Who Will Speak For the Poor?

If there was any doubt as to who Congress works for, it should have evaporated after the passage of the so-called "Cromnibus" spending bill last week. Included in the funding bill were provisions so odious to good sense that more representatives in Congress should have stood up in protest. One of these, a provision repealing certain regulations on derivatives trading, is so outrageous an act that every single member of Congress who voted for the bill should be ashamed to return to their home districts for Christmas. To make it even worse, the provision was drafted by Citigroup, one of the rogues whose reckless gambling through derivatives trading helped wreck the economy in 2008. Adding insult to injury, the same bill contained a provision raising the maximum allowable political donation so that a couple can now contribute a maximum of $3.1 million to a political party of their choice, as though our system of government was not already awash in money. 

It is fitting that one of the last acts of this Congress is a final insult against the majority of the public. The Congress that couldn't see fit to raise the minimum wage, fix gaping loopholes in the tax code that allow the wealthy and corporations to pay little in taxes, mandate that men and women be paid equally for the same job, couldn't be bothered to help veterans of the wars they helped to create, couldn't help themselves but continue to ignore all but the wealthy at the very end. 

If Congress isn't going to act on behalf of the poor and middle class, then who will? If representatives elected to speak for us all will only speak for a small percentage of exorbitantly wealth Americans, then who will speak for the poor in this country, for those who are supposedly middle class but live lives of economic insecurity, whose ranks grow larger every year? Who will talk about the outrage of a so-called recovery where most of the gains have gone to the top 1%, while incomes remain stagnant or have decreased?

Who in power is going to speak about the injustice of a lack of affordable housing in this country, where rents in urban areas for the smallest of spaces average over $1,000 a month? Who is going to speak about the injustice of a "social safety net" that fails to live up to the name, where a person can be poor enough to barely scrape by, but not poor enough to merit any sort of help? Who will decry the injustice of a broken system of public education, deliberately starved of funds at all levels, so that the nation's children face crowded classrooms with outdated textbooks, and the nation's high school graduates face the prospect of attending college and graduating with debt equivalent to a home mortgage, all for lousy job prospects at the end?

It is outrageous that the men and women on both sides of the aisle supposedly elected to speak for all of us have abandoned almost completely that responsibility. Little wonder, then, that not even 40% of the public eligible to vote bothered to show up at the elections. But this is exactly the wrong response. If our politics is drowning in cash; if our elected leaders speak only for the very rich, then the solution is not disengagement but organization and more activism. The only way to fix the problem, and to get a more responsive Congress, is to band together and give them hell for thinking that we can be ignored. When they are about to do something outrageous, tie up their phone lines with indignation, flood their office with letters and crash their website with email traffic! And if they still don't listen, organize to get them voted out! If you're angry with your elected representative, then do something about it. Only if we act together to change what's happening will we, eventually, manage to get a government that speaks for us all.