Phil Bailey, your grasp of history and current events are on a par with your spelling.

Dan, I’m glad you posted (all) the words to Randy Newman’s song. For weeks after Katrina hit, I had the chorus repeating in a loop in my head. It was heartbreaking and maddening at the same time, just like events as they unfolded.

maha, thanks for yet another lucid history lesson.

I’m with moonbat - the works of William Strauss and Neil Howe have really helped my comprehension of the world.

I’m very grateful for the work you do to produce this blog. It attracts the best commentary I’ve found anywhere.

Today, we’re an empire that’s in debt up to our eyeballs, and China and the other Asian tigers are about to eat our lunch, if they haven’t already. The IMF would’ve declared us bankrupt long ago, were it not for the fact that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, and no one is yet ready to cash out their dollars, which triggering a global panic.

And so I believe whatever crisis comes next, it will make the Great Depresion look like a picnic. This doesn’t even touch on the way fascism is more in style this time, versus socialism back in the 1930s.

I just finished reading The Fourth Turning, which is about cycles in history. The authors present evidence for an 80-100 year cycle that’s repeated itself for the last 500 or so years in American and English history. Within this 80-100 year long cycle, there are four shorter “seasons”, each corresponding to a generation (about 20-25 years each).

These “seasons” are a lot like the four seasons we experience with the weather. They each have their own mood, their own sociological and economic characteristics, and they repeat, in much the way that winter this year is like winter last year, spring always follows winter, and so on. Spring and summer are times for expansion and growth, autumn a time for unravelling and contraction, and winter a time of crisis. The crisis is major, all encompassing, and changes everything.

In this schema, the Great Depression and World War 2 were the last crisis this country went through. The roaring 20s were part of “the unravelling” that preceded this crisis. In more recent history, the 1960s-up till Reagan were a summer, a period of awakening, that repeats once every long cycle. It was followed by an autumn or unravelling (the great conservative revolution that began with Reagan), and ends in a crisis

A crisis begins with a catalyst (the 1929 stock market crash, or perhaps 9/11 in our time) and culminates in a climactic battle, often a global war, that sorts out the winners from the losers, big time.

The book talks a great deal about the kind of child rearing that occurs within each of these seasons, and how this, plus the socioeconomic context of each season, produces a particular kind of people, a generation, that rises in their own way to meet the challenges of the time. These same archetypal generations occur over and over again, because of the repetitive nature of the four “seasons” within the long cycle.

The book has had the same sort of impact that works like Future Shock did when it came out in the 70s. The Fourth Turning was published in 1997, and I found it to be one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in quite a while. It helped me, a baby boomer who grew up during the ever expanding 1960s, understand these weird conservative kids who came later, as well as my parents’ generation who built the world I grew up in. It’s also making me look forward to the children of these conservatives - they parallel the heroic generation that got the country through the Depression and World War 2.

Oh, bullshit. “Entitlements” like the GI Bill and post WWII mortgage subsidies helped fuel the great economic growth that lasted until the 1960s. Invest in your people, and you reap rewards. Let them rot, and eventually they’ll drag you down into the third world shithole the nation will become.

The great depression ended when WWII began and the economic engin of the US was again turned on. All the federal spending from 33-40 did very little to revive the country.

Mostly true, but in other ways the New Deal was wonderfully successful. The New Deal programs had a longer-term success in fostering economic stability. Federal deposit insurance, unemployment insurance, Social Security, increased government oversight of securities, and other New Deal innovations made Americans’ economic lives more secure and created a buffer against many of the factors that cause economic depressions.

It appears to me that the votes in Lousiana are blaming state officials for their failures…look how many are scrambling to be govenor.

Have you talked to anyone who lives in Louisiana or on the Gulf Coast? I have. They’re pissed at everybody. But mostly they’re pissed at Bush.

I have noticed that all references to “inflation” these last 3 or 4 years, since prices have skyrocketed (but “inflation” is not a problem yet…) is to “core inflation,” excluding everything that affects living standards!

“CORE INFLATION
A measure of inflation that excludes certain items which face volatile price movements. Core inflation eliminates products that can have temporary price shocks because these shocks can diverge from the overall trend of inflation and give a false measure of inflation.

Core Inflation is thought to be an indicator of underlying long-term inflation.

Notes:
Core inflation is most often calculated by taking the Consumer Price Index and excluding certain items from the index, usually energy and food products. Other methods of calculations include the outliers method, which removes the products that have had the largest price changes.”

http://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Core+Inflation

Oil crossed the #30/bbl level in 2003… Temporary?

What has happened down here is the wind have changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain
Rained real hard and it rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

The river rose all day
The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away all right
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

CHORUS
Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away

President Coolidge come down in a railroad train
A little fat man with a note-pad in his hand
The President say, “Little fat man, idn’t it a shame
What the river has done
To this poor cracker’s land.”

CHORUS