Bonnie and Clyde in 1933, about a year before their deaths – Wikimedia image
Though they wished to be buried together, her family protested. They are buried in separate cemeteries in Dallas. Bonnie is buried in the Crown Hill Cemetery off of Webb Chapel Road in Dallas (do not confuse with the Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis). Clyde is buried in the Western Heights Cemetery off of Fort Worth Boulevard, in Oak Cliff (now a part of Dallas).
US Department of Justice, Division of Investigation identification order for Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Image via Wikipedia
“Posse members suffered deafness for hours after unleashing the thunderous fusillade” Wikipedia image
The grave of Clyde Barrow – Wikipedia image
The grave of Bonnie Parker – Wikipedia image
You should recall Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in their movie turn as Bonnie and Clyde. But Serge Gainsborough and Brigitte Bardot, in French? From 1968:
The U.S. economy appears to be coming apart at the seams. Unemployment remains at nearly ten percent, the highest level in almost 30 years; foreclosures have forced millions of Americans out of their homes; and real incomes have fallen faster and further than at any time since the Great Depression. Many of those laid off fear that the jobs they have lost — the secure, often unionized, industrial jobs that provided wealth, security and opportunity — will never return. They are probably right.
Cover of Winner-Take-All Politics, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson
And yet a curious thing has happened in the midst of all this misery. The wealthiest Americans, among them presumably the very titans of global finance whose misadventures brought about the financial meltdown, got richer. And not just a little bit richer; a lot richer. In 2009, the average income of the top five percent of earners went up, while on average everyone else’s income went down. This was not an anomaly but rather a continuation of a 40-year trend of ballooning incomes at the very top and stagnant incomes in the middle and at the bottom. The share of total income going to the top one percent has increased from roughly eight percent in the 1960s to more than 20 percent today.
This what the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call the “winner-take-all economy.” It is not a picture of a healthy society. Such a level of economic inequality, not seen in the United States since the eve of the Great Depression, bespeaks a political economy in which the financial rewards are increasingly concentrated among a tiny elite and whose risks are borne by an increasingly exposed and unprotected middle class. Income inequality in the United States is higher than in any other advanced democracy and by conventional measures comparable to that in countries such as Ghana, Nicaragua, and Turkmenistan.
Herbert Hoover, 88, attended the opening of the Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa, on August 10, 1962, 30 years after his speech in Des Moines defending actions to shore up the credit of the U.S. At this 1962 event, former President Harry Truman came to pay respects, mensch that he was; Truman is walking ahead of Hoover here. Photo from Travel Iowa blog, and probably from the Hoover Library and Museum
Let me remind you that credit is the lifeblood of business, the lifeblood of prices and jobs.
Herbert Hoover, address at Des Moines, Iowa, October 4, 1932. — The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Herbert Hoover, 1932–1933, p. 467. (courtesy of Wikiquote)
_____________
Just a month before he would be crushed at the polls by Franklin Roosevelt, President Herbert Hoover returned to Iowa, his proud home state, to deliver this speech in Des Moines, detailing actions his administration had taken over the previous 18 months to save the U.S. and world economies. Much of this action had been out of the glare of popular press. Hoover hoped that by explaining the difficult battles his administration fought behind the huge oak doors of boardrooms and international diplomacy, Americans might appreciate more what he had accomplished, and not focus so much on the fact that the Great Depression still ravaged millions of Americans.
In today’s anti-credit political environment, it is interesting to see one of our most ardent businessman presidents defend credit. In an irony unappreciated in today’s political discussions, much of the discussion in 1932 between Hoover and Roosevelt was over which one could better manage to get to and keep a balanced budget.
The full speech is available at The American Presidency Project housed at the University of California – Santa Barbara. Politics wonks, history fans, and economists will want to look at the full speech this line is ripped from, contextually bereft. Context, in this case, does not change the meaning, but deepens the complexity of the issues and time. Hoover bragged about keeping the U.S. on the gold standard, because so many contracts and mortgages were written to be payable in gold, and not currency. So leaving the gold standard could have enormous disrupting influence on credit.
