{"id":342881,"date":"2018-01-08T14:37:49","date_gmt":"2018-01-08T13:37:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/first-time-arrogance-the-second-time-vengeance\/"},"modified":"2018-01-08T14:37:49","modified_gmt":"2018-01-08T13:37:49","slug":"first-time-arrogance-the-second-time-vengeance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/first-time-arrogance-the-second-time-vengeance\/","title":{"rendered":"First Time Arrogance, the Second Time Vengeance"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<div id=\"attachment_98562\" style=\"max-width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-98562\" src=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-27-at-3.12.36-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"335\"  \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by Anirvan | <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>In his 1852 essay, \u201cThe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,\u201d Marx recalls a saying from Hegel,\u00a0\u201cthat all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Marx adds, \u201cHe forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Often forgotten, Marx follows with an equally telling observation: \u201cMen make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0He warns, \u201cThe tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0That nightmare defines 21<sup>st<\/sup>century U.S. politics.<\/p>\n<p>In 1873, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published\u00a0<em>The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today<\/em>, a popular work that satirized the greed and political corruption of the modern era.\u00a0\u00a0The term \u201cgilded age\u201d stuck, signifying\u00a0a period lasting from the 1870s to 1910s.\u00a0\u00a0It epitomized\u00a0the rise of a new class of capitalists, the \u201crobber barons,\u201d who promoted innovation with shady business scams that fostered corporate tyranny.<\/p>\n<p>Working with other corporate buccaneers and backed by unscrupulous speculators, these tycoons of old formed giant trusts that monopolized the production and distribution of essential goods.\u00a0\u00a0Economic power fostered political influence.\u00a0\u00a0The robber barons controlled Washington, D.C, politics as well as many state&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/01\/08\/the-new-gilded-age-first-time-arrogance-the-second-time-vengeance\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Photo by Anirvan | CC BY 2.0 In his 1852 essay, \u201cThe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,\u201d Marx recalls a saying from Hegel,\u00a0\u201cthat all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Marx adds, \u201cHe forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.\u201d Often forgotten, Marx follows with an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-342881","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342881\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}