Kill the Poor

There's unfortunately nothing new in the Pew study of the US 'recovery' from the Great Recession, which showed that it was a spectacular recovery for the rich at the expense of everybody else (whose net worth actually dropped between 2009 and 2011), or in New York's analysis, based on its own more sophisticated criteria, that nearly half the city (all four boroughs) is in poverty.

It's against that backdrop however that we judge Washington's failure to support jobs while continuing to lay out corporate welfare, and in particular the very obvious move last week to lessen the pain of well-off air travelers while doing nothing for the poor, working families, elderly, local economies, etc. being materially and even physically hurt by the sequester.

I heard again a theory I hadn't heard in a long while, that now that a lot of labor is no longer necessary in the US, since its been either automated or outsourced, the powers that be are willing if not actively trying to starve those folks out.  The words "kill the poor" were spoken.  It's a forecast of the future I heard from radicals in the 1960s, but this time I heard it on PBS as a description of the present.  Specifically in connection with the incarceration industry, but more generally applicable.

Kill the poor is kind of a paradoxical policy for the GOP, given its white fundie southern base, but the imagery of poverty is racialized now--only black and brown people can be called poor with impunity.  So the policy is part of GOPer racism, if not the complete effect.  Apart from hatred projected onto President Obama, it is evidenced as well in the refusal to fund government functions and therefore government jobs--which owing to non-discrimination policies have been for some years a path to the middle class for black and brown workers who have taken great pains to educate themselves.  And don't think for a minute that isn't part of this hatred for government.

Kill the poor has become part of the increasingly bold savagery institutionalized in GOPer controlled state governments.  At least two states (Ohio and Georgia) have revived the debtors prison by jailing poor people who were unable to pay municipal debts.  As Jim Hightower pointed out, that these acts are unconstitutional under the US and state constitutions has not stopped anybody.

All of this as evidence is buried as fast as it mounts that thousands have been and probably still are being impoverished by banks foreclosing on mortgages--including those in which payments were up to date--and through credit card manipulation.

The wolf of the sequester turns out to be the wolf of the GOP and its corporate allies, aided and abetted way too often by others.