blunder on the part of FDR. Roosevelt believed that people would be more protective of Social Security if they thought it was funded by their taxes: "we bought it, it's ours." But – as FDR well knew – that's not how government spending works.

The US government can't run out of US dollars. The US government doesn't get its dollars for spending from your taxes. The US government spends money into existence and taxes it out of existence:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#mmt

A moment's thought will reveal that it has to be this way. The US government (and its fiscal agents, chartered banks) are the only source of dollars. How can the US tax dollars away from earners unless it has first spent those dollars into the economy?

The point of taxation isn't to fund programs, it's to reduce the private sector's spending power so that there are things for sale to the public sector. If we only spent money into the economy but didn't take any out of the economy, the private sector would have so many dollars to spend that any time the government tried to buy something, there'd be a bidding war that would result in massive price spikes.

When a government runs a "balanced budget," that means that it has taxed as much out of the economy as it put into the economy at the start of the year. When a government runs a "surplus," that means it's left less money in the economy at the end of the year than there was at the beginning of the year. This is fine if the economy has contracted overall, but if the economy stayed constant or grew, that means there are fewer dollars chasing more goods and services, which leads to deflation and all kinds of toxic outcomes, like borrowing more bank-created money, which makes the finance sector richer and the real economy poorer.

Of course, most governments run "deficits" – which is another way of saying that they leave more dollars in the economy at the end of the year than there was at the start of the year, or, put another way, a deficit probably means that your economy got bigger, so it needed more dollars.

None of this means that governments can spend without limit. But it does mean that governments can buy anything that's for sale in their own currency. There are a lot of goods for sale in US dollars, both goods that are produced domestically and goods from abroad (this is why it's such a big deal that most of the world's oil is priced in dollars).

Governments do have to worry about getting into bidding wars with the private sector. To do that, governments come up with ways of reducing the private sector's spending power. One way to do that is taxes – just taking money away from us at the end of the year and annihilating it. Another way is to ration goods – think of WWII, or the direct economic interventions during the covid lockdowns. A third way is to sell bonds, which is just a roundabout way of getting us to promise not to spend some of our dollars for a while, in return for a smaller number of dollars in interest payments:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#payfors

FDR knew all of this, but he still told the American people that their taxes were funding Social Security, thinking that this would protect the program. This backfired terribly. Today, Democrats have embraced the myth that taxes fund spending and join with their Republican counterparts in insisting that all spending must be accompanied by either taxes or cuts (AKA "payfors").

These Democrats voluntarily put their own policymaking powers in chains, refusing to take any action on behalf of the American people unless they can sell a tax increase or a budget cut. They insist that we can't have nice things until we make billionaires poor – which is the same as saying that we can't have nice things, period.

There are damned good reasons to make billionaires poor. The legitimacy of the American system is incompatible with the perception that wealth and power are fixed by birth, and that the rich and powerful don't have to play by the rules.

The capture of America's institutions – legislatures, courts, regulators – by the rich and powerful is a ghastly situation, and to reverse it, we'll need all the help we can get. Every hour that Americans spend worrying about their how they'll pay their rent, their medical bills, or their student loans is an hour lost to the fight against oligarchy and corruption.

In other words, it's not true that we can't have nice things until we get rid of billionaires – rather, we can't get rid of billionaires until we have nice things.

This is the premise of my next novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14; it's set in a world where care and solidarity have unleashed millions of people on the project of maintaining the habitability of our planet amidst the polycrisis:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

It's a fundamentally hopeful book, and it's already won praise from Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. I wrote it while thinking through and researching these issues. Conservatives want us to think that we can't do better than this, that – to quote Margaret Thatcher – "there is no alternative." Replacing that narrative is critical to the kinds of mass mobilizations that our very survival depends on.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/intergenerational-warfare/#five-pound-blocks-of-cheese

This Saturday (Nov 4), I'm keynoting the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA.

