anomaly said:
Oh by the way, can some liberal PLEASE get in here and help me....it seems it's me versus 3 conservatives right now.
Hey, anomaly, I'll jump in and give you a hand.
Someone said that poverty was a urban problem. Wrong!
From the Joint Center for Poverty Research:
In a three-year average of poverty rates from 1999-2001, the five poorest states were New Mexico (18.8%), Louisiana (17.5%), Mississippi (16.8%), Arkansas (16.3%), and the District of Columbia (16.1%).
Not one a state with a major urban center. DC being a possible exception, but not really. It is an urban center, but not on par w/ our largest American metropolitan areas. (Funny, being the 5th poorest community in America, that they got stiffed by the Bush administration on the pornographic display of wealthy, right-wing buffoonery displayed during the recent inaugural "festivities," but I digress.)
The reason that the poor have gone against their best interests to vote Republican is simple: They don't know any better and most of the poor in the South, where poverty IS greatest, are backwards & poorly educated. And they distrust what they perceive as intellectualism (aka, liberalism) in the Democratic party. And they are PROUD to be ignorant. Many of them have lived in poverty for generations & feel no great compulsion to get out of it. They voted for George Bush because he talked about the issues that matter to them: gay marriage & abortion. IGNORANT to the fact that the Republican party looks at them as serfs or, at the most, insignificant, poorly paid laborers who make it easy for their corporations to GAIN from their low-paying jobs & need to purchase their household needs cheaply from their neighborhood "company store" Wal-Mart.
You can tell them that the Bush administration doesn't care a whit for them or whether they manage to get out of the poverty that has hampered their ability to move upward and they say, "So what! Nobody has EVER cared about us." And they would have a point there. What they don't understand is that the voodoo & trickle down economic theories of the republican party only stand to make their situations & their children's situations even more bleak.
I am poor and I live in the South and I know from whence I speak.
Poverty is on the rise again. It has been documented by the census bureau. Go there and check it out if you don't believe me. Families losing their health insurance is on the rise as well.
Someone said that unions & their insistence on fair wages for workers is the reason for outsourcing. Let me see some data on that. Outsourcing is happening not because they can pay people in other countries a couple of dollars less, it is happening because they can pay them PENNIES on the dollar. What are Americans supposed to do? Work for a few dollars a day so that industry can continue make billions w/ the life's blood of its workers? How is this theory going to work for the average working American? The fact is it won't & shouldn't be allowed to happen. Everyone deserves a living wage, even folks in Mexico, China, Indonesia or Sri Lanka.
Government regulations of industry were put in place for real & compelling reasons.
Industry will default on the side of profits when the choice is between money & workplace & environmental safety, fair wages, employee benefits, & fair labor practices. We know this, we learned this lesson already. Government regulation is why we have cleaner air today in Louisiana. It is why our communities have robins again & why moss is on our trees (for now at least; government restrictions on air pollution have already been rolled back). Government regulation is why we don't have sweat shops, why we have child labor laws. It is why employees are entitled to benefits. Do you really think that American industry is capable of regulating itself? Bullshit. It is not in the interest of capitalist enterprise to look for ways to SPEND money. Only to keep from spending it. Anyone who has ever worked for a major American corporation knows what I'm talking about.
There, hope that helps. I know how it feels to be a lonely voice amongst a crowd of hostility. I haven't contributed in a couple of weeks, but your plea touched my heart. I could not turn my back.