•TPC•

Photo: Civilian Conservation Corps at an experimental farm in Beltsville, Maryland. (Circa 1933)

By Carolyn Baker

Speaking Truth to Power

6/1/07

…..that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.

“The Glass Menagerie”, by Tennessee Williams

William Faulkner famously stated that “good history is not was.” By this Faulkner meant that history is a tapestry of interconnected events whose meaning and significance cannot be appreciated unless past causes, present manifestation, and future consequences are assessed. , author of The Great Depression, America 1929-1941, provides us with the kind of tapestry to which Faulkner was alluding as McElvaine analyzes the first momentous collapse that the United States ever experienced.

I was recently gifted with this book by a friend who thought that as an historian, I would appreciate it and find it timely, and certainly I do, but due to current events and how rapidly they are unfolding, my comments about it here will not be from an academic perspective. I am much less interested in the quality of history in McElvaine’s book, although I find it first-rate, and more interested in the values the author is emphasizing and that the Great Depression manifested among the masses of American people. You might say that I have been touched by and wish to share the soul of this book, more than its intellect. For that reason, I choose to describe this article as a commentary rather than a review of the book.

One cannot thoroughly appreciate the catastrophic nature of the Great Depression without understanding what preceded it. The decade of the 1920s, not unlike the economic milieu of the 1980s and 90s, was a time of dizzying, unrestrained, and frantic consumption. It was the apotheosis of the “conspicuous consumption” about which Thorsten Veblen wrote in his turn-of-the-century classic The Theory of the Leisure Class. Threading his tapestry forward, McElvaine writes that, “Put simply, most Americans late in the twentieth century have adopted the consumption ethic that was rising in the 1920s, but was temporarily reversed during the Great Depression.” (xviii) McElvaine, of course, wrote this book in the eighties, but certainly the consumption ethic has not abated but rather intensified since then.

Ironically, one factor that contributed to the onset of the Depression and that eventually pulled the nation out of it was consumption. Franklin Roosevelt’s stellar accomplishment in the engineering of New Deal policies was the emphasis on “purchasing power” for average Americans. McElvaine occasionally draws parallels throughout the book, and also in recent articles, between the twenties and the late-twentieth century, not only with regard to consumption but also to a stock market index that seemed during the 1920s to reach unprecedented heights. Clearly, the consumption on steroids that we have been witnessing the past sixty years in the United States is no longer capable of “curing” an economic depression, but it is certainly capable, along with mountainous debt, of contributing to the occurrence of a Second Great Depression.

Elevated levels of consumption are almost always attended by an increase in “individualism” and a decline in a sense of community. The Great Depression reversed this trend in America dramatically, and for me, that is perhaps the most riveting feature of McElvaine’s book as he writes, “…the most significant fact about the Depression era may well be that it was the only time in the twentieth century during which there was a major break in the modern trends towards social disintegration and egoism.” (xxiii)

From the perspective of today’s world, whenever I reflect on the 1930s, I never cease to be amazed at the spirit of cooperation that blossomed amid the hardship and impoverishment of the times. Of this McElvaine notes: “The economic collapse that started in 1929 obliged people who had begun to accept the new values of unlimited consumption and extreme individualism to take another look at these beliefs in comparison with the more traditional, community-oriented values that had existed in earlier times.” (xxiv) The author also notes that many men who had become unemployed and found themselves spending more time at home also found themselves in the position that women had traditionally experienced—that is, at the bottom of the economic hierarchy. Whereas in the Victorian era, the Horatio Alger-style, self-made man was championed, during the Depression the “self-made man became the self-destroyed man.” (xxiv) In other words, during the Depression, people began to recognize the value and necessity of interdependence which manifested in a preference not for the highly individualistic urban lifestyle, but for rural and small-town life.

I don’t wish to romanticize the Great Depression era as some golden age of cooperation and community, but I do believe there are applicable lessons to be learned from the way in which communities responded to the suffering of their time, particularly as we stand on the shifting sands of a cliff called “collapse.” As I have said many times, collapse is not an event but a process—a process which is not in the future but in which we are deeply engaged at this moment whether we recognize it or not. And imperfect as the spirit of interdependence may have been in the Depression era, it was, as McElvaine emphasizes, “…the time in which the values of compassion, sharing, and social justice became the most dominant that they have ever been in American history.” (7) Conversely, “…more and more people became dependent as the nation industrialized.” (7)

As the friend who gave me this book stated, “This book reveals very poignantly what has been lost in American culture.” He was referring above all to the issue of cooperative values, and values is something historians often avoid addressing in their frantic attempt to remain “objective.” Yet, as McElvaine notes, “Values are the critical base on which any society rests.” (196) Unfortunately, American capitalism itself is a poster-child for the schizophrenia between economics and ethics.

