A submerged state, according to political scientist Suzanne Mettler, is what you get when a government refuses to distribute funds and services directly to individuals and families, and instead uses tax breaks or payments to private companies all in order to hide the hand of government and exaggerate the role of the market.
But for this, blame not the Boomer, but his overrated progenitor. It’s the generation that made capitalism work so well for so many—the Band of Brothers—who are the real culprits here. The New Deal electorate and the Great Society coalition. Sure, the ruling class reactionaries hated FDR’s reforms, but as Michael Harrington pointed out, “these same reactionaries benefited from the changes that the New Deal introduced far more than did the workers and the poor who actively struggled for them.”
“After the Great Society program in the 1960s,” says Leo Panitch, “left-wing Democrats, rather than calling for more public housing to rebuild America’s cities instead called for the banks to lend money to poor black communities…one of the effects of winning those demands was a channeling of those communities more deeply into the structures of finance, the most dynamic sector of neoliberal capitalism.”
I do so enjoy anything that reinforces the idea of “Greatest Generation my ass”
Hey enterprising History nerds, here’s your free book idea…
the story of the American Century told from two angles: 1) The myth we get told, of the enterprising America that could do anything, the century gets kicked off in the late 19th Century with the building of the Brooklyn bridge vs. 2) The underlying mythologies not explicit yet supporting the other nonsense… and the opposite truths they hide (America as Capitalism’s worldwide bastion and the horrible human/environmental cost…). This century gets kicked off in the mid-to-late 19th Century via Horatio Alger.
Proven: history loves GIFs. Thanks NYPL!
The Library has just launched Stereogranimator, a site that lets users turn our historic collection of stereographs into animated images like the one above.
So cool! Also, per the Times: “Stereographs, produced by the millions between the 1850s and the 1930s, were a wildly popular form of entertainment…” So really, people have ALWAYS loved gifs!
I’VE ONLY BEEN SAYING THIS FOR AGES ALREADY.
Newt Gingrich, who hopes to be the GOP nominee, and is also crazy. (via wilwheaton)
This is actually the most purely Presidential thing Newt Gingrich has said. He really comes off as an American President saying something like that. A regular Andrew Jackson or Barack Obama. Who the fuck cares about the law when you’re the leader of the “free world”? Thus it’s always been so.
