THE WAR AGAINST YOUTH

OUCH!!!!

Boomers ain’t gonna like this one.

Hat tip to my Millenial friend Harry Jarin for sending me the link.

The War Against Youth

The recession didn’t gut the prospects of American young people. The Baby Boomers took care of that.

By Stephen Marche

James Victoire

Published in the April 2012 issue

Twenty-five years ago young Americans had a chance.

In 1984, American breadwinners who were sixty-five and over made ten times as much as those under thirty-five. The year Obama took office, older Americans made almost forty-seven times as much as the younger generation.

This bleeding up of the national wealth is no accounting glitch, no anomalous negative bounce from the recent unemployment and mortgage crises, but rather the predictable outcome of thirty years of economic and social policy that has been rigged to serve the comfort and largesse of the old at the expense of the young.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, human potential has been consistently growing, generating greater material wealth, more education, wider opportunities — a vast and glorious liberation of human potential. In all that time, everyone, even followers of the most corrupt or most evil of ideologies, believed they were working for a better tomorrow. Not now. The angel of progress has suddenly vanished from the scene. Or rather, the angel of progress has been sent away.

Nobody ever talks about generational conflict. Who wants to bring up that the old are eating the young at the dinner table? How are you going to mention that to your boss? If you’re a politician, how are you going to tell your donors? Even the Occupy Wall Street crowd, while rejecting the modes and rhetoric and institutional support of Boomer progressives, shied away from articulating the fundamental distinction that fills their spaces with crowds: young against old.

The gerontocracy begins at the top. The 111th Congress was the oldest since the end of the Second World War, and the average age of its members has been rising steadily since 1981. The graying of Congress has obvious political ramifications, although generalizations can be deceiving. The Republican representatives tend to be younger than the Democrats, but that doesn’t mean they represent the interests of the young. The youngest senators are Tea Party members, Mike Lee from Utah and Marco Rubio from Florida (both forty). Here’s Rubio: “Americans chose a free-enterprise system designed to provide a quality of opportunity, not compel a quality of results. And that is why this is the only place in the world where you can open up a business in the spare bedroom of your home.” He is speaking to people who own homes that have empty spare bedrooms. He will not or cannot understand that the spare bedrooms of America are filling up with returning adult children, like the estimated 85 percent of college graduates who returned to their childhood beds in 2010, toting along $25,250 of debt.

David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter, had the guts to acknowledge that the Tea Party’s combination of expensive entitlement programs and tax cuts is something entirely different from a traditional political program: “This isn’t conservatism: It’s a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boom generation.” The economic motive is growing ever more naked, and has nothing to do with any principle that could be articulated by Goldwater or Reagan, or indeed with any principle at all. The political imperative is to preserve the economic cloak of unreality that the Boomers have wrapped themselves in.

Democrats may not be actively hostile to the interests of young voters, but they are too scared and weak to speak up for them. So when the Boomers and swing voters scream for fiscal discipline and the hard decisions have to be made, youth is collateral damage. Medicare and Social Security were mostly untouched in Obama’s 2012 budget. But to show he was really serious about belt tightening, relatively cheap programs that help young people like the Adolescent Family Life Program and the Career Pathways Innovation Fund were killed.

His intentions may be good — he may want to increase support for AmeriCorps — but the program shrunk last year. Three quarters of the applicants were turned away. He resisted Republican efforts to slash Pell grants by $845 per student, but then made other changes to the program that will save the government — or cost students, depending on your perspective — a projected $100 billion over ten years.

The youth vote still supports Obama, but in a chastened, conditional way. In hindsight, Obama’s 2008 campaign looks like an indulgent fantasy in which the major conflicts in life simply don’t exist. There may be no white America and no black America, no blue-state America and no red-state America, but one thing is clear: There is a young America and there is an old America, and they don’t form a community of interest. One takes from the other. The federal government spends $480 billion on Medicare and $68 billion on education. Prescription drugs: $62 billion. Head Start: $8 billion. Across the board, the money flows not to helping the young grow up, but helping the old die comfortably. According to a 2009 Brookings Institution study, “The United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children, measured on a per capita basis, with the ratio rising to 7 to 1 if looking just at the federal budget.”

The biggest boondoggle of all is Social Security. The management of entitlement programs, already weighted heavily in favor of the older population, has a very specific terminal point that coincides neatly with the Boomers’ deaths. The 2011 report by the Social Security trustees estimates that, under its current administration, the fund will run out in 2036, so there’s just enough to get the oldest Boomers to age ninety.

Only 58 percent of Boomers have more than $25,000 put aside for retirement, so the rest will either starve or the government will have to pay for them. But the government’s future ability to pay is decreasing rapidly precisely because the Boomers splurged so heavily during the Bush and Clinton years. Public debt per person in the United States currently stands at $33,777. George W. Bush inherited a public-debt-to-GDP ratio of 32.5 percent and brought it up to 54.1 percent during a period of economic growth. (The money borrowed from the future paid for massive tax cuts, with no serious reductions in domestic spending, two expensive wars, and a prescription-drug benefit added to Medicare.) Under Obama, the debt-to-GDP ratio has risen to 67.7 percent and is projected to rise to 74.2 percent this year.

This is no conspiracy; no nefarious backroom deal by political and corporate overlords. The impasse of the moment is, tragically, the result of the best aspects of the Boomers’ spirit. The native optimism that emerged out of the explosively creative postwar world led them to believe that growth would go on forever; that peace and prosperity were the natural state of things. Their good intentions seem like willful naivete today, but the intentions were genuine. Clinton actually believed that globalization would export the First World rather than bring the Third World home; it did both. The prescription-drug benefit was the “compassion” in compassionate conservatism. All those tax cuts were intended to liberate opportunities, not destroy them.

Cynicism rises to fill the emptied space of exaggerated and failed hope. It’s all simple math. If you follow the money rather than the blather, it’s clear that the American system is a bipartisan fusion of economic models broken down along generational lines: unaffordable Greek-style socialism for the old, virulently purified capitalism for the young. Both political parties have agreed to this arrangement: The Boomers and older will be taken care of. Everybody younger will be on their own. The German philosopher Hermann Lotze wrote in the 1870s: “One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.” It is exactly that envy toward the future that is new in our own time.

And we will not talk about any of it. We will keep mum. We will hold our tongues lest we seem ageist, lest we seem bitter, lest we seem out of touch, lest we seem pessimistic, lest we seem divisive.

HOW TO DISENFRANCHISE A GENERATION:

Across the country, state branches of the Republican party are making a thinly veiled attempt to disenfranchise the young through “voting reform.” The trick is simple: Require government-issue photo ID before allowing somebody to vote. Eighteen percent of young voters don’t have current photo IDs. Scott Walker in Wisconsin has signed this “reform” into law. So has Rick Perry in Texas. Similar new rules are going forward in roughly thirty other states. Restricting out-of-state IDs is a natural next step, already under way: That way, thousands of college students won’t be able to vote. The Advancement Project, a civil-rights advocacy group, calls the move “the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century.”

Let’s say you just graduated from high school.

College, right? You have to go to college. That’s not just what your career counselor told you. That’s in the numbers. If you go to college, you’re significantly less likely to lose your job. The pay of college graduates has risen over the past twenty-five years and everybody else’s pay has declined. Which curve do you want to be on?

And yet, at the exact moment when an education has never been more necessary, education is increasingly out of reach. From 1980 on, the price of attending a four-year college has risen by 128 percent. While the price has spiked, the quality has tanked. Students at college in 2003 did two-thirds the homework that students in 1961 did. In a survey published in 2011, 45 percent of students showed no improvement in “critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing” after two years of college. You did not read that incorrectly: That’s no improvement. None. And how could the results be any different? Three decades ago, 43 percent of professors were adjuncts. Now, with colleges bloated by older, tenured professors who take up huge slices of academic budgets while teaching crumbs of courses, the vast majority of classes are taught by adjuncts. On college campuses, the supposed hotbeds of liberalism, the young are instructed primarily in the mechanics of crony capitalism.

Once you’re out of college, you’ll have to intern. Again, no choice. The practice of not paying young people for their labor has become so ingrained in the everyday practice of American business that we’ve forgotten how bizarre and recent the development is. In the early 1980s, 3 percent of college grads had had an internship. By 2006, 84 percent had done at least one. Multiple internships are common. According to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, more than 75 percent of employers prefer students who have interned or had a similar working experience.

Employers have feasted on despair — and these aren’t internships for struggling small presses or rarefied design companies. Subsidiaries of General Electric, a company worth $200 billion, employ them regularly as an “important recruiting tool.” Disney uses eight thousand of them in dismal working conditions. Jennifer Lopez Enterprises uses them. So does The Daily Show. So does the pope. And because internship programs are sheltered from the violation of labor laws by the complicity of universities that give students “credit” for them — as long as the students pay thousands of dollars for those credits — American companies can operate these programs for the most part hidden from scrutiny. The best study of intern life in America found that companies save annually around $2 billion from pseudo-employment.

