When speaking at the Democratic National Convention in August, Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic state senator in Michigan, echoed President Abraham Lincoln’s observation in his Gettysburg address that we are a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Such is nothing more than empty meaningless feel-good rhetoric. A diametrically opposed viewpoint of McMorrow was proffered at the 1890 People’s Party convention in Topeka, Kansas by Mary Elizabeth Lease (1850-1933) a lecturer, editor and political activist. Angry that the Republican Party and Democratic Party did virtually nothing for the poor and farmers, Lease concluded — nearly 135 years ago — both parties were owned by big business.
These are Lease’s insightful words that still ring true today: “Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street.”
In short, it makes no difference who is president, as he or she will be a puppet of Wall Street. Corporations have had Washington in their back pockets for generations.
Louis H. Pumphrey, Shaker Heights