America in the 1920s was capitalism on steroids with the ruling elite gorging on corporate profits, most notably profits from the automobile and related industries. Three presidents in a row, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover had agreed that “the business of America is business”. Yet when the house of cards collapsed in 1929, the working and middle classes, alongside intellectuals who had been criticizing capitalism for some time, awakened to the nightmare that the American dream had become. Not surprisingly, countless working and middle class individuals moved dramatically to the left politically, many embracing socialism and organizing and protesting for economic and social justice. Why else during the McCarthy era was the thirties referred to as the Red Decade? (203)

And of course, gangsters of the Depression era were portrayed in film as Robin Hood’s. The 1960s cinematic portrayal of support for and idealization of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrows was not exaggerated. In my family I grew up on an often-told and re-told tale of my grandmother’s matter-of-fact statement that “if John Dillinger knocks on my door, I’ll give him a hot meal and a place to hide down in the cellar behind the furnace.” The Depression brought people—all kinds of people—together and kept them together.

One of the most powerful and moving pieces of cinema in the thirties was King Vidor’s “Our Daily Bread” in which a young unemployed husband and his wife (John and Mary) living in the city become desperate for income. John appeals to Mary’s rich uncle who gives them several acres of land which they are totally unskilled in farming. But along comes a farmer from a Midwestern state on his way to California with his family who joins them and begins teaching them how to farm. Soon the population of the farm grows and more and more unemployed, wandering individuals wind up on John and Mary’s land looking for not only a new start, but a sense of community with which to launch it. Together, the farm’s residents survive by hunting, growing their own food, and sharing skills. A series of challenges arises, but each time, the community moves through them—except for the most formidable of all, drought. However, near the farm is a reservoir, but the community has no way to access it. Therefore, they must construct a conduit from the reservoir to their crops—a gargantuan project that has them working day and night with picks and shovels routing the water to their land.

For me, the most powerful and moving scene in the film was the long brigade of men digging with their shovels and the coordinated thud of their picks into the earth, toiling around the clock, to bring water to their land. I’ll never forget the sound of those picks reverberating with sweat, determination, and above all, cooperation. They were successful, and their crops flourished, but only because they never gave up on creating a new life, and they never stopped working together to do so.

Today, no movement offers any viable alternatives for political, economic, social, or ecological justice. Few are even cognizant of the severity of the issues at hand, and most are woefully unprepared and uninformed. A frightening and naïve assumption prevails: that the U.S. government will “take care” of its citizens in the throes of natural disasters, pandemics, blackouts, or dirty bomb attacks. These realities could exacerbate one’s angst as one contemplates collapse, but in fact, they might instead motivate us to begin building the lifeboats we must have in order to navigate it. We will not be able to do this until we have experienced a profound transformation of our values—and our sense of community.

Historians generally agree that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Keynesian economics rescued the nation from total catastrophe, but McElvaine points out that “…the changing mix of American values in the Depression—was of even more significance than was Roosevelt himself.”(324) Roosevelt’s agenda would have fallen on deaf and smug ears ten years earlier, and it could not have succeeded without a change in values in the American people that was able to resonate with the values of the New Deal. I hasten to add that I do not believe that it was the New Deal that ultimately pulled the nation out of the Depression, for as I make clear in my book U.S. History Uncensored, it was ultimately World War II and the launching of the military industrial complex that did so and has continued to “prevent” depressions and mask more protracted, less visible economic and social injustice.

“Perhaps the chief impact of the Great Depression,” says McElvaine, “was that it obliged the American people to face up to the necessity of cooperative action because it took away, at least temporarily, the easy assumptions of expansion and mobility that had decisively influenced so much of past American thinking.” (337) Expansion? Mobility? Do these sound like aspects of American life that could be severely curtailed by energy depletion, climate change, or an increasingly worthless U.S. dollar?

Mainstream economists have just begun to use the “R” word in relation to the economy, but anyone who has done even minimal research, with or without a degree in economics, understands that the United States, in fact many nations on earth, are moving rapidly toward a Second Great Depression. It is therefore imperative to understand the causes and effects of the First Great Depression, particularly its impact on the culture and the values of individuals in it.

