Ye Auld New America: Didn't We Go Down This Road Before?

 
Working for someone else, fingers to the bone with no expectation of decent wages or a foothold on the ladder, is back in vogue here in America.   Even your big deal congresspersons will tell you that.  There are no greater patriots than the country's laborers, and the very, very finest--the finest patriots of all--are those who have no use for unions. The best patriot/workers understand that in America it's All for One and None for All.

And this, too:  If God wanted you to be healthy, wealthy and wise, he would have given you better parents.  It's a practice near to sin to get the taxpayers to take care of you and yours.  The taxpayers have a hard enough time taking care of the rich.

The rich have earned our blind, gushing loyalty (How, you ask? By being rich, you ninny).

You? You haven't.

Yes.  Well.  You'll pardon me for bringing this up, O ye sensitive ones who hate having to hear about the bad old days vs. the good old days, but didn't we goddamn settle this already?

Child coal mine workers, 1900s

I bring this up because Nate Silver says there's a 60% chance the Republicans will take the senate.  Nate seems to know what he's talking about but he doesn't say why the Republicans deserve to take the Senate.  That's for the rest of us to chew over.  So I'm chewing:

How many workers see something in the Republicans that tells them life will be better when the GOP/Tea Party takes over Congress?  What is it they see?

How many women see something in the GOP that the rest of us don't?  Enough to take them over the top?  What is it they see?

When the Republicans win will they finally get busy and deliver on sustainable jobs? Affordable, ethical health care?  Bridges?  Roads? Pollution? Kids?  Or will a comfortable win tell them all they need to know about the sterling virtues of capitalism and the ready acceptance of an oligarchy?

Paul Krugman:

America’s nascent oligarchy may not yet be fully formed — but one of our two main political parties already seems committed to defending the oligarchy’s interests.

Despite the frantic efforts of some Republicans to pretend otherwise, most people realize that today’s G.O.P. favors the interests of the rich over those of ordinary families. I suspect, however, that fewer people realize the extent to which the party favors returns on wealth over wages and salaries. And the dominance of income from capital, which can be inherited, over wages — the dominance of wealth over work — is what patrimonial capitalism is all about.

In Bernie Sanders' report, "Poverty is a Death Sentence", he warns:

“If people don’t have access to health care, if they don’t have access to education, if they don’t have access to jobs and affordable housing then we end up paying not only in terms of human suffering and the shortening of life expectancy but in actual dollars."

These are not revelations new to the 21st century.  Krugman and Sanders are both echoing what President Roosevelt said in his 1944 State of the Union speech, in the midst of the Second World War, when he proposed a second Bill of Rights:

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
• The right of every family to a decent home;
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
• The right to a good education.

We've been here before.  Millions of Americans took FDR's words to heart and worked tirelessly for decades to insure that these most obvious, common-sense American rights should come to pass.  Many of them did come to pass, but now they're in jeopardy.  Now the Republicans (and, yes, some bloody Democrats) are working tirelessly to undo it all.

Millions of us see clearly what's happening again and are trying to stop it, but there are millions of distinctly separate Americans who think it's high time we give up on that old FDR course and head in another direction.  The direction they want to take us in is the same direction we were headed when all hell broke loose in 1929 and it all came crashing down.

It looks like the oligarchs might just get away with it.  So what is it they're seeing in this new, same-old plan--the plan that caused the stock market crash in 1929 and led us into a devastating long-term depression--that makes them think it's going to work this time?

The answer is, it doesn't have to.  America is the place to make money; any idiot knows you wouldn't want to keep it here.  Whatever happens to us won't happen to them.

Some setup, huh?  Makes you wonder if we shouldn't have stuck with that Democracy thing and at least given it a try.

(Cross-posted on Dagblog, Alan Colmes' Liberaland, and Political Carnival.  Featured on Crooks and Liars Blog Round Up)

Happy Birthday, Social Security. And Many, Many More. XOXOXO

Today marks the 77th anniversary of the signing of the Social Security Act, and even though it's not one of those anniversaries we might consider A Big One, it's important.  For this reason:  it may well be the last time any of us will be able to celebrate this landmark law without also being reminded of its untimely death.

