Sucking Out the Wealth of the Poor

AUTHOR GORE VIDAL recalled riding in the back seat of a limo when he was seven years old, seated next to his blind grandfather, Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, in the summer of 1932. All around the slowly moving car were men dressed in rags, throwing tomatoes and rocks, screaming at the Senator. Vidal said he was frightened, and clutched his grandfather's hand tightly. The Bonus Army was in town, veterans of World War One, demanding relief. Washington D.C. was under siege, and the child in the back seat understood, first and forever, that a war between the rich and the poor was quite possible in America. In fact, he was witnessing one. Senator Gore, a conservative Democrat, did not believe in giving anything to anybody, including war veterans impoverished by the great depression, seeking early payment of their promised war bonus. Flash ahead to 2014, Ferguson, Missouri, the shooting death of a young black man by a policeman, and local outrage, colored black. Amid the yelling, we look at the inexorable statistics, and we find that there is a systematic war ongoing against America's poor, and America's African Americans. Ferguson Missouri, like all other towns and cities in the United States, detains, arrests, charges, and convicts blacks and poor people in huge numbers, disproportionate numbers, even when most of the crime is committed by middle class European Americans. For every step along the circuitous path of the Ferguson, Missouri "justice system", fees are extracted, fees for being arrested, fees for being charged, fees for being fined. An endless bureaucratic sucking, all legal, pumping lifeblood into the community coffers, and the poor and the black are disproportionately fined, feed, and re-feed. As if America is sweeping its trash off the streets, and sucking out what little wealth the poor possess. Surely we can find a better way to finance our cities, and enforce our laws.