My history professor was talking in class today

[LeftWingPunk]

about how when he was a kid. He said he was in junior high during the Cuban missile crisis so I figure that he's around 60 years old. He said that in the post-World War II era that the United States was so far ahead of any other countries in the world. All the clothing and every product and car was made in the U.S.A. The country was ahead of all the other countries by large margins in pretty much everything. The economy was at its best ever and people were able to get things that they previously couldn't. Americans had the "the sky is the limit" attitude toward everything.

No one ever thought that any other country would ever catch up with the U.S. when you consider how far ahead of everyone they were. Yet it did. What happened?

[EFerrari]

1. Ronald Raygun.

[hlthe2b]

3. Yup.. HIs economic and trade policies started the downhill run

[EFerrari]

10. That bastard was Big Money's president and he not only sold out the American people

at home, but he did the same in our international relations.

If you want to look for the roots of modern anti-American sentiment all you have to do is look at his foreign policy.

Ronald Reagan began the slow death of the middle class and seeded so much hatred for America that it would be very easy to blame him for 9/11.

[WhoIsNumberNone]

58. Anti-American sentiment-

I agree St. Ron made it worse, but there was plenty of anti-American sentiment in the world stemming from Vietnam, and the Arabs displeasure with us probably began around 1967 when we really began selling out to Israel. And the Iranian revolution against the Shah was in 1979.

[EFerrari]

60. Well, you make good points. n/t

[Fire1]

7. In a nutshell. n/t

[Spider Jerusalem]

17. Would've happened without Reagan, regardless.

Things don't occur in a vacuum and history is never free of context. 1971 represents the peak of domestic American petroleum production, for instance; given the need for petroleum as prerequisite for a modern industrial society much later foreign policy would not be very different (see the Carter Doctrine; access to petroleum resources is a key strategic interest of the United States and military force will be used if necessary to ensure it). The economic shocks of the oil crises of the '70's seriously diminished American competitiveness anyway; given strong competition from Japan and Germany, which both produced more fuel efficient vehicles and did so at a relatively cheaper cost than US automakers due to exchange rates, the domestic auto industry would have been no better off without Reagan; decreased economic competitiveness and a changing geopolitical landscape would have meant that things would be different in detail, but not probably in the broader picture.

[EFerrari]

18. I disagree. Raygun faced that challenge and balanced the books

purposefully on the backs of working Americans. He didn't look for better solutions, he looked for a way to bail his benefactors out.

That's why Germany has too much electricity from rooftop solar panels and why we are still trying to drill our way out as if that was a viable option.

[handmade34]

55. I agree it was Reagan's politics

unfortunately enough people were taken in that they voted for him... there was a reason that people bought into his version

[EFerrari]

59. I admit that I still don't understand that.

Maybe there were too many toddlers in my house at the time or something. But he always looked like this to me:



(With apologies to the actual Herb.)

[hootinholler]

37. We certainly would have faced those challenges with or without Ronnie...

However, I think we would have been in a much better position had we not had a union busting corporatista at the helm. Add in the scourge of the war on drugs whilst the CIA was running crack into L.A. to finance arms for Iran...

-Hoot

[Vexatious Ape]

24. That's right

Trickle down started the whole downward spiral.

[mwb970]

65. America's downhill slide began in earnest with St. Ronald.

We were slipping pretty noticeably in the 70s, but once Ronnie got in everything went straight to hell. In some ways, I think Reagan was America's worst president. Without Reagan, there could have been no Chimp, no Dick, no $arah.

I'm so glad I'm old enough to have lived in America when it was still a decent place, before a deeply pathetic president sent us into an irreversible decline.

[Greyhound]

70. He was the tipping point, but it began about 30 seconds after the Japanese surrendered.

As we were light years ahead of the world (intact infrastructure) we dominated, but the corporations (many the very same ones that financed and supported the Nazis) were allowed to completely control our national industry and they brought advances to a stand-still for 30 years of stealing.

I suppose that's why history is so hard to see when you're living it, it's too close and the consequences obscured. The Fascists won WWII.

[slackmaster]

2. I blame Disco

Your professor is absolutely correct, BTW.

[ashling]

9. Like I've always said

Disco Sucks :thumbsup:

[RandomThoughts]

19. It is fair to blame disco, if a story I heard years ago is true.

What I heard was that Disco came from a group of producers looking at every popular hit, and finding what they have in common, then they found music to match that.