Two years ago, when we celebrated Social Security's Diamond Anniversary (well, some of us did) the usual rumblings against the best and brightest of our safety net programs could be heard, but since they were far off and not unlike anything we had heard before (and since the Democrats were still in the majority), we did the usual and just ignored them.

Two years later, they're not just rumblings, they're lightning strikes. Even the folks who have the most to gain from the continuance of Social Security are getting ready to cast their ballots for the very politicians who are not just promising but itching to kill it dead.  Mitt Romney and his cohort, the SS-hating Paul Ryan, would like nothing better than to get the chance in November to kill off all such safety nets once and for all.  If they win the presidency, we can kiss goodbye any hope of saving Social Security and its offspring, Medicare and Medicaid.  The only reform we'll see is a slow elimination or corruption or privatization of the social programs many more addled Americans have now been lulled into associating with "Big Bad Government."

The creation of the Social Security program was nothing short of a miracle.  Days after FDR was sworn in for his first term, in March, 1933, he appointed a committee to come up with a plan to help the people who had become victims of a devastating depression by giving them money.  Cash in their pockets.  Money that the oldest, the ones who couldn't work, would never have to pay back.  And they did it without judgment because they knew the people in this nation were poverty-stricken because they, the government, hadn't been governing with the best interests of the citizens in mind.  In effect, they owed them.  (Well, no, they didn't say that, but they didn't have to.)

Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act into law.  August 14, 1935

Roosevelt envisioned creating a long-term safety net that would eventually be self-sustained by payroll deductions when everyone got back to work, but he was adamant about the need for the Federal government to start these payments before the coffers were filled.  His idea was that the normal safety nets had long disappeared, the country was in trouble, and the government had a moral duty to help out.

President Roosevelt appealed his case for Social Security to Congress this way:

In the important field of security for our old people, it seems necessary to adopt three principles: First, non-contributory old-age pensions for those who are now too old to build up their own insurance. It is, of course, clear that for perhaps thirty years to come funds will have to be provided by the States and the Federal Government to meet these pensions. Second, compulsory contributory annuities which in time will establish a self-supporting system for those now young and for future generations. Third, voluntary contributory annuities by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age. It is proposed that the Federal Government assume one-half of the cost of the old-age pension plan, which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.

The amount necessary at this time for the initiation of unemployment compensation, old-age security, children's aid, and the promotion of public health, as outlined in the report of the Committee on Economic Security, is approximately one hundred million dollars.

(Roosevelt's message to Congress on Social Security, January 17, 1935)

 For all intents, remember, the treasury was empty, and such a request must have sounded plain loony to some.  Of course it did.  The Republicans fought him all the way, but they were in the minority and they lost.  (Interesting to note, though, that 81 Republicans in the House and 16 in the Senate voted for the Social Security Act.)
Three years after the law was enacted he went before the American people and talked about what it meant for the country:

Five years ago the term "social security" was new to American ears. Today it has significance for more than forty million men and women workers whose applications for old-age insurance accounts have been received; this system is designed to assure them an income for life after old age retires them from their jobs.

It has significance for the needy men, women and children receiving assistance and for their families--at least two million three hundred thousand all told; with this cash assistance one million seven hundred thousand old folks are spending their last years in surroundings they know and with people they love; more than six hundred thousand dependent children are being taken care of by their own families; and about forty thousand blind people are assured of peace and security among familiar voices.

It has significance for the families and communities to whom expanded public health and child welfare services have brought added protection. And it has significance for all of us who, as citizens, have at heart the Security and the well-being of this great democracy.

These accomplishments of three years are impressive, yet we should not be unduly proud of them. Our Government in fulfilling an obvious obligation to the citizens of the country has been doing so only because the citizens require action from their Representatives. If the people, during these years, had chosen a reactionary Administration or a "do nothing" Congress, Social Security would still be in the conversational stage--a beautiful dream which might come true in the dim distant future.

