Are there no prisons?
- Plenty of Prisons.
And the Union Workhouses, are they still in operation?
- They are, I wish I could say there were not.
Oh, from what you said at first I was afraid something has happened to stop their useful coarse, I'm very glad to hear it.
-A few of us are endeavering to provide some meat and drink for the poor. What can we put you down for?
Nothing.
- You mean you wish to remain annonymous?
I wish to be left alone, I offer my support to the institutions I mentioned before, those who are badly off, should go there.
-Many, can't go there. Some would rather die.
If they would rather die, they'd better do it and decrease the surplus population
This sound like anyone we know lately?
Perhaps a certain serial adulterer, multi-millionaire "historian" non-lobbyist with a $500,000 Tiffany's Credit Line. Certainly one can trust the he is certainly an Expert On the Fortunes and Fates of the Poor.
“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working. And have nobody around them who works. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’-unless it’s illegal,” Gingrich said, according to multiple reports of the event.
"What if you paid them part time in the afternoon, to sit at the clerical office and greet people when they came in? What if you paid them to work as the assistant librarian. What if they were the assistant janitor, and carried a mop?
Well, I think that under that "what if" - you'd be putting the current clerical office clerk and assistant library OUT OF A JOB, so you'd get your union busting and your child labor bones going at once. What a two-fer.
However, as a matter of fact - we don't have to play "what if", we can simply look across the Pacific to places like Malaysia where what he's suggesting is already the standard.
Just ask Nike
What is child slave labor? Child slave labor is employment of minors, especially in work that may interfere with their education or endanger their health. Slavery seems outdated, but it is still prevalent in the modern world. Nike is one of the largest companies that use sweatshops and child slave labor.
Nike has sweatshops all over the world. In the 1970s, Nike's shoes were mostly made in South Korea and Taiwan, with some factories still in the United States. However, in 1984 the $5.2 billion dollar Nike Corp. closed its last U.S. factory and moved its entire production to the cheap labor in Asia. Many of their sweatshops can now be found in Indonesia, China, and Vietnam, because these countries have no protective labor laws and endless supplies of cheap labor.
CBS News 48 Hours reported on the Nike story in Vietnam and reported the following:
1.) Nike workers in Vietnam earned on average 20 cents per hour
2.) 15 women workers were hit on the head by their supervisor
3.) 45 women were made to kneel on the ground for 25 minutes with their hands in the air
4.) and a Korean supervisor fled the country after accusations that he sexually molested female workers.
Are there no workhouses? Why, yes there are. And apparently Gingrich would like to move them back into the U.S.. Yay, America.
Gingrich seems to be, or pretends to be, unaware the a significant portion of America's Poor - Actually Do work.
America’s Working Poor: How 12 Million Americans went from Working Poor to Food Stamps in Two Years. 38 Million Americans in Poverty by Government Statistics.
The middle class in America has been under assault for years but this recession only magnified the issue. Most Americans, 6 out of 10 own their home and this is where most of their wealth is stored. Yet the housing bubble bursting has wiped out much of what they once thought was part of their net worth. Housing has yet to recover the value that was once lost. But one group that we rarely hear about is the poor. More disturbing of all, we now have a large legion of working poor which boomed in the last decade. This trend actually started way before the official recession start date in December of 2007. Since the recession started, 12 million Americans have fallen from middle class or working poor to now relying on food assistance from the government.
This is also shown by the growing gap in income inequality. As reported by Bloomberg.
A widening gap between rich and poor is reshaping the U.S. economy, leaving it more vulnerable to recurring financial crises and less likely to generate enduring expansions.
Left unchecked, the decades-long trend toward increasing inequality may condemn Wall Street to a generation of unimpressive returns and even shake social stability, economists and financial-industry executives say.
“Income inequality in this country is just getting worse and worse and worse,” James Chanos, president and founder of New York-based Kynikos Associates Ltd., told Bloomberg Radio this week. “And that is not a recipe for stable economic growth when the rich are getting richer and everybody else is being left behind.”
This truth is growing more obvious, as Economist Come together in Solidarity with the Occupy Movement to stand against the Wealthy in support of the Middle Class and the Poor.
There are even some members of the 1%, who like Scrooge after his wild nigh of Ghostly Visits seemed to begun to come more in touch with there own basic humanity and humility than Gingrich seems capable of.
Today in Bloomberg Businessweek, Nick Hanauer, a sucessful venture capitalist who has helped launch more than 20 companies, including Amazon.com, writes an op-ed that demolishes the myth that the rich are “job creators” and that we should never raise their taxes.
Hanauer says that government policymakers who have lowered taxes on the rich for decades “had it backward.” He advocates for raising taxes on the wealthy to fund public investment and explains that “Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Middle-class consumers do”:
Of course the demonization of the poor as lazy, greedy and criminal is a long standing Republican game that goes all the way back to President Reagan's "Welfare Queen" imagery. The Poor simply aren't pulling their own weight, and need more punishment to bring them into line.
Like a serial abuser making excuses for their next brutal beating of their wife, girlfriend and/or children.
But In Gingrich's case it's even worse, because there's ample evidence this is merely a Pose on his part. He's merely pretending to be Scrooge to appeal to the hard-hearted, bigoted, Conservative Electorate. In 2009 Gingrich joined Al Sharpton and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to tour poor Schools around the Country at the Behest of President Obama.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Education Secretary Arne Duncan is joining forces with two unlikely allies, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, to push cities to fix failing schools.
The trio will visit Philadelphia, New Orleans and Baltimore later this year. They plan to add more stops as their tour progresses.
"These are cities that have real challenges but also tremendous hope and opportunity," Duncan told reporters on a conference call Thursday.
The idea came from a meeting they had with President Obama in May at the White House.
Education is high on Obama's priority list. He is seeking to boost achievement, keep kids from dropping out of high school and push every student to pursue some form of higher education.
I just watched Sharpton on MSNBC point out that at no time during this trip did Gingrich bring up the suggestion of "making poor kids work" as a solution to our inner city problems.
So not only has Gingrich shown himself to be a heartless, ignorant prick with these recent comments, he's a pandering, lying, ass gasket of a heartless, ignorant prick.
Which of course these days is entirely synonymous with: Republican Presidential Candidate.
Vyan