The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

By Steve Fraser

Library book

So whereas the other three books; Coming Apart, Boom,Bust, Exodus and Our Kids tell what happened and why, this book attempts.to explain why there was so little.outrage at this latest capitalist crime spree.

Finance moves west and the populist movement begins.

Henty Demarest Lloyd says the Republican party isnall used up. "The Republican party took the black man off the auction block, but it has put the white man on the auction block of the money power." 

There's a book that just came.out called "To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party." I remember seeing that title and thinking yes this party once stood for something. You made men free. What do you stand for now?

101 In 1896 the People's Party disolved. "Millions flooded back into the Democratic party. William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech brought them in by the truckload.

1896 McKinley wins. The populists are beat down. Frederick Turner pronounces the frontier closed. A new millennium is upon us. The 1890 census spells it all out.

112 Find out more about the "Paris Commune"

113 Here's  the "Great Uprising of 1877"

115 At the time of the Great Uprising a Pittssburgh paper writes. The laboring people, who mostly constitute the militia, will not take up arms to put down their brethren." Contrast this with the rich dick who said "I could pay half the working class ro exterminate the other half." Maybe not sir. Maybe we will cohere.

118 Major unrest between the forces of capital and labor contnued. The 1886 Haymarket Square. What did the communist savages want? An 8hr work day. 

119 The movement towardss an 8hr work day became known as the great upheaval.

122 "The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor... [was] part trade union, part guild [and] part political protest...Like.the Populist movement... [it was] an alternate social universe of reading rooms, newspapers, lecture societies and clubs."

124 May 1, 1886 is the first May Day. Though not first celebrated until the following year "to honor the executed anarchists." May Day is "still celebrated now in most parts of the world except in the United States where it began."

128 It was Jay Gould in 1886 who said that about hiring.labor as quoted above.

131 Tomkins Square, Haymarket Square, these are the temples of Labor. And the most honored rallying cry of them  all Homestead!

133 Shortly after Homestead Frick is Shot by Andrew Berkman. People who screwed over their fellow man in that day always had to worry about this possibilty. Nowadays "Neutron Jack" can safely go on TV and.brag anout his abuse of the working class to thundering applause.  Wasnt always that way. Is this  how democracy ends? To thundering applause? 

134 Pullman 1894!

137 Coxie's Army

138 Ludlow! These arenthe historical bastions of labor.

139 1905 'The Wobblies"

145 "The past is mot dead, it's not even past." William Faulkner

146 "On the shoals of roast beef and apple pie socialistic Utopias of every sort are sent.to their doom. There is a new nook out this week that claims it's our ability to buy stuff (consumerism) that keeps us from rioting today. Even though it sucks we can still buy a new Iphone and be happy. 

Even Carnegie pictured hiself a.working class hero by founding working mens libraries. Course he then made it, with his union busting and insistence on the 12hr work day, so  the.working man would never have time.to use them. 

196 The picture looked great in America in 1970. The rising tide was lifting all boats for sure and it lifted the poors higher. "The bottom fifth of the population saw its income raise by 116%." And thentop fifth got 85%. There was plenty to go round.

235 "Between the years of 2000 and 2011 17 American manufacturers closed each day.

272 The blasts the myth that ruthlessness is necessary to promote proper "shareholder value". The author reminds us that this shareholder value is a brand new.concept in the corporation and that in most cases after ruthlessness and treachery to boost the corporations bottom line, in many cases the stock price declines. 

284 Ahh were firmly in the 80's now. It was heady times with everyman an investor and the day of the day trader. Newpapers, tv pop culture itself revolved around the next tale of Wall Street riches  just waiting.to be plucked. "The apotheosis... [of this era] was when Ivan Boesky addressed the graduating class in Berkeley 1986." The speech about greed being good was the basis.for the character of Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street, that was being written at this time, and would come out the following year.

287 And n with Reagan's splendidly opulent Inaugural ball, suddenly being rich becamemthe new black. The message was everywhere, from Lifestyles of the Rich amd Famous to fawing magazine coverage of these fabulously rich new society. It was morning again in America and we in the unmonied class were waiting.to be trickled upon. And boy did we ever get trickled on.

301 So our says its a 'vanishing act" that todays rich do, at least those that want to be elected.  Watching the uberrich John kery and George bush dress and actmlike.good old boys in that election was good.comic opera. This hiding out in plain site "contributes to self erasure as a ruling class: the final nonconfrontation." Not really sure i buy this argument.

303 Consumerism and a.feeling of choice, though false, is what keeps us quiescent says the author. A new book comkng out called Cool: has the same premise.

309 So how do you continue to feed your consumerism habit with no money? You charge it. Debt most times leads to those long nightsmof.feeling guilty and possible bankruptcy. But not.to feel yoo bad the author reminds us that the.most indebted of us ie our "financial institutions walk away from their debts passing them on to the public treasury, without a qualm.

213 Theres a fine line here about consumerism. The children of the greatest generation shunned the consumerist nature and the need to acquire and conform. I,  at the tail end of the boom, did not feel that way. Of.course those hippies were taken up later in the craze as anyone whose tried to buy tickets to Fleetwood Mac ($300 yeah right) will tell you. That group spends money now.

Yes independent contractors. The corps like that, easier to throw stuff away.

341 In 2012 union membership was at 6.6, the end of an era.

351 A new auto worker today bring home what his grandfather did in 1946, and glad to get. "All this was met with barley a whisper of discontent."