The first of these perils was the steady strangulation of credit through the removal of $3 billions of gold and currency by foreign drains and by the hoarding of our own citizens from the channels of our commerce and business. And let me remind you that credit is the lifeblood of business, the lifeblood of prices and of jobs.
Much of the rest of the speech defended Hoover’s use of government in ways that would cause apoplexy among Tea Partiers and a blizzard of critical press releases from Republicans, today:
Hoover addresses a large crowd in his 1932 campaign. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Now, we have fought an unending war against the effect of these calamities upon our people in America. This is no time to recount the battles on a thousand fronts. We have fought the fight to protect our people in a thousand cities from hunger and cold.
We have carried on an unceasing campaign to protect the Nation from those unhealing class bitternesses which arise from strikes and lockouts and industrial conflict. We have accomplished this through the willing agreement of employer and labor which placed humanity before money through the sacrifice of profits and dividends before wages.
We have defended millions from the tragic result of droughts. We have mobilized a vast expansion of public construction to make work for the unemployed. We fought the battle to balance the budget. We have defended the country from being forced off the gold standard, with its crushing effect upon all who might be in debt. We have battled to provide a supply of credits to merchants and farmers and industries. We have fought to retard falling prices. We have struggled to save homes and farms from foreclosure of mortgages, battled to save millions of depositors and borrowers from the ruin caused by the failure of banks, fought to assure the safety of millions of policyholders from failure of their insurance companies, and fought to save commerce and employment from the failure of railways.
We have fought to secure the disarmament and to maintain the peace of the world. We have fought for stability in other countries whose failure would inevitably injure us. And, above all, we have fought to preserve the safety, the principles, and the ideals of American life. We have builded the foundations of recovery.
Now, all these battles, related and unrelated, have had a single strategy and a single purpose. That was to protect your living, your comfort, and the safety of your fireside. They have been waged and have succeeded in protecting you from infinitely greater harm that might have come to you.
Thousands of our people in their bitter distress and losses today are saying that “things could not be worse.” No person who has any remote understanding of the forces which confronted this country during these last 18 months ever utters that remark. Had it not been for the immediate and unprecedented actions of our Government things would be infinitely worse today.
Instead of moving forward we would be degenerating for years to come, even if we had not gone clear over the precipice, with the total destruction of every ideal we hold dear.
Let no man tell you that it could not be worse. It could be so much worse that these days now, distressing as they are, would look like veritable prosperity.
In all these great efforts there has been a constant difficulty of translating the daily action into terms of public understanding. The forces in motion have been so gigantic, so complex in character, the instrumentalities and actions that we must undertake to deal with them have been so involved, the figures we must use are so astronomical as to seem to have but little relation to the family in the apartment or the cottage or on the farm.
Five months after Hoover’s Des Moines speech, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover in convertible automobile on way to U.S. Capitol for Roosevelt’s inauguration, March 4, 1933 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
If Hoover made that speech today, every fellow at the Hoover Institution would sign a petition demanding his impeachment, never mind that he’s not president any more.
____________
A few notes about the photograph at the top: This photo shows two former presidents, Herbert Hoover and Harry S Truman, walking through a crowd at the dedication of the Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, in West Branch, Iowa, in 1962. One might pay careful attention to how lax security was, generally — the crowd is allowed within an arm’s length of the two former presidents — and this was after an assassination attempt had been made on Truman, in Washington, years before. Insignia on the uniforms of the police are difficult to discern, but from the uniforms it looks as if there was a combination of local police, possibly a county sheriff’s staff, and Iowa state highway patrol troopers. I found it interesting to note that several of the younger men appear to be Explorer Scouts, BSA — one wearing what appears to be an Eagle Scout neckerchief. Cameras were special event tools, but generally not of the quality that could get a decent photograph at an event like this, except for professionals with professional cameras. Still, visible are double-lens reflex cameras held up in hope of a proper aim, small Kodaks, one man winding film in a 35-mm single-lens reflex, and a tiny handful of home movie cameras (with three lenses on the front — wide angle, normal and modest telephoto). Click on the photo for an expanded view, and see what else you may. If by chance you know anything about this photo, Dear Reader, please tell, in comments.