Disco actually fits the model of engineered society for profit, if that story is true.

[lame54]

69. it's still better than rap

[LisaM]

4. Reagan - totally

and the dismantling of the unions. All those things your professor talked about - all the made in USA stuff? UNIONS.

[monmouth]

22. And almost all of the homeless mental patients you see around

now? There used to be mental homes, state hospitals, etc. to house and care for them. They didn't need to sleep in the streets or beg for food. Reagan was a pox on this nation.

[sadbear]

5. Union busting

[tblue]

12. And saying "Gov't is the problem."

And also that regulation/oversight of business is such a terrible thing.

I remember when "Made in the USA" was really, really what you wanted. The other stuff was considered cheap. Look at us now.

[Spider Jerusalem]

6. The Cold War, decades of excessive military spending.

The historical term is 'imperial overstretch'. It's what brought down Rome. And the British Empire. The costs of maintaining a high level of defence spending sufficient to have soldiers stationed on the other side of the world and of having a fleet patrolling every ocean eventually hollow out the economy as defence spending grows in proportion to infrastructure investment; also, higher standards of living and wages lead to decreased economic competitiveness from emerging markets with lower raw materials and unit labour costs.

[truedelphi]

68. Thanks Hunter.

I thought you'd snuffed yourself, but glad to know you are here posting items.

:pals:

[TheDebbieDee]

8. Yeah, back then in America, if you were fair-skinned, blond or blue-eyed,

the world was your oyster!

The rest of us were just S-O-L!

[EFerrari]

14. You are right about that. But back then, the Civil Rights Movement was building

and it took Reagan opening his campaign in Oxford to stop it in its tracks (for the moment, anyway).

Because his class war was also a race war and any class war affects people of color in this country first and most.

[DURHAM D]

26. and male nt

[county worker]

11. That was true for most white heterosexual males, me included.

What happened?

Kennedy was assassinated
Vietnam war
Civil rights movement
women's movement
12% inflation
Nixon's presidency
Backslash against social programs
Dems voting for Reagan
Machines doing what was manual labor, EDS
Busting of unions
Closing of steel mills, textile mills, and major manufacturing plants
Migration of poor whites from the South to Northern urban centers
The sexual revolution
Assassination of Dr King
Assassination of Bobby Kennedy
Easy credit
Migration of whites to the suburbs
Personal computers, computers in general, the internet
The US becoming the first post industrial nation
Service economy replaced manufacturing economy
Removal of many regulations


Not in correct order but those are some of the things

[RandomThoughts]

13. Yea the USA had 80% of world production capability after ww2

I think part of it was huberus, and much of it was entropy.

However a mindset was put out that America is better, mostly to fight the cold war, but that ideology stuck, and many Americans now actually believe that Americans are really better people, and got there because of some betterness.

And then, maybe to promote financial sector, there was books written about how America would become a service economy where it would no longer make things just handle the moving of things.

I don't know if that was a pushed meme to support outsourcing and service sectors, or was just stupid, but when I heard that, I knew things were going to get worse.

But the thing is, there is nothing wrong with trade if the other countries treat their people with what we would accept as good working and democratic standards(although we need to get those standards back also), if they don't there should be protectionism.

But if the bottom line is all that matters, people want free trade to make biggest profit possible, and American peasants are no different to a quarterly profit report then some other person in another country, even if they live across the street.

My guess is it was race to the bottom, and America was moving fast.

[Ozymanithrax]

15. Japanese stuff was trash in the late 50's to mid 60's...

Consumerism came to adulthood in the 70's, and globalism in the late 80's. Unions, the only real force keeping wages high for workers, were busted. The textile industry simply moved oversees where slave labor could guarantee a much better return on investment.

[Captain Hilts]

16. Germany and Japan had modern production facilities and ours were WWII or earlier era. nt

[slackmaster]

48. Because technically speaking, we bombed them back into the Stone Age

And they had to start over.

[jobycom]

20. Those expectations were a bit unrealistic.

We were the least destroyed of the major economic powers after WWII, so we got a lot of the business of rebuilding the world. Also, because of FDR's efforts in the 30s, we were poised in terms of resources and infrastructure to take advantage of the situation. So things were great.

