[lbo-talk] Senate Dems drop public option

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Thu Dec 10 03:54:05 PST 2009



>
> Chuck:
> Most people have no idea what it means to live a working class life and
> get old in this asshole country. The cruelty and brutality is really
> astonishing once you turn the corner on age, and face it directly. I
> have great admiration, comradeship for my daughter-in-law's mother, C
> who switches between the nightmare of Nuevo Laredo and Laredo. She was a
> cleaning lady her whole life and still managed to help put her daughter
> through college. Half her family lives on one side of the border and the
> other half on the other. What she does is travel by bus between her
> children ... roaming in the southwest nowhere. It's a stark heroine life
> stripped to the bone. Nobody seems to see it.
>
> US Capital to Working Class: Drop Dead.
>

Alan: Truer words were never spoken... even at the most simple level. Even my working class rural and on-and-off public support-dependent students are flabbergasted by Domhoff's statistics about 1% of Americans controlling ~40% of all wealth with the next 19% controlling another 50% or more. Sadly, fewer are able to unpack the facts about white household median wealth being 10 times as high as median black and hispanic but at least most are set back a bit. This semester, out of 150 Intro students, despite my efforts to stress movements, collectives, communities and struggle, only two wrote about trying to work on these issues, about 40 said the government really needs to do something, 20 threw up their hands but said that this indicated how important it was that they work hard to get into the top 20%, 20 threw up their hands and said nothing was ever going to change and that they were screwed, and most of others - since it is a course they are taking as a distribution requirement - simply wrote a report on the article or got something down on paper.



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