The author goes on to point out the “feminization” of American society during the Great Depression, noting that “The self-centered, aggressive, competitive ‘male’ ethic of the 1920s was discredited. Men who lost their jobs became dependent in ways that women had been thought to be.” (340) Yet it was not only in loss of jobs that men became more “feminized.”

Whenever any individuals, male or female, join to create community in a spirit of cooperation, they are “feminizing”, for the feminine principle is above all, relational—a concept inherent in the traditions of many indigenous peoples. It is this kind of joining that characterized the Great Depression era and to which we must aspire as we build economic, emotional, and spiritual lifeboats for the daunting journey ahead.

There will be no New Deal, no FDR, no parental federal government to kiss everything and make it better. There will only be ourselves and the others with whom we choose to join and prepare.

U.S. Census: One in Five Lives on Less than $7 per day

By William Shanley

New Haven, Connecticut (April 16, 2007) From Combined News Services and Evolution Solutions Newsroom — A 2004 analysis of data by the US Census reports that 60 million Americans now live on less than $7 per day. That’s one in five in the U.S. living on less than $2,555 per year. At the same time, the richest 1 per cent now garners about 16 per cent of national income, double what they earned in the 1960s.[1]

While global income inequality is probably greater than it has ever been in human history, with half the world’s population living on less than $3 per day, and the richest 1% receiving as much as the bottom 57%, the fact that so many Americans are living on so little, is particularly confounding.

The so-called “wealthiest, most abundant nation on Earth” now has the widest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation.[2] In light of the fact that one dollar spent in the Caribbean, Latin America and Asia buys what $3 or $4 does in the U.S means the quality of life for tens of millions of Americans is now on a par with huge populations living in the developing world.

And there’s more bad news to report from here. There has been no increase in non-supervisory wages since 1972. Twenty-five million Americans now depend on emergency food aid.[3] This rapidly increasing trend is a brutal reminder of how the extreme political right has eviscerated the social safety net in the U.S. over the last 25 years. At a time when globalization is in full gallop, and its destructive effects are being felt in many working-class communities from Detroit to Connecticut, the national crisis is being exacerbated by the rising power and stature of a winner-take-all culture that celebrates greed and egotism by rewarding the super-rich at the expense of the poor.

With only 6% of global population, the US consumes 25% of the world’s resources. A profile of Connecticut, one of America’s richest states, is quite revealing. It possesses islands of some of the greatest wealth in the world throughout Fairfield County, yet has three of America’s ten poorest cities, Hartford—the capitol—Bridgeport and New London. The New Haven-Meriden corridor has the 7th greatest gap between rich and poor in the US–in close running with some of the Old South’s poorest and most segregated states, Mississippi and Alabama.

Across the nation, the price of this economic dysfunction is an increase in the level of insecurity and pain for everyone, and there is almost no place left to live without encountering violent and non-violent crime, proliferation of drugs, guns, mental illness, lost hope, cynicism and corruption. At the same time, the middle class is being forced to bear the brunt of the economic cost for courts, police, prisons and welfare through taxes. While the median price of a home has doubled in the last five years, and with interest rates now on the rise, home foreclosure rates for first-time homebuyers are skyrocketing. Rents have followed suit, pushing millions more into economic hardship, poverty and homelessness. For too many Americans, the litany of violence, punishment and suffering seems unending, and the American Dream is now a uniquely Made-in-America Nightmare.

Evolution Solutions, a young, New Haven, Connecticut-based Internet start-up, is stepping into the breach to help bridge the chasm by organizing and circulating the enormous untapped wealth via a peer-to-peer gifts and wishes pool called GiveGet Nation. The non-profit social enterprise has launched its beta 1.0 application and its founders are welcoming the public to take the system for a test drive (www.givegetnation.net).

”If we can attract a mere 1% of what people in Connecticut have stored in lockers, attics, closets and basements, for example–a 1% that they will likely never use again–we can begin to wright the course and provide promise and possibility to the weakest among us here in the richest state,” said founder William Shanley. “Everyone, no matter how rich or poor, has needs and resources. We provide a level playing field for everyone to participate in the infinite game of life through sharing.”

