This is only a work of fiction, of course--
...Though the Corpos continued to promise a gift of at least $5000 to every family, "as soon as funding of the required bond issue shall be completed," the actual management of the poor, particularly of the more surly and dissatisfied poor, was undertaken by the Minute Men.
It could now be published to the world, and decidedly it was published, that unemployment had, under the benign reign of President Berzelius Windrip, almost disappeared. Almost all workless men were assembled in enormous labor camps, under M.M. officers. Their wives and children accompanied them and took care of the cooking, cleaning, and repair of clothes. The men did not merely work on state projects; they were also hired out at the reasonable rate of one dollar a day to private employers...
Keep reading...it gets better:
...Of course, so selfish is human nature even in Utopia, this did cause most employers to discharge the men to whom they had been paying more than a dollar a day, but that took care of itself, because these overpaid malcontents in their turn were forced into the labor camps.
Out of their dollar a day, the workers in the camps had to pay from seventy to ninety cents a day for board and lodging.
There was a certain discontentment among people who had once owned motorcars and bathrooms and eaten meat twice daily, at having to walk ten or twenty miles a day, bathe once a week, along with fifty others, in a long trough, get meat only twice a week--when they got it--and sleep in bunks, a hundred in a room. Yet there was less rebellion than a mere rationalist like Walt Trowbridge, Windrip's ludicrously defeated rival, would have expected, for every evening the loudspeaker brought to the workers the precious voices of Windrip and Sarason, Vice-President Beecroft, Secretary of War Luthorne, Secretary of Education and Propaganda Macgoblin, General Coon, or some other genius, and these Olympians, talking to the dirtiest and tiredest mudsills as warm friend to friend, told them that they were the honored foundation stones of a New Civilization, the advance guards of the conquest of the whole world.
They took it, too, like Napoleon's soldiers. And they had the Jews and the Negroes to look down on, more and more. The M.M.'s saw to that. Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
Each week the government said less about the findings of the board of inquiry which was to decide how the $5000 per person could be wangled. It became easier to answer malcontents with a cuff from a Minute Man than by repetitious statements from Washington.
But most of the planks in Windrip's platform really were carried out--according to a sane interpretation of them. For example, inflation.
In America of this period, inflation did not even compare with the German inflation of the 1920's, but it was sufficient. The wage in the labor camps had to be raised from a dollar a day to three, with which the workers were receiving an equivalent of sixty cents a day in 1914 values. Everybody delightfully profited, except the very poor, the common workmen, the skilled workmen, the small business men, the professional men, and old couples living on annuities or their savings--these last did really suffer a little, as their incomes were cut in three. The workers, with apparently tripled wages, saw the cost of everything in the shops much more than triple.
Agriculture, which was most of all to have profited from inflation, on the theory that the mercurial crop-prices would rise faster than anything else, actually suffered the most of all, because, after a first flurry of foreign buying, importers of American products found it impossible to deal in so skittish a market, and American food exports--such of them as were left--ceased completely.
It was Big Business, that ancient dragon which Bishop Prang and Senator Windrip had gone forth to slay, that had the interesting time.
With the value of the dollar changing daily, the elaborate systems of cost-marking and credit of Big Business were so confused that presidents and sales-managers sat in their offices after midnight, with wet towels. But they got some comfort, because with the depreciated dollar they were able to recall all bonded indebtedness and, paying it off at the old face values, get rid of it at thirty cents on the hundred. With this, and the currency so wavering that employees did not know just what they ought to get in wages, and labor unions eliminated, the larger industrialists came through the inflation with perhaps double the wealth, in real values, that they had had in 1936.
And two other planks in Windrip's encyclical vigorously respected were those eliminating the Negroes and patronizing the Jews.
The former race took it the less agreeably. There were horrible instances in which whole Southern counties with a majority of Negro population were overrun by the blacks and all property seized. True, their leaders alleged that this followed massacres of Negroes by Minute Men. But as Dr. Macgoblin, Secretary of Culture, so well said, this whole subject was unpleasant and therefore not helpful to discuss...
Excerpted from Chapter 17 of It Can't Happen Here (etext here), published in 1935 by award-winning American author Sinclair Lewis, whose novel about an opportunistic media preacher Elmer Gantry was once made into a film starring Burt Lancaster.
The protagonist of It Can't Happen Here is Doremus Jessup, an urbane, centrist-moderate small town newspaper editor who does not believe his own instincts, that it is time to move from Vermont to Canada, until his doctor son-in-law is shot before his eyes by the Minute Men - the homegrown brownshirts of the Corporatist Party - and he himself sent to a gulag ... and even then he remains in denial that this can be happening in America, not to blacks or Communist radicals, but to a bourgeois white man like him, until it is flogged out of him.
--Even though he has been warning, ironically and cynical at the overt and uncouth stupidity of the Corpo candidate, Buzz Windrip, a crass but canny little creep of a lawyer and literal former snake-oil salesman, who is elevated as a folksy, down-home champion of "real" ordinary non-elitist academic working white Christian men, mostly by the PR work of an educated possibly-Jewish closeted gay former leftist radical with a military fetish, who successfully builds the Windrip myth and markets it despite the laughter of the educated, via radio broadcasts and jingles and hate-speech for the effeminate cowards like FDR and his followers.
--Lewis was married to a foreign correspondent and thus saw both the things that were going on overseas at that time, and how the US media edited them out and kept the public in the dark, at a time when the American Legion was beating up striking workers and cheerleading for Mussolini, and a two-time Medal of Honor winning Marine Corps general's career was shitcanned and he courtmartialed by President Hoover, for calling Il Duce a common murderer. And the media whores of the day genuflected before the power of money.
