The Joads Were Luckier Than Us

The Joads are probably the most famous (fictionalized) poor family on this side of the Atlantic. In The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck told the story of their efforts to survive the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. American readers experienced their frustrations, their heartache. Poverty, so often discussed in academic terms by economists, suddenly had a face---a human face that people recognized.

The Joads were luckier than us. They had a voice and someone to make sure that voice was heard.

The front of page of today’s Fort Worth paper quotes Obama. “Enough is enough.” The editor’s response?



Oh, the shame. The wealthiest nation on earth treated like some third world country. Don’t they know that we are the world’s royalty? We eat off golden plates and wipe our asses with silk cloth. We have enough nuclear weapons to blow the world up several times over. We are so rich we can burn food in our automobiles----

What? You say that Americans are dying from lack of health care? They are getting sick, because the only food they can afford to eat is high in fat? They have worn out their last pair of shoes pounding the pavement looking for work that isn’t there? I don’t believe you. Today’s local paper has one----count it, one---letter to the editor that mentions unemployment. The section entitled Work &Money has a brief mention of a mortgage workshop for those facing foreclosure.

Oh well. What do you expect from a paper in the home state of GOP presidential candidate, Rick Perry? Texas newspapers will want to help their local boy, by painting a rosy picture of the local economy, so that he can campaign on a “There’s still plenty of jobs and opportunity in Texas” platform. I’ll bet the nation’s News Paper, the New York Times has all the news….

Front page online. Look at that! The Chinese are begging us to raise our debt ceiling. To protect our foreign creditors---like China. Our politicians will not do it for the millions of Americans who live from disability check to disability check, but maybe they will do it for China.

Here’s a good one ( also linked on the front page): “What’s the best city in Europe?” That’s important information. Once the banksters destroy this county’s middle class and retire to live off their ill gotten gains, they will want to find somewhere more pleasant to live. It’s hard to enjoy your $300/bottle wine when the homeless are staring at you through the restaurant window. But, if they want to retire in style, they will have to re-open all those loopholes. That’s why there is another front page piece about how Wall Street is trying to “reform the reform.” Catchy. We thought the banking industry stole our pensions. Turns out they were only trying to reform them. And hey! What’s with all this doom and gloom talk. “Google’s Profits Top Expectations”. Whoopee! It’s party time. Let’s open up a second can of cat food and celebrate!

Scrolling on down the screen, I finally stumble upon an article that addresses the nation’s real problems. “When hospital overcrowding becomes personal.” Another patient died while having to wait for care in one of our overcrowded emergency rooms. Yeah, yeah. Dog bites man. This happens all the time. But wait! This patient was a doctor’s mother! Now that’s personal. What hope do the rest of us have if even a physician’s mom can not get the care she needs?

Maybe if I turn to the section devoted to U.S. news. Ah, here’s one. It’s about the plight of immigrants. No, forget that. It’s about the plight of those who employee immigrants. These business owners are “paying a high price.” And the New York Times has put a human face on their suffering.



http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/business/smallbusiness/how-a-small-business-can-survive-an-immigration-audit.html?ref=us

Hmmm. I wonder what the worst day in the life of an unemployed American is. Was it the time she was escorted out of the bank where she had worked for fifteen years, never missing a day? Maybe it was the evening when she looked in the cupboard and discovered that there was nothing to feed the kids. Maybe it was the night when the same children cried themselves to sleep from hunger. Maybe it was going down to the food stamp office and being told “Congratulations! You qualify---for $10 worth of food!” Was it the day she had to take her youngest to an overcrowded emergency room, because the boy just would not stop coughing and wheezing, and the nurse asked “How long has this been going on?” and the mom replied “A week” and the nurse looked at her incredulously and said “A week? Why didn’t you call his doctor?” and she had to admit “I don’t have the money to take him to a doctor”...

Want to know why the Joads----and a lot of other people who lived through the Great Depression are luckier than us? Back then, the press talked about their suffering. Back then, poverty and unemployment and sickness had a human face. And when people look into the eyes of other people who are suffering, they just naturally feel an urge to reach out and lend a helping hand. That's how we got Social Security. That's how we got the Civil Rights Act. Until the modern press gives us an image as powerful as this one....



...the current recession will continue to be about the plight of China and small business owners and bankers who can't decided which European city they like best.

now excuse my while I return to the rerun of American Pickers to be followed by PawnStars, or should I watch HardCore Pawn tonite to see how those folks in Detroit are making out.

Damn, Detroit once had a bunch of factories there until the unions tore em down, remember that?


Why would bankers want to go to a socialist country? would it be for the healthcare? how about the low taxes?

Elites who buy power -- and the candidates who sell themselves!!

were created as projects with WPA .

Unemployed people were paid by the Feds to make art.

WPA artist programs led to an art renaissance in this country.



Heres a link to WPA images.

http://www.google.com/search?q=wpa+art&hl=en&biw=1366&bih=643&prmd=ivns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=x2MfTtLhCu7UiALQ7LXJAw&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&sqi=2&ved=0CBQQ_AUoAQ

what?