#pluralistic #class war #inheritance tax #death tax #mmt #modern monetary theory #intergenerational war #intergenerational wealth transfers #social security #ss

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mornington-the-crescent · 1 year

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The Poll

So, for those who don’t know, I put up a poll of, “Who was the worst American President?” The list was FDR, Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, Herbert Hoover, and Richard Nixon. It got up to about 13k notes before I deleted it, because I was tired of the notes clogging up my feed. And the results were... telling.

About 75-80% of all the notes were, “Where is Reagan/Andrew Jackson?!?” Many of the rest, though, can be seen below:

What this tells me is that more than ten thousand people didn’t have an education; they had an indoctrination.

You want to hear it? All right, buckle up, because it’s time for a stroll down memory lane.

Why was FDR a bad president?

It is almost hard to know where to begin with this. Let’s start with one of the most basic ones: The belief that FDR got us out of the Depression.

Point of fact, No the fuck he did not.

Making American Depressed

If you ask almost any historian or economist, they will tell you flat-out that not only did the New Deal not end the Great Depression, but that it made it significantly longer and worse than it would have been otherwise. Hoover bears some of the blame for this, but the pseudo-socialist dogshit that was the New Deal bears the brunt of the blame for this one.

The stock market crashed in late October, 1929. Two months later, unemployment peaked at 9%. Over the next several months, unemployment started to fall, down to 5-6% by the spring of the next year. Half a year after the crash, unemployment had not hit double digits. Hoover’s intervention, though, did cause unemployment to reach double digits. Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and took office in 1933, and unemployment did not fall out of double digits for the remainder of the 1930′s. The thing that actually pulled the US out of the Depression was the second World War; turns out that removing roughly 12 million people from the labor force to go and fight does wonders for unemployment numbers. FDR even said that Doctor New Deal was replaced by Doctor Win-The-War.

This was hardly the first economic downturn in American history. For the first 150 years of this country, there were downturns all the time. And what the government did was nothing, and the economy recovered on its own. But Roosevelt represents the first massive large-scale intervention in the economy. And government intervention in the economy slows economic recovery; when you have no idea what the government is going to do tomorrow in regards to the economy, it’s hard to make smart financial decisions, so you just don’t bother. After all, why do anything if tomorrow, the rules of the game are going to change?

Separation of Powers Who?

FDR issued more executive orders than any other President of the 20th century. He may, in fact, have issued more than all the other Presidents of the 20th century combined. Rather than letting Congress, the legislative branch of government, you know, legislate, he preferred to try to do everything himself.

The President is supposed to be the weakest branch of the government, but Roosevelt did everything he could to try to establish its supremacy over the other branches. When Congress didn’t give him his way, he used executive orders. When the Supreme Court challenged some of his acts as unconstitutional, his response was to threaten to have them replaced, or to simply pack the court with judges more sympathetic to his aims. This is a man who was openly contemptuous of the concept of the rule of law.

Here’s a fun entry from the notes:

Hey, you want to talk about fascists? Actual, honest-to-goodness Fascists, not just the modern definition (i.e. anyone a nanometer to the right of Noam Chomsky)? Let’s talk about the originals. Let’s talk about the inventor of Fascism, Benito motherfucking Mussolini. And how FDR openly admired him, and was “deeply impressed by what he has accomplished”, calling Fascism the “cleanest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery [he had] ever seen”, and that it made him “envious”. And Mussolini, for his part, said of Roosevelt that, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices … Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.”

When the guy who fucking invented Fascism is saying that he thinks that you are also doing Fascism, then maybe you’re not a good person.

Concentration- I Mean, Internment Camps

And just like his buddies on the other side of the Atlantic, right when World War 2 kicked off, Roosevelt thought it would be a good idea to take “undesirables” and throw them into prison camps. Roughly 20 thousand Italian- and German-Americans, American citizens, were thrown into camps, simply for the crime of having ancestors from countries we were at war with. And then, of course, there’s the 120 thousand Japanese-Americans who were likewise rounded up and put into prison camps, two thirds of whom were natural-born American citizens.