Presidents Harry Truman and Herbert Hoover at the dedication of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum on August 10, 1962 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I posted a short excerpt from a recent column by economist Paul Krugman, explaining why GOP reliance on magic to fix the economy probably won’t work. Commenter David Xavier took issue with Krugman’s analysis. David’s comment brought home to me just how badly many self-described conservatives misunderstand basic economics, especially the keystone free enterprise principles of supply and demand.
My explanation of why supply side economics can’t work came out for the 21st time at least. Let’s make a post of it, in hope that more people may read it and view it, and understanding may increase.
David Xavier said:
Krugman wants the government to spend as this will drive demand. But “demand is constituted by supply”. To buy something you must first produce and sell something. The selling is what gets you the money, but the production of value adding output is what first allows you to sell. Without value adding activity, there is nothing to sell and therefore there is no basis for demand.
I replied:
Well, there’s the problem. You don’t understand either the law of supply, nor the law of demand. You’re talking “supply side” economics, which we discovered didn’t work way back in 1982 through 1988.
Supply does not stimulate demand, ceteris paribus. It’s the other way around. Henry Ford’s Model A didn’t created demand for transportation; the demand for transportation, coupled with a demand for transportation that didn’t involve horses and their natural effluents, created a demand for a horseless carriage. Ford created a machine that met that demand, and could manufacture it in enough quantity to matter.
Demand is not “constituted from supply.” Demand comes from needs, and wants. If supply can be created to meet that demand, demand can be met from supply.
But demand comes first, as Krugman, a Nobel-winning economist, well understands.
If consumers have no money to buy, the quantity supplied cannot matter in the least. If there were no demand for transportation at all, Henry Ford is sunk.
The law of supply explains how producers go about meeting demands — if prices are higher, they are happier to supply more. Again, if consumers have no money to purchase the good or service offered, the amount of supply is completely irrelevant.
Before Henry Ford’s mass production of automobiles created a demand for gasoline, gasoline was cast off from oil refining as a waste product from the production of kerosene for lanterns. Refineries from Standard Oil dumped millions of gallons of gasoline into rivers — no demand, the massive supply simply did not matter.
And as we can see from that example, demand not only creates the market, it can make a product considered to be waste, into the economic equivalent of gold.
Without demand, supply is simply excess manure, or gasoline by-product from the production of kerosene, to be dumped into a river (and thereby pollute the hell out of the river).
You’re right to say that without value-added activity, there is no economic activity. But tell that to Mitt Romney, who thinks finance is the magic, and not production.
A key problem with all of Republican economics is the ignoring of consumers, and ignoring the reality that consumers need money to stimulate demand. Tax cuts can’t help the hungry, who cannot eat tax cuts, nor the unemployed, who cannot take to the bank tax cuts on non-existent income.
Your odd myopia — maybe blindness — to the reality of how economics works, is shared by a lot of so-called conservatives. It’s a tragedy; it’s a tragedy I hope voters will put an end to, soon.
Did you ever notice that no supply-side economist has ever won a Nobel? Have you noticed that few supply-side economics articles are available in journals? Has your search for the numbers to back up the Laffer curve been as unproductive as they have been for everyone else — including Arthur Laffer? (Laffer promised to publish an article explaining how supply side economics work, as soon as he got the numbers together. That was in 1982. 40 years later, there is still no real intellectual foundation for GOP claims of tax cuts creating wealth. Those studies that have been done suggest tax rates maximize revenue when taxes hit about 70%, more than three times the rates Laffer proposes. History shows a much different story than Laffer claimed: Tax cuts in the Harding and Coolidge administrations led to bubbles that collectively burst in October 1929, leading to the Great Depression; tax cuts in 2001 led to bubbles in housing and the stock market, which burst in 2008, leading to our Great Recession.)
Right now, businesses are sitting on a pool of about $2 trillion, profits they’ve accumulated since 2008. If supply side economics worked, that money would be invested in manufacturing and service creation, and we should have an unemployment rate in negative numbers. The disproof of supply side economics is our current situation. Employers have plenty of supply of money, but they refuse to hire without demonstration of demand from consumers. Unemployed consumers, lacking money, cannot make that demand up from thin air. Magic does not work, in the real world of supply and demand, in economics.
