Dana Blankenhorn

Declare Independence From The Ultra-Wealthy

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 26 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

---

Since the World Cup is still going on, let’s start this off by talking about FIFA.

John Oliver gave you the basics. 

FIFA is a private organization, and governments are forbidden from running national affiliates. It’s also a global organization, and uses that status to get out of paying all sorts of taxes, pitting one country against another to do so. It’s supposed to be about promoting kids’ soccer, but it’s mostly run for the benefit of the people who run FIFA.

You can argue over whether Qatar paid off FIFA officials for the 2022 World Cup. You can argue about whether Qatar is a “21^st century slave state.” You can’t argue about the corruption inherent in FIFA. The group canned the man who headed CONCACAF, the regional group the U.S. belongs to, over corruption. A man named Chuck Blazer, who was put in charge of U.S. operations 20 years ago, got rich as “Mr. 10%", taking rake-offs on events for doing nothing more than approving them.

But this is not a football story. The FIFA story is not unusual.

My Un-Philosophy

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 24 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

---

Most people practice a philosophy of false choices.

Every move to give poor people a break isn't socialism. Every effort to liberate capital isn't fascism. Every expansion of the First Amendment doesn't necessarily mean anarchy, or a religious dictatorship.

But that's the way it's portrayed, in our media, by our politicians, and in our online forums.

This is particularly true on the right today, and as I've said it is for good reason. When your worldview blows up in your face, the first instinct is to become more strident, not less. This was true for Democrats after they lost in 1968, and again after 1980. It takes time to accept change you didn't make, to say “yeah but” to it, to align with others in order to regain some semblance of power, until the other side collapses in its turn.

20th Century Limited

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 21 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

---

FDR faced two crises. One was an economic crisis, the Great Depression. The second was World War II, testing whether democracy could survive against the false choices of fascism and communism.

I would argue they were the same crisis. FDR's response to the Great Depression saved America for democracy, which was indeed threatened by extremists of the Left and Right. His response in World War II saved the world.

Our time is similar.

As the Great Recession fades into the background, America is facing the return of those false choices, both abroad and at home.

Economic Struggle Beneath A Political Surface

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 16 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

---

Beneath every political struggle in American history there is always an economic one below the surface.

The Civil War was about tariffs and states' rights, according to the South. It was about slavery, according to the North. But it was really about mechanization, about machine power replacing human power. Manufacturing won the war, and provided America's new economic model.

The same was true during the Progressive Era a generation later. It seemed to be about human dignity and the power of corporations. It was really about national markets and the inputs needed for mass manfacturing.

Again, the New Deal. Economic collapse? Not really. It was about economic systems, the false choices of fascism and communism on one hand, democracy and capitalism on the other.

The same was true with Vietnam. It seemed to be about the Cold War, when it was really about a switch from manufacturing to technology, from hands to minds, as the center of economic life.

Which brings us to the present day.

This Hamiltonian World

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 13 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

---

History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes.

In the case of America, which has been a united nation for most of 225 years now, it can rhyme multiple times.

The Crisis of 1896, which resulted in the Progressive Era, rhymed in many ways with the first political crisis in our history, the dispute between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson resulting in the 1800 Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican victory over Hamilton's Federalists. 

The dispute in both cases was one of basic finance. Hamilton wanted a strong central government, and a national bank, in order to grow manufacturing and assure that the new United States could defend itself. Jefferson sought a “republican” government, a full democracy in which all men could be treated equally because they were equal.

Equally poor.

Reading Jefferson's own words from the 1790s, it's clear that what he objected to in Hamilton was less the means to his end than the end itself. That end was prosperity. Hamilton wanted America to become rich, and worked to create institutions aimed at doing that. Jefferson cared less about money than about rights. He believed money corrupted, that it was responsible for the injustices he'd seen in France.

Jefferson feared Hamilton was aping Great Britain, whose great banks had created a rich empire, mostly benefitting its great men. In this he was right.

The 1938 Game

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 11 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

---

What fascinates me about historical cycles is how you don't always go back to the last one.

