Forty years down the road from The Kerner Report’s Recommendations for Action, we haven’t accomplished squat in the fight to overcome poverty in the inner cities, or in the rural areas of the US where seasonal jobs in industrial agriculture create conditions favorable to a modern slavery as old as time and as new as tomorrow’s nightly newscast.
Greed.
Stupidity.
Cruelty.
Fear.
Imprisonment.

Let’s come together over this, people.
If we can spend $12 billion a MONTH on a war halfway round the world, we can build good schools in the inner cities, and staff them with competent teachers. We can provide jobs in something as simple as Cory Booker’s program to weatherize the public infrastructure of Newark, New Jersey. You can create industries out of the recognition of unmet needs.
Unmet needs abound in our nation.
Number one on that list: good, steady, decent-paying jobs.
Not burger-flipping or shelf-stocking at Wal-Mart.
Building.
Repairing.
Renewing.
We’re not talking about rocket science, and heaven help me, I’m not even talking about unionized jobs (although I was a vocal advocate Saturday of repealing Right to Work in Texas, because this bit of idiocy is how the corporate masters artificially depress wages throughout not just the South but much of the Midwest and even along the Pacific shore).
We’re talking about the kind of jobs you used to be able to get in Detroit, building cars; or building the parts to go into cars. We’re talking about the kind of jobs you used to be able to get in Charlotte and Darlington, working in a clothing factory, or in Post, Texas at a fabric mill. We’re not talking about six-figure incomes, but we’re not talking about minimum-wage, either.

That’s the first step.
The second step is health care coverage for everybody, NOT the few who can afford it — because the hospital system is losing ground under an increasing burden of misuse of emergency rooms by uninsured and underinsured Americans, and this is in fact also eating up resources people who are in serious emergency situations — post-car-crash trauma, for example, or acute myocardial infarct — need just as desperately as that young man who died of toothache awhile back.

This is not meant to deny that poverty, particularly that variety known as deep poverty, disproportionately affects black Americans.

It is to point out that once more, the Reaganite mantra of “government can’t do anything” has conned black people, white people, Latino people, and poor people in general into voting against their own best interests, and it’s forty years since Dr. King was killed, and it’s high time we, the citizens of the United States of America, set about acting on the Kerner Report conclusions .

Let the billionaires eat cake — as long as Wall Street can afford it.