As increasing numbers of people in the USA, also in the entire world, agonize over the never-ending, highly destructive wars of the USA, they also seek to trace the roots of where exactly things went so wrong and the US polity drifted towards its endless aggressions.
Many scholars and historians also try to find this answer, and increasingly many of them are led back to those three terrible days when three of the greatest leaders of the USA were assassinated.
One of the most important aspects of these assassinations was that these were used to silence forever the most promising voices of peace and justice in the USA, and there is increasing evidence that the conspiracies to kill these great leaders started shaping up soon after they had declared their strong commitment to peace as well as their determination to oppose wars.
During 1963-68 the USA was shaken by assassinations of its three most promising and popular leaders.
The overall impact was in terms of a big loss to the forces of peace and civil rights, and a boost to forces of foreign aggression and domestic injustice. The three lives lost were those of President John F. Kennedy followed by the loss 5 years later of prominent civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.
On November 22, 1963 President John F. Kennedy, the popular and young President of the USA, was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. The youngest US President died at the age of only 46. Two days later the man accused of this assassination, Oswald (who had been denying any role in this) was also killed. Since then there have been widespread allegations of some wider planning behind these two killings (as well as of a local police official).
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This Isn’t Your Grandfather’s (1960s) Inflation Scare
March 14, 2018
This Isn’t Your Grandfather’s (1960s) Inflation Scare
As soon as the GOP followed its long-promised tax cuts with damn-the-deficit spending increases (who cares about the kids, right?), you knew to be ready for the Lyndon B. Johnson reminders.
And it’s worth remembering that LBJ pushed federal spending higher, pushed his central bank chairman against the wall (figuratively and, by several accounts, also literally) and eventually pushed inflation to post–Korean War highs.
Inflation kept climbing into Richard Nixon’s presidency, pausing for breath only during a brief 1970 recession (although without falling as Keynesian economists predicted) and then again during an attempt at wage and price controls that ended badly. Nixon’s controls disrupted commerce, angered businesses and consumers, and helped clear a path for the spiraling inflation of the mid- and late-1970s.
So naturally, when Donald Trump and the Republicans pulled off the biggest stimulus years into an expansion since LBJ’s guns, butter and batter the Fed chief, it should make us think twice about inflation risks—I’m not saying we shouldn’t do that.
But do the 1960s really tell us much about the inflation outlook today, or should that outlook reflect a different world, different economy and different conclusions?
I would say it’s more the latter, and I’ll give five reasons why.
1—Technology
I’ll make my first reason brief, because the deflationary effects of technology are both transparent and widely discussed, even if model-wielding economists often ignore them. When some of your country’s largest and most impactful companies are set up to help consumers pay lower prices, that should help to, well, contain prices.
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