When we last left our hero, Capitalism, he was flexing his muscles, having laid a knockout blow on Mercantilism and turning his pugilistic attention to dominating the entire economy of the Western world and, before long, that of the rest of the planet as well. An offshoot of the power of the fast-growing nascent business class was its reach fully into the phenomenon soon to be called “Imperialism.” Undeveloped areas were conquered and their resources, on the cheap, absorbed into the Capitalist maw. “Taking up the white man’s burden” was the smarmy, advertised interpretation of this legalized thievery.

The U.S., because of its colonial past, was not originally in the same camp as Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, et. al. It took almost a full century before the U.S.A joined the rapacious pack, picking up a few stray dependencies like the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa and Puerto Rico, while keeping a wary eye and military invasion plans on most of Latin America.

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The 5th annual Maine Philanthropy Awards, to be presented at a dinner on Wednesday, April 11,2012 will honor Maine author and historian Neil Rolde at Colby College. Rolde has served his adopted state of Maine as an historian, philanthropist, and public servant, representing York County in the Maine House of Representatives for sixteen years after serving six years on Governor Ken Curtis’ staff. In addition to Rolde, who will be named the 2012 Maine Philanthropist of the Year, the program will recognize exceptional individuals from a Central Maine High School, Colby College, and Central Maine who have made an extraordinary contribution to the service of others. The awards serve as the celebratory conclusion to the Nonprofit Leadership Institute

Fernande Braudel public domain photo

The world-class French economic historian Fernande Braudel once posed an interesting question in one of his books. “Which country,” he asked, “just prior to the Industrial Revolution, would experts have predicted to be the first to become industrialized?” His answer was even more interesting. It was neither a place in Western Europe nor was it the United States. No, India then had the most advanced manufacturing system and seemed on a springboard to catapult into a full-fledged Capitalist society?

So why didn’t India fulfill this expectation?

Braudel’s reply was that India’s employers kept wages so low for its workers that there was no impetus to seek labor-saving machines and techniques to cut down costs. Thus in Western Europe and the U.S. where labor scarcity had led to higher wages, innovations appeared that helped to usher in the beginnings of Capitalism, as we know it.

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A protester of Occupy Wall Street. The movement is similar to the Bonus Army protests.

WordPress has reported to me a response to one of my earlier blogs, which was about the Bonus Army of 1932, a forerunner of the current Occupy Wall Street movement, and how on this occasion several thousand World War I veterans were dispersed from their tent city in Washington D.C. by orders to the U.S. Army from President Herbert Hoover.

The person who commented, citing this blog, was an Angelita Fisher and she appears to be connected with an Internet operation called INTEL HUB, which is heavy on support for Congressman Ron Paul and dedicated to opposing “globalism,” whatever that means.

The first part of her response, which is actually unconnected to my blog, seemed somewhat mystifying, asking me to “Examine U.S. military policy during the Cold War from 1946-1989” discussing “policy development, military strategy, nuclear weapons and targeting” and a host of other such esoteric subjects. Her final words, though, still unconnected, were more concrete and within my capability to respond. Ms. Fisher stated: “Despite fighting the Korean War to stalemate and suffering defeat in Vietnam, the U.S. emerged victorious in its four decade long conflict with the Soviet Union. Why?”

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President Barack Obama, photo by Ramona du Houx

History, as we know, creates many parallels. A favorite saying of people who promote the teaching of history is that “Those who ignore history are forced to repeat it.” Illustrations of this phenomenon are too numerous to quote in a single blog. Rather, I intend to focus on a single situation of the early 20th century, occurring in another country, which may offer lessons for today’s United States.

That country is France –the France that existed between the end of World War I and its collapse and surrender to the German Nazis and their fascistic French allies in 1940 – a dire situation that lasted until the Liberation in 1944.

The parallel with today in the U.S. involves President Barack Obama and the prominent French leader of the 1920’s and 1930’s, Leon Blum.

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Mr. Scrooge

With Christmas upon us, productions of Charles Dickens’ classic story, A Christmas Carol, adopted for stage and screen, are popping up everywhere as they have for generations. In this redemptive tale that has so caught the imagination of the English-speaking world, Dickens has really fashioned a religious drama in which the message of Jesus during the celebration of his birth is brought home to a single individual and releases him from the mean, selfish, bitter inner misanthropic image that he projects.

