Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
Click above, or below, to read Eric Mann’s fascinating article
I’ve been looking for the nails in Van Nuys’s coffin as far back and away as Iroquois Schenectady; one might have looked a bit closer in time and space. This morning I found a great article on http://counterpunch.org about how the hard-working middle-class of the Valley fought for their very existence in 1982 by insisting that the common wealth of the community was the point of enterprise, and its needs are more important than any pencil-head corporation’s balance-sheet shenanigans.
GM’s Van Nuys Assembly opened in 1950 and employed thousands of United Auto Workers until 1992, when the plant closed. Management had planned to shut down a decade earlier, but the Valley community supported the union, our local politicians supported the union, and one of Studio City’s greatest union men ever, Ed Asner (RIP) was turned like a Lou Grant bulldog on GM’s shiny-balloon CEO:
Eric Mann goes on to describe what sounds like a barnburner of a bargaining session:
The decade that began with chants that “the people united can never be defeated” ended, of course, with a great sucking sound.
in 1609 Hudson was an unremarkable English seaman working for Dutch masters, doing the unremarkable (to them) English/Dutch sailing captain’s job of finding the Northwest Passage to Fabled Cathay. He failed of course but everybody did at that job, and they didn’t mind; they kept hiring him anyway. In the short and medium term, the real job of these voyages was the job of finding new wijk ports to extend the English-Dutch common trading network. As we know, Hudson’s inestimable success was in finding the Valley that bears the River that today bears his name. The North River, as the Dutch called it, has a perfect configuration for a wijk, or indeed, for many. It has deep harbors in a wide central bay at its mouth; for a long way upriver, there are vigorous tides for the effortless ebb and flow of traffic; and it is directly adjacent to willing and eager trading partners. The City, the cities, built on this estuary made the Hudson River the New Money River in the world, supplanting the Rhine. Hudson didn’t build New York, but he and his men did bring back plenty of extraordinarily soft beaver pelts. In Mokum they sold for a pretty stuiver soon after landing, to the keen-eyed merchants who crowded the Damraak and maybe slipped the Half Moon sailors and stevedores a little something to get a peek into their cargo. Several of those merchants immediately chartered ships of their own, and there were Dutch traders smoking with Mohawks at Albany and Raritans on Staten Island from 1610. What made the amazing pelts so soft, what made them valuable, what gave them the perfectly trimmed nap, was that they had previously been worn by the Indians as their clothing. The most important and successful wijk trading city of them all, was built on carving the percent out of dealing in the Native Americans’ own second-hand jewelry and their own second-hand rags. Both industries, of course are still huge in New York. But if we take the Half Moon as a metaphor — Hudson certainly did find a route for Dutch-English trade to illuminate, penetrate and dominate the distant hemisphere, through the traders who built in his wake. It just took The Whirligig of Time, and a Gold Rush, and a whole lot more capital, for the wijks to open the passage to Cathay.
Full Disclosure: Bait and switch. The wise homily above was merely a ruse, to get Patient Reader to click on Michael Hudson’s latest interview on Nakedcapitalism.com. It is a sharp non-jargony reading of the China Question. He is that rare economist in America who actually seems to know and follow, and who cares about, where China is actually at…versus, where America is at, and how where we’re at is so far out into the Swamp of Ignorance, that the rest of the world has not only stopped following, but has given up even waving and calling out from the shoreline. Hudson explains why America’s plutocracy is just not where it’s at, for China, or the world, or the wijks, anymore. In other words, Hudson explains why China has de-monetized the Money River of Hudson.
Don’t be afraid of hiking alone, or snakes, or icy patches, or any of the other vague terrors conjured and then dismissed in this hilarious, horrible, brilliantly insultingly dumb, soul-crushingly smug sucker-punch to the cojones. DO be afraid that this gooey ordure is from the once-flagship journal of the once-intellectual metropolis of America’s West Coast.
The Singularity must have tracked my interests (hiking, Yosemite, men?) and come up with this, in fact, pushed it at me all over the Internets, dangled it several times before my lazy-swimming eyes. SFGate? That’s the old Chronicle, right…? Patient Reader, I clicked!
