Do you realize that almost none of us have ever experienced a peacetime economy?

[Taverner]

Think about it.

1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. This was the last time we were a peacetime economy.

Post WWII, we jumped headfirst into the Cold War. Although there was no traditional 'war,' we spent like there was. We kept purchasing from the Defense Contractors as if we were still invading Normandy. This continued, and grew even (Under Reagan) until the wall came down in 91.

Then we spent a few years closing bases and scratching our heads - but the defense contracts were signed, and we were still spending as much as if the wall hadn't come down. Suddenly, 9/11, wet dream for all of the neocons at PNAC. Military spending on a wartime economy grows - and the war has no end! Yipee! It's a good day to work for Northrop Gruman!

So that's 66 straight years of a wartime economy. 66 Straight years of uncontrolled military spending with little to no oversight. 66 straight years of spend first, pay later. 66 years of merchants of death making obscene profits.

[onenote]

1. well, if the "peacetime" economy of 1929 - 1941 is a model

I'm just as happy not having experienced a peacetime economy.

[Taverner]

2. So you'd rather be at war indefinitely than suffer economic hardship

For the poor in America today, life is worse than it was during the depression

Today, you can work full time at two jobs and still not have enough to pay rent.

[bryant69]

4. But of course life was pretty good in the 1950s.

And not bad in the 1990s.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[Taverner]

6. The 50's and 90's are just a taste of what to expect from a peacetime economy

I know the USA is good for more than just war.

[tom_paine]

14. Now THAT I agree with. n/t

[onenote]

5. life is worse today than it was during the depression? You've got to be kidding

Maybe you can work two jobs today and not have enough to pay rent. During the depression, upwards of 25-30 percent of the workforce couldn't find any jobs. And even as frayed as its become due to the efforts of repubs in recent years, the safety net created in response to the depression, supplemented by programs enacted as part of the great society, offers poor and middle income families a lot more protection than they had in 1929.

[Frances]

9. Worse today than in the Great Depression?

If you can't find someone who remembers that time, you need to do some research.

When I moved to Massachusetts in the 60s, I met a man who told me that during the Depression, he went to school every other day because he and his brother had to share one pair of shoes. They took turns going to school.

During the Depression, in my native Alabama, the climate was warm enough much of the time for kids to go to school barefoot (see Jimmy Carter's autobiography). We had a long growing season, but when winter came, many people made a meal out of biscuits and sugar cane syrup. (This is mentioned in To Kill a Mockingbird, which was set in a town 35 miles from me.)

The author of the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men said that the only place he had seen greater poverty than in northern Alabama was in rural China.

In the movie Grapes of Wrath, the kids in a camp in California were subsisting on flour mixed with water.

I don't remember the statistics, but, as I recall, there were a significant number of young men who were found to be malnourished when they took their military physicals at the beginning of World War II.

[Xithras]

10. And today's hyperbole award goes to...

I seriously hope that you don't really believe that life is worse today than it was during the depression. The depression had 30% national unemployment rate with rates exceeding 50% in some areas of the country. Portions of the country were nearly depopulated as jobless, homeless vagrants wandered the country looking for work and food. My own grandfather was thrown out of his house at 15 because his mother couldn't afford to feed him anymore (she was a good woman, and was simply trying to save the younger children by forcing the older ones to get work and fend for themselves). There was no welfare, no social security, no food stamps...NOTHING. Your options were to find work at whatever miserable wage you could find, or spend hours standing in long soup lines run by churches and charities in order to get one thin bowl of soup and a lump of bread to get you through the day, or starve to death. And yes, a LOT of people starved to death. If you got sick, your life was over because you could no longer stand in line, and your job was gone. Sick days? Yeah right! If you missed even an HOUR of work, you can bet that your boss would just replace you with one of the HUNDREDS of people standing outside his office door waiting for a job opening. And there were no ER's to visit if you got injured and needed immediate medical attention. If you didn't have the money to pay a doctor, you went without treatment.

I'm sorry, but the simple fact that the majority of America's poor are HOUSED, no matter the quality of that housing, puts them in a better position than the people who lived during the depression.

[Frances]

11. Thanks for your post

[Xithras]

13. My grandfather never talked much about WW2, but the Depression was another matter.

Hell, it's why I'm a Democrat, and why he was a Democrat until the day he died. The man used to rail on and on for hours about how stupid American's were for supporting Republicans, and that it was all because we didn't know our history. We didn't remember how bad it really was before FDR. And why not? Because it's the wealthy who write the history books, and the corporations who print them. The crimes of the power classes have almost been expunged from American history, replaced instead with images of men in suits waiting 20 minutes for a free handout, cute kids selling apples on a street corner, and a few thousand happy migrants following the crops across California. That's the Hollywood version of the Depression. The ugliness of real life in those days would be almost incomprehensible to modern Americans.