384 Good point here. The word parasitism in the first Gilded age meant the rich. In this one it means the poor. Still not sure how we got there though.

Mario Procaccino coined the term 'limosine liberal" in a Mayoral race against John Lindsay.

385 A 'tenther" is a person who quotes the tenth amendment at you, which reserves for the states all powers not  expressly granted to the feds

393 Oh this has to be wrong. "The homosexual population earns 10-26% less than heterosexuals." Ive never met a poor gay guy yet.

Books:

Henry.George progress and Poverty

Edward Bellamy Looking Backward

Henry Demarest Lloyd Wealth Against Commonwealth

William Dean Howells A Hazard of New Fortunes

1982 Barry Bluestone The Deindustrializarion of America

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century

By George Gilder

Steven Quartz and 1 more

Cool: How the Brain's Hidden Quest for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our World

John  kenneth Gallbraith The AffluentnSociety

Vance Packard The Hidden Persuaders

Marcuse One Dimensiomal Man

Charles Murray Losing Ground

Essays

Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities

By Chad Broughton

Library book

This is right in line with what I've been reading. I told the girl at the library I'm in my "death of the American dream" phase. These four book Murray's Coming Apart, Putnam's Our Kids, This book and Frank's Age of Acquiescence, and now the audiobook Losing our way will make the block.

These are all so similar Its like reading one big book detailing the story of our lost American Century. I grew up in the 60's at the height of the boom, and came.of age in the 70's when the cracks.first started.to show. In the 80,s I joined the work force albeit in the Army but still. These were still roaring times for all supposedly, but unbeknownst to me at the time the seems were coming apart. I remember thinking if everyone is.rich now why are so many Dollar Stores opening everywhere. The peices just didnt fit. By the 90's it was the computer boom and we all assumed we would.make up our losses  digitally, and some did. But definetly by the 2000's everybody could tell something was definitely wrong with the American Dream. Though still true for a small privileged few, for the rest of us it had turned into a nightmare. Then the rich dicks crashed the country amd.with that most of the worls and the.blinders were finally and totally removed.

Now we live in two separate Americas. Two diffents types of Americans separated but wealth, geography and experience.

These five books.mentioned document what I lived through. The weird thing is that I was totally ignorant of the vastness of the divide most of the time while living it.

I look forward.to seeing what was actually.going on behind the curtain while I was just trying to live my life in my beloved America.
(Gets off soapbox,  [to rousing applause]).

6 So the Maytag factory moved to Mexico, (great song about jobs moving to mexico by the Pirates of The Carribean call Streetman Named Desire check it out)
(And remind me never to by a Maytag appliance ever again) The worst thing about all this is is the big lie. The nig lie was we have to move.to Mexico, (cutting the throata of our fellow Americans in the process), to stay competitive. At the same.time CEO salaries were skyrocketing to astronomical hieghts. There was no move to compete. It was never necessary. The money the saved by destroying their own country went right into their own greedy little fat pockets. This is the whole.reality of the job moving phenomenon that swept America in the 70,s and 80"s. So where was I? Oh yes the Maytag move to Mexico so another greedy CEO can get his 30 pieces. So the so called "free trade areas" set up down there are called Maquilladoras. A local poet named Gloria Anzaldua describes it as "an open wound where the third world grates against the first and bleeds." Does that give you some idea of how wonderful it is there. Congratulations, you broke the country and exported misery all so instead of making 20 times the workers you could make 200. Kudos enjoy you pound of flesh and ignore that whole pesky Kharma thing, I'm sure ot doesnt apply to rich people.

Pg 7 love this "Pobre Mexico tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos" poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States. I first hear this reading a book by Eisenhower's son about the Mexican War and have lovednit since. 

12 the tar used by the workers in the late 50,s was full of what would later be recognized as carcinogens. Just be a nurse and witness the shells  of the human detritus from these and other factories. 

19 The author reminds us here of the "Kitchen Debate" where Nixon one upped Khrushchev by "beating the soviets at their own game of creating a classles, or at.least more egalitarian,  society."

Pg 28 finally after much negotiation the Admiral.factory was a.good placento work. It was a good job. "The 60's and the early 70's...thosr were the good times."

Up till that point no one expectednto benthere long anyway so it didnt matter. I remember my factory days. Everyone it seemed had somethingnelse going on for them and very few of my co workers ever would say that this job was important to them. We had musicians, professional athletes and all types of people who aspired to other lives that would be there for them andntheynwould leave this place behind. But webhad heard of Union places where people got paid well and got excellent benefits. The people who worked at places like Ford Motor Co were the elite of the working class and we all aspired to it. 

This is an aside....The NYS budget has passed. Minimum wage? Nope. Education money? Nope anything goodnfor anybody? Yep. Now when the rich buy there yachts in NY theyll do it tax free. This is what is important to our "so called" representatives. Anyone need any further convincing of how screwed we are?

Pg 32 with all boats being lifted equally, in 1973 "appliance city was humming" I was 12 that year and thanked god that I was born into this greatness. The future was so bright we had to wear shades (which were also manufactured in America.)

Pg 33 "There were 18 million manufacturing jobs" in America in 1975 and it would peak in 1979. That was the year I was to join the work force and finally get my share. Little did I know, the future, my future, in America would be much different than what I had thought.