The problem is, it couldn't be sustained, for a number of reasons. First, other nations as they rebuilt became more competitive, so they caught up. At first that only helped us by giving us more customers, but it eventually led to other nations being able to compete with us. Second, as other nations did catch up, they all demanded more resources of their own, which raised the prices of the natural resources we needed. Resources like oil often wound up under the control of nations that we had not always been good to, so they could have some control over our economy.

Then of course, our nation went conservative. Rather than continuing the wise investments of FDR or the stabilizing social programs of FDR, JFK, and LBJ, the nation got greedy, trying to kill the goose to collect all the eggs at once. Reagan and Bush cut taxes dramatically, expecting our expenses to just disappear without the government collecting funds to pay for them. Instead, we ran up a deficit and a debt that destroyed the value of the dollar and left other nations trying to find a more stable standard. We tailored our economy towards promoting large corporate businesses rather than smaller, more adaptable and diverse smaller businesses, and this drove down wages and creativity. We took short-sighted views of business by the quarter instead of longterm goals.

And we shifted from a diplomatic to a military mentality, choosing to destroy other nations rather than work out our problems with them, so that we earned enemies, lost trust, and destroyed potential customers.

So now we are left with less creativity (from our businesses, I mean, not our people), which has led to less production at home, and cheaper production overseas, and our shrinking production base has forced us to buy cheaper products from abroad, strengthening other nations while weakening ours. That's not completely bad--it's a good thing for the world to raise the standards of poorer nations. But we are not keeping up our standards, or our production, or the innovation that used to keep us prosperous. Large corporations rarely care about innovation, they care mostly about marketing what they are already selling. Innovations come from smaller businesses, but every time a tax cut bill targets the wealthiest, smaller businesses suffer in comparison, and we fall further behind.

Then there's education, where the current political climate would rather teach religion than science, and where funding has been cut to the bone, so that only a few can get a quality education anymore.

It's not all irreversible. Our base economic resources are still strong, and our population is still smart and educated. A simple shift in emphasis, as we saw under Clinton, could turn us around just as dramatically as it did during the 90s. Sustain that change, and we can be sitting high again. But our voters have been convinced that tax cuts are good for the economy (they aren't, at least in the way they've been happening), and so we will have to fall a lot further, I fear, before we get desparate enough to get back on track.

That's the short answer, in general. :)

[LeftWingPunk]

33. jobycom said that

"We tailored our economy towards promoting large corporate businesses rather than smaller, more adaptable and diversable smaller businesses."

That is true. I am from Des Moines and read this book called "The Life and Time of the Thunderbolt Kid" which was about life in Des Moines in the 50s and 60s. It talks about how there were still some mom and pop grocery stores and there were hardly any chains. All the restaurants were local and had a unique twist to them and were purely Des Moines. All but one of the restaurants Bryson talks about going to as a kid were gone by about 1980. The only one left is George the Chili King which has turned into a seedy dump.

[madrchsod]

21. union workers were making more money and ....

had more job security than the management class. but the real killer of the middle class was the opening of the far east to us based corporations. the banks decided to invest in the east and american corporations followed. from the last year of carter to today every president has done nothing to stop the selling of our jobs to the lowest bidders.

sounds like your professor is my age..

[LeftinOH]

23. The post-WWII era was an anomaly; we enjoyed a 25-30 year "bubble"

of opportunity -and it won't happen again.

[DemReadingDU]

28. post-WWII - that would be 50 year "bubble"

We had the best party ever, now we are going to have the worst hangover.

Bib business sold us out.

:(

[boomerbust]

25. Look at the gang in this pic

[Caliman73]

27. It was inevitable that we would be challenged, but not that we'd fail

We could have assumed a leadership role and maintained a decent standard of living, but the corporations led and the people followed into excess. After WWII every other major nation was in shambles. England, bombed...France, battle scarred, humiliated, and internally a mess, China, damaged and in the midst of a civil war, Japan, destroyed, the Soviet Union, likewise destroyed and under totalitarian dictatorship. We had no real competition for the several decades it took to rebuild. Plus we were the ones helping to rebuild which was a big boost to industry. Once those nations, save the Soviets were up and running, they didn't need the US as much and started pumping their own products into the markets.

That, along with our militarism and insistence on privatizing vital services was the path to our current situation.

