"What do insanely poor people buy that ordinary people know nothing about?"

[daredtowork]

37. There is another post on DU

About "what is politics"? - and I think that question has the potential to exonerate politics and politicians from the problems of poverty. I've notices that a lot of posts on poverty around here - such as SSI/SSDI-related ones - will sink without comment or rec when they are not actually under attack.

I just started reading the Trilateral Commission's "Crisis in Democracy" which someone else posted on DU. I didn't realize that the US part was largely a response to Rawls' Theory of Justice and that's when the word "inequality" re-entering US political culture. I've been wondering how people started talking about "income inequality" again without the instant stigma of "socialism/communism". Anyway, that book is written from a standpoint very much above issues of social justice and seems to regard the whole issue of government providing social safety nets as a failed experiment or a brief aberration in a larger historical pattern.

Anyway, I think there are a lot of people, even in the Democratic party, who would like to see a politics without people in it.