Almost 150 thousand American citizens, thrown into literal concentration camps, without the bother and expense of due process, stripped of their constitutional rights simply on the basis of race.

As for the concentration camps set up in Europe by the Nazis, however? Despite being told of their existence by people who had escaped, as well as journalists and lawyers from Germany, once American planes gained the ability to attack those camps, to shut them down? FDR refused to grant them permission to do so.

Commander in Thief

Executive Order 6102 outlawed the private ownership of gold, allowing the government to confiscate all of it. Once that was accomplished, the Gold Reserve Act allowed him to change the value of gold, debasing America’s currency (which was on a gold standard at the time), which permitted him to steal literally billions of dollars from American citizens, without any compensation.

World War, Too

There is evidence to suggest that Roosevelt knew about the imminent attack on America by Japan in December of 1941. He discussed with several high-ranking people in the War Department, and in his own cabinet, how to get Japan to fire the first shot in the war, so that he could get America involved. It would make sense: His oil embargo was designed to provoke a Japanese response, so as to draw America into the war. And once America was in the war, ordered the Philippines to be abandoned, outright lying that there was an army waiting to retake it once it had been conquered by Japan.

And as the war dragged on, he got quite cozy with Uncle Joe, Stalin himself. He helped to repatriate two million people to Russia, who very much did not want to go back, many of them ending up either in the gulags, or simply killed outright. And his constant concessions to Stalin helped the Soviet Union hold on to eastern Europe, setting the stage for the Cold War. Even when he was informed of Soviet spies within the American government, and provided evidence of their disloyalty and subversion, he simply let them keep at it.

Racism, Racism, and more Racism

Remember how you cheered when lynching was made a federal crime a few months ago, and asked why it hadn’t been done before now? Well, the main reason was good ol’ FDR himself. A bill was proposed in the Congress which would have made lynching a federal crime, and Roosevelt refused to pass it.

Or what about during the Olympic games in Berlin, when black athletes from America took home multiple gold medals? Roosevelt invited the white athletes to the White House, but not a single black one. Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals, said, “Hitler didn’t snub me --- it was [Roosevelt] who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”

And then there was his nomination of a KKK member to the Supreme Court; Hugo Black, who had zero judicial experience, was nominated simply because he supported the New Deal.

He also was of the opinion that America was, and ought to remain, a white and Protestant country, and that too many Jews was inherently a bad thing, because of how distasteful he found them. He boasted that there was no Jewish blood in his veins, as a mark of pride. He even went so far as to turn away ships of Jewish refugees, fleeing Nazi tyranny in Europe.

In conclusion

FDR was a massive piece of shit. He massively overstepped his constitutionally-appointed bounds at every available opportunity, massively expanding the power of the Presidency at the expense of all other parts of government, and at the expense of individual liberty. He was openly racist and anti-Semitic. His economic policies brought ruin upon the American economy. He openly praised fascism right up until the moment that it was no longer politically expedient to do so, and switched to deferring to authoritarian communism instead. Almost everything that you hate about the modern United States can be traced directly back to this one man.

The fact that he is remembered as not just a good President, but one of the best Presidents, shows how utterly broken American education is.

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marzipanandminutiae · 4 months

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oh, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades 1860-1930 (Wendy Gamber, 1997), we're really in it now

#just read this and I love it so much #history #dress history #clothing history #fashion history #women's history #book recs #nonfiction

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david-goldrock · 3 months

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I find it hilarious when people here actually support bds

They think they are doing stuff for palestinians

The bds movement, which is a reincarnation of the nazi Jewish goods ban of the 1930's and 40's, is a failed movement that never had an impact larger than a thousandth of a percent on Israeli economy

Who did it hurt? Many Palestinian workers, who's factories keep getting pushed into the green line to "free Palestine" which just makes their commute hours longer to impossible (some are a security threat and are not allowed in Israel)

All you are doing is fucking the Palestinians over. how usual is the BDS achievements, managing nothing but antisemism, hurting the Arabs in here, and doing nothing to help, like the entire "free palestine" movement

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philosophicalconservatism · 7 months

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“No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has...What do the poor most need? They need to stop being poor. And how can that be done, on a mass scale, except by an economy that creates vastly more wealth? Yet the political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they are concerned, wealth exists somehow and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it.”

