Based on Internal Revenue Service figures, the richest 1% have TRIPLED their cut of America’s income pie in one generation. In 1980 the richest 1% of America took one of every fifteen income dollars. Now they take THREE of every fifteen income dollars. That’s a TRILLION extra dollars a year. Some ultra-rich individuals, like hedge fund managers David Tepper and John Paulson, made $4 billion in a year (on most of which they paid only a 15% capital gains tax rate). This is enough to pay the salaries of every public school teacher in New York City. But we blame the immigrants instead of the people taking unimaginable amounts of money from society. Howard Zinn wrote about the petty thieves who go to jail for crimes averaging $1000 per offense, while sophisticated financial insiders get probation for swindling millions from the system. The only difference now is that it’s “legal” to use financial trickery to divert funds from education and infrastructure to a few well-positioned money managers. Paul Buchheit ☀
We all know that President Jefferson doubled the size of the United States by buying Louisiana from France in 1803, right? It never occurred to me, until this morning, to wonder how France got the right to sell it in the first place. The answer is, they simply claimed it. Forget about the fact that thousands, if not millions, of natives had been living there for centuries and that this land was sacred ground for most of them. It was stolen from them by western power-brokers! I got this from Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen which I’ve been reading the last couple days. It is just one from among thousands of examples of how the white invaders mistreated, cheated and abused the indigenous people. I strongly encourage you all to read this book. Based almost entirely on original documentation, Loewen exposes the racist way the 12 major history text books used in American high schools delete, distort and ignore American history to keep (whether intentionally or unintentionally) the myth of white exceptionalism in place. It is a truly eye-opening work, even after reading Howard Zinn’s (also incredible) The People’s History of the United States. Greg Boyd ☀
To live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. Howard Zinn ☀
Like other cultural icons, the very figure of Howard Zinn has already in the weeks after his death begun to assume almost mythic proportions. One of Zinn’s former students, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Alice Walker, went so far as to admit to Democracy Now that she somehow “felt he would live forever.” In some ways Walker was right. Even as the followers of Jesus, Elvis, and Tupac often doubt their respective guru’s death and claim to ‘see’ them after their reported passing, so too will Howard Zinn be seen, heard, and felt throughout the halls of academia as his memory reverberates within the hearts and minds of every brave soul who dares to take up a pen to write the history of everyday people. Indeed, the very parts of himself that Zinn valued most will almost certainly escape the grave. Although Zinn will likely forever be remembered as the man who wrote A People’s History of the United States he perhaps more significantly, and in spite of his detractors, may have written THE people’s history of the United States. At least for now. Zinn Lives: Scholars Remember the Person Behind A People’s History ☀
Would a pure “free market” resemble Stalinism? Is modern day America an example of the logical endpoint of libertarianism? Yes and no.
Libertarianism evolved as a revolt against socialism. The United States has never had anything approaching a “free market”, yet the myth of “rugged individualism” is essential to the American dream. If communism was the height of tyranny, then pure individualism would be the height of freedom. In the 20th century the American ethos was characterized by what Dr. King described as a “morbid fear of communism”. Thus did libertarianism evolve as the logical alternative. The problem isn’t free market philosophy, it’s not enough free market philosophy. The solution to the health care crisis isn’t that the government is failing to provide for its citizens, it’s that the government is involved in health care at all. The solution to the failure of privatization is more privatization. And so on.
What would such a society look? Since any “free market” would quickly produce monopoly and statism, we are only able to catch glimpses of Ayn Rand’s utopia. For example, Howard Zinn notes of Colorado mining towns at the turn of the century that:
“Each mining camp was a feudal dominion, with the company acting as lord and master. Every camp had a marshal, a law enforcement officer paid by the company. The ‘laws’ were the company’s rules. Curfews were imposed, ’suspicious’ strangers were not allowed to visit the homes, the company store had a monopoly on goods sold in the camp. The doctor was a company doctor, the schoolteachers hired by the company … Political power in Colorado rested in the hands of those who held economic power. This meant that the authority of Colorado Fuel & Iron and other mine operators was virtually supreme … Company officials were appointed as election judges. Company-dominated coroners and judges prevented injured employees from collecting damages.” [The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913-14, p. 9-11]
We were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousness-embedded there by years of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television. This would seem to lead to a simple conclusion: that we all have an enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink long-held ideas. Howard Zinn ☀
If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves. Howard Zinn ☀
As part of the project of bringing his autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train to the screen, Howard Zinn provided a comprehensive reading list for activists interested in making their own history.
