Categories
- admin only: Assignments (26)
- admin only: Featured (163)
- Assignment due December 7 (39)
- August 31 Assignment (43)
- ClassrefA (11)
- ClassrefB (7)
- KM24 (261)
- November 11 Assignment (2)
- November 16 Assignment (42)
- November 2 Assignment (43)
- November 23 Assignment (41)
- November 30 Assignment (45)
- November 9 Assignment (40)
- October 12 Assignment (42)
- October 19 Assignment (47)
- October 28 Assignment (37)
- October 5 Assignment (47)
- September 16 Assignment (44)
- September 2 Assignment (50)
- September 21 Assignment (47)
- September 28 Assignment (51)
- September 7 Assignment (51)
- TV24 (455)
- Uncategorized (1)
Author Archives: Jack Masterson
Posts: 15 (archived below)
Comments: 7
An Easy Scapegoat for troubles
It is typical of Americans to blame president for anything that goes run, especially when it comes to nationwide financial troubles. From George Washington to Barack Obama, nearly every president has been blamed for some kind of miscalculated fiscal, spending or monetary policy. Yet when you examine the nature of our system, especially so since 1913 (advent of the federal reserve system) the presidents have hardly had any real command of fiscal and monetary policy. In fact, the federal reserve is so separated from the command of the president (really as a protection built into the system) that his only real decision making is in deciding who should run the federal reserve during his administration. In the case of Obama, he actually kept the same federal reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, as Bush appointed; the person who, in many Americans point of view, is responsible for steps leading up to the crash of 2008. But federal financial policy leading to recessions and depressions is as old as the republic itself. In 1932 Andrew Jackson started to take measures to destroy the second bank of the United States of America, the equivalent to the federal reserve in the early 19th century. In 1936 he succeeded in revoking its charter and by 1937 the country was in deep financial turmoil because credit dried up when the job of the bank of the US was dumped on a number of smaller banks. This credit crunch was coupled by a monetary crisis; many banks wouldn’t accept paper money for loan repayment and many people became out of luck in this department. The crisis was blamed on Jackson, especially so by the whigs (the other party in the two party system of the time). Van Buren (D) was president for only 6 weeks when things took a turn for the worst but even he was blamed. In the case of the panic of 1837, the president’s reckless fiscal/bank/monetary policies were largely to blame with regards to Andrew Jackson. He conducted a ‘war on the bank’, blaming it for all the troubles, but, when finally abolished, no new system was even thought of and thus Jackson’s action and inaction directly caused the panic of 1827. Flash to October 1929. Hoover, the 4th president to work within the framework of the Federal Reserve system, is taken by surprise to find that the federal reserve was lending millions of tax payers dollars to support a system of call-market trading and buying and selling of securities on margin, or with lent out money. Essentially, the federal reserve was loaning at 4% to banks like JPMorgan who would in turn loan to brokerage houses at 6-9% who would then loan money to individuals looking to buy stock on margin for 12-20% (using the stock the people bought with the lent money as collateral in the transaction). Again, Hoover wasn’t even aware of the magnitude of this financial disease, nor of the Federal reserves very key role in getting the ball rolling, until a few weeks before Black Thursday. Thus, by the time he started to take control of things, the stage was already set for a titanic rupture in the financial system. Hoover, hand-cuffed by circumstances, actually decreased the federal reserve interest rate, which caused even more money to flood the call market and even more speculative buying and selling (on one of the days the volume of trading was so great that the meter in the NYSE broke down for 15 minutes causing huge panic on the floor). Thus, all things considered, even though Hoover shouldn’t have appointed ex-bankers to run the Fed and even though he should have paid more attention to the importance of the call-market and buying stock on margin he really can’t be completely blamed. The crisis of 1929 was primarily a crisis of a flawed private financial system and less so a crisis of fiscal/lending/monetary policy of Herbert Hoover. And yet, as the cartoon above shows, he was blamed as if he was the one forcing people to buy stock portfolios with money that they never had in the first place. Fast forward to 2008. Suddenly, in the same week, Lehman Brothers (a bank worth over 100 billion dollars) goes bankrupt, AIG, the second biggest insurance company in the world, is purchased by we the people, and the government leverages a by-out of Merryl Lynch, another multi-billion dollar bank/investment firm on wall street, by Bank of America. What exactly happened in September 2008 is still being sorted out but the Wall Street Journal was spot on when they said that the events would change capitalism forever. Essentially, every major bank and was purchasing and selling billions upon billions in securities pegged to the housing market in the United States of America. One of the culprits, mortgage backed securities, were packages of sometimes million and millions of dollars worth of mortgages were traded by hegdefunds and investment banks. How they figured out how to make money off of rapidly buying and selling