I'm kinda happy to see 2015 go. I was actually fine with 2015 til just before Thanksgiving when I fell and broke my leg. Because of my broken leg I'll be glad when this year is over. Meanwhile I'm chilling on Herb Alpert music and hanging with my cat.
And may the year be full of love and productive things.
I don't remember the job market ever being easy. Once when I was still in college I found a job as a temporary. Went into a warehouse and was assigned to unload a train car. At first they'd have me moving boxes while everyone worked hard. Then the other guys handed me the one hand-truck, sat down and started shooting the breeze, while I continued removing boxes and stacking them inside. At about 5 minutes to 10 they took the hand-truck from me and told me to sit down and take a break. No sooner than I sat down the supervisor came through. He was as regular as clockwork, and this repeated itself all day. At the end of the day I asked if they needed anybody the next day and he said "heck no, you need to eat beans boy." That experience taught me to be careful with "friends" as well as enemies. I think that is as close as I ever came to a Union job.
Late in his life, Roosevelt articulated 4 Basic Freedoms that everyone ought to have. These are:
I got to meet Daniel Schávelzon a few years ago when my wife was bringing his archeology to Howard University through the Spanish Department. He is an urbane, intelligent and wise person. And he was a friend of my wife. She had even interviewed him on one of our trips to Argentina! I had put his works on the back burner when I moved out here to Brunswick as they'd gotten packed up into Boxes, and as I'm not as connected to Howard as I was while my wife was alive. So it was a shock this week when I was sitting in my living room half awake and recovering from a broken leg. And they did an episode of "Hunting Hitler" -- and who was one of the archeologists helping them?! Daniel Schávelzon!
Argentina is one of my favorite countries. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a sanguinary past. On the contrary Buenos Aires and Montevideo both have a history that is as dark as any Southern City in North America. When we toured some of the archeology sites featured in "Buenos Aires Negro" -- they were exactly like what is in the basements of old houses in Alexandria or Georgetown. Shackles, private prison rooms, torture tools, used to subjugate and control slaves; all in the basements of upscale walk up townhomes (row houses) in fancy neighborhoods. At least places like "La Boca" were painted really pretty. The tourist traps focus on tourism, industry, and Tango. Daniel Schávelzon dug into some of these houses and found evidence of Argentina's past as a majority black city. Argentina, unlike Maryland or Virginia, freed it's slaves 5 or six times before civil wars and new methods of slavery made black chattel slavery uneconomic. The two cities were transhipment points to mines in the West of the country and plantations all over. The origins of Tango were in mulatto communities combining half remembered African religion and dances with European music traditions. Jaz, Tango and most of the really good dance music of the world, were invented by people who would die without the outlet of music and singing.
And so it is that oppressed people who weren't allowed into the USA wound up in Argentina. Jews, Syrians (including what are now known as palestinians), Italians, Spaniards,... We should have sent a copy of the statue of Liberty to Argentina; except many of the immigrants never could "rise" out of poverty.
And Racism has been part of the equation since the beginning. The racist leaders of Argentina tried to deal with their "negro problem" by drafting black folks. The civil wars and regional wars between provinces or between countries like Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina etc... were fought with drafted immigrants and former slaves. The women were left behind and scrambled for a living.
Jews fleeing the Holocaust, some of them, arrived in Argentina. They were followed by Nazis. Maybe even Hitler! The children of those Nazis would run the Argentine Military in the 70s and 80s.
The Right Wing in this country learned to rip out a page from the strategy of progressives. If they take their abusive agenda's, call them "reform" and throw in words like "reform", pay lip service to the programs "service needs", and use big words, they can fool most people reading their articles into thinking they are talking about the real thing and not simply privateering on a source of public revenue. It all sounds good until you dig into the reality of their proposals.
First written in 2012 -- updated 12/13/2015
Christopher H. Holte
At least when you shoot a zombie in the brain it finally stops coming at you. Not so with RW economics.
Alternet has a fun little article on Krugman's Friday Column: http://www.alternet.org/economy/paul-krugman-demolishes-zombie-ideas-have-eaten-republican-brains. I'd cite the column directly but I used up my freebie quota at the NY Times and am too broke to pay them.
And besides Janet Allon does a better job of contextualizing his comments anyway. Krugman is too polite to take the argument where it needs to go. These are Zombie ideas that never die. The notion of Zombie came from lurid stories of Voodoo and New Orleans Witch Doctors, so calling these ideas Zombie economics follows from years of economists (even sometimes former hucksters) calling them "Voodoo Economics." They were voodoo when they were new ideas. But they won't die!
