Will our seniors die in poorhouses because billionaires want bigger mansions?

In the earlier decades of the past century, before industrial unionism and FDR’s New Deal dramatically raised mass living standards, cold-water tenement slums, decrepit frame hovels, and barely sustainable family farms were where most working-class Americans lived.

Add to that the tarpaper shacks of the unemployed before the death grip of the Great Depression was finally broken by uplifting progressive policies and programs.

Where did senior citizens go during that grim, profoundly unjust era of stupendous wealth enjoyed by robber barons while multitudes suffered in squalor?

Unless they could be adequately taken care of by kin already experiencing poverty, they were sent to county poorhouses that were utterly Dickensian in their humanity-huddling-to-die horror.

Think of what you know about bad orphanages, but with old folks with failed bodies and broken spirits, not chronically unhappy, deprived children.

Jump, now, to the present. Ponder relentless Republican attacks on workers’ rights and their consequently declining purchasing power.

Think about how Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, the Tea Party and other cat’s-paws of crony capitalism are shielding their rich patrons from having to pay even a nickel for the economic calamity unregulated corporate/financial mega greed and malfeasance caused in the first place.

We, the common people who had nothing whatsoever to do with Wall Street’s collapse, are unfairly forced to make sacrifice after painful sacrifice to bail out the real culprits.

Ordinary families facing frightening futures are being told that Medicaid must be “reformed” through disastrously inadequate block grants, that Medicare has to be scrapped in favor of personal insurance purchases only partially funded by gimmicky vouchers, and that it would be better if government got out of providing Social Security, forcing seniors to risk the volatile stock market instead.

Conservatives are decimating our collective bargaining ability as current workers, turning us into low-wage peons, yet we’re expected to save for our retirement.

Meanwhile, the Republican budget proposal that’s been correctly dubbed a “road map to ruin” wants tax rates for wealthy individuals and highly profitable monopoly corporations to be reduced by an astonishing 10 percentage points!

All this as our infrastructure, education, social safety nets, overall quality of life, and global standing dramatically deteriorate.

The overwhelming majority of adult Americans either earns wages or once did. They’re the folks to whom “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” applies. All other considerations—especially the profit lust of the top 2 percent—must take a back seat to service and protection directed toward America’s indispensable backbone, its workaday (or worked a lifetime) citizenry.

“Make the wealthy pay to save the USA!” must become an incessant popular demand, together with loud calls for ending our country’s intolerably costly and counterproductive attempt to be world policeman.

How much of a federal deficit would we have if the rich paid their fair share of taxes and if we closed most of our over 800 military bases or active sites across the planet, together with ending ill-advised wars?

If we concentrated on smartly building a viable economy for this century, rather than retrogressing to poorhouse days just so contemptible profiteers can increase their ill-gotten booty, we’d have a surplus with which to build a strong nation that wouldn’t fall behind China or any other country in the years ahead.

Just as assuredly, however, continued adherence to reactionary elitism that assumes national health can be measured strictly by how well the upper crust is doing will definitely lead to society’s collapse.

Those who would shamefully tarnish an aging populace’s golden years to derive ungodly pleasure from the glint and sparkle of constantly greater personal riches can’t be permitted to decide our fate.

Worshiping the almighty dollar when the common good gets savaged as a direct result is plainly treasonous.

It’s by appealing to the American people’s best interest and purest patriotism that right-wing traitors and their brutal budget can be soundly defeated.

Dennis Rahkonen of Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the ’60s.