RedSK--S & HATE CRIMES (Edited)
by Winter Rabbit | 9/30/2009 07:32:00 PM

Source

The Indian removals which destroyed one quarter of the Cherokee tribe, were actually conceptualized by Jefferson and then extended and carried out by Jackson. There were great debates about whether the “redskins” were human and whether they had souls.







I heard a descendant of Moxtaveto (Black Kettle), speak about the racism of Sports Mascots. She said the focus was on the name "Redskins." She went on to explain how, after American Indians were mutilated and exterminated, the name used to refer to the mutilated American Indian was "Redskin." As if anyone thinks the killers said anything that would indicate the reality of what they had done at the time. "Redskin" was a term used to dehumanize and enable the genocide.


Source

REDSKIN A 500 YEAR HATE CRIME,
is being used in educational presentations throughout the United States to effectively reveal the history of racial and religious hatred behind the term Redskin Indians and clearly shows the harm brought by ridiculing minorities. It is appropriate for adults and children in middle school or older.


Disgustingly so, “Redskin Indians” refers to literally skinning American Indians. “But his (Jackson’s) Indian Fighters had a very peculiar preoccupation, that was skinning the Indians on the battlefield. They used to make pants” it says in the video. Reverend Goat Carson, who is “Internationally recognized for his presentations,” discusses it in “REDSKIN A 500 YEAR HATE CRIME.”


Source

Telling it like it is Reverend Goat cuts through the barriers created by America's history books. "REDSKINS" makes human beings out of the Indian children and elders who were mutilated and skinned for their religious and racial heritage.


Furthermore, if anyone doubts that manifestations of that hate are less than current, I relate the following.





PORTLAND -- The FBI is investigating recent posts on craigslist that offered to sell "Maine Indian scalps" to "white people only," according to court documents and the leader of the Penobscot Indian Nation, who reported the situation to state and federal officials.

The person who posted the items claimed to have six scalps and related artifacts that were obtained by bounty hunters in the 1700s and came into his possession through a private family collection.

- snip –

"Even if it is hair, with a little bit of flesh on it, that is human remains. That could be one of our ancestors," Mitchell said. "This doesn't just affect people in the past. It affects us today, people who are living."



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So one last time, "Redskin Indians" refers to literally skinning American Indians. "But his (Jackson's) Indian Fighters had a very peculiar preoccupation, that was skinning the Indians on the battlefield. "They used to make pants" it says in the video.

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It goes on to say “they’d be able to take an Indian and skin him from the hip down and make themselves a pair of pants.” Next, it talks about how they made reins for their bridle to ride their horses and that “redskins” became a joke. Hence, "the depth and pervasiveness of the racism against Indigenous Peoples so deeply engrained in the history and psyche of the United States and the dominant culture."

One last time, "Redskin" was a term used to dehumanize and enable genocide.

What the Consolidated Indigenous Shadow Report says about Indian Mascots on page 72.


Although the United States would probably respond that racist mascots and logos are an exercise of free speech that it has reserved under the Convention, they reveal the depth and pervasiveness of the racism against Indigenous Peoples so deeply engrained in the history and psyche of the United States and the dominant culture.


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Open Thread
by AndrewMc | 9/28/2009 06:07:00 PM
Yammer, yammer, yammer . . . .




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Friday Ramblings, Sept 25th
by AndrewMc | 9/25/2009 07:00:00 AM
Some random stuff from the week:

I wish that this was the worst of the hypocrisy and cruelty forced upon us by eight years of the Bush administration. But it wasn't, this was:

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.




I'm no presidential historian, but these would be interesting to listen to. And I'll probably read this, although I do still have some Clinton fatigue.


There's more rambling below in Readmoreville . . .




Oh, really? What a surprise:

The overwhelming majority of Iowans - 92 percent - say gay marriage has brought no real change to their lives.






What's funny to me is that the topic of "should there should be free speech on the internet" is even under debate. Duh.


Blame Shakespeare.


It's about time.