But maybe you’re an overachiever — instead of interning, you want to get a master’s or a professional degree. With entry to the professions comes another opportunity to be taken advantage of, and it’s not just the inherently ridiculous price of a creative-writing M.F.A. or journalism school, where on some level, everybody understands the students are being played for suckers. The cost of medical school has spiked over the past three decades. In 1981, average medical-school debt was less than $20,000. Today it is $158,000. Law-school tuition rose 317 percent between 1989 and 2009 while American laws schools wildly increased the number of lawyers they graduate. Naturally, a glut of lawyers decreases their value. So kids pay more for a worse education that leads to lesser prospects in order for the schools to prosper temporarily. Even for doctors and lawyers, an accrual of property or any rise in net worth happens much later in life than it did twenty years ago. The standard debt-repayment plan for physicians is ten years, but twenty-five is a commonly accepted option. For the new professional class today, life begins at forty. That’s not just an expression.

And if you didn’t take your high school advisor’s advice to go to college? Well, you should have listened. What goes for the white-collar young person applies even more ferociously to the blue-collar world, or what’s left of it. The nature of the generational setback for unionized labor can be summed up in a single devastating phrase: New workers will earn a “globally competitive wage.” Manufacturing jobs, having been exported to the Third World, are now returning to America at Third World rates. Newer workers at unions across the country earn ten to fifteen dollars an hour less than established workers, and the unspoken but widely reported understanding with the AFL-CIO is that the wage of these workers will not increase. In other words, Boomer workers make almost double what their young counterparts do, and will continue to do so regardless of how long a young worker stays in the same job. As one older worker in one of these bifurcated factories told The New York Times, by the time the young reach their maximum earning, their elders “won’t be here any longer to remind them of what they are missing.”

Government, academia, the professions, corporations, unions, and both political parties — all continue to mine the vulnerability of youth in service of the needs of their aging power base. Separately, each of these cases would amount to a minor scandal, but taken together they point to a broader and more significant alteration to the way of the world. From every corner of the institutional spectrum, the whole of American society has been rearranged so that the limits of vision coincide exactly with the death of the Boomers.

Nobody wants this. The Boomers did not set out to screw over their kids. The wind just seemed to blow them that way. But no matter what their motivations, a painful truth grows truer with every passing year: Through its refusal to act, the generation in power is willing to do what other generations before them would not — sell their children’s birthright for a mess of their own pottage.

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN AMERICA IS HAPPENING EVERYWHERE ELSE:

A generation now means an economic cohort — a moment in the cycle of rising and (mostly) falling economic data. The UK has 21.8 percent youth unemployment, France 22.8 percent, Hungary 26.1 percent, Italy 28.2 percent, Spain 47.8 percent. Around the world, young people are beginning to be defined by their unemployment: the mileuristas of Spain, “those who earn less than a thousand euros”; the NEETs of England, “not in employment, education, or training”; the hittistes of Tunisia, “those who lean against the wall.” Revolutions or unmanageable riots have inevitably followed the rise of masses of bored, underemployed young people.

Many claim that the young deserve their fate: They’re entitled, they have too many choices. They don’t know what they want. They’re getting themselves into debt. They don’t know how good they have it.

These criticisms are convenient, but also demonstrably incorrect. Defining generations by cultural attributes or values, almost always done with unrepentant shallowness, is the stupidest thing that commentators do. However, a recent study from the National Center for Education Statistics comparing high school seniors in 2004 (who are in their mid-twenties today) with high school seniors in 1972 (now in their late fifties) is useful and practical.

The breakdown is rather stark: Two thirds of the Boomers thought “being able to give their children better opportunities” was important; 8 percent wanted to live close to their parents; 18 percent believed that making money mattered; 27 percent cared about social problems. The students in 2004: 83 percent claimed that the opportunities of their children were very important; 25 percent wanted to live close to their parents; 35 percent were serious about making money; and 20 percent cared about social problems.

Compared with their parents, high school kids who graduated from college into the teeth of the recession are a Republican fantasy. They want a good job in order to raise a family, and it’s exactly that arrangement that is going to be denied them. The deal they were promised, that if you work hard and make smart choices you will have a good life, is not working out. A Great Disappointment will no doubt follow.

Everyone currently emerging into the workplace will be economically scarred for life by the misfortune of their timing. The initial wage loss for a worker emerging in a bad economy is 6 to 7 percent for every 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, which means a twenty-one-year-old starting a job today makes about 24 percent less than he or she would have five years ago. After fifteen years, even during the good times, the wage loss still hovers at around 2.5 percent.

A more profound shift is under way, though. Currently the average American parent spends 10 percent of his or her annual income on their adult children, regardless of income. Meanwhile, one in four young Americans recently moved back home with their parents after living apart. Calling them the Boomerang generation implies that it’s the irresponsible, feckless children who don’t have it together enough to leave the nest. But many children who live at home have jobs. So we have children living with their parents after they have income, just like they did in the early parts of the twentieth century and before. The idea of youth as a time of freedom and self-discovery will last exactly one generation, it seems.

People who want to join society will do so through an increasingly lengthy period of humiliation and struggle, and only through the help of their parents. Even before the recession, that was more or less true. It’s the dirty little secret of every middle-class person in their mid-thirties: Everybody’s parents helped them out. Who do you think is paying for all those summer internships? How many new parents do you think actually have enough money for a Bugaboo stroller, let alone a down payment on a first home? And if you don’t have a mom or dad who can help with ballet lessons for the kids or family vacations, God help you. America is becoming what it was founded to reject, what it has resisted throughout its history, a patronage society.

The situation is obviously unsustainable: At the exact moment when the United States and all other Western countries are trying to deal with aging populations, they are failing to capture the energy and potential of the people who will have to work to support those aging populations. We have arrived at a moment, just before the 2012 election, in which the hedges, the corner-cuts, the isolated decisions about young people from a host of institutions have accrued to the point of a continuous catastrophe. The question rises from the wreckage: How long can you eat the young?

Get ready for the summer. It’s going to be hot.

Youth should be the only issue of the 2012 election, because all the subsidiary issues — inequality, the rising class system in America, the specter of decline, mass unemployment, the growing debt — are all fundamentally about the war against young Americans. But the choice young Americans face is between a party that claims to represent their interests but fails to and a party that explicitly opposes their interests and actively works to disenfranchise them.

The protesters, the occupiers, the kids who screamed themselves hoarse in the parks of New York and Oakland last year have spent the winter nestled underground nurturing their strategies. Has there ever been a movement so full of people who don’t want to be there, who would rather be working?

Around the world, the response to chronic youth unemployment has been consistently traditional. The Arab world takes to the streets the way it did in the 1950s. Italy returns to its antique paterfamilias. England goes into its standard mode of underclass rioting. And what’s happening in the United States would be instantly recognizable to any progressive of the 1930s.

By bus and train and car pool, they will follow the gerontocracy to Tampa and Charlotte, the cities with the utter misfortune of hosting the presidential nominating conventions. Then we’ll see if the people inside the convention centers can find the youth anything better to do.

We’ll see then how the flowers of rage, planted and nurtured so carelessly for three decades, have sprung up and who will harvest them.

—
Sources: Pew Research Center; Urban Institute; Project on Student Debt; Eurostat; Bureau of the Public Debt; Brookings Institution; Department of Education; National Center for Education Statistics.

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RON PAUL – THE OBI-WAN KENOBI & GREY CHAMPION OF THIS FOURTH TURNING

Great article on the Lew Rockwell site. This guy would fit in real well on TBP. It seems his definition of Generation X is spot on.

The X and Y Generations and Ron Paul: An Alliance for Our Age

by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD

Members of Generation X, born 1962 to 1981, and Generation Y, 1982-2004, are rallying behind Ron Paul in his run for president. Media commentators find it odd that people under the age of 40 in the X Generation and especially voters under age 30 in the Y Generation are so taken with this unassuming, soft-spoken 76-year-old candidate. Ron Paul is in the Silent Generation, whose members are now 70 to 87 years of age (born 1925-1942).

Exit polls show that Ron Paul won the majority of voters under age 40 in the Iowa caucus and in the New Hampshire primary. He received 21.4 percent of the votes in Iowa (first-place Rick Santorum got 24.6 percent) and came in second in New Hampshire with 22.9 percent of the votes (first-place Mitt Romney got 39.3 percent). More voters under age 30 chose Ron Paul over the other candidates in the South Carolina primary and Nevada caucus. He garnered 41 percent of the under 30 vote in Nevada – Mitt Romney got 36 percent; Newt Gingrich, 16 percent; and Rick Santorum, 7 percent. But only a small minority of older people has voted for him, as was especially evident in the Florida Republican primary.

In Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069 (1991) and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997), William Strauss and Neil Howe examine the four main generations alive today, including the Boom (“Baby Boomer”) Generation, born 1943-1961. They show how these generations mirror ones in the past. They note that a “Young Hero and Elder Prophet” pairing occurs repeatedly in history, myth, and art, as with Joshua and Moses in the Old Testament, the Gray Champion in Colonial America, King Arthur and Merlin in Celtic myth, Tolkien’s Frodo and Gandalf, and Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. In Star Wars, Episode IV, Obi-Wan Kenobi instructs Luke in the ways of the Force and in Episode VI tells him that killing Darth Vader (his father) is the only way to destroy the evil Galactic Empire. And as Joseph Campbell, the American mythologist, notes, the young hero’s close bond with a wise elder is essential to his ultimate success.

The “Gray Champion” precipitated the Boston Revolt of April 1689, mounted to protest King James II’s increasingly autocratic rule of the British-American colonies. As Nathaniel Hawthorne describes it in his Twice-Told Tales, the King-appointed governor of New England marched British troops through Boston to intimidate the public and quell any thoughts of colonial self-rule. Hawthorne writes:

“Suddenly, there was seen the figure of an ancient man, who seemed to have emerged from among the people, and was walking by himself along the center of the street, to confront the armed band. He wore the old Puritan dress, a dark cloak and a steeple-crowned hat, in the fashion of at least fifty years before…”

This elderly champion with a manner “combining the leader and saint” commanded the soldiers to stop; and “at the old man’s word and outstretched arm, the roll of the drum was hushed at once, and the advancing line stood still.” Then, “inspired by this single act of defiance, the people of Boston roused their courage and acted. Within the day, Andros [the governor] was deposed and jailed, the liberty of Boston saved, and the corner turned on the colonial Glorious Revolution.” This revolt led to the American Revolution 85 years later.

Ron Paul is the Obi-Wan Kenobi and Gray Champion of our time, and the Darth Vader of our U.S. Empire is the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve System, with its network of twelve regional private banks, was established in 1913. The Fed is the country’s third central bank (the first two, established in 1791 and 1816, each lasted for 20 years). The Fed issues token coins and paper dollars, and creates and transfers unlimited amounts of computer-generated digital money. Manufacturing money this way, during its 99-year existence the Fed has destroyed 98.8 percent of the value of the dollar, as calculated by the Shadow Government Statistics (SGS)-Alternate-Consumer Price Index (CPI). Using this measure of inflation, a basket of goods and services that cost $100 in 1913 now costs $8,204! (Even the Bureau of Labor Statistics admits that the dollar has lost 96 percent of its value since 1913, with that $100 basket of goods and services now said to cost $2303.) Using the more accurate SGS-Alternate-CPI, the greatest drop in the dollar’s value, 95.1 percent, has occurred since 1971, when president Nixon severed the dollar’s last remaining link with gold, turning it into an effortlessly issued fiat currency. (A fiat currency is one that has no hard asset backing it such as gold and derives its value from government edict.) Like a virulent virus, the Fed has infected the U.S. dollar and made it grow like a cancer.

The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1921 killed somewhere between 20 to 40 million people (including my 22-year-old grandmother and my wife’s 23-year-old grandmother). What the Fed is could result in an equally dire hyperinflationary economic collapse, similar to what happened in the Weimar Republic, Austria, and Hungary in the 1920s, Argentina in 1989, and Zimbabwe. (A practical definition for hyperinflation is that the country’s largest pre-inflation bank note – for the U.S., the $100 bill. – becomes worth more as toilet paper, or for stoking a fire, than as a currency. The currency remains “current” but no longer serves as a medium of exchange.)

Dr. Paul prescribes an Austrian cure for our country’s economic problems (see below). A professor at the University of Vienna, Carl Menger (1840-1921), founded the Austrian School of Economics, which is named for its country of origin. (Government officials and economists in Austria do not follow or endorse “Austrian Economics.”) This branch of economics studies the action of individuals in the marketplace and puts forward a subjective theory of value. It explores important subjects like marginal utility (the amount of benefit derived from consuming one additional unit of a product or service, a concept that debunks the labor theory of value), moral hazard (where being covered against loss increases risk taking – executives at the leading investment banking and securities firm, Goldman Sachs, make a bad, multibillion dollar investment in AIG, and the government, i.e., U.S. taxpayers, bails them out), and malinvestments (making the wrong kind of investments, like building too many shopping malls, encouraged by Fed-set artificially low interest rates). Austrian economists don’t spin their wheels constructing mathematical models of the economy on a large, “macroeconomic” scale, something that Keynesian economists like to do and which have little bearing on the real world of human action. In contrast to pump-priming, big government Keynesianism, Austrian economics stresses the importance of free markets and a stable currency for economic calculation and setting prices.

Starting at a young age, Americans need to learn the basics of Austrian Economics and appreciate how it restores economic health. But government schools do not teach Austrian economics or the concomitant Jeffersonian vision of individual liberty. These subjects make a compelling case for limited government and are thus politically incorrect.

The primary role of government schools, where 90 percent of U.S. children are educated, is to inculcate, in the words of John Calvin, “the duty of obedience to rulers.” Government-employed bureaucratic officials determine what political and economic ideas children are to be taught. Compulsory government schooling has become a zero-tolerance, one-size-fits-all, dumbed-down operation that focuses on social engineering rather than on learning and individual achievement. James Ostrowski, in Government Schools Are Bad for Your Kids, puts it this way: “[The government school] produces barely literate, historically ignorant, uncultured lovers of big government.” Sadly, public schools have evolved into prison-like indoctrination centers that children and adolescents in the Y Generation currently endure – six and seven hours a day for thirteen years. For a sobering assessment of what our nation’s public schools have turned into, watch the online documentary on tagtele.com titled “War on Kids,” available HERE.

Nevertheless, there is reason for hope.

The outpouring of support by young people for Ron Paul is truly heartening. In Texas, for example, students at the Hudson Middle School in Hudson overwhelmingly cast ballots for Ron Paul in the school’s mock GOP primary, “after spending weeks studying the candidates’ views on the issues and watching debates among the hopefuls” according to a newspaper account, which reported: “They liked Paul’s anti-war stance, as well as his willingness to talk straight and not attack his opponents to make a point. ‘He’s just like this down-to-earth dude who just seems like he knows what he’s doing,’ seventh-grader Danielle Heidkamp said.”

Generation Y members like Danielle will carry the Ron Paul banner forward. The Y Generation is also named the “Millennial Generation,” coming of age as it is at the beginning of a new millennium. This generation must cope as young adults with the unfolding global financial crisis. When the Baby Boomer generation was growing up in the 1950s and 60s U.S. government debt increased $2.5 Billion a year. Life was good. Today, with the Millennial Generation coming of age, U.S. government debt increases by $2.5 Billion every 16 hours.

After the housing boom peaked in 2006 and foreclosures began to mount, the so-named “Millennial Crisis” began in February, 2007 when the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) announced that it would no longer buy subprime mortgages or mortgage-related securities (collateralized debt obligations). The Y Generation facing this crisis today bears some likeness to the GI Generation, born at the beginning of the last century (1901-1924), who became young adults during the last big crisis in U.S. history, the Great Depression and World War II. Strauss and Howe see the GI and Y generations as both manifesting a “Hero” archetype – can-do heroes and competent pragmatic managers who possess confidence and optimism.

Strauss and Howe name Generation X the “13^th Generation” because it is the thirteenth one to call itself “American,” beginning with the Awakening Generation born 1701-1723. The Glorious Revolution (Revolution of 1688) brought this about, which dethroned King James II and led Parliament to pass the 1869 English Bill of Rights, called “An Act declareing the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Setleing the Succession of the Crowne.” This Act enabled people in the American colonies, emboldened by the Boston Revolt and this Bill of Rights, to see themselves as distinctly American and not servile British subjects.

Progressives view human history as a linear process. Beginning with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson early in the last century, progressives have sought to expand government power and use it to effect what they consider to be beneficial social, political, and economic change. They are notable for launching the FED, an income tax, World War I, Prohibition, and the New Deal. Linear thinkers, which include politicians, the mainstream media, and CEOs of big corporations, work to maintain the status quo and their power and wealth. Rather than progress in a linear fashion, however, human history has a more seasonal, cyclical nature. As Mark Twain observed, “It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.” Twain is also alleged to have said something like, “Although history doesn’t repeat itself, it often rhymes” (source unknown). Whatever “rhyme” or “repetition” that might have helped bring about the Millennial Crisis, having a linear-thinking progressive president will only serve to make things worse. That includes President Obama and all the Republican presidential candidates except Ron Paul. He alone knows what is really going on, understands it, predicted it, and knows how best to deal with it.

Not counting the earlier crisis that caused the colonial Glorious Revolution and its Boston Revolt (1675-1704), there have been four crises in American history: the American Revolution (1773-1704), followed 66 years later by the Civil War (1860-1865), 64 years later by the Great Depression and World War II (1929-1946), and 61 years later by the current Millennial Crisis (2007-?). Each crisis has been worse than the previous one. There were 25,000 deaths in the American Revolution. Some 600,000 to 800,000 people died in the Civil War. And in World War II 50 to 70 million people died (civilian and military). In the American Revolution hyperinflation of the Continental Dollar rendered it worthless, and in the Civil War the Confederate Dollar suffered the same fate.

