A leading Republican light, one who is seeking his party’s nomination for president, has indicated in public which direction the right wing wants the country to go…back to the 19th Century.

Newt Gingrich, who has an income and perks from his tenure as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and lots of money from his “historical advice” to Freddie Mac, the housing mortgage agency, has declared America’s child labor laws to be “truly stupid.”

He made his declaration on Nov. 18 in a question-and-answer session, after his talk at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.  In that talk, he outlined his vision for America.  You can broaden what he says about schools to other aspects of our national life.  Essentially, here’s what he would do:  get rid of unionized janitors and have a “master janitor” and replace all of the fired janitors with children from the same school, so that they would be bringing home a paycheck and building the neighborhood economy, as a way to fight poverty.

Gingrich said he would, as U.S. president, make “radical changes” that would have an impact on poverty in the nation.  If a return to child labor is one of the pillars of his grand plan for America, the country is in trouble.  Of course, the country has been in trouble for some time, possibly for 35 years (for the poor and the working class), and Gingrich is merely expressing the intent of the right wing of the country, including Republicans, “Blue Dog” Democrats, and others on the political right.

For decades, they and their corporate benefactors have been maneuvering the national economy and the political system into a position that allows control of most of the country by a very few.  In case there are those who do not understand what the “Occupy” movement wants (and there are many who pretend not to know), it’s the 1 percent having such power over the other 99 percent.  It’s past time when the 1 percent and their politicians “get it.”

How Gingrich gets to the understanding that child labor laws are the cause of income inequality in America is a mystery.  He is said to be a professor of history, yet his understanding of the eternal conflict between capital and labor seems to remain at the high school level, at best, which is to say virtually non-existent.

He apparently has not heard of the sweatshops that employed boys and girls, rather than men and women.  Largely, it was because the children could be coerced or otherwise forced (even physically) to work without complaint for 10 or 12 hours a day, six days a week. 

Gingrich has not heard of the mill children or the “breaker boys,” who worked those long hours in the coalmines sorting coal from stone in the freezing cold until their hands were bloody.  These are just a few of the hundreds of examples of child labor in the land of the free, but that’s why there are child labor laws.

Eventually, the majority of Americans were repelled by the idea that children could be exploited…abused, really…so easily by the captains of industry and their minions.  One of the Robber Barons asked at the time: Why hire a man for a dollar, when I can hire a kid for a dime?  They weren’t joking.  Children worked in every trade and inhabited cold, dark, fetid factories in just about every industry.  The regular wages not paid to their parents went into the coffers of the rich owners and the neighborhoods and communities were bereft of those wages. 

Newt Gingrich apparently never heard about the working conditions in America before child labor laws.  Unions fought against such abuse of (poor) children and fought to see that they got free, universal, public education.  As a history professor, Gingrich should know these things, but it could be just one of his memory lapses. 

Instead, he shows his contempt for those who are less well off financially.  It is evident in his view of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement that is sweeping the country.  In those places, as well, the participants are not as financially secure as Gingrich.  Although he believes child labor laws to be “truly stupid,” his ignorance about the origins of such laws tends to show him to be ignorant, if not stupid, about the history of his own country.  What is wrong with the country has been articulated very well by the OWS protestors, all across the country:  1 percent vs. the 99 percent.  The former has most of the wealth and power and the latter is left with little to nothing, except for massive debt.  That’s enough for starters.

Gingrich said derisively in an interview that OWSers should “take a bath” and “get a job,” which comment shows how out of touch he is with the lives of the American people.  You would think that he does not know that the unemployment rate is just above 9 percent and that 14 million men and women are unemployed, and that there are nearly five applicants for every job opening.  Even the mainstream media have reported such things.  All he has to do is watch a news show once in a while.  After a while, one would be justified in thinking that he is willfully ignorant…not the kind of character the country needs for a president.

The former House Speaker probably would not have liked Will Rogers much, especially since he didn’t buy jewelry for his wife from Tiffany’s.  But Rogers had some advice for both Wall Street and Newt Gingrich:  “The country is bigger than Wall Street.   If they don’t believe it, show ‘em the map.”  That observation is just as true today as it was eight or nine decades ago. 

But Gingrich is trying to claw his way into the upper echelons of the rich.  It may be why he took a job as a “consultant” for the home mortgage lending agency, Freddie Mac, from which he is reported to have received as much as $1.4 million for his sage advice.  He claimed to be a consultant, and said he never has been a lobbyist.  He countered critics by saying that he told Freddie Mac what to do to avoid disaster, but they didn’t take his advice.  Others said that he merely was used for his access to highly placed politicians, who should have exercised some control to prevent the housing bubble that burst over the country in a shower of toxicity. 

For now, he is leading the Republican pack of presidential primary hopefuls, but each one has taken his or her turn in the lead then has fallen back into the pack.  If it’s a question of character, Gingrich will be back in the pack in a relatively short time.  He, along with the others in their series of “debates,” has been falling over himself (like they all have) to appear palatable to the powers that be.  He wants to be part of them and he wants to be their president, and that’s why he is bashing the Occupy movement, the exemplification of the grievances of the working and middle classes.

And, it’s always permissible for the politicians, the press, and the pundits to flog the young for their callowness, their inexperience, and their very youth.  People who are used up, a little slow in their movements and thinking, and corrupt to a greater or lesser degree always like to blame the young.  In the case of OWS, the people in power are wrong, for there are Americans of all ages and stations of life who know that it’s the Gingriches of this nation that have put the people in the dire straits in which they find themselves. 

There are many things wrong about Gingrich and those of his political persuasion and the young people know it.  That’s why it is so telling about his overall allegiance to the powerful, to Corporate America, that he has spoken out loud in favor of the return of child labor, which will never equalize the disparity between rich and poor, as he insists.  Rather, it will return us to a time when every member of the family worked, just to put a simple meal on the table.  It was called the age of the Robber Barons.

America was lucky enough to survive that era for a relatively short period for several reasons, not the least of which was the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt and, probably even more important, the rise of unions, the existence of which did indeed tend to keep the greedy from taking everything.  The return of child labor that Gingrich promotes is a kind of bellwether for the kind of country he and his Republican comrades want.  If they get what they want, this time we may not be able to recover as we did a century ago, because many of the structures of societal safety and security have been damaged or destroyed.

The structures need to be rebuilt and the Occupy movement is in the streets to remind those in power that either they need to rebuild the structures or, better yet, get out of the way of those with fresh minds, who are not mortgaged to Corporate America and who can do the job.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.