What this boils down to is "we've given up on trying to get the high schools to do better, so deal with it. Bitches."


What telling about the discussion of "why college costs so much and what can be done about it" (free subscription required) is that nowhere does the discussion of "let's cut our expensive football program" come up. Instead it's "let's increase faculty workload." Typical.


The Teaching American History initiative is an excellent way to bring professional development to teachers. It would be a real shame to see this program cut.


You're probably getting tired of hearing me go on about tenure at KCTCS, but this is a bit of good news. No, great news!

[Attorney General Jack] Conway's analysis rips apart the KCTCS board's argument that the state law that created the community-technical college system in 1997 gave it broad authority to set employment policies for the system and its institutions. But that same law, the attorney general notes, unambiguously states that new faculty members at KCTCS "shall earn tenure," and that clear-cut statement takes precedence over more general assertions of authority. "Although the board has been given 'exclusive authority' to govern KCTCS," Conway writes, "such authority cannot be over and against that of the General Assembly," which enacted the law and its specific provision assuring tenure for faculty members.



Friday at right about the time people start cracking a cold one--the end of civilization.



Speaking of Friday--the beer of the week is Left-Hand Brewery's Oktoberfest. Even though it gets only middling marks on BeerAdvocate, I had it on tap the other day and found it to be refreshing, full-bodied (in the Marzen style) and quite, quite good. They make a number of other, very good beers.

Their website is cool, but the Flash gets annoying after a bit. It also automatically resizes the window in Firefox--major annoyance.


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A Pictoral History of Racism in the United States
by AndrewMc | 9/23/2009 05:00:00 AM
This is a picture history, and I don't want to foreshadow the story. Follow me below.





The images of a slave ship shocks us today, and part of their power comes from the dehumanization of the slaves. Shackled and forced into the cargo hold, these Africans are pictured as sub-human.

slave ship


Here the imagery is a bit more subtle, as the artist portrays slaves killing helpless women and children as well as an unarmed man. It reinforces the racial imagery of the brutish black man.






This widely circulated image of a slave being executed for taking part in a rebellion in Suriname demonstrates the brutal lengths to which people went in order to enforce the slave system. It also reinforces the idea of the kinds of punishments fit for non-whites.




After the American Civil War, racial imagery came to be used as a tool of political and social oppression. Not that this wasn't the situation previously, but after the Civil War Africans had the legal right to vote. For racist whites this required new methods of intimidation, and imagery was as important as ever. Here we see an African American and an Irishman depicted as monkey-like, showing that in this early period the use of an ape to depict people of supposed "lower" racial orders wasn't confined to African Americans.





The Spanish American War and the onset of imperialism provided American cartoonists with another opportunity to depict the "other" in stereotypical ways. Note the use of ape-like imagery to show foreigners as sub-human. This, of course, coincided with the height of the "Social Darwinism" movement.





Of course, racial intimidation wasn't limited to cartoon-world. In real life, whites lynched blacks by the thousands from the 1860s through the 1960s. Lynching provided the violent backdrop, and the ever-present threat, that helped reinforce the consequences of transgressions by blacks who strayed out of "their place."





For some, lynching was a family affair. Note the young girl in the right-hand foreground.





Racism also wasn't limited to cartoons and violence. Institutional racism in the form of workplace segregation was the legalized norm in many states up through the 1960s and 1970s.





As it was for public facilities, of course.




The presence of groups like the KKK--even when they weren't engaged in violence--served as a form of intimidation.








And then we have this, regarding President Barack Obama, which is easy to parse in the context of several hundred years of racial imagery and intimidation.













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It Is Us
by AndrewMc | 9/21/2009 07:00:00 AM
Last week I had the “opportunity” to attend the Kentucky “Governor’s Conference on Postsecondary Education Trusteeship.”

I love the word “opportunity.” It has so many divergent meanings, and as with many words, context is everything. A business opportunity can bring profit, and the phrase “opportunity knocks” is generally seen as positive. But when my department head says “I have an opportunity for you,” I usually turn and run in the other direction. When the dean or the provost says it, I’m not yet sure what to think.




