It dealt with the time period, 1914-1945, that of my oppressed parents, grandparents, and great- grandparents' , and also yours,-and the period thereafter, when me and my siblings were born, as were you.
It was then that the captains of capital and politics finally retrenched sufficiently from the downward income-equalizing tendencies of two World Wars and the Communist movements, to restore that unregulated capitalism and political cronyism that had produced their prior periods of opulent privileges during the "gilded age" in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
Their "good ole days," were not happy days for us. They were to our forebears' political and economic detriment, producing black American people's present consumerist, hand-to-mouth, economic orientation and predicament. These overarching political ramifications, and incipient global macroeconomics our folks, were, seemly, ignorant of; yet their spirits are very sensitive to their own injustices and economic deprivation.
Piketty writes:
"Briefly, the shocks that buffeted the economy in the period 1914-1945--World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Great Depression, World War II, and the consequent advent of new regulatory and tax policies along with controls on capital--reduced capital's share of income to historically low levels in the 1950s. Very soon, however, capital began to reconstitute itself. The growth of capital's share accelerated with the victories of Margaret Thatcher in England in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980, marking the beginning of a conservative revolution. Then came the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, followed by financial globalization and deregulation in the 1990s. All of these events marked a political turn in the opposite direction from that observed in the first half of the twentieth century. By 2010, and despite the crisis that began in 2007-2008, capital was prospering as it had not done since 1913."
P.41-42, CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY by Thomas Piketty (2014)
Monday, July 7, 2014
'CAPITAL' ACQUAINTENCES
Reading Thomas Piketty's book last night, before bed, I encountered a passage that rocked my world. 
It dealt with the time period, 1914-1945, that of my oppressed parents, grandparents, and great- grandparents' , and also yours,-and the period thereafter, when me and my siblings were born, as were you.
It was then that the captains of capital and politics finally retrenched sufficiently from the downward income-equalizing tendencies of two World Wars and the Communist movements, to restore that unregulated capitalism and political cronyism that had produced their prior periods of opulent privileges during the "gilded age" in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
Their "good ole days," were not happy days for us. They were to our forebears' political and economic detriment, producing black American people's present consumerist, hand-to-mouth, economic orientation and predicament. These overarching political ramifications, and incipient global macroeconomics our folks, were, seemly, ignorant of; yet their spirits are very sensitive to their own injustices and economic deprivation.
Piketty writes:
"Briefly, the shocks that buffeted the economy in the period 1914-1945--World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Great Depression, World War II, and the consequent advent of new regulatory and tax policies along with controls on capital--reduced capital's share of income to historically low levels in the 1950s. Very soon, however, capital began to reconstitute itself. The growth of capital's share accelerated with the victories of Margaret Thatcher in England in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980, marking the beginning of a conservative revolution. Then came the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, followed by financial globalization and deregulation in the 1990s. All of these events marked a political turn in the opposite direction from that observed in the first half of the twentieth century. By 2010, and despite the crisis that began in 2007-2008, capital was prospering as it had not done since 1913."
P.41-42, CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY by Thomas Piketty (2014)
It dealt with the time period, 1914-1945, that of my oppressed parents, grandparents, and great- grandparents' , and also yours,-and the period thereafter, when me and my siblings were born, as were you.
It was then that the captains of capital and politics finally retrenched sufficiently from the downward income-equalizing tendencies of two World Wars and the Communist movements, to restore that unregulated capitalism and political cronyism that had produced their prior periods of opulent privileges during the "gilded age" in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
Their "good ole days," were not happy days for us. They were to our forebears' political and economic detriment, producing black American people's present consumerist, hand-to-mouth, economic orientation and predicament. These overarching political ramifications, and incipient global macroeconomics our folks, were, seemly, ignorant of; yet their spirits are very sensitive to their own injustices and economic deprivation.
Piketty writes:
"Briefly, the shocks that buffeted the economy in the period 1914-1945--World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Great Depression, World War II, and the consequent advent of new regulatory and tax policies along with controls on capital--reduced capital's share of income to historically low levels in the 1950s. Very soon, however, capital began to reconstitute itself. The growth of capital's share accelerated with the victories of Margaret Thatcher in England in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980, marking the beginning of a conservative revolution. Then came the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, followed by financial globalization and deregulation in the 1990s. All of these events marked a political turn in the opposite direction from that observed in the first half of the twentieth century. By 2010, and despite the crisis that began in 2007-2008, capital was prospering as it had not done since 1913."
P.41-42, CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY by Thomas Piketty (2014)