Culture of Death

Andrew Greeley remains the voice of sane catholicism. With an eye for hypocrisy in govt. and and ear to the ground for the little guy, Greeley knows the ins and outs of power mongering. Speaking of the culture of death, that great recent catholic mantra, Greely spins out fact after fact about the soullessness that has become the American nightmare.

Greeley notes that poverty is on the rise, profits for big corporations are getting bigger, and the hatred for the poor simply dfsguises itself as good old, virtuous greed.

While he's not willing to say that hurricane Katrina was sent by God to avenge America's injustices towards the poor and for carrying out a bogus and corrput war, he does note that Katrina pays in some way a terrible debt that FrankenBush and his cohorts have exacted on the American soul.
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2 Deadly Sins Did Big Easy In
by Andrew Greeley

The terrible, tragic mess in New Orleans reflects and adds to the economic and social mess in the whole country. The foolish, endless war in Iraq has pushed the national debt beyond all reasonable limit.

The tax benefits for President Bush's friends, "the haves and the have mores" as he called them in an unwise slip of the tongue, have aggravated the deficit problems for which the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren will have to pay. Much of the debt is owned by the Chinese, who have also taken over the clothing market. Median family income and real wages fell again this year (according to the Wall Street Journal) and the proportion of the country that lives in poverty has risen again. The cost of gasoline climbs almost every day because the obscenely profitable oil companies have not plowed any money into building new refineries for the last 15 years. The proportion of people without any health insurance also has increased.

Many industries -- airlines and automotive especially -- are trying to make money by outsourcing jobs to other countries and curtailing the salaries and benefits of workers. The most notable of the offending industries -- Big Oil and Big Pharma -- are piling up profits squeezed from lifeblood of the working and middle class. No one cares about poverty anymore, so long as it is limited to the poor (like the people who couldn't escape from New Orleans because they couldn't afford autos).

. . . . . . . .

The country's habit of responding to infrastructure problems with too little and too late (Iraq writ large) will produce more disasters. Airports that are too crowded and inadequate air traffic control, poor public education, lack of concern for the poor, spiraling medical costs -- all are infrastructure problems that will come back to haunt us.

We are as a culture too proud and too greedy to worry about such matters, just as we didn't care a few years ago about the incompetence of the FBI and the CIA -- and the inability of the FBI to hire enough translators of Arabic or devise a working computer system.

The United States is the only superpower left, we can do anything we want, we don't have to care about what other countries think or worry about levees and pumps, new runways, more refineries, global warming, near misses at airports, better education, or competition from China and Asia. God Bless America!

© 2005 Chicago Sun Times

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