But the underlying desire for personal and family security was nothing new. In the early days of colonization and through the long years following, the worker, the farmer, the merchant, the man of property, the preacher and the idealist came here to build, each for himself, a stronghold for the things he loved. The stronghold was his home; the things he loved and wished to protect were his family, his material and spiritual possessions.

His security, then as now, was bound to that of his friends and his neighbors. But as the Nation has developed, as invention, industry and commerce have grown more complex, the hazards of life have become more complex. Among an increasing host of fellow citizens, among the often intangible forces of giant industry, man has discovered that his individual strength and wits were no longer enough. This was true not only of the worker at shop bench or ledger; it was true also of the merchant or manufacturer who employed him. Where heretofore men had turned to neighbors for help and advice, they now turned to Government.

Now this is interesting to consider. The first to turn to Government, the first to receive protection from Government, were not the poor and the lowly--those who had no resources other than their daily earnings--but the rich and the strong. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the United States passed protective laws designed, in the main, to give security to property owners, to industrialists, to merchants and to bankers. True, the little man often profited by this type of legislation; but that was a by-product rather than a motive.

Taking a generous view of the situation, I think it was not that Government deliberately ignored the working man but that the working man was not sufficiently articulate to make his needs and his problems known. The powerful in industry and commerce had powerful voices, both individually and as a group. And whenever they saw their possessions threatened, they raised their voices in appeals for government protection.

It was not until workers became more articulate through organization that protective labor legislation was passed. While such laws raised the standards of life, they still gave no assurance of economic security. Strength or skill of arm or brain did not guarantee a man a job; it did not guarantee him a roof; it did not guarantee him the ability to provide for those dependent upon him or to take care of himself when he was too old to work.

Long before the economic blight of the depression descended on the Nation, millions of our people were living in wastelands of want and fear. Men and women too old and infirm to work either depended on those who had but little to share, or spent their remaining years within the walls of a poorhouse. Fatherless children early learned the meaning of being a burden to relatives or to the community. Men and women, still strong, still young, but discarded as gainful workers, were drained of self-confidence and self-respect.

The millions of today want, and have a right to, the same security their forefathers sought--the assurance that with health and the willingness to work they will find a place for themselves in the social and economic system of the time.

("A Social Security Program Must Include All Those Who Need Its Protection." RADIO ADDRESS ON THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY OF THE SOCIAL SECURITY ACT. AUGUST 15, 1938)

This is what we're fighting to save.  The moral code of this country, as spelled out by the founders, has always dictated that government is there to serve the needs of the people.  Sometimes that's ignored, as Roosevelt himself infers in his radio address, but it's never forgotten.

Even now, it's not forgotten.  Not by us.  Reading through Roosevelt's statements on Social Security, it's clear that he intended to work tirelessly to do what was right for the people still suffering from the effects of a man-made, wholly unnecessary depression.  We need to remind our leaders today--also to blame for a wholly unnecessary depression--that social safety nets are an obligation they've inherited, and are, in fact, an obligation they agreed to when they took their oaths of office and vowed to uphold the constitution.

So let's get to the meat of it: President Obama is no Roosevelt.  Not even close.  But in my heart of hearts I believe he knows in his heart of hearts what he should do. So far he hasn't done it well, but there's no denying baby steps have been taken.  He dropped the ball early on and hasn't recovered it yet, but there's hope.  With President Obama, there's hope.

If Mitt Romney is elected president, either because of or in spite of his running mate, in all likelihood the Republicans will take both the House and the Senate, and that will be the end of Obamacare, of Social Security, of Medicare and Medicaid, of any chance at easing the conditions of the poor and middle class and rebuilding a country nearly devastated by a man-made economic crisis not of our choosing and not of our making.

How do we get that message out?  I don't know, but it can't hurt to keep reminding voters that once upon a time, in conditions much like these, something happened in this country that changed us forever.  Our government took charge and did, not just what they were elected to do, but what they were morally obligated to do. They took care of a nation in mortal pain.  And the country survived.  It thrived.  So much so that, until this latest man-made fiasco, we were still seen as the greatest nation in the world.

We could keep reminding them of that.

