If HRC runs in 2016, who should be the pro-worker, pro-peace, pro-justice candidate in the race?

[Ken Burch]

110. Not a valid characterization of progressives at all-and a slander against most of the poor, btw.

It's not about rejecting the idea that ANY social programs might need changing(the New Left was critiquing the Great Society programs as soon as they were implemented, as far as that goes, and calling for the government to actually listen to the poor and take THEIR wishes into consideration, but that's not what you're interested in-you just want to regiment the poor and to be able to pass moral judgment on them, as if you can claim moral superiority over them simply because, due to quirks of fate, you're doing better than them in this system)it's about opposing the notion of leaving the poor with nothing WHILE the programs are being fixed. Change things, but take care of the powerless WHILE you're changing them.

And, as far as that goes, the overwhelming majority of the poor did NOTHING to cause their own misery...some have made their lives worse, but usually that happened AFTER their conditions were rendered bleak in the fist place. Substance abuse is almost always a last step in the process...it happens AFTER the poor(or anyone else)has had all their hopes crushed by life. The poor don't get high just for the hell of it...it's the anesthetic for the terminal conditions their lives have become.

Most poor people DO want to work, though.

Most poor people with kids DO want to raise them right, and most of them try their best to do so. If previous Democratic administrations had done the decent thing and allowed two-parent families to get public assistance, at least temporarily, there wouldn't have BEEN a significant problem with family breakup among poor families.

Most poor people DO want to better themselves and to get out of poverty.

If progressives(and we aren't a unified lot, by any means)question anything on the matter of poverty, it's the notion that we've somehow reached this Great Moral Reckoning in which MOST of the poor have been proven to be the authors of their own suffering, therefore the "enlightened" middle class is fully justified in lecturing them, regimenting them, and treating them as if they deserve more punishment than help...as if most poor people could easily have made it out of poverty anytime they wanted to, but just deliberately CHOSE to stay poor just to piss off the middle class.

We reject that notion because life isn't like that, and because the poor aren't like that, and because, if we're going to be honest, all of us that aren't, at the moment, poor need to admit that we could end up in that condition at any time, if the right combination of bad breaks came our way.

Expect people to try to be decent and to help themselves, yes...but don't assume that they have to be forced to do those things, or that you are entitled to judge them if they haven't been able to help themselves...because this system is rigged, and getting more and more rigged, against more and more of us.

As Phil Ochs once to aptly put it..."there, but for fortune. go you or go I".