When I first began studying America's political cycles in 2006, I posted lots of articles about “the 1966 game.” For years I mainly compared what was happening in American politics to a bizarro version of the Nixon cycle.

More recently, I've been looking at the present crisis through the eyes of 1996. (Blame Doris Kearns Goodwin.) What most historians have been unable to explain is why people like J.P. Morgan essentially surrendered on issues like miners' wages, or why John D. Rockefeller calmly accepted the break-up of Standard Oil.

Goodwin never answers that one in “The Bully Pulpit,” but I have my own theory.

Business isn't always conservative. The word “progressive” includes the word progress, and business is inherently progressive, always pushing change with the aim of profit. Mass manufacturing, the growth of GM and Ford, would have been impossible without sure prices for inputs like electricity and for rail transport costs. What regulation did, in the end, was create that certainty. It enabled business progress.

Then, in recent weeks, we suddenly began playing The 1938 Game.

Two Enemies

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 9 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

---

Each generational crisis contains elements of those that came before.

As in 1968, we see a nation divided by war and growing debt. As in 1860, this is mainly a regional split, north vs. south. As in 1896, it's all about money, with a small Gilded Age crowd of oligarchs seeming to hold all the cards.

But there's also a great commonality with the crisis that consumed Franklin Roosevelt after 1932. Democracy is at stake, with the greatest risks to it being false choices and apathy.

The New Deal was created to address the key problem of the economy, but that program did not define the existential crisis of the Greatest Generation. That was a more basic question: could democracy survive? Could freedom live in a highly scaled industrial era, against the false choices of communism and fascism?

The Value of Emotional Intelligence

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 6 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

---

The industrial era was marked by shortages, and the need for technical expertise to overcome those shortages.

That expertise came in many forms. There was political and economic expertise, there was engineering and scientific expertise. A host of new professions grew up around this expertise. The world that these people built was defined by this kind of knowledge, turned to science, then through engineering transformed into technology.

The Internet Era has flipped all this on its head. You don't necessarily need to know stuff when you can Google it. The job of building knowledge, which was once about brute force, is now more about building connections, both among facts and among the people with access to those facts.

This is why the center of economic life has shifted in the 21^st century. Power that resided in factories early in the 20^th century, then moved to offices later in the century, now resides on university campuses.

The Fall of Faith-Based Economics

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 3 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

---

I recently did a piece for TheStreet.com on Austrian economics and, out of modesty, I didn't offer my full view of the matter, because I'm a tech writer.

My view is that Austrian economics, like Karl Marx' communism, is faith-based economics. It ignores economic evidence, its acolytes spending all their time rejecting contrary facts.

They explicitly reject the notion that government can weigh evidence of economic strength or weakness and do anything about it. Thus Austrian economics can never fail. It can only be failed by those too weak to apply it rigorously enough.

Austrian economics stands alongside climate denialism and religious millenialism as one of three pillars of the modern conservative movement. This is what makes conservatism a clear and present danger to democracy in our time. It's at the heart of our present crisis.

2014: Forgetting And Beginning Again

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 52 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

---

While in New York recently I got a powerful insight into what the next year will bring.

I decided to visit the site of the World Trade Center, “Ground Zero,” or “The Pit,” as it's been variously called.

Construction is transforming it. The new One World Trade Center, with its huge antenna, has been topped out. A shorter building, called Four World Trade Center, is going up nearby. The buildings that survived 9-11 are being redone under the name Brookfield Place .

Right now, a visit remains like going to a grave site. There are tickets, and tours, of the site where the Towers once stood, now transformed into a memorial. But there is also scaffolding everywhere, and it obscures the view of what's actually happening, the beautiful process of rebuilding.

Next year, that scaffolding comes down. Next year, New York can begin the important process of forgetting.

We all talk about remembering the past, of memorializing it, but it's also important to forget it and move on. You can't mourn forever.

Some time next year, New York will finally start to move on, and so will the rest of us. Instead of the empty, elevated courtyard of the old site, the new site is at street level. The new World Trade Center isn't separated from the rest of the city, as the old one was, but is integrated into it.