Nota bene: Videos come from a delightful series on economics created and put up on YouTube by Dr. Mary J. Glasson, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Glasson’s series is available at YouTube and covers almost every topic in an entry-level survey undergraduate economics course. Look for “mjmfoodie” at YouTube.com.
Woody Guthrie singing, Smithsonian Folkways image – The sticker on Woody’s guitar reads, “This Machine Kills Fascists.” Woody regarded music as a great tool of democracy and freedom.
July 14, 2012, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Woody Guthrie, folksinger, union organizer, chronicler of American values, troubles and change.
We’re already more than halfway through Woody’s centennial year — and what celebration took place at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub? History slips by so fast.
Much celebration remains. Get out your calendar and figure out which events you can join in.
Poster for the 2012 Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah, Oklahoma
How is Pete Seeger doing? He just turned — what? — 93; will he be able to make many of these events? (Book signing in New York, July 18 . . .) (Let’s start the Pete Seeger Centennial a few years early, maybe — like now . . .)
The Civilian Conservation Corps provided jobs for over 3 million young men during the Great Depression and helped establish the foundation of our nation’s park system. 70 years after the creation of the CCC, Conservation Corps veterans reunite in one of the parks they helped build, sharing stories and rekindling old memories.
A pictorial map showing Texas State Parks with significant work performed by the CCC:
Map of Civilian Conservation Corps Legacy Parks in Texas - TPWD image - Click on map for original, larger version
Air pollution texts often made the note, but I’ve not seen it talked about much recently: Air pollution in the U.S. (and England) was so bad in the first years of the 20th century that it actually shut out the sun, and an epidemic of rickets followed.
Child with rickets, son of relief client near Jefferson, Texas. This child has never talked though he is two years old. He has never received any medical attention. Lee, Russell, 1903-1986, photographer. CREATED/PUBLISHED 1939 Mar. More information about the FSA/OWI Collection is available at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.fsaowi; CALL NUMBER LC-USF34- 032719-D REPRODUCTION NUMBER LC-USF34-032719-D DLC (b&w film neg.)
Public health officials, clever devils, discovered a form of vitamin D that prevented rickets. It turns out that humans manufacture vitamin D from cholesterol, using ultraviolet B from the sun. So, when the sun was smokily eclipsed, rickets proliferated.
In an era when technical and legal tools were inadequate to clean up the air pollution, physicians, nutritionists and researchers struck on the idea of supplementing food with vitamin D — and that is how we come to have vitamin D-fortified milk today, and a lot less rickets.
At the dawn of the 20th century, the expansive industrialization and urban migration in the major cities of western Europe and the northern United States set the stage for the high prevalence of rickets among infants residing in those polluted and “sunless” cities. Overcrowded living conditions in the big-city slums and tenements and the sunlight deprivation precipitated by atmospheric pollution from smoke and smog were responsible for a rickets epidemic. Increased ozone concentration from industrial pollution and the haze and clouds from atmospheric pollution compromise vitamin D production by absorbing the UV-B photons essential for its synthesis.
* * * * *
Edwards Park states, “But for rickets vitamin D would not have been discovered. Its discovery was the secret to rickets; its use is essentially the therapy of that disease.” The discovery of vitamin D led to the eradication of the epidemic rickets of the early 20th century. Pioneering advances were made in the understanding of vitamin D and rickets from 1915 to 1935. The discovery of the synthesis of vitamin D by the irradiation of foods was the “jewel in the crown” of vitamin D discoveries. This discovery was a catalyst for the public health triumph against rickets. It became feasible to fortify and enrich milk and other foods with vitamin D to ensure that the general population was likely to consume sufficient vitamin D.
It’s a good article with detailed history of rickets, the search to find what turned out to be vitamin D, and the use of nutritional supplements to eradicate a nasty, crippling disease in children. Happy to see it online.
Some of our greatest triumphs in science, technology and public health are too little known. I am working on the history of technology and science, and particularly its wedding with social progressivism in the Progressive Age, part of a project I was fortunate to stumble into in the Dallas Independent School District funded by a Teaching American History Grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Sadly, Republicans in Congress insisted on cutting those grants to improve teaching with greater emphasis on original sources and original documents.