what is essentially debt, or owed money, is beyond my understanding of economics. The insurance companies, like AIG, sold credit default swaps, insurance against people defaulting on their loans, to the banks trading MBSs. Thus, when the housing market reached its maxmum (supply in US became higher than demand), everything came crashing down as people defaulted on their loans. This was followed by a credit crunch, trillion dollar stimulus spending, rescuing of the entire private financial infrastructure by us tax-payers and the rest of the story everyone knows. So, who do you blame. Of course you blame that guy George for everything. Surely he cooked up this whole mess as a get rich quick scheme. But wait? Again, George didn’t have anything to do with the day to day of the Fed. So, besides appointing half of the former board of directors of Goldman Sachs to the Federal Reserve board, did Bush really cause this financial crisis? As for the recession, we blame Comrade Barak Obama for forcing us to live under a Stalinist regime as he pumped trillions into the economy with his stimulus plan, which was really a scheme to transfer money from the rich to the poor. But is the stimulus spending to blame for the slow growth rate of businesses in America, or can we blame the banks that are still overly cautious about lending? Again, it still remains to be seen. All three of these events are similar, not only in that they triggered recessions, but also that presidents seemed to be the scapegoats for all of them. This tells us that the American people are quick to blame their executive when things go wrong for them. Instead of realizing that the capitalist system is inherently flawed in that it has recessions and growth periods built right in, the people look to blame the government. That’s the American mentality and that’s what has happened from 1787-present.
Posted in admin only: Featured, Assignment due December 7, TV24
Tagged Financial Crisis, Monetary Policy, president
Leave a comment
A more physical kind of fight for freedom
The song and video ‘born here’ by DAM, a palestinian rap group, is an example of using hip-hop as the platform for a political manifesto. DAM highlight the everyday struggle of people in Palestine living under what they feel is an oppressive, racist regime in Israel. Hendrix’s action was more of a solemn, somewhat sarcastic yet emotional reflection on the contrast between what America claims its practices are and the reality. DAM is much more specific and militant about addressing the obstacles to their freedom and rally people to take to the streets and topple the Zionist regime. The contrast of music is typical in that in the 1960′s there were very general calls to action in many cases (like “if i had a hammer”) whereas in the 21st century political songs have become very specific in their goal of action.
Jimi Hendrix remixes the National Anthem
Jimi Hendrix, who showed up late to the biggest concert in modern history, Woodstock of 1969, played the Star Spangled Banner in front of a crowd of mostly people under the influence of some illegal narcotic substance in the rain. Although the song wasn’t written in the 1960′s, or the 20th century for that matter, Jimi Hendrix gave a whole new meaning to the song when he performed it, while also under the influence of psychadelic drugs, quite unreservedly and unmelodically on electric slide guitar. Instead of placing their hand over their hearts in revently reflecting on the greatness of the union, the audience, which politically ranged from the fringe of the democratic party to those bunched into the category ‘left of Lenin’, either mocked the nationalist rituals, rolled their eyes back in a trip or both. This was what the offspring of the baby-boomer generation had become; pot-smoking unpatriotic fornicating slime, to paraphrase some of the more conservative commentary on the Woodstock concert. This song is about the United State’s fighting for its freedom in the war of 1812, yet when Hendrix played the tune in 1969 most in the audience thought of what that tiny north American republic had become; an evil empire with the grandest military machine ever witnessed by man, which was then reigning napalm down on civilian villages in the north Vietnam. So, by playing this song in the time and place he did, Hendrix gave the star-spangled banner a whole new meaning.
Freedom of choice, at least in brands
In the 1950′s, perhaps the greatest freedom, and the one which Americans likely, at heart, cared the most about was freedom to choose different products or brands. The vote at the supermarket, the vote with your dollar, mattered much more to many people than did that of the ballot box. Although most American if asked which mattered most would choose political choice, just the the sake of not seeming ambivalent to politics and thus unpatriotic. But, just like today, Americans spend thousands of hours a year shopping and deciding which brands to buy than do they seriously think about one candidate over another in general elections and which will bring them maximum satisfaction. The same is true today, in fact, some political scientists and writers have labelled the choice in political elections as one between the democratic brand and the republican brand; this is the only distinction which matters in consumer, post-industrial societies today.
ATTENTION
In 12 days from now the United States Occupation of Afghanistan will surpass the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan in total amount of time. This is a historical reality which needs to be brought to the attention of all Americans as soon as possible.