[mzteris]

29. I think part of it was . . .

the people who grew up prior to/during WWII - had to work and work hard. Every day. No "instant" gratification. Results took effort. There were no guarantees of "success" you got what you worked for.

People felt good about coming out of the depression. About "winning" the war. About suddenly people being able to afford to "live" and to get their kids into schools and keep them there. The ones that weren't "academically" motivated could and did succeed with other necessary skills.

People, like my dad, who never officially finished more than 3rd grade, was able to "work his way" to the top - and retired with PHds reporting TO HIM 'cause just cause he was "uneducated" didn't mean he wasn't very smart. He never forgot going without food during the depression - or having nothing but "flour and water 'biscuits'" with some slightly rancid left over bacon rind. He never forgot having to sleep four to a bed - cross-wise with their feet hanging off the sides 'cause they were all to "big" to sleep right ways on the bed.

I think kids starting feeling "entitled" to having things handed to them. to having it easy. to not going hungry or having high standards to aspire to. To face the knowledge that you either worked - and worked hard - for what you got, or you got nothing.

It was a heady time of technological advances. Amazing things that changed the world. Now - we're pretty ho-hum about "technology". We landed on Mars and people were like, so what? We could perfect replicators and transporters and people would think "pretty cool" and "about damn time" rather than OMFG - LOOK AT WHAT WE"VE ACCOMPLISHED!! HOW AMAZING!

People are "amazed" by golf shots and touchdowns and movies and the ostentatious display of (unearned) wealth. We rely on lotteries and reality shows rather than a work ethic. You made your bed and you had to lie in it so you made damn sure your sheets were clean and wrinkle free even if that meant washing them by hand and ironing them.

OK - I sound like some grumpy old woman (don't say it!! lol) - but I think people are just complacent anymore.


I was appalled when I went back to school (University) a few years ago after a - um - 25 year hiatus, and the students around me (for the most part, not all) were only concerned with how little work they had to do in order to "pass" the class. They cared nothing about actually LEARNING anything, they just wanted to credit so they could move on to the next thing.

Sacrifice? not even in the vocabulary of younger people anymore. (Most, not all.) Hard work? What's that? Everyone gets a "trophy" or a medal, just for showing up. Excellence is not celebrated or rewarded for fear that someone might get their feelings hurt. Mediocrity, eh, it's "good enough", isn't it?

[wickerwoman]

62. I'm not sure that's entirely fair.

Maybe I'm jaded from dealing with a lot of professors who did copious amounts of dope in the 60s and stumbled into tenured academy jobs that they have to be pried out of with crowbars. Compare them to newly minted PhDs today who work twice as many hours with no hope of tenure, lousy pay and fifty people breathing down their necks for year-on-year contract positions.

If the kids seem disillusioned it may be that they're on to the fact that it doesn't matter how hard they work- they still have a 50/50 chance of being on the breadline and bunking in mom's basement after graduation.

The 50s and 60s were a hiccup, as other posters have mentioned. You worked hard and you could pull yourself up to something comfortable. Now you work twice as hard and you don't get shit. Except grief about how your lack off success must be because of something wrong with you. It's not the kids being complacent that has resulted in real wages not rising in 50 years or 18% unemployment.

In the 50s one man could support a family with a 40 hour a week job. Now two parents working 100 hours a week between them struggle to make ends meet. You think they don't know what sacrifice or hard work are?

I don't mean to be harsh... but it precisely this Calvinistic attitude that wealth comes from virtue and hard work and therefore the poor must be lazy, that makes it so hard to address the institutional causes of ingrained poverty in our society.

[mzteris]

67. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear -

I'm definitely not a "calvinist" and i most certainly don't ascribe to the "poor are just lazy" or "oh just pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality - though having a good work ethic is certainly important. Absolutely not!

ooops - I just saw the time - I have to fly but I'll come back and try and elaborate. There is a difference in attitude - though yeah, sometimes that lack of opportunity to "succeed" makes a big damn difference - but not usually by kids IN college, that's usually affects more highschool kids.

[barbtries]

30. greed.

someone else mentioned reagan, and i would have to agree that his presidency was a watershed imo. rich getting richer poor getting poorer.

[elleng]

31. The industrial revolution keeps moving.

It is a big world, becoming more and more productive.