More Americans, more American school kids, should know about the triumphs of public health and science. Maybe highlighting some of those advances here can help another teacher somewhere else.
Part 1 runs tonight at 7:00 p.m. and the repeats at about 8:30 p.m. (if I’m reading this schedule correctly, and KERA has done this before with programs they expect to be very popular).
Part 2 is scheduled for Monday at 7:00, and Part 3 for Tuesday at 7:00 — with repeats to follow both nights.
Franklin Roosevelt voting in Hyde Park, New York, November 2, 1937 - FDR LIbrary image
In the Dallas district, and across much of Texas, field trips are being cut out. Budget restraints, you know. Rick Perry’s math is atrocious, and the “surplus” he claimed we had in the budget turned out to be a $27 billion deficit.
For information call:
Clifford Laube at (845) 486-7745
YOUR BUS COULD BE ON US!
New funding available for field trips to historic Hyde Park destinations
HYDE PARK – Field trips are back! The National Park Service and FDR Presidential Library and Museum are pleased to offer new transportation grants for 2011 field trips to five renowned Hyde Park destinations – FDR Presidential Library and Museum, Home of FDR National Historic Site, Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, Top Cottage and Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site.
The new grants are managed by Teaching the Hudson Valley (THV), a nonprofit that helps educators and students discover and appreciate the natural, historical and cultural treasures of the Hudson Valley. A list of available programs and grant application form are available in the Grants section of THV’s website.
“These sites are brimming with world-class learning opportunities for local students,” said Sarah Olson, superintendant of the Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Sites. “We recognize that many school districts have cut back or eliminated field trips due to budget constraints. These grants are designed to put great field trips back in reach.”
Educators are free to create their own curriculum, and the sites have a wide variety of prepared curricula, including:
Pretend You are the President, grades 4-6
Eleanor Roosevelt: First Lady of the World, grades 4-6
FDR’s Boyhood Farm, grades 1-3
Searching for Salamanders, grades 7-12
Podcasts interpreting the many trails that traverse the 5 sites
“To walk in the footsteps of history, to touch and hear nature – these are the experiences that make learning vivid and memorable,” said Lynn Bassanese, director of the FDR Presidential Library & Museum. “Field trips are becoming an endangered species, but the need for them is still great. Together these sites have provided decades of great experiences for educators and students. These new grants will help us continue the tradition.”
K-12 educators in public and private schools may apply for regular, summer or after-school programs. Trips should be related to core curriculum or programs and take place by December 31, 2011. Teachers in the same school or district may apply together.
ABOUT THV
Launched in 2003, Teaching the Hudson Valley (THV) helps educators and students discover and appreciate the natural, historical, and cultural treasures of the Hudson Valley. THV programs foster collaboration between schools and informal learning sites. Our growing collection of free K-12 lessons uses significant Valley sites to teach all subjects. For details, visit http://www.TeachingtheHudsonValley.org.
THV is a program of the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area and HRV Greenway Conservancy, Inc.; National Park Service – Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Sites; Hudson River Estuary Program/NY State Dept. of Environmental Conservation; and Hudson River Valley Institute at Marist College.
# # #
Alas, it turns out it’s not intended for Texas classrooms. Drat.
I’ve taken large groups of 14-16 year-olds through those sites. An halfway interested teenager can get eyes opened seeing how FDR grew up, in the place he grew up. The library and museum offer spectacular displays on FDR’s presidency and the times. It’s exactly the sort of experience a lot of my students have never had, but need.
I’ll have to see what we can do with museums and libraries a little bit closer — the George H. W. Bush Library in College Station, Texas, the Lyndon Johnson Library in Austin, and the Bill Clinton Library in Little Rock. Possibilities of touring close-by sites make me quiet about the odd situation at the George W. Bush Library and Center for Right-Wing Propaganda planned for Southern Methodist University. There’s a great chance that the advantages of having the educational resources will outweigh the ignominy of the propaganda activities (though the Hoover Institute makes one appropriately wary).