The enemy and the primary cause of our current recession are the greedy bastards at the investment banks, not people trying to avoid living their lives in the smallest possible home.

Otherwise, they get no sympathy from me.

Yeah, I think people ought to be aware of the impact of large families, but from the makeup of ages and races, I am guessing adoption may have been involved. Don't know for sure, judging how other people live their lives is not really high on my list of fun things to do (I leave that to the Governor in Texas).

We met when we took our usual welcome gifts over, and will probably learn more, in time.

Rahm .... crowing about preserving "private health care industry" ... business s/b grateful!

Thursday, August 12, 2010 10:03 AM

In a Thursday interview, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel argued that rather than recoiling against Obama, business leaders should be grateful for his support on at least a half-dozen counts: his advocacy of greater international trade and education reform open markets despite union skepticism; his rejection of calls from some quarters to nationalize banks during the financial meltdown; the rescue of the automobile industry; the fact that the overhaul of health care

preserved the private delivery system;

the fact that billions in the stimulus package benefited business with lucrative new contracts, and that financial regulation reform will take away the uncertainty that existed with a broken, pre-crash regulatory apparatus.

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=B2F85DDF-18...



sigh -- :(



:nuke:

Won't happen.

and insanely enough, wasn't one of those works of art -- a mural -- just taken

down somewhere by a GOP Governor -- something like that !!!

Unbelievable "Know Nothing's" -- !!!

Now a new one is forming. What were the high temperatures in Dallas and Oklahoma City today? The country is running a fever, in more ways than one.

Amazing that we are now repeating those days!!

Sad --

When in doubt, I go for style over grammar. In other words, I pick the one that sounds best. "The Joads were luckier than we" sounds too much like a ballad from pre-WWII England. "The Joads were luckier than we are" (which is the proper form if you are using "than" as a conjunction) is awkward. The most important words in any sentence are the first and the last. They form a counterpoint. In the title "the Joads" contrasts with "us.". "The Joads" ..... "are." has less rhetorical impact.

Those same 'job creators' are offshoring those created jobs overseas, after sucking this economy and country dry. Than we have those investors concentrating on 'Emerging markets'.language is important.
Unfortunately, the ones trying to take over realize this and pay big $$ to pr firms,phrase your dangerous agenda by use of creative doublespeak. and you can manipulate a large segment of the population.
Enter Frank Luntz and his ilk.
No mainstream news shows speak honestly and plainly anymore and people are focusing on the irrelevant.That is scary.

it really is the media that is screwing this country six ways to sunday. is that a proper expression?

well written and argued. thank you. couldn't stop reading.

planet, past or present?

we do not have it worse than folks during the great depression.

Not to downplay our problems, which are significant, but they really can't be compared.

1) we have a social safety net. Maybe not perfect but it's something.
2) people aren't starving or roving around the country living in tents or less just to find a scrap of food to eat. Hell, we're still the most obese country on earth. Depression era americans would have been ecstatic to get a quarter of what we eat every day.

Granted, I work in a clinic that provides healthcare for those who are poor and uninsured. And every day I see middle aged Americans who have been laid off from their jobs (with benefits), for whom getting on Social Security and getting that $800/month check is the equivalent of winning the lottery.

Maybe we need a fifty million American march---the nation's uninsured---on Washington to make people remember that there is a whole lot of suffering going on right now that the MSM does not cover and Washington would rather have us ignore.

but we have homeless and hungry even in good times.

So their existence is not a de facto proof that our nation is in the worst state it's ever been in.

By all accounts things are bad now, but were far worse in the 30s.

People have no concept of perspective. I think the internet has promoted hysteria and overreaction.

i am one step away from being homeless, running out of ui, and there are no job prospects in sight. this is the worst economic situation i have seen in my 52 years.

I'm poor. I do mean to say that this op and ones like it where someone says that "we" are worse off than those who lived through the great depression are using hyperbole to make their point. There was no ui in the thirties.

when my ui runs out. i get your point, but it seems moot, given THIS is the worst economic crisis many of us who are alive today have experienced. here's to better times for everyone :toast:

consider: you have UI. You have a home. You are not starving.

if i am homeless, will i be grateful that my situation is not as bad as it might have been if i was born forty years earlier?

They could say, with a high degree of probability, that things would be better for their children and their grandchildren.

We can not say that today.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, is going to make our world a better, safer, or more hope-filled place for the next generation.

They are going to have their work cut out for them undoing the harm.

Good luck to them.

I apologized to my kids for not getting the job done.

But they told me it was OK. They said that they were proud of me, and that they know how I really tried because they were there.
:cry:

I have recently noticed that I'm getting lines on my forehead just like hers, they are exactly like the lines I remember from my Grandmother's forehead. She lived a good but hard life. The good in her life was that she lived each moment, she knew no other existence except the hard-scrabble, live off of the land to provide for her family life, so she accepted it. That same existence, though, was the hard part of her life; the doing it day to day and the concern brought on by the fear that something could happen to make her unable to keep it up and provide.