[Frances]

15. Have you ever seen the movie The Grapes of Wrath?

That movie shows what life was like for the Okies.

When I moved to California, I met a man from Oklahoma who was lucky enough to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps. (The Corps was responsible for a lot of excellent work in our national parks.) He said that his children told him that he had been on welfare.

My answer was, "You should have sent them back to Oklahoma as teens and let them live with a poor farmer. Let them them plow a field with a mule. Let them eat only what they could grow. Then they would have learned the difference between welfare and a decent job."

[Xithras]

16. My grandfather actually came to California to work in the CCC.

Interestingly, it's the reason I live in California today. He went from Maine to West Virginia looking for work, when a CCC recruiter signed him up for trail work in Sequoia National Park. They gave him 90 days to get out here, but when he arrived two weeks later, he was informed that they couldn't use anyone else, and sent him to a recruiter looking for people to cut trails for Yosemite. He went to Fresno, where he was again told that the Yosemite crews were full up. A farm recruiter looking for field hands happened to be in the CCC office at the same time, and put him on a truck to Modesto to pick peaches. He did that for a season, and then hit the CCC office again looking for work. He got lucky this time around and landed a CCC job pouring sidewalks around a handful of Central Valley cities. He never did make it to the national parks, but he did get to help build some of the first paved roads into the Sierra foothills, and poured hundreds of miles of sidewalks in towns that otherwise might not have them today (some of his sidewalks still exist, and still have the CCC stamp on them)...and some of those towns were, and are, very poor.

And he did all of this before he reached his 18th birthday. He later joined a seminary, became a priest, and served as a battlefield chaplain in WW2. After the war he came back to one of those little town outside of Modesto, started a family, and here I am today :)

The guy was, and still is, a personal hero of mine.

[Frances]

20. I too think your grandfather was a hero in the best sense of the

word.

One of my heroes is a man who was my minister in the 1950s. He was a conscientious objector in World War II who became a battlefield medic. Brother Chris was respected by the many World War II vets in our town because the work he did was both dangerous and life saving.

[Taverner]

17. Look, that example was hyperbolic but the fact still remains

That we are a wartime economy, and it is killing us

Things are better today than during the depression - HOWEVER, it is getting worse and worse every day. We in suburbia may not notice it, but there is a new strata of homelessness, comprised of working people, many of them with families. There are a number of folks who work full time, have kids, and sleep in their cars at night. In places like SF, this is compounded by the fact that rents are so high that they could never afford rent without at least a 50K job.

[tom_paine]

12. That analogy is extreme and overreaching. And I think factually incorrect.

I mean, think about it. That was the severest of dislocations and there weren't even two jobs to get to work enough to "not pay the rent".

I like a little hyperbole as much as the next person becaue sometimes pointing out extreme scenarios gets people thinking. It also "helps" that the sitaution HERE AND NOW is looking more like it is an "extreme situation" in reality, and there's nothing like having current reality on the side of speculative hyperbole.

After all, I am a Jew and if more of us had been screaming "speculative hyperbole", when Hitler seemed like an honorable Christian man to most of Germany's 60 million Christians, maybe more people would have woken up to what he was in time to stop him.

Bushler may or may not turn out to be as evil a murderer as Hitler (probably not, but if he nukes Iran he makes a big leap towards that) in the end, but the fact that the chance that it is so are a hundred-fold, a thousand-fold, than the minimal pre-2000 chance that America could ever fall to an cabal of immoral criminals, liars, and murderers like the Royal Bushies and their Inner Circle, is enough to get me pointing out the growing similarities wherever possible.

[Richard D]

3. This country . . .

. . . as it's currently set up, cannot survive economically without war. Sad but true. The military/industrial complex is the core of the economic engine.

[mainer]

7. Don't the Clinton years qualify?

At least, some of the Clinton years?

[Taverner]

8. We were essentially at war with Iraq during that time

You didn't read much about it, but the No-Fly zone in Northern Iraq was especially targeted.

Besides, military spending never went down during Clinton - it stayed the same. We had contracts we had made in the Cold War days that we had to fulfill. Unfortunately, the PNAC stepped in just in time, before those contracts ran out, with this new, glorious war against the Islamofascist hordes wanting to put our blonde daughters in burkhas :eyes:

Lather, rinse, repeat...

[WinkyDink]

18. "War-time" usually refers to having our Armed Forces actively engaged with an enemy force.

I completely disagree that the Clinton years were "war-time" ones.

[Taverner]

19. I'm referring to a war-time economy - but I consider bombing missions active engagement