by

“Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was paying a former student to keep quiet about allegations of sexual abuse from the time when Hastert was a teacher and wrestling coach in Illinois, two sources with knowledge of the federal government investigation told CNN on Friday afternoon.”

There are serious reasons why this doesn’t make Hastert much different from other Members of Congress, or for that matter the President.

Childhood poverty has risen for every major racial group since 2008, according to a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) report released on 28 May. This, over the time Barack Obama has been president, but he’s immensely assisted by the Congress in this work to transfer more wealth to the plutocrats who run the system.

As the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn so succinctly puts it, “Wealth creates poverty, and poverty creates wealth.” When massive wealth is flooded to the billionaires, massive poverty swirls in its wake.

Why, in the wealthiest nation on earth do we have any children living in poverty, let alone rising numbers of millions?

The National Center for Children in Poverty estimates that 45% of American children live in low-income families with 16 million of them, 22% of American children, living in poverty. There is no Land of Opportunity, as the establishment myth has it, for these children.

Congress has the ability to raise taxes and fix this. They certainly know how to spend prodigious wealth on those who finance their political campaigns, piling on trillions to add to the national debt. And they certainly know about child poverty increasing– the NCES report was sent to the Congress, after all.

If past performance is an indicator, we may be assured Congress will do nothing about this report. Poor children do not contribute to political campaigns, nor do they vote, the two things which raise a scintilla of interest from Congress.

But knowing this hellish existence, replete with hunger, lack of medical care and sometimes homelessness is being inflicted on children in the wealthiest nation on earth, and doing nothing about it, is child abuse, as sure as any other child abuse, and these sociopaths who can ignore such suffering while on their knees kissing the butts of transnational investors who don’t give a damn about this nation or its people should be standing before a hanging judge, had we a system of justice based on justice, and sentenced to whatever child abusers get.

Jack Balkwill is an activist in Virginia.