Stop saying it.

Editor,

In a documentary I watched about a month ago, Milton Friedman answered a question about wealth equality in a global economy organized along neoliberal lines: deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, subsidies for corporations (to stimulate "jobs"), a "flexible" (meaning non-union) workforce, and cuts to social programs.

Friedman said, with a visibly devious look in his eye, that despite wealth inequality the poor are "better off."

The interviewer was an amateur, the son of a Johnson & Johnson heir, and was hardly prepared to go toe-to-toe with a wily old con man, which left me boiling for weeks because there is no way I will ever be able to tell that mendacious intellectual tyrant that the fact of the matter is that poor people absolutely are not better off now that they are prey to corporate sharpies pulling every imaginable rug out from every person whose rugs they can get their hands on.

This shibboleth, that "the poor are better off," is as much hogwash as the "job creator" smoke that privileged nonentities who can get away with it get uninformed -- by definition -- TV watchers to parrot as justification for stomping on the weakest, poorest people to give themselves another crystal knickknack (from the most ironic scene in "The Act of Killing").

If you are among the people who say that "the poor are better off" in a world where corporate plunder is blessed and sold by cynical, hypocritical politicians, stop saying it. It isn't true. Not in the USA or anywhere else on the planet Earth.

Re: "More Hunger for the Poorest Americans" (12/25/2013)