{Rachel Maddow} Rachel Re: b (l) o (w) n appetite

6 March 2009

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Rachel
• Maddow

[soSUBURBIA]

You make your own opportunities. Our ancestors came here by boat from famine and repression to Ellis Island. A strange new world with nothing to hold them back but themselves. We're here because THEY refused to give up. They eeked out a living in big cities like New York in early 20th century or worked their fingers to the bone in rural America on farms. No one handed them anything.

[Meggion]

That's all well and good...but do you really think the African American lesbian born into the worst part of Detroit and the white male son of the fortune 500 lister really have the ability to make the same opportunities? Sometimes it doesn't matter how hard you work, reality has its built in biases.

[soSUBURBIA]

We value hardwork and an honest dollar. Well, the PEOPLE do anyway. Most of them.

[Meggion]

I'd have absolutely no problem with valuing hard work and only helping those that help themselves if we all started out from the same position, but we don't. Some people never even have a chance to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" as the saying goes. It doesn't seem right to me that the circumstances that one is born into should dictate the opportunities they'll have throughout their entire lives.

[soSUBURBIA]

Well, having ONE person abuse the system and leech off my hard earned money is enough for me.

[Meggion]

And I can't that's not a legitimate position. It's very Libertarian and I can see the value in that perspective. I'm just more of an idealist. Regardless of the benefits I happen to see in the Socialist perspective, however, though it's done well in Europe, I don't ever see it being embraced in the United States. We seem to value the community in a different way here.

[janeun7777]

Rachel outdid herself with this. I wish every person in America could hear this. For almost 30 years our food supply has been poisoned by the greed of big business and the politicians in their pockets.

[AgentFantastic]

The customer's always right, right? And the customer doesn't want to SICKEN AND DIE eating someone's product, the safety and viability of which is being audited by a private company paid for by the company it's auditing!!!

come on.

[AgentFantastic]

So if it 's socialistic to ensure the public food supply doesn't include fallen workers, rat poo and whatever could be scraped off the ground, then so be it.

look at the most recent salmonella outbreak from that peanut plant. if they weren't forced, by government, to track down the source, how manymore people would have gotten sick or died?

people have a right to live free of foodborne illnesses or death, more so than companies have a right to profit.

[soSUBURBIA]

Yes. Never give up. No excuses. The race card doesn't work anymore.

[Meggion]

I'm in graduate school for medical ethics. This entire semester has been spent arguing the pros and cons of Universal Health Care. I know only too well that their will always be those that abuse the system and that sharing burdens is never done perfectly. But those that are called "free riders" in much of the ethics literature are in the very small minority. There will always be those that will abuse the system, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make it more fair in every way that we can.