Clark Kerr, a California Quaker born in 1911 who lived through the Great Depression to eventually become an economics professor and chancellor of the University of California Berkley, said this in a letter to his father September 1, 1932: There are so many ways in which our economic system could be changed and improved so as to allow security and sufficiency for all . . . Capitalism is so cruel, so unjust and so terribly inefficient. Two years later he studied the Unemployed Cooperative League in Southern California. He saw the coops as an effort by the unemployed to support themselves and do so with self-respect. There are any number of cases of babies starving to death, homes without food, gas, light or water [*happening right now on Native Reservations]. Families evicted. At the same time . . . food products are being left unharvested or are dumped in the ocean to keep prices up. One day in March 1933 he was visiting a cooperative in Pasadena when he learned that a big finance company had evicted a pregnant mother and her sick one-year-old from their one-room shack because they were fourteen dollars behind in rent. Kerr drove the co-op officials to the scene, where they found the mother and child in the street, locked out of their hovel, their paltry possessions in a heap beside them. A co-op official convened a meeting on the spot with about thirty people to voted to condemn the finance firm and smash the lock. I helped them break the law and move the family back in, Kerr confided to his father. This country has come to a place where one must break the law in order to insure that the people may have the privilege of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. [*my addition] Sound familiar to anyone? excerpt from Subversives: The FBIs War on Student Radicals and Reagans Rise To Power by Seth Rosenfeld ppg 48-49
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 08:14:20 +0000
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