(via ziatroyano)
The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of ‘important’, of course, depends on one’s values. Howard Zinn ☀
Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it also. We did. My mother, who earned seventeen dollars a week working twelve-hour days as a maid, had somehow managed to buy a typewriter for me and I had learned typing in school. I said hardly a word in class (as Howie would later recall), but inspired by his warm and brilliant ability to communicate ideas and conundrums and passions of the characters and complexities of Russian life in the 19th century, I flew back to my room after class and wrote my response to what I was learning about these writers and their stories that I adored. He was proud of my paper, and, in his enthusiastic fashion, waved it about. I learned later there were those among other professors at the school who thought that I could not possibly have written it. His rejoinder: “Why, there’s nobody else in Atlanta who could have written it!” It would be hard not to love anyone who stood in one’s corner like this. Alice Walker ☀
Within two years of reading Salinger, I’d affected all the trappings of The Young Punk Who Would Be Vegan and read A People’s History of the United States, but unlike Salinger’s novel, Zinn’s history resonated with me until my sophomore year of college, when I was disabused of its importance by the man himself. I had attended a lecture of his and somehow weaseled my way into a dinner that followed. I told him how significant A People’s Historyhad been to my political and intellectual development and that I had read it four or five times and that I was about to start it again when he stopped me short:
“My little book has served its purpose,” he told me. “Perhaps it’s time you started on the bibliography.”
He smiled and was about to say something else when he was whisked away by some other sycophant eager to bend his ear, but after talking to other people who had very similar conversations with him, I think I know what he was going to say: namely, that his “little book” was meant more as a point of departure than a destination. Treating it the way Matt Damon’s Good Will Huntingcharacter did (and every newly-minted hipster firebrand does) violates the spirit of its polemic, because the book isn’t meant to replace traditional histories so much as supplement them.
For example, if the significance of the Christian tradition is given short-shrift in the book, it isn’t because that tradition’s unimportant to the development of the nation, but because a robust canon addressing that issue already exists. Zinn never intended his book to be an education in itself, but many readers—especially non-serious ones involved in any of a variety of Zinn-friendly scenes—inflated its importance until it became the definitive source for the entirety of American history. The extensive bibliography in the back-pages indicates that it had no pretensions of being anything of the sort.
I could prattle on about its faults—foremost among them, Zinn’s subscription to a dualism so powerful and pervasive that his accounts of internecine conflicts on the left border on unintelligible—but it is impossible to deny the attraction the book has for young adults whose knowledge of American history comes from the skeletal outlines of a public education. The simplicity of its dualistic worldview appeals to the adolescent in the first throes of rebellion because that worldview is itself adolescent. That sounds like an insult, but I mean it in the same sense that Zinn meant what he said to me: A People’s History represents a stage in one’s intellectual development.
It was never intended to arrest it.
The largest lie is that everything the United States does is to be pardoned because we are engaged in a “war on terrorism”. This ignores the fact that war is itself terrorism, that the barging into people’s homes and taking away family members and subjecting them to torture, that is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give us more security but less security. Howard Zinn ☀
Yet with his passing, we ought to confront a great fallacy in his writing which is being proven with every passing day. Namely, Zinn spoke of this amorphous “people” in his book that was always the victim, not perpetrator of America’s crimes. This despite the “people’s” historical enthusiasm for American imperialism, red baiting, and racist violence. When I see the tea bagger rallies with their hateful depictions of the president and insane talk of secession and conspiracy, I can’t help but think, regardless of their “astro-turf” nature, that these people are indeed part of “the people” just as much as the massive crowds that turned out for president Obama’s inauguration. As we mourn Zinn’s passing, we ought to admire his determination to gain a more critical and truthful picture of American history, but take that one step further and acknowledge that we have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us. Short Note on Howard Zinn ☀
I always wondered why Howard Zinn was considered a radical. (He called himself a radical.) He was an unbelievably decent man who felt obliged to challenge injustice and unfairness wherever he found it. What was so radical about believing that workers should get a fair shake on the job, that corporations have too much power over our lives and much too much influence with the government, that wars are so murderously destructive that alternatives to warfare should be found, that blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities should have the same rights as whites, that the interests of powerful political leaders and corporate elites are not the same as those of ordinary people who are struggling from week to week to make ends meet?
Mr. Zinn was often taken to task for peeling back the rosy veneer of much of American history to reveal sordid realities that had remained hidden for too long. When writing about Andrew Jackson in his most famous book, “A People’s History of the United States,” published in 1980, Mr. Zinn said:
“If you look through high school textbooks and elementary school textbooks in American history, you will find Jackson the frontiersman, soldier, democrat, man of the people - not Jackson the slaveholder, land speculator, executioner of dissident soldiers, exterminator of Indians.”
Radical? Hardly.
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