SJG, please stop insulting everyone ........
The caption to this photo read..... Christmas dinner during the Great Depression: turnips and cabbage
http://buzzlamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2…
And please stop advocating another great depression where people lose their life savings, jump out of buildings, children starve, and the resulting revolution will be headed by drug addicted hookers I will get you banned!
http://buzzlamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2…
And please stop advocating another great depression where people lose their life savings, jump out of buildings, children starve, and the resulting revolution will be headed by drug addicted hookers I will get you banned!
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26 comments
No one gets "banned" around here.
They only get "band."
What happened though was people were economically displaced and so they were susceptible to disreputable sorts who went around telling people to migrate to other places, like from Oklahoma to California. If there were really jobs out there, then the employer could have provided rail transport. Only about 2 days.
But as it was, people were scared and tried dangerous things, like traveling long distance in broken down vehicles, without adequate cash reserves, and without much knowledge of what they were going to find.
They would have done better if they ignored the boosters and stayed where they were. Food was not absent there, draught or none. What had happened was just that they had lost either jobs or share cropping gigs. As bad as they may have seemed, there was still food, and they still had community support.
Now if they did try to migrate, it was different, as they were seen as a menace and they were herded into concentration camps. This was the real injustice of the Great Depression.
People did not loose life savings in the Great Depression, not unless what you are calling life savings means stock market speculation.
No one lost even 1 penny in a bank. Those banks that had collapsed were bailed out by the federal government. Not one depositor lost money.
Now of course, making the banks safe also meant making them highly regulated. This is also where Barak Obama lost his FDR moment, in that he did not restore banking regulation.
They say that it is just folk lore that ruined speculators leapt out of high-rises. But you're right here, it would have been a tragedy. It keeps me up late every night thinking about it, that speculators could commit suicide if the markets crash. I mean, what if afterwards there are still some left?
Women and men who deliberately and knowingly become sex workers are already social radicals. So if you want to be a social radical yourself, and if you don't want to become a sex worker, you would still do well to align yourself with sex workers. They are already way outside of the envelope.
But to be politically aware they and you do need to refrain from Alcohol, Drugs, Born Again Christianity, and Psychiatric Medication.
If we don't want to go again through something like the Great Depression, and probably worse, then right now today we must stop supporting these market bubbles and instead start reforming our political and economic system so that it works for everyone.
You've just got to face it mikeya02. Stop acting like everyone has to agree with you. What you are putting out is just plain poison. You would do well if you started spending your time with sex workers, and learning from them, instead of listening to Fox or NewsMax.
SJG
https://sites.google.com/site/sjgportal/…
Weather Report, 1976
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1CvETVF…
SJG
https://sites.google.com/site/sjgportal/…
The issue is that you don't like my views. You usually don't agree with them, but it goes beyond this. You seem to think that views you disagree with are improper. There is much which you seem not to have even considered.
SJG
https://sites.google.com/site/sjgportal/…
For as long as there has been a middle-class, there have been hookers who have been financially supported by it, occupying a much more radical social space than their patrons. These hookers are already proto revolutionaries.
I have myself been working very hard to secede from the middle-class. While I don't wish to be a sex worker, I do want to be a radical. And I do expect that I will be spending much of my time with female sex workers, sharing all aspects of life with them.
SJG
https://sites.google.com/site/sjgportal/…
."Or else go view porn on"Reality Kings".com
Hmm. Can't help but start thinking of him as Sloth from "The Goonies" or Cyrus from "Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay."
It's hard to win an argument with a smart person, but it's impossible to win an argument with a stupid person
from jackslash's conversation of last week
you should know don't feed the cats they will always be hanging around your back door
I also showed you Wikipedia and law firm pages also saying that for the entire United States, public drinking, with just a few exceptions, New Orleans being one, is illegal. Are these law firm pages and the Wikipedia wrong?
If you know more than they, then please do enlighten us.
