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SO THIS is what the "Republicans" want??

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jim
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« on: January 11, 2016, 09:37:29 pm »

The "Republicans" are surely showing a lot of these "symptoms." Grin mad bat



8 Ways America's Headed Back to the Robber-Baron Era
  
 We are recreating the Gilded Age, a period when corporations ruled this nation, buying politicians, using violence against unions and engaging in open corruption.
  
By Erik Loomis / AlterNet

July 2, 2012(not real old Smiley
  
Over the past 40 years, corporations and politicians have rolled back many of the gains made by working and middle-class people over the previous century. We have the highest level of income inequality in 90 years, both private and public sector unions are under a concerted attack, and federal and state governments intend to cut deficits by slashing services to the poor.

 
We are recreating the Gilded Age, the period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when corporations ruled this nation, buying politicians, using violence against unions, and engaging in open corruption. During the Gilded Age, many Americans lived in stark poverty, in crowded tenement housing, without safe workplaces, and lacked any safety net to help lift them out of hard times.

With Republicans more committed than ever to repealing every economic gain the working-class has achieved in the last century and the Democrats seemingly unable to resist, we need to understand the Gilded Age to see what conservatives are trying to do to this nation. Here are 8 ways our corporations, politicians and courts are trying to recreate the Gilded Age.


1. Unregulated Corporate Capitalism Creates Economic Collapse

In the late 19th century, corrupt railroad capitalists created the Panic of 1873 and Panic of 1893 through lying about their business activities, buying off politicians and siphoning off capital into their own pockets. Railroad corporations set up phony corporations that allowed them to embezzle money from the railroad into their bank accounts. When exposed, the entire economy collapsed as banks failed around the country. The Panic of 1893 lasted five years, created 25% unemployment, and was the worst economic crisis in American history before the Great Depression.

In the early 21st century, the poorly regulated financial industry plunged the nation into the longest economic downturn since the Depression. Like in the Gilded Age, none of the culprits have served a day in prison.

2. Union Busting

In the Gilded Age, business used the power of the state to crush labor unions. President Hayes called in the Army to break the Great Railroad Strike of 1877; President Cleveland did the same against the Pullman strikers in 1894.

Today’s corporations don’t have to use such blunt force to destroy unions, but like in the past, they convince the government to do their bidding. Whether it is holding up FAA renewal in order to make it harder for airline employees to unionize, Republican members of the National Labor Relations Board leaking material on cases to Republican insiders, or governors Scott Walker and John Kasich seeking to bust their states’ public sector unions, not since before the Great Depression has the government attacked unions with such force.

3. Income Inequality

Today, we have the highest levels of income inequality since the 1920s and the gap is widening to late 19th century levels with great speed. In those days, individuals like John D. Rockefeller had more money than the federal government, while the majority of Americans lived in squalor, poverty and disease.

In the Progressive Era, we started creating laws like the federal income tax, child labor laws and workers’ compensation to begin giving workers a fair share of the pie. For decades, labor fought to increase their share and by the 1970s, had turned much of the working class into the middle class. Today, that middle class is under attack by a new generation of plutocrats who wish to recreate the massive fortunes of the Gilded Age.

4. Open Purchase of Elections

In 1890, copper magnate William Clark paid Montana lawmakers $140,000 to elect him to the U.S. Senate. While most plutocrats did not share Clark’s interest in being politicians, they ensured their lackeys would serve in office, often by offering corporate stock to politicians. Disgusted by this corruption, America in the Progressive Era of the early 20th century created a number of reforms, including the 17th Amendment that created direct elections of senators, as well as a 1912 Montana state law limiting corporate expenditures in politics.

Beginning with the Citizens United decision and continuing with the recent overturning of that 1912 law, the Supreme Court has allowed corporations and wealthy plutocrats to buy elections openly once again.

