Good News And Bad News

We all know that there's no such thing as a bank with a conscience -- at least not one of the huge corporate banks. In spite of what the Supreme Court may believe, corporations are not people and only people have consciences. A corporation only has a bottom line, and they don't care who they have to screw over to fatten the profits of that bottom line.

In the last couple of years banks in this country have been foreclosing on homes at a record level. But while these banks file the paperwork to foreclose on homes, it is actual humans to have to deliver that paperwork and force people from their homes -- usually deputy sheriffs and hired movers.

A couple of days ago one of those corporate banks, Duetsche Bank in Atlanta, sent sheriff's deputies and movers to toss another person out of there home. But when those deputies and movers got to the home, they found it inhabited by 103 year-old Vita Lee and her 89 year-old daughter. That was when those deputies and movers showed they had a conscience. They didn't care how legal the bank paperwork was, they absolutely refused to evict those two women.

I applaud the decision made by those deputies and movers. Kicking a 103 year-old woman from the house she had lived in for 53 years would take a pretty hard-hearted person. Maybe the bank executives would like to go do that job themselves, since they have yet to demonstrate they even have a heart.

Ms. Lee told the people who had come to move her, "Please don't come in and disturb me no more. When I'm gone you all can come back and do whatever they want to." Thank sounds like some pretty good advice to me. I'm just glad to see some authorities in this country still have a conscience.

Meanwhile, the bad news is that poverty continues to grow in this country, and it is innocent children that are being directly affected by that growth. Data from the Department of Agriculture shows that in the last four years the number of children that are receiving free or low cost meals at school has risen by 17% -- from 18 million in 2007 to a current total of over 21 million.

These 3 million new children on the free or reduced-price lunch program are from families that once considered themselves middle class -- that is, until they lost their jobs and were unable to find a new job. And it just keeps getting worse. Every week more families slip into poverty -- which means more children are condemned to grow up in poverty. And the politicians in Washington do nothing but argue over whether rich people should get a new massive tax cut.

Politicians, especially Republicans and blue dogs, are now showing they don't have any more of a conscience than a corporate bank -- that is, none at all.