Tag: robber barons

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like the Gilded Age

The following commentary by Justin Fox was posted on the Bloomberg View website February 7, 2018, and published in the StarTribune February 11, 2018:

The 19th century provided fertile ground for racists and elites while American immigrants and workers suffered.

Reformers like the cartoonist Joseph Keppler depicted the Senate as controlled by the giant moneybags, who represented the nation’s financial trusts and monopolies. Credit: wikipedia

In an impromptu speech to a crowd that gathered outside the White House on George Washington’s birthday in 1866, President Andrew Johnson rambled on for more than an hour, referred to himself 210 times (a rate of about three times per minute), and said Republican lawmakers Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens were at least as treasonous as the leaders of the just-defeated Confederacy.

A few days earlier, when a delegation of black leaders led by Frederick Douglass came to visit, Johnson had told them that poor whites, not blacks, had been the real victims of slavery in the South. After Douglass left, Johnson launched into an off-color, racist tirade about him to an aide.

Does any of this sound at least an eensy-weensy bit reminiscent of some recent presidential statements? Continue reading “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like the Gilded Age”

Trump administration’s zeal to peel back regulations is leading us to another era of robber barons

The following article by Jermi Suri was posted on the Conversation website October 11, 2017:

Credit: Library of Congress

The Trump administration has a clear economic objective: deregulate. Loosening regulations on industries, the White House believes, will lead to faster growth and more jobs. This is the stated reason for pulling the U.S. from the international climate accord, and the economic justification for seeking to rescind the EPA Clean Power Plan that limits carbon emissions from plants.

But an examination of history shows that government regulations are not always harmful to industry; they often help business. Indeed, government regulation is as central to the growth of the American economy as markets and dollars. Continue reading “Trump administration’s zeal to peel back regulations is leading us to another era of robber barons”