So there I found myself at the Governor’s Conference—a yearly event that lays out the “state of the union” for education. The conference features sessions on a variety of topics. This year’s offerings included something on enrollment, a session on trustee/regent responsibilities, one on the “post-recession” challenges, a session on the upcoming legislative agenda in Kentucky, and a few others.

At the opening talk, the speaker flew through a series of PowerPoint slides, sometimes three or four of them in a matter of a second or two. But I did learn that nationwide, more money is being spent on wealthier students, and less on low-income students in the form of grants, federal aid, and institutional aid. So, the speaker concluded, more money is going to students who don’t need it. In the past year, there’s been about 17% more money for low-income and about 35% more for high-income students. 60% in aid dollars go to students with no financial need.

This should be probed a bit. I suspect that the speaker was casting a pretty wide net with her figures. For example, I suspect she’s counting the increased money that’s going into honors programs, which tend to serve students from middling and upper-class backgrounds.

At the talk on the legislative session we had a chance to ask questions of two of our legislators who are on Kentucky’s Senate Ed. Committee. Both are very nice guys, but I harangued them for calling for greater oversight of universities by Trustees/Boards while at the same time not exercising their own oversight over those boards. For example, I went into the issue of tenure at KCTCS and the astoundingly bad decision made by the Trustees. Where is the oversight when these boards fail?

By far the most startling thing I saw came at a session on higher education in the “post recession.” Friends, this is a sign of the times, and it wasn’t pretty. In fact, I’d call it a downright nightmare.

Essentially this speaker based his talk on three main premises:


  • The current recession requires decisive action: cutbacks, and long term innovations
  • A new generation of emerging analytic capabilities [web 2.0], means more accountability and performance improvement
  • To lift out of recession and more forward, and become more efficient and have better solutions, based on operational efficiency


OK, so far a bit of this makes sense. There’s fat in any university, and the recession certainly requires us to re-think how a university operates, what we need to prioritize, and how we can move forward. And certainly “operational efficiency” is something that any university should strive towards. The number of non-teaching administrators is growing by leaps and bounds.

And by and large he made some sense in the things he said when he discussed how we need to make sure students complete college without having to deal with too many institutional obstacles. But a lot of it made me uneasy, to be honest. The fact that he was hammering the “efficiency theme” got me a bit worried. It clearly was slanted toward the idea that students needed to get in, get out, and get a job. There was very little sense of a broader educational mission, or of any kind of understanding that a university exists for more things than to award degrees to get people jobs.

Whatever. I’d heard these things before.

But then he said that we need to “Improve academic productivity” and my head snapped up. I raised my hand. “Could you possibly explain what you mean by that?” I asked. His initial answer didn’t say anything, so I asked him to again explain how one would measure efficiency among faculty. At that point someone in the back, who I believe was with the speaker, shouted that it was “entirely possible to measure efficiency among faculty, it’s done in factories all the time!” I laughed, turned to the speaker, and asked him to readdress the question. He started to talk about how courses are taught, how many students one has, about hiring more adjuncts, and holding professors accountable for getting students through. I started to get chills.

I realized that I could meet all of his efficiency requirements by teaching a few 500-person sections, assigning crap work, and giving everyone an “A.” And that would be perfectly acceptable under his model.

Then I looked through the brochure for his biography. The speaker was a consultant for several factories (including Black and Decker) and for the University of Phoenix and Capella University. So, essentially his experience has been in trying to help a company produce a product for as little money as possible, all while charging as much as possible for that product. He has no teaching experience.

This is the future, folks. As state funding decreases and universities come to rely on tuition for more of their operating budgets, there will be increased pressure to make certain that students graduate, regardless of the education they receive. The idea of a “liberal arts” education will fall by the wayside as universities seek to maximize their bottom lines by hiring more adjuncts and having them teach larger sections of students.

Keep in mind that when KCTCS decided to abolish tenure for new hires, it started itself down the road towards greater efficiency. And this isn’t just a “Kentucky thing.” Other states are looking into changing the tenure rules as well.

