War On The Poor [Live From Death Row Commentary 1992]

Lyrics

[Spoken Word by Mumia Abu-Jamal] In every phase and facet of national life, there is a war being waged on America's poor. In social policy, poor mothers are targeted for criminal sanctions for acts that, if committed by mothers of higher economic class, would merit treatment in the Betty Ford Center. In youth policy, governments hasten to close schools while building boot camps and prisons as their graduate schools. Xenophobic politicians hoist campaigns to the dark star of imprisonment for street beggars, further fattening the fortress economy whose only apparеnt solution to the scourge of homelеssness is to build more and more prisons. In America's '90s, being poor is not so much as economic status as it is a serious character flaw, a defect of the spirit. Federal statistics tell a tale of loss and [?] so dreadful that Dickens of a tale of two cities fame would cringe consider: - Seven million people homeless, with less than $200 in monthly income; - Thirty-seven million people, 14.5 percent of the nation's population, living below poverty levels; - Of that number, 29 percent are African Americans, meaning over 10.6 million Blacks living in poverty. Both wings of the ruling "Republicrat" party try to outdo themselves in announcing new, ever more draconian measures to restrict, [?], restrain and to eliminate the poor. One is reminded of the wry observation of the French writer Anatole France: "The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread." Already, U.S. manufacturers have fled to Nafta-friendly Mexico and only the Zapatista insurgency and [?] has slowed an emerging flood of western capitals. Outguned in industrial wars by Japan and Germany, the U.S. has embarked on a low-technology, low-skilled, high-employment scheme that exploits the poor as the stupid and the slow via a boom in prison construction. America's soul growth industry. Increasingly, more and more Americans are guarding more and more American prisoners, for more and more years. And this amid the lowest crime rate in decades. No major political party has an answer to this social dilemma, short of cages and graves for the poor. The time is ripe for a new, brighter, life-affirming vision that liberates, not represses the poor, who, after all, are the great majority of this world's people. Neither serpentine politics nor a sterile economic theory which treats them, people, as mere economic units, offer much hope for the very politicians they vote for spit in their faces, while economists write them off as nonpersons. It must come from the poor, a rebellion of the spirit that reaffirms their intrinsic human worth based upon who they are, as opposed to what they possess. From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.