Broke and Broken

I received this in my email today, from a blogger named Jane Stillwater:

"I can't do this any more": Homeless people in America are dying

"As I was walking down Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley yesterday, I passed a homeless man huddled against the cold at a bus stop bench near the corner of Shattuck and Channing -- and the man was talking to himself. 'I just can't do this any more,' he was saying. 'I just can't.'

"I felt so bad for this poor guy that I gave him a few dollars -- yeah, like a measly two bucks might even begin to help stop his hunger, chill, weariness and desperation.

"A week from now -- or perhaps a month from now or, hopefully, maybe even a year -- that man will most probably be dead.

"Living out in the cold, having very little food to eat, having no health-care or dental-care options, having no warm place to stay, lacking even a toilet or a shower, having nothing but rags to wear, and having no place to feel safe? That level of deprivation can actually kill people. Under these bleak circumstances, I myself would probably be dead within days. And what about you? How long could you survive that kind of merciless gauntlet, that kind of ordeal?

"I can't do this any more."

This message in my mailbox comes as President Obama makes the recess appointment of  Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new consumer protection agency designed to impose tougher (that would be "any") regulations on financial institutions so as to prevent their future -- further abuse of America Citizens with their predatory, shady practices. 

According to the New York Times:

"Mr. Obama, announcing his decision before a political rally-like crowd of 1,300 at a high school here in a suburb of Mr. Cordray's hometown of Cleveland, seemed to welcome a contentious second session of the 112th Congress, in which any attempts at bipartisan compromise appear in danger of being lost in all-out election-year war.

"I refuse to take 'no' for an answer," Mr. Obama said, adding, "I am not going to stand by while a minority in the Senate puts party ideology ahead of the people we were elected to serve."

For his sake -- and ours -- we hope that, for once, the interest of working Americans will be put ahead of Wall Street.