The Dayton Daily News today as usual ran their "TODAY IN HISTORY" section -- which I always enjoy.

Today's headline, from 1935 (I was 5 years old), reads: "Works Progress Administration (WPA) approved by Congress."

My mother, divorced by then, was about to get her first decent job with the WPA doing real work with Ohio libraries. The WPA it turned out led to "regular" federal jobs.

Then World War II came along (I was 11). I just read now that FDR told "us" that he must put aside his "Dr. New Deal" and become Dr. "Win the War."

Mrs. Roosevelt did not agree but her voice for social justice would be less effective.

Imagine -- just imagine -- had FDR listened to his Better Half. Had his health held out (as with modern medicine it might have) or had he groomed a progressive to inherit the New Deal mantra …. Or, even (dare I say) had he been defeated by Wendell Wilkie in l940 (a progressive who had been given the Republican nomination as a sacrificial goat)….

But FDR invented the military industrial complex. He had to do so to win the war. And like locusts, the plague of a national socialism (by and for corporations) has been in place ever since.

The young have had "equal opportunity" federal jobs -- in the military.

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