To Hell with Hunger, Palin's got a book out

The magnitude of the increase in food shortages -- and, in some cases, outright hunger -- identified in the report startled even the nation's leading anti-poverty advocates, who have grown accustomed to longer lines lately at food banks and soup kitchens. The findings also intensify pressure on the White House to fulfill a pledge to stamp out childhood hunger made by President Obama, who called the report "unsettling." 
(Amy Goldstein, Washington Post, 11/17/09)

_________________________________________

Every morning I get email alerts from the Big Papers about stories they've published that day.  Yesterday I was skimming the list of articles in the Washington Post, and I saw this:  America's Economic Pain Brings Hunger Pangs.

I read the story and was, as anticipated, duly appalled beyond belief.  This is America and we're talking about hungry people numbering in the millions.  "Hungry" does not mean starving.  It means a scarcity of food.  It means food this morning but what about tonight? It means food today, but what about tomorrow?  It means a rumbling in the stomach because food has to be rationed.  It means that as a country we're following a road we thought we had left behind.

Children in Soup Line - 1930s

So on more than a whim, I pulled up the WaPo website to see where this story fit on their main page, and--guess what?  It wasn't there.   The two top-read stories yesterday morning were about--guess what?  Sarah Palin's book tour blitz.

This week is National Hunger and Homeless Awareness week--not that anyone would notice.   The unofficial event is coordinated and co-sponsored by the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness.   (In order for it to be official, somebody in the ranks of government would have to recognize hunger and homelessness as a real problem.  Though Obama called the hunger report "unsettling", I don't see any emergency mobilizing going on. It's simply another report among many that causes them to shake their heads and make promises they sincerely believe in, but about which they have no idea how to even begin addressing.)

This is the first paragraph of Goldstein's article:  "The nation's economic crisis has catapulted the number of Americans who lack enough food to the highest level since the government has been keeping track, according to a new federal report, which shows that nearly 50 million people -- including almost one child in four -- struggled last year to get enough to eat."

Fifty million people, including one child in four, didn't have enough to eat last year.  You can cite rampant unemployment, you can blame illegals, you can certainly put the finger on outsourcing and off-shoring, but the report touches on a major factor that nobody wants to talk about:  insufficient wages. 

"The report's main author at USDA, Mark Nord, noted that other recent research by the agency has found that most families in which food is scarce contain at least one adult with a full-time job, suggesting that the problem lies at least partly in wages, not entirely an absence of work." 

So while we talk about "joblessness" and the impact of hundreds of thousands of jobs lost each and every month, we tend to forget that homelessness and hunger also comes to people struggling to make a living in a job market that is increasingly hostile to them and to their families. There are working people living in their cars, for God's sake.

When millions of able-bodied workers with practical skills and functioning brains are reduced to fighting for menial jobs that pay peanuts, under circumstances that not a one of us could have foreseen even 10 years ago, we have to finally admit that for most of us, life in America is not the recurring pleasant dream but the absolute nightmare.

So here I go again:  Jobs, jobs, jobs that pay, pay, pay. . . a living wage, dammit. We can start like this:

We can build factories and roads and bridges and schools and libraries and railroad stations and we can fill those places with art by American artists.  We can put our young people to work maintaining and creating parks and waysides and scenic overlooks.  And we can send our best writers and photographers out on the road to chronicle the Second Coming of the Great Depression. This is history in the making, and it is history repeating itself.  These are real people who, many of them, come from families who were in this place before.  Many of them worked hard and created a life swank in the middle class, only to be dropped back into the dark places of their forebears.  I'm guessing they're ready and eager to get to work.

It goes without saying that we will need to pay our people a living wage for the necessary work they do.  But in turn, they will once again be able to pay their fair share of taxes, they will once again be consumers, and they will once again be shareholders in an America that welcomes and rewards their efforts.

But in the meantime we have to feed people who don't have enough food, we have to house people who are homeless (even as their former homes sit empty), and we have to stop pretending that millions of people without hope for a future is a situation that, given enough time, will right itself.

It's not going to happen without a whole lot of pushing and shoving.  The very thought of a New New Deal sends Corporate America reaching for their buggy-whips.  Back!  Back!  You can have our billions when you pry it from our cold, dead hands!

So.  All Right.  There's a crowbar around here somewhere. . .

Ramona

Here We Go Again. . .

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. ... Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me. And I welcome their hatred!"
FDR, Madison Square Garden, October 31, 1936
_____________________

"The bear market would no doubt have magically turned around by now, and those failing geniuses at the helm of our flat-lined megacorporations would no doubt be busy manufacturing new profits and putting people back to work — if only Mr. Obama had solved the banking crisis, had lowered taxes on the rich, had refused to consider running up those giant deficits (a difficult thing to do at the same time that you are saving banks and lowering taxes), and had abandoned any inclination that he might have had to reform health care and make it a little easier for ordinary American kids to get a better education."
Bob Herbert, NYT, March 7, 2009
_______________________

"Americans all over this country hope for change. They hope the corruption, earmarking and pork-barrel practices will stop. What are we giving them? We are giving them a slap in the face, that is what we are giving them ... So much for the promise of change."
John McCain, Senate floor, March 2, 2009
(41 days after Obama's Inauguration)
________________________

Oh, that Grand Old Party. . .don't you just love them? Is there a former regime anywhere in the world more under-appreciated than they are? Why won't we listen?? Yeah, they've done some things in the past--some things that might have caused a tiny bit of the problems we're facing today--but if we just give them one more chance they promise to change their ways. Because, after all, they are the party of change. . .

Before we turn all those billionaires into mere millionaires, and before we do something as drastic as create jobs for the great unwashed, and before we make the whole damned country healthy, could we please, please just listen to what they have to say??

You know, there was a time when I might have indulged them--a very long, long time ago--but you give an inch with those people and they'll take a mile. I'm listening again to FDR's famous Madison Square Gardens speech, given in October 1936, and it sickens me that it's the same speech Barack Obama should be giving today.



How have we come to this again? Where was everybody? Oh, there were voices raised against the current Right Wing machine--many millions of them--but again, for way too long, we were treated as quaint, foolish Chicken Littles: "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

So now that the sky has fallen, can we please get back to reality? Can we not give another moment's breath to the GOP's pompous hate mongers, their selfish twits, their holier-than-thous? If President Obama ever wants to get us on the right track again, he has to turn against them in order to be for us. That's his job. Hold him to it.


As Bob Herbert said today, in yet another smack dab, right on column, "I don’t know whether President Obama’s ultimate rescue plan for the financial industry will work. He is a thoughtful man running a thoughtful administration and the plan, a staggeringly complex and difficult work in progress, hasn’t been revealed yet.

What I know is that the renegade clowns who ruined this economy, the Republican right in alliance with big business and a fair number of feckless Democrats — all working in opposition to the interests of working families — have no credible basis for waging war against serious efforts to get us out of their mess."

Ramona

Is There Nothing Sacred in this Country?

UAW-CIO mural, Romulus, Michigan
painted by Walter Speck, head of the Detroit WPA Arts project, 1937
(Click here to read more)

I read an article in the New York Times today by Tracie Rozhon entitled "New Deal Architecture Faces Bulldozer". She writes:

"Hundreds of buildings commissioned by the Works Progress Administration and Roosevelt’s other 'alphabet' agencies are being demolished or threatened with destruction, mourned or fought over by small groups of citizens in a new national movement to save the architecture of the New Deal."

We have a nasty habit in this country when it comes to old buildings.  We refuse to see value in them once walls begin to crumble and windows begin to fall out.  No matter their history, when the time comes that they require some major TLC (and it will. They're OLD!) they become liabilities and committees quickly form to figure out how they can get around that old historical nostalgia thing and convince the public that an old building is just an old building and even when it's gone they'll still have the memories.

"It’s ironic to be tearing [WPA structures] down just when America is going through tough times again,” wrote biographer Robert A. Caro, in his 1974 book, “The Power Broker, “ We should be preserving them and honoring them. They serve as monuments to the fact that it is possible to combine infrastructure with beauty.”

