WEEKLY WARNING WORDS
June 30, 2004 - Week 41 - Capstone of Industry
BY DR. BRUNO J. KEITH
The lying pro-fessors of Wharton, Harvard & Yale still teach that the great captains of industry forged our democratic capitalism based on a huge middle class. That was the big lie which guaranteed the survival of American robber capitalism. Why does that obvious prevarication still reverberate in our poisoned atmosphere?
True is that the billions of acres, stolen from native Americans & donated by corrupt Congressmen to their enterprising friends & co-conspirators spread eastern poverty & lawlessness westwards. Only the Homestead Act & labors of landgrant colleges kept our farming industry afloat until "illegal" labor & trade unions risked the lives of their organizers who began to fight for livable wages.
The captains of industrial suppression prospered from child & underpaid immigrant slavery without ever sharing their surplus profits with workers who made them stinkingly rich. All 3 branches of the federal government joined state militias and local tyrants with their Pinkerton guards to suppress, & often murder, organizing or striking workers, so they could let them starve into being willing, like black slaves, to give their sweat & blood for barely subsisting. During the "good old time", 95% of US was wretchedly poor, hungry, sick, inadequately dressed & housed & desperate.
The small middle class was satisfied with the crumbs off the tables of the wealthy as company store keepers, office workers & policing forces. No industrialist, banker, broker or government agent dared working for fair deals in the work places, in the courts or in the churches. No avenging angel battled for the poor & despised.
Actually that suited Henry Ford just like Morgan, Rockefeller, Frick and all other controllers of their Congress & President until he realized that he could massproduce his new automobiles if his workers could afford to buy them. Much as he hated unions, their organizers and proud workers, he began experimenting with paying for a day's work what he had spent for a week's work & thereby worked wonders.
All other automakers & producers of modern household & farm equipment also got over their hatred of Jewish prophets & preachers for the underclass & began to make their deals with labor organizers until all but agricultural workers began to earn enough to be able to afford their beer, tobacco, potatoes and cake and chicken on Sundays. Such blue collar prosperity made quite a few frugal savers who could send their children to school, their women to church and themselves to continued-education courses of their unions.
As soon as unionization was legalized, the finer arts legitimized their middle class status. Soon the most ambitious workers became the best citizens & patriots & the underpinnings of an ideal capitalistic democracy.
The Hoover Depression jeopardized the model status of these United States. He admitted: "There is nothing I can do; there is nothing anyone can do." His Secretary of the Treasury, Mellon, agreed. Without FDR's New Deal, the savage freebooter capitalism of the Republicans seemed doomed.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved our economic system. World War II brought back prosperity because our women proved that they could maintain our industries & civilization while their men gave their lives in their struggle against inhuman fascism. Democrats & their F.D.R. used the failings of Republicans to legislate, in 1944, the "Servicemen's Readjustment Act". This "G.I. Bill of Rights" gave 16 million young or youngish Americans the right to cash payments & free college education or vocational training. They soon enhanced our civilization, our educational standards and subsequent good & best positions at work and in life. Even the right-wing American Legion had hailed & supported this "unnecessary" budget busting. Senator Taft, "Mr. Republican", had fought it tooth & nail but accepted it quite gracefully when it was enacted.
Robert A. Taft, son of President William H. Taft, was more conservative than his huge father. As the scion of a distinguished political dynasty, he was perhaps the greatest scholar in his family. He also took all honors under Republican banner for granted.
He went beyond family tradition when he subscribed to the campaigns of slanders & lies against Democratic leadership. Yet, of all Democratic power centers, he hated Labor Unions more than obvious traitors to their country. Obviously he demonstrated more love & forgiveness to Nazi terrorists than to most Americans & more hatred to hard-working laborers who hoped to live in acceptable comfort & with dignity. Somehow he saw an aberration & a form of treason in their attempt to become part of the middle class.
This tough Taft had also fought against F.D.R.'s Social Security legislation because he didn't believe in a safety net for the underclass. But he accepted it graciously because a large majority of his fellow citizens had expressed the idea that a little bit of assured income in times of great need would prevent a dismal & destructively deep economic depression.
He also began the legal dismantling of trade union empowerment by his Taft-Hartley legislation, so heinously continued by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. His re-Publican achievements qualified him for the special distinction of being honored as "Mr. Republican".
As a result, F.D.R. created a very large middle class that began to prosper beyond the most optimistic expectations. What neither Roosevelt nor Taft had expected, soon millions of old & new Americans moved into the upper atmosphere. None of the previous captains of industry, except shipbuilder & insurance organizer, Kaiser, liked the born-again competition for million-dollar jobs. To nobody's surprise, the ungrateful profiteers of Democratic fairness & their offspring quickly forgot their benefactors. They became the staid standardbearers of the G.O.P. & now try to make most miserable the life & work of every workstiff, their children and all who couldn't make it like them. They thus recreated the misery of our 19th century existence. With the help of their President, Bush, they try hard to leave many children & their parents behind & use pious terror to control women & their workforce, so they can live it up like the now ancient captains of industry.
Week 42 - July 7, 2004 - The President's Private Parts & Partners