This is journalism? This is even…advertising? Is this written by a bot? What is this? Democracy requires an alert, inquiring Fourth Estate. I share this for the laugh, but…seriously, folks, ….what do we do now?
This past weekend when I clicked “publish” on my blog about the origin of the Gold Standard, I opened the news headlines and was amazed to read about a Golden Anniversary: it was 50 years ago, on August 15, 1971, that Pres. Nixon came on TV to announce that the Universe had changed. The dollar would no longer be backed by the Gold Standard. I unpublished, and rewrote to mark the event.
“Ooh, Archie, Wage, Price, Rent Freezes Announced?” “Stifle, Edith, he’s no El Presidente, he’s just sticking it to the You-know-who-skis”.
Nixon’s forgotten bombshell came despite the Gold Standard having been staunch Republican policy for 100 years, and in contradiction to the library of Republican economic tracts and editorials and sermons promising ruination should we leave the Gold Standard, and to boot, he announced it as an imperial fait accompli…so, wow, goodbye to all this:
Nixon is correctly regarded as small-minded, anti-intellectual, bigoted, regressive and paranoid. So it is astonishing that, though he considered them maggots, he actually seems to have read the reports sent up by the weak-kneed pink Ivy League effetes staffing his cabinet offices. He perceived that with hard money, the Main Street economy was in imminent danger of a crash, a slump, and then a slippery, never-ending deflation. [Patient Reader, take that bemused look off your face, economic troubles for the masses were really a big worry to him. Back then, under the New Deal, and having fought three wars in succession, we hadn’t known hard times for a generation. Nixon worried about bringing home an army of angry, dope-smoking veterans exposed to Godless Communism. If the country had no jobs for them, no churn, no frontier, no growth, and no future, his historical page would be a wet crumpled-up wash rag on the john floor of the Library of Congress’s remaindered book jumble sale.] Nixon’s base were Christian Main Street cloth coat conservatives, not the worldly Rockefeller wing. Bankers existed, in the world of downtown Van Nuys, to make car loans and give enough interest on the savings account so that a man of 24 had enough saved already to buy a low-mortgage bungalow for his pregnant bride. And too often, they wouldn’t do even that. Nixon didn’t go to Yale and showed it now; he thought the Old Money was betraying America by hedging their American wealth in gold, and limiting America’s future growth. Nixon looked past the aura — the mystical, Calvinistic, 17th century alchemical absolutist purity of the Gold Standard — and saw the Witch of the East. He dropped the house. William Jennings Bryan was right. The one-earner + one-shopper + two-car passbook-saving Malthusian-positive family, his base, had been crucified upon a Cross of Gold.
Four-score years before, and more, the Republicans caricatured currency reformers as heretical zealots, and equated leaving the Gold Standard with trampling on the eternal law of God. In the 19th century down to the 1970s, it was the Bank of England and the Banque Rothschild that was the vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smelled like gold. This anti-Gold Standard cartoon from the Populist Era is remarkable, for Nixon apparently came to this View.
“Prosperity without war requires action on three fronts. We must create more and better jobs. We must stop the rise in the cost of living. We must protect the dollar from the attacks of international speculators. [Slyly dog-whistling to voters: the “You-know-who-skis.”] We are going to take action. We are going to move forward to a new prosperity without war that befits a great people, all together, and along a broad front.” — From Nixon’s Saturday, August 15 1971 broadcast
Nixon became convinced a larger money supply would help achieve conditions for the marvelous velocity of money effect of full employment. This would need planning and management, and strong Federal control. But it was not socialism, if it was managed by a guy like him.
Pres. Roosevelt, in 1933 during the Depression [caused by the “Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke The World,” Ahamed, Liaquat Penguin, 2009] had already faced down the gold-bugs by doubling down on gold.The New Deal aggressively moved to buy, hoard, smuggle in, and prop up the gold dollar by counter-intuitively making dollars not convertible to gold. Gold was recalled from circulation, wedding rings excepted, and citizens were given back paper currency at a set price. The U.S. Treasury buried them in Fort Knox and made it illegal for Americans to buy gold coins at all. This earned the howls and hatred of conservatives for being a class traitor. But Roosevelt intended to maximize the amount of gold available to the government to back the paper he needed to prime the pump. 40 years later, in a sense, Nixon was just making the New Deal official: not only was gold not convertible, but the amount of dollars issued into the economy would henceforth bear no relationship whatsoever with the amount, or price, of gold in the world’s vaults.
