xmlns:og='http://ogp.me/ns#'. The Digibandit: Feb 18, 2011

Friday, February 18, 2011

America Is One Spark Away From Revolution

Bob Herbert's op ed piece in the NY Times today stated:

Mr. Mishel has been trying to call attention to the human toll caused by job losses on this vast scale. The institute estimates that the poverty rate for children is in danger of increasing from 18 percent, which is where it was in 2007, the last year for which complete statistics are available, to a scary 27.3 percent in 2010.
For black children, you don’t want to know. But I’ll tell you anyway. The poverty rate for black kids was 34.5 percent in 2007. If the national unemployment rate rises, as expected, to the vicinity of 10 percent next year, the poverty rate for black children would rise to 50 percent or higher, analysts at the institute believe.

That would be a profound tragedy.

We already know that children are being harmed in families hammered by job losses, home foreclosures and the myriad stresses that grip families trying to cope with economic reversals. Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of the Children’s Health Fund and a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, has referred to these youngsters as the “recession generation,” and has described what is happening to them as “a quiet disaster.”



This is a prescription for massive social disruption - and it can take off as fast as those wildfires in California.



All it will take is someone who can galvanize that cauldron of misery out there in an America brought to economic ruin by the actions of greedy and rapacious AND non repentent capitalists gone wild.