RULED AND FOOLED
RULED AND FOOLED A Chicago Surrey Reveals the Depths of Poverty To Which Capitalism Has Consigned the Workers SINCE the dawn of history society has been divided into classes, one ruling and the...
...But the hideous facts hurst through the sham today...
...No overseer of a plantation in the days of Negro slavery was ever able to figure out a diet for slaves at the low cost now figured for blacks and whites under the "starry banner of freedom...
...Moreover, these houses are the bankers of the railroad whose job is to finance it...
...Physical health "is suffering to a degree that is little realized...
...The Chicago Example The wage worker is dependent upon the sale of his labor power for a living and when the employing class do not buy it his income stops...
...The republic that was once perfectly consistent with the enslavement of the Negro is certainly capable of serving the interests of a new form of labor exploitation...
...We are forced to crowd together to save the rent Children are sent to relatives and the home is broken up...
...It is especially marked in the cases of growing children, who are getting insufficient and unbalanced diets with resultant serious effects on their developing bodies...
...That is, Hoover's "American system" of relief is an insult to tlie outcasts of capitalism...
...We are turned adrift like used cattle that can net longer be milked and are pushed down belotv prison and slave standards of living...
...Chicago, where grafting politicians have looted the city into bankruptcy...
...Failing in that, the fat boys get a loan and part of it goes to the bankers who had failed in their job...
...The committee continues...
...In the background lit up by these flashes are the pompous gentlemen who arc high in the governing apparatus at Washington...
...The Truth About Charity And yet the great burden of caring for the distressed was also chiefly borne by the distressed themselves...
...Working people of the nation...
...Awake...
...The class that owns the industries have the power to consign him to idleness...
...A Socialist nation of industries collectively owned for the common good of all will end this nightmare...
...It has loaned $12,800,000 to the Missouri Pacific Railroad and nearly six millions of this loan is intended to pay half of a loan to the railroad by J. P. Morgan and Company and two other financial houses...
...Over eight millions of his class are now idle...
...In Tulsa, Oklahoma, ten thousand human beings have been living on a charity ration for five months costing six cents a day for each person I No matter how much attention food experts may give to devising such a diet human beings aire certain to wither and die...
...The adjoining column in The Times reports the food cost of the inmates of Sing Sing prison...
...The capitalist system is based upon a human exploitation more intense than any other...
...These news items are like flashes of lightning that illuminate the dark hell that is now our American capitalism...
...Their children waste away and many are driven into petty crime but the usurers must be fed out of the Federal money vats...
...The republic has been and is a mask for concealing class antagonism and class conflicts...
...The real burden of this crisis is being borne," declares the committee, "not by any relief agency, but by the poor sharing with the poor...
...And it does...
...When his income stops he and his family face want...
...We feed, house and clothe our exploiters...
...we heap, into their laj>s vast riches and then their system goes to pieces...
...End the Nightmare So we return to mmt theme after having surveyed a few aspects of the rotting social and industrial system...
...We are compelled to share our crusts in communal fashion...
...Stealing of food, fuel and various kinds of merchandise...
...In terms of money the diet of the unfortunates in Sing Sing is valued at nearly four times the diet served the "freemen" of Tulsat Hoover'g "Reconstruction" I The two stories of rationing of prisoners and "freemen" also show a variety of meats and vegetables allotted to the caged inmates of Sing Sing that the starving in Tulsa do not get...
...Let's organize to end it...
...Out of our labor efficiency gush vast quantities of commodities...
...Meantime fat officials at Washington deliver moral lectures against the increase of crime...
...Chicago, where robber barons levy contributions on a starving population of workers...
...The diet of the convicts is served at a cost of 23 2-5 cents each...
...In the United States we have been ruled and fooled with the fiction that all citizens are equal...
...No nursing bottle for them...
...RULED AND FOOLED A Chicago Surrey Reveals the Depths of Poverty To Which Capitalism Has Consigned the Workers SINCE the dawn of history society has been divided into classes, one ruling and the other ruled, one riding and the other being ridden...
...There are millions of Vorkcrs and farmers who have lost "or who arc losing their homes...
...breaking open padlocked gas and electric light outlets" and other practices are becoming common...
...This means that over twenty millions of men, women and children are without any guarantee of their bare physical wants...
...In Congress a majority, fearful of loading more burdens on the backs of the jobless and starving masses, have rejected the sales tax...
...This has been true of monarchy and republic, despotism and democracy...
...Critics arc aghast at one performance of this huge nursing bottle for bankers and capitalists...
...Chicago may be considered as an example of the frightful disaster that has come to the workers who can find no buyers of their labor power...
...Lowered resistance to disease of all kinds is widespread" Crime the Alternative This is the fate that has come to the children of the working class...
...The upper idle classes have often been divided into more or less conflicting groups but they have been one in their will to live on the toil of the laboring masses...
...The Socialist movement is a bugle call to the masses to organize for the struggle for emancipation, to get rid of the class regime that protects idlers and usurers at the top and that consigns us and our families to starving mudsills...
...Two items in adjoining columns in the New York Times present a grisly contrast...
...This privation is not necessary...
...While we try to feed each other the Hoover Administration feeds millions of funds to capitalist corporations...
...Nor is this all...
...In short, Hoover's "rugged individuals" in Tulsa on the score of diet would be nearly four times better off if they were convicts in a penitentiary...
...But there is the Reconstruction Finance Corporation at work, tlie pet creation of President Hoover...
...A committee representing ten or more investigating groups surveying the wreckage of city capitalism reports: "The future historian will record that the years 1931-32 was a time of threatened famine in aU the great cities of the West and that only by the sending in of millions of dollars from cutside sources were food riots and starvation prevented...
...Chicago, where machine guns of gangsters spit death in the streets and pineapple primaries determine elections...
...The starving are being driven to petty crimes...
Vol. 13 • April 1932 • No. 15