In the meantime, the Board of Regents offered the president of the University of Kentucky a $168,000 “performance bonus.” Lee Todd, who earns $304,000 per year, wisely turned it down, saying that it would be inappropriate in this economic climate, when faculty and staff didn’t get raises this year.

The response? The Board voted to give it to him anyway, with one member saying “"He is CEO of a $2.4 billion entity. I think anything under $1 million is paltry, personally."

Welcome to the future of education.


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Friday Ramblings, Sept 18th
by AndrewMc | 9/18/2009 12:01:00 PM
Nobody at my university thinks our system of student evaluations is in any way accurate. One question on the form is "Does your instructor treat you fairly with regard to race." I [white guy] have had classes with not a single non-white student in them where I've pulled an 75-80% "Strongly Agree" or "Agree" rating.

I show up early for class every single day, with all my stuff ready to go. I pull 80-90% "strongly agree" on "My instructor shows up on time and prepared."

The whole evaluation tool is deeply flawed--all faculty unanimously agree on it. And yet the university uses it as its main basis for tenure and promotion. And the faculty voted not to change to a new instrument, largely because of fear of the unknown.

Still this is worth reading. [subscription required, sorry]

Follow me . . . .



This article [registration required] reminded me of stories I'd hear about rural school districts here in the "48." A few months before testing time administrators would identify kids likely to perform really badly on state assessment tests. They'd bring the parents in and "recommend" that the kids be homeschooled. Then they'd bring the kids back after testing at some point. I've heard this from enough disparate districts--where the teachers say it happened in their schools--to think this isn't entirely legend.


The steady progress of socialism. I'm torn on this one. I'm glad the government is working to increase funding. And I was not comfortable with the subsidies for private lenders [hell, let them sink or swim on their own, right?]. But if student-loan funding comes to be dominated by the government, then there's always the chance that some unnamed, capricious political party could vote to end funding. And that'd be it.

This article comes on the heels of a vote, in my town, to reject a proposal to add a $6/year tax to every $100,000 in value on a home in order to help fund the school system. Given property values here, there are very few people who would see their property tax increase more than $18 per year. Yeah, $18 per year. But no! Taxes are anti-American. Like education.

Here's a fun game: ask your university's IT person how much of a hassle this would be.

Don't read this until after you've had a stiff drink. Or two.



Speaking of drinks, it's Friday! Beer Of The Week is Stone's Vertical Epic. They release one each year, on the numbers [2/2/02, 3/3/03, &c &c]. This year's 9/9/09 just came out last week, and I haven't been able to find it so far here. If you've had it, let us know how it is.


Just a reminder that people should use the open threads for random ramblings instead of hijacking a topical thread for something. There's an open thread every week. All discussions are welcome, except for holocaust denial and "truther" stuff. If people don't like those two restrictions, find another blog. Seriously.

Sorry, but that's life. If people want to discuss why these rules are in effect, have at it [but don't assume that the regular contributors will participate]. But the simple reason is that Holocaust denial is intellectually fetid. "Trutherism," is rarely subject to intellectual discourse, but instead is characterized by footstomping, breath-holding, and special pleading. If those two rules aren't to your liking, there are plenty of places for you to shout and dance around. I hate to be blunt like that, but I've been dealing with Holocaust deniers on the Internet since 1989, when I first got on. Nothing's changed, and the "Truthers" aren't much different in terms of content.


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Tuesday Open Thread
by AndrewMc | 9/15/2009 07:00:00 AM

How schools "calculate" the "percentage of full-time faculty" for rankings.

Combating discrimination on campus.

Find a review of some new scholarship on Alger Hiss here.

More money doesn't necessarily mean more graduates.

I thought this was timely, given the recent addition of about a half-dozen "studies" programs to the curriculum at my university.

Re-think that grading style! [subscription required]

New faculty? Good advice.





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Faculty Strike
by AndrewMc | 9/13/2009 07:48:00 AM
For those of you who have not been following the news in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, faculty at Oakland University in Michigan have been on strike.

