Watching The Grapes of Wrath on TCM.

[UnrepentantLiberal]

Some things never change.

[southernyankeebelle]

1. It's like turning the clock back. You wonder if people ever learn.

[orpupilofnature57]

2. Tell me Steinbeck didn't see the NWO

[Warpy]

3. In the book, there was a hell of a lot about how the banks had grabbed all the land

and sold it off to Agribusiness. That's basically what getting "tractored off" meant, that you'd had your debt called because the Dust Bowl had wiped out your chance of bringing in a crop that year, your land got sold to some big combine, and they sent a tractor around to wreck your house so you'd have to leave it.

And there you were, sitting in Kansas or Oklahoma, the bank holding your paper in NYC because it bought it from the local bank that they then allowed to go under, how could you fight a NYC bank? Who was a NYC bank? Was it one man or a whole bunch of them, buying up loans and stealing land out from under you?

There are a lot of compelling reasons to read the book, although the movie is certainly a good adaptations. The discussion of what was happening to family farms and why is one of those reasons.

[orpupilofnature57]

4. You could still see the results in 1975

San luis obispo, were I spent the night in the vestibule of a church in the hardest rain I have ever experienced ,and the kids we talked to parents all worked in some aspect of agriculture.

[freshwest]

5. Allegedly we are living in a cycle to repeat the 1930s that we cannot avoid.

I remember seeing the movie years ago. That was also at the time when public schools taught about the dust bowl, the social programs begun by FDR to alleviate the situation and bring the banksters to heel.

They also taught us all about the reasons for the growth of hte labor movement and unions, as well and civil rights history but that changed after I left high school. It was just basic knowledge for a lot of us, since the Nixon years they've been re-writing our history to exclude what was done to help the American people.

The sixties with its emphasis on civil rights, ending wars, saving the air, land and water and all the people were the natural outgrowth of what we were taught was right and wrong and what must be permitted to happen to us again.

Now the right has taken over education and no one will know this without the internet, I suppose, and they're on it like flies on manure to spread their fascism. There is going to be a backlash, Occupy is the chief engine of that. But it will have to be diferent in its language and its actions since things have changed so much in this country.

I see more of what Korten and others are telling people to do to survive, while others are trying to make the national transition to a more independent life gentler and more humane.

[Zorra]

6. The Grapes of Wrath

is definitely a timeless work of art.

My all time favorite novel, and the movie is awesome too.