“Less government in business, more business in government.” — Warren Harding (1920)
“The business of the American people is business.” — Calvin Coolidge (1925)
“A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage.” — Herbert Hoover (1928)
“All I do is supply a demand.” — gangster/bootlegger Al Capone
The Progressive Movement of the early 20th Century was designed to counter the abuses of the late 19th Century Gilded Age, which made fortunes for Robber Barons like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Morgan at the expense of the underprivileged working class.
Progressives then included Presidents like Republican Teddy Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Reforms included woman suffrage, a graduated income tax, antitrust legislation, election expansion, food safety, and child labor laws, to name a few. Unfortunately, it also included Prohibition.
However, World War I and the Spanish Flu epidemic changed public attitudes. Republican propaganda, led by the Harding—Coolidge—Hoover Presidential triumvirate, urged “a return to normalcy” through isolation, protectionism through high tariffs, less government “socialism,” faith in the free enterprise system, and an unregulated stock market. The inevitable Crash of ‘29 and subsequent Great Depression led to FDR, the New Deal, and salvation.
The return of convicted felon Donald Trump to the White House sets the stage for a second Roaring ‘20s through his own return to normalcy with Project 2025, the right wing extremist agenda tailored to his dictatorial whims.
Destroy the civil service system by replacing fired government employees with MAGA minions. Cut funding and privatize Social Security and Medicare, with Wall Street profiting at the expense of seniors. Remove government restraints designed to protect our clean air and drinking water.
It gets worse in your moral life, which by law will start at conception. Contraception and abortion pills will be banned. Same for pornography. “Anti-white racism” (?) will be outlawed. Like Prohibition, expect similar punishment for medical and recreational marijuana. Like Al Capone, drug cartels will profit.
Don’t think of protesting. The military will be activated for domestic law enforcement against “enemies of the people.” All of this stoked by MAGA propaganda aimed at the fear, anger, and ignorance of the general public. Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.
Will this second ‘20s “return to normalcy” be countered by a second New Deal? Only if there are enough survivors left to fight for it.
ED ENGLER, Sebring, Fla.
Here’s a great story about politics … and teeth. A Nov. 24 article in the Minnesota Star-Tribune — “Need a dentist? Prepare to wait” — reported that the availability of dental care in rural Minnesota was “abysmal.” Beyond the problem of so few dentists, there is the cost. As most of us know firsthand — dental insurance does not cover much. The article said, “Often, people in rural Minnesota grin and bear their dental woes.”
Now here is the political part of this tooth story. The elected Democrats at the state capitol in St. Paul are predominantly the ones who have worked hard creating the “socialist” programs that help people in rural Minnesota get dental care and save their teeth. The Democrats got legislation passed that boosted how much the state paid dentists for providing dental care for low-income people in rural Minnesota.
Yet the entire state (outside of the Twin Cities) went red, every rural county went to the Republicans.
What can we conclude — it appears the Trumpers in rural Minnesota would rather destroy “socialism” than save their teeth.
The Democrats in St. Paul work hard to try and help them save their teeth, but that it’s “the hell with those bleeding-heart liberal socialists who are trying to help me save my rotting teeth.”
Go figure.
FRANK ERICKSON, Minneapolis, Minn.
Kudos to you and Dave Zirin for printing his [11/1/24 TPP] column, “Gambling Is An Addiction. So Why Was Pete Rose An Outcast?” His suggestion is right that the current gambling epidemic unleashed and welcomed by the North American pro sports leagues might have been avoided three and a half decades back, had a shred of honesty prevailed. As matters stand, however, the disgrace of all the depraved, depraving franchises apparently remains unrectifiable. No use weeping over personal flaws in masterworks, particularly gifted athletes. Ty Cobb, I seem to recall, demonstrated manifestly psychopathic conduct. Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, despite their phenomenal vision, could behave like silly fools.
Another great performer of a different order, the 19th-Century Russian fiction scribe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, also suffered from a ruinous gambling addiction. He was cruelly victimized by the rotten czarist tyranny, now replaced with a mafia regime in the Kremlin momentarily threatening, along with prodding by analogously untrustworthy juntas in Beijing and Washington, to unleash nuclear winter and civilizational Armageddon upon this betrayed globe.
