﻿HANGING THE PORK CHOPS 
 
JERSEY CITY.—Ed. Trawin, a man of experience in transportation, is looking for a job. The Public Service Railway Company of New Jersey, whose car barns and offices at Montclair Ed took care of, has just fired him. I. wasn’t because Trawin faded to give satisfaction, he was told, but the position he held was abolished for reasons of economy and efficiency. 

I am one of the few Wobblies that get fat on scandal. Anxiously I grab the capitalists paper, push my spectacles up on the clearing, and with abated breath I read about the good times we are having. Prosperity fairly drips all around me. Everybody is well to do—everybody but me. 
The paper talks to me, an individual, and convinces me that no one but me is broke. Of course it has many readers (though it shouldn’t have) and it convinces each and every reader that none of the neighbors are kicking— (and not a one of them has a “pot to spit in”) everybody is doing well. A full page ad. confronts me, stating Wall Street no longer can create a panic—a presidential panic. Praise God we’ve got ‘cm licked! Wall Street is as helpless in our hands as a lous in a boiling-bee. . . . The panic I felt minute ago is dissipated in thin air; I resolve to sit tight; look pretty—and wait. Yes we have no nickels! 

The paper has taken us one at a time and convinced us “how good the times” are. We have no opportunity to consult our neighbor to find out if the press speaketh the truth. The nerve of the press is refreshing. It comes right out and lies to us about a thing that we are in position to know better than it does. It tells us we’re rich—when our household goods are in the hock. We’re well off— though we can’t buy socks. We are prosperous—although the grocer won’t trust us. All of us [sic] All of us are on the verge of becoming millionaires; everybody else except the man that happens to be reading the paper. He alone is poor—same as all the rest of them. . . . 

Les quit kidding— Company, ‘tention! 
This prosperity resulting from our “perspirety” should not be blazoned or blabbed about by the press, that away. Many irresponsible people, when they find themselves jitneyless, get the idea that if they step out and grab some of this prosperity so plentiful, it wouldn’t be noticed. Hence we find the crime wave rising so rapidly in prosperous times. Many citizens if they knew people were hard up would never think of kicking in a store or robbing a pedestrian, or Presbyterian. They would be content to suffer with the rest. But— 
When the press assures them that everybody else is loaded with cash they become jealous and start hiding in the alley, right away— and when they’re all in the same fix the alley soon fills up, and the police then dassent go in to pinch ‘em; ‘twould be no use anyway ‘cause they couldn’t pay a fine. It’s better to wait till they make a haul — then fine ‘em half of it. Yes indeed, the capitalist press is the cause of this crime wave. They’ve convinced the citizens that we have the money. 
You never see much crime during a panic when work is plentiful. It is only during periods of prosperity, when work is scarce, that the citizens bust the laws. 
Stop right there, reader; I want it distinctly understood that I am strictly against law-breaking, house-breaking or any other breaking, and it grieves me when I see the citizens taking an inoffensive law in their cruel hands and crushing it like an egg shell. 
I have laid in my bed sobbing over the crimes committed against private property by care free citizens, in their own ward. My soul has revolted against these patriots that step out in a most matter of fact manner and waylay these business folks. I see modest and shrinking 100 per centers step out and cheerfully wreck the superstructures of our jurisprudence, and I turn sick in the belly and retire to moan the whole night long. My health suffers and I pine away, eventually to pass away. Give me time— I am against all this. I am against lying by the press. Tell the people they’ve got nothing. Never did have. Never will. Tell them they are a bunch of suckers to stand for it. Speak the truth O ye press—at least occasionally. Tell them you never in your lying career saw so many men getting “free” Christmas dinners. Tell them that the “scribes,” the “press” 1923 years ago hung Christ— and then go and hang yourself.— (T-bone Slim).