Anti-semitism was protean, hydra-headed, and impervious to logic or evidence. As Jakob Wassermann put it:
'...Vain to go among them and offer them one's hand. They say: why does he take such liberties with his Jewish pushfulness? Vain to keep faith with them as a comrade in arms or a fellow-citizen. They say: he is Proteus, he can assume any shape or form. Vain to help them strip off the chains of slavery. They say: no doubt he found it profitable. Vain to counteract the poison.'
Moritz Goldstein argued that it was useless to expose the baselessness of anti-semitic 'evidence':
'What would be gained? The knowledge that their hatred is genuine. When all calumnies have been refuted, all distortions rectified, all false notions about us rejected, antipathy will remain as something irrefutable.'
- Paul Johnson, "Modern Times", chapter 3 "Waiting for Hitler" [NOTE]
It was said in the 1990s that "liberals are the new Jews". That is more true than ever, as Weimar America meets its version of the 1929 market collapse.
As in Weimar, the "respectable" politicians try to work around the margins of a bankrupt financial system, while real reformers are shut out. The Obama administration can't find a kind word for Howard Dean, Paul Krugman, James Galbraith or the liberals who put Obama in the White House.
We stand at the verge of a massive economic dislocation, one forcing millions of families from their homes and into severe financial distress, one that threatens to rend the fabric of our society. If we do not become angry, if we do not muster within us the courage to confront the corporate state that is destroying our nation, to actively defy entrenched power, we will have squandered our credibility and integrity at the moment we need it most.
- Chris Hedges, "The Looming Collapse of the American Empire"
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/...
Today's economic collapse has the potential to completely unchain the same kind of industrialist-funded, right wing gangsterism that vomited up the Nazis. The American brownshirts have been organizing for decades. They have their own, hermetically-sealed propaganda apparatus that has produced a mountain of hatred and envy. Somewhere in that mountain are the equivalent of ten "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" directed at the New Deal. They mine this mountain for sound-bites and slogans to inflame their own Freikorps of fundamentalists, racists, misogynists, homophobes, and anti-intellectuals - all that is left of their increasingly deranged party. But, in times of economic crisis, people crave simplicity, often with fatal results. Witness how the Nazis went from 3% of the vote in 1928 to 18% in 1930 to 39% in 1932. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/... )
By the 1920s any political leader in Germany who wished to make anti-semitism an agent in his "will to power' could assemble his campaign from an enormous selection of slogans, ideas, and fantasies, which had accumulated over more than half a century...
- Paul Johnson
Liberals/progressives should be worried. We have been the targets of such propaganda campaigns for decades now: unremitting attacks on social security, unionization, school funding, and healthcare reform. These campaigns are designed to eliminate the infrastructure of the middle class, which was put in place by the New Deal. In the last few months, the propaganda campaign to demonize the New Deal has cranked up another notch, with the calumny that the New Deal did not work. (I will not bother to recount this latest baseless slander from Amity Shales. You can read it here: http://www.dailykos.com/... .) As the economic disaster unfolds, simple lies will be easier to sell and to believe than a complex betrayal.
"Never Again"
Liberals have tried to refute these red-baiting lies for decades; but I'm with Moritz Goldstein. When you strip away the fig leafs of corporate media hypocrisy, its clear that the bankster elites hate the middle class, hate America, and hate the Constitution. They want to be kings, and they want us to be peasants.
Sorry, but we've seen this movie before. Its time to say "Never Again" to the assault on the liberals who brought the world the middle class. IMHO, the best defense is a good offense. Its time for one of those "who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes" moments (henceforth referred to as a "lying eyes moment") when it comes to the facts of economic history.
The corporate media coverage of the financial meltdown makes Baghdad Bob look like George Washington. Never have so few liars covered up for such massive looting of so many people. The corporate media tries to scapegoat "socialists" and "unions" and "subprime borrowers" for the calamities visited upon the world by Wall St. bankers, offshore banks, crooked insurers like AIG, and co-opted regulators. They have put Bernie Madoff on the back page, soon to be joined by Allen Stanford. I mean, why talk about multi-billion dollar crooks when you can talk about non-existent provisions for a Las Vegas railroad in the stimulus bill?
Incovenient Economic Truths
In what ways does our current economy resemble the "Long Depression of 1873"(Ref1) , the "Great Depression of 1929", and the many other panics (Ref 2) in American history? Got your lying eyes ready?
