Replacing New Deal with bum deal

To the editor:

During the middle years of the last century, a proud liberal and progressive, Franklin D. Roosevelt, brought us programs to provide support to those suffering at the hands of the Great Depression and stock-market crash. These were folks whose life savings had been eaten as a result of poor decisions by business leaders. Thus, the New Deal was born.

Later in that century, two liberals and progressives, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, brought us the civil rights movement which finally brought the need for justice and equal rights to the American consciousness.

Then came the socially progressive Republican, Richard Nixon, during whose presidency environmental protection was born as the clear water, clean air and endangered species acts were passed and the Environmental Protection Agency was established.

Since then, the Republican Party has been taken over by right-wing extremists who seem to care not one whit for anyone but the wealthy. Their credo seems to be locked up in the fundamentalist notion that wealth is the measure of morality. If your are wealthy, they seem to argue, you must be moral. If your are not, it's because you are morally wanting. And if your are poor, it's because you deserve to be poor. To them, social programs that protect the weakest of us represent improper drains upon their wealth.

Under President Bush, the New Deal has been replaced by a bum deal, and the civil rights movement by a no-rights movement.

JUSTIN HEAD, Cape Girardeau