5. Supreme Court Partisanship

In the Gilded Age, the Supreme Court interpreted laws not as to the intent of the lawmakers, but to promote business interests. It refused to enforce the 14th Amendment to stop segregation, but it did create the idea that a corporation was a person with rights. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 was intended to moderate monopolies; the Supreme Court only enforced it against unions since organized labor “unfairly restrained trade.”

Today’s Supreme Court has resorted to this aggressively partisan stance. The Court is fine with the open flouting of the 4th Amendment, allowing strip searches of middle-school girls if they’re suspected to be carrying drugs, but creates a grotesque expansion of the 14th Amendment in the Citizens United decision. Meanwhile, Antonin Scalia just took the opportunity in a Supreme Court dissent to lambast his colleagues for striking down much of the Arizona anti-immigration law by approvingly citing 19th-century laws in the South that limited the movement of African Americans.

6. Violations of Civil Liberties

In the late 19th century, civil and military authorities looked down upon protesting citizens. Widespread violations of civil liberties took place when Americans protested for almost any reasons, whether it was labor unions, political gatherings in Washington, D.C., or African Americans organizing to protect themselves from white supremacists. Police shot strikers and thugs and mobs murdered organizers.

Today we are seeing a growing recreation of this society with no respect for civil liberties. The use of police violence against Occupy protesters, like the pepper-spraying of nonviolent activists at the University of California-Davis did spawn some outrage. But in the aftermath of the PATRIOT Act, the authorities have tremendous power to suppress protest and are not afraid to use it against peaceful citizens.

7. Voter Repression

The Gilded Age saw the rolling back of Reconstruction, with black people unable to vote in the South due to the grandfather clause, poll taxes, literacy tests, and threat of violence. Conservative extremists have chafed at black people voting ever since the civil rights movement ended segregation.

Today, voter ID laws and voter roll-purging seek to limit black voting again. Florida Governor Rick Scott hopes to purge enough black people from the voting rolls to swing the Sunshine State to Mitt Romney this fall, while a lawmaker in Pennsylvania openly said the Keystone State’s recently passed voter ID law would do the same. Even more shocking, the recently released Texas Republican Party platform has a plank calling for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed in the wake of police beatings of civil rights protestors in Selma, Alabama.

8. Anti-Immigration Fervor

In the Gilded Age, Americans feared the millions of people coming from eastern and southern Europe, the Middle East and Asia to work in the nation’s growing economy. Fearing these immigrants would never assimilate, Americans looked to bar their entry. Beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and continuing through the Immigration Act of 1924, the country slowly closed its doors to the world’s tired and hungry.

Today’s immigrants face an increasingly militarized border, states like Arizona trying to usurp federal immigration policy, and increased numbers of deportations. Conservatives fear the changes Latinos could bring to the United States and talk about English-only laws and the evils of bilingual education. They also recognize the likelihood of Latinos voting for the Democratic Party in coming decades and thus use the same kind of voter repression strategies that target black voters.

The Gilded Age was a horrible time and I fear the nation slipping back into this hell of poverty, violence and hate. I believe that young people largely reject the extremist agenda that is hurtling us through a time machine to the bad old days of the 1890s, but they don’t have the power right now. Republicans know the demographics do not favor them and are trying to fix the game through voter suppression, packing the courts with extremists, and concentrating wealth and power so they can control politicians and the media.

During the Gilded Age, people throughout society began organizing for reform: labor unions, farmers, middle-class reformers. After 1900, this organizing paid off as government began passing reforms to alleviate the most extreme problems of the Gilded Age. Child labor laws, worker compensation for injuries at work, government regulation of the railroads, and the direct election of senators all took power away from corporations and put it back in the hands of the people. It wasn’t perfect, but it started the social reforms that created the American middle-class.

Like in the late 19th century, we need to take back our country from corporate control. We need to create well-paid jobs in the United States, revitalize the labor movement, and pass legislation to respect civil liberties, give undocumented immigrants legal status, and ensure that voting rights laws are enforced. Like our ancestors, we can fix these problems. First we need to recognize that the 1% has declared war upon the middle class and then we can start organizing to create the better tomorrow we crave.