Pg 36 Here's a tidbit I didn't know. The original legislation that gave workers rights under FDR's new deal didn't include farm workers. This is why their wages are so low and still are today. My parents came to Clintondale NY as migrant workers.  I will never forget where II come.from.

Pg 36 The farm workers Union triednto get the border sealed to stop the illegals from busting their srtikes with their sheer numbers. But the local power structure intervened and "the flow of replacement workers resumed. " This in 1967. Anyone who today, some 40 years later, who wonders why we can't seal off the border still, has their answer. Its because it support low wages for the farm jobs. 

Pg 44 And to this day, the labor pool, [in southern Texas] is at once limitless, desperate and transient -just the way employers like it. Such is the enduring legacy of the Magic Valley."

Pg 47 In 1974 Rockwell International bought out Admiral and it was the beginning of the end for Appliance City. In the negotiations for that year, instead of seeing what the Union could get, it was what would the Union give up to keep the doors open. And in that instance,30 years of prgress had just peaked and very few realized it.

Pg 62 Whereas the old managers shouted customer, customer, customer, the new CEO shouted Shareholder, shareholder, shareholder. Jack Welchs shareholder value movement had begun to take hold. Its where you forget everything else and just concentrate on the share price. This why phones are automated, it costs less and improves shareholder value. Ask anyone if they like these automated phones-the answer is.no. They know we hate them. They did it anyway. This is why I have to go back and.forth between internet and TV companies. They company couldn't care less about existing customers. They just want.new sign ups. This is what is good.for the.bottom line. Everything in the now, this quarter. In a recenrt movie I saw the corpoate lawyer tells the other one his kid is now 7 quarters old. This is where we are at today. And all that shaeholder value? You got it, went right in the CEO's pocket. They this trend is starting to reverse. Let us hope that is true.

Pg 64 so in the end Mr "shareholder value" Ward in just 18 months crashed the company and completely.tanked the stock. Screwed up everything. So what do you thinnk the board did? Tar and feathers? Out of town on a rail? Nope, not in this altenate plane of America. They handed him 2 million and asked him to please leave. Yep that sounds about right. Marvelous! That's fair.

Pg 71 After many takeaways, the plant.closed anyway. The news sent the stock price soaring. Screwing 1,600 American workers gave them a 7% bump. Congratulations! 

Pg 79 "Clinton sighns NAFTA on December 8, 1993. A day that will live in infamy. And Ross Perot hears a sucking dound.

131 The author quoyes a worker,"It used to be that if you laid people off, it was a badge of shame...Now its cheered on Wall Street. "Neutron" Jack Welch and that other asshole.nicknamed "machine gun" something, (I cant find it.right now) were proud of the fact they they screwed over their loyal employees. They bragged publicly about the enjoyment they got out of destroying all those lives and reveled in the monetary rewards of such pychopathic behavior.

This from the Huff online;

The study (PDF) also found that 36 of the 50 layoff leaders "announced their mass layoffs at a time of positive earnings reports," suggesting a trend of "squeezing workers to boost profits and maintainhigh CEO pay."

Wow.....just wow. It truly is an age of Acquiescence.

In 2004, the year the factory finall closed, saw a "record US trade deficit of 617.7 billion" dollars. In Canada the first ever Wal-Mart store to unionize was promptly closed.

134 "The gutting of the unions paralleled a general erosion of social connectedness. And here we have the metion of "social capital" and the inevetable reference to "bowling Alone" (man this is an important book, read it.  I read it and I'm going to read it again.) So I guess the first thing we are.going.to need to do is learn to trust each other again. Thats going to be hard to do with every story you see on the news that tells you not to. They do that for a reason. God forbid we all get together for a minute and realize who the real problem is here in America.

147 Now mexican Maytag workers make about 6.75 a day. The cost of the average lunch at the only resturaunt in town is also about $6.75.

152 mostly prices for goods and foodstuffs were "dollarized". A 2003 study that compared prices between Nuevo Laredo and Minneapolis showed "prices were comparable. 

153 Message to CEO's with factories in Mexico. "It's good that you have come but you must see your workers as human beings." Part of that means paying a.living wage.

155 In moving to Mexico, they not only all cost of running the factory, but "any sense of obligation to the place where they make there money." 

Remembet the Company picnic? Those were the days my friend.

159 Flora, a Maquilladora worker and single mom, leaves her house from 6a till 9p 6 days a week. 

215 So get this my right-wing nut job friends "Only 10% of Californias uncompensated care was from these people. I love it when I read a.posting from one of my friends that says all the Mexican has to do is set foor in Amerixa and free riches and services are showered on them. Everyone of them should live one day in a pickers shoes. The attitude would change I'm sure. It's ok though just stand by because that status is where we are all heading in the working class here in America. So you will have a chance to experience it first hand.

223 This poor ex-Maytag worker, still making less than poverty wages hasnto pay back benefitsnto the state of Illinois because shes now working. Meanwhile the CEO, who crashed Matag, got 20 million. Oh yeah, that's fair.

247 The ABCD's of the American grain market. Acher Daniels Midland, Brugo, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus (not julia?). These are the biggest players in the international grain game today. Read Oxfams "Cereal Secrets" for the whole scoop. 

