The Poor Are Still Invisible

Just as the candidates in this interminable national election, which is financed by the wealthy, have focused on jobs while ignoring income, they have also focused on the shrinking middle class while ignoring the poor. I'll quote from the Los Angeles TImes story Poor go unheard in presidential race (October 16, 2012).

Kathleen O'Malley, whose granddaughter was playing with Starks' niece, said she's working as a dog walker to supplement her Social Security check.

"I don't consider myself middle class," O'Malley said. "I consider myself at the poverty line."

Too bad for her, and for the one in six U.S. residents who live in poverty.

If you've been following the presidential campaign, you might easily have gotten the impression that the poor no longer exist. The word "poverty" was mentioned once in the first debate between President Obama and GOP challenger Mitt Romney. Together, the two candidates made 29 references to the middle class. And in Tuesday's debate, I lost count after Romney reeled off more than half-a-dozen references in a single answer.

In the vice presidential debate, the word "poverty" got one mention. But Vice President Joe Biden and GOP challenger Paul Ryan dutifully followed their leaders, with 33 references to the middle class.

Congratulations, middle class. You're on the radar screen as never before, no doubt because the candidates believe the key to victory is to woo those of you who might still be undecided.

In the first debate Obama said he believed "we do best when the middle class is doing well." Romney said then and again on Tuesday that the middle class was being crushed. Ryan touted a five-point plan for a stronger middle class, and Biden said "my whole life has been devoted" to — anyone care to take a wild guess?

"Look at my record," Biden went on. "It's been all about the middle class."

The omission of the poor from the election discussion is despicable, of course, but it is hard to find any aspect of the Great Bamboozle which is not despicable.

It might be worth noting that those formerly in the middle class do not simply disappear, at least physically. They typically join the ranks of the invisible poor, a place where Joe Biden can't see them.

And while we could wish (and probably do) for a saner world, a fairer world, an "impossibly hospitable world" in the immortal words of Kurt Vonnegut's alternate persona Kilgore Trout, wishing will not make it so.

Thus we Americans are stuck in an insane society which is almost devoid of fairness, a place where, once one strips away all the substance—this is easy to do because there isn't much of it—all that's left is an enormous mountain of bullshit. There are only 17 days left until we find out who the new King of Bullshit Mountain will be.

Thank God for small favors.

Bonus Video — Blind Alfred Reed, 1929

 

Comments

[Dave]

Most poor people I know think they're middle class.

[Oliver]

I know what you mean Dave, but the real issue is the constant larceny by those at "the top" towards everyone else. The poor and the middle class are one and the same to the elite, if we see the middle class for what it is - a temporary phenomenon in history.

Throughout human-time, the alpha male (a.k.a. psychopathic) clique at the top of the stinking pyramid have got there by thieving, raping and pillaging from the rest - resulting in the poor staying poor.

With the unplanned birth of the middle class during a recent transitory period of trickle-down wealth, the psychos let them be for a while as they continued to prey on the weakest. The Crash of 1929 was manufactured to relieve most of the population of their savings, creating more poor. The nascent middle class was nearly wiped out then and there.

When the poorest were no longer so attractive as victims, the psychos in their never-ending lust for more-more-more turned their attention to the increasingly comfortable middle class, culminating in the pinnacle of theft now referred to as the Crash of 2007/08 - manufactured to relieve most of the population of their accumulated wealth in property and savings, via the taxpayer bailouts and disappeared asset values.

Now, you would think this would be enough. The clique have enough dollar bills to make a daisy chain to Uranus and back, several times over. But no. Now they are about to prey on each other, starting with a dust-up between US banker-terrorists and foreign elites such as the Chinese and Russian billionaire robber barons. The writing is on the wall - just wait for the US military-industrial string-pullers to foment for war after the election (using Iran as a tableau) whichever buffoon is "elected" next month by the blinkered who bother to vote in that sideshow.

The (im)moral of the story is that, for those with nil empathy for anyone else but their own fetid genes, enough is never enough.

This, in a nutshell (get your nuts before they disappear off the shelves) is the sorry state of Homo nonsapiens. We came, we saw, we conquered, we destroyed, we shat on our own doorstep, we ate each other and we disappeared - in a sliver of a flicker of geological time.

Ho hum, as Kurt V said many times. Lucky for him, he has been relieved of the need to witness any more of this comedic planet, which is the opposite of a place where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

[Ken Barrows]

Dave,

Following up on the comment that most poor consider themselves to be middle class, I offer a definition: everyone except the top 1% of households and bottom 1% of households are "middle class." Problem solved because Joe Biden has now spent his life fighting for everybody.