Poor People Are Now America's Most Important Cash Crop

Poor people have now become America's most important cash crop. The tens of millions of people who have become poor since our agriculture became mechanized, our factories closed and our unions broke are now the basis of huge industries, creating millions of jobs, that are engaged with confining them, intimidating them, policing them and incarcerating them. Whole regions (much of upstate New York) depend on a steady supply of poor people to fill the prisons that are now their most important engine of economic growth, and a whole array of institutions have arisen from giving their children a narrow scripted curriculum, filled with tests, that is perfect to train them for low wage work in the service sector, or if they are lucky, in the military or the police. The system works so beautifully because it creates jobs for the near poor on the misery of the poor while the elite keeps its monopoly of the nation's wealth unchallenged. And the system perpetuates itself because the supply of poor people continues to grow as more sectors of the economy are privatized, globalized and deprived of union protection. Who needs cotton? Who needs steel? We have the largest growing population of poor people in the advanced world to use as a basis to create jobs and generate corporate profits! God Bless America!