256 Oh what these poor people go through. Tough to loose a job. ..tough. Meanwhile, "The aughts had been the first decade of zero net job growth" in America. (Had I had this info then I would have never job-hopped like I did at this time. Bad move on my part.) Also, the top one percent got a 154 boost in their bottom line between the years of 1980-2010. Anyone say justice? Not saying they dont deserve it but...

260 This is straight out of Punam's "Our Kids." "Family income was nearly.as predictive as parental education in" in determining educational acheivement. Read "Our Kids" to get the full story on this topic.

262 Poor education is the new black. Racial segregation has actually declined while segregation based on education has increased. It means the poorer less educated classes dont have other role models living in their midst anymore. Read all about in Putnam's "Our Kids" and Bill Bishop's "The Big Sort."

269 They actually talk of gowing through "stages of grief" in loosing their jobs. 

271 Studies show that we carry an "impact bias," which can help mislead us in timesnof acute change for good or bad. Mom was right, maybe, whatever has happened, is not such a big deal and it'll look better in the morning. 

279 In speaking of Drugs and the cartels, this local.say the drugs used to go up the coast through Tijuana. Nowasdays though the drugstravel up north via the NAFTA corridor. Wonderful! Anothernside benefit of being sold out by our "paid employees" to the Corporations. Ducky!

281 In juarez, its "Maquilladoras, narcos and migration...that's the triangle." Truly understand whats going on there you havento understand this.

In "Exporting Obesity," The authors basically asked if the end user in the junk food cycle get as much and the seller. The everpresent and cheep fast (bad and really cant be actually called food) encourages obesity, diabetes and a slew of other health hazarrds. The author says "we must add 'big food' to the triangle."

290 In the end, you're bought up and dismantled for your parts. The companies who specialize in this like Bain Capital, "are not the job makers anymore, they are profit-takers. They are not buying up your Factory to save.your job. Hey, it's just business.

295 Renewables mean jobs, yes. Im also finishing Naomi Klien's "This Changes Everything." I love her stuff. She makes argument in her book.

299 For the first time since the 1990's, Manufacturing jobs went up in America. Maybenthose jobs really are coming back. There one Jobs that wont be coming back who told the Prsident "those jobs are not coming back." The Mac will be assemnled in the  USA once again.

This book was great. Kept me right in thebaction and.provided alot of goodies. Must read!!! Special

Books

Dickens A Tale of Two Cities. Apparently people at the time were outraged that he would tell them the grim reality of the existence of the working class in the Industrial Age. We need another tale of two cities now.

John Kenneth Gallbraith The Affluent Society.

 

Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants

by Robert Smith

Essays

Read The Last Refrigerator in the Atlantic

http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/the-last-refrigerator/380154/

Articles:

This article was written in 1974 in the Chicago Tribune.  Compare it to what you read in the papers today about America.

Stability In the Heartlands Galesburg: Rockwell's America

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1974/05/26/page/45/article/galesburg-rockwells-america

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

By Robert Putnam

Library book

I was eagerly awaiting this book since I first heard about it. I loved Bowling Alone, Putnam's earlier work, and the topic "the new age of gross inequality in America" really intrigues me.

Pg 9 "we were poor but we didnt know it" and I can add some were rich but they didn't show it. (Ha im a poet and dont know it). That line about not knowing you were poor is prevelant even in my generation. We had a swimming pool, we went on family.vacations every year, sometimes twice, and had all the other perks of what I considered wealth. But in reality we were just lower to middle middle class. But i never felt deprived or poor in any way. Putnam says one can also say in reality,compared to what was to come that "We were [actually] rich and didn't know it." Rich in the opportunitiees that were there for us but would soon dissapear. 

So, in chapter one we learn that education is the great separator of the new classes, and those who have it rise, while those who don't stagnate. And thanks to the "Big Sort" we now live different lives as different classes. Those community bonds that held rich and poor together have fallen away and the classes have repaired to their own neutral corners.

Putnam detail tthe fact that school itself helps to separate us. Now more and more kidsnfrom different socioeconomic classes instead of having the differences moderated, its just further exacerbates them.

Soft skills are just as important to child development as hard education. Extra curricular activites like sports and musicnprograms and clubs teach important organizational skills and teaches leadership and working in a team and.following through things.

176 Putnam uotes Wellington to make his point,"It is here [on the playing fields of Eton] that the battle of Waterloo was won." He meant the soft skills that go along with, and are vital to, a good education.

188 The factors that widen the education gap include; family structure, parenting, childhood development, peer groups and extra curricular opportunities.

190 Aptitude is now less important to a childs educational success as socioeconomic backround. Studies show that high scoring poor kids are less likely than low scoring rich kids in attaining a degree. The author remarks,"[So much for the  idea that] at the heart of the American Dream: [lies] equality of opportunity." Lil, Horatio Alger has left the country.

Books:

Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (You have this on Ebook)

1954 David Potter People of Plenty

Essays:
Crmbling American Dreams

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/opinionator/2013/08/03/crumbling-american-dreams/

Andrew Carnegie

David Nasaw

Library Audiobook

Started this one at the gym today. Voice quality of the narrator is abysmal.

Carnegie say Americans work to hard in general. He says we should learn to take it easy. Really Andra? Its hard for us to take it easy when you set our wages and work environment in such a way that this is impossible. Littetally lmao at this.one.

Im at the part about Homestead. I love how Carnegie completely disassociates himself from any complicity in the decisions being made by.Frick. He tells others "well I don't like the way it's being handled but what can I do so far away?"