**Erik Loomis is a professor of labor and environmental history and a blogger at Lawyers, Guns and Money.


       
IMOWe are in serious trouble if THIS keeps going much longer.


http://www.alternet.org/story/156111/8_ways_america's_headed_back_to_the_robber-baron_era
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LET NO MORE FOOLS VOTE!!

Corporate ownership of the GOVERNMENT is as FASCIST as Vice Versa!!

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Zachary18
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« Reply #1 on: January 12, 2016, 12:07:18 am »

Jim great post!!!  I'll start with point #1 which mentions the Panic of 1873 and the Gilded Age.  The Panic of 1873 was not caused by the Gilded Age, it created it.  The article gets the whole history of the Panic of 1873 wrong.  The causes the article listed did not cause the Panic of 1873.   The problems [leading to the Panic of 1873] had emerged around 1870, starting in Europe. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, formed in 1867, in the states unified by Prussia into the German empire, and in France, the emperors supported a flowering of new lending institutions that issued mortgages for municipal and residential construction, especially in the capitals of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. Mortgages were easier to obtain than before, and a building boom commenced. Land values seemed to climb and climbborrowers ravenously assumed more and more credit, using unbuilt or half-built houses as collateral. [Europe exported its sub-prime mortgage crisis]  The most marvelous spots for sightseers in the three cities today are the magisterial buildings erected in the so-called founder period.  The long-term effects of the Panic of 1873 were perverse. For the largest manufacturing companies in the United States — those with guaranteed contracts and the ability to make rebate deals with the railroads — the Panic years were golden. Andrew Carnegie, Cyrus McCormick, and John D. Rockefeller had enough capital reserves to finance their own continuing growth. For smaller industrial firms that relied on seasonal demand and outside capital, the situation was dire. As capital reserves dried up, so did their industries. Carnegie and Rockefeller bought out their competitors at fire-sale prices. The Gilded Age in the United States, as far as industrial concentration was concerned, had begun.  http://srnels.people.wm.edu/articles/realGrtDepr.html  Yes, we are entering a new Gilded Age, and for the exact same reasons as we did post 1873...New lending institutions and sub-prime mortgages....
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« Reply #2 on: January 12, 2016, 05:52:34 am »

Jim great post!!!  I'll start with point #1 which mentions the Panic of 1873 and the Gilded Age.  The Panic of 1873 was not caused by the Gilded Age, it created it.  The article gets the whole history of the Panic of 1873 wrong.  The causes the article listed did not cause the Panic of 1873.   The problems [leading to the Panic of 1873] had emerged around 1870, starting in Europe. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, formed in 1867, in the states unified by Prussia into the German empire, and in France, the emperors supported a flowering of new lending institutions that issued mortgages for municipal and residential construction, especially in the capitals of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. Mortgages were easier to obtain than before, and a building boom commenced. Land values seemed to climb and climbborrowers ravenously assumed more and more credit, using unbuilt or half-built houses as collateral. [Europe exported its sub-prime mortgage crisis]  The most marvelous spots for sightseers in the three cities today are the magisterial buildings erected in the so-called founder period.  The long-term effects of the Panic of 1873 were perverse. For the largest manufacturing companies in the United States — those with guaranteed contracts and the ability to make rebate deals with the railroads — the Panic years were golden. Andrew Carnegie, Cyrus McCormick, and John D. Rockefeller had enough capital reserves to finance their own continuing growth. For smaller industrial firms that relied on seasonal demand and outside capital, the situation was dire. As capital reserves dried up, so did their industries. Carnegie and Rockefeller bought out their competitors at fire-sale prices. The Gilded Age in the United States, as far as industrial concentration was concerned, had begun.  http://srnels.people.wm.edu/articles/realGrtDepr.html  Yes, we are entering a new Gilded Age, and for the exact same reasons as we did post 1873...New lending institutions and sub-prime mortgages....

Thanks, Zach!! Smiley

Remember some of What you have posted here. Yours is great post!!
IMO this is a part of what a good forum is about!! Smiley
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LET NO MORE FOOLS VOTE!!