I won't mention the name of the club this pertained to, as I'm not trying to impugn it, and it sounds like it must be really fun. I will just say that given that that muni does not require business licenses, and as it does not have an alcohol license, then probably it is an officially non-existent business. So no one knows who owns it. Obviously this is desirable.
Does it even have a Fictitious Business Name filing? Usually this is with the county. The idea is to protect the public from being in situations where they don't know who they are dealing with.
I would not be surprised at all if there is no record that this place even exists, other than the real estate deed. Utility bills might be getting paid in cash, or by the landlord.
Remember that I have been close to AAMP operators. So I know much about how clandestine businesses operate. Like most on this forum, I have partaken in prohibited forms of service offerings, and I have also tried to understand more about how such things operate.
If challenged by the authorities then probably at this Iowa establishment they plan to say that they are a BYOB membership club, even though they have no membership list and have collected no membership fees. I am sure that they know that this might not work.
@PhantomGeek, you clearly enjoy strip clubs. Have you ever considered why they do things this way, versus doing things that way? Even though they probably don't wish to talk about it, there are usually legal reasons which underlie how things are done. Have you ever considered that you might wish to be involved in some sort of a business which is somehow related? If so, then I suggest that you start looking into these things. An excellent place to start would be John Hubner's book about the Mitchell Brothers, "Bottom Feeders". It chronicles decades of legal and political struggle.
I gave the example of one Club-Ante in San Mateo, CA, basically the basement of a properly licensed blues bar named Vibes. I am fairly sure that Club-Ante did not officially exist, and so there was no record of there being a strip club in town. Eventually San Mateo did what it felt necessary and got the building demolished.
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@Meat72
Friends and family of mine lived through the Great Depression. In school it was always an important topic, because this was the first time in our nation's history that people started to think critically about things like our economy and the 'work ethic'. And then on top of this there was the interesting case of the 1934 Upton Sinclair Gubernatorial Campaign, and EPIC ( End Poverty in California ), and the particular focus on the vast surpluses of food which were being destroyed. And then there are the Grapes of Wrath book and movie, and much of their focus is on the fate of those displaced from share cropping and then conned into leaving Oklahoma, only to be treated horribly and subjected to completely unnecessary hardships in California. And it was because of this depiction of California that Steinbeck found himself subjected to death threats.
These migrants would have been coming into San Bernardino and Kern Counties. Still to this day, these counties and their sheriffs have bad reputations.
Then also there was FDR and his New Deal, and one of its most important accomplishments was the establishment of the USDA and farm subsidies. Farmers and ranchers were from then on paid to limit production. And the USDA itself buys up large quantities of agricultural product for it's own purposes, like feeding the poor.
The Great Depression certainly entailed economic dislocation. Besides land owners in Oklahoma going bust and being bought out by banks that wanted to transition away from share cropping in favor of mechanization and wage labor, the auto plants shut down and then all their suppliers shut down. So unemployment reached a level of at least 25%.
And then of course banks started to fail, and then this triggered runs on banks which threatened banks which otherwise would have been stable.
So fear was everywhere, and unfortunately lots of people were conned into this or that, where they would have done better just by staying put and staying calm. There was also a problem because many were ashamed of accepting welfare or private charity.
So what were some of the results? First of all, no bank depositor ever lost a penny. Second, one of the greatest Presidents in our entire nation's history was elected, along with a supportive congress. The Social Security Act was passed and it remains one of the most popular pieces of federal legislation of all time. Then there was the regulation of the banks and the financial markets.
Then with public works programs and then rearmament programs, and then a commitment to Keynesian policies to stabilize the economy long term, the economic problems were mitigated. This carried us into the late 70's, when we faced the challenge of the OPEC Cartel, and then the Shaw of Iran being deposed and hostages held in an embassy, and then the beginning of the dismantling of the New Deal when Ronald Regan was elected in 1980.
And remember that Donald Rumsfeld was there in Saddam Hussein's office, showing US support, when Saddam ordered poison gas attacks on the Kurds, and this emboldened him to wage war with Iran and this of course destroyed OPEC and that cheap oil funded the Reagan Boom. But then in 1986 the stock market crashed and some predicted that never again would the Dow exceed 4000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80…
But to get specifically to your issue of food availability, and especially in some of the more heavily populated regions of the country, East of Eden.
