Being Poor And Powerless

ITS HARD BEING POOR in America, for many reasons. Particularly hard being poor and black, but that's another topic altogether. If you're poor, chances are you get stopped by the police more often than if you were wealthy. The true magnitude of this has only recently been discovered. All across the fruited plain, it would seem, local police forces' haul harmless people in on trumped up charges, on orders from higher up. It got to the point where Obama's Attorney General issued a directive to all local police departments in America to ease up on poor people. They already have enough problems. The problem is, revenue for cities and towns has gone down. You can't suddenly start to roll rich people; they're immune, by virtue of power and status. In steps the current attorney general, Mr. Sessions, appointed by Trump. he issued a directive rescinding the Obama directive; in other words, poor people in cities and towns across America are back to being targets. Defenseless poor people are ocne again at high risk for police harassment. Mr. sessions probably believes, or pretends to believe, that poor people are poor only because of laziness, and a healthy fear of the police might put some ambition in them, or something like that. In conservative ideology, everything is determined by free market capitalism, which rewards some, and punishes others. The actual truth, we know, is far more complicated than that. There are many factors which determine who is poor, who has what resources, including tax policy, which is made by the wealthy, of the wealthy, for the wealthy. The United States is owned and controlled by the wealthy, and always has been. Our famously divided country is divided by, more than anything else, the disparity in wealthy, which is enormous in America. If the division between rich and poor continues to increase, as it seems destined to, then all other divisions will increase, racial, conservative versus progressive, amid many others. Money is power because people use it to influence and control other people, by employing them. Democracy, in which everybody has equal power, cannot exist unless everyone has economic equality. We can have democracy, or economic inequality, not both. throughout history countries have chosen to dispense with democracy and encourage economic inequality, with tragic results. Perhaps there will come a time when we decide that this must change.