VIRGE McLEOD, Bonners Ferry, Idaho
It was allegedly T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) who said, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” The poet was almost certainly correct in his broad supposition, as we see daily.
Untold millions of otherwise sane people become addicted to whisky, pornography and various drugs for the hope of at least briefly eschewing the unpleasant realities of modern life. Indeed, some opt for suicide as remedy.
Our minds are “wired” — as some say — for cause-and-effect, but instead we find randomness and bewildering pandemonium throughout much of contemporary existence.
As life becomes ever more complex, relief sought surely becomes more difficult and stressful. Mundane realities pester multitudes toward self-harming behavior, as sociologists affirm.
WILLIAM DAUENHAUER, Willowick, Ohio
In the aftermath of the tragic resurrection of Donald Trump by the American electorate, nothing could be more tasteless and inane than the attempt at satire by Ted Rall entitled “Stein Wins”“ [12/1/24 TPP]. His typical portrayal of the two major parties as virtually indistinguishable is particularly offensive at this time, as indefinite fascism at the hands of only one of these parties looms on the horizon. His imagination of Harris and Trump appearing at a joint conference to denounce Stein would have been impossible even if Rall’s fantasy had come true. Harris would never have sat with Trump in a joint conference and vice versa. In real life Trump has never denounced Stein; his forces and those of Putin promoted her efforts in the 2016 and 2024 elections. Yes Ted, while you may may scoff at the idea, a vote for Stein was indeed a vote for Trump.
This latest piece by Rall renews my wonder at how a fine publication like yours wastes its space on this frivolous writer, whose thoughts are inimical to promoting practical progressivism.
STEPHEN APPELL, Brooklyn, N.Y.
The fallen democracies throughout the world and those being presently threatened are a substantiated reality in Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s book, “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” and multiple others. Those facts are fortified and are inclusive of three more since 2016. The culmination of our evolutional advancements and enhancements in our humanities’ “social betterment” for groups and individuals that have been oppressed, denigrated and subjugated for thousands of years gave risen to a point whereby the status quo and those who’ve held the “power and control” of thinking and behaviors that are supportive of the collusionary origins of our historical religious zealotry and men’s creation of religion itself, and their very first biblical precept Genesis B.S. Their anthropocentric, misogynistic mindsets were the instinctive mammalian origin of the “baboon beating his chest” to demonstrate his “superior being” B.S. in a world becoming more humane and civilized. This bogus premise and collusionary dictated assertion has been generationally purported and is the very basis for centuries of deeming “lesser beings” as some sort of reality to control thinking and behaviors as was done by our feudalistic dictators for centuries and putting fears in people’s minds regarding our “flat earth” B.S. and the fears of disobeying any and all of their dictates.
It was our 1800s Era of Enlightenment and a replicated need to expose all of the lies and propaganda, but a mounting politicalization of our violence and humanity itself that has now become ideologically poisoned beyond the state of belief with the coupled facts and realities that men have created enough “deadly weaponry” that is such a fear that did not exist in the 1800s. Evolution and modernity have made the awareness of the aforementioned an “urgent, expeditious need” to replicate our 1800s expose that was the motivation for more democracies throughout the world that is now the very essence of “our salvation.”
The need for this urgent replication must be more investigatively thorough and go back to human origin and our first Neanderthals, homo sapiens. It’s imperative that an exposé of facts, truths, and realities be factually and scientifically cited, as it’s presently a lot of bogus B.S. and lies that are directly attributed to our existing divisions and decisive assertions, suppositions and propositions that a multitude hae already been disproven but not accepted by our societal radicals who hold the power live purposefully in denial of facts and reality.
FRANK C. ROHRIG, Milford, Conn.This month offers me a chance to look back. You mailed out holiday greeting cards. Christmas jingles were heard at the super market. It was the ‘70s. Madison Avenue came out with some good advertisements. The department stores were well decorated. Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State. Richard Nixon was President. You drove a station wagon to the train station. Choo-choo ! The holidays are draped in a spirit of giving. Give back.
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From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2025
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