"Northern Lights". The villains of the story were the banking, insurance, railroad, and mill and elevator interests based in the Twin Cities (most of them in Minneapolis), and the victims were the Norwegian and Swedish immigrant farmers who settled in eastern and east-central North Dakota during the last decades of the nineteenth century. So ruthless, avaricious, and unprincipled was the treatment of the latter by the former that when North Dakota finally became a state in the 1890's, the framers of the constitution found it necessary to incorporate within it a state-owned bank, mill, and elevator. The framers gave these entities constitutional status in order to frustrate attempts (which they knew would be forthcoming) by Twin Cities corporations to destroy them in the courts. It's worth noting that when I was a school kid in a small North Dakota town in the 1940's, my teachers still referred to the Twin Cities with undisguised loathing and contempt.
The ruthless, avaricious and unprincipled groups are still alive, but today their names are the Freedom Club, the Taxpayers League of Minnesota and the Center of the American Experiment. Together they've co-opted the Republican party to do their bidding. Not at all surprisingly, most of their membership is wealthy.
Undisguised loathing and contempt seems an appropriate response, but this ruthless group is more clever and subtle these days -- making it harder to generate that needed visceral reaction from every day citizens, no matter their political stripe. They've played to the fears of the conservative everyday Joes and Janes, and have got them dancing to their tune: Pawlenty to Minneapolis: Drop Dead!
It's high time that the principled, ethical people of all political persuasion stand together and take back our future from the avarcious plunderers. I'm amazed at the number of editorials and letters to the editor and postings I read here where people express dismay over some government cut that will harm some downtrodden group of citizens. Not that those facts are not true, or that those situations are not deplorable, rather that the appeal to the better interests of those in power is futile and ridiculous. They don't care! Or if they do, they only care as long as it is someone else's money that is spent to fix the problem, not their money through taxes. Appealing to someone's better interest is not a useful tactic in this day and age -- they may not have one. It's better to appeal to their self interest. Everybody has one of those. We can no longer ask or appeal for sanity. We have to demand, no, outright force it. Against the organized, wealthy, powerful and fear-riding manipulative usurpers of the American way and the Minnesota Miracle, the only way to compete and win is to be better organized, work harder and have larger numbers of supporters.
We'd better make sure we twist the arm of media to get some of it on our side, or we will still be likely to lose. More than ever, the media is controlled by the same ruthless, avaricious and unprincipled people who have stolen our government and society, resulting in an abrogation of the media's key and sole responsibility in this country: keeping the government honest. How rarely they call a spade a spade these days. It's time every crook in government get a public black eye each time he or she is involved in vote peddling, special interest coddling or self-dealing.
We here in Minneapolis are like a dozen people sitting in a bass boat in the middle of Lake Minnetonka. The co-opted Republican party is cruising by every few minutes in their yacht and shooting new holes in our boat, which we are doing our best to plug with our fingers. A few of us are bailing madly. And lastly, it's pouring rain (and since this analogy may be a stretch for some: it's the economy).
Are we going to slowly sink and drown?
Chris Johnson Fulton
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