The New York Times lead story is U.A.W. Makes Concessions to Help Automakers. The article is pretty aptly titled because the NYT chose to focus entirely on the evil UAW parasites that are sucking the poor, helpless automakers dry through ludicrous demands such as job security and pension/health care payments.

The Big Three claim their industry is tanking not because of their refusal to change their big, heavy, gas-guzzling car designs, but because evil workers are demanding their contractually promised benefits. The Big Three are failing not because the rest of the world is building fuel-efficient cars, but because the UAW demands that CEOs pay their salaries between the time their jobs get shipped to Mexico, and they find new sources of employment.

Written beside the American creed of hating terrorists and loving the Irish and Italians should be the footnote and we ignore poor people. Poor people always get the shit end of every deal usually because they can't get the attention of politicians or pundits, and because of this the poor people in New Orleans and India have a lot in common.

India has more than 100,000 millionaires, and is creating new ones at a rate rivaled only be Russia. Meanwhile, nearly half of Mumbai's 14-18 million residents live in slums. In the United States, poor people suffer under a specialized caste system that masquerades as a functioning democracy. In the good ole' US of A, the top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression.

Yet, in the 2008 election, neither major candidate uttered the word "poor" in the thousands of hours clocked speaking into cameras. But the sickness of ignoring the poor goes beyond John McCain and Barack Obama. The United States government and the corporate media systematically ignore the suffering of the poor, too.