Eva Peron... ???

I have two university degrees and almost a third. I have never in my life earned more than about half that kind of annual salary. Thanx for pointing this out, pom. Never wanted to be classed as a bourgois anyway.

On the subject of Peron

I was 2 years old when Evita's funeral procession passed by my parents apartment on Avenida Paseo Colon. According to my folks , the descamidos(shirtless ones) paid to watch the procession from our balcony.

I was 6 years old when Peron was overthrown. I remember being bundled up and taken to my grandparents apartment for safety.

My mother had a keen appreciation for Evita's social work but my father hated Juan Peron and the repression that eventually labeled him a dictator.

They both did have a grudging admiration for a country that allowed the immigration of Jews who had been swept out of Europe, like my Austrian grandparents. They surely would have perished otherwise.

On a whim I called my mother tonight to ask her about living under Peron.

Her memory is a bit hazy but she told me that at first there was a groundswell of appreciation for the changes made for the lower classes in this aristocratically led society. Some of the improvements have been pointed out earlier in this thread. But after an immense effort was made to buy out the British owned rail and trolley lines and American owned phone company, and with the collapsing market for Argentine beef exports the economy came to a standstill.
My father struggled for years to join the middle class but finally gave up and in 1960 we emigrated to the US where we immediately enjoyed a much higher quality of life

I get the impression that the coalition which which supported Juan Peron was fragile and unstable and did not survive the first economic downturn. The middle classes must have started to view the guy as an existential threat and the military told him there would be a civil war if he didn't leave, but the guy still had immense support and there's no way to picture pure nostalgia sweeping him back into power in 73.

The idea of trying to control the schools the way Hitler did must have been a big part of the thing and this also is a major fear factor for US conservatives at present. The leftist control of education in the US is more insidious than the Hitler Youth or Pioneer/Komsomol system in Russia and amounts to a closed-loop system which has developed over a long period of time by loose confederations of the like-minded with control over many of the government institutions which affect education. This has led to the mass home-school movement and may ultimately lead to a mass rejection of government schools by the right as some critical point is reached.

This is interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_xVSgPY8Qo&feature=related

That has to mean household income with both parents, the kids, and the dog and cat all working. Hundred grand jobs are still rare in America.

This clown thinks Peron was left-wing . . . this is part and parcel of the contemporary conservative meme that all dictators are leftists . . . these jokers just drift further and further into fantasy land every day . . .

Like I said earlier, stuff you find about these people is all over the place and obviously present ideas of left or right would not apply. There were apparently people with both far left and far right leanings who called themselves peronists at the time.

Could you elaborate on this one a bit? It almost sounds like you would have needed some sort of a license or something to become middle class at the time in Argentina; in the US of course, you just work a bit harder, make a little bit more money and dress a little better and people assume you are middle class more or less.

Uh uh uh, Gunga Dim . . . if you claim to have me on ignore, you're not supposed to peek . . .

My mother (Cuban) was, when young, a huge Evita fan. My dad, much less so. Mom's love for Evita faded with time.

The Peron's were populists. While General Juan tended more to being a right-wing populist -he was trained in Italy and an admirer of Mussolini-, Evita tended more to being a left-wing populist, Chavez style: she truly loathed the rich of her time (though she used designer clothes) and wanted to somehow monopolize the giveaways with which she bought the populace's love.

I think they did much damage to Argentinian culture, democracy and economics. But they were loved, anyway.

There is an Argentinian film "Eva Perón", which was somehow an answer to Madonna's "Evita". I am told by Argentinians that it is a much better depiction of the character.

... Oh, and about Evita's past. It is knows she was a second-rate actress before meeting General Perón. She truly hated Argentinian movie star Libertad Lamarque and had her banished from the country.

Thanks. The following little sequence of videos seems to actually tell some of the story:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrhPOCw1kls&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42rGT3tqZTk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo1Bw6hvoWo&feature=related

From what I remember him saying. There was a tremendous problem with inflation and the lack of available credit to buy a house or car. He never was able to buy a car there but bought one within months of arriving in New York.

One thing you have to keep in mind... The capitalist system had collapsed in 1930 and by the time Eva Peron died it was not clear to anybody that it had any sort of a future without a world war to drive it. Many expected the world to slump straight back into depression within a few years. The idea of casting around for a "third way" at the time is not anything anybody could have been faulted for.

All honor to the "greatest" generation which fought WW-II; building houses and cars were not amongst their talents in life. It's always been very hard for me to believe that the same nation which was building all of those beautiful ships and airplanes in 1944 went straight back to building the same horrible ugly cars and houses after the war was over. The one guy (Preston Tucker) who ever tried to make any sort of a real car in those days was saved only by a jury from spending his life in prison for it.

That's the whole point. In order to make cars and houses available to an expanding middle class you had to use a cookie cutter and find new innovations in financing. Levittown was a huge breakthrough in housing.

What about the horrible ugly cars??

Even worse, hast ever heard the story about Harley Davidson's role in WW-II??

That puzzles me. Starve Spain after WWII? What about the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War during the 30s? Sexual hangups? What sexual hangups? The issue was that Eva Peron visited Spain was labeled pro-Fascist because of that visit. Everyone hated Franco. . . even the apolitical.

Now, to answer your question as to whether I admire the Perons. First, the left is not an unified, united and conglomerate thing. I tried to explain that several times in this thread. Heavens! For several years, I spoke with two people on a daily basis who both claimed to be on the left and who disagreed with each other . . . however, they never knew that they disagreed. I simply listened to them and never reported one conversation to the other person. Even in America, members of the left differ in their interpretations of events, etc.

Second, there are very few people that I admire. Most people are pretty flawed and while I admire one aspect of several people, there are few that I can honestly say I admire. I admire Pete Seeger for practicing what he preaches. I admire Elizabeth Warren for close to the same reason and for being the voice crying in the desert. I suppose I could come up with a short list of 10 or so people I admire but it would take time. I'd rather do other things!

Besides, I am not Argentine and I do not speak Spanish. I do not know or understand their culture. How could I admire people so distant from me?

How could 6K . . . $6,000. . . be middle class when it is below the federal poverty level and has been for a long time?

The superintendent of schools will make $100,000. The starting salary of a newly minted attorney is $80,000 in a large firm so that will come to $100,000 shortly.

WHile it is true that the bottom 4 quintiles (80%) of American workers have had stagnant buying power for nearly 40 years, just think how little $100,000 is today.