That strike ended Thursday, with a three-year contract agreement.

Faculty had been sounding off about things here.

Many historians participated in this strike, and I hope to have one or two of them recount their experiences for us here.






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Deregulation and the Triumph of Wall Street
by midtowng | 9/11/2009 12:11:00 PM
With most of the media focused on Obama's speech about health care on Wednesday, this item got largely overlooked.
Sweeping regulatory reform of the financial sector-thought to be a 2009 legislative given just four months ago-may now come down to a piece-meal approach, with the White House and its allies happy to see a couple prized components signed into law this year.
"I think it's unraveling,' says former FDIC Chairman William Isaac. "It is hard for me to see how this legislation gets done this year."
One year removed from a catastrophic, global, economic meltdown, and 26 months removed from the start of the credit crisis, our political establishment is either unwilling or unable to reform the system and punish the perpetrators of this debacle. The situation is so far beyond the pale that it makes one wonder if another catastrophe is even avoidable.



"And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."
- Sen. Dick Durbin
The proposals also challenged the status quo of the financial services industry, which publicly supported the reforms in general but lobbied against many of the particulars behind closed doors.
"There's a lot of problems with this regulatory reform, so it could easily slip to next year," says one knowledgeable industry representative.
In fact the proposed changes are extremely mild in comparison to the deregulations that preceded them in the previous decades. But Wall Street simply can't wait to return to the speculative frenzy of the recent credit bubble, and now that most of the risk has been offloaded onto the American taxpayer, Good Times Are Here Again.
The all-consuming debate over health care has damped enthusiasm for tackling such complex legislation. Meanwhile, major U.S. banks have regained their footing, and some of their swagger.
Companies are selling exotic financial products similar to those that felled markets and the world economy last fall. And banks' appetite for risk has grown: The nation's top five banks collectively stood to lose more than $1 billion on an average day in the second quarter of 2009 should their trading bets go sour, a record level. Now, the federal government is locked in a kind of regulatory limbo. U.S. officials say they are committed to preventing history from repeating and have pleaded for fresh powers to do so. But today, they have few new options -- excepting another bailout -- should financial markets seize up again or a large institution totter.
"There's no fundamental change in the way the banks are run or regulated," said Peter J. Solomon, a former Lehman vice chairman who runs an eponymous investment bank in New York. "There's just fewer of them."
...
Perhaps the best indicator of Wall Street's revived exuberance is its continued pursuit of exotic financial engineering. The market for credit derivatives, widely blamed for helping destabilize markets, remains vast....Total return swaps -- a type of derivative that lost favor during the crisis -- are among the instruments regaining popularity, bankers and investors say....Even collateralized debt obligations, perhaps the biggest money-loser in Wall Street history, are staging a comeback of sorts.
So after trillions of bailouts and guarantees at the taxpayer expense, banks have used that taxpayer money to thwart any reform legislation, while returning to risky investment practices at an even greater level than ever. And when things blow up again, we can expect an even larger bailout than before. Or another Great Depression. Or both.
Nothing has been fixed. Nothing has been changed, because we gave money to the people that caused the problems and demanded nothing in return.

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"The abatement of financial tensions has led some financial institutions to imagine they can return to the same modes of action prevalent before the crisis."
- British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, September 3

So what has Wall Street done with all that TARP bailout money? Well, they bough Ginnie Mae bonds because they are backed by taxpayers.
Wall Street also used the TARP money to give themselves huge bonuses. More than anything else, Wall Street has used the bailouts to speculate on stocks and bonds.

What the Wall Street banks haven't done is lend money to businesses so that they can hire employees.
"The pace of bank credit tightening has become draconian in scope and now stands at the recessionary levels last seen in 1991 and 2002," credit analyst Christopher Garman said in a report. "This promises a rapid increase in default rates over the next few quarters."
What the Wall Street banks haven't done is lend money to consumers so they can pay their bills.
About 65 percent of domestic banks -- up notably from about 30 percent in the April survey -- indicated that they had tightened their lending standards on credit card loans over the past three months, and about the same fraction of respondents -- up from roughly 45 percent in the April survey -- reported having tightened standards on consumer loans other than credit card loans.
Only the healthiest borrowers, the ones who need it the least, have access to credit these days. We could have let the Wall Street banks fail and have gotten into that situation at a much cheaper price.

