Race. Poverty. Class - the schisms this country needs to face up to now!

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

So, I guess it took a hurricane to reveal to the slumbering, unaware American population that (Gasp!)there are actual poor people in our country who don't have cars and can't afford 2 weeks at a Ramada Inn at the drop of a hat. We haven't raised minimum wage in this country in years! Everyone who lives anywhere in the real world knows that we have been fostering a generation of the hopeless -hopeless because of their access to decent jobs, education and upward mobility. For this group, gangs, drugs and crimes are reasonable choices because they are the ONLY choices they are faced with on a regular basis.

We are a selfish, ignorant, sanctimonious, head-in-the-sand-society.

The wealth that we spend on warfare and corporate welfare could provide living wages, affordable housing, education, healthcare and secure retirement for all of us. But, oh, my God, that would be socialism!!! It's much better to piss away our tax dollars on the connected few and hope that one day we may join their numbers. That's the "American Way". FUIGOTMINE.

[applegrove]

1. Oh - you are not that way. Some people are. But not the vast majority.

The others... they have to know themselves so that you do not keep repeating & repeating the same mistakes. Time to know the real America with all its ugliness inside everyone - instead of riding on the coattails of being the first democracy.

Freepers need to learn they are a people in a place. Same as any other people in a place in time. Nothing special about Americans. Or Freepers. Nothing special about them that isn't the same all over the world.

At least what I've seen from what the real American leaders have been saying post-Katrina.

[newswolf56]

2. Paul Krugman makes the infinitely damning argument...

that America's unique savagery toward the poor (and thus by extension all of its other socioeconomic viciousness including its refusal to build adequate mass transport) is an expression of white America's racism: less obvious than Hitler's, but every bit as calculatedly murderous.

This essay of Krugman's is the most important critique of the American people ever written and is a Must Read for anyone who wants to understand why Bush is president and how horribly close we are to overt Nazism (note in this context both the aftermath of Katrina and Bennett's call for genocide):

http://www.pkarchive.org/column/091905.html