History May Be Partly Bunk: Pat Eight by Dave Jaffe

History May Be Partly Bunk: Part Eight by Dave Jaffe.


   The great depression of the 1930's led to massive upheaval and great suffering. It also triggered the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Japanese militarism. Both events led to World War Two. As the economy fell into a very steep downfall in the years 2007 and 2008 the U.S. government came to the rescue to avert a massive world economic downturn.
     In 2009 the new Democratic president Barack Obama pushed his agenda of spending trillions of dollars to save the U.S. and the world's economy. Though Republicans balked at spending these massive sums, Obama and his Democratic government won the day. "They are too big to fail," some people in the U.S. said about the big financial firms that may have started the whole mess.
    President Obama spent trillions bailing out these big firms and helping other big firms survive. For a time the U.S. government and the Canadian government  owned parts of General Motors and the Chrysler auto giant. Workers in these firms endured savage cuts to their wages and benefits. Yet without government help these auto giants would have gone under and the North American economy would have been destroyed.
     In Europe, the U.S.A also spent trillions of dollars and saved Europe from economic collapse. By 2010, the western economies started to move forward again. Yet the pain for many people still went on. Over 11 million Americans lost their homes. In European countries like Spain, youth unemployment stood at 30 per cent in 2018. "A whole generation of Spanish youth," one British economist pointed out, "have grown up and never have worked." The big banks just got bigger while ordinary citizens suffered. There's no doubt that the Great Recession - as the economic collapse was called- helped trigger the rise of the far right in the U.S. of A. and Europe.
   Left wing groups in the U.S. formed Occupy Wall Street to protest the rescue of big banks and the great gap between rich and poor. On the far right in America, a massive Tea Party movement sprung up and denounced Barack Obama as a socialist.
    As all this unfolded, I wasn't even touched by any of it. In fact I got richer. Every month after turning 65, I received three small government cheques . Small as they were, they far outstripped  the tiny handicapped allowance I had subsisted on for the previous ten years. For the first time in years I started to save a growing amount of money.
     "History is bunk," said Henry Ford whose Ford Motor company survived the Great Recession without any government help. Maybe Ford was right or wrong. Yet I managed to survive most of  the great upheavals of the 20th and 21st century without being scarred or traumatized. I lived in what John Berger called "pockets of exemption" and I realize in the closing years of my life that I have been incredibly lucky. I also hope that billions of others have also been as lucky as I have been.