I believe Hillary Clinton can fix poverty in America by using FDR’s “New Deal” WPA methods…

*NOTE 2015  — I no longer support either of the Clintons because of ethics violations.  Probably Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders are closer to what the Democratic Party believed.  This was written back in 2008, long before the current administration screwed up the country further.  

Unless I really believed this I wouldn’t say it. Part of the problem is the degree of homelessness and abject poverty all across the country. I think this varies State by State, and also community by community. If you live in an affluent community unless you do some research, or travel into blighted areas how can you know what things look like? To give you an example of this, a friend of mine recently moved out to an area of the Southern California desert. He talks a lot about what things look like in the current economy. Apparently there are tons of tract-style houses built on spec out there, because this is a bedroom community for LA, and commutable as well. A year or so ago he said the houses were all in the high $400,000’s. That isn’t really very expensive for Southern California. Now, this year, he tells me the prices have dropped to the $200,000’s and even below. Great big brand new shopping malls have vacant parking lots. It looks like blight, with tattered real estate flags and American Flags waving in the wind, in front of the brand new houses that nobody is buying because they can’t afford them. He told me someone ought to photograph it, because symbolically it represents what is going on here for “Middle America.” I wrote a little about working with the homeless the other day. I was a therapist for mothers and children at a large shelter here. What I want to say is that I saw women and children of every race and creed pass through town. Mostly, this was due to poverty and abandonment by family systems (close relatives), or the fathers. What people may not realize is that here we have a huge, huge, problem on our hands. It’s not much different than the Dust Bowl era. Some people had come from as far away as Arkansas or other Eastern States looking for work in California. It’s not that hard putting two and two together when it comes to all the “outsourced” jobs that have gone overseas. Where are these AMERICAN people going to find legitimate work? Yesterday, I searched youtube for videos of poverty in Indiana and also homelessness because I wanted to see what that looked like in a different state. What I saw really was very surprising to me. In the first video, I’m seeing blight in a small Indiana town. There is a factory in the video with the windows all broken as if rocks have been hurled at it. It shows “Small Town America” and how a young couple feels, there. Another thing about the video is the male “lead” going to the “State Theater” on “Main Street” — and that is closed up, as well as whole businesses being for sale, or going out of business. The lead actor is waving our flag, and telling a story about what it’s like someplace else in a small town. One of Hillary Clinton’s plans is to create jobs here at home, especially in the Green Industries. That would help a town like theirs. I can tell you this as a trained therapist. People gain self esteem from their work. In civilized countries. If you kill small town America, you will kill off the backbone of the country, and I think this is meant by “lunch-bucket” Democrats. What I think is important in the first video, is the truth it tells, about a tiny town that is closing up, or dying, in a state of extreme blight. The first film is below…it’s called “Times Is Hard.”

If a little town in mid-America looks like this, others must too. But what about the bigger towns? I wanted to look at what homelessness looks like in urban Indiana too. So, the next video is about a Veteran on the streets there. This is a BIG city in Indiana. One in four homeless men on the street there are Veterans according to the video. You will see what “the face of homelessness” looks like in Indiana. I know it’s hard to look at this so closely if you aren’t familiar with it. Working with this population broke my heart, out West. Because there are much larger social problems underlying this whole thing. One of these is the “Outsourcing.” If you take away all the manufacturing and put it overseas where there is cheaper labor, if you put it overseas where there are no environmental regulations…? Who is responsible for what “blight” is being created here? How are you going to be able to help a person “come back” from the streets, if there is no place to go. And no job? I saw children who had never had a formal home. No children’s books. No bedtime stories, no beds. I saw the end of an era of the “nuclear family” as we in America have known it. I saw a second generation of people being born on the streets, literally. Under shrubs, by the side of the road. It seems to me, that we need large reforms. But, this has to happen in people’s hearts first. And I really think we need to get back to a “MADE IN THE USA” model. I believe that Hillary Clinton knows this. That is why I’m for her. The last time that people were saying “BUY AMERICAN” was in the 1970’s, and Ralph Nader remembers that era. So does our former President Clinton, Al Gore and John Edwards. If you want to see what we are actually producing in this country? Try finding the “Made in the USA” mark on the package, or stamped someplace on what you bought. You won’t find many things like that when you start looking. In fact, it will shock you when you see where things are being made, and why they are so cheap in the first place. People who are under 30 probably can’t relate to a time when there weren’t poor people or homeless people, or things made inside of the US. It used to be like that. States had things they were known for producing, like cars or foodstuffs or even fabrics. Why can’t we rebuild that model before it is too late? It’s a serious matter. So, in thinking about Indiana as the “Hoosier” State, I wonder what they used to make in that burned out factory? Was it cars? Or something else? What crops are they known for? What grows there? What kind of an industry could be built there? Now? Using FDR’s model. The WPA built things. People were put to work on things like the Hoover Dam, and buildings, and all kinds of things. How much better to put some of the billions of dollars raised to campaign in this election to work on projects like that? It seems criminal not to help people on the streets or little dying towns across the country. Here is the wikipedia on FDR’s New Deal:

