When I was a child, cold winter Saturdays like this one were often spent in the tower of a Victorian mansion that had been made into four apartments. My best friend’s family lived in the apartment on the top floor that used to be the attic of the mansion. My family lived in the duplex in the ally behind the apartments, where the stable for the mansion once stood. The kids in our neighborhood spent their 10 - 25 cent weekly allowance on coke, pretzel sticks, and penny candy. Then we settled in around a big table and enjoyed this game of high finance that was developed during the great depression. The game ended hours later when one of us had accumulated most of the property and wealth and someone else went bankrupt paying the rent required for landing on the other’s property full of hotels.
The game was developed during the great depression, when the country reaped the result of years of over extended credit, unbridled greed, and the consolidation of wealth. So it seemed fitting that I was playing Monopoly in a made over Victorian mansion, though I had no clue about the history of either as I munched on my pretzels and drank my Coke.
The Gilded Age and the Jazz Age that preceded the worst economic depression in history were periods of unprecedented corporate growth. An increasingly smaller percentage of the population controlled not only business, but through their wealth also influenced the political process to their advantage. These were times when the gap in the distribution of wealth between workers and those who owned the means of production increased dramatically. This was also the age of the muckrakers and the trust buster, Teddy Roosevelt. There are many similarities between this period of history and our own. Is John McCain a Teddy Roosevelt Republican hiding in a Reagan costume? Check out my guest column on the Cosmic Message web site?
3 comments:
Let me be the first to congratulate you on this excellent post, Ceejay. :)
Your command of the subject, cartoons to illustrate it with and quotes serve as a reminder that the economy is headed for disaster unless we get our fiscal house in order.
Too often we're the last ones to be informed of this and by then the damage is done. We have to take our own prescreptive remidies, the kind that balances budgets on that backs of the wealthy for a change instead of a temporoary fix which steals from middle class and poverty programs we have we've relied on the past.
Let's resolve to never get ensnared in the type of coroporate fascsim the past seven years has been witnessed to learn to and become productive citizens again, one that fosters respect for all and does put greed as the object of desire.
What a wondeful world it will be.
Peace,
Cosmic
The odds are simply not in favor of any Republican this year. The undercurrent running through everyone's head is that of change and substantive change at that.
Now, the recent spat between Obama and Clinton might grow nastier, but Obama to his credit tried to patch things over with her and in the process utterly removed the charge from what had been growing nastier and more negative. Kudos for him for doing so.
Now we are back to talking about McCain and his presumptive nomination more than we are about Hillary versus Barack.
Yes, Kevin, the tide is clearly in favor of the Democrats this year. If they can stay focused on positive plans for change instead of sinking to negative campaign ads, I think they will have it made. I was very disappointed in Hillary's recent ad talking about a call at 3AM about a world crisis, but I thought Barack handled it well. I expected better of her.
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