All things considered, you have to wonder if the Green Shoots and Recovery talk has any validity if the bank's lending patterns don't reflect it. On the other hand, the Green Shoots talk has been very effective in reducing the political pressure for banking reforms.

Which brings us back to the proposed banking system reforms.
The first thing that jumps out at you is all the ways that the Federal Reserve would be entrusted in regulating and reforming the financial system. The Fed would be in charge of detecting and thwarting systemic risk.

The irony could not be greater because the Federal Reserve was the leading advocate of deregulation in the financial system over the last two decades, believing that the financial markets are self-regulating.
Not only that, the Fed was caught flat-footed by the economic meltdown. They completely failed to detect the credit bubble, despite repeated warnings from outside the Federal Reserve, and then failed to understand the magnitude of the situation until the system was on the verge of collapse.
What's more, the Fed has shown no signs of a change in attitude. They continue to view their role as janitor of disasters, not a preventer of them. Their only accomplishment so far has been a massive transfer of bad debt from private hands to public hands.

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"We must break the Money Trust or the Money Trust will break us."
- Louis D. Brandeis, 1913

Then there are the things mostly missing from the proposed reforms. For instance, limits on executive compensation, an idea that America is fighting on a global scale.
Then there is the half-hearted attempt are regulating the rating agencies, the people who got paid to say that subprime mortgages were "safe".
Basically, even if all these proposals were implemented, which isn't going to happen, it still wouldn't be nearly enough.
"The American regulatory structure is in total disarray and what has been proposed to fix it is partial, and even then there is heavy resistance," said Hal Scott, Nomura Professor on International Financial Systems at Harvard Law School.
"I don't see us coming out with any significant change to the structure."
What I find to be most interesting from the reform proposals, and from the political debate, is the complete absence of discussion concerning the most obvious of suggestions - rolling back the deregulations.
I think the reason this isn't being discussed is because any debate about past regulations would illuminate just how pathetic the proposed reforms are.

Regulating casino capitalism

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“America’s economic system is where it is today because gambling became the financial sector’s principal preoccupation. The pile of chips grew so big that the Money Industry displaced real businesses that provided real goods, services and jobs.”
- Harvey Rosenfield

Did you know that Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo are currently in violation of federal banking law, but the government won't enforce that law?
The law in question is the Riegle–Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic President.

Prior to passage of this act, banks were restricted from operating widespread, multi-state branching networks. Plus, many states had their own restrictions on banks. These restrictions dated all the way back to the National Bank Act of 1864. The result was a nation full of relatively small banks. The idea was that competitive equality was good for the industry. Local banks invested their money locally, while large banks drained funds from rural areas and directed them to large cities.

The Riegle-Neal Act deregulated this limitation on the financial industry. Now banks could go national almost without restriction. The result has been a dramatic decrease in the number of small banks in the country.
However, there was one caveat built into the bill - no single bank could have more than 10% of all the deposits in the country.

The 10% limit remained in effect for a little over a decade. When the crisis struck in 2008, the Treasury and Fed encouraged the consolidation of the banking industry between the weak and the strong. The 10 percent cap became the victim of the crisis in the same way that laws against torture were also ignored.