Typical self serving Carnegie

4/3 Today Carnegie writes Cleveland on the  silver issue. He tells him how he feels and then goes on to tell the President of the United Srates what he should say and then provides a script.for him. Such arrogance would not be repeated until our own modern time in this the second Guilded Age.

I gave up on old Andy to aggrivating! The last day I listened he was fawning over Spencer and comparing himself to Jesus. Yikes. Gag gag....

Done!

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

By Charles Murray

Library Ebook

Pg 24. This, the author says, is our first glimpse at the fledgling new superclass...

"The culture depicted in thirtysomething had no precedent, with its characters who were educated at elite schools, who discussed intellectually esoteric subjects,"

I remember this show. I remember seeing thisnshow and thinking who are these people.

"The culture depicted in thirtysomething had no precedent, with its characters who were educated at elite schools, who discussed intellectually esoteric subjects," 

Yep yuppie scum

"In the years to come, America would get other glimpses of this culture in Mad About You, Ally McBeal, Frasier, and The West Wing, among others, but no show ever focused with the same laser intensity on the culture that thirtysomething depicted—understandably, because the people who live in that culture do not make up much of the audience for network television series, and those who are the core demographic for network television"

Pg 35 "but such data are proprietary. (Google)  The best I can do is use the DDB Life Style data that were provided to Robert Putnam in the research for Bowling Alone and are now available to other scholars. 11 That database does not permit us to isolate the top few centiles—the highest income code is $ 100,000—but it does give a quantitative measure of the relationship between income, education, and a wide variety of tastes and preferences."

37 "Garrison Keillor—if you are in a gathering of the new upper class, you can use the phrase “all the children are above average”and be confident that almost everybody recognizes the allusion." (From.Lake Wobegon)

Pg 43 "Other workplaces in America haven’t changed even that much. The technological changes in hospitals have been sweeping, but the nurses, dietitians, respiratory therapists, and orderlies who work there do their jobs much as they always have, subject to the same constraints of hours and place that those jobs have always imposed (and the same is true, I should add, of physicians). Not true sir. The hospital has changed dramatically. Severely.

Pg 46 "FOUR DEVELOPMENTS TOOK us from a set of people who ran the nation but were culturally diverse to a new upper class that increasingly lives in a world of its own. The culprits are the increasing market value of brains, wealth, the college sorting machine, and homogamy."

Pg 49 "Just about all of the benefits of economic growth from 1970 to 2010 went to people in the upper half of the income distribution." And since

Pg 50 "Then in 1994–95, the bottom end of the top centile careened up from $ 233,000 to $ 433,000. Whether the change happened within that single year is open to debate—an analysis using IRS data shows the leap occurring from the late 1980s through the late 1990s—but there is no doubt that a phenomenal growth in top incomes occurred sometime during that"

Pg 54 on having to put up with us interact with us peasants..."Still, it amounts to one of those things that people are glad they have done, but did only because they had to. Either they figure out a way to fit in or else they are lonely (see Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street for the revenge of the lonely small-town smart boy). Those same young people would have jumped at the opportunity to be around other people like themselves. Over the last half century, the opportunities to do so opened up."

Pg 57 "Given this concentration of academic talent in a relatively few colleges and universities, the original problem has been replaced by its opposite. Instead of feeling sorry for the exceptionally able student who has no one to talk to, we need to worry about what happens when exceptionally able students hang out only with one another."

Pg 59 "Without doubt, certain applicants get an edge that has nothing to do with merit. In The Price of Admission, journalist Daniel Golden documents the ways in which elite schools manage to find room for the children of alums, big donors, celebrities, athletes, the elite college’s own faculty, and wealthy parents."

Pg 61 "1940 to 2003.26 They found that homogamy has increased at both ends of the educational scale—college graduates grew more likely to marry college graduates and high school dropouts grew more likely to marry other high school dropouts."

Pg 62 "IQs at age 18 will be very similar to what they were at age 6, and statistical analysis will not show that the children who went to the expensive private schools got an IQ boost as a result."

Pg 70 "In 1960, 40 percent of Manhattan’s jobs had been industrial. By 2000, that 40 percent had shrunk to 5 percent. By 2000, 15 percent of all jobs in Manhattan were in the financial sector, another 15 percent fell into the category of “professional, scientific, and technical services,”and another 9 percent were in a category labeled simply “information.”That’s 39 percent of all jobs."

Pg 80 "But Asians have since the 1960s been seen by whites as “honorary whites,”in sociologist Andrew Hacker’s sardonic phrase,"

Pg 88 "Thirty-one percent of Wesleyan graduates were living in SuperZips, and 65 percent were living in zip codes at the 80th centile or higher. It would appear that the college sorting machine replicates itself with remarkable fidelity as a residential sorting machine. The hypothesis."

Pg 1o4 De Tocqueville's America: 

"Local freedom …perpetually brings men together, and forces them to help one another, in spite of the propensities which sever them. In the United States, the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people. On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: they listen to them, they speak to them every days."

The author says,"Not any more."

Just as I tjought this book dovetails perfectly with Putnams Our Kids.

Pg 131 The founding virtues industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity. Thats our secret lol

Pg 137 "When Tocqueville was traveling around America to observe our prisons (the original reason for his visit), he commented on how few magistrates and public officers America employed for apprehending crime, “yet I believe that in no country does crime more rarely elude punishment."