Ironically, when we think of Ebenezer Scrooge, whenever we speak his name even, we conjure the first impression he makes upon us. We do not consciously acknowledge his conversion. Scrooge has become almost a noun, meaning someone who is not only a miser but also a disbeliever in the words and admonitions of Jesus Christ. The early Ebenezer neither accepts nor practices the idea of doing unto others what you would have done to yourself.

By the end of the story, however, the old gentleman has changed. A kindly side emerges. The spirit of the holiday reaches him through a series of ghosts and he arrives in the sunlight of sharing a charitable disposition with his fellow Londoners, employees and relatives. Ebenezer Scrooge is re-born, so to speak.

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President Obama gives historic economic speech

Slightly more than a full century separates two presidential visits to the small town (population about 4,500) of Osawatomie in the middle of Kansas. The second instance, the arrival of President Barack Obama on December 6, 2011, is not only an event with a history behind it but a direct use of history in the interplay of today’s politics. The first instance, of course, was Theodore Roosevelt’s appearance on August 31, 1910. Both men had chosen this out-of-the way venue as the launching pad for important speeches.

Actually, when Teddy Roosevelt came to Osawatomie in 1910, he was no longer President. His second term had ended with the election of 1908. Rather than run a third time (he could have done so legally then), he chose his Vice-President William Howard Taft to succeed him as the Republican standard bearer. With TR’s help, Taft won, but he proved to be a disappointing protégé for Roosevelt and his ideals. Taft showed his conservative streak by supporting the most reactionary factions within the GOP. As the presidential election of 1912 approached, TR found that in order to effect a progressive change in the U.S., he would not be able to run on a Republican ticket. Thus, in 1912, he launched the Progressive Party, nicknamed the Bull Moose Party, and ran independently. But early on, such as at Osawatomie in 1910, he was already putting forth a stunning platform to end the domination of American politics and economy by certain “business interests,” as he called them, dedicated to severe income inequality, benefiting what today we would deem the “1 percent”

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the "wild frountier"

Where are the Republicans headed? What is their dream of perfection? When they get through with their current shenanigans in Washington and elsewhere, what will the United States of America look like?

One not wholly facetious answer was given in the following manner. How about a country where there are no taxes, no government, and everyone has a gun. And, folks, such an entity is not beyond probability. We have a living example in our own day and age of the GOP nirvana.

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U.S. Supreme Court, Washington D.C.

The recent 5-4 decision by the United States Supreme Court in a case brought before them through the intervention of a group known as Citizens United has created a major sensation on the American political scene. It joins other landmark cases such as Roe Versus Wade and Brown Versus School Board in its making of waves, and some commentators have even dipped into the deep past and likened it to the Dred Scott case on slavery prior to the Civil War and Plessy Versus Ferguson on segregation after 1865.

What the Supreme Court decided by a one vote margin was that money equaled free speech and its use could not be curtailed by State laws during elections. To the dissenters, this meant that elections in America now could be legally “bought.”

So what do we know about this group that successfully challenged spending limits on the amount that individuals (which include corporations and labor unions) can use to support candidates who, from their point of view, if elected, will favor their donors in the passage of legislation?

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A protester of Occupy Wall Street. The movement is similar to the Bonus Army protests.

Needless to say, various commentators on today’s economic and financial climate in the United States, have seen parallels with the time of the Great Depression. Admittedly. that economic disaster triggered in 1929 by conditions over here similar to ours at the end of the George W. Bush Administration, hit Americans on a much bigger scale. Unemployment, for example, was 25 percent, not 9.1 percent, which is high enough certainly, given that one major political party, the Republicans, have dedicated themselves to keeping it at that level.

Recently, the amazing overnight growth of the OWS, [Occupy Wall Street] movement has brought to mind a similar activity in the early 1930’s, albeit in this case on a much smaller extent compared to the flood of occupiers worldwide at the present time. It then involved the “occupation” of only a single city, Washington D.C., by some 40,000 people, mostly comprised of military veterans of the First World War and their families. They are known to history as the Bonus Army, although in their own eyes they preferred the term Bonus Expeditionary Force, reflecting the name, the “American Expeditionary Force,” under which they were sent to Europe in 1917-1918.

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