It took a Quaker Siegfried from California to finally slay the dragon of the Rhinegold. World governments were marshaled into the scheme, the Fed banks and Treasury Dept. and International Settlements systems were upgraded to IBM punch cards, and by mid 1973, the apparatus for the petrodollar was up and running. So, while the Brady Bunch went to Hawaii, Nixon’s mandarins were placing the dollar in an intricate “basket of currencies and commodities” (gold included, and oil); all balanced against each other in the new global currency market. That sounds like a Round Table of equals, but in reality, it was dollar imperialism. The keystone role of the dollar as the world’s trade coin was mortared in place with a kind of agio — an extra premium value over other currency. This was guaranteed because of the agreement that the worldoil market would be denominated only in U.S. dollars. This means that before any other country gets to fill their gas tank, even with their own oil, their money has to first stop at the U.S. Temple to visit the moneychangers. This agiopetroleo, which few American citizens even know exists, is the source of Original Sin: American Exceptionalism. It floods our economy with billions and billions of unearned dollars’ worth of purchasing power. If another country gets rich by developing, if they use more oil to fuel their growth, their rise isn’t “eating our lunch” at all! It only helps the U.S. economy rise higher still above them! It’s a neat trick, but it…set the planet on fire with burning oil, wars and greed and it has baked the Tree of Life to certain extinction right down to the roots, within my lifetime. It mightn’t have been that way.
Nixon seemed to want to harness the agio petroleo to finance universal health care, up-grade the South to modernize and equalize our racist economy, boom the starter-furniture showrooms once more, and set the clean-shaving barbers in Van Nuys abustle with jovial backslapping and clean racist jokes. There is good reason to believe Nixon would be appalled by what happened: plastic 24% credit traps and Quantitative Easing and underwater mortgages and medical bankruptcies and off-shoring and speculative ballooning of asset prices and austerity and starving the public sector and endless “Disaster Capitalism” wars and baking the Middle Class to certain extinction right down to the roots, within my lifetime.
If you don’t remember the Universe changing to a fairer economy in the early ‘70s, you’re not alone. You DO remember why you don’t remember, though — you just have never thought about why Islamic terrorism appeared out of nowhere at just this time.
1972 — OPEC Nations Oil Ministers meet in Vienna. [yech — why didn’t they book at the Sacher?]
The OPEC nations, who already saw the agio as a slap in the face, a grabby U.S. “tax” biting into their profits, had a collective conniption when the U.S. turned around and quite brazenly, considering Nixon’s audible anti-Semitic asides, shipped massive armaments to reinforce Fortress Israel. They were incensed that the petrodollars Nixon was stealing from them, he was using to kill them. [In their culture that’s wrong.] In 1972 they picked up their oil, in 1973 they took it home. The Oil Embargo caused a world-wide run for the last drops of gas. Since these fumes now had to be bought in the new petrodollars, it caused in turn a run on the U.S. dollar. That in turn caused the value of the U.S. dollar to soar 40% in the new currency markets. Instantly, every American product all over the world was 40% more expensive. Instantly, every consumer in the world, especially Americans, stopped buying American anything.
Who even remembered we had gone off the Gold Standard? Armageddon was on Main Street’s mind by 1973, not currency. Nixon, itching to try out his new shiny, whirring Modern Middle-Class Money Machine, never got his sweaty hands near the plastic-coated controls. Somebody came along and threw a bucket of Watergate on him, and he melted, melted, what a world…
Ah, what might have been. Clean water, clean air, modern jobs, local control, more people working fewer hours for more pay. Capitalism had to deliver for the little guy. Loose money, Nixon believed, would build society from the middle. Instead:
NEXT IN PART FOUR OF VAN NUYS — A VIEWING: The Van Nuys family in Old New York
The Valley Village View 