>The working class has had it's
>collective butt kicked all over the place in the
>past 25 years. Millions of good paying jobs for
>people with less than an advanced degree in
>computer science have vanished. Wealth inequality
>is staggering in this society. Millions of people
>struggle from paycheck to paycheck, nothing left
>for savings, basic housing and transportation is
>ruinously expensive for millions, the only reason
>millions of others are living a middle class
>lifestyle is because they have two incomes and
>incredible levels of household debt at usurous
>interest rates. In order to have one of those
>scarce, better paying jobs, people are working
>ridiculous hours, or they're holding down two or
>three jobs, commuting hours on end, some even live
>away from their families most
>of the time. Routine medical and dental care is
>unaffordable for millions, in some cases even if
>there is some insurance. The society has gotten
>less crime-ridden in certain respects in the past
>few years, by virtue of the fact that poor people
>have been locked up wholesale. (The mushrooming,
>the explosion of the incarceration system is
>something that is scaring the shit out of me. It
>has become a staple of our economic system,
>providing jobs to replace those that have gone
>away. Once you've built new prisons, to keep
>people employed you've got to keep them going.
>You keep them going by locking up people. And
>there's the cheap prison labor (legalized slavery)
>provided by these fine institutions.) And there's
>the racism, the sexism, the homophobia, the
>unacknowledged class war, the Empire...
>
>Upshot is, we got trouble right here in River
>City. The people on this list all know all this.
>
>So WHY can't left/progressive forces seem to get
>the time of day? You'd think people would be so
>pissed off by this state of affairs that it would
>be easy. Fuck the corporate media; I work for it,
>and it doesn't have the sway some believe it does
>with people in general.
Woooo!!! SAY it, Sister! Yes!
Real People [tm] have been getting the most godawful drubbing since Reagan, and it just gets worse. If the left can't get it together enough to formulate and deliver a better message, what the hell good is the left?
'If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, then what am I? ...And if not now, when?' Smart man, Hillel.