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, notorious bank-robbing outlaws from Oak Cliff, Texas, ran into a police ambush and were shot to death on May 23, 1934, in Bienville Parish, Louisiana.
Bonnie and Clyde in 1933, about a year before their deaths - Wikimedia image
Though they wished to be buried together, her family protested. They are buried in separate cemeteries in Dallas. Bonnie is buried in the Crown Hill Cemetery off of Webb Chapel Road. Clyde is buried in the Western Heights Cemetery off of Fort Worth Boulevard, in Oak Cliff.
May 8, 2011, is the 100th anniversary of the birth of bluesman Robert Johnson.
Robert Johnson -- one of two known photographs of the Delta blues legend
In a fitting tribute to Johnson and an important coming-of-age coming-to-senses moment, First Presbyterian Church in downtown Dallas announced plans to save the old Brunswick Records Building at 508 Park Avenue, a site where Johnson recorded songs in 1937 that changed the blues, changed recording, and left us a legacy of Johnson to study from his short life.
(On at least one day of those 1937 recordings, Johnson could have brushed shoulders with the Light Crust Doughboys, the Texas Swing legends, who were recording in the same building. The Doughboys set their own pace and gave birth to Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Two of Texas’s greatest music legends, in the same building on the same day, both just stepping on the platform of the train to immortality.)
Saving 508 Park Avenue vexed Dallas for a couple of decades. First, blues is not the music of Dallas cognescenti, though the world class musicians in town including Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s Jaap van Zweden tend to support the eclectic music scence and honoring musicians of all genres (and Texas is loaded with different music genres). Second, while Park Avenue may have been a bustling business district adjunct once, Dallas’s city center suffered 50 years of decline after school desegregation. Parts of downtown and Uptown begin to look prosperous again, but the southern peninsula of the city, away from the now-packed-with-performance venues Arts District, a freeway and ten blocks away from Uptown, with its back up against another freeway, part of Interstate 30 and the famous Dallas Mixmaster.
508 Park Avenue, Dallas, Robert Johnson's early recording site, photo by Justin Terveen for the Dallas Observer
Plus, the building is directly across the street from the Stewpot, a kitchen operated by First Presbyterian Church to serve Dallas large and unfortunately thriving homeless population.
Who wants to renovate an abandoned building that has homeless people as scenery for the better part of the day?
Big news this week: 508 Park Avenue was sold to First Presbyterian, who have plans to save the building (and recording studio!), add a performance amphitheatre at one end of the block, and a park at the other. This is people-friendly development well ahead of its time — there is not a resident population in that part of the city to support such a venue — yet.
Last summer, it was the neighbors, First Presbyterian Church of Dallas, who made an offer to buy 508 Park Avenue and the adjacent building and empty lot. But the deal was contingent on the city allowing the church, which also operates the Stewpot, to tear down an unrelated building next door, at 1900 Young, and replace it with an outdoor amphitheater for church socials and concerts. The Landmark Commission went into last Monday’s meeting with angels on one shoulder and devils on the other: The commission’s task force suggested approval; city staff, denial. The latter would have sent 508 Park Avenue back into purgatory.
But Landmark OK’d the plan, and the church says it will restore 508 Park Avenue to its former glory, inside and out—including the construction of a real recording studio where Johnson once sat and played “Hell Hound on My Trail.”
The church promises: It has musicians lined up to participate, but it can’t yet reveal who. The church promises: 508 Park Avenue will be resurrected.
One hell of a birthday gift for a man who supposedly sold his soul to the Devil.
The second authenticated photo of blues legend Robert Johnson
So, on Robert Johnson’s 100th birthday (assuming he wasn’t really born in 1912 . . . another mystery for another time, perhaps), the news is that the legendary bluesman who burned out like a shooting star helped save one of the few examples of art deco building decoration in Dallas, when a group of Christians who help the homeless, decided to step in an update their downtown Dallas campus.
Every step of the way, it’s an unlikely story. Truth is, in this case, much, much stranger than fiction.
Ovation Music released to YouTube the video of Eric Clapton playing and singing “Me and the Devil,” at 508 Park Avenue, in the same room where Robert Johnson sang for a record early on. Johnson recorded the song at that same location on Sunday, June 20, 1937.
