Quote of the day

Joseph Grosso wonders about a viciously cold America:

What is it about the even barely noticed presence of poverty that sends so much of American politics and culture into attack mode? Harsh treatment of the poor of course has a long history in the work houses, debtors’ prisons, and chimney-sweepers, as any reader of Blake, Dickens, Hugo, and Zola can recognize. Yet in the present-day one would be hard-pressed to find a society more intolerant than the present United States. By now the facts have been so rehashed as to become strangely easier to ignore: the highest rate of poverty in the Western world, highest child poverty, highest permanent poverty, highest income inequality, highest rate of incarceration, highest health-care costs, it can go on and on. On top of it all one will probably the only society where one will find more, or at least as many, protests against improving any of this as for; where else in the world are there pro-austerity marches?

America — a place where everyone must have a job but also a place which shows neither a living wage nor a full employment platform for either legacy party.

A God fearing land?