The JP has already written about the new bankruptcy act, paid for by the credit card industry and delivered on a silver platter by Congress. The act, conceived in greed and born of corruption, will, when it takes effect next month, hang like an albatross around the victims of Hurricane Katrina as well as other Americans who face financial disasters. Even though it is undisputed that the majority of bankruptcies in America are the result of debts incurred from medical treatment, it is clear that the Congress has virtually repudiated the notion of bankruptcy as a fresh start for persons hopelessly over their heads through no fault of their own.

Wake up, Chumps!

With the exception of Bennie Thompson, our Mississippi senators and representatives voted for this corrupt legislation. As the poorest state in the nation, the irony of our elected representatives supporting this oppressive legislation--legislation immensely harmful to the citizens of this state--is simply overwhelming and a testimony to our penchant for shooting ourselves in the foot.

The bankruptcy law is only a symptom of what is going on in Washington, however. It is impossible to itemize all the actions, big and small, that occur daily in the halls of power that are designed to curtail our liberties, ravage our environment, endanger our health, make terrorism against us more likely, and shift the role of our government from serving and protecting the public to fattening the wallets of the wealthy and powerful few. The process grinds on from day to day, concealed from the public by its sheer volume, its obscure and often dishonest language, and the complicity of the mass media.

The evidence of this is overwhelming. Only the deliberately ignorant can dispute the existence of a vast and ever-widening disparity between the top 1% and the rest of us, both in income and wealth. Only the deliberately ignorant can ignore the sea change in governmental expenditures away from the general welfare to the industrial-military complex and the financial industry that facilitates it. Only the deliberately ignorant can close their eyes to the gutting of the nation's industrial strength to be replaced by a service industry that endows the few with fabulous wealth and the many with minimum-wage dead-end jobs.

We in Mississippi bear a special responsibility for this, having elected some of the most reactionary representatives to be found in Washington, D.C. The idea that the extreme, right-wing ideology that goes under the name of conservatism is good for Mississippi is a proposition so mean, so utterly idiotic, and so contrary to common sense and experience, that acceptance of it normally requires a level of hallucination sufficient to warrant commitment to a mental institution, a vivid illustration of Florence King's dictum that a wall erected along the Mason-Dixon line would enclose the world's largest asylum.

Building a wall around Mississippi would enclose a pretty big asylum, by itself.

There is one consolation, however: As the nation gradually but surely turns itself into a third-world country, we in Mississippi will hardly notice the difference, since we are already a third-world country. A national plantation system.

Chumps!