I hate blogger!!!!! I.really need some other note taking software. This POS sucks

184 "Between 1985 and 2005,” Aguiar and Hurst write, “men who had not completed high school increased their leisure time by eight hours per week, while men who had completed college decreased their leisure time by six hours per week.”  And I see they put that "less leisure time" to good use.

204 "Religion’s role as a source of social capital is huge. “As a rough rule of thumb,” Robert Putnam wrote in Bowling Alone, “our evidence shows [that] nearly half of all associational memberships are church-related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context.” 1 But it’s not just the contributions of Americans in religious settings that make religion so important to social capital." Putnam makes the same.comments on the importance of social capital in his new book Our Kids.

Pg 210 "None of the graphs I have just shown you fit the conventional wisdom that working-class white America is still staunchly religious while white American elites are dominated by secular humanists. There are two explanations." Just a myth that doesnt play out in the actual facts.

Books:

Robert Reich The Work of Nations,

Richard Florida The Rise of the Creative Clasz

David Brooks Bobos in Paradise.

The Bell Curve Charles Murray

Joseph Soares’s  The Power of Privilege,

Robert Putnam Bowling Alone

Robert Putnam Our Kids: The AmericanDream in Ctisis

David Callahan Fortunes of Change.

Eli Pariser 

The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think

Michael Harrington’s The Other America

Henry Adams

History of the United States During the Administrations of 

The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt

Edward C. Banfield

Moral Basis of a Backward Society

Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (The...

by Theda Skocpol

This is sort like Bowling Alone. This author tells the importance of civil organizations in society.

The Big Sort Bill Bishop

Bowling Alone Robert Putnam

The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism By Robert William Fogel

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

By Bruce Scheier

Ebook

Yet another book telling me I have no privacy. Cant wait to get into it.

.5% Not only.can they track where you are and where you've been but, "researchers were able to use this data to predict where people would be 24 hours later, to within 20 meters."

1% "Sun Microsystems’ CEO Scott McNealy said it plainly way back in 1999: “You have zero privavy anyway, get over it."

3% "Companies like 23andMe hope to use genomic data from their customers to find genes associated with disease, leading to new and highly profitable cures." Thats if the Federal Govetment wll ever lt us have our own DNA data. So far the havent want to See Topol's The Patint Will See You Now for the details.

3.2% "Raytheon is planning to fly a blimp over Washington, DC, and Baltimore in 2015 to test its ability to track “targets”—presumably vehicles—on the ground, in the water, and in the air.

See for yourself

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/17/billion-dollar-surveillance-blimp-launch-maryland/

3.4% "By 2010, we as a species were creating more data per day than we did from the beginning of time until 2003."

3.6% "Austrian law student Max Schrems. In 2011, Schrems demanded that Facebook give him all the data the company had about him. This is a requirement of European Union (EU) law. Two years later, after a court battle, Facebook sent him a CD with a 1,200-page PDF: not just the friends he could see and the items on his newsfeed, but all of the photos and pages he’d ever clicked on and all of the advertising he’d ever viewed." Everything you ever did on Facebook is saved.

4.8% "Another device allows me to see all the data on someone else’s smartphone—either iPhone or Android—assuming I can get my hands on it. “Read text messages even after they’ve been deleted. See photos, contacts, call histories, calendar appointments and websites visited. Even tap into the phone’s GPS data to find out where it’s been.” Only $120."

6.4 % "On the Internet, surveillance is ubiquitous. All of us are being watched, all the time, and that data is being stored forever. This is what an information-age surveillance state looks like, and it’s efficient beyond Bentham’s wildest dreams."

books:

Eric Schmidt Jared Cohen The New Digital Age. 

The Death of Caesar: The Story of History's Most Famous Assassination

By Barry Strauss

Ebook

Awesome. I.still remember most of this. I have lived the entire period through my reading. But the most colorful and.memorable was Colleen Mccollough Fist Man in Rome.

Enjoyable so faf. No real new stuff, but enjoyabke.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

By Naomi Klein

Ebook

Been wanting to read this for awhile now. Glad it finally came up in the cue. Love her stuff and her radio show.

Scarry ass book. Shit.

10.3% "But it wasn’t until James Hansen, then director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before a packed congressional hearing on June 23, 1988, that global warming became the stuff of chat shows and political speeches." Still we dont beleive

11.3% "But there is no question that the trade architecture and the economic ideology embedded within it played a central role in sending emissions into hyperdrive." Good luck getting them to do anytjing that lessens profit.

22% "In practice that means that, despite endless griping, tweeting, flash mobbing, and occupying, we collectively lack many of the tools that built and sustained the transformative movements of the past. Our public institutions are disintegrating, while the institutions of the traditional left—progressive political parties, strong unions, membership-based community service organizations—are fighting for their lives." This is the very argument raised in Putnam's Bowling Alone. Man everything connects yes Mr Forester. Only connect.

27.2% "natural gas—as a supposed solution to climate change, despite mounting evidence that in the coming decades, the methane it releases, particularly through the fracking process, has the potential to help lock us into catastrophic levels of warming."

36.1% So here the discussion is about climate engineering. Specifically a plan to inject particles in to the atmosphere to block the sun and stop global warming. The tales of the Annunaki say that they were here to mine gold to inject into their atmosphere inntheir home planet of Niburu. I found the similarity shocking.

