| Year | Event
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| 1938 | Kristallnacht (The Night of the Broken Glass): anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland; 200 synagogues destroyed; 7,500 Jewish shops looted; 30,000 male Jews sent to concentration camps (Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen). An excerpt from the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen asserts that there was general support by the citizens of Germany for the extermination of the Jews. The book and the author have been highly criticized by some.
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| 1942 | The U.S. Supreme Court, in "Wickard v. Filburn", confirmed that by the gimmick of the "commerce clause", the federal government can regulate any activity of citizens no matter how trivial.
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| 1965 | A U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is inaugurated
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| 1978 | President Carter (D) signs the National Energy Act of 1978. It contains a controversial regulation deregulating natural gas but forbidding electric utilities from burning natural gas. Within a year there will be so much excess natural gas that the Department of Energy will be begging the utilities to use it again. The act also included another government imposed disaster, a four-cents-per-gallon tax exemption for 10% blends of ethanol with gas. This was the beginning of ethanol subsidies that ultimately, by 2008, cost the taxpayers over $11 billion and increased gasoline and food prices around the world, while at the same time resulting in a net energy loss!
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| 1989 | East Germany decided to lift the Iron Curtain and allowed the Berlin Wall to be torn down.
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| 1993 | The Supreme Court in "HARRIS v. FORKLIFT SYSTEMS, INC." removed a barrier to proving sexual harassment when it unanimously ruled that workers do not have to offer evidence of serious psychological damage to win their case.
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| 2005 | Today's Example of a Most Interesting Government Purchase: The Money article, "Company under fire won Katrina contracts" relates how the "Beltway Bandit", Titan, wins a fat Katrina contract - $450,000 - in spite of or maybe because of its history of corruption and scandal (Abu Ghraib abuser).
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