Root cause of US protests is inequality: American activist
Racial and economic inequality is the root cause of the current protest movement that is spreading across the United States, says an American political commentator and activist in Maryland.
US police arrested at least 150 people on Wednesday who were protesting against the death of an African-American man in police custody in Baltimore.
Twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray died of severe spinal injuries on April 19, a week after he was arrested and detained by Baltimore police.
Since then, tens of thousands of Americans have taken to the streets across the country. Protests have been largely peaceful, but in some cases they turned violent.
“I would say that the root cause has been the inequality regarding black Americans and other people of color and those in the lower economic strata of American society,” Myles Hoenig told Press TV on Thursday.
“The rules are written against the poor, the minorities--the working class of America,” he added.
“And for more than sixty years, we have seen such a degradation of their cities, regarding jobs, health and so on,” he stated.
Hoenig said that even though some improvement has been made, these people are still stuck in a cycle that the establishment has put them in.
“We see that one of the greatest industries in America, for profit prison industry, is designed to keep people imprisoned and to keep people without opportunities of jobs,” he noted.
“The jobs have been moved overseas in order for corporations to pay less in wages,” he pointed out.
He went on to say that “we see the lack of grocery stores, restaurants, and services for the poor in the inner cities. It’s called a ‘food desert’ when large cities, like Baltimore, don’t have more established grocery stores that service many, many people.”
“So people are forced to go to small little Mamas & Papas that have to raise the prices of the food and quality is not all that good,” he observed. “There’s just an overall attack on the poor.”
GJH/HRJ
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