He tried to tell us. As did Gen. Butler. And Mark Twain, too. I never heard about either of them, nor about ex-liberal-hawk Clemens' "America-hating" activities (you may remember being told in high school that he became "reclusive" and "embittered" late in life - this is why), for all my independent studies of 20th century history via original mass media documents, until two years ago on the internet - links from radical leftists, who have likewise been sounding the alarm for so long ignored and attacked, like the unheeded heroes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and To Serve Mankind crying out that there are monsters in our midst.
--As the page on Twain at Veterans For Peace notes, observing on the suppression by even Harpers of The War Prayer, even in death their voices are muffled.
Lewis, in 1935, also blames the infighting and ideological purity and purges of the activist left of his day, for making it impossible for them to be an effective counteractant to fascism, so that Windrip is able to bring in actual fascism under the name of Freedom and Democracy while loudly denouncing "fascism" in his speeches. In the novel, communists, socialists, and FDR liberals don't make common cause until they're getting beaten up by the Minute Men, at which point it's far too late. Lewis was right about that, too.
Our press is amnesiac - or owned. Dick Cheney and Wiliam F. Buckley (ex-CIA) were both open supporters of apartheid in South Africa, and opposed to equal rights for women, a mere quarter-century ago. (You can see the sort of desperate denial that "decent conservatives" have been engaging in for years, in that Cheney link.)
And we are surprised by what is happening with the Sack and Rape of New Orleans, followed as all rapes are by blaming the victims? Governor Blanco learns too late how much use it is to be an anti-abortion, anti-affirmative action, conservative Republican-lite Democrat in order to win against a groomed token black Republican, as Congress agitates to strip her of her power and privatize the entire state of Louisiana, Tancredo's call foreshadowed by pundits like Bush I's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, former presidential candidate, Reagan aide and red NY representatitve Jack Kemp here on Sept 5,, and National Review mau-maus the New Orleannais unceasingly.
And so we become Borogravia, while the Doremus Jessups of the world refuse to see what is transpiring before their very eyes, or to act on our instincts of danger, choosing to be lulled by the voices of the media, until it has happened irreversibly. Only then does he dare to look back at the myths of America that he bought into as a New Englander, of self-reliance and necessity and moral purity, daring to question even the Civil War, the rejection of reason, diplomacy, and sacrifice by the wealthy that it entailed with the long refusal of America to face that it bought its prosperity from Canada to Mexico with blood and hypocrisy, and the unending celebration of militarism in America that followed it - and the deaths of so many young people, betrayed by their elders' greed, who might have made the world a better place.
"More and more, as I think about history," he pondered, "I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever."
In 1932 Gen. Smedley Butler was approached by representatives of a group of bankers and industrialists horrified at the direction FDR had taken the country, who wanted to forcibly retire the president "for his health" until they could re-educate him out of his class treason, and wanted the popular Marine hero to lead an army composed of veterans from the American Legion on Washington to secure power for their cabal.
Instead, he refused, saying that he served democracy, and went to Congress. Who held closed-door hearings, and covered it up and the names of the top business tycoons were classified by Congress for national security reasons and have never been released. Which you never learned in history books in school, I will bet.
After having seen the corruption of American democracy in its heart firsthand, both with this, and earlier while involved in the investigations regarding corruption and profiteering in WWI, he went on to decry his own service of Capitalism in these words which he published in the Socialist newspaper Common Sense, also in 1935:
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.
And he was laughed at and ignored - look at Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh! Look at the sex scandal here, the new Packard there, until the American public was blindsided by enemies attacking us from out of nowhere for no reason, having thought themselves immune, unlike those silly Europeans fighting all the time...and the Cold War began, both ends against the middle and all the money we made for our masters going to the Masters of War, and silent obedience, never questioning, trusting in Duck and Cover, became the rule of American freedom and democracy thereafter.
But there is hope for us today: we the people are not being silent, we are rescuing ourselves when we see that the plutocratic authorities are our enemies, we are casting aside old differences and sharing information and in just a few short years, have cracked the stranglehold on information that has been the rule for so many generations.
Who could have imagined in 1970 that citizens with computers would have been able to expose the rigged shows of media circuses, catch the telling of truth to power and suppression of the same on live TV and spread it in minutes to the world, to those who did not see it - before it was orwellized by the propaganda station of the Anglo-American-Australian kleptocrat Sir Rupert Murdoch?
New Orleans has been sacked, as Rome was in 1527 by its own ruling families as well as the foreign mercenaries and allies with whom the de'Medici have been playing games, New Orleans has been sacked by our own Mayflower Medici, who have been running the catspaws of the Maybury Machiavellis from the shadows; Rome still stands, and lives, unlike Pompeii: let that give all a hope of hope.
But the war of the wealthy and privileged against the poor and marginal of this country - and when 10% of the nation control over 80% of the wealth, marginal is all of us, whether we know it or not - has only begun.
--Was Prescott Bush in the year that his son George who would later head the CIA was 8, one of those who put up the moneys and decided, like those who would overthrow Vetinari, that it was time to put a more compliant man than Roosevelt in the White House? If anyone now in Washington knows, and has a drop of loyal blood in her (or him) now is the time to stop the foolish obedience to rules that ignores the purpose of them, and come forward.
And anyone else, who knows whatever they can of this present coup, speak and do not hesitate! We are here for you, waiting. Do not stand idly by while those great families and their followers who have intended to dismantle the New Deal from its inception, finally accomplish it.It is too late when it comes to Babi Yar, when it comes to foreign military intervention and war crimes trials, what good will it do for you or us to say "I was just following orders..."