Tuesday, April 01, 2008

AMERICA - Race, Poverty, and the Inner City

"Race, Poverty, and the Inner City --- 40 Years Later" Bill Moyers Journal

The article is short, so I cite only the comments from the people interviewed.

Senator Fred Harris (D-OK):
(link to interview with video)

"I think virtually everything [the Kerner Commission recommended] was right... one of the awfullest things that came out of the Reagan presidency and later was the feeling that government can’t do anything right and that everything it does is wrong. The truth is that virtually everything we tried worked. We just quit trying it. Or we didn’t try it hard enough. And that’s what we need to get back to.

We made progress on virtually every aspect of race and poverty for about a decade after the Kerner Commission report and then, particularly with the advent of the Reagan administration and so forth, that progress stopped. And we began to go backwards... When we cut out a lot of these social programs, or the money for them... [and] we don’t emphasize jobs and training and education and so forth as we had been doing, there are bad consequences from that... I think what you need to do is to help people up, give ‘em a hand up. And recognize the kind of terrible conditions that they’re grown up in."

Newark Mayor Cory Booker:


"The knee jerk reaction [is] to spend more money. Well, you know what? I can show you places in the city of Newark where we're doing more with less simply because we have good people stepping forward and saying, "I'm not gonna tolerate this any more in my nation, in my community, on my block." They're doing mentoring programs. You have grassroots leaders... Because it's all about the spirit. It all comes down to a spiritual transformation... At some point in America, we're going to have to get beyond blame and start accepting responsibility."

OK, readers, what to you think?

For me, it's not a surprise that with the advent of the GOP's Moses (President Reagan) trumpeted the beginning of corporations-before-peons era. Corporate Greed before the (so called) Christian Ethic of caring for the less fortunate.

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