Of Course E. Ky is the Most Criminally Poor; What Are We Going to Do About it?

Signs of spring in eastern Kentucky: blooming dogwood and redbuds, ferns covering the trash dumped in the woods and the latest study repeating the obvious: that people exploited by Big Coal are irretrievably enslaved by poverty.

Bill Estep at the Herald:

Kentucky did poorly in the latest national survey of well-being, but the state's 5th Congressional District fared even worse.

The district covering Eastern and Southern Kentucky ranked the lowest among 434 nationwide included in a survey of people's perception of well-being.

The survey assessed people's emotional and physical health; behavior that affects health, such as smoking or exercising; job satisfaction and access to basic needs, including food and housing; and their outlook on life.

SNIP

Donna Pace sees the reality of the survey every day. She heads the Harlan County Community Action Agency, which has assistance programs to help people with heating, food and other needs. Requests for services have increased as jobs in the regional coal industry plummeted the last two years.

"We're seeing people we've never seen before, who never had to ask for help," Pace said.

Cynical and pessimistic as I am, I have genuine hope that the Affordable Care Act - which after just six months has allowed 370,000 low-income Kentuckians to obtain the health insurance that is a huge step away from generational poverty - will be the game-changer that nothing else has ever been.

Which is why powerful entities like Big Coal and the Koch Brothers and Wall Street are bound and determined to destroy the ACA.

People who can take pride in their work because they are well-paid and humanely benefited are proud, responsible citizens are not the beaten-down drones the plutocrats need to create a maintain a serfs-and-lords economy,

Billionaires feed on poverty. Obscene wealth needs hundreds of millions of poor people getting poorer every day. It's been true since the first neolithic asshole stole more than his share of the aurochs somebody else risked his life to kill.

Appeals to religion don't work; religion justifies their theft. Appeals to social responsibility don't work; rich sociopaths don't give a fuck about society. Appeals to human morality don't work; the rich don't think the non-rich are human.

The only thing that has ever worked - for 40 years from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s - is to tax the criminally rich out of existence.