Monday, December 15, 2014

If protests reflect anger at inequality, then why isn't New Albany protesting?

As we take a look at Mark Bittman's superb essay, it seems like a question worth asking.

Have there been protests here in New Albany?

If so, did media cover them?

I believe there were protests in Louisville, and perhaps these drew from the surrounding region, although this points to a sad fact: Fairly soon, we'll have to pay a bridge toll to leave our own town for a protest in Louisville.

Unless we just speedily pass through NA on the way there, via the Sherman Minton. But that's another story.

Perhaps I'm overlooking NA's innate perfection; as in Soviet vassal states of old, there is no need to protest when one lives in the worker's paradise.

(drums fingers, whistles the Internationale)

No ... that isn't it, either.

Is It Bad Enough Yet?, by Mark Bittman (New York Times)

THE police killing unarmed civilians. Horrifying income inequality. Rotting infrastructure and an unsafe “safety net.” An inability to respond to climate, public health and environmental threats. A food system that causes disease. An occasionally dysfunctional and even cruel government. A sizable segment of the population excluded from work and subject to near-random incarceration.

You get it: This is the United States, which, with the incoming Congress, might actually get worse.

This in part explains why we’re seeing spontaneous protests nationwide, protests that, in their scale, racial diversity, anger and largely nonviolent nature, are unusual if not unique. I was in four cities recently — New York, Washington, Berkeley and Oakland — and there were actions every night in each of them. Meanwhile, workers walked off the job in 190 cities on Dec. 4.

The root of the anger is inequality, about which statistics are mind-boggling: From 2009 to 2012 (that’s the most recent data), some 95 percent of new income has gone to the top 1 percent; the Walton family (owners of Walmart) have as much wealth as the bottom 42 percent of the country’s people combined; and “income mobility” now describes how the rich get richer while the poor ... actually get poorer.

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