In The Fourth Turning, William Strauss and Neil Howe predicted, in 1997 when the book was published, that the next period of crisis in our country’s history, the “Fourth Turning” (following the first three crises) which they named the Millennial Crisis, would begin in 8 to 10 years. They were spot-on predicting when it would begin, 10 years later (in 2007), and this is what they say about its course:

“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. Thus might the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse – or glory. The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis [the one we are experiencing now]; all they suggest is the timing and dimension.”

One thing is certain. This crisis, now in its 6^th year, will not be over anytime soon. How bad it becomes will depend on whether or not our country heeds the teachings of Ron Paul and his advocates.

Unfortunately, the establishment media tries to ignore Ron Paul and pretend he doesn’t exist. Jon Stewart, on The Daily Show, skewers the media’s talking heads on this score, asking “How did Ron Paul become the 13^th floor in a hotel?” in “John Stewart Shows How Ron Paul Is Feared By The NWO Mafia Controlled Mainstream Media,” which can be seen on YouTube HERE. But other wiser heads can see and appreciate his true worth.

Bill Buckler, Captain of the financial newsletter The Privateer, published in Australia, has this to say about Ron Paul:

“Dr. Paul’s great and merited attractiveness to a growing number of admirers has a very simple source. He is that rarest of creatures – a FREE man. He is beholden to nobody. He has developed his ideas and his convictions over a long and fruitful life of independent thinking. He does not compromise. He homes in on the fundamental issue and principle of any political issue and serves it up without salt or other ‘seasoning.’ He says what he means and he means what he says. He is the living embodiment of the ‘dream’ that most Americans have long since given up on as they saw it slip further and further beyond their grasp. He is the only prominent person who is doing everything he can to turn the non-debate which masquerades as the ‘mainstream’ in the US and global political economy into something of substance. That, far more than presidency, is his goal.”

Ron Paul wants to legalize freedom and have the government stop punishing people for using the freedom that is rightfully theirs (as long as you, of course, do not encroach on other persons and their property). All the other leading candidates who want to be elected president are pro-big government and seek power. Mitt Romney is Wall Street’s Republican candidate, with the investment banking and securities firm Goldman Sachs being his biggest contributor. There is little difference between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, except perhaps that Romney is even more pro-war than is Obama. I highly recommend Andrew Napolitano’s YouTube video “Judge Napolitano What if the Government Has Been Lying to You” where he portrays Republicans (excluding Ron Paul) and Democrats as “two wings of the same bird of prey.”

Ron Paul is different. As the YouTube video What Is It About Ron Paul? affirms,

“Once you get hooked on Ron Paul you can no longer bear listen to a man who wants power. You become instantly disgusted whenever they begin to speak. Before they were just boring, but now they’re revolting. Listening to a Romney, or a Gingrich, or a Bush, or Obama makes you sick; and you just don’t understand how Ron Paul can get through those debates without getting nauseous. You see a political veneer in these politicians that is so transparent, like a ghost flapping its ethereal tongue at you.”

A poster shown in the video states, “Once you get hooked on Ron Paul you can no longer bear to listen to a man who wants power.”

People all over the world are getting hooked on Ron Paul. A Canadian citizen, Terry Neudorf, for example, writes this in a blog titled “Ron Paul Shakes the World”:

“When the name Ron Paul is mentioned to my grandchildren, a smile will creep across their faces, and they will recall, and speak with excited tones about a time where an idea was born, a message was spread, and a revolution took hold that shook the world. That’s the time I’m living in right now. I will treasure every moment. Thanks for all you do.”

Young Americans are joining The Ron Paul Movement, like those manning phone banks to promote and raise funds for his campaign. (Don’t expect Goldman Sachs to contribute any money to Ron Paul’s campaign.) Leaders of the X and Y Generations allied with Ron Paul are our best hope for the future – and for coming through the Millennial Crisis without war. A third world war, with nuclear weapons in play, could well prove to be even more devastating than was World War II. But even if he is not elected president, all is not lost. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ron Paul’s spirit and teachings will live on and guide a new generation of Luke Skywalkers, including his son, X-Generation Rand Paul, to lead our country safely through this time of economic and social peril.

The Austrian Cure for Economic Illness

Dr. Paul’s Austrian treatment for the Millennial Crisis comprises six parts:

1) End the Fed – close down the central bank. “Unplug the machinery of the Fed,” as Ron Paul puts it in his book End the Fed (see also the other three books he has written on government and liberty in “Suggested Reading” below). The market must be free to set interest rates without a central bank artificially lowering them and inflating the money supply. Banks should once again exist as free-enterprise institutions without privileges or bailouts from the state. ATMs, Web-based systems of funds transfer like PayPal, and online trading can function perfectly well without a Fed. 2) Restore sound money to the economy – privatize the country’s monetary system, abolish legal tender laws, and allow the free market to determine the forms of money it prefers.3) Lower taxes and cut government spending – close military bases that the U.S. maintains in more than 130 countries around the world and bring the troops home; defund unconstitutional departments like Education, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, etc.; abolish the personal income tax. 4) No bailouts – the economy needs to liquidate all the malinvestments and mistakes made during the boom in order to be able to move on and recover from the bust.5) Allow prices and wages to fall to levels the market sets – propping up prices stifles recovery, as the Great Depression proved. 6) Regulate the government, not private property and markets – entrepreneurs and investors will only make long-term investments that spur recovery and boost employment if they feel that their property is secure. (Fifteen cabinet-level departments control different parts of the economy, along with 100 federal regulatory agencies that have produced more than 81,000 pages of regulations, not including those set by state and local governments.)

Disclosure:

Like Ron Paul, I am a member of the Silent Generation.

Suggested Reading:

Articles

Ron Paul. “Mises and Austrian Economics: A Personal View” (1984. 23 pages. Ludwig von Mises Institute)
Murray N. Rothbard. “To Save Our Economy From Destruction” (The Freeman, 1995. Reprinted on LewRockwell.com)
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. “Why Austrian Economics Matters” (1995. Ludwig von Mises Institute)
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. “Money and Our Future” (2009. LewRockwell.com)
Donald W. Miller, Jr. “A Fourteen Point Plan for a Post-Wilsonian America” (September 28, 2001. LewRockwell.com)
Donald W. Miller, Jr. “The Austrian Cure for Economic Illness” (June 2, 2008. LewRockwell.com)

Books

By Ron Paul

Pillars of Prosperity: Free Markets, Honest Money, Private Property (2008, Ludwig von Mises Institute)
The Revolution: A Manifesto (2008. Grand Central Publishing)
End the Fed (2009. Grand Central Publishing)
Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (2012. Grand Central Publishing)

Others

F.A. Hayek. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents–The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2) (1944, Reprinted 2007. University of Chicago Press)
Ludwig von Mises. Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944, Reprinted 2011. Liberty Fund, Inc.)
Murray N. Rothbard. What Has Government Done to Our Money? and The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar (1963, 1962, Reprinted 2005. Ludwig von Mises Institute)
William Strauss and Neil Howe. The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997, Broadway Books)
Adam Ferguson. When Money Dies: The Nightmare of Deficit Spending, Devaluation, and Hyperinflation in Weimar Germany (1975, Reprinted 2010. Public Affairs. Also available for free download from the Ludwig von Mises Institute)
Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse 2009, Regnery Publishing)
Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse (2011, Regnery Publishing)

February 9, 2012

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. He is a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and writes articles on a variety of subjects for LewRockwell.com. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com

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BAD MOON RISING

I see the bad moon arising.
I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightnin’.
I see bad times today.

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Bad Moon Rising

“Human history seems logical in afterthought but a mystery in forethought.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

The above statement by historians William Strauss and Neil Howe is very significant as we try to make sense of the events unfolding before our very eyes in today’s world. On September 17, a mere six weeks ago, a few hundred young people showed up in Zucatti Park in Lower Manhattan to protest our corrupt, broken and Wall Street manipulated economic and political system. That first night, approximately 100 protestors occupied the park and were outnumbered by the NYPD in full riot gear. The idea to Occupy Wall Street began circulating on the internet in late August. The Millennial Generation used their social networks and put their tech savvy talents to work. Before long, thousands of protestors showed up in cities across the U.S. The model for this movement was the successful demonstrations in Egypt and Tunisia, earlier in the year.

The initial reaction among mainstream media and politicians across the land was bemusement. A bunch of young hippy throwbacks were going to make a meaningless statement and then fade away. The attention span of Americans is as long as the commercial break between contestants on Dancing With the Stars. Everyone knows the Millennials aren’t to be taken seriously. They are a bunch of spoiled, coddled, lazy college kids who need to get a job. But a funny thing happened during the commercial break. The kids held their ground. They didn’t leave. More young people arrived. More young people began protesting in cities across the country. Middle aged people began to get involved. Even some older people joined the cause. Before long there were thousands of people getting involved. It spread to Europe, with young people occupying London and Rome. Donations and supplies began to pour in from around the world. There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.

