As is self-evident, Republicans are gung-ho on cutting taxes because there is very little that government does that they truly value. The bigger the gaps are in the safety net, the better it is for many Republicans. The less protection of the environment, the more freedom there is, particularly for abusers. The more unregulated the financial institutions are, the more opportunity there is to create “funny money,” and the poor will only get a piece of that when it becomes a known counterfeit commodity.

We talk about the value of having a bird’s eye view of our society. If you could fly over every nook and cranny of our country, swooning down when desirable to get a better look, what would you see as America’s greatest, and most obvious problems? Since your flyover would include observations of the hollars in Appalachia as well as the neighborhood of Chicago’s west and south sides, you would see the abject poverty that reflects how tens of millions of Americans live.

You would also fly over Hempstead, the North Shore of Chicago and Beverly Hills. To a reasonable person, it might appear that the residents have more wealth than is necessary to live a comfortable life. That is particularly so when compared to the squalor in which so many of the others who we have seen are forced to live.

So, the obvious question arises. How can a country of so much wealth have so much poverty in it midst? This seems like such an obvious question to me. But that may be the problem. I am projecting my vision of America on everyone else, whether they agree with me or not. I don’t like the presence of poverty in our society, but clearly for many more, it is either a minor inconvenience or a badge of honor representing that some people clearly have it better than others.

For those who subscribe to the Bible, there is a line about the meek inheriting the earth. I guess that like virtually every other line in the Bible, it has a throw-away factor; a shelf-life only as long as it is convenient for someone the believe, or at least, espouse it. So, if I’m hung up on the economic disparity in our society, it may be that this is my problem and I need to “get over it.”

Like most people, I can be fairly stubborn and don’t like to sacrifice my values on a whim. But this leaves me in a position where I’m quite distant from the American mainstream.

I can be a bit of a policy wonk, but what good is advocating a set of policies if the public does not back them? The only other option is to grab an inordinate amount of the levers of power as so many well-healed Republicans seem to have done.

I could try to be preacher and spread the gospel of income inequality. But I think that many of our problems are papered over because there is the “preacher-industrial complex” telling us what to think and do.

I guess that the answer is for me to own my problem and hope that in small ways, the logic of the undesirability of income inequality will prevail. I can take a knee for that.

The post Is it my hang-up, or society’s, that we are so tolerant of poverty? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

One of the interesting differences between the discord following the deaths of unarmed black men in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore is to what extent African-Americans are full participants in the police and justice system in each community.

In Ferguson, justice was certainly delayed, if not denied, because of a white power structure that did not question itself after Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown. Wilson was one of 54 white officers out of a total of 57 police in Ferguson. The police chief was an old-guard white man, Tom Jackson. The mayor of Ferguson is James Knowles, III, who is also white. The Prosecuting Attorney in St. Louis County is Bob McCulloch who is white.

A clear picture of what exactly happened on that hot August afternoon in 2014 was not presented until the U.S. government, specifically the Department of Justice, became involved. It is no small coincidence that the U.S. Attorney-General was an African-American man, Eric Holder, and his boss is of course our African-American president, Barack Obama. The Justice Department issued two reports, both in March 2015. One detailed the incidents on Canfield Avenue on August 9 that led to the death of Michael Brown. The other was a critique of the police department in Ferguson and the North County Justice System.

It was not until these reports were released that we received an honest understanding of what really happened on August 9. The DOJ applied the kind of critical thinking to the testimony of Grand Jury witnesses that the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office did not. Some might have expected the DOJ under Holder to conclude that charges should have been pressed against Darren Wilson, but instead it methodically explained that there was not sufficient evidence to do so. But in the separate report, it took to task the judicial system in Ferguson and surrounding North St. Louis County communities.

In Baltimore, the judicial power structure has far more African-Americans in vital positions. The chief of police, Anthony Batts, is African-American as is the State’s Attorney, Marilyn Mosby. The city’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, is also black. Forty-three percent of the police officers are African-American compared to Ferguson’s five percent.

In Baltimore, all six of the police officers (3 white; 3 black) who were involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray were indicted by the state’s attorney with a range of criminal offenses. Five of the six are charged with second-degree assault. The indictments of these officers indicates to citizens of Baltimore that justice has the potential to be fair in their city. The same cannot be said about Ferguson.

If the police officers in Baltimore are convicted and sentenced with real penalties, it will be strong evidence that the justice system can function well in that city when it comes to use of excessive force by police officers. In another sense, it will be a tribute to the significance of black power.

But black power can only do so much in Baltimore or any other community. Even if the judicial system works to perfection, it does not automatically raise people out of poverty, provide them with affordable, comprehensive health care, humanize the schools, raise the level of the housing stock, or open up thousands of new job opportunities. Only if the judicial system could rule that the country needs a massive redistribution of wealth in America could the problems of Baltimore and other communities like it be fully addressed.

It is not advisable for any of us to sit around and wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to ultimately rule that wealth is unevenly distributed in the United States and that this situation must be remedied “with all deliberate speed.” (borrowing language from their school desegregation ruling in Brown v Topeka in 1954). Yet such a ruling, if enforced, would give society the tools to correct many of the economic injustices that currently exist in the United States.

A second way to bring comprehensive change to Baltimore, Ferguson, and any community in economic distress, is for the United States Congress to pass, and the President to sign, a massive stimulus bill that would create millions of jobs, provide adequate health care universally, modernize our housing stock, update our infrastructure, sensitize our schools, and ensure an adequate economic and social safety net for all citizens. This is a much more realistic approach than a Supreme Court ruling, because it is doubtful that the Court would find economic disparity to be unconstitutional.

As much as we can cheer the racial justice that seems to be happening in Baltimore and applaud what Eric Holder’s Justice Department has brought to Ferguson, we cannot lose sight of the reality that to bring a more complete justice to impoverished communities, the federal government must lead the way with economic redistribution. Only the federal government has the taxing and spending power to do this. To focus on local solutions to national problems is paradise to conservatives because local communities cannot enact economic justice. Neither can most states. We need more progressives at the national level who can help solve our urban problems through more economic fairness.

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