Posted in Uncategorized
Leave a comment
Total War
The Total War program means a policy in which every available resource needed for the war effort is prioritized to the front first. Here, this propaganda is aimed at getting people to carpool; more people in a car, more gasoline available for U.S tanks, battleships and bomber planes. For a fascist or communist government like those in Russia or Germany, total war is ‘easier’, in the sense that resources can be allocated at the ‘pull of a lever’. There is no dissent because there is no privately owned large-scale industry. In the United States, where most large-scale industry is private, the government can only do so much. In fact, during World War II the government exercised the tightest control in our nation’s history over private large-scale industry, but even this could never match the control Stalin exercised over industry in Russia, even in peace time. The total war policy in the United States also had to deal with the cultural tradition and constitutionality of liberty; there are certain things people can’t be forced to do in the United States, even in war time. Driving to work alone was one of them. Even though laws may have been passed in certain states forcing carpooling, propaganda was needed to show Americans that riding to work alone was not only slightly illegal, but it was also beneficial to Hitler and the Japanese. Much of the World War 2 propaganda pitted certain unfavorable, selfish civilian activity directly against the boys at Normandy and in the Pacific. Ideologically, as is shown in this nugget of propaganda, certain of these unfavorable activities were directly aligned with facsism; thus, if you drive to work alone you might as well be a fascist. This was all part of the image of the good war; America was fighting on the side of good against the side of evil. This kind of good vs. evil paradigm was used in justifying almost all of the campaigns known as ‘the cold war’ and, lately, by George Bush jr. in the war on terror.
Lets Have Another Cup of Coffee
This Video is really a song but I think it really says something about the state of the nation circa 1932. It is well known that the depression started in 1929, on Black Tuesday when the market crashed. What is not very well known is that ‘main-street’ or ‘the real economy’ didn’t hit rock bottom until 1933-1935. I can’t quite decide whether this song by Phil Spitalny is ironic or genuine; although I am leaning toward ironic given the rapidly increasing poverty and job loss in 1932 when this song was written. The most telling line of the song is “Mr. Herbert Hoover says now’s the time to buy/ lets have another cup of coffee….”; Hoover between 1929 and his termination in 1933 constantly told the nation that ‘prosperity was right around the corner’ and ‘now would be a great time to buy property because the market has settled at its absolute bottom and has no where to go but up’, echoing many financial analysts of the times. Sounds a lot like Barack Obama and CNBC circa 2009-2010.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syvLVpPTYEc
Communism: An Easy to Read Label
Communist Leader
The red scare of 1919-1920 marked the beginning of a recurring phenomenon in American history: labeling any potential enemy as being communist, or in league with the Soviets. During the original red scare, many Italian and Jewish immigrants as well as many non-Marxist labor and union leaders were carted off to prison or deported because one court or police force deemed them to be Communists. After the Bolsheviks took over the Russian Empire in 1917, much of the world feared the revolution would spread. In places like Germany and Italy this almost actually did occur, but failed for various reasons. In the US, however, 99.9% of historians will tell you that this was never even a remote possibility. The tradition of calling subversives communists lifted its ugly head during the 50′s when senator McCarthy lead the republican leadership to cleanse much of the government of democratic office holders and even some representatives because they were ‘in league with Moscow’. Today, we know that almost all those accused did not have real marxist sympathies. Even in our own time it has lifted its head. During the recent presidential campaign Obama was accused of being a communist by the counter-campaign and right wing media even though not him nor any of his staff besides Van Jones (who was fired quickly after Obama’s election) ever had any real marxist associates/conspirators. I think Foner does a good job of explaining the Red Scare in a short 2 paragraph piece and I am sure he will do equal justice to the McCarthyist era.
1. I wonder if FDR was attacked as a Communist in his first presidential election to the extent to which Obama was recently in his 208 bid?
2. Do you think the title ‘fundamentalist’ will ever gain as much power as a false accusatory device as communism was for many decades in the US?
Posted in admin only: Featured, October 12 Assignment, TV24
Tagged communism, McCartyism, Obama, Red Scare
4 Comments
Presidential Oppulence and the tired, starving masses
This is the registration room at Ellis Island. These immgrants are waiting upon their fate.
President Taft was so fat that he had to have the normal bathtub in the presidential quarter replaced with a much bigger custom one made in Patterson NJ, an industrial town where many tubs and toilets and porcelin things like that were made in the age of consumer-industrial.
