Barack Obama and Goldman Sachs' New Permanent Underclass
• Good news, America! We're finally building equal opportunity ghettos! Now that 1 in 15 Americans are considered the "poorest poor," we're making sure they live in underserved neighborhoods; "geographically concentrated poverty in the U.S. is now at the highest since 1990." But it's a rainbow of poverty! Red and yellow, black and white!
• And we're making sure they don't get to bust out. Because few of them can afford to have cars, they can't go to school, improve their lives or take their children to programs. A entrenched and segregated underclass!
• But it'll be a mobile underclass, that moves from poor area to poor area, when it can, because home ownership, which was a terrible idea bought by many people, is shrinking: "Through the 12 months ending mid-2011, the Census Bureau reported a net increase of 1.4 million households that moved into rental housing." Meanwhile, for those still entrenched: "The percentage of those who are late by 90 days or more on their monthly mortgage payments was virtually unchanged at 3.51 percent in the July-September quarter."
• And so, relatedly, today at noon, Occupy Wall Street is marching on Goldman Sachs' headquarters. Even though it dumped and wrote off its (allegedly) mortgage robo-signing holding, there's plenty of good reasons to do so. Plenty of reasons to march on the White House too.
Photo of Occupy Oakland yesterday by James Martin.
Wait, 'finally'?
Fascism operated from a Social Darwinist view of human relations. Their aim was to promote superior individuals and weed out the weak.[5] In terms of economic practice, this meant promoting the interests of successful businessmen while destroying trade unions and other organizations of the working class.[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_fascism
God, people will make any argument to get out of funding public transit, won't they? That poor woman was probably late for work because the buses she took ran late, slowly, and infrequently. Take that money that would have been spent on some ill-conceived program to buy cars for the poor (yikes!), multiply it by 2 million, and invest it in a better public transportation network for LA.
Stupid car politics is a big part of the reason why the poor are in such a mess nowadays. You know, way back when, the poor all lived on top of one another in the city centers and no one had cars, but they could at least find work and afford food! That was more humane than what we expect of them nowadays.
A+ Vangelization, fuck cars.
@brianvan I wish I had more thumbs!
@brianvan We're doing it right now.
Man, now I want a drink.
an Old Fashioned? I'll take two.
I'm not sure "entrenched" is the right word, since I believe the hope is that they'll die off? Of something vague like "poverty," certainly not of anything that universal health care could prevent. If you ignore something long enough, it will go away. Is the thinking.
COOL!