"The goose that lays golden eggs has been considered a most valuable possession. But even more profitable is the privilege of taking the golden eggs laid by somebody else's goose. The investment bankers and their associates now enjoy that privilege. They control the people through the people's own money."
- Louis D. Brandeis, 1913

One of the primary means for Wall Street banks to bring in revenue these days is charging fees for pretty much everything. They will haul in 38 Billion dollars on overdraft fees this year, with a median APR of 4,547%. That's enough to make a loan shark blush. They will rake in another $48 Billion from credit card swipe fees.
The best example of predation by the banks is in the form of payday loans. The major banks have always been silent owners behind this loan shark filth that suck the life blood out of the poorest, but lately they have come out into the open.
A few of the nation's largest banks -- including Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp, Wells Fargo & Co. of San Francisco, and Fifth Third Bancorp of Cincinnati -- are now marketing payday loan-type products, with triple-digit interest rates, to their checking account customers.
Would it surprise you that as recently as 1979 this sort of usury was regulated and illegal? Would it also surprise you that it was a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President that revoked those laws?

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The law in question was the Depository Institution Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. William Greider explained in his book Secrets of the Temple, "Passage of the Monetary Control Act had very little to do with how effectively the Federal Reserve could control the supply of money. It's purpose was to protect the Federal Reserve's political base."
The law did a lot of things such as requiring banks to operate under the Federal Reserve umbrella (commercial banks were leaving the Fed at the time), gave banks more opportunities to merge and consolidate, raised deposit insurance levels, and, oh yeah, allowed S&L's to speculate in commercial real estate. But it also did one other thing that seems very relevant today.
Eliminates State mortgage usury ceilings and restrictions on discount points, finance charges and other charges...
The most important part of the Glass-Steagall regulation of the New Deal was Regulation Q. This law regulated the amount of interest and fees that banks could charge for over 47 years.
The Monetary Control Act gutted Regulation Q, and all state usury laws were unilaterally suspended. The law was a political trade-off. The Federal Reserve became stronger at the banks expense, but the banks endorsed the law because they got the most prized gift of all - a free pass to prey on the most vulnerable in American society, and they got a multi-billion dollar tax cut to boot.
It seems rather ironic that the give-aways to the wealthy that Reagan and the Republicans of the 1980's were famous for started entirely with the Democrats.

"I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010. I wasn't around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness."
- - Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, 1999

"The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown."
- Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, 1999

Much ink has been spilled over the demise of Glass-Steagall in 1999. In fact many of the ills that plague the financial world today go back further and are not being discussed today. Reviving Regulation Q would be the most moral and Christian act we could do today, but it is not being discussed. Rolling back the Riegle-Neal Act would permanently fix the problem of banks being "Too Big To Fail", and thus saving the taxpayer of ever having to do another disastrous bailout of these crooks.
In the meantime, even before any reforms are voted on, it would be nice if the government would simply enforce the laws already in place, such as the 10 percent cap rule.

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Teach Your Children Well
by AndrewMc | 9/07/2009 07:00:00 AM
This week, the President of the United States plans to speak to the nation’s school children in order to urge them to stay in school, work hard to succeed, and don’t do drugs. According to an e-mail sent by Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, the president’s message is that kids should “work hard, set goals for their education and take responsibility for their learning.” Uh oh.

The message of working hard to better oneself is apparently one that is both dangerous, and anathema, to large swaths of the Republican Party.



Naturally, there is a Republican backlash against the president’s attempt to indoctrinate our children with the crazy message that they should work hard in school, that they should use their education to get ahead in life, and that staying off drugs will, in the long run, lead to a life in which they can become prosperous citizens who can contribute to the greatness that is the United States of America. The very idea of this speech has made Republicans irate.

Of course. Because what could be more insidious that the president of the United States trying to get children to do the very thing that the vast majority of us agree that they should do? Is it the message that they should work hard? That they should take responsibility for their learning? Both of those ideas strike at the very foundation of Republican ideals of laziness and reliance on the government to tell you what to do.

We can posit a number of reasons for Republicans’ reaction. Robin Gibbs dismissed it as an indication of the “silly season.” I dunno. If that’s the cause, it’s been “silly season” since November 5th. Others have attributed it to the August doldrums. But what with the health care debate raging across the country, the war in Afghanistan, and the steady trickle of mostly-depressing economic data, there’s been a distinct lack of fodder for the papers this August.

A new term seems to have entered the American lexicon—Baracknophobia—which describes the irrational fear of all things related to Barack Obama. Except I’m not sure it’s that, either.

