The Great Depression Right Outside Our Doors

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_great_depression_right_outside_our_doors_20111028/

While Occupy Wall Street and similar movements around the country take aim at financial institutions and their political cronies for taking the country into recession, let’s not forget those at the very bottom who were victims of economic depression long before the current collapse.

Connie Rice, a Los Angeles civil rights attorney, writes about their plight in a powerful new book, “Power Concedes Nothing: One Woman’s Quest for Social Justice in America, From the Courtroom to the Kill Zones.” She tells the story of how she and her colleagues have worked to free poor neighborhoods of the evils of gang killings, police brutality, poorly run schools and bad health. They are doing it in a civil rights organization with a hands-on approach called the Advancement Project.

“Our experts fret over a Great Recession but ignore the permanent Great Depression beneath their penthouses,” Rice writes.

Recalling Dr. Martin Luther King’s call for a radical restructuring of our society, Rice says his dream “barely survives 40 years of Southern Strategy race baiting, wrecking-ball destruction of safety nets, failure of public institutions, unhinged greed from our banking and financial sectors, a caste of American untouchables abandoned to prisons and an underground economy increasingly dominated by gangs that grow in power and reach.”

More at the link --

[Autumn]

1. Sorry but that damn thing broke right through

my fucking door. For many of us it broke in quite a while ago.