>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>Jimmy Carter = Afghanistan + Paul Volcker
>
>Yup, I know that.
Then, why do you say that Nader "seems seriously nuts, in both the political and psychopathological senses," on account of his having given up on the Democratic Party in 1979? It makes perfect political sense to come to the conclusion that the unhappy marriage of the Democratic Party and organized sectors of American workers made during the Popular Front ended in 1979, with the former divorcing the latter.
The GINI index was at its lowest in 1968 (at <http://www.frbsf.org/econrsrch/wklyltr/el97-03.html> and <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Stats_incpov.html>); the real hourly earning peaked in 1973 (at <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Stats_earns.html>); the real value of the average AFDC grant peaked in 1977 (at <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Welfare_and_wages.html>). Empirical evidence of the beginning of the end of an era had been accumulating since the late 1960s. Therefore, 1979 -- the year when Jimmy Carter's appointment of Paul Volcker as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board made the Democratic Party's abandonment of American workers official -- was exactly the right moment for American workers and their allies to begin organizing a political party of their own. -- Yoshie
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