First Saturday as the World Turns

It’s not about the poor, stupid—it’s about the rich!

By Ed Rogers

While debating how the Congress and your local elected representative act—or, more often, don’t act—toward the poor, I have seen idea, after opinion, after facts even when they are not facts, and a whole gambit of crap that has nothing to do with being poor.
    I was raised poor and came from what folks called land-poor people. That is to say, before WWII, my family were farmers. My father and most of the young men who grew up helping farm the land joined the WPA as soon as they could. No one had money to buy your crops and it was cheaper not to grow more than you could use. Going to work for the WPA meant there would be one fewer mouth to feed.
    Most of the money they made they sent home. In the United States, these men built the parks and walking trails we enjoy today. They built highways where the experts said no highway could be built. They worked from sunup until sundown for little pay. It was the “Great Depression” and being poor was the normal!
    My father and uncle hopped freight trains in order to get home for a few days and jumped the train to go back to work. My uncle told a story of him and my father standing on the coupling between two boxcars. It was dead of winter and they came down from the top of the train to get out of the wind. The train went up a grade and the coupling parted. As the train topped the grade and started downhill, the cars came together. My father’s heel caught in the coupling. Two more inches and he would have lost a foot. It took fifteen minutes before the pressure released and he could free his foot. The rails were full of men just like them, and more than one lost their life trying to get home.
    The wealthy of their day looked upon them the same as they do today. With closed eyes! All the ideas we and others kick around to help the middle class, or what is known as the soon-to-be-poor, are nothing more than paint on an old outhouse. No matter what color you paint it—it’ll still smell like shit.
    These men and women went on to build a middle class. They formed unions, sent their kids to college, bought homes and cars, and prepared for retirement. They brought a class-driven nation back in line. But they took their eye off the prize they had won.

The rich steal from the poor and have from to beginning of time. Without money or power, people become items to be used and discarded. There is but one answer. During the “Great Depression” the wealthy learned a lesson from the poor, and it was just in time. The lesson was that there is a line beyond which human beings will not be pushed but will turn on their tormentors and fight back. Across the land, hobo camps began to arm themselves. When you have lost everything, the fear within you dies.
    When you are only one per cent, wealth carries little weight in the face of an armed mob. The French Revolution showed the wealthy what happens when the powerful try to push people beyond that line.
    Up until Ronald Reagan, the wealthy pushed but never pushed beyond the line. With Reagan, it was as though history were a lie, and Father Ronnie exposed it. The rich were given the green light they had prayed would open the gates of gold. Under Father Reagan and his rich donors, unions fell, pensions disappeared, and the chance of retiring from a good-paying job vanished.
    Under Clinton—whom Democrats look on as a God, but he was cut from the same cloth as Ronnie—the arrow to the heart of the middle class struck home: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
    Then they passed the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and next on the promised list of the rich is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). All of these passed under the watchful eye of the Democrats, I might add. Lest you think I am blaming the Democrats for the passing of these bills, I am not. I blame the Republicans, who are playing like they are Democrats, for passing these bills. There are few real Democrats and even fewer true Republicans in Washington, DC these days. There are only hands waiting in line to receive money.
    Oh! I forgot the crazies. They’re so stupid, they don’t have sense enough to get paid for their crazy shit.
    I wish this was all new ground we were plowing, but it isn’t. It is the way the world has been for a long time. Here is something from the past that we could read in today’s newspaper (if there were such a thing):

TUESDAY SIXTEEN of MAY, 1950, THE DAILY MAIL, HACEMTOWN, MD
Truman Heads Home
    After he pledged to a huge Chicago Rally that he’d drive “obstructionists” out of Congress, President Truman put opponents of his “Fair Deal” program on notice today. He said he would fight to drive “obstructionists” out of Congress.
    He rode happily back to Washington in the wake of Democratic cheers to put new heat on those he termed “backward looking” Senators and Representatives to fall in line with the Administration.
    Speaking to a roaring crowd of 12,000 party faithful overflowing the Chicago Stadium, the President last night gave his party this key for action:

The Democratic Party will carry on its fight for its programs during the remaining months of the 81st Congress. After that is over, we will carry on the fight in the 82nd Congress. I hope that by next January some of the worst obstructionists will have been removed. We will carry on the fight, this year, and the following years—because we are a party that is not afraid to dream and plan and work for a better future.

The Chicago Stadium, the setting for his own nomination for the vice presidency in 1944, resounded with whistling, handclapping, yelling, and cheers as the gray-haired Chief Executive enunciated the party doctrine.
    The President’s speech climaxed a three-day Jefferson Jubilee celebration, which brought cabinet members and 3,000 Democratic Party leaders from throughout the country to Chicago. He did not direct his remarks to Republicans or Democrats when he declared that Congress still had “many backward looking Senators and Representatives.”
    His aides said his “non-political” trip to the Northwest last week was just a mild taste of his commitment before the November election. The President was interrupted frequently by applause.
    Once, when departing from his prepared text, he declared: “I wish the opposition would come up with something and be a real opposition. A great political party cannot survive and be against everything.”
    He went on to say, “The Whig and Federalist parties vanished because they lacked programs.” He added he sincerely hoped “the Republican Party will profit by their examples.”
    He declared, “We need a strong two-party system.”

We have always had the crazies with us, but now they have unlimited money and safe districts. The Republicans need to realize that winning and not caring about its cost is leading them down a dark hole and dragging the rest of us with them.
    There will be a war—in Congress or in the streets. The answer is no longer in the hands of talkers. That time has passed. Revolutions don’t start with a yell, but with a whisper. The kindling that the Republicans spread across the land with their disregard for the citizens is waiting for one spark. I believe they have pushed people across the line and history is but looking and waiting for the next hero.
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Copyright © 2014 by Ed Rogers

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