Seeing those same lines on my forehead have made me realize that my fear, concern, and desperation to make changes these last 10 years that would help the people of this country have worn me out.

And I'm pissed that those of us with the worry-lines on our foreheads have been steadily working for the good and we've been drowned out by the loud and hateful minority of domestic terrorists.

And how is it possible that I've never seen the wee baby in the lap of the Mom in the picture? I've seen that picture several times and noticed it today for the first time. I guess my focus has been on Mom's eyes.

"Moody Investor Services said it is reviewing the U.S. bond rating for a possible downgrade."

Would this be the same Moody's Investor Service that told us that Mortgage Backed Securities were AAA Rated -- "as good as cash?"
After 2008 why are they even relevant to describing reality?

The Grapes of Wrath is my all time favorite novel. I have read it maybe 5 times.

Great juxtaposition.

From the Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck:

Tom Joad: Well, maybe it's like Casy says. A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then...

Ma Joad: Then what, Tom?

Tom Joad: Then it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.

K&R.

They would probably move back to Oklahoma because their mortgage done busted.

A must read. I hope it is published everywhere, linked to everywhere.

Brilliant! Spot on and just brilliantly said.

conduct during the boom years prior to the mortgage crisis.

From the New York Times:

Thus the agencies became the de facto watchdog over the mortgage industry. In a practical sense, it was Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s that set the credit standards that determined which loans Wall Street could repackage and, ultimately, which borrowers would qualify. Effectively, they did the job that was expected of banks and government regulators. And today, they are a central culprit in the mortgage bust, in which the total loss has been projected at $250 billion and possibly much more.

In the wake of the housing collapse, Congress is exploring why the industry failed and whether it should be revamped (hearings in the Senate Banking Committee were expected to begin April 22). Two key questions are whether the credit agencies — which benefit from a unique series of government charters — enjoy too much official protection and whether their judgment was tainted. Presumably to forestall criticism and possible legislation, Moody’s and S.&P. have announced reforms. But they reject the notion that they should have been more vigilant. Instead, they lay the blame on the mortgage holders who turned out to be deadbeats, many of whom lied to obtain their loans.

Arthur Levitt, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, charges that “the credit-rating agencies suffer from a conflict of interest — perceived and apparent — that may have distorted their judgment, especially when it came to complex structured financial products.” Frank Partnoy, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law who has written extensively about the credit-rating industry, says that the conflict is a serious problem. Thanks to the industry’s close relationship with the banks whose securities it rates, Partnoy says, the agencies have behaved less like gatekeepers than gate openers. Last year, Moody’s had to downgrade more than 5,000 mortgage securities — a tacit acknowledgment that the mortgage bubble was abetted by its overly generous ratings. Mortgage securities rated by Standard & Poor’s and Fitch have suffered a similar wave of downgrades.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27Credit-t.html

We are a democracy, not a Moodytocracy.

Why should we give any credence to Moody's ratings.

If you actually look at the list of countries and their ratios of debt to GDP, you will find that the countries with high ratio of debt to GDP are the industrialized, developed countries. Those with low ratios of debt to GDP include South Africa, Zimbabwe, slightly higher, China and Russia.

Also the figure 92.7% debt to GDP include the debts of the states, and I doubt that
Obama and Congress will be dealing with state expenditures at this time.

The focus on debt is just a diversion from the focus on the real problem: jobs.

When Americans have work, no one worries that much about the debt.

We need to change our trade policies. And Obama's efforts to get us into new trade deals with Colombia and South Korea for example are way off the mark. Horrors. That will just put us in more debt at the federal and personal levels.

The Joads had a voice? The Joads were luckier than current Americans? This is the problem with hiding in DU and playing to the audience: you are applauded for spewing ignorance.

The Joads were forced to leave their farm, and their shack of a house was bulldozed soon after their departure.

The "voice" of the Joads -- Jim Casey -- was killed for using his voice. And no one was ever going to be punished for his murder.

The Joads lost members of their family during their trip of desperation to California. The only safety net for the family was the establishment of camps for migrants with some level of safety and toilets. No food, no assistance.

Yes, the current situation is very bad, and there is suffering out there, but not like the depression.

Damn. Educate yourself.

...the Joads didn't have Internet connections, or cellphones.

I suspect there are too many people who cannot even envision what life was like 40 years ago, let alone 70 or 80. The current generation has never seen rationing, and quite possibly most of them will never meet someone who doesn't have indoor plumbing, or who worked at a menial and possibly dangerous job during childhood.

Anyway, excellent post, Buzz Clik.

you are wrong about cheap food being full of fat.Some of cheap food is but buy brown rice and dried beans in bulk.Very good low fat, high protein ,great carbs cheap food.Also eggs in my area are $1.50 dozen.Excellent protein ,the cholesterol in the yolk is harmless if you boil or poach them. Sardines ,one of the best foods you can eat.I could go on.........................