The six weeks since September 17 have been chaotic, venomous, confusing, and verging on deadly. Wall Street gyrated wildly with stocks falling 8% by October 3 and rebounding by 15% by October 28 and plunging again this week. The Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) declared the country was headed back into recession on September 30:

“It’s important to understand that recession doesn’t mean a bad economy – we’ve had that for years now. It means an economy that keeps worsening, because it’s locked into a vicious cycle. It means that the jobless rate, already above 9%, will go much higher, and the federal budget deficit, already above a trillion dollars, will soar. Here’s what ECRI’s recession call really says: if you think this is a bad economy, you haven’t seen anything yet. And that has profound implications for both Main Street and Wall Street.”

The ECRI has called the last three recessions with no instances of false alarms. Last week, the Conference Board announced the Consumer Confidence Index plummeted to two and a half year low of 39.8, last seen in March of 2009. The Dow Jones was trading at 6,500 in March 2009, some 47% below today’s level. It is an interesting dichotomy between how the average American feels about the world and how the Wall Street elite feel about their Ben Bernanke sheltered world. The Consumer Confidence Index was 110 in 2007 and 140 in early 2001. We’ve come a long way baby.

During these past six weeks the European Union has teetered on the verge of disintegration. Non-stop negotiations, agreements, plans, declarations, special purpose vehicles, bailout funds, and lies have poured forth on a daily basis. Greece still lives – on a ventilator – as it has been brain dead for months. The sole purpose of all the public relations efforts, press conferences, summit meetings and lies has been to keep European banks, their stockholders and bondholders from accepting the consequences of their irresponsible lending to the PIIGS. Essentially, the German people have been put on the hook for losses that should have been born by the stockholders and bondholders of the biggest French, German, Belgian and English banks. The EU has put a tourniquet over a cancerous tumor. The entire world is awash in bad debt and until this debt is liquidated, we will stagger from crisis to crisis like a drunken sailor. John Hussman describes the master plan:

In effect, European leaders have announced “We have agreed to solve our debt problem, leveraging money we do not have, to create a fund, which will then borrow several times that amount, in order to buy enormous amounts of new debt that we will need to issue.”

As politicians and central bankers around the world desperately try to keep their debt drenched ponzi scheme going for awhile longer, the mood darkens among the populations of developed countries around the world. I came across a quote from, of all people, Vladimir Lenin that describes how the last six weeks seemed to me:

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

It seems like history is accelerating. Momentous events have been occurring regularly since 2007. Our political and financial leaders are blindsided on a daily basis by each new crisis. The majority of the American public continues to be apathetic, willfully ignorant, and constantly absorbed by their array of electronic gadgets and mindless drivel spewed at them by media conglomerates. Rather than think critically, most Americans allow left wing and right wing mainstream media to formulate their opinions for them through their propaganda and misinformation operations. Linear thinkers, who make up the majority of the political, social, media and financial elite in this country, believe the world progresses and moves ever forward. In reality, the world operates in a cyclical fashion, with generations throughout history reacting to events in a predictable manner based upon their stage in life. The reason the world has turned so chaotic, angry and fraught with danger since 2007 is because we have entered another Fourth Turning. Strauss & Howe have been able to document a fourfold cycle of generational types and recurring mood eras in American history back 500 years. They have also documented the same phenomenon in other countries.

The housing collapse, near meltdown of our financial system, revolutions in the Middle East, economic turmoil in Europe, poisoned political atmosphere in Washington DC, and most recently the Occupy Wall Street movement are part of a larger cycle. The four living generations have each entered the phases of their lives that will lead to a convulsive upheaval and destruction of the existing social order. We’ve entered a twenty year period of Crisis as described by Strauss & Howe:

“A CRISIS arises in response to sudden threats that previously would have been ignored or deferred, but which are now perceived as dire. Great worldly perils boil off the clutter and complexity of life, leaving behind one simple imperative: The society must prevail. This requires a solid public consensus, aggressive institutions, and personal sacrifice. People support new efforts to wield public authority, whose perceived successes soon justify more of the same. Government governs, community obstacles are removed, and laws and customs that resisted change for decades are swiftly shunted aside. A grim preoccupation with civic peril causes spiritual curiosity to decline. Public order tightens, private risk-taking abates, and crime and substance abuse decline. Families strengthen, gender distinctions widen, and child-rearing reaches a smothering degree of protection and structure. The young focus their energy on worldly achievements, leaving values in the hands of the old. Wars are fought with fury and for maximum result.” – Strauss & Howe

History is Cyclical, not Linear

“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt

I’ve been trying to decipher which direction this Fourth Turning will lead, and the last six weeks has started to crystallize my thinking. I’ve been fascinated by the intense reactions, opinions and arguments that have taken place across the airwaves and internet regarding the true nature of the Occupy movement. Some of the reaction is based upon pure ideological grounds, with media outlets like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, NY Post and CNBC, disparaging, ridiculing and demeaning the movement. The anti-rich tone of the protests may not sit well with the multi-billionaire owners (Rupert Murdoch, Mort Zuckerman, Roberts Family) of these mega-media corporations. The liberal media such as MSNBC, Huffington Post, and CNN have sometimes been fawning over the movement in an effort to co-opt it into liberal Tea Party for the benefit of Obama and the Democratic Party. The propaganda and misinformation coming from both these ideological camps is easy to discern for a critical thinking person. Sadly, the nation is filled with people that don’t want to think. Therefore, they let their opinions be formed by talking heads on a TV screen.

These reactions were predictable. What caught my attention was the generational reaction to Occupy Wall Street. I know all the rugged individualists out there chafe at being lumped into a generational cohort, but the fact remains that groups of people born during the same time frame encounter key historical events and social trends while occupying the same phase of life. Because members of a generation are molded in lasting ways by the eras they encounter as children and young adults, they also tend to share certain common beliefs and behaviors. Aware of the experiences and traits that they share with their peers, members of a generation also tend to share a sense of common perceived membership in that generation. To deny the reality that large clusters of human beings tend to act with a herd mentality is contrary to all visible evidence. The herd mentality can be observed in the Dot-com bubble, Americans unquestioningly allowing passage of the Patriot Act, the housing bubble, the mass hysteria over the latest iSomething, Black Friday riots at retail stores to obtain the “hottest” toy or gadget, and the slaves to the latest fashions and trends as directed by the corporate media machine. The masses don’t realize they are being manipulated by the few who understand the power of propaganda:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays – Propaganda – 1928

The Occupy movement is being driven by the Millennial Generation. They have used their superior technological and social networking skills to organize, educate, and inspire people to their cause while befuddling and confusing the authorities. They continue to rally more young people to their fight against Wall Street and K Street tyranny. The generational lines of battle are being drawn. The Baby Boom Generation, who is at the point of maximum power in society, fears this movement. They control Wall Street, corporate America, Congress, the courts, academia and the media. They have reached their peak of influence and power, which will rapidly wane over the next fifteen years. They see the Occupy movement as a threat to their supremacy and control of the system. The cynical, alienated, pragmatic Generation X is caught between the Boomers and the Millennials in this escalating conflict. It is likely the majority of this generation will side with the Millennials, realizing the future of the country depends on them and not the elderly Boomers. To clarify, not every Boomer, Gen Xer, or Millennial will act in concert with their generational cohort. But it doesn’t matter if a few cattle stray from the herd, when the herd is stampeding in one direction.

The chart below details the Strauss & Howe configuration of generations and turnings for the last two Saeculums in American history. They describe their generational theory in the following terms:

“Turnings last about 20 years and always arrive in the same order. Four of them make up the cycle of history, which is about the length of a long human life. The first turning is a High, a period of confident expansion as a new order becomes established after the old has been dismantled. Next comes an Awakening, a time of rebellion against the now-established order, when spiritual exploration becomes the norm. Then comes an Unraveling, an increasingly troubled era of strong individualism that surmounts increasingly fragmented institutions. Last comes the Fourth Turning, an era of upheaval, a Crisis in which society redefines its very nature and purpose.” – Strauss & Howe

Each new generation is born approximately three years prior to the next turning. This results in Strauss & Howe having a slightly different generational grouping than government demographers.

