“I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich…The men who get rich maybe be the most honest men you find in the community. Let me say here clearly…ninety eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them. It is because they are honest men….I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man who God has punished for his sins…is to do wrong…let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings.”

No, this quote’s not cribbed from Romney’s clandestine comments at an Good-Old-Boy presidential campaign fundraiser. Russell Conwell wrote it in the years following the Civil War and used to justify the rise of the great Robber Barons of the late 19th century. Conwell gave this same “Acres of Diamonds” speech over 5,000 times and reached millions of people with it, according to Howard Zinn in his book, “A People’s History of the United States.” Conwell went on to found Temple University, by the way. Such largesse from men like him and Stanford, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller was not altruistic. It was an investment in the education of the professions that they would need (lawyers, accountants, bankers) to keep control of the obscene wealth they had amassed.

Profiteering is also not new. An enterprising young man named JP Morgan bought five thousand defective rifles from an army arsenal and sold them to a general in the field for $22 each. When told that Morgan’s guns were blowing the soldier’s thumbs off, a federal judge still upheld the deal as a fulfillment of a legal contract. Morgan also paid $300 to a substitute to stay out of uniform and didn’t have to risk being hurt by one of his own defective rifles. Much like today, none of the Barons spent time in a uniform but they all made fortunes off the conflict. Fighting wars has ever been a poor man’s burden. Most of the wealthy, or just the comfortable, believed Conwell’s evaluation that if you were poor you deserved what God put on your plate. It was rarely food.

This is our heritage. This is the foundation of our capitalist system. You tell me how much of these Barons’ fortunes trickled down. Oh, but jobs were created by these vast coffers, right? At what cost? What pain and suffering? Before the Golden Spike was driven, 20,000 people died in the four years it took to build the continental railroad. Most were blacks, Chinese and Conwell’s white sinners. Even Saint Ronald Reagan said was a patented joke. How much of Mitt Romney’s quarter of a billion untaxed dollars went back into the creation of jobs? What happens when there’s simply more people than jobs?

Using scripture and the evangelicals to push through political agendas is also a tradition. Tycoons of all ilk use scripture of all kinds to explain why they are the chosen ones. Jumping forward 140 plus year, the Mormon Church recently sent $55 million from Utah to California to help defeat gay rights initiatives. One bishop looked right in the camera and said, “We know the mind of God.“ And, it turns out that Frank Gifford was right; the NFL is like a church. The league is a $10 billion enterprise and pays its commissioner $44million a year. Doesn’t it seems odd that the government categorizes them as a “trade non-profit.” The CEO of the American Red Cross takes home about $600,000 in comparison. The operative word is “Government.” Many people hate its intrusion yet wealth has always directed through that 1% funnel. Why? It’s a closed loop. You need to be rich to be in politics. Rich politicians choose our Supreme Court justices. Only lawyers can interpret the laws that lawyers make.

We are told that a decent wage would cost jobs and shut down small businesses. Rarely do we see figures stating how much a living wage would affect the obscene profits of mega stores like Wal-Mart. There are few mega-employers in Calaveras County. Most people are either retired or scrambling to save their houses. You can see the dark storefronts as you drive 49. Venture capitalists use those dusty windows to good purpose; when they can’t justify the 1% with large numbers they fall back on the age-old tactics of fear. In an economic downswing is there any phrase more terrifying than “Jobs will be lost”?

We 99% are like the extras on The Walking Dead, wandering the streets looking for work. Then you hear about the record profits still being made in this “bad economy” and you begin to think that we don’t just look like the walking dead; when it comes to our history, most of us are zombies.

Jerry Tuck is a retired San Andreas resident and an indie author. Contact him at olwhofan@aol.com or use the Contact Form.