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/20th-dep…
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/07/03…
"Moreover, it was difficult for many to understand why people should go hungry in a country possessing huge food surpluses."
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommat…
"In the early 1930s prices dropped so low that many farmers went bankrupt and lost their farms. In some cases, the price of a bushel of corn fell to just eight or ten cents. Some farm families began burning corn rather than coal in their stoves because corn was cheaper."
"The Federal government passed a bill to help the farmers. Surplus was the problem; farmers were producing too much and driving down the price. The government passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 which set limits on the size of the crops and herds farmers could produce."
"Before the Great Depression, people refused to go on government welfare except as a last resort. The newspapers published the names of all those who received welfare payments, and people thought of welfare as a disgrace. However, in the face of starving families at home, some men signed up for welfare payments. For most it was a very painful experience.
Town families could not produce their own food. Many city dwellers often went hungry. Sometimes there were soup kitchens in larger cities that provided free meals to the poor. Winters were an especially hard time since many families had no money to buy coal to heat their houses.
"
http://www.iptv.org/IowaPathways/mypath.…
"The problem was over production and underconsumption, not under production."
https://youtu.be/IQ_lizW5zSI?t=48m8s
So I think what we can take away from this is that there was great economic dislocation, as people lost jobs and income, and so they lacked money to buy anything, even food. Unfortunately though, many responded to fear and did leave their home area, responding to rumors and unscrupulous promoters. These who responded to fear would be those most likely to experience hunger.
Then there were also those ashamed to accept private charity or welfare. These people had been raised on the 'work ethic' and it was hard for them to challenge it. But they had to. It was primarily a psychologically challenging time, much more so than a time when there was physical deprivation independently of this. After all, the basic necessities of life still existed, there just was not money to pay for them. But when no one has money, that doesn't really matter.
But as far as food itself, the issue was loss of money to pay for it, and then collapse of market prices badly hurting the farmers. BUT FOOD ITSELF WAS STILL AVAILABE AND THIS SURPLUS SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN NATION WIDE.
Remember too that I am today locally involved in community organizations, and some of these are devoted to feeding the poor. All during @Dougsters Boom of 2015, there have been poor people being feed by private charity and public assistance. But they aren't actually starving because attitudes have changed, and this change started during the Great Depression.
http://www.shfb.org/
And why not a food surplus during the Great Depression, draught in Oklahoma or not, there is no reason that food production would have been seriously undermined and so it would have been in surplus.
If people stayed in their home areas, even if living on the street, they would still be fed. The problem was that they were psychologically unwilling to do this, and so they often responded to fear migrated into other areas where they were seen as a menace.
Did some people starve? Yes of course they did. But there has been economic strife and consequences during the heights of each of these booms too. Many people suffer seriously during each of these booms. The only reason that they don't starve is that attitudes have changed.
And now to what caused the Great Depression? It was the lassie faire policies of Collide and Hoover and the rise of the speculators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE9aFqEy…
PBS, The Great Depression
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ_lizW5…
So what can we do to try and prevent more strife today? Stop supporting these stock market Ponzi Schemes, like the ones @Dougster earns his living by supporting, and stop supporting these new companies which seek to destroy our labor market. The longer people go on supporting these things, the greater the strife is going to be.
We must transition to an economy which is both economically sustainable and ecologically sustainable. The longer we go on avoiding this, and supporting these booms and the resulting busts, the more severe the big big bust will be, and the more strife it will cause and the more politically dangerous the situation will be.
FWIW, when Steinbeck wrote East of Eden, he had already departed California permanently in favor of New York. As people say, the book gives you a map to the brothels. The main female character, psychotic, was inspired by his second wife, a Hollywood actress.
When in Monterey they wanted to name the high school after him, Steinbeck objected and suggest that instead they should name a brothel after him. They compromised and named the public library after him.