Great Power Saeculum (82)
Missionary Generation	Prophet (Idealist)	1860–1882 (22)	High: Reconstruction/Gilded Age
Lost Generation	Nomad (Reactive)	1883–1900 (17)	Awakening: Missionary Awakening
G.I. Generation	Hero (Civic)	1901–1924 (23)	Unraveling: World War I/Prohibition
Silent Generation	Artist (Adaptive)	1925–1942 (17)	Crisis: Great Depression/World War II
Millennial Saeculum (67+)
(Baby) Boom Generation	Prophet (Idealist)	1943–1960 (17)	High: Superpower America
13th Generation	Nomad (Reactive)	1961–1981 (20)	Awakening: Consciousness Revolution
(a.k.a Generation X)	Nomad (Reactive)	1961–1981 (20)	Awakening: Consciousness Revolution
Millennial Generation(Generation Y)	Hero (Civic)	1982–2004 (22)	Unraveling: Culture Wars, Postmodernism, Digital Technology
New Silent Generation (Generation Z)	Artist (Adaptive)	2004–present (6+)	Crisis: Great Recession, War on Terror, Declining Superpower, and Globalization

There is nothing mystical about their theory. Strauss & Howe are historians who have created a framework for understanding why people act a certain way to events differently, depending on which stage of life they occupy. The theory is so logical because it is based upon the average 80 year life cycle of a human being. A human being goes through four stages during their life: childhood, young adulthood, midlife, and elderhood. During each of these stages, you will react to the same event in a very different manner. During an 80 year cycle, there will be four generations at different stages of their life. The interaction between the generations at each 20 year turning determines how history is steered through the events of that cycle. The life cycle stages can be seen in this chart:


	Prophet	Nomad	Hero	Artist
High	Childhood	Elderhood	Midlife	Young Adult
Awakening	Young Adult	Childhood	Elderhood	Midlife
Unraveling	Midlife	Young Adult	Childhood	Elderhood
Crisis	Elderhood	Midlife	Young Adult	Childhood

Strauss and Howe compare the saecular rhythm to the seasons of the year, which inevitably occur in the same order, but with slightly varying timing. Just as winter may come sooner or later, and be more or less severe in any given year, the same is true of a Fourth Turning in any given Saeculum. The theory does not predict the events which drive history, but it does predict the generational reaction to events depending upon their age. We entered the Fourth Turning Crisis in 2007 with the housing collapse and the implosion of our financial system. The configuration of elder self righteous Boomers at 60 years old, midlife pessimistic Gen Xers at 40 years old, and coming of age Millennials at 20 years old is an explosive mixture that will provide the impetus and fury to this period of catharsis and pain. Winter has arrived. There is no way to avoid it. The bitter winds have begun to blow. The first harsh front arrived in 2008 with the near meltdown of the worldwide economic system. There has been a lull in the biting gale force winds of this Crisis through the shoveling of massive amounts of newly created debt into a system already drowning in debt. The Occupy movement and the impending collapse of the European Union charade will usher in the next blizzard of pain and suffering. We hurdle towards are rendezvous with destiny.

“The ‘spirit of America’ comes once a saeculum, only through what the ancients called ekpyrosis, nature’s fiery moment of death and discontinuity. History’s periodic eras of Crisis combust the old social order and give birth to a new. A Fourth Turning is a solstice era of maximum darkness, in which the supply of social order is still falling—but the demand for order is now rising. It is the saeculum’s hibernal, its time of trial. Nature exacts its fatal payment and pitilessly sorts out the survivors and the doomed. Pleasures recede, tempests hurt, pretense is exposed, and toughness rewarded—all in a season.” – Strauss & Howe

Millennials Rising

Over the last six weeks I’ve watched as the young protestors around the country have been called: filthy hippies, losers, lazy, coddled, socialists, communists, spoiled college kids, parasites, useful idiots, and tools of the left. Most of the wrath being heaped upon these young people for exercising their Constitutional right to free speech and freedom of assembly has been from the Baby Boom Generation, who are at the peak of their power in our society. Sixty percent of the Senate is made up of Baby Boomers, with the next closest generation being the Silent Generation with twenty five percent. Over 58% of the House of Representatives is made up of Baby Boomers, with the next closest generation being Gen Xers at 27%. They occupy the executive suites of the Wall Street banks (Blankfein, Dimon, Pandit, Monihan) and the Federal Reserve (Bernanke). They make up the majority of judges, local politicians and school boards. They run the Federal government agencies. And they dominate the airwaves as the high priced mouthpieces for their corporate bosses. This Prophet generation will lead the country through the trials and tribulations of this Fourth Turning.

The disdain and contempt for these Millennial protestors flies in the face of the facts about this generation. They use drugs at a lower rate than their parents did at the same age. Teen crime rates and teen pregnancies have declined. They will have the highest level of college education in U.S. history. They were protected during their youth as organized sports taught them teamwork. They are the most technologically savvy generation in history. They volunteer at a higher level than previous generations. They have been more upbeat and engaged than their predecessors (Gen X). And they are much closer to their parents than Boomers were at the same age. They reject the negativism and cynicism of their parents and believe positive change is possible in our society. They have shown respect for authority up until the last six weeks. They were primed to be led by Boomers that could articulate a positive vision of the future based on reality and a better tomorrow. They were ready to make sacrifices in order to create a brighter future. But a funny thing happened. The Boomer generation failed to deliver on their part of the bargain.

Prior Hero Generation Americans had braved the winter at Valley Forge and stormed the beaches of Normandy as Prophet leaders like Ben Franklin and Franklin Roosevelt provided inspirational guidance and the vision of a better tomorrow. Strauss & Howe accurately assessed the Millennial Generation in their book Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, published in 2000 when the 1^stMillennials were graduating high school:

“As a group, Millennials are unlike any other youth generation in living memory. They are more numerous, more affluent, better educated, and more ethnically diverse. More important, they are beginning to manifest a wide array of positive social habits that older Americans no longer associate with youth, including a new focus on teamwork, achievement, modesty and good conduct. Only a few years from now, this can-do youth revolution will overwhelm the cynics and pessimists … will entirely recast the image of youth from downbeat and alienated to upbeat and engaged — with potentially seismic consequences for America.” – Strauss & Howe

The youth of America listened to their parents and stayed in school. They’ve racked up over $1 trillion in student loan debt getting college educations. Meanwhile, our Baby Boomer leadership had an opportunity to address the country’s unsustainable fiscal path by accepting the consequences of a thirty year debt binge and liquidating the banks that took extreme risks with extreme leverage. An orderly liquidation (aka Washington Mutual) would have punished the stockholders, bondholders and management of the Wall Street banks, while leaving the depositors whole and purging the system of debt that can never be paid off. Our politicians could have ended our wars of choice in the Middle East and cut our war spending by hundreds of billions without sacrificing one iota of safety for the American people. The political leadership could have put the country on a deficit reduction path that would have insured the long-term viability of our republic.

Instead of doing the right thing, our Baby Boomer leaders did the exact opposite of the right thing. They held the American taxpayer hostage and absconded with trillions of their tax dollars and handed it over to the same Wall Street banks that had run the largest fraud scheme in world history and blew up the worldwide financial system. The Boomer Chairman of the Federal Reserve decided to not only save the Wall Street banks but to purposefully try to pump up the stock market, while destroying the lives of savers and senior citizens with his zero interest rate policy. His policies have led to a surge in energy and food prices and contributed to revolutions in the Middle East. The Wall Street banks have used the accounting gimmick of relieving loan loss reserves to create fake profits over the last two years. Wall Street celebrated by paying themselves $60 billion in bonuses between 2008 and 2010. The poster boys for the .1% Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein “earned” $23 million and $19 million respectively in 2010.

The politicians borrowed trillions from future unborn generations to inflict a Keynesian nightmare of solutions on the American economy that included: an $800 billion porkulus program, $22 billion pissed down the toilet on a homebuyer tax credit as home prices are now lower, $3 billion for Cash for Clunkers that cost $24,000 per car sold, loan modification schemes, tax credits for windows, doors and appliances, and payroll tax cuts. The result of all the Federal Reserve and politician “solutions” has been to increase the National Debt by $5.3 trillion in three years, a 55% increase. It took the country over 200 years to accumulate the first $5.3 trillion in debt. Everything done thus far has benefitted only the top 1%. The real unemployment rate is 23%. The real inflation rate is between 5% and 10%. The economy is headed back into recession. But at least the top 1% are doing well, as the stock market has risen 84% from its 2009 lows. Somehow, the oligarchy that runs this country is taken aback by the protests growing increasingly contentious across the country. It is not a surprise to those who understand the cyclical nature of history and the darkening mood in this country, which has been deepening since the Tea Party protests of 2009.

Hope You Are Quite Prepared To Die

Hope you got your things together.
Hope you are quite prepared to die.
Looks like we’re in for nasty weather.
One eye is taken for an eye.

Creedence Clearwater Revival – Bad Moon Rising

It seems the young people in this country have realized they have no future when the system is run for the benefit of an oligarchy consisting of Wall Street banks, mega-corporations, media conglomerates, and puppet politicians in Washington D.C. These people will stop at nothing to retain their wealth and power. Not only do they want to retain it, they are actively trying to increase it. They have achieved their goal beyond all expectations, and are still able to convince a large portion of the population through their propaganda machine they deserve every penny. The chasm between the “Haves” and “Have Nots” has never been greater in U.S. history. The truth is that Americans have always admired entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who created businesses, created jobs, and ended up with vast wealth. But, that is not the wealth protestors on Wall Street and across the country are angry about. They are angry at the hyper-concentration of wealth in the hands of men that have rigged the system in their favor through bribery (lobbying & contributions), fraud (no-doc loans & AAA rated toxic derivatives), accounting schemes (special purpose vehicles & suspending mark to market) and holding the American middle class hostage (TARP & zero interest rates). When the 400 wealthiest Americans own more than the “lower” 150 million Americans put together, you have a system that is badly broken.

