"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined. Suddenly it all comes to be, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or more accurately what you haven’t done. For that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."
Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free
"All things are ready if our minds be so."
William Shakespeare, Henry V
Postscript (Oct25): In discussing this chart further with Nick, I think the data is accurate back to about 1790 or so. As you may recall, the US used various forms of currency prior to declaring its independence. As someone might wish to extrapolate what a currency might have been, relating it to other currencies, so this is what I think has been used prior to 1792.
I would have preferred not to have used it since it adds *nothing* to the analysis, but it is not my call. However I do not agree that this valuation is good prior to 1792 because I do not understand the method that was used to derive it. That does not mean it is wrong. It means that I have less confidence in it that the rest of the chart because it is based on a derivation that I have not examined.
"Those entrapped by the herd instinct are drowned in the deluges of history. But there are always the few who observe, reason, and take precautions, and thus escape the flood.
For these few gold has been the asset of last resort."
Antony C. Sutton
"Like liberty, gold never stays where it is undervalued."
J. S. Morrill
"There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst."
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."
Adam Smith
"Here and there an individual or group dares to love, and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity. So in a real sense this is a great time to be alive. Therefore, I am not yet discouraged about the future.
Granted that the easygoing optimism of yesterday is impossible.
Granted that those who pioneer in the struggle for peace and freedom will still face uncomfortable jail terms, painful threats of death; they will still be battered by the storms of persecution, leading them to the nagging feeling that they can no longer bear such a heavy burden, and the temptation of wanting to retreat to a more quiet and serene life.
Granted that we face a world crisis which leaves us standing so often amid the surging murmur of life's restless sea. But every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. It can spell either salvation or doom. In a dark confused world the kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men."
Martin Luther King
"However, I have learned that in times of crisis, the dodos always charge in to make matters worse."
Andrew Greeley
"The long memory is the most radical idea in America. That long memory has been taken away from us. You haven't gotten it in your schools. You're not getting it on your television. You're being leapfrogged from one crisis to the next. Mass media contributed to that by taking the great movements that we've been through and trivializing important events.
No, our people's history is like one long river. It flows down from way over there. And everything that those people did and everything they lived flows down to me, and I can reach down and take out what I need, if I have the courage to go out and ask questions."
Utah Phillips
"You will study the wisdom of the past, for in a wilderness of conflicting counsels, a trail has there been blazed. You will study the life of mankind, for this is the life you must order, and, to order with wisdom, must know. You will study the precepts of justice, for these are the truths that through you shall come to their hour of triumph. Here is the high emprise, the fine endeavor, the splendid possibility of achievement, to which I summon you and bid you welcome."
Benjamin N. Cardozo
“The term propaganda rings melodramatic and exaggerated, but a press that, whether from fear, careerism, or conviction, uncritically recites false government claims and reports them as fact, or treats elected officials with a reverence reserved for royalty, cannot be accurately described as engaged in any other function.”
Glenn Greenwald
The Kansas City Star
Nightmare in Maryville: Teens’ sexual encounter ignites a firestorm against family
October 12
By DUGAN ARNETT
MARYVILLE, Mo. — There wasn’t much left by the time she arrived, just a burnt-out structure and the haze of smoke that lingered around it.
The siding and gutters had melted. The roof was gone. Inside, piles of ash filled the rooms that had once bustled with the pleasant sounds of a family.
That morning last April when Melinda Coleman received word that emergency vehicles were gathering around her Maryville house, she had hoped for the best.
But if the events of the past year and a half had taught her anything, it was that when the town of Maryville was involved, that seemed unlikely.
Since the morning her daughter had been left nearly unconscious in the frost of the home’s front lawn, this northwest Missouri community had come to mean little besides heartache.
Few dispute the basic facts of what happened in the early morning hours of Jan. 8, 2012: A high school senior had sex with Coleman’s 14-year-old daughter, another boy did the same with her daughter’s 13-year-old friend, and a third student video-recorded one of the bedding scenes. Interviews and evidence initially supported the felony and misdemeanor charges that followed.
Yet, two months later, the Nodaway County prosecutor dropped the felony cases against the youths, one the grandson of a longtime area political figure.
The incident sparked outrage in the community, though the worst of it was directed not at the accused perpetrators but at a victim and her family. In the months that followed, Coleman lost her job, and her children were routinely harassed. When it became too much, they left, retreating east to Albany...
Read the entire story here.
The Crisis Last Time
By Richard Parker
November 7, 2008
For writers who seek to influence public affairs, timing plays a paramount role. And few writers have had better timing than Adolf Augustus Berle.
In the summer of 1932, with America trapped in the greatest financial crisis in its history, Berle published “The Modern Corporation and Private Property,” a scholarly yet readable analysis of America’s largest companies and their managers. Berle is largely forgotten today, yet with that book he succeeded in persuading Americans to see their economic system in a new way — and helped set the stage for the most fundamental realignment of power since abolition.
The stock market had plunged vertiginously three years earlier, and by 1932 Americans were desperate to reverse the much wider collapse that had ensued — and to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. The New Republic was soon hailing “The Modern Corporation” as the book of the year, while The New York Herald Tribune pronounced it “the most important work bearing on American statecraft” since the Federalist Papers. Louis Brandeis would cite its arguments in a major Supreme Court ruling on corporate power. Running for president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt recruited Berle — a Republican Wall Street lawyer who had supported Hoover — to join his “brain trust,” and that fall entrusted him with drafting what became the most important speech of the campaign. After the election, Berle remained in New York, yet his connection to the president he audaciously addressed as “Dear Caesar” was such that Time would characterize “The Modern Corporation” as “the economic bible of the Roosevelt administration.”