Thomas Sowell (1930-) American economist.

#socialism #liberty #conservative

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metamatar · 13 days

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As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, the caricature of the enemy shifted more decisively from the West to the Muslim. As the desire to homogenise the Hindu community took hold, Hindu Right organisations began engaging with Bengal’s marginalised castes in a way the Left did not even contemplate doing till the late-20th century. The slow incorporation of lower castes within the Hindu fold went hand-in-hand with the steady expulsion of Muslims from the national body.

Organisations like the Bharat Sevashram Sangha and Hindu Mahasabha played a crucial role in both processes, often providing what we can call intellectual justifications for such strategies. If Mukherji propagated demographic fears, the Mahasabha and the Sangha worked on the ideological mission of keeping the Hindu community together. This required preventing restless and assertive lower caste communities from breaking away from the dominance of the upper caste bhadralok.

Founded by Swami Pranabananda in 1917, one of the Sangha’s primary missions was urging Hindus to fortify themselves as an unbreachable, unified community. Such a mission called for an end to caste discrimination and the practice of untouchability. To achieve its ideological ends, Hindu organisations identified tribals and Dalits as their primary target groups. [...] The campaigns, aimed at reorganising the village economy, carried out social work in backward areas. [...]

By 1926, the Sangha ran more than a dozen ashrams in areas of eastern and southern Bengal dominated by marginalised caste communities. The organisation founded Hindu Milan Mandirs, conceptualised on the lines of mosque gatherings, apart from launching Rakshi Dals comprising armed volunteers to defend Hindus against enemies. This movement for the assimilation of Hindus (Hindu Samanvyay Andolan) worked on multiple registers. The Hindu Milan Mandir provided spaces to hold prayers, conduct rituals and festivals, and deliberate on issues related to Hindu society. The young were taught history, the elderly given an education in the Shastras. There were libraries with books on Hinduism and the Hindu way of life. Schools of martial arts training were set up for self-defence.

Through the 1930s and 1940s, both the Mahasabha and the Sangha worked in tandem to fortify the Hindu community as one. Even as the BSS urged upper castes to end untouchability, it also asked lower castes to integrate themselves with the larger Hindu community by giving up their “hatred” of upper castes. These organisations wanted to direct Dalit anger at Muslims, representing them as the primary other and threat to Hindus. The Sangha’s spaces of Hindu congregation, Pranabananda believed, would facilitate organising as a homogenous, non-porous community. They served, or at least attempted to serve, the purpose of subsuming smaller oppositional caste-based identities into a sweeping fold of Hindu identity. Such a ubiquitous Hindu identity, proponents hoped, would steer groups away from caste antagonism and towards building a Hindu Dharma Rashtra. In some ways, the scale and operations of this intricate organisational network resembled the structure of the RSS, founded in 1925. During riots and famines, Hindu Milan Mandir volunteers would rush to the aid of Hindus, collecting monthly subscriptions and food from each member.

#caste #hindutva #excellent article on sanskritization and hindutva #and the murder of caste politics in general i guess

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gothhabiba · 5 months

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The historical link between meat and colonisation in Israel

In her PhD thesis on the historical role of Tel Aviv under the British Mandate for Palestine, Dr Efrat Gilad shows that while Zionist technocrats promoted a diet of little to no beef, urban settlers enjoyed their steaks and stews. Furthermore, their love for meat led them to play a key role in the colonisation of Palestine. (23 March 2021).

