No Room for the Poor in Conservative VS Liberal Interchange

by Caroline Arnold
In the present political circus it seems that liberals mostly want to tweak the status quo to get better deals (cheaper, less polluting energy, safer water, air & food, universal medical care & education) for themselves and their immediate neighbors. They also want to stop global warming and raise taxes on the rich.

Conservatives seem to want the private sector to manage the economy, control education, health care and prisons; they also want control of women’s bodies, voter registration laws to limit voting by poor people, lower taxes for the rich, cuts to Social Security, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act for everyone else. And they expect Ivy League schools for their children, student loans at high interest for the middle classes, and minimal training for poor kids to be obedient workers and consumers or professional killers in the armed forces.

But I see hardly any political commitment on either side to the world’s poor and illiterate, to the billions of humans whose lives are blighted by wars, energy extraction, trade policies and economic myths, to the unemployed and homeless of our own communities, to the "illegal aliens" who cross political borders in search of better lives, or to refugees fleeing floods, droughts or famines.

One of the reasons I can’t spend much time on the gas-drilling/fracking issue is that I don’t see in it the "preferential option for the poor" that I believe should be central to all our social, political and economic activities in a world of seven billion souls – half of them hungry – on a planet that we are literally and figuratively burning up.http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/18