Letter from Slim Wolfe
Civil Liberties – May 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
Look over the list of grievances we Americans have about the state of our nation, as enumerated here in these pages by the editors and staff writers, and you may see a common thread: speculators.
The price of oil, the price of food, real estate, growth patterns, the value of the dollar, our lifestyle choices which lead to planetary degradation, our compulsion to meddle in world politics, all these and more are controlled or influenced by that class of tweakers (ring of prostitutes, if you prefer) whose sole function seems to be buying low and selling high.
An inordinate amount of our attention is given to the doings of these persons who seem to have no redeeming social content. You won’t hear the figures on unemployment or the price of flour one-fiftieth as often as you’ll hear the latest Dow Jones average. We love the antics of our high-flying gamblers while we babble helplessly in the wake of their sleight-of-hand deals.
So which candidate can we hope will go on the warpath against this insidious virus? President and patrician Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted drastic measures to restore the nation after the crash of 1929 brought the economy to its knees, but whatever controls may have been placed on high finance and speculation haven’t been enough.
Any government on the globe which takes a more radical approach, like agrarian reform or revolution, is automatically labeled the enemy of freedom. Revolutions have had, shall we say, mixed results, but is humanity destined to run its course squeezing the blood from the productive workers while the masters and grunts of failed banks ride around in private limos and jets to their next job interviews?
In light of all this, it’s a good thing that Salida has legalized chickens, even though the poultry mash you purchase may be grown on huge corporate farms by underpaid and undocumented peons. At least you’ll have some eggs to toss at the gremlin of your choice.
Both Clinton and Obama talk about leaving thousands or tens of thousands of troops in Iraq to protect our strategic interests. Speculators have strategic interests in Iraq; you and I probably don’t, or wouldn’t, if we’d evolved to a higher plane of transportation and fuels.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove
