General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: To those DU'ers who lived through the "Golden Age of Capitalism" (1940s to 1970s)-some questions... [View all]RainDog
(28,784 posts)I wasn't alive then, but the legislation that brought us social security, the various work project programs that put people back to work and gave them skills to survive, the national projects - things like the TVA that brought electricity to rural parts of the nation, and, later, Eisenhower's Interstate Highway Program, a federal govt. project that made it possible to move people, goods and information from one place to another - those were all instrumental.
fwiw - FDR insisted that African-Americans would be included in WPA programs, even tho southern whites objected to this.
Europe was devastated after WWII, as was Japan. The U.S. didn't have the competition from those nations that now exists. Those nations rebuilt with social safety net programs in place to retrain people when jobs were lost, with educational standards higher than those in the U.S, with a focus on the common good to elevate all... something that is anathema to conservatives.
The refusal by conservatives to move forward, in the 1970s, with new energy policy, as envisioned by Carter, has set the U.S. back in terms of innovation.
Reagan's mantra that the govt. is the problem helped to give racists a cover, and the long-standing drive by Reagan and his pals to undo the New Deal continues to this day...and Democrats play along with this at the expense of the entire nation's well being.
Outsourcing of jobs to other nations has created a new global "governing" entity - the multinational corporation. They are responsible to no one but share holders - they have no provision for the common good.
Among those are military contractors, whose goal is to be necessary to stay in business. The revolving door from such corporations to the govt. has turned the conservatives away from their view of limited interference in other nations' business. We have military bases all over the world, and when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...
Innovations that are not about multi-national corporate growth, however, cannot get a hearing in the U.S. because those same CEOs, etc. fund elections - and the govt, apparently, is now a servant of the rich, just as it was before FDR tried to avert class war by bringing some justice to American economic life.