Items of some interest…

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • Will Rogers Today

    “Now it’s Pro­hi­bi­tion, we hear a lot about that. Well, that’s noth­ing to com­pare to your neighbor’s chil­dren that are hun­gry. It’s food, it ain’t drink that we are wor­ried about today. Here a few years ago we were so afraid that the poor peo­ple was liable to take a drink that now we’ve fixed so that they can’t even get some­thing to eat. So here we are, in a coun­try with more wheat, and more corn, and more money in the bank, more cot­ton, more every­thing in the world; there’s not a prod­uct that you can name that we haven’t got more of than any other coun­try ever had on the face of the earth, and yet we’ve got peo­ple starv­ing. We’ll hold the dis­tinc­tion of being the only nation in the his­tory of the world that ever went to the poor house in an auto­mo­bile. The potter’s fields are lined with gra­naries full of grain. Now if there ain’t some­thing cock­eyed in an arrange­ment like that then this micro­phone here in front of me is, well, it’s a cus­pi­dor, that’s all. Now I think that per­haps they will arrange it, I think some of our big men will per­haps get some way of fix­ing a dif­fer­ent dis­tri­b­u­tion of things. If they don’t they are cer­tainly not big men and won’t be with us long. Now I say, and have always claimed, that things would pick up in ’32. Thirty-​​two, why ’32? Well, because ’32 is an elec­tion year, see, and the Repub­li­cans always see that every­thing looks good on elec­tion year, see? They give us three good years and one bad one. No, no, three bad ones and one good one. I like to got it wrong. That’s the Democ­rats does the other. They give us three bad years and one good one, but the good one always comes on the year that the vot­ing is, see? Now if they was run­ning this year why they would be all right. But they are one year late. Every­thing will pick up next year and be fine. These peo­ple that you are asked to aid, why they are not ask­ing for char­ity, they are nat­u­rally ask­ing for a job, but if you can’t give them a job why the next best thing you can do is see that they have food and the neces­si­ties of life. You know, there’s not a one of us has any­thing that these peo­ple that are with­out it now haven’t con­tributed to what we’ve got. I don’t sup­pose there is the most unem­ployed or the hun­gri­est man in Amer­ica that hasn’t con­tributed in some way to the wealth of every mil­lion­aire in Amer­ica. It was the big boys them­selves who thought that this finan­cial drunk we were going through was going to last for­ever. They over-​​merged, and over-​​capitalized, and over-​​everything else. That’s the fix that we’re in now.”

    Will-​​Rogers pol­i­tics Depres­sion financial-​​crisis speech