Corporate ownership of the GOVERNMENT is as FASCIST as Vice Versa!!
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« Reply #3 on: January 12, 2016, 12:19:40 pm »

To answer the question posed as the title of the thread ................ Yes, this is what the Republicans want.

At least, those who control the Republican party.

What I can't, for the life of me, understand, is why the "rank and file" Republican supporters want to give it to them.  Maybe, it's because when our history books cover this period, they tend to go on and on about the great wealth and glamour of "The Gilded Age", and "The Roaring Twenties".  But they quickly brush over the abject poverty, the homelessness, the starvation, and the sickness that were so pervasive of the periods.  They don't spend much time telling us about the 12- or even 16-hours a day, seven-days-a-week requirements of a great many jobs.  Or the poverty wages those jobs paid.  They don't tell us about the "company stores", who used credit and debt to trap workers into those jobs.  They don't tell us about the total absence of any kind of job safety standards, and the high percentage of workers who died on those jobs.  They don't tell us that, if one was injured on those jobs, he was on his own -- there was no employer-paid health care, even for on-the-job injuries.  It was your tough luck that your family starved, because you were hurt on the job.  There was no workers' compensation.  There was no health insurance.  With the lack of sanitation that came with the resultant slums, disease was rampant.  Typhoid epidemics were common.  In the early 20th century, Influenza killed millions. 

Yes, that's what today's Republican party would take us back to.  Or, even beyond, if they really had their way.  To many of them, the Feudal System was the ideal.  Where a wealthy man was, literally, the king of his realm.  The serfs were his property.  Their lives depended, entirely, upon his magnanimity.  What they produced was his, not theirs, and he provided (or didn't provide) for their basic needs at whatever level he wanted to.

And, who are so many of the Republican voters, who seemingly want to give this to them?  Poor people.  The very people these corporate bigwigs exploit, to achieve their obscene wealth.

Go figure.
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« Reply #4 on: January 12, 2016, 12:47:23 pm »

To answer the question posed as the title of the thread ................ Yes, this is what the Republicans want.

At least, those who control the Republican party.

What I can't, for the life of me, understand, is why the "rank and file" Republican supporters want to give it to them.  Maybe, it's because when our history books cover this period, they tend to go on and on about the great wealth and glamour of "The Gilded Age", and "The Roaring Twenties".  But they quickly brush over the abject poverty, the homelessness, the starvation, and the sickness that were so pervasive of the periods.  They don't spend much time telling us about the 12- or even 16-hours a day, seven-days-a-week requirements of a great many jobs.  Or the poverty wages those jobs paid.  They don't tell us about the "company stores", who used credit and debt to trap workers into those jobs.  They don't tell us about the total absence of any kind of job safety standards, and the high percentage of workers who died on those jobs.  They don't tell us that, if one was injured on those jobs, he was on his own -- there was no employer-paid health care, even for on-the-job injuries.  It was your tough luck that your family starved, because you were hurt on the job.  There was no workers' compensation.  There was no health insurance.  With the lack of sanitation that came with the resultant slums, disease was rampant.  Typhoid epidemics were common.  In the early 20th century, Influenza killed millions. 

Yes, that's what today's Republican party would take us back to.  Or, even beyond, if they really had their way.  To many of them, the Feudal System was the ideal.  Where a wealthy man was, literally, the king of his realm.  The serfs were his property.  Their lives depended, entirely, upon his magnanimity.  What they produced was his, not theirs, and he provided (or didn't provide) for their basic needs at whatever level he wanted to.

And, who are so many of the Republican voters, who seemingly want to give this to them?  Poor people.  The very people these corporate bigwigs exploit, to achieve their obscene wealth.

Go figure.

Great Post, CG!!

I am old enough to have seen some of what you are saying - not the VERY bad parts, I don't think,  but certainly bad enough.