If you've gone across this country anywhere at all, chances are you've seen something that was built as part of Roosevelt's WPA Project, designed to put millions of people back to work in the 1930s.
You've seen beautiful bridges, roads, parks, and public buildings. You've seen murals in railroad stations and libraries, commissioned by the New Deal visionaries, and painted by out-of-work artists.

The Painted Desert Inn at Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park was a WPA project built in the 1930s by the young men and boys in the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corp) . We visited it a few years ago, and I was completely enthralled by the work that went into it. As a works project during the depression, the designers and facilitators could simply have put up a utilitarian building and left it at that. But they made it a work of art to complement the stunning beauty of its surroundings.

It had been abandoned and neglected until recent years, but thanks to more current visionaries, it's been lovingly restored. It is no longer an inn, but the murals, the chandeliers, the painted glass ceiling and the magnificent stucco work of the 1930s are intact. (Click here to see more pictures of the building.)

Painted Desert Inn, built by CCC Corps 1935-40

Murals, posts and vigas created and completed by CCC Corps

Glass ceiling, painted by CCC Corps

In my online travels researching this post, I found this remarkable website with photos of some of the other WPA projects across the country. It's not complete by any means--there were thousands--but it gives an idea of the scope of the projects, and, more importantly, the worth.

You've seen the heartbreaking photographs of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans and you've read the clear and poignant words of writers like Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston--all employed by the government during the days of the WPA.

"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me.There was a sort of equality about it. "

(From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960. Dorothea Lange describing the series of migratory farm labor photographs she took in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California called "Migratory Mother")

Yes, the New Deal WPA programs were make-work projects. And yes, they could be considered entitlements, since their work wasn't what most would consider "necessary". But oh, the treasures they produced! (Deny that, you dolts in Washington, who still believe, all evidence to the contrary, that the heart and soul of this country lies in keeping the Upper Class uppermost).

In "American Life Histories", from the Library of Congress, I found manuscripts from the Federal Writer's Project, 1936-1940. Every state in the union produced a WPA guidebook written by the writers of the day. In one of them, for the Georgia Writer's Project, Mrs. Ada Redford interviewed Mr. Clifford Farr, owner of the Skinner Clothing Company in Augusta on July 17, 1940. Here's an excerpt:

Ada Redford: "What do you think caused the depression?"

Clifford Farr: "It would take a more brilliant mind than mine to tell you the real cause. My ideas along with a lot of other small merchants is about the same. It was Wall Street against the world, along with a political upheaval, in other words, a Republican trick. Millionaires were made over night from the life savings of others. The war got the credit for a lot of and rightly so. I remember the close of the Spanish American War; cotton dropped to 3 1/2 and 4 cents a pound, why? Politics and the little man being crushed and beggared by the man or men who were in power. Take my business for instance; before the last depression fourteen families were being supported from it; my own personal loss was 50%. I was worth around $40,000 with an income of $5,000. That was cut in half and today my average is a little more than $3,000."

Ada: "What to you think of conditions today?"

Clifford: "They are about the same as the pre-war days of the last World War. When this program is over, there will be an increase in business. The present administration is wise now to all the Republican tricks and there will not be another depression such as Hoover and the Republicans caused. The people in our country know now that it was a political trick to enrich the big man and make beggars out of the little man. We have more unemployed than any other country in the world today, and the cry is that this is a machine age. That is true, to a great extent, but who built the machines? Where did the money come from? Out of the pockets of the working man? Again I say, 'Wall street against the world.' "

These words, those photographs, along with the thousands of other treasures that came out of the New Deal, not only should be, but must be preserved. There are tribes of dangerous power-mongers who want to re-write history and ignore the obvious signs of a country turning back on itself, but we can't let that happen.

Those buildings, those parks, those bridges, those artworks, those words, were crafted by a people who came out of a darkness artificially created by hubris and greed. They built a new America for us. The least we can do to preserve the memory of those hard times is to preserve the wonders their hard labor created after the New Deal administration finally saw the light and gave them hope.

Ramona