36.5% Here they talk about a Strto Sheil sun blocking device. And i commented The Simpsons did that!

36.8% "During the Cold War, U.S. physicists imagined weakening the nation’s enemies by stealthily manipulating rainfall patterns." The CIA weather machine, that of course doesnt exist.

38.5% Klein tells us that as the situation becomes more dire, we may be convinced to try anything w e think might help us and the rest be damned. "This is how the shock doctrine works: in the desperation of a true crisis all kinds of sensible opposition melts away and all manner of high-risk behaviors seem temporarily acceptable." When it gets to this point we know were in trouble.

38.7% "French sociologist Bruno Latour. His argument is that humanity has failed to learn the lessons of the prototypical cautionary story about playing god: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. According to Latour, Shelley’s real lesson is not, as is commonly understood, “don’t mess with mother nature.” Rather it is, don’t run away from your technological mess-ups, as young Dr. Frankenstein did when he abandoned the monster to which he had given life. Instead, Latour says we must stick around and continue to care for our “monsters” like the deities that we have become. "Love.your monsters!

"Latour’s entreaty to “love your monsters” has become a rallying cry in certain green circles, particularly among those most determined to find climate solutions that adhere to market logic."

Books:

Bruno Latour The god species

Christian Parenti Tropic of Chaos 

Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence

The Culture of Narcissism Christopher Lasch

Michael Grunwald  The New New Deal,

Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills”  more poem than book. Read about this in the Age of Acquiesence too. Everything connects Mr Forester. Only connect.

 Mark Isaacs The Undesirables. He wrote about men who had survived wars and treacherous voyages losing all will to live on Nauru, 

Donella H. Meadows and 2 more

The Limits to growth: A report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind

Superfreakonomics Levitt and Dubner

Mark Lynas The God Species

Ed Ayres God’s Last Offer

Essays

Cool dudes: Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white 

The Billion Dollar Shack by Jack hitt NYT Magazine 2000

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/magazine/the-billion-dollar-shack.html

Documentaries:

This book is coming out as a documentary in the fall of 2015

Also check out "The Take" about a group of workers who took over their shuttered auto-parts plant and turned it into a thriving co-op.

Al Gore An Incovenient Truth

A Case for Climate Engineering (Boston Review Books)

by David Keith

The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors

By Dan Jones

Audiobook

Not really getting much of this at the gym. Not really grabbing me. Should be good i would imagine but im not hearing it as of yet.

Still not getting one word of this....maybe i will have to read it instead.

Ok finished today at the gym and finally heard a little of it.

China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

By Richard Bernstein

Library book

In 1945, America and China were allies. The USA was helping China in it's war With the Japanese (the enemy of.my enemy). There were two faction at the time in China. To the north, was Mao and his Communsists.  And in the south Chianh ki Shek and thr Nationalists. Together they formed an uneady alliance in the immediate need to put aside differences and fight for the homeland.
   
And then with the defeat of the Japanese, the uneasy truce split apart. America back Chiang and "lost China" along with him.

Who lost China would be the subject of many pundits at the time with the two political parties using the issue to bludgeon each other. This book tells the story of that pivotal year of 1945 were the seeds were being sown.

23 FDR himself, on the subject of the feud between Stillwell and Chiang (who they called Cash My Check), said "in that Olympian manner of his: 'Big Boy, if you can't get along with Chiang...get rid of him." Several schemes were worked up for Chiangs' "disappearance including dropping him out of airplane with a faulty parachute. Mighty inauspicious beginning to what was supposed to be  a good partnership.

25 Also a 4plot.to poison Chiang was being cooked up by Stillwell and "senior American intelligence officer for.China Carl F Eiler. Like other of our Asian allies think Ngi Dinh Diem, relations remained mercurial.

31 Chiang was supported fervently by Henry Luce and appeared  on the cover of Time magazine some ten times. 

This one above was August 1945. It was none other than Theodore White on the ground in China at that time reporting for Time magazine.

43 Barbara  Tuchman wrote a Biography of Stillwell? Are her other writings about China in this period?

48 So the Patrick J Hurley, a fervent Republican (who has the honor of being in the picture on the cover of this book, seated center in bow tie)  sent by Roosevelt to "straighten things out between Stillwell and Chiang later reveals the whole truth. He says Chiang was purposely sandbagged by the  curent "communist favoring"  American regime in place ie. the White House,  to deliberately cause a communist takeover of China. So you tell me  who lost China.

70 The vast numbers of Chinese population make sacrificing them an acceptable loss. Mao always said Nuclear bombs canr hurt us as much as you. we alot more people. Some 40 million were sacrificed in the famine of 1959-62. The author says,"There was always enough people  left for a fresh start...The population was fungible." 

94 This John Paton Davies Jr "an old China hand" had it right in 1944 when he warned the US to not follow in the footsteps of the European colonialist stategies in Asia at the expense of population there. He said this flawed policy would serve us no purpose and only drive the Asians into the open arms.of Stalin and the communists. The author sums it up this was,"don't allow Stalin to champion a new m order in Asia while the United States remains attachef to the decaying remnants of the past. Had we only heeded this advice, the Viet Nam quagmire would never have happened. 

96 Service and Davies andnthe other China hands on the scene predicted correctly that following the war, there would be an civil war in China and the Communists would win. Who lost China? Not these men who entreated their bosses to make an accommodation with the fledgling communist government.