I can come to no real conclusions as to why poor people are endorsing and participating in this nonsense - except - that they have some sort of belief that they will be among the "agents" of the wealthy. And then there is the old AUTHORITARIAN personality that for some strange reason holds onto this kind of a structure as the CORRECT way, by some, even "GOD'S" way. idiot shocked Huh? Well: I don't get it either. Huh? But it is out there like in the Bolshevik and NAZI movements. shocked

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I am very afraid that we are losing this nation - OR: Have indeed LOST IT.

LET NO MORE FOOLS VOTE!!

Corporate ownership of the GOVERNMENT is as FASCIST as Vice Versa!!
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« Reply #5 on: January 12, 2016, 02:00:24 pm »

You may be onto something, there, Jim.  A huge part of the feudal system was the role the church played, in keeping it going.  Only clergy were educated, back then -- most monarchs, even, were illiterate, relying on the priests and monks to do any reading or writing they needed.  This gave the church tremendous power.  Add to that, the use of superstition (witch trials, for example), and they had, pretty much, the whole European world under their control.

Anyone else notice how much Republicans, and the conservative movement, rely on religion for their support, these days?  They convince people that poverty is their lot, in life -- it's part of God's grand plan.  Just one of the "...mysterious ways" he uses to accomplish "... the wonders he performs".  Religion teaches people to just accept their lot, and not to question it.  It teaches people to blindly follow authority -- after all, how else can one describe the unquestioning "faith" that religion is totally dependent on? 

And there, Jim, is that mysterious "... old AUTHORITARIAN personality" you mentioned.  They're taught to accept authority without question - especially if it's sanctioned by their ultimate authority - the clergy.  To them, the clergy directly represent God, and their word is God's word.  And, their clergy are telling them to vote Republican. 

Why?  One only has to look at the reliance of the Republican party on "wedge issues" -- social issues, like abortion and gay marriage.  While the Democratic party has advanced the pro-choice and gay rights positions as individual civil rights issues, the Republican party, recognizing the power religion holds in many peoples' lives, has jumped on these issues in order to manipulate those people into opposing their own best interests, economically, in order to assuage what their clergy are telling them is ascribed by that religion.  That's why the Republican party has, in recent years, fabricated this "war on Christianity", supposedly being waged by us "Godless Liberals".

The Republicans view this as a "win-win" situation.  The Republicans see it as a way to regain majorities - and, thus, power - in Washington.  And the churches see it as a way to win back the almost total power they had over everyone - including the civil governments - that they've so craved, ever since they lost it, at the end of The Dark Ages.
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« Reply #6 on: January 12, 2016, 04:21:55 pm »

The Gilded Age yielded Theodore Roosevelt, and trust busting through the Sherman Anti-Trust (1890)and later the Clayton Act (1914).  The Roaring 20 gave us FDR and stronger financial regulations (i.e. Glass/Steagal) and the New Deal legislation covering a broad range of worker protections and safety net programs.  The Republicans and the corporate mainstream Democratic Party are sclerotic and not up to the task of the needed reform.
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« Reply #7 on: January 12, 2016, 06:40:13 pm »

The Gilded Age yielded Theodore Roosevelt, and trust busting through the Sherman Anti-Trust (1890)and later the Clayton Act (1914).  The Roaring 20 gave us FDR and stronger financial regulations (i.e. Glass/Steagal) and the New Deal legislation covering a broad range of worker protections and safety net programs.  The Republicans and the corporate mainstream Democratic Party are sclerotic and not up to the task of the needed reform.


Absolutely!! It is as if they want to do away with the very people that built all of it!! mad bat

I tried to make a point on another board once that when we had mules on the farm, they didn't "work" much if any during the winter season, but we fed them and gave them shelter until spring for obvious reasons. Smiley No Point made...to these! idiot'S
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I am very afraid that we are losing this nation - OR: Have indeed LOST IT.

LET NO MORE FOOLS VOTE!!

Corporate ownership of the GOVERNMENT is as FASCIST as Vice Versa!!
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« Reply #8 on: December 02, 2016, 09:25:16 am »

#republicanswon
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