“By beginning to circulate the limitless human product, labor, intelligence and spiritual capital of the world, we can transform it a little bit at a time,” said Timothy Wilken, MD, a Carmel, California-based general practitioner and synergy scientist. Dr. Wilken is William’s partner in the initiative and is the inventor of Giftegrity, a give and get synergy engine used in GiveGet Nation based on the work of the late genius Buckminster Fuller. “We not only provide a means to circulate lumpy items like goods, but our application also organizes and circulates work, intelligence and spiritual power to build, solve and heal. If you are retired and need a volunteer to rake your lawn, we can provide it. The same is true with professional counseling, engineering, medical and legal services. If you have artistic and spiritual interests and pursuits, you can post gifts and wishes in those domains, as well.”

“To make a difference, it’s crucial that we get the message out and alert givers and getters to the opportunities and efficiencies afforded by participating in our person-to-person world of sharing,” William continued. “Unlike many other non-profits that use a condescending top-down model with large staffs and overhead, we’re are the action that makes the rubber meets the road, without having to go through a cadre of social practitioners to meet peoples needs.”

US in Denial as Poverty Rises Next door to Yale, the bastion of privilege that turns out the land’s leaders, lies a tent city of America’s poor, huddled masses

by Ed Vulliamy

The north wind cuts cold and sudden across the historic green of New Haven. It blows through the ‘tent city’ where the homeless huddle. And it blows round the spires and quadrangles of Yale University, one of America’s richest Ivy League colleges…[4]

“I’ve done a lot of research here in our community,” William offered. “One homeless charity here in New Haven spend more than 80%of the $2.4 million it received in 2004 from a variety of government, public and private sources, before it housed one person. It has swank office space, a staff of 60 and only houses 105 people, 30 of them through a 60% rent subsidy. It spent ten years and $10 million to purchase and renovate a 33 unit building. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The city spent $18 million to house the homeless in 2004, yet it can’t tell you how many of its 1100 homeless it housed in any given week. The homeless are in plain site all over town, sleeping on the Green and begging for money on Chapel Street. And if the city housed them all, that would equal more than $16,000 per person, or $1,363 per month, enough to make payments on a $175,000 condo. The story is the same with AIDS services and services for the mentally ill. That’s just not good enough. This is not only true here in Connecticut, but all over the US.”

“HurricaneHousing.org housed 30,000 victims of Katrina in six weeks, and we will create success in this area, too, by connecting needs and resources,” said Timothy Wilken, MD. “Everyone has a story, some wisdom to impart and a contribution to make to society. It’s important that we give everyone a chance. At GiveGet Nation, we can stimulate the flow of abundance between islands of scarcity in society in myriad ways. Give, get, share. Goods, actions, knowing, spirit. We’re a human values economy that runs on the primary sources of human capital that underlie all money and goods and services.”

“We are only as secure as the weakest among us. Increase the level of suffering anywhere, and you increase the level of suffering everywhere. And vice-versa,” said William Shanley. “Everything affects everything else. There are no closed systems in nature.” That’s 21st century quantum science. “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” That’s classical physics from the 9th grade. These are laws of the universe, and it’s in our own self-interest to do the right thing or we end up bloodying ourselves. This message is not about laying a guilt trip on people, but alerting our neighbors to a daily crisis for 1 in 5 Americans–diminished dreams for at least one, possibly two or even three, in the lower and middle classes –who cannot make ends meet.”

“No matter how rich or poor everyone has gifts and wishes and genius to share. That’s our motto,” remarked Timothy. “In so doing, we provide an even playing field for everyone to participate in the infinite game of life. ‘As you sow, so shall ye reap.’ ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ These are principles to be found in all spiritual paths, of all people, places and times. And they are also indicative of the nature of nature. We must make these principles come alive again in our communities or our future will most certainly be lost and the promise of America soon forgotten.”

“As you can see, we’re quite passionate about the subject. Many people believe because they are rich and powerful, or because they were born in affluent families, that this is the natural order. ‘Survival of the fittest’ does not explain a Mozart born in Darfur. Nor does it recognize the value of the scores of generations who have come before us who have given us the gifts of language, math, invention, science, technology, the arts, and literature. It’s time for us to give back. ‘No man is an island” and can live in isolation from the air we breathe, the light of the day, the weather and the seasons in the life we share. Everyone needs to give and take. Everyone has gifts and wishes. Giving and receiving are the eternal process of exchange we call nature and the universe. All the great mystics and philosophers have taught the value of giving and receiving. It is not only the right thing to do, it is also what we do as living organisms. All we need to do is awaken to this fact, to project ourselves into the process of give and take, and come alive.”