At first glance, the book would hardly seem to merit such broad acclaim. But if the topic was limited, Berle’s analysis was not. He used the data compiled by his co-author, the economist Gardiner Means, to examine how markets had become concentrated in just a few hundred firms and how senior managers had wrested power from the companies’ legal owners, the shareholders. No radical, Berle was eager to preserve the corporate system, which he called “the flower of our industrial organization.” But he now believed that new controls would have to balance “a variety of claims by various groups in the community” — not just its managers or shareholders — and assign “to each a portion of the income stream on the basis of public policy rather than private cupidity.”
In 1932, as in our own moment of financial crisis, most Americans could see that something needed to be done because these new behemoths — which had turned America from a nation of farmers into the world’s largest industrial power — were on the verge of collapse, poised like Samson to pull the entire economy down with them. Berle’s genius in “The Modern Corporation” was to align his professional insights with the public’s fears, and its anger. As he starkly put it in his preface, “Between a political organization of society and an economic organization of society, which will be the dominant form?”
In Theodore Roosevelt’s and Woodrow Wilson’s era, reformers like Brandeis had argued that strict antimonopoly and anti-collusion laws could return America to a place of small firms and farms, the beau ideal of Adam Smith’s market model. But Americans continued rushing to the cities, spurring an explosion in mass consumption, financed by a boom in cheap consumer credit and easy home loans. Then, in 1929, the markets crashed.
The crash for a time reinvigorated not only the anti-monopolists, but also union organizers, socialists, agrarian populists and crackpot utopians. It also brought forth “forward looking” chief executives like Gerald Swope of General Electric, who supported progressive corporatism — a world of government-mandated business cartels in exchange for higher wages, improved working conditions, and corporate-based workers’ compensation, pension and unemployment plans. Berle, however, was keen on none of these solutions. In his book, he explained that giant corporations were not “natural” economic institutions but recent inventions of the law, cobbled together on the remains of the medieval corporation, a quite different institution. What the Depression showed, he argued, was that modern corporations had failed not only stockholders, but the public — and would do so again, if left unregulated.
But what sort of regulation was required? On details, Berle was maddeningly but deliberately vague. What he did say clearly was that government needed to bear final responsibility for the economy by using its powers to balance supply and demand. It would also need to require corporate directors to manage the managers, not just for shareholders’ benefit but in accordance with new rules codifying the collective rights of stakeholders and the broader social responsibilities of corporations.
The impact of Berle’s ideas was no doubt enhanced by his decidedly nonradical biography. The son of a reform-minded Congregational minister and his wealthy wife, he had entered Harvard at 14 and finished Harvard Law School at 21 — at the time its youngest graduate ever. (Arrogant as well as gifted, he once showed up in Felix Frankfurter’s class the semester after completing it. Puzzled, Frankfurter asked him why he was back. “Oh,” Berle replied, “I wanted to see if you’d learned anything since last year.”) After a year at Louis Brandeis’s firm, he briefly did public-interest legal work before marrying well and settling down to a prosperous career in Wall Street corporate law.
As clients flocked to him, however, he began questioning the very system that was making them (and him) rich. In 1923, alarmed by the venality, the chicanery and frequently the stupidity of Wall Street, he started writing articles that over the next several years would virtually invent the modern field of corporate finance law, emphasizing moderate solutions. After Columbia Law School offered him a job in 1927, he began cycling between his lucrative practice downtown and his teaching uptown.
But the Great Crash — and the subsequent revelations of market manipulation, fraud and reckless risk-taking — forced Berle to change sides. He was a Mugwump Republican, but the economic chaos of the Depression, and the threat it posed to American democracy, convinced him a new sort of regulation was now unavoidable.
In late 1931, Franklin Roosevelt, then governor of New York, called on the Columbia political scientist Raymond Moley. Roosevelt was weighing a run for president and was looking for fresh ideas. Moley quickly approached Berle and connected the two ambitious Harvard men.
A month after “The Modern Corporation” appeared, Berle drafted Roosevelt’s famous Commonwealth Club address, delivered in September 1932. Proclaiming that “the day of enlightened administration has come,” Roosevelt articulated the rationale for much of the New Deal’s financial and corporate reforms, including deposit insurance and securities regulation. He defended the coming government interventions as protecting individualism and private property against concentrated economic power. Calling for a new “economic constitutional order,” he declared it our common duty to “build toward the time when a major depression cannot occur again.”
“None of Roosevelt’s speeches,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later wrote, “caught up more poignantly the intellectual moods of the early Depression than this one.” It helped assure his landslide victory — and earned Berle a series of ever more important posts in the administration. America began an unprecedented 40-year expansion.
By the Reagan era, however, a new philosophy would take hold, and the public oversight of markets that Berle helped pioneer would over time be swept aside, in confident belief that markets could self-regulate and that government was the problem, not the solution.
Today, that era itself seems to be coming to end, and the question Berle posed — will democracy rule the corporations, or will the corporations rule democracy? — seems a profoundly important one worth asking again.