They were all caused by excessive leverage and asset inflation. ( Ref 3)
That's all it takes to turn a functioning capitalist economy into a pile of rubble. Too much leverage is like taking the governor off an engine - it revs up until it rips itself to pieces. We have known this for centuries. Eighty years ago we put regulations in place to prevent excessive leverage and asset inflation. Those regulations were repealed, courtesy of Phil Gramm who BTW has just wrecked the Swiss banking secrecy via the UBS decision. Way to go, Phil - your toxic scheming has managed to wreck not one, but two financial giants.
Just as you clearly don't have to be a communist to destroy our financial system from within, you don't have to be a communist to criticize the deliberate mismanagement of our economy; you just have to have working eyeballs and be willing to believe what they show you.
Both the Long and Great Depressions began with the collapse of overbuilt and over-mortgaged assets, which had been artificially inflated in value by stock market leverage and buying pools. Anyone with a memory can instantly recognize the M.O. of these con-men, shysters, and robber barons. What does that say about the corporate financial media? That they are either fools or knaves. They are either incompetent or bribed. My lying eyes vote for the latter option.
One of the worst side-effects of market crashes is that they further concentrate wealth in the hands of the very same elite that caused the crash. The sometimes economist (and full time engineer) Trond Andresen has built a mathematical model of this behavior. He calls the whole system a "financial black hole". ( At http://www.itk.ntnu.no/... pick the paper dyn-of-accum.pdf ) Of course, you rarely find mention of this mathematical model; while the infamous Laffer Curve is still being touted by the crazier inmates of the GOP asylum.
Being an engineer, Dr. Andresen uses models that include time delays (as opposed to the "perfect, instantaneous" equilibrium of the free market quacks) to show how excessive leverage takes decades before a final exponential blowoff occurs. You know, like the one we are having right now.
Another Scandinavian economist, Axel Leijonhufvud, is also on the job. ( http://www.voxeu.org/... ) Both he and Andresen argue that in a free market, there are no countervailing forces to create an "equilibrium" value for the amount of leverage or asset inflation that is acceptable. Above certain levels, both of these economic factors enter into positive feedback loops. The only way to make the economy explosion-proof is to regulate leverage and asset inflation.
Of course, our criminal elites have spent the last three decades moving in exactly the opposite direction. They have drastically lowered Capital Gains Tax rates, marginal tax rates on the super rich, estate taxation, SEC oversight, and margin requirements (see the CFTC debacle). They have put a smoothly functioning system into positive feedback by playing with the parameters.
There is a shorthand the economists have for such a system shift: a Minsky moment. In this moment, the nature of the business changes from honest to dishonest, from sustainable to unsustainable. The Minsky moment happens because a small shift in asset value is magnified into the insolvency of banks and hedge funds that have leveraged recklessly. America has been having a Minsky moment for at least the last year.
Summing up
So here are some truths that real history teaches about the predictable and recurring calamities of unregulated capitalism:
- Unregulated markets are constantly punctuated by increasingly large crashes.
- The period from 1932 until 2000 shows that regulation can moderate these crashes.
- High marginal tax rates actually encouraged investment in business; and tax cuts caused disinvestment and speculation. (Refs 4,5)
- Leverage must be regulated.
- Asset inflation must be taxed by capital gains.
Liberals need to hammer anyone, Democrat or Republican, who opposes the historical facts and their logical interpretation. We are spending our last dollar to bail out the crooks who bankrupted us. It has to stop.
As Michael Hudson, a professor at The University of Missouri, in Kansas City and a former Wall Street economist has correctly pointed out, what we have done is give $ 12 trillion to the richest one percent - or ten percent of the population - and indebted the economy and the government to this oligarchic class for the next 100 years. We need to refinance mortgages directly so that aid goes to homeowners. The banks and bondholders who made massive profits on these con schemes should take the hit, not the elderly couple down the street. This is what Roosevelt did in the 1930s with the Home Owners Loan Corporation.
- Chris Hedges, "The Looming Collapse of the American Empire"
The only good thing about the current crisis is that it gives the world one last chance to get the financial lords off our backs. If we fail now, the elites will own us until they pollute the planet to death. Either way, its "Never Again".
References
- http://chronicle.com/...
- http://www.peakoil.com/...
- http://www.voxeu.org/...
- http://www.alternet.org/...
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
[NOTE] I am no fan of Paul Johnson - he is a right wing hack. But I find it ironic to use his prose to defend liberals.