In Bailout Talk, What About Saving the Have Nots?

[MountainLaurel]

On Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in Southeast Washington, homeless people rummage through garbage cans in search of food. Unemployed men and women congregate near construction sites, only to leave discouraged when told that no day laborers are needed. Others opt to sell drugs; some, their bodies -- risking death to survive.

"The war is not abroad -- it's here against the poor," George Robinson, a 51-year-old veteran, told me yesterday after leaving a mental-health counseling session at St. Elizabeths Hospital. He still sounded depressed. "Prices so high on everything and wages so low it doesn't even pay to work."

As the nation's leaders grapple with how to spend $700 billion to stimulate the economy, the concerns of truly hopeless and despairing people such as Robinson have been given short shrift. Even as Congress was bailing out the financial system, a modest proposal to fund jobs programs, expand unemployment benefits and increase spending on food stamps was put on hold.

A clash for a lion's share of the bailout booty has been symbolically cast as Main Street vs. Wall Street -- in essence, the have-much against the have-more.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/21/AR2008102102551.html

[FirstLight]

1. I am so lucky

I have a roof over my head and food in the fridge...but I have been living from hand to mouth for my entire adult life... I finished college and had about 2 years of good employment at the end of the Clinton era...but now I sometimes fel like my effort is a joke.

borroring from one bill to buy food is commonplace. Missing work because of sick kids or me being sick is not thought about in terms of geting well, but in how much money I lost for the day...

So many others in really dire circumstance compared to me... and yet so mnay of us ALL need relief from this indentured servitude to our corporate masters.

I can only pray that Obama an pull this off despite their obvious attempts to steal it.!