Reparations for the Common People

Paying a long overdue dividend

DONALD JEFFRIES

I wrote the book Survival of the Richest: How the Corruption of the Marketplace and the Disparity of Wealth Created the Greatest Conspiracy of All. It received more critical praise than any of my books, from the likes of Arthur Blaustein, a former Chair of the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity.

Look at the book’s Amazon page. It has a long list of impressive blurbs under the “Editorial Reviews” section. These were people I largely have never communicated with. It was heady stuff for a community college dropout like me. Naomi Wolf compared it to the late Barbara Ehrenreich’s excellent Nickel and Dimed. Naomi went on the write the Foreword to the paperback version. Needless to say, I was extremely honored. But the book just never sold well. Even Naomi’s name on the paperback didn’t seem to help. There was a huge distinction between the critical praise and the disappointing sales. That’s why the publisher never put out an audio version. There wouldn’t even have been a paperback if Naomi hadn’t agreed to write the Foreword.

What was especially noticeable was the way the Left ignored the book. This should have been a book that keenly interested them, what with their well-known empathy for the common riff raff. Only Naomi and a few others liked it. I couldn’t get the other Naomi - Naomi Klein- to read it. But then I think she hates Naomi Wolf now, so her connection with it might have been a factor. I devoted a lengthy chapter to the life and assassination of my political hero Huey Long. This also probably repelled much of the Left, who despise Huey and consider him a “demagogue,” the label firmly attached to his reputation by the court historians. Huey was the only politician who ever actually provided tangible assistance to the poor, and made their lives better. Good, respectable “liberals” prefer a virtue signaling government bureaucracy.

The Left also undoubtedly disagreed with my contention that immigration, especially illegal immigration, was the primary cause of plunging blue collar wages and diminishing benefits. Even for most old fashioned liberals, immigration is always considered a good thing. We are a nation of immigrants. Diversity is our strength. The immigrants that came before the diabolical 1965 immigration “reform” act wanted to be in this country, and assimilated quickly. We were mostly enriched by their presence. Can you imagine life without all that great Italian food? Present day immigrants are seemingly asked not to assimilate. Even with ESL classes in school, many Hispanic children struggle to speak the language fluently. And, of course, the millions who are here illegally will work cheap. Doing the jobs “Americans won’t do.”

Anyone who has read my work knows that my heart will always be with the everyday people. The common man. The unwashed masses. What were once called peasants. That’s one of the many reasons I could never be a conservative. Many of these people couldn’t afford the bootstraps to pull themselves up with. In my book, I documented the reality they face, in trying to gain the upward mobility that is largely unknown in present American society, outside of the worlds of sports and entertainment. You have to see the statistics to believe just how rigged this economy is against the poor and working class. And now increasingly the middle class. What’s left of the middle class. Probably the most significant number to consider is the fact that the bottom fifty percent of American workers make less than $27,000 annually. That’s half the country.

Obviously, you can’t live independently in many parts of this land on that kind of paltry salary. You’d be lucky to rent a decent room somewhere. Perhaps that’s the new American Dream; no more suburban single family home with a white picket fence. Notables from John Wilkes Booth to Barney Fife resided in boarding houses. We may be looking at the revival of a once thriving industry. Who says Bidenomics can’t create jobs? Adult children aren’t living in their parents’ basements because they’re all “snowflakes” that don’t want to work. Who can’t keep up with the legendary work ethic of our beloved illegal immigrants. They simply don’t have the same kinds of decent paying blue collar jobs that millions of Americans from my generation, including me, once worked. They’ve all been outsourced or eliminated.

Just as you can’t have a viable economy when half your workforce isn’t paid enough to meet the ever increasing costs of living (actually, it’s about eighty percent of workers who aren’t paid enough to meet the costs of living), you can’t have a sovereign nation without an industrial base. We have shipped our industry offshore. Americans sat idly by while once powerful unions were decimated, starting with Ronald Reagan “standing up” to the air traffic controllers. Unions, even with their corruption and mob influence, helped create higher wages and better benefits in even nonunion workplaces. I should really be more grateful for being fired from a company I worked for for 44 years- my entire adult life- because I helped a handicapped co-worker. I live in a “right to work” state. So at least they couldn’t have forced me to join a union. If I could have found one. Collective bargaining sounds a bit “insurrectionist.”

