Socialism/communism is the Right's word for any government programs that help all the people
Such as Social Security, Medicare, education, public transit. The ignorant Trump-loving dolts throwing around accusations of communism wouldn't know a real communist from a dead flounder.
The billionaire-corporate class want to strip America of all beneficial public programs. They want American working people to be reduced to poverty so they will be forced to take any job, no matter how low paying or how bad the working conditions.
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One of the difficulties as I see it is that we worship money instead of honor. A billionaire in our estimation is much greater in the eyes of the people than the public servant who works for the public interest. It makes no difference if the billionaire rode to wealth on the sweat of little children and the blood of underpaid labor. No one ever considers the Carnegie libraries steeped in the blood of the Homestead Steel workers, but they are. We do not remember that the Rockefeller Foundation is founded on the dead miners of the Colorado Fuel Company and a dozen other performances. We worship Mammon.
Until we get back to the fundamentals and return to the Giver of the Tables of the Law and His teachings, these conditions are going to remain with us. It is a pity that Wall Street with its ability to control all the wealth of the nation and to hire the best brains of the country has not produced some statesmen, some men who could see the dangers of bigness and of the concentration of the control of wealth. Instead of working to meet the situation, they are still employing the best law brains to serve greed and selfish interest.
People can only stand so much, and one of these days there will be a settlement. We shall have one receivership too many, one unnecessary depression out of which we will not come with the power still in the same old hands. I believe this country would be better off if we did not have sixty percent of the assets of all insurance companies concentrated in four companies. I believe that a thousand insurance companies with $4,000,000 each in assets would be just a thousand times better for the country than the Metropolitan Life with $4,000,000,000 in assets.
The average brain is not built to deal with such astronomical figures. A thousand county seats of 7,000 each are a thousand times more important to this Republic than one city of 7,000,000. Our unemployment and our unrest are the result of the concentration of wealth, the concentration of population in industrial centers, mass production, and a lot of other so-called modern improvements.We are building a tower of Babel.
- Sen. Harry Truman U.S. Senate floor December 1937