Do the Millennials have a right to be angry? The table below shows how the economic solutions of the oligarchy have worked out for the youth of our country. There are 19 million young people between the ages of 18 and 29 that are not working. Some are still in college, but most are not. That is a lot of potential Occupiers.


Age Group	% not employed
18 to 19	65%
20 to 24	40%
25 to 29	27%

After observing the reactions to the OWS movement over the last few weeks, I’m more convinced than ever that different generations view the same event through the prism of their own life experiences, beliefs, prejudices, and biases. I’ve found the Baby Boomers have generally been doubtful of the protestors’ motives, condescending towards their intelligence, scornful about their appearance, and derogatory regarding their flaunting of authority. This is fascinating considering that Boomers love to reminisce about their glory days protesting the Vietnam War. The Boomer generation was at this same age configuration in 1970. Their GI Generation parents probably had the same opinions about the long haired, drug using, sex crazed youthful Boomers in 1970. Now the Boomers are the establishment and they don’t like seeing their authority challenged by these naïve troublemakers. Strauss & Howe saw the likelihood of this conflict back in 1997 when the oldest Millennials were only 15 years old:

“When young adults encounter leaders who cling to the old regime (and who keep propping up senior benefit programs that will by then be busting the budget), they will not tune out, 13er-style. Instead they will get busy working to defeat or overcome their adversaries. Their success will lead some older critics to perceive real danger in a rising generation perceived as capable but naïve.” – Strauss & Howe

The Millennials spearheading these protests are most certainly capable. In a matter of six weeks they have created a worldwide movement occupying every major city in the world. The biggest complaints coming from the Boomers is they are naïve, misguided, immature, and don’t understand the real problem. The bitter condemnation of the protestors for breaking a myriad of minor administrative laws, regulations, ordinances, and curfews is beyond laughable. Fox News, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, NY Post and the other mouthpieces of the ruling oligarchy are apoplectic about the young protestors camping out in public parks, but they were not too concerned by the Wall Street banks systematically defrauding millions of people by creating mortgage products designed to deceive.

They weren’t irate when Wall Street held Congress hostage for a $700 billion ransom. They weren’t enraged when Ben Bernanke bought a trillion dollars of toxic mortgage debt from the Wall Street banks at 100 cents on the dollar. They weren’t furious when the government officials forced the FASB to abandon mark to market rules, allowing the Wall Street banks to falsely report their financial statements. But, they are outraged by young people exercising their right to free speech and right to assembly. When their paid armies of thugs attack the protestors with tear gas and billy clubs, they declare the protestors had it coming. It seems the 150 year old American tradition of civil disobedience to protest unjust laws, defined by Henry David Thoreau, is not too popular among Boomers or the corporate mainstream media.

“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?” – Henry David Thoreau

Many of the protestors are naïve, misinformed about the true causes of the financial crisis, impulsive, and seeking solutions that would result in more government control. Their critics say they should be in Washington DC, not on Wall Street. The Boomers don’t like their flaunting of rules and regulations imposed by local authorities. Again, the older generations have conveniently forgotten how naïve, impulsive and rebellious they were at the age of 20. The amazing thing to me is this generation never showed this side during their younger years. Their slogans like “Tax the Rich” are misguided. They need assistance from older generations, but instead they are getting beaten and arrested by the older generation. Some Boomers, like William Black, have opened a dialogue with the protestors, but the majority of Boomers are resistant to the movement. In prior Fourth Turnings, the Hero archetype followed the orders of the Prophet archetype. I fear the Boomer Generation, through their intransigence and refusal to proactively address our structural problems, have set in motion a revolutionary chain of events that will lead to class warfare and possibly civil war in this country. The real danger, as experienced in other countries (France, Russia, China), is that a demagogue could gain control. Strauss & Howe envisioned that possibility in 1997:

“This youthful hunger for social discipline and centralized authority could lead Millenial youth brigades to lend mass to dangerous demagogues. The risk of class warfare will be especially grave if the 20% of Millenials who were poor as children (50% in the inner cities) come of age seeing their peer-bonded paths to generational progress blocked by elder inertia. Unraveling era adults who are today chilled by school uniforms will be truly frightened by the Millennials’ Crisis-era collectivism.” – Strauss & Howe

The most outrageous accusation made against the protestors is they are somehow responsible for their current plight. The Boomers declare they are spoiled kids who need to get a job. A critical thinking analysis of the Millennial Generation demographics reveals how ridiculous it is for Boomers to blame Millennials in any way for our current economic debacle. There are 97 million Millennials and 54 million of them are under the age of 20. Another 21 million are between the ages of 20 and 24, barely getting started in the real world. Only 39 million of them were eligible to even vote in the last Presidential election. It should be clear to even the most dense CNBC anchor that the young people protesting in the streets are not to blame for the raping and pillaging of the U.S. economic system by the barbarians on Wall Street over the last thirty years, with the consent and encouragement of the bought off politicians in Washington D.C.

Generation	Age	Total Pop.(mil)
G.I.	86–109	6
Silent	69–85	22
Boomer	51–68	73
Gen-X	30–50	83
Millennial	7–29	97
Homeland	– 6	29

After placing the living generations in their assigned age buckets, I was shocked to see the Millennials being, by far, the largest generation. I had assumed it was the Baby Boom Generation. At their peak in 1970 they totaled 76 million and made up 37% of the U.S. population. But, time has not treated them well. Approximately 3 million have left this earth and they only make up 24% of the population. Both Gen X and the Millennials now outnumber the Baby Boomers. They will continue to see their power wane as the years roll by. The Millennial power will grow as the Fourth Turning progresses, since they make up 31% of the population today and will see that ratio grow as the G.I. and Silent generations die off. There are very few people remaining that lived through the last Fourth Turning. The initial phase of this Crisis has revolved around the Wall Street induced housing collapse with the consequences of not enforcing the rule of law by liquidating insolvent banks and prosecuting the white collar criminals that reaped ungodly profits by committing fraud on an epic scale. This has left the country with an unsustainable level of debt, a hollowed out economy, and unemployment at Great Depression era levels, while Wall Street bankers, media titans, and career politicians reap compensation packages fit for kings. Jesse from Jesse’s Café Americain describes our political system perfectly:

Kleptocracy:“rule by thieves” is a form of political and government corruption where the government exists to increase the personal wealth and political power of its officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population, often without pretense of honest service.No outside oversight is possible, due to the ability of the kleptocrats to personally control both the supply of public funds and the means of determining their disbursal.

The Millennials were raised by parents who believed government could solve all our problems. The welfare-warfare state became monolithic during the Boomer reign of error. Therefore, it is understandable these young naïve revolutionaries still cling to the belief the government can solve our problems through more taxes or new programs. The point being missed by all the doubters and detractors of the OWS movement is these young people have zeroed in on the right culprits. They are not stupid. They understand these basic facts:

The $15 trillion National Debt, headed to $20 trillion by 2015, is the gift we are leaving to the Millennials.
The $100 trillion of unfunded entitlement liabilities will never be honored by the time the Millennials retire.
The Millennials know the $1 trillion per year spent maintaining our military empire is more than the next 18 countries’ spending combined, and it benefits only the corporations peddling armaments, while making us less safe.
The soldiers getting killed and wounded in our wars of choice in the Middle East are predominantly Millennials.
There are 14,000 professional lobbyists in Washington D.C. representing mega-corporations, unions, trade groups and other special interests, which have doled out $30 billion over the last decade influencing (bribing) politicians to write the laws in their favor, and not one lobbyist was working for the Millennials.
Millennials know Wall Street has spent $154 million on political contributions and $383 million on lobbying in the last decade. The buying of political influence by our bastions of crony capitalism was as follows: Goldman Sachs – $46 million; Merrill Lynch – $68 million; Citigroup – $108 million; J.P. Morgan Chase – $65 million; Bank of America – $39 million.
The Millennials know the 71,000 page Federal tax code and 140,000 pages of Federal regulations are written to protect the interests of the few, not the many.
Millennials know the financial industry consciously created products designed to induce mortgage fraud, knowingly packaged toxic mortgages into derivatives, bribed the rating agencies to rate them AAA, sold these worthless instruments to their customers, shorted these same derivatives, and pocketed billions in fees and ill gotten gains. After blowing up the financial system and costing taxpayers trillions, not one person has gone to jail.
Millennials know how to read a chart:

Millennials know that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are the same face of a never changing oligarchy. Change brought about through opposing political parties and elections has been rendered obsolete as the oligarchy chooses the candidates, uses their wealth to create policies and programs, and is able to control the masses with their propaganda message machines.