I think there are a couple of intertwined explanations. On the one hand, the Republican party is essentially bereft of any single elected national leader with a coherent intellectual agenda who can reach people in a systemic fashion. They have nobody who can speak for them from the steps of the Capitol who commands the respect of the rank-and-file. Perhaps the only elected official who comes close for them in terms of national prominence, unfortunately for Republicans, is Michelle Bachman. Most people, however, would recognize that she’s nuttier than a fruitcake. Seriously.

Instead of intellectual rhetoric, what the Republicans have is an array of people from the talk-circuit-media [Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck] who throw out red meat to their listeners in order to boost ratings. A vicious cycle ensues as the more traditional media outlets—television and print news—pick up on the rantings and elevate those “ideas” to national prominence.

It makes for great entertainment, bad politics, and, I believe, a dangerous cultural and intellectual environment.

A republic is at its healthiest when it has political parties that can stand in opposition to each other on policy matters, but cooperate when necessary. Within that, though, it is imperative that both parties have clearly defined agendas with intellectual foundations that speak to the core principles of their respective followers. In cases where a country has only a two-party system, it is especially important for the opposition party to have a clear set of policies with which it can challenge the majority group.

Right now the United States doesn’t have that. We have one party in power that is attempting to forward the set of policies on which it was elected. This party has not done the best job of framing the debate, to be sure. However, while it may not be clear what the Democrats will eventually settle for in negotiations, it is pretty clear what the Democrats stand for—health care reform, environmental policies, greater regulations, great power to labor instead of management, and a whole array of other reforms.

Republicans used to have a clear ideology, framed by people like Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley. These were people who actually attacked the founders of the John Birch society for being too wingnutty. Such a thing would be unimaginable in today’s so-called conservative environment.

And so we find ourselves in a setting where asking schoolchildren to write letters to the president to suggest solutions for the president [something that my own university would call “student engagement” and for which they would dish three credit hours] is labeled “Marxist” by the Michele Malkins of the world. If that weren’t loopy enough, Democratic strategist Patricia O’Neill writes this off to “diversity,” as if one of the Democrats’ main party platforms [the push to include more minorities in all areas of American life] is equivalent to the ranting of a fringe group of whackjobs.

It’s not news that something is seriously wrong with civic discourse in American pubic life. It’s probably not even news that there is something so fundamentally flawed inside the Republican party that it cannot challenge and control, or at least ignore, the crazy in its base. And, I have to say, it’s not really even news that the Republican party cannot form, much less act on, any kind of coherent set of policies that reflect either its party platform or its core principles.

This latest round of “Say no at all costs” might be different. The vocal group of Republicans who scream about Obama asking children to be responsible, stay in school, and not do drugs may not represent the core of the party. But they do represent the most vocal group. They are the same group of people who just got home from Teabagging and disrupting town halls. And they are the face of the party, whether mainstream Republicans like it or not.

For a while I had thought “good, then they can go on and lose a few more elections.” I’m no longer convinced that this is a good thing for the American Republic.

[An update: The White House has released President Obama's subversive speech.]

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300,000
by AndrewMc | 9/04/2009 08:39:00 AM
Sometime in the next few minutes the "Visit Count" for Progressive Historians, according to SiteMeter will pass 300,000. It's an incredible milestone. Looking at the map of visitors, one can see that in any given month Progressive Historians reaches people on all the inhabited continents. Amazing.

Browsing back through the archives of posts that go back to 2007, it's also amazing to see how many incredibly high-quality, thoughtful, and analytical posts have come through here.

Jeremy deserves a huge, virtual, pat on the back not only for starting this blog and working his ass off to keep it going, but also for corralling authors, responding to posts, and generally being tireless in his commitment to history blogging.


[A quick update: Visitor #300,000 was someone coming in from Bombay, India.]





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CARE Packages for the Troops
by AndrewMc | 9/03/2009 06:15:00 AM
Go read this. Now.


Don't Send Michael Bolton CDs to Iraq.







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