124 Chinese communists rescued downed American pilots and treated them like heroes. Just five short years later in Korea, they greeted them with imprisonment and torture.

128 And here in a closer look at this idealistic "classless" society set up by the fledgling Chinese comminists at Yenann we see that some pigs are more equal than others. Will tjere ever be a truly classless society on this planet? Yeah, good luck with that.

132 The first flourishing of behavior that would become de-rrigeur in Moa,s China can be seen here. Every petty tyrant needs a chief sniveling groveling sycophant, tthis part was played by Kang Sheng, who oddly enough is never mentioned.in dispatches of the fawning Ameicans of the Dixie mission. Mao learns to "kill the chicken to frieghten the monkey" with his very public denunciations of anyone with the audacity to pointnout obvoius contradictions.to him. Ahh gotta love a petty tyrants amd their "distortion fields" (yep, that was a shot at Steve).

The author says this is 20th Century Orwellian Totalitarianism at its' finest. (take.me.to church!)

134 One recipient of the emotional torture program wrote,"Once you confessed,you had a better life." (I'll tell you my sins so you can sharpened your knife).  Everyone had to have a sin.If ya didn't ya better make one up.  Wow. Mao'ss utopia!

137 When the "witch hunt" began by our own "petty tyrants" ie Senators and Congressman, to asses who was responsible for the "loss" of China, two camps develpoed. On the one side were the Foriegn Service experts,  like Stillwell Davies and Jack Service, and were called the China hands. On the other side of the argument you had people like Henry Luce, Patrick Hurley and General Wedemeyer who would come to be known as the China lobby. The Washington "CW" said the China hands fawning over Mao, "coupled with their denigration of Chiang led to an erosion of support for the KMT." This situation weakend the support for Chiang allowing a later Communist takeover.  Later Hurley would swear it was all done that way on purpose.  

290 Wow this is getting really good. So the end of the war with Japan by atonic bomb surprises everyone. And now the scramble.began in ernest for the future of China. Russia would support Mao of.course and we as  per our usual would support the oppressive side that the people mostly hated ie Chiang. Didn't matter to us a hill o' beans. As Roosevelt said once of Anastamosa, when told he was a bastard Ol' Rosy said,"Yes but he's our bastard." This is realpolitik at it's finest.

So the war iis over but we are sending in the Marines to help prop up our "bastard" against the wishes of our countrymen who, with the war over wanted their boys home and pdq. So one of the first Marines killed in this Chinese sideshow was Cpt John Birch, yes that John Birch whose name would forever after be associated with those "right wing nut jobs" of the eponymously named John Birch Society. Wow!

This from Wikipedia on the subject:

Origins

The society was established in Indianapolis, Indiana, on December 9, 1958, by a group of 12 led by Robert W. Welch, Jr., a retired candy manufacturer from Belmont, Massachusetts. Welch named the new organization after John Birch, an American Baptist missionary and military intelligence officer who was shot and killed by communist forces in Chinain August 1945, shortly after the conclusion of World War II. Welch claimed that Birch was an unknown but dedicated anti-communist, and the first American casualty of the Cold War.^[8]Jimmy Doolittle, who met Birch after bailing out over China following the Tokyo Raid, said in his autobiography that he was certain that Birch "would not have approved" of that particular use of his name. 

Indeed im sure he would not be happy may he rwt in peace.

Pg 312 gives the details. 

332 So what we ar witnessing here is the birth of the Cold War and the tactics that would not serve us well in the immediate future.

Books: 

Graham Peck 

Two Kinds of Time: Life in Provencial China During the Crucial Years 1940-1941

This book gives thenflavor of China just before invasion by japan.

There are several books by John W Dower that look good on Amazon.

Read Babara Tuchmans books to get a flavor of China at this time.

Theodore White Thunder Out of China

Diana Lary

The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation, 1937-1945 (New Approaches to Asian History)

Edgar Snow and 1 more

Red Star over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism

This book preceeded an avalanche of pro  Mao books published at the same time. These people saw the communists under Enlai and Mao as freedom fighters and as less red and more Chinese. Of course later they were discredited by Moa actions as he turned out to be just another petty power grabbing tyrant. 

Movies: 

Empire of the Sun. Movie about a young british boy in a Japanese interment camp in WWII.

Patrick Hurley at center (in bow tie) with Communist leadership in Chongqing, 1945

The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal, the Power Behind Five English

By Thomas Asbridge

Ebook

This book is great!. They found a manuscript when is a long poem of the biography of an actual Knight. In the period of Henry II to Eleanor of Acquataine, he served the royals.

Something i didn't realize when I went by it earlier. The importance of.the "White Ship" incident. I didn't bookmark it but I should have. The death of.so many young.royals at once caused a succession crisis.

"One eyewitness estimated that 200 crusaders lost their lives each day from illness and starvation. Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, who had led an advanced Angevin contingent to Acre, passed away that December; so too did Count Theobald of Blois, one of William Marshal’s old friends from the tournament circuit."

45 "Acre became the graveyard of Europe’s aristocracy."

On the Battle of Lincoln one of the Great Knights last

70 "the heart of the Anglo-French army had been crushed. The English historian David Carpenter has rightly described Lincoln as ‘one of the most decisive [battles] in English history’, concluding that its outcome ‘meant that England would be ruled by the Angevin, not the Capetian dynasty’."