So here we stand, about five years into this Fourth Turning, with protests in the U.S. growing increasingly violent and intense. The calls for civility after the Gabrielle Giffords assassination attempt in January of this year went unheeded as the political vitriol has grown increasingly nasty. January seems like a lifetime ago. Revolutions have overthrown rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Unrest and bloodshed continues in Syria, Gaza, Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. The European Union is disintegrating before our very eyes and violent protests against austerity measures flare up on a daily basis in Greece, Italy and Spain. There is no doubt we have entered the 2^nd stage of this Crisis – the more violent and dangerous stage. I can sense fear and uneasiness among the more connected members of society. The drones, which constitute a large portion of America, are highly focused on Kim Kardashian’s divorce after 72 days and a $10 million wedding. The Millennials leading the protest movement are connected. They understand what is at stake. Strauss and Howe had it figured out 14 years ago:

“Of all today’s generations, the Millenials probably have the most at stake in the coming Crisis. If it ends badly, they would bear the full burden of its consequences throughout their adult lives. Yet if the Crisis ends well, Millenials will gain a triumphant reputation for virtue, valor and competence.” – Strauss & Howe

So what happens next? The truth is that no one knows what will happen next. We can only try to connect the dots and peer into a foggy future. We know that our leaders have not solved any of the financial imbalances that existed in 2007. They have made them worse, as have leaders across the world from China to Japan to Europe. We await the next Lehman moment, except this time it will be a sovereign nation and the contagion will be ten times greater than the 2008 meltdown. Our already fragile economy will be brought to its knees in a replay of the 1930s. As nations plunge into economic chaos, civil strife will likely lead to authoritarian figures rising from the ashes of the turmoil. Could Russia and China take advantage of this turmoil to acquire new resources through military means? Possibly. When the American middle class sees their remaining wealth dwindle to nothing, will they take to the streets? Revolution seems too remote to fathom, but it seemed remote in 1764 and 1855 too. When people have nothing left to lose, anything is possible. The collapse of our economic system is baked in the cake. Our current fiscal path is destined to end in fatality. Strauss & Howe knew the outcome of this Fourth Turning would depend upon the wisdom, strength and fortitude of the American people:

“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. Thus might the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse – or glory. The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis; all they suggest is the timing and dimension.” – Strauss & Howe

Winter has arrived. There will be difficult hurdles with many trials and tribulations in front of us. You may have to choose sides in a generational war. No one wants to face bitter choices. No one wants bloodshed and war. But it really doesn’t matter what we want. There is no real justice in a country that attacks and incarcerates young people for exercising their right to free speech and dissent, while allowing a psychopathic Wall Street banking cartel to wreak havoc upon our nation. The generational alignment is such that the existing social order will be swept away in a violent manner. What replaces the existing order will be up to the American people. You may lose your wealth, security, freedom, or life during the coming struggle. The years ahead will require steely determination and courage like our forefathers exhibited on the frigid barren fields at Valley Forge, the undulating wheat fields at Gettysburg, and the bloody beaches of Normandy. I have three teenage sons at home. My choices will be dictated by what I feel will be best for their futures. I will do WHATEVER it takes to secure a better tomorrow for my boys. If that means standing beside them in battle, so be it. Lines are being drawn. You will not be able to avoid choosing sides, just as you cannot avoid Winter if you ever want to see the dawn of another Spring.

“History offers no guarantees. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Since Vietnam, many Americans suppose they know what it means to lose a war. Losing in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence – perhaps even our nation – might never recover.” – Strauss & Howe

MILLENIALS GET IT

As I perused my local paper this morning I glanced at the story about the North Penn graduation yesterday. Approximately 1,200 Millenials graduated and are moving on to their next step in life. I was about to skip to the next story when I saw the name Neil Howe in the story. The valedictorian’s speech to his class referenced our current Crisis as laid out by Strauss & Howe in The Fourth Turning. This 18 year old kid gets it. He understands these are dangerous times. He told his fellow classmates they are the new Hero Generation, as he referenced the last Hero Generation that did the heavy lifting and dying during the last Fourth Turning.

I know the old farts on this site do the usual bashing of the youth of today, but they are wrong. This country will only get through this Fourth Turning with a positive result if the Millenials are successful in handling the terrible ordeals that await them. I have three Millenials at home. I know their friends. These are good kids. Their eyes are open. They see how badly their elders have fucked things up. They have no choice but to fix it. They have no choice but to meet the immense challenges ahead. While the Boomers scream at each other and threaten to shut down the government and issue more debt to paper over a debt crisis, the Millenials are preparing for the next 15 years. They are faced with modern distractions (iPods, computers, TV, social media), but human nature does not change. They have not been properly educated by the Boomer run education system, but they understand crushing debt, no jobs, stagnant income, and rising food and energy costs. They know the country cannot run $1.5 trillion deficits for infinity without destroying the country. They are our last best hope.

We’ve been here before. The GI Generation has virtually died off, but the new Hero Generation is getting ready to step up. The old fogies who shit on this generation need to step back and understand history. This generation will step up, because they have to.

North Penn grads hailed as next greatest generation

By Linda Stein
Staff Writer

North Penn High School seniors celebrate as they take the fieldfor the Fifty-Sixth Commencement ceremony at the school on Wednesday evening June 15,2011. Photo by Mark C Psoras

TOWAMENCIN — A sea of newly minted North Penn High School graduates in blue caps and gowns marched into Crawford Stadium Wednesday under a softer blue sky.

Cheering and applauding family and friends clutched balloons and flowers. Some took pictures. Others smiled, waved and blew kisses as the 2011 graduates–more than one thousand strong–took their places on the field, ready to begin a new stage in their young lives.

In an inspiring speech, class Valedictorian Julian Pei spoke of the challenges that his generation faces with economic uncertainties and war abroad.

“Sometimes it feels as if our country is unraveling,” Pei said. “But we cannot fear these times, rather, we must embrace them. The word ‘crisis’ in Chinese is made up of two parts. The first character means ‘danger.’ Clearly we are facing some uncertain and possibly dangerous times ahead. But the second character means ‘opportunity.’

“I believe our generation faces some enormous opportunities in the face of crisis,” he said. Citing historians William Strauss and Neil Howe, Pei said that American history has 80 to 100 year cycles.

Current circumstances comprise a moment of crisis but “we are the ‘Hero Generation,’ mirroring the ‘Greatest Generation’ from about 80 years ago.

“In order for us to properly seize life’s opportunities and become unbeatable…we must be prepared to take on any challenge,” Pei said.

“Go out into the world knowing that the time is now to take the fist step in sculpting a new generation.”

Pei, who plans to go to the University of Pennsylvania, will study biology and finance.

The Lifecycle of the HERO Archetype

We remember Heroes best for their collective coming-of-age triumphs (Glorious Revolution, Yorktown, D-Day) and for their hubristic elder achievements (the Peace of Utrecht and slave codes, the Louisiana Purchase and steamboats, the Apollo moon launches and interstate highways). Increasingly protected as children, they become increasingly indulgent as parents. Their principal endowment activities are in the domain of community, affluence, and technology. Their best-known leaders include: Gurdon Saltonstall and “King” Carter; Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. They have been vigorous and rational institution builders. All have been aggressive advocates of economic prosperity and public optimism in midlife; and all have maintained a reputation for civic energy and competence even deep into old age.A lifecycle outline:

As HEROES replace Nomads in childhood during an Unraveling, they are nurtured with increasing protection by pessimistic adults in an insecure environment.
As teamworking HEROES replace Nomads in young adulthood during a Crisis, they challenge the political failure of elder-led crusades, fueling a society-wide secular crisis.
As powerful HEROES replace Nomads in midlife during a High, they establish an upbeat, constructive ethic of social discipline.
As expansive HEROES replace Nomads in elderhood during an Awakening, they orchestrate ever-grander secular constructions, setting the stage for the spiritual goals of the young.

The G.I. Generation (Hero, born 1901-1924) developed a special and “good kid” reputation as the beneficiaries of new playgrounds, scouting clubs, vitamins, and child-labor restrictions. They came of age with the sharpest rise in schooling ever recorded. As young adults, their uniformed corps patiently endured depression and heroically conquered foreign enemies. In a midlife subsidized by the G.I. Bill, they built gleaming suburbs, invented miracle vaccines, plugged “missile gaps,” and launched moon rockets. Their unprecedented grip on the Presidency began with a New Frontier, a Great Society, and Model Cities, but wore down through Vietnam, Watergate, deficits, and problems with “the vision thing.” As “senior citizens,” they safeguarded their own “entitlements” but had little influence over culture and values.

The Millennial Generation (Hero?, born 1982-?) first arrived when “Babies on Board” signs appeared. As abortion and divorce rates ebbed, the popular culture began stigmatizing hands-off parental styles and recasting babies as special. Child abuse and child safety became hot topics, while books teaching virtues and values became best-sellers. Today, politicians define adult issues (from tax cuts to deficits) in terms of their effects on children. Hollywood is replacing cinematic child devils with child angels, and cable TV and the internet are cordoning off “child-friendly” havens. While educators speak of “standards” and “cooperative learning,” school uniforms are surging in popularity.