Henry Teller and the Legacy of Imperial Justification
Colorado Senator and Secratary of the Interior for Chester Arthur
Henry Teller was only mentioned once in the chapter, yet his biography tells much about the political climate in the United States with regards to a number of questions including foreign policy and monetary policy. He served as a Colorado Representative and later Senator in Congress for over thirty years and also as the Secretary of the Interior for a few years during the Chester Arthur administration. He switched from being a Republican to a Democrat and was a self-proclaimed ‘Silver-Republican’ meaning he had Populist sympathies but was not fully committed to their cause. In Foner, he is quoted as saying that America’s mission in the Caribbean was to aid the Cuban patriots in their “struggle for liberty and freedom”. While first put into this language in 1898 by Teller, this doctrine of cloaking imperial aspirations in the language of aiding oppressed peoples in their struggle for freedom and liberty became a central tenet of justifying American imperialism in the century to come and still is the party-line in the recent Afghani and Iraqi campaigns of 21st century. So, although a mover and a shaker on the front of monetary policy, for the purposes of this assignment Henry Teller altered history in that he birthed a form of justifying naked American imperialism that has been used all throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Senator Teller, why do you think it is so important to categorize the current campaign in the Spanish Caribbean in terms of aiding oppressed peoples in their struggle for liberty and freedom as our nation did just over 110 years ago?
If it is our duty to help oppressed peoples to gain freedom, why not use our resources to free others under the yoke of an imperial powers; say, an Algerian liberation campaign or a campaign to free the Russian peasantry from the tyrant Tsar Nicholas?
Posted in admin only: Featured, September 28 Assignment, TV24
Tagged Henry Teller, Imperialism, Silver Republicans
1 Comment
Give me you huddled masses, unless they’re Chinese.
Chinese Exlcusion act of 1882: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=47&page=transcript
For those of you reading this, that little poem at the base of that big green statue in New York harbor is a complete lie. Often the narrative of American history goes as follows; ‘the Tsar, the King of England, the Kaiser, the Emperor of China and the King of France were on a peasant killing spree. But thank God for the United States of America, for the blessings of Liberty on the North American continent saved them all. Our doors have always been open to all the tired, starving huddled masses, from 1776 to present!’ And then, sadly, some young citizens grow up and attend a college history class and get to learn about the Chinese Exclusion act. So, first, the who what when where. In 1882, a majority republican Congress along with Chester Arthur the republican president passed the Chinese Exclusion act which literally banned all Chinese seeking employment in the US from immigrating; giving refuge to ones already living in the United States. It is key to mention that the ban was on chinese workers (the only people in china who had any interest in coming to the US in the first place), Chinese aristocracy of course was welcome to visit anytime. During the same epoch, the government placed immigration quotas on Italians, Jews, Poles and even Irish but, nevertheless, none of these groups were outright banned from this continent. Although the Poles, Jews and Italians were held to be sub-human species by the almost all WASP congress and presidency, they were still given preference over the chinese; this reflects a policy of selective racism on the part of those landed white protestants still exclusively running the country 100 years in. The Chinese exclusion act was again ratified in 1892, extending it to 1902 and again, in 1902, was extended; the first legal chinese immigrations took place in the 1920′s. That doesn’t seem very welcoming to me.
Chinese Exclusion Act
Posted in admin only: Featured, September 21 Assignment, TV24
Tagged 1882, Chinese Exclusion Act, Immigration
2 Comments
40 acres and a mule
The right to property or, as the euphism in the declaration of independence states, the right to ‘pursuit of happiness’ has always been the trickiest and most misleading freedom to discuss. Throughout American history one might ask if property is a God given, or at least a government given right then why are massive amounts of the population without property and, going even further, before 1865 on could ask ‘why is a sizable amount of the population considered to be property themselves in their own human form?’ The story of blacks in America being gaining the ability to hold property in any significant number has been a saga. Immediately after the war the Freedman’s bureau, a radically progressive entity set up by the Union military to oversee the transformation of blacks from slavery to freedom, promised every black family in the south 40 acres and a mule; some were actually given this in certain places along the Georgia and South Carolina coastline and on an island dubbed ‘Sherman Island’. This was done under martial law, under a measure called Special Field Order 15. Eventually, with the election of President Johnson, it was revoked and the former owners of the land, i.e the former slave owners, had there land returned to them. And thus begins the saga of a government policy, especially in the South, of denying blacks any ability to better themselves through the aquisition of property. Over the course of the last few decades of the 19th century the closest thing any meaningful amount of blacks had to property were small sharecropping fields on plantations that were chopped up into small subdivisions. Although this wasn’t akin to the days of chattel slavery, much of their labor was done in vein as part of the deal was that the landlord would reclaim some large proportion of the crop yield leaving blacks with little left. In the cities blacks worked as industrial wage laborers; more than often being paid much less than a white worker for doing the same job. This was also true in the north, where the spiral of wage slavery went on for years and even decades without blacks being able to aquire property in some significant number; even when they did manage to buy property blacks were increasingly confined to ghettos because a. due to their denial of occupation mobility they couldn’t afford elsewhere and b. even if they could afford property elsewhere whites would simply refuse to sell to blacks; even into the 1970′s many real estate offices around the country refused to deal with blacks. Now of course throughout all this blacks nominally, or de jure, had the right to acquire property. In the 19th century this seems almost cruel in that every social and governmental institution created and maintained a barrier against blacks acquiring prosperity and property. Today, the dream has been partially realized. Black property ownership has been increasing steadily since the 1950′s. However, a tragically disproportionate amount of blacks today are without property, confined to ghettos as were their first generation of free ancestors. In todays world, the reason for this is largely due to social institutions standing in their war and less so for government policy, but I’m not qualified to go into specifics for this is a certainly a hot button issue.