508 Park Avenue, Dallas, is already a memorial to Robert Johnson, to the blues, and to the city where these early blues hits were made. The struggle remains to make the memorial accessible, and not threatened with destruction.
The U.S. economy appears to be coming apart at the seams. Unemployment remains at nearly ten percent, the highest level in almost 30 years; foreclosures have forced millions of Americans out of their homes; and real incomes have fallen faster and further than at any time since the Great Depression. Many of those laid off fear that the jobs they have lost — the secure, often unionized, industrial jobs that provided wealth, security and opportunity — will never return. They are probably right.
Cover of Winner-Take-All Politics, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson
And yet a curious thing has happened in the midst of all this misery. The wealthiest Americans, among them presumably the very titans of global finance whose misadventures brought about the financial meltdown, got richer. And not just a little bit richer; a lot richer. In 2009, the average income of the top five percent of earners went up, while on average everyone else’s income went down. This was not an anomaly but rather a continuation of a 40-year trend of ballooning incomes at the very top and stagnant incomes in the middle and at the bottom. The share of total income going to the top one percent has increased from roughly eight percent in the 1960s to more than 20 percent today.
This what the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call the “winner-take-all economy.” It is not a picture of a healthy society. Such a level of economic inequality, not seen in the United States since the eve of the Great Depression, bespeaks a political economy in which the financial rewards are increasingly concentrated among a tiny elite and whose risks are borne by an increasingly exposed and unprotected middle class. Income inequality in the United States is higher than in any other advanced democracy and by conventional measures comparable to that in countries such as Ghana, Nicaragua, and Turkmenistan.
In the late 1960s and the 1970s, conservatives made big displays of singing this song. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir recorded one very popular version of it; it showed up often. In those occasional complaints about the difficulty of singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” this song’s suitability for national anthem status was always raised.
Today? I haven’t heard it at a Republican gathering in long, long time. I’m not saying that it’s completely disappeared from the conservative song book — among other things, I don’t attend Republican conventions as often as I once did, but I don’t think I’d hear it if I did. I am saying that people finally started listening to the song, and it’s been largely dropped from conservative sing alongs for political reasons.
And that tells us a lot.
It would be good to hear this song a lot more; it would be good if more people sang it.
Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger leading the congregation in singing Woody Guthrie’s “The Land Is Your Land,” from a 1993 concert at Wolf Trap Farm Park in Virginia (one of my favorite venues for any music):
(Arlo’s got a new release this year, featuring this tune.)
Leisure Guy, in his leisure no doubt, has some time to look seriously at political criticism and its accuracy. For example, recently he wondered about the claim that FDR didn’t do anything to help the U.S. out of the depression, and perhaps helped prolong it. [I have corrected a minor error; he had FDR being inaugurated in January of 1933. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the last president to be inaugurated in March; the term was changed to start in January during his presidency.]
This graph is from an interesting post by Paul Krugman, but I was fascinated to see that you can tell when FDR took office. He was elected, as you know, at the end of 1932, and he took office in late January [March] of 1933. Can you find that spot on the graph?
But of course, Right Wingers will tell you that FDR made the Depression worse. Some will even say that FDR started the Great Depression.
RT @JenGranholm: On 30th anniversary of Sally Ride's Historic Journey, NASA selects a record number of female astronaut candidates http://t…Splashed: 7 hours ago
RT @JenGranholm: You cannot be what you cannot see. Thank you to Sally Ride for inspiring this new generation of female astronauts. http://…Splashed: 7 hours ago
RT @JenGranholm: This just in: added benefit of immigration reform -- it reduces the federal deficit by $175 B, per CBO, b/c more ppl in la…Splashed: 7 hours ago
@GregAbbott_TX Sylvan Learning Centers are not public schools, unaffected by CSCOPE -- why were they quoted in the story?Splashed: 7 hours ago
@GregAbbott_TX Can you name a teacher who celebrated the end of CSCOPE's lesson planning aids? There may be some, but I can't find 'em.Splashed: 7 hours ago
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Posted by Ed Darrell 
