Real job creators. Small business owners from across the country give us their take on the economy and American politics.

The Clarksville Foundry. (clarksvillefoundry.com)

Everybody talks about small business these days. How great it is. How beleaguered it is. What a barometer it is of the health of the American economy. What a source of job creation it should be. And of course “job creators.”

That’s the mantra of opponents to a surtax on millionaires to pay for the middle class payroll tax break. But are small business people millionaires? And what do they think of Obama in Kansas? The GOP on Capitol Hill? The economy?

This hour On Point: our own small business roundtable on policy, politics, job creation, and the American way ahead.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests

Joan Ecker, founder and owner of F.H. Clothing Company in Quechee, Vermont.

Charles Foust, Jr., president of the Clarksville Foundry.

Katie Tyler, founder and CEO of Tyler 2 Construction, a commercial construction company based in Charlotte, founded in 1983

President Obama makes constant reference to the 1960s which begs the question, “what really happened to the democratic fervor of the 1960s?  Then too why was Obama himself helped into office by this audience that embraces him as a native son?  An example of why and what for is expressed in the Alex Kingsbury essay.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO THE 1960S

Edward P. Morgan in What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy (2010), states that the civil rights victories of the 1960s suffered a backlash that laid them open to right-wing obstructionism.

 

Edward P. Morgan

Morgan writes that the generaltional frame was an easy way for the media to encompass the range of visible turbulence it was covering in the latter 1960s, especially as political protest and countercultural appearance began to converge.  While the media made frequent reference to the “generation gap,” attacks on the young began to appear in the media as early as 1965, when, for example, the president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce proclaimed that the “generation of youth that is discountented, restless, and rebellious” was the nation’s leading problem.  (153)

 

 

Morgan posits that “explaining youth” the question, the easiest answer was to scutinize their parents and speculate about ways the young were encouraged to be self-indulgent by “permissive” parenting—a theory that evolved from a misreading of pediatrician Benjamin Spock’s guide Baby and Child Care, used by many post-war parents.  While it is quite possible that some parents read Spock’s emphasis on the individualtion of the developing child as permission to indulge their children, the permissive parenting theory also ignored the way postwar consumer culture systimatically encouraged both self-indulgence and other-directedness.

Newt Gingrich of the Anti-Intellectualism of 1960s: Eric Hoffer

In seeking to explain both the counterculture and the rise of student activism, the media gravitated toward several psycological or pop-psychology voices to authenticate their conclusions.  Longshoreman Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book The True Believer had argued that history’s great mass movements were populated by “misfits” who longed to transcend their lives of failure by being part of a great historic movement.

 

 

In the mid-1960s, Hoffer’s book became a popular source for explaning the social movement of the time—particularly his argument that youth whose “restless groping for an identity” led them to “join any mass movement and plunge into any form of spectacular action.” 

 

 

 

With a slim 1967 volume titled The Temper of Our Times, his own public television show (“Conversations with Eric Hoffer”), and a well-publicized hour-long interview with CBS television’s Eric Sevareid, Hoffer provided pungent commentaries on the “New Age.”  With a nod to their similar class origins, Hoffer praised President Johnson as “one of us,” thereby earning him an invitation to the White House and wider publicaity for his views.  (153)

 

 

More Backlash Right-wing Style

 

Bruno Bettelheim and Irving Kristol

Morgan writes that 1968 was year of generational backlash.  Freuadian psychoanalyst Brono Bettelheim received substantial media attention when he charged at the annual convention of the American Orthopsychiatric Association in Chicago in 1968 that “civil disobedience, contemptuous attitudes towards the police, and emothional attacks on President Johnson were damaging the mental health of the young.”  Bettelheim blamed “liberals, the press and teachers who failed to assert their authority” rather than the actual instituions and events targeted by youthful protesters.

 

 

Bettelheim further muddied the waters of the 1960s parental responsibility: “We send our children off to school to make their way into the system, and then tell them the system is lousy.  We vilify the President as a man who is killing babies and then ask our children to respect authority.”  Later, responding to a 1969 student takeover of a University of Chicago building, Bettelheim simply asserted from afar that “many of these kids are very sick.  They need a psychiatrist.”  (153-4)

Meanwhile, ironically, Irving Kristol’s more conservative response to the 1960s accurately read the movement’s feeling that “American life and American society” were “devoid of both moral authority and moral significance,” he rejected the “New Politics” that “would give moral direction and moral purpose to American life.” Particularly galling for Kristol were “liberal reformers” like Robert Kennedy in 1968, who showed a “keen sensitivity” to the “political mood of young people on the campuses and black militants in the ghettoes.”  Kristol’s rejection of the “barren” agenda of reform provided the backdrop for his own conservative responses to issues like poverty and social welfare, [after Israel’s 1967 War].  (157)

 

 

THE GREENING OF AMERICA

 

 

 

 

Charles A. Reich (1970)

 

 

 

Professor Charles A. Reich concludes The Greening of America: How the Youth Revolution Is Trying to Make America Livable (1970) with hope that the anticipated Occupation would be fulfilled in the future.  Reich states that we have all known the loneliness, the emptiness, the plastic isolation of contemporary America.  Our forebears came thousands of miles for the promise of a better life.  Now there is a new promise.  Shall we not seize it?  Shall we not be pioneers once more, since luck and fortune have given us a vision of hope?

 

 

Five Big Moments In The Iraq War

December 17, 2011

With the Iraq war officially over and the pullout of U.S. forces nearly complete, host Scott Simon talks with Tom Ricks, author of The Best Defense blog, and Jon Lee Anderson from The New Yorker about the most influential turning points of the war.

 

 

The extraordinary thing about this new consciousness is that it has emerged out of the wasteland of the Corporate State, like flowers pushing up through the concrete pavement.  Whatever it touches it beautifies and renews: a freeway entrance is festooned with happy hitchhikers, the sidewalk is decorated with street people, and the humorless steps of an official building are given warmth by a group of musicians.  And every barrier falls before it.

 

There's No Going Home For Iraqi Squatters

by Kelly McEvers

 

 

Makeshift houses in Baghdad are the only homes some internally displaced Iraqis know. Many are too afraid to go back to their original homes; for them, the threat of being targeted is still very real.

 

December 17, 2011

Nadia Karim Hassan says she stayed in her Baghdad neighborhood as long as she could, but by the height of the sectarian war in 2007, too many fellow Shiites were getting killed, and she had to leave the area and move into an abandoned building. http://www.npr.org/2011/12/17/143875228/internally-displaced-iraqis-struggle-for-permanency

 

 

We have been dulled and blinded to the injustice and ugliness of slums, but it sees them as just that—injustice and ugliness—as if they had been there to see all along.  We have all been persuaded that giant organizations are necessary, but it sees that they are absurd, as if the absurdity had always been obvious and apparent.  We have all been induced to give up our dreams of adventure and romance in favor of the escalator of success, but it says that the escalator is a sham and the dream is real.

And these things, buried, hidden, and disowned in so many of us, are shouted out loud, believed in, affirmed by a growing multitude of young people who seem too healthy, intelligent, and alive to be wholly insane, who appear, in their collective strength, capable of making it happen.  For one almost convinced that it was necessary to accept ugliness and evil, that it was necessary to be a miser of dreams, it is an invitation to cry or laugh.  For one who thought the world was irretrievably encased in metal and plastic and sterile stone, it seems a veritable greening of America.