The New Deal was the title that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave to a sequence of programs and promises he initiated between 1933 and 1938 with the goal of giving relief for the people, reform of the society, and recovery to the people and economy of the United StatesGreat Depression. Based on the assumption that the power of the federal government during the was needed to get the country out of depression, the first days of Roosevelt’s administration saw the passage of banking reform laws, emergency relief programs, work relief programs, and agricultural programs. Later, a second New Deal was to evolve; it included union protection programs, the Social Security Act, and programs to aid tenant farmers and migrant workers.

Hillary Clinton is an old-fashioned Democrat in my opinion. She isn’t a Republican Democrat, or a fake. Using FDR’s model, she could help this country back on it’s feet again. We have to. After looking at the blight in Indiana, and taking a look at the homeless on their streets, we have to. You cannot let American Corporations dictate Labor in the ways they have been in this country, because it isn’t working for the country as a whole. When I read about what Obama signed into law, and that Hillary Clinton voted against it, I knew she was on Labor’s side. She cares about American Workers of all colors and creeds. I just believe that, as a feminist. Also, my gigantic education should put me in the other camp because I consider myself a liberal, but it doesn’t. Because I worked with and saw the problems of homelessness in America way post the Republican 80’s era, I am in a position to talk about this. I’m Obama’s generation. But he isn’t the same kind of Democrat as me. I no longer do that work with the homeless. It was too hard on my psyche, given that I couldn’t solve such HUGE problems. Now I’m just a writer. But, I share the morality of John Steinbeck. If you want to read about the era of the Dustbowl all you need to read is his novel “The Grapes of Wrath.” When you do? You will understand what it means to be an old-fashioned FDR-style Democrat at heart. You will also be able to pick a real Democrat from a Faux-Democrat. Right now, given the looks of the country, we need to address this issue first. It is an issue of Nationalism. Ours. We are the greatest, free country in the whole world. We are the end product of a long line of Western Civilization. The health of a civilization is shown in its great works, for example the arts and architecture. In the deep past, there was room for everyone on the face of the earth. Years from the dawn of Western Civilization, where are we? What kind of a civilization values wealth over human life? Humanism, born from liberalism, comes from studying the Humanities. If the Humanities are not being taught? Here is the wikipedia on that: HUMANITIES Please feel free to leave any comments on poverty in your State, or on the above issues. I don’t want to get into a ridiculous childish fight over who is for who politically at this point. Either you know what I have said, or I have given you some food for thought. Signing off as your Green Democratic Friend… (and just know, behind the scenes many are coming by — WordPress allows you to see what people search for, and what they are interested in reading) So please feel free to say how some of this might apply to your family, or your State, and also, leave ideas about how you might fix things econonmically? Great! That’s how Democrats solve things. Ideas. It’s a Western Civilization kind of thing. We can have a dialogue about solving things for the poor and ending Outsourcing before it kills us off, in little towns all over the place…that once were thriving.