A Lifetime of Wishing And Hoping
I was born during World War II, during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. I was too young to remember him, but all my life I heard of the revolution he performed for the country.
Before Roosevelt, for workers to unite and form a union was dangerous, if not illegal. At Matewan, Ludlow, and many other places workers were machine gunned and bombed for uniting and asking for better working conditions and higher pay. There was no limit on hours worked, or child labor, or low wages.
There were no safe retirement options, since all were invested in private corporations, and many people lost all their years of savings when the Great Depression destroyed the economy in 1929. All across the country were “poor farms” and “old folks homes” for people who had lost all their money to financial swindles and crashes.
Young people of today have no concept of the depths of desperation and cynicism then. Workers who had lost their jobs, with hungry wives and children at home, began to look at Communism as the path out of the cycle of business crashes that came every few years. Some present day estimates put the percentage of the population looking favorably at Communism as 35% or more.
The unfavorable ratings of Republicans was even higher. Millions of starving people in the middle of the country, began calling jackrabbits “Hoover hogs”, since that was the only meat they could afford. My father-in-law, born and raised in Oklahoma, was fond of saying,”I may go to Hell, but it won’t be for voting Republican!” I know friends today who refuse to call that dam holding back Lake Mead anything but Boulder Dam. Roving bands of desperate people looking for work lived in settlements of squalor and destitution called “Hoovervilles.”
I read somewhere that FDR saved Capitalism from Communism and I believe that may be right. I also believe he did it by moderating Capitalism with Socialism—the belief that if we all work together and help each other, all will be better off.
Roosevelt didn’t just believe in a minimum wage—he believed in a living wage—that anyone who works a full time job should be able to support their family without needing supplemental assistance from government.
He also believed that if private business could not provide enough jobs for all those who needed them, it was up to the government to provide jobs to carry them through the hard times. Then as now, there are a million projects in this country that need worked on badly, and there is no reason unemployed men and women can’t be put to work making the country better.
FDR believed that if companies could get together and hire private armies to combat their employees, the workers should have the right to get together and hire lawyers and negotiators to stay even. He signed the Wagner act, which required companies to allow the workers to vote for a union, forbade them from firing any organizers, and required them to negotiate in good faith with the union. This was the beginning of a true Middle Class, which had never been seen before.
Even though Franklin Roosevelt came from the wealthy class, he worked hard to make life better for the working class. He was not well liked by the rich businessmen of the country, and he once said,”They are unanimous in their hatred for me—and I welcome their hatred.” That attitude is hard to imagine in the modern age, where politicians of both parties accept millions of dollars from bankers and financiers without a trace of shame.
He called his programs the New Deal, and he became so popular that he was elected to four terms, and the Democratic Party dominated the presidency for the next forty years. The only Republican between 1932 and 1978 was Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, a WWII hero, and he said it would be foolish to try to tear down the programs of the New Deal.
Once upon a time we believed in the power of government to lift the country out of poverty, to create an interstate highway system, to take us to the moon and back, and regulate the financial industry to create the largest Middle Class ever seen in the world.
Then Reagan came along to convince us that our government is the problem, not the solution. By lowering taxes on the most wealthy corporations he impoverished the whole country. By attacking the working people he started the demolition of the Middle Class.
We no longer can afford to send astronauts to the International Space Station—we have to rent space on Russian rockets. Our bridges and highways are falling into dangerous disrepair. We haven’t actually won a war against a real enemy since World War II under Roosevelt. All across the country beggars sit on street corners asking for money for food or shelter. Many are veterans of our failed wars, for which we had no money afterwards to care for those grievously wounded.
Every president since 1980 has catered to the wealthy corporations and Wall Street financiers. The only difference is the Republicans do it up front, and the Democrats claim to be for helping working people, and then they sell our jobs to China and Mexico and do nothing as companies destroy the unions and fire any worker who dares to complain.
The state of our economy depends on where you put the yard stick. If you measure at Wall Street—the Dow-Jones, the NASDAQ, Standard and Poor index, we are doing fantastically. If you put that yard stick on Main Street, we are approaching Third World status. We have more hungry children than any modern country, we have more homeless people than any civilized country, and even though we have mandated health insurance for all, we still have the most unaffordable health care system in the industrialized world.
All my life I have waited and hoped for a worthy successor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I have held my nose, shed tears, and voted for the lesser of two evils. I have voted for third party candidates. I have been punting for a lot of elections since I first voted in 1964. I may not have many elections left in my life.
Bernie Sanders has my hopes up again. He not only says he is for working people, he has thirty years of record to validate his words. He is not being paid by Wall Street firms. He is not giving speeches to banking firms. He is for removing the insurance firms from our health care system and going for a national government run health care system that removes the profit motive from healing people.
This year I’m not bunting anymore. I’m swinging for the fence. I’m working hard to see Bernie Sanders become the next President of the United States. Join me! This may be our last chance!