This is a very famous picture depicting black men and women standing on a line to get either food or some service from the government. They are poor living in an urban ghetto and above is a picture of 'the american dream'; white family in the suburbs.
Posted in September 16 Assignment, TV24
Tagged property rights, Reconstruction, social mobility
Leave a comment
Strange Bedfellows
This is a picture of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld meeting with former 'president' of Iraq Saddam Husssein in 1983. During the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988, the United States supplied heavy armament to both sides. This picture represents both the shifting alliances within and American dominance over the middleast.
Posted in September 7 Assignment, TV24
Leave a comment
More than Historiography
Although it is a book review, Foner spends little word space actually discussing the David Blight book. Instead, Eric details his own short historiography of the Civil War, explaining the different schools of scholarly thought and how events after the war’s end echoed so loudly of political implications, not only for Civil War historical interpretation, but also, of course, for the contemporary situations. Personally, I wouldn’t find this book interesting. I am not a big Civil War guy so it follows that I wouldn’t devote the time and effort to reading not only a Civil War history but one which goes into detail about post-bellum historiography. However that may be, one planning on concentrating in American history might find this book fascinating. Foner sounds like he is generally contented with Blights analysis, although his praise rarely comes through very strongly. More importantly, however, the author illustrates how relevant, emotional and debate-worthy historical memory is, especially with a topic as hot as the civil war and all its racial implications (which, even today after 150 years, is still significant). Southern historians generally tended to ignore the crucial role of African-Americans and slavery when reconstructing the Civil War, although Northern historians, at least for the first few of decades, were also quite stubborn in this regard. The ‘reconciliationist school’, which tended to be the dominant historical view, north and south, for much of the 19th and even early 20th centuries, glossed over or ignored the fact that slavery was pivotal in the causes, events and outcome of the war while the emancipationist school, the overwhelmingly dominant today, sought to clarify slavery’s role in the war. The interesting thing about the Civil War, from a 21st century historian’s perspective, is that the debates are not merely confined to academia, as are many historical debates (100 years war, etc.), but are still very much alive in the eyes of many southerners and even some of us yankees. The state of race relations in the South can still be traced back to the fighting in the 1860′s and that issue is much larger than the American Historical Society.
Posted in September 2 Assignment, TV24
Leave a comment
August 31st assignment by Jack Masterson
How do we separate valid historical evidence from useless information and material trash? Further, why are some individuals so fixated on reconstructing past happenings, filtering useless substance from vital building blocks as a restoration carpenter might do, and why is there such fierce debate in the historical community about this filtration process; determining what is relevant and what can be swept under the rug? In short; why does history matter? The grade school answer would be ‘well, we can always learn from the past’? Nice, but why then have so many historians fallen over to the school of thought that views history as a series of cycles, where although the terrain may be different the players and the game itself are essentially always identifiably the same. Going further down this road, we can point out that history itself was invented by man, and what the modern student thinks of as ‘history’ is actually a quite recent invention; the practice of modern historiography comes out of 18th century western Europe, although some might argue that Athenian and Roman Antiquities produced something that look like history. In short, I’m going to finish up my piece by arguing that history itself is merely a branch of academia; it is not an applied science like economics or biology as some historians might have you believe. It has no applicable relevance on anyones life, and I say that as a history major and someone who has been devoting his life to the study of the past for the last decade of so.
Posted in August 31 Assignment
Leave a comment