[FarCenter]

32. The US had an intact manufacturing infrastructure and a huge amount of capital

We had been the chief seller of material and arms to the winning side in two World Wars.

By 1946, we had the only fully intact infrastructure among all the developed countries. We also had all of the world's gold in Fort Knox. To support the sales of material and arms, our mines, oil wells and transportation systems had been fully developed.

Since WW II, we have been fat, dumb, and happily living beyond our means off of our capital.

Meanwhile, the other countries rebuilt their infrastructures, developed their resources, and educated and trained their people.

Furthermore, most of them did not spend vast sums on maintaining military and geopolitical hegemony as "leader of the free world".

[old mark]

34. Well, John, we won WWII and nearly completely destroyed the manufacturing capabilities

of Germany, Italy and Japan. Our allies Britain, and part of France, were impoverished by the war which for them began in 1939, not nearly in 1942 as it did for us. The Soviet Union and the US were THE world powers, the only ones with manufacturing capabilities and cash.
Many people trained in science, arts of all types and every technical skill came to the US before, during and after WWII to escape the war and/or Communism. Our country had huge amounts of cash due to the war workers who worked many hours on end for years with little on which to spend their money. Even many returning veterans had cash - they were in places where there was nothing to buy for years, and many had more money even on service pay than they ever had before. Factories began making cars, refrigerators, all sorts of household items. Developers created the suburbs and built millions of new houses in ten years, and sold many to veterans. Many of us early boomers were born then. (1947, here.)

My dad had worked making military uniforms during the war, got a better job right after, had enough money to buy a tavern as well as a house and a car.

We gave our former enemies money, rebuilt their countries and by the mid 1960's we were losing our advantage, and by the '70's we had lost it completely and were declining to where we are today.

We suffered from corporations with no long term interest in keeping jobs here - they saw new plants built in Japan and Europe and never spend a dime on new factories here, nor on new bridges, railroads, electric transmission, etc. They bought into foreign companies an left the American workers here to do the best we could do.

Here we are today.

mark

[Jokinomx]

35. The Grim Truth.......

It's currently a thread that made the greatest page....but this is the link to the actual article.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25166.htm

The link to the Greatest page post....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8116969

it's a long article ... with a point of view that most Americans don't want to face. But we are evolving into, if not a third world country, a third rate one.

Thanks for the post.

:toast:

[walldude]

36. I can tell you what happened

We stuck our heads so far up our own asses that we couldn't see reality when it was right in front of us. The 80's and the Reagan administration unleashed a tsunami of greed and narcissism so big and so deep that we are still trying to paddle away from it. And it's not working, we have slowly become so used to right wing ideals that many on the left are now on the right, and they don't even realize it. Those of us who haven't moved have watched the line run away from us and are now standing in "far-left loonyville".

[elehhhhna]

38. We let Japan keep all the treasure they'd looted in Asia...

billions to kickstart their economy. All in the same hands today as before the war.

[slay]

39. Souless corporations that would do ANYTHING to make a profit and the never ending greed of the rich

They don't care about us. They don't care about this country. They only care about one thing - $$$$$$$$. They start wars for it, trading blood for oil which IS money to them. Capitalism. Capitalism is the problem. That's why Fox is always screaming about socialism. If only we could be so lucky to have a socialist (Bernie Sanders) as our leader! Capitalism is the problem - but people are a LONG way away from admitting it. Socialism could well be the cure but thanks to well funded capitalist propaganda operations, we are even further away from that possibility than we could/should be. :(

Capitalism may have worked for a time, like religion, but now both pose a very serious threat to our continued survival on this planet. :mad:

[KonaKane]

40. It's interesting that the US really gained prominence under that "socialist"

FDR. After that, it was a long and slow slide backward.

I would love to hear some teabagging idiot address that little paradox.

[DearAbby]

41. What happened?

When you squeeze out the middle class, this is what happens.

[jberryhill]

42. Why shouldn't it have happened

I sometimes wonder whether people think the ideal situation is for the US to be some sort of Disneyland while the entire rest of the world lives in squalor.

[damntexdem]

43. Yeah, in the 1960s:

'A Japanese transistor radio' was a joke (explicitly so in an Allen Sherman song); but within a few years Japanese electronics were the standard for the world.

Even in the early 1970s, a Japanese car like a Honda has dismissed as a joke. Need I say more about a few years later?

