Deeply wrong

In today's Guardian Jonathan Freedland highlights the extent of inequality in Britain today, and indicates why he thinks it matters:

To my mind, there is something deeply wrong here. If one man can spend £15,000 plying his pals with a syrupy cocktail, while another lays out blankets for his child to sleep in the kitchen then we know the system is broken. This is not some narrow criticism of the Labour government, but rather a challenge to our assumption that we are a civilised society at all.
.....
[T]he truth is that the injustice of extraordinary wealth alongside desperate poverty is no museum piece. It is alive and present in 21st century Britain.

Personally, I would want to qualify the thought that 'the system is broken'. Perhaps Jonathan only means to say that it's not working acceptably. In which case, yes: 'deeply wrong' is right. But 'broken' can also suggest - the opposite of what's true - that these things can't persist. But they can and do, unless people are persuaded to fight to change them.

After the Katrina disaster there was a BBC report in which this was said:

[S]ome hope that the aftermath of the hurricane will force people to confront the issue of inequality.

As if the issue was somehow absent before Katrina, isn't with us continuously. Or as if it was an issue specific to America, and not a general feature of capitalist societies - in which the circumstances of many people's lives are permanently of a sort that it would horrify others luckier and more privileged to be plunged into.