About Evolution Solutions, Inc.

Evolution Solutions, Inc. is a registered non-profit corporation based in New Haven, Connecticut whose sole purpose is to educate, inform and provide the means for people to consciously evolve “a world that works for everyone.”

For more information about Evolution Solutions, Inc., its founders and associates, please visit the website http://www.givegetnation.net/ or contact William Shanley.

Contact: William Shanley, President at

[1] Financial Times of London, “Seasonal cheers for new philanthropists.” December 27, 2006.

[2] Global Issues: Social, Political, Economic and Environmental Issues That Affect Us All. “Poverty Facts and Statistics.” http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Facts.asp

[3] Alan Whyte, “Hunger in America: 25 million depend on emergency food aid.” March, 2006: World Socialist Web Site: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/hung-m09.shtml

[4] The Observer/UK, November 3, 2002.

By Si Contino

5/3/07

Because so many notable business pundits appear to be bemused by America’s most recent economic vexation, specifically the collapse of the mortgage markets; I thought I’d take a crack at edifying your readers, to the extent I’m capable, as to its true nature and causes.

To begin with one must remember that all the statistics kept on our economy are bogus. They are contrived in such a manner, compiled explicitly for casual regurgitation, so as to never display anything less than full employment, wage growth and a serendipitous lack of inflation.

With that as a foundation, what’s actually occurring in this economy is the globalization of assets and wealth. That is to say, because the value of American labor is falling so precipitously, (due to the utilization of cheap foreign labor around the world), the value of the assets held by them is falling in direct correlation with their declining wages. It must.

Here’s why:

A worker formerly employed in a lost economic sector, (manufacturing for example), earned between $50 - 60,000 annually. That job gets outsourced. Now that worker takes a job paying $20 – $25,000 annually. All the tax cuts, cheap foreign goods, and low paying jobs being created by President Bush and globalization aren’t going to restore this worker’s former standard of living.

Presently, someone trying to pay down a debt service based on their former “un-globalized” salary, and prior level of affluence, just can’t do it. The fact is, now that America’s been globalized, that worker – along with all others of the same economic rank – can’t afford the assets they’ve purchased and are trying to hold on to.

Just as wages within their economic sector are being deflated; so must the value of their assets be deflated. This has to occur so that new members of their socioeconomic group, those just entering America’s global workforce, can afford to participate; including those living and working here illegally.

What we’re seeing now is just the beginning of a global revaluation; a downward harmonization of American worker’s livelihoods with the livelihoods of the world’s other working people. Furthermore, this state of affairs isn’t going to end any time soon; not until the descending worth (wages and assets) of America’s working classes, meets the ascending worth (wages and assets) of the labor they compete with globally.

Therein lays the rub. Most of the rest of the world’s labor works for nothing, or almost nothing, and holds no assets. Truth be told, the only country whose entire economy has prospered due to Globalization is communist China; where free market capitalism doesn’t exist and where every societal need is provided for by the government.

As Ross Perot so aptly phrased it during his debate with Vice President Gore in 1993, we’re in: “a race to the bottom”.

Exacerbating this crisis is the fact that, while the wages and assets of those forced to compete globally are deflating; the costs of goods and services they must purchase to subsist are inflating. The primary sources of this inflation being deregulation and President Bush’s lust for printing money; principally to pay for the globalization of Iraq.

As for the true health of America’s overall economy international spending is out of control; Iraq alone is costing American taxpayers over $412 billion! Yet the Washington oligarchs have no compunction.

Across the board American’s have experienced the steepest decline in their standard of living since the Great Depression, as America’s become a debtor nation. Bankruptcies, home foreclosures, and personal dept are at an all time high, as is our trade deficit; while concurrently, real wages and property values plummet.

Still Globalist fanatics boldly proclaim their manifesto: “Free Trade will promote a global ecumenism and provide us economic prosperity” All the while America’s two greatest exports remain her jobs and wealth.

With the mendacious predictions which brought about Globalism in the first place, (being implemented without the true consent of the governed), and with America’s economic power declining; here’s the real question. What type of country is America destined to become in the twenty-first century?

Perhaps the answer can only be found in the past. Perhaps in Charles Dickens in his novel, A Tale of Two Cities.

About the author: I’ve been a lifelong resident of Bucks County, PA and am a married father of two adult children. After pursuing undergraduate studies in the 1970’s, I’ve acted in various capacities within the corporate setting.