In the case of Japan, what did it was Total Quality Management. That was developed in the U.S. in the automobile industry at the end of WWII, but said industry ignored it. Japan, however, was rebuilding an industrial base and adopted TQM for that purpose. They started by copying American products, originally not all that well -- hence the transistor-radio jokes. By applying TQM and its adjunct, Continuous Quality Improvement, however, they soon developed superior products that they constantly improved upon (well, that is, until they were corrupted to U.S. forms of corporate practice, as with Toyota in recent years).

Basically, we rested on our laurels, and then started outsourcing. And now we're paying for it.

[Jade Fox]

44. The war in Viet Nam.....

did major damage to the economy. Many people don't know this. Focus on the illegality/immorality of the Viet Nam War has overshadowed it's effect on the economy.

The post WWII economic boom was the biggest this country has ever seen. Time was I knew more of the details about what caused the long, slow slide downward starting in the late 1960s, but I'd have to go back and look it up now.

[proud2BlibKansan]

45. We stopped making stuff here

NAFTA happened.

Union busting happened.

[Naturalist111]

52. And cheap labor happened so US Corporations outsourced

[dorkulon]

46. Those were the days of the 91% tax bracket.

It amuses me when 'small government conservatives' pine for the good old days, that golden era of progressive taxation. When you realize that the tax code was their dystopian nightmare, it becomes clear that what they really miss is the days before the Civil Rights Act. But the fact is, those steep taxes made the robust middle class we once had possible.

[eShirl]

47. we didn't have to recover from the devastation of a war fought in our own country

that was a big advantage we had over many other countries

[zorahopkins]

49. Fast Food

Cheap Food Served Fast.

It's what did us in.

That and floridation.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

50. Reagan's policies of excessive military spending, union busting,

corporation-coddling, and deregulating, most of it aided and abetted by the DLC.

[Naturalist111]

51. We gave and sold our technology to other countries and guess

what, it wasn't only the corporations. It was your everyday citizen too. For the almighty buck. Also, your everyday citizen wanted the cheap stuff like they still do (Walmart). It wasn't that great for everyone back then, although, it was a hell of a lot better then, than it is now. Understand that people wanted the good life and as much of the stuff that made living great. So they bought cheap stuff. Sound familiar?

[Martin Eden]

53. Vietnam didn't help

A generation of Americans inspired to ask what they can do for their country were betrayed by their government and developed a counter-culture that had a few positives but on the whole was emblamatic of the lost promise of the 1960's.

[Odin2005]

54. It started with JFK's tax cuts and LBJ trying to have both Guns and Butter

The first was economic stupidity and the later destabilized the monetary system, KOed Bretton Wood, and eventually caused the Stagflation of the 70s. This gave conservative ideologues, backed by Monetarist economic theory, the excuse they needed to take control of the economy, screwing American workers in the name of "Fighting Inflation".

Keynesian stimulus is for blunting the impact of recessions, it should NEVER be used to try to keep a boom going.

[TexasObserver]

56. It was Reagan and the selfish, short sighted greed that it foisted.

[nadinbrzezinski]

57. While Labor reached it's hayday

of power in the 1950s and 60s, the seeds were in place as the counter attack started.

By the time Ronnie Reagan got ready to dissolve PATCO, well...

We had a third Red Scare (McCarthy, the first was in the 1880s after the Haymarket Affair, and the second after WW I, and the Russian and Mexican Revolutions).

After that... well the work was in place to convince labor that they were middle class not labor, and to convince them that all they knew was really not a good idea.

Oh and Taft Hatley, 1947...

Oh and welcome to DU and this is truly the Cliff's Notes of this... the serious Cliff's Notes.

[OneBlueSky]

61. greed is what happened . . . the "haves" simply wanted more . . .

and more, and more, and more . . . and the Congress they so deftly bought and paid for was only too happy to oblige . . .

[Cid_B]

63. I love how everyone here..

... picked their own pet peeve and of course that's what led us on the road to ruin.

I'll do it too. We went from a nation of producers to a nation of entitlement.

[ThomThom]

64. In a word GREED that is what happened

We have lost track of what put us on top. We must go back to the days when we made things.

[DailyGrind51]

66. The "military-industrial complex" took over!

President Eisenhower warned us about what would happen if we permitted the M.I.C. to take over, but no one was paying attention.