Outrageous Poverty and the Blue Dogs

OK, you all know about Paris Hilton's $325,000 doghouse. Then the Wall Street Journal chimed in with an article by a British physician informing the American public that dogs get better health care than ordinary humans in the British medical system. Thank God for those good U.S. insurance corporations that protect us from such a fate. And thank God for warning us of the dangers of single payer.

Dalrymple, Theodore. 2009. "Man vs. Mutt." Wall Street Journal (8 August).

Then Barbara Ehrenreich published a brilliant piece showing how governments are criminalizing poverty -- yes, making it a crime to threaten society by sleeping on the street or some such violent act. Yet, dogs, are free to behave that way.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2009. "Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?" New York Times (August 8)


From all this I have now learned that dogs have become the standard by which we must judge humanity. When workers complement bosses for treating them like dogs, we will understand. Poor people should aspire to enjoy canine cuisine.

Makes you want to join the Blue Dogs (or should that be Blue Bloods?). Or might there be a better system for organizing society? I don't have time to go any further. I have to get back to reading Kapital.

The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man - hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence, relations which cannot be better described than by the cry of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: Poor dogs! They want to treat you as human beings!

Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right