If the Left was truly progressive, their number one issue would be the massive disparity of wealth in America. The statistics all tell the same story. Four men having as much collective wealth as the bottom half of the population, which has an anemic less than one percent of the wealth combined. When you hear breathless reports about the stock market, keep in mind that ten percent of the people own 90 percent of the stocks. Wall Street is irrelevant to that bottom fifty percent that is being paid peanuts and basically has nothing. And the thirty percent just above them on the economic ladder are struggling, too. The stats vary, but it’s clear that over 70 percent of workers are living paycheck to paycheck, and about the same percentage don’t have $1000 savings in the bank. That’s a real indictment of our glorious marketplace.

Without that 1938 legislation, which was only reluctantly passed during the New Deal, due to the pressure from Huey Long and other real liberals, employees wouldn’t have the 40 hour work week, overtime, sick leave, or vacation leave. They assassinated Huey, who was advocating for a 30 or maybe even 20 hour work week, and a month’s paid vacation annually for every worker. But this watered down version of his populist vision proved to be a boon for the working class. Combined with the growth of unions, many “unskilled” workers, who never even got to a community college they could drop out of like me, were able to lead a middle class lifestyle. Workers in that era had strong private pensions, and Social Security was just a supplement for them.

To understand what a threat real populism represents to the ruling class, consider how they treated Huey Long, before they finally killed him. He was given the Jim Garrison/Donald Trump treatment by the state controlled media. Read, or watch, All the King’s Men. Watch Ken Burns’ 1985 documentary on Huey Long, and realize that as biased against him as it was, it represents the fairest treatment the Kingfish has ever received in the media. Look at the twinkle in those once powerful oldsters’ eyes as they talk about how happy they were that he was killed. Huey’s policies dramatically improved the lives of poor Louisianans. He cut the cost of utilities significantly. He abolished property taxes for all but the richest families in the state. He even made sure that the pay phones in Louisiana cost less than in any other state.

Franklin Roosevelt grew to despise Huey Long. He considered him one of the two most “dangerous” men in the country, along with Douglas MacArthur. Huey’s “Share our Wealth” society had grown to some twelve million members at the time of his death. His plan would have exempted the first million dollars of income from any taxation. This would be equivalent to some twelve million today. So only those in the rarified air of the top levels of the One Percent could possibly have opposed it. Huey was one of the first critics of the Federal Reserve. He also was already talking about the tax-free foundations. He knew where to find the wealth to redistribute it fairly. The Rockefellers’ Standard Oil and his other powerful enemies knew that he understood their rigged, counterfeit system.

Since Huey Long was assassinated in 1935, a month after announcing his bid for the presidency and also stating from the floor of the U.S. Senate that the powers that be were planning to assassinate him, no one has picked up his mantle. This is decidedly strange, since “Share our Wealth” was such a winning political issue for Huey Long. The consolidation of wealth has grown steadily worse since Long’s day, and was exacerbated beyond our estimation by the unconstitutional COVID lockdown. Bernie Sanders has nibbled around the edges, but obviously is no disciple of Long’s. I’m sure he hates Huey, like the rest of the conventional Left. We need populism, which is against concentrated power anywhere; individually, and in public or private industry. The last thing we need is the current bastardized definition of “democracy.”

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, the great British populist Lord Acton, close friend of Robert E. Lee, reminded us. Americans have allowed such intense concentrations of power to be constructed in their midst that it would be extremely difficult to deconstruct it. But we could at least try. Start with one of RFK’s tiny ripples of hope. Means test Social Security and Medicare. Subject all income to Social Security taxes. Isolate the funds. Make it a crime to comingle it with the general revenue. If you’re going to have a minimum wage, tie it to a maximum wage. Sixty years ago, the president of a company (they didn’t call them CEOs then) made maybe 20 times what the lowest paid worker did. Now CEOs make hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions more than their lowest paid employees.

Make all those “performance bonuses,” created in the 1990s, subject to taxes, like other income. Force large corporations to release year end disclosure statements to all their employees, so they can learn that top executives were given millions in Christmas bonuses, while they’d be lucky to get a holiday turkey. If I were in charge of a television network, I’d force any talking head, or any public official being quoted on any issue, to have their yearly income, and their net worth, listed under their names onscreen. This might be one way for the sheeple to understand how disconnected everyone with a large public platform is from the issues that are most important to the poor, the working class, and what’s left of the middle class. Think of it as a sunshine law, akin to police being required to give their name and badge number to citizens.

