Word: underclass
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Outside the Shi'ite underclass, however, there is little sympathy for Sadr and his cohorts. Most Iraqis wonder why it has taken so long for the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to take on the Mahdi Army. Inevitably, many are asking whether Maliki will go whole hog, pursuing the Mahdi Army until it is completely destroyed. Failure to do so could cost Maliki his political life, and leave Iraq to reckon with a wounded, more dangerous animal. On Wednesday, he gave the militias in Basra 72 hours to surrender their weapons...
...What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain...
...recently as a few decades ago, it was possible for a median-income American family to live comfortably and securely—but no longer. Today the middle class is rapidly becoming the underclass; working Americans’ incomes are stagnating just as food and fuel prices are soaring. Already millions of people are working two or three jobs, yet are still being forced to choose between feeding their families or heating their homes. (And heaven help you if you need prescription medicine or emergency care.) Is it any wonder that we have a foreclosure crisis? Is it any wonder...
...might consider Ridley Scott's American Gangster, which is based on the true story of a drug lord named Frank Lucas, who in the 1970s cornered the Harlem heroin market and thereby made millions upon millions. He is a black man, no less a member of a struggling underclass than his Italian and Irish movie predecessors, and he has a couple of gimmicks that they (who were never drug dealers) didn't have. For one thing, he eliminated the middle men; he bought his smack directly from sources in Southeast Asia and smuggled it into the country, often...
...liberally, as it were, missing among its innocent curls of smoke the sinister economic system that it sets up. One cannot sneer at the social irresponsibility of a Hummer driver and then return home to relax over a joint whose procurement demanded the subjection of an impoverished underclass on the fringes of society...