An Obama Plan for inner cities should channel Marshall Plan

My conservative colleagues in social debate love to lay the tragic wasteland of America's inner cities at the hands of Democrats, whom they claim, have ruled those sorrowful inhabitants for a century. Vote for candidates 'not espousing the same drivel' and all those drugs, unemployment, guns and crime will begin to recede, they claim.

Nonsense. The folks pointing the finger are the ones in state legislatures and Congress refusing to spend a dollar to rebuild America, particularly our racially ravaged inner cities. They're motivated by greed, heartlessness and at worst, racism; often reveling in the festering shame of America.

Since he's looking for a new gig next January, I'd like to see Mr. Obama lend his name to the rebuilding of America's ghetto's in the same spirit of self interest rightly understood that motivated the Marshall Plan of 1948. Named after its prime motivator, Gen. George C. Marshall, the Marshall Plan invested $12 billion ($120 bill in today's dough) to rebuild 18 Western European countries devastated by WWII. It was self interest rightly understood in that the investment was a pittance of the cost in blood and treasure from a Europe collapsing into chaos.

What better legacy for the man who gave us the audacity to hope for an America that could rebound from the malaise of near economic collapse, massive military adventurism and refusal to address the 40 million shut out of a heartless health care system designed only for the well off.

An Obama Plan for America's ghettos is not reparations, not welfare, not free stuff and not paternalism. It is, in the best tradition of the Marshall Plan, American self interest rightly understood.