In your thesis you studied colonisation in Israel through attitudes towards meat consumption. What gave you this idea and why was it a worthwhile one?

There were various indicators that meat would be a useful entry point to the history of Jewish settlers in Palestine. One indicator had to do with a surprising statistic I came across. In 2019, according to OECD statistics, the world’s leading beef consumers were Argentina, the United States, and almost tied for third place were Brazil and Israel. Israel is an anomaly on this list. The other countries that tend to lead in meat consumption are also global meat producers and exporters. Their meat industries evolved over centuries, beginning with European settlers who used cattle to colonise. As cowboys or gauchos drove livestock across vast territories dominating the land, producing and consuming meat became linked to national identity.

Israel, however, does not produce the majority of the beef it consumes; rather, it mostly relies on imports. While colonisation is part of Israel’s past and present, Jewish settlers did not drive herds of animals to dominate Palestine’s landscape as did the cowboys and gauchos of the Americas. The ecologies and economies of livestock in Palestine were vastly different than in the above-mentioned countries. This does not mean there is no historical link between meat and colonisation in Israel – my research actually shows that there is – but that the historical trajectory that led Israelis to consume as much beef as Brazilians was different, and thus required further investigation. My dissertation is the first comprehensive history of meat in Palestine/Israel grounded in extensive archival research.

Can you describe your research questions and the methodology you used to approach those questions?

As a historian, my methodology involves archival research and analysis of historical documents. Early on I noticed a gap between two types of sources. On the one hand, there was a clear correlation between the growing numbers of European Jews settling in Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s and the soaring demand for meat. This was evident in many sources including data on livestock imports and slaughter, newspaper articles on the price of meat and its availability, the building of new slaughterhouses in Palestine’s cities, and multiple disputes between consumers, butchers and cattle dealers. On the other hand, when reading through sources produced by Zionist technocrats – such as economists, agronomists and nutritionists – I noticed a vastly different attitude to meat. While urban settlers were preoccupied with gaining more access to meat, Zionist technocrats seemed determined to convince Jewish settlers to adopt a diet of little to no beef.

My work then focused on three interconnected questions: Why did Zionist technocrats oppose meat consumption? How did urban settlers create systems to allow them access to meat in a country of limited supply (and in defiance of national experts)? And finally, how did urban settlers – in creating those systems – promote the colonisation of Palestine?

What are your answers?

First, I found out why Zionist technocrats opposed meat consumption, and this was entangled in ideas about climate, nutrition and economy. Zionist technocrats adopted an idea rooted in colonial medicine according to which consuming meat was harmful in Palestine’s heat. This was a significant finding because it highlights European Jewish settlers’ alienation from Palestine’s environment, and resonates with histories of other settler colonies, allowing us to think comparatively and transnationally about colonisation. The second layer in the discourse against meat was linked to the settler colonial economy. Beef consumption depended on Palestinian breeders and regional Arab livestock merchants, and increasingly also on overseas imports. This threatened Zionist leaders’ aspirations for a self-reliant Jewish settlement, which they believed was essential to its expansion. Thus, technocrats believed, high levels of beef consumption obstructed Zionist goals.

My second major finding shows how urban Jewish settlers ignored technocrats by generating a booming meat economy. Settlers first supported Palestine’s existing meat economy but gradually also created separate systems of import and slaughter. Because local supply chains of beef were deemed insufficient and firmly in the hands of Arab and Palestinian merchants, Jewish butchers and cattle dealers tapped into their connections to the European trade and created new networks of overseas cattle import. In creating their own meat infrastructures, especially in Tel Aviv, settlers worked to dominate Palestine’s meat trade. Whereas the literature often focuses on ideologues or rural “pioneers”, I show how urban settlers are historical agents who were perhaps oblivious or defiant of national ideologies pertaining to the meat trade but who nevertheless played a key role in a national endeavour: the colonisation of Palestine.

#Israel #food #Palestine #meat

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