Picking Your Pockets

 

Picking Your Pockets

I read the other day where our erstwhile Attorney General was suing someone, the United States Treasury I think, because there are qualifications in the Covid Relief Bill that prevent states from using the money to fund tax cuts. Those Republicans really don't want you to have that money nor do they want the money to be used to fund activities by the state for the  

benefit of its citizens. They would much rather the money be used to gorge the wealthy and leave you to take the crumbs from the table. Seems they want you to be afraid that you will lose not only your salvation but also your right to be called an American if your government tries to help you out.

My parents were born in the Gilded Age. For those of you who missed that day in school, it was a time when wealthy people had managed to buy Congress and the Presidency. The disparity between wealthy and poor had become so great that the working poor were little more than serfs to their liege lords. If your name wasn't Rockefeller, Vanderbilt or Carnegie you were barely making it until you died. Usually at a pretty young age.

Dad was born on the West End of Louisville and didn't really have it too bad for a few years until the Great Flood took everything they had. Dad's family, a large one, ended up living on a shanty boat on the river but later was able to move to a home on the shore. But that was little help since the depression had started when Wall Street crashed. They had very little. He told me of picking up coal that had fallen off the trains in order to be able to have some heat. This would have been in the 1920s and 1930s. He lived in poverty until the biggest works project in history came which was World War II. Then the Navy took over his room and board.

Mom was born into the mountains of Leslie County and she has told me many times of how the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration put people to work  

building public buildings and roads. They built Ky. 80 which ran past their house. Until then Wooton Creek served as part of the road. Mom left the mountains in 1939. First to Florence and then to Louisville where she went to work as a comptometer operator in a factory. She and her family were brought up dirt poor while the big money from U.S. Steel and others raped the mountains for their timber and coal leaving total devastation in its wake. Most of all they left the people as poor or poorer than they were before the big money from up East came.

They met after the war in Louisville and birthed me. The point here is that they revered President Roosevelt so much that they gave me the middle name of Franklin. People of that generation had a picture of Roosevelt on the wall right beside Jesus. Sometimes it was just Roosevelt. Roosevelt took office during a time of massive unemployment and soup lines. Homes and farms were being foreclosed on with people losing everything they had.

Does any of this sound familiar? Have you seen the miles long lines of people lined up for food. They may have a fancy car but they don't have money for food or rent. If you don't take anything else away from this I want you to remember this.

THE DISPARITY IN WEALTH IS GREATER NOW THAN IT WAS IN THE GILDED AGE. I'm not lying. Look it up.

And the wealthy have once again bought our Congress and the Kentucky Legislature is solidly in their pockets. They need to keep you poor and barely making it so that you'll be thankful for those crumbs and won't have enough energy to pay attention. They're doing a great job of that too.

They manage to keep the voters in line by telling them they don't have enough sense to know when and how to have their own babies while, at the same time, picking your pockets. They tell them the world's best universities are indoctrinating their children to become Communists and Socialists. These are the same universities that educated and built the richest country in the world. But wait! Some want to build new schools that will indoctrinate your children in a different direction that will keep the rich people in power and teach them that poor people are poor because they just aren't smart enough or don't work hard enough. To top it all off the new Gilded Age people want to do to the entire earth what Big Timber and Big Coal did to Kentucky. Strip it of all the wealth and leave nothing but a smoking heap and poor people.

My parents lived it and told me about it. I haven't forgotten and I can see what is happening.

My Take is this. We need another Roosevelt.