Not One

Trey Smith

We, who once led the world in worker rights, and whose management thinkers were considered gurus, now lag the world with many citizen rights.

And yet not a single presidential candidate from the Republicans or the Democrats is talking about poverty. None have presented plans. They say they’ll create jobs; we seem to have heard that song before. They say they’ve run companies (that closed factories and moved jobs to China) and that means they’ll be able to run the economy. Yeah, right.

President Obama has presented a Jobs Plan that when scrutinized has as much depth as a goldfish pond. The GOP candidates spent $12.5 million on television ads in Iowa alone, and Obama is raising a $1 billion war chest to fight the election. It is probably fair to say that people who can throw that sort of cash around don’t have a clue of what it is to be hungry, or to wait in a job line, or to fear foreclosure.
~ from Poverty in America: The Subject Presidential Candidates Would Prefer to Ignore by Marsha Coleman-Adebayo ~

It's not just this election year. Poverty has rarely been on the national agenda of the politicos. The last time we heard a mention of it was when President Bill Clinton decided it was high time to end welfare as we knew it. His grand strategy did nothing to stem the tide of poverty, it merely swept it further under the rug.

Let's face it. From the standpoint of the elites, poverty is a good thing. The more poverty we have means a better opportunity to depress wages and to attack unions (both the public and private sector flavors). When people are desperate, they'll work for a pittance and few will raise a peep if you force them to work overtime or the company decides to cut corners to save money.

More poverty also means less tax dollars flowing into state, county and city coffers. With local governments hamstrung to provide basic public services, many have turned to corporations to buy up our public assets for pennies on the dollar. Local government officials then are able to push off insolvency for another year or two and the corporations get to make huge profits squeezing the people even more than usual.

Best of all, widespread poverty provides the elite with the ability to create scapegoats. It's the age old "divide and conquer" strategy. They set up this group or that to take the fall and so the 99 percent spends most of the time fighting amongst themselves. With their attention diverted from what is actually going down, the poor rarely notice that it is the elites who are robbing us blind.

It's no wonder that you won't find any viable national candidate talking about poverty -- they love things the way they are now. Why upset a good thing?