text: Archives for October 2015 | Friendly Fire - Page 2
  Posted on October 8, 2015 by Jonathan Dobrer
  Let's play a game with time and see if you can tell which headlines are from 74 to 80 years ago and which from this week.
  Ready? Chamber of Commerce complains that government regulations will kill jobs and stop our economic recovery. How about? African forces refuse ceasefire in Ethiopia. Try, Los Angeles wilts under heat wave reaching 107.2. Then there's, Blast in Cuba Blamed on Reds. Finally, Crisis Grows in the Ukraine.
  This was a trick test. All of these appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times from 1935 to 1941 and were randomly sampled from the same date, September 21.
  History seems to repeat itself like an old frozen burrito heated and consumed well past its sell-by date. Little wonder we have chronic heartburn.
  As we read today's headlines, we see the current cavalcade of tragedy and farce, and we may be inclined to believe that we live in uniquely terrible times. We don't. As Ecclesiastes wrote, and as these old front-page stories prove, "There is nothing new under the sun."
  Karl Marx observed that, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce." Mark Twain is often quoted as kind of refuting Marx by saying that "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Thus, it's never exactly the same, but we see the same problems, issues and themes across time. It's as if we humans were completely incapable of learning from history.
  We didn't get the message from France's catastrophic humiliation in Vietnam and went right in. We learned nothing from the destruction of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and didn't just bomb the terrorist camps, but invaded. What were we thinking? Maybe, "Oh Alexander failed, Great Britain failed. The Soviet Union failed, but our exceptionalism will make us triumph." Now Russia seems not have learned from their own failure in Afghanistan and is sending ground troops into Syria.
  Economically, we don't seem any quicker on the uptake. The leveraging of stock purchasing that helped create the crash in 1929 was restricted for a while and then crept back. The accumulation of power in few corporations that begat Republican Teddy Roosevelt and anti-trust legislation is all but forgotten by both Republicans and Democrats. The "magic of the market," can't work without real competition.
  Every argument against environmental regulations and living wages is the same: Job killers. Every argument against more progressive tax systems is also exactly the same. Job killers. Every argument against unions is also exactly the same. Yes, Job killers. Yet the economy flourished in the 1950s with unions at their strongest and the highest tax rates at over 90% and restrictions being put on air pollution, child labor and unsafe working conditions.
  What is depressing about all of this is not simply that we don't learn from our failures. We also don't learn from our successes!
  As George Santayana wrote, "Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it." Or to put it more simply, in popular terms, it's always Groundhog Day.