The national debt should be repudiated. It was created out of thin air. It isn’t real. And the taxpayers never signed off on it. They shouldn’t be required to pay back bankers’ loans. The Grace Commission, during the Reagan administration, found that fully one third of all government spending is pure waste. I’m sure the percentage is even higher now, in the transgender-DEI-fueled America 2.0. Eliminate all the useless government agencies. Which means pretty much all of them. End all foreign aid. Bring all the troops home, from the over 150 countries they are nonsensically stationed in. End all government benefits to noncitizens. End birthright citizenship. Deport the unknown millions who entered here illegally. Station a fraction of the troops who were in other countries on the southern border. Simple fixes. It can be done.

Finally, let’s all back reparations. They are long overdue. Now, I don’t mean reparations for slavery in this country, which was abolished over 160 years ago. I mean reparations for all those underpaid and exploited workers. All those sleeping in tents on the streets, because their families rejected them and too many mental hospitals have been closed down. All those who never got a big Christmas bonus, in fifty years of employment. Who didn’t get a private pension upon retirement. Who never got to live the American Dream because they simply weren’t paid enough. Just following the recommendations of the Grace Commission, and abolishing all the agencies that are in effect welfare institutions for untold numbers of government employees.

All those who had their cars repossessed, because they couldn’t pay back counterfeit loans of imaginary, fiat currency. Homeowners foreclosed on because they hit hard times, and fell behind on their mortgage payments, loans which again were created out of thin air. All the whistleblowers fired, with their lives ruined, because they tried to expose the crimes of the powerful. All the bewildered citizens, beaten and abused by militarized police, who were never held accountable. All the framed, innocent prisoners, convicted by a rigged system, who now suffer behind bars for crimes they never committed. The people of Appalachia, leading lives of nightmarish poverty in a land of plenty. These are the people who deserve something, for the generations that have been cheated and ripped off.

Well, who’s going to pay for these reparations, I can hear some of you asking. Audit the tax-free foundations. There are probably untold billions, if not trillions, in the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Gates Foundation, Clinton Foundation, and the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace (which pushed for WWI, btw), among others. A full audit of the Federal Reserve would probably disclose more trillions. Tax all profits held off-shore by globalists at 100 percent. Come up with a special billionaire’s tax, at least for those four guys that have more wealth than the bottom half of Americans. After all, aren’t they kind-hearted philanthropists? That’s what the media tells us. They brag about not leaving anything to their kids (except for those billions in their tax-free foundations, that is). Bill Gates’s father has been pushing for higher taxes on the rich for years. So he and his son should love this idea.

I’ve heard some gaudy numbers being bandied about for slavery reparations. Of course, that is all a logistical nightmare. Who pays? Only Whites? Whites who had ancestors living here prior to the 1860s? Who gets paid? Only full Blacks? Half Blacks? One quarter Blacks? It’s an impossibly ridiculous, divisive notion. But the reparations I’m talking about are easier to figure out. Start with a nice lump sum to all those living on the streets, and to the bottom half of American workers, making less than $27,000. Extend it, to a lesser degree, to the remaining thirty percent or so of those hanging on by their fingernails to a middle-class existence. It won’t cost nearly as much as what we’d be saving by eliminating waste and abolishing worthless agencies. I’d also eliminate pensions for all retired politicians. They didn’t earn them.

Huey Long paved the state of Louisiana, created the first free healthcare clinics, slashed property taxes, cut utility rates, and did it all somehow with the third lowest operating costs of any state. He knew where to cut. A real populist today would know where to cut, and who really needed help. Now I know my proposal has zero chance of ever being passed. It’s like asking for another Year of Jubilee, which indeed I have been asking for. That’s because those who have confiscated the wealth need to know that you don’t have it, as Huey described it. What’s the good of riches if you can’t look down upon dumpster divers? A mansion doesn’t mean as much if there isn’t a gutter to contrast it with. You need unpopularity to give popularity any meaning, ugliness to contrast beauty, and being rich isn’t as important if no one is poor.

You may say I’m a dreamer, like John Lennon. But I’m certainly not an atheist, and the last thing I’d want is a one world government. The People are done “sacrificing.” The vast majority are barely making it. Our children have a lower standard of living than we did, as Ross Perot warned about. We are the richest country the world has ever known. If you divided all the wealth up evenly between every man, woman, and child in America, it would come to $344,000 each. I’m not suggesting we do that. But it demonstrates how sinful the hoarding of wealth by the top echelon of the One Percent has been. It’s time for the People to get something in return for all those taxes. The “peace dividend” that never came. It’s time for reparations.

Source: "I Protest" by Donald Jeffries