SJG
https://sites.google.com/site/sjgportal/…
Chicago Hunger Strike, trying to stop privatization of public schools
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/9/4/chi…
SJG
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/…
TL; DR
Now if these attorneys are wrong, and you know better, then please to go ahead and enlighten us.
@Mikeya02, your source
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/…
Is a strange one. It sounds like some sort of far right conspiracy theory tripe.
Let me just try and respond the its broad brush assertions though. It talks about the period from 1932 to 1933. We.. Nov 1932 would have been the election, and FDR would have taken office in March 1933. So probably the worst of any unnecessary physical deprivations would have quickly ended once FDR took office, because people's attitudes would have changed.
As far as public works camps being strictly run, I know there is some truth to this. Take for example Boulder Dam, they did not want that to be like one of these mining towns with saloons, gambling, and prostitution.
But concentration camp, no I don't think so. But there may have been some sort of off the job discipline, not unlike being in the military.
The number of 7 million is completely preposterous.
I mean if you have food rotting on the ground, and you have people starving, I guess there are different interpretations you could apply to the situation. Is starvation the cause of death, or is it shame and humiliation?
One of these videos talked about a starvation death every hour, I think in Toledo. Okay, but just say a city of 800,000 and a life expectancy of 80 years, then there will be more than one death every hour anyway.
If a person is raised on the self-reliance ethic and they have never had an reason to question it, and then their job goes away, they might just want to dig a hole and crawl into it. Is that then a starvation death?
They say that the jobless today mostly stay indoors. Shame and humiliation I am sure.
Teresa of Calcutta has talked about the United States in recent decades. She says there is poverty everywhere, "for those who have eyes to see". In the United States she says that it is social isolation, not people dying out on the street.
I know a man who just died in his condo unit, from a diabetic coma, and from being over worked, and from refusing to go to the doctor. Some of this later was due to the costs. I tried to get his church to intercede. If things had been a bit worse in the last times I saw him, I'd off called 911 on him myself. Now I wish I had. But at the time I figured best to try and get his church to act, as he would be more likely to listen to them.
I mean in France, when there were food problems the people would just riot. That solves it. Usually what it was was that there was a shortage and so the price would skyrocket. What they were calling for was for the King to "set the price of grain." So they didn't actually steal the grain.
Then of course in the closing days of WWII in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh and his Communists came to prominence where there was a food shortage and people were being denied access to the food reserves. So the solution really was self evident, just start passing out rifles.
In the United States during the 1930's, I don't think anything like that would have been necessary. Americans are not usually that mean spirited. Problem was that people were just too ashamed.
And then when they did listen to rumors and migrate, the risks they faced multiplied exponentially.
But some of you folks are acting like I am calling for unnecessary misery. I am not. Could the 1920's bubble have continued? Well no of course not. The stock market was a Ponzi scheme. To maintain the prices you would have to be drawing a geometrically increasing number of people and their money into it, just to maintain pricing. So eventually the bubble had to burst.
And then with the production and consumption bubble, the same thing. People were living beyond their means, in order to gain social status, or to impress the opposite sex, or just to keep up with the jones. And of course as it still is today, automobiles are the staple crop of this.
So as living beyond one's means cannot go on forever, and as more and more people had their own income dependent on people living beyond their means, and then once it started to collapse, everyone started holding on tightly to what cash they had, extreme collapse was inevitable.
This is why when in 2008 the automakers shut down, we all knew this was really really serious. GM might have gone under for good. And then all the upstream suppliers will shut down and all the pension and benefit plans become at risk.
I mean today, at the peaks of each of Dougster's booms, and at the troughs of them, there are always people who do not have money to make ends meet. This is right outside my front door. There is no shortage of food production, as there was no shortage of food production during the Great Depression. But there are huge numbers of people who are just shut out, and many permanently.
Because attitudes started to change during the Great Depression, today we have Food Stamps and WIC, and we have General Assistance.
But we also have private charity. Most of the local supermarkets donate whatever food they have to take off the shelves due to expiration date, to these programs like Second Harvest.
They distribute to dozens of charities through out the county. Right across the street from them is Cathedral of Faith and their Reaching Out Center. They give food to hundreds of people per day. This is during both Dougster's booms and his busts.
What I am most impressed with is Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco.
http://www.glide.org/
They are committed to the premise that poverty is caused by social marginalization, not any kind of personal moral or salvation defect.
I mean, this should be obvious. You show me someone who is without food. I'll show you someone who has been socially marginalized.
http://www.glide.org/story
They serve over 1 million hot meals per year.
They will continue to do this for as long as it is needed, and it will be needed until people finally learn that our economic system does not work.
Our over consumption bubbles and Ponzi schemes cannot continue indefinitely either. Either we let them crash now and suffer a version of the Great Depression, or we keep propping them up and suffer a much more severe and politically dangerous version later.
President Obama did a pretty good job of mitigating the 2008 bust. He increased Food Stamps money, and this is one of the best ways to get money to poor people and get money recirculating in the local economy. He also had other food programs. NGO's were passing out these heavy boxes of canned and dry goods.
And then he funded all the 'shovel ready' projects. Lots and lots of them were underway here. So he mitigated the worst of it. But he missed his FDR moment in that the did not re-regulate the banks, and that would have been a greatly needed reducer of future risks.
So we have to change our system, otherwise there will be a crash far greater than anything imagined. So what we need to do right now is stop contributing to any of these bubbles, financial markets, real estate markets, or over consumption.
Let what happens happen, but then deal with it. Don't let people starve or beat their spouses or children. But don't prop up the financiers either.
Glide Memorial offers counseling for people facing homelessness for the first time. I see people who are going thru this all the time, and they are terrified. I know that during the Great Depression the fear would have been even worse because of the shame associated with not being employed. I think attitudes have improved somewhat.
From the Great Depression through the 1970's, homelessness in America was almost unknown. But then as Reagan came in, he made policy changes. Scientific American analyzed why this created modern homelessness.
So our private relief systems and the attitudes of our public agencies have had to change.
The only real remedy is to change how our economic system works. Learn from Upton Sinclair and his 1934 campaign, and learn from Buckminster Fuller who also came into his own views during the Great Depression.
This month's Atlantic Monthly has a cover article about people learning to live without anything like stable employment, but being able to live like that and still keep their heads up. If people can keep their heads up, then no one again will be starving while food is in surplus.
SJG
https://sites.google.com/site/sjgportal/…
the pigheaded moron also thinks that water was unnecessary to grow crops.
he is too stupid to look at pictures and films of the wastelands and devastation to understand what happened. instead he references Upton (all art is propaganda) Sinclair who never once missed the opportunity to lie to the American people in pursuit of his dream of worldwide nazi-like socialism claiming the ends justify the means.
the recently posted truism applies in spades: “it is hard to win an argument with a smart person but it is impossible to win an argument with a stupid person”
they really don’t come any stupider than the resident west coast alucard
Now of course I don't mean to contradict your family, but I will just say that within a decade the US would be supplying troops plus refugees all around the world. Especially back then the US could easily produce enough food to feed the entire world.
While there was a draught in Oklahoma, this was not the entire country and it did not even mean that food could not be produced in Oklahoma. It just meant that with the economic crash on top of that, many land owners went insolvent and banks ended up owning the land.
And then as explained in the article about Iowa, farmers had been having a hard time maintaining income parity with urban people, ever since the end of WWI. So to try and keep up, they were producing more and more and more. So during that worst time of the depression, 1932 before FDR was elected, there still would have been monumental and grossly excessive mountains of food. The price went to zero, everywhere in the country.
So if people were starving amidst plenty, then at some point we have to say that this is being caused by moralistic subjugation, not by an economic collapse, and certainly not by a food shortage.
But please, with all do respects, do tell us what your family members have said about that time. And please let us know the location this pertained to, and especially if it was urban or rural, and if there was hardship and lack of food, please let us know why it was this way. Where was the food?
SJG
https://sites.google.com/site/sjgportal/…