Alfonso Jackson opened his mouth: "being poor is a state of mind, ....

not a condition"


http://www.berkshireeagle.com/Stories/0,1413,101%257E6267%257E2179768,00.html


Mind games with the poor

Here's one you didn't see unless you were reading the papers with a fine tooth comb this week: Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Alfonso Jackson told a congressional committee he doesn't talk about housing the poor because "being poor is a state of mind, not a condition."

What a howler! Twenty years ago, when Americans still had a sense of outrage, it would have created a minor scandal, and the late night television comics would have had a field day. "Gee, if being poor's all in my head, I guess I can just call my landlord and tell him to imagine I've paid the rent." But now, the public and the media are so numb to this sort of talk that the Associated Press relegated it to the bottom of a brief story about a paltry restoration to a massive cut in the Section 8 housing voucher program. According to Google News, only nine newspapers in the entire country saw fit to run it.

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Mr. Jackson is typical of the people Mr. Bush appoints to not do jobs he doesn't want done -- house poor people, protect the environment, police the stock markets. And this is not the only problem the Bush administration pretends doesn't exist in the hope that will make it go away. If poverty is a state of mind and not a material condition that results in an inability to pay for the basic necessities of life, like a warm, dry place to sleep, then no one in America is poor.
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run this man out of town