Two Perspectives on Riots, Jobs, and Poverty

Two Perspectives on Riots, Jobs, and Poverty

In case no one has noticed, there has been an increasing number of violent outbursts and riots in the streets. New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg and America’s President Barack Hussein Obama have, respectively, keen insights and perspicacious cures for all that civil disruption.

The upheavals in the Mideast are somewhat explicable given the so-called Arab Spring although the violence in the United States and Great Britain can’t be explained away as easily. Fortunately, New York’s Mayor for Life Michael Bloomberg has his finger on the pulse of humanity and is fully capable of pinpointing the cause: poverty and a dearth of jobs.

Hizzonor contended on his Friday radio show, (which he skipped last week due to a scandal in his administration), ”You have a lot of kids graduating college, [who] can’t find jobs. That’s what happened in Cairo. That’s what happened in Madrid. You don’t want those kinds of riots here.”

So, if I understand the mayor correctly, Egyptians weren’t protesting against former despot Hosni Mubarak and the mobs in Spain–and London–were just staging boisterous campaigns for employment and not anarchically revolting?

I’m sorry to advise Mr. Bloomberg that he is wrong as proven by facts and slews of videotapes.

Egyptians wanted to depose Mubarak, and succeeded. The mostly Muslim English rioters would love to have toppled the regimes in that country, but their destructive efforts failed. The Spanish–and the Greeks? Who knows? They always seem annoyed at something or other.

None of this means to suggest poverty and unemployment aren’t serious issues everywhere. As of 2010, America’s national poverty rate stood at 15.1% or 46.2 million people and jobless Americans still number 9.1% of the working population, all of which are horrific figures.

Bloomberg may have analyzed the world situation with his pulsating finger but we have a man in charge of the U.S. economy who has been fingering America’s fiscal health as effectively as Mayor Bloomberg gauged world events.

Some cynics would say President Obama been flipping his finger at the nation since he hasn’t done a damned thing about poverty or unemployment over the course of his 32 months in office.

Correction: He has done a damned thing, he’s made both worse. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5469.)