No one cares that the poor continue to sink

By William Collins
Well, the Great Recession has at least brought us one piece of good news -- we don't need immigrants anymore. The press now reports that native-born Americans have finally become so financially desperate that they are accepting those famous jobs that were previously too dangerous, filthy, exhausting, underpaid, poisonous and demeaning for civilized people to agree to. Hunger will do that to you.

This level of destitution was widely visible and understood during the Depression, but today is generally considered a bit too unpleasant for the media to dwell on.

Relegated to even greater obscurity is the shredding of the social safety net, begun under President Reagan and refined under both George Bushes and Bill Clinton. This abandonment of the poor has left them constantly in conditions closer to the 1930s than the 1960s.

Other players also loom large in their lives. Our food industry, for example, has discovered that while the cheapest ingredients may be the most fattening, they do make the most profit. Thus, corn syrup, sugar and grease make up a heavy share of the poverty diet. Obesity and diabetes then follow as night the day.

With good food being unaffordable and good health care being unavailable, sickness and death are afflicting today's slums.

Additional avaricious industries, both in manufacturing and the service sector, have similarly long relished the malevolent, job-destroying charms of "free trade."

Sending jobs abroad generates major profits.

And so it goes the world over. The race to the top for the wealthy has unleashed a race to the bottom for the poor. In this country the partial removal of the safety net has caused lives at the lower end of the scale to become mean, brutal and short. These lower classes no longer have a serious production function in society and are useful mainly as consumers. We can even get along without them entirely if they become too expensive to maintain. Their menial tasks are better performed anyway by immigrants, who are generally more afraid to complain.

Most of this news slips beneath the radar of the press. Yes, they occasionally admit it is sad that so many citizens go hungry, have to skip their meds, live off extended family, and lose their possessions in eviction. Unfortunately, though, advertisers don't care. They need readers who can spend. Thus the news focuses on folks in the upper two-thirds of the wealth scale. Those are the ones who can often afford homes and new cars, even if maybe not right now.

The growing disparity between rich and poor, along with the shrinkage of the middle class, has been gnawing at our society for decades. We are returning now to the economic framework of the 1920s, while many of FDR's works have been repealed.

Unfortunately President Obama seems less of a Roosevelt than a Clinton, which may just permanently solidify the rock-bottom role of our nation's underclass.

http://www.post-trib.com/news/opinion/1753661,col-collins-0907.article

and he won't have the benefit of the dot com boom.

to show that we care any more than the ones we claim don't care.

digging into your pocket and donating what you can "afford" or pulling the guilt trip "have you given" to disguise the root of the problem.

We don't have a poverty problem we have a hoarding of the wealth problem with the comfortable middle class acting as gatekeepers for the pigs at the top. Charity isn't going to solve this because it addresses the symptom of a massive disease that resides among the wealthy.

Only when the democratic party starts talking about class, the 3 decade war on the poor and the massive gulf between rich and poor and start transferring that stolen wealth back to who it belongs- the working class and the working poor will there start to be a dent in poverty.

Charity solves nothing. What the poor need is for the gatekeepers, the oh so generous comfortable classes to lend their considerable political clout to solving the problem of the rich.

are also able to add a little something extra into the plate at church when the offering is for helping others.

I wish we could do more. :( I do tell people about the thrift shops where we do a lot of our shopping and the food bank too, in the hopes that they can save a little money in a way that has worked for us.

What we really need is a (dare I say it) more socialistic government with programs that reach everyone and not just a few.

Charity and generosity just merely rearrange money before it gets sucked into the wealth of the top 1%. If you give food you have grown or clothes you have sewn to the poor, that's the only way to cut the rich out of the loop.

the point where we can barely keep up now and have nothing left over, we cannot cut any more..
Where we are not is still a couple of steps up from where we had been at our lowest and we feel for others are sliding past us on their way to homelessness.
I have been homeless and sick and in need of medical care, but could not get it during Clinton era.
It took me literally wandering into an ER and collapsing before I got care for pneumonia and hiv.

I have a partner who is working, but he is only bringing home a fraction of what he was making when we med shortly after I got out of hospital and had managed to get some SSI and find an apartment with another acquaintance who took the rent and spent it on drugs.

The house is a bit larger than we need, but we thought we might have to take in friends or relatives who were worse off.
edit to add, the house may be larger, but it was lower in cost by far than any of the smaller ones we looked at nearer to town, the others that were cheaper in the areas we could afford were uninhabitable tumble down wrecks.
We had wanted to grow food this summer but I was in hospital at planting time and well there is not much for us or any to give away this year.
We went from too much rain too wet to plant to too dry to grow.

And I thought these right wing asses claimed to be Christian?
What it's not Christian to take care of our Brothers and Sisters,
in reference to the failing economy and the health care bill that would help keep folks from landing under a bridge or a tent and sick to boot?

amazing how so many think they are in a hight bracket than they are...

refrigerator and banking the money and shrink meaning the next stop is the street.

The first group is cutting back to ride out the recession the second group has been in a worsening depression for decades.

...no one even mentioned "The Poor" during the Campaign.
I don't care what you think about Edwards, at least he spotlighted the issue.

The corporate takeover of the planet is nearly complete. Slow death for the "unproductive" is happening all around us, while we look the other way.

sw