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Saturday, October 4, 2008

Screw The Poor

Surfing the net, and I come across Michael Yons blog about Afghanistan. So I'm scrolling down the page, looking at the pictures, and I come across this little bit of text:
But at another American unit, I recall officers grumbling and haggling over how much they would pay Iraqis for ammo they were turning in. These weren’t the rich Iraqis who sent their kids to Sandhurst or Paris for school, but the poor, uneducated ones who worked in dirty places where they sometimes found explosives, or perhaps earned some money planting them. And I thought what a shame—those Iraqis might, after all, sell the same explosives to terrorists, or get paid more to just bury bombs in the roads. Such bombs killed or wounded literally tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis. But there is a natural tendency among people the world over: few among us seem to like to pay poor people a fair price for anything. We think poor people should work for next to nothing and be happy for it. I have seen this kind of contempt for the poor throughout the world. Rich Iraqis do it to poor Iraqis. Rich Americans to poor Americans.
I know I don't like dealing with crazy people. You can't conduct a simple business transaction with them. Once you start talking to them you become part of their world and it's hell getting away from them. Are poor people crazy? Or maybe we just see them that way.

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