Sasha Abramsky has published in the May 14, 2012 edition of The Nation a penetrating exposé on the plight of the poor in America.
“Angry at the way the political system is ignoring poverty, Bill Luckett ran for governor [Mississippi] last year on an anti-poverty and invest-in-education platform. He came in a strong second in the Democratic primary, though in a state as heavily Republican as Mississippi, that didn’t necessarily count for much. “I’d never intended to get into politics,” he explains over a glass of red wine in one of