B. U. G. S.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) disposes of money by the tens of millions of dollars.

The exact amount is not known because, as with Jesse Jackson, the Internal Revenue Agency will look at the SPLC’s books about the time that salamanders grow breasts. In any case, no one questions where the SPLC gets tens of millions each year, at least.

When President Johnson’s War Against Poverty got going in 1964, huge consulting firms began to spring up all around Washington. People who got government grants would say, without any humorous intent, “The money is in poverty.”

When I was an honorary Boston Southie, my little outfit of three people didn’t even have a bank account. But we organized a joint protest of the anti-busing and textbook protestors in Washington, DC that included at least ten thousand people. Every one of them was a working-class person who paid his own way from West Virginia, Boston, Louisville and other places to be there.

Our little apartment was known as “The Kanawha Hilton” because so many working people from that coal-mining area of West Virginia would stay there when they came to Washington.

The three of us, a former newspaper man, my legal secretary wife, and I would call up grassroots protests who couldn’t afford press relations people and ask them, “What do you want us to do?”

We did their press conferences, we marched with them, we spoke for them when they wanted us to. We rode with the independent truck drivers, we worked with wildcat coal strikers.

And we paid our own way.

It came as a bit of surprise when the Communist Party’s official publication, “The World,” announced that we were “part of a highly-financed right wing conspiracy.” They named us specifically, The Populist Forum, as one of the “heavily-financed right-wing groups.”

I remember reading in the Communist World in the 1960s a that a Jewish millionaire had left them a million dollars in his will. That was a million dollars in the 1960s, remember.

It was a small item because it wasn’t that much of a deal. A million bucks was nice, but it was in no way unusual. Plenty of limousine liberals gave them lots of money and whenever the head of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) went to Russia, they would send him home with a million dollar gift in his jeans.

Once again, we’re talking about a million bucks in the 1960s. With inflation and growth, the American Gross National Product (GNP) is well over ten times as high today as it was in the 1960s, so you can just multiply that figure by ten to get an idea of how much money I am discussing here.

The Communist Daily World was called the Daily Worker in the old days. That got sillier and sillier and sillier, since there were no workers in the party by 1960, and certainly no white gentile workers. Like every other Communist Party, the American one was led by people who would not know which end of shovel you dig with.

Lenin, Trotsky and all the “intellectuals” who ran the Communist Party there and here lived the high life. The leaders of the Revolution of the Poor and Oppressed never missed a meal and none of them ever did a day’s work in their lives.