John Edwards Mentioned Positively in a New Poverty Book

A book called Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It was published in June. My institution bought a copy and I thumbed through it. Sure enough, on pages 156-7, JRE is mentioned twice.

The context is about pensions (and folks getting cheated out of them when companies declared bankruptcy) within a chapter entitled, "Elderly, Angry, and Looking for Work."

First quote:

"And while leading Democrats, such as ex-Senator John Edwards had long pushed for a reform of the bankruptcy process that better protected workers' pensions and prevented the executives of bankrupt companies from walking away with multimillion-dollar handouts, the Bush White House wasn't interested in such safeguards."

Second quote:

"During his campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, John Edwards claimed that from 2005 through early 2008 nearly two-thirds of US companies had frozen their pension plans, and one in five workers had actually seen reductions in the size of their eventual retirement benefits. This trends was a startling reversal of three quarters of a century of government policy aimed to shore up and protect the nation's pension systems."

The point here is that our elderly got ripped off and had to go to Wal-Mart or some where else to earn extra money.

http://tinyurl.com/ljtllx (link to Amazon copy)

You know, I bet this nonsense is still going on and no one is paying attention to it, even with a centrist administration.

I sure miss his voice. I think Earl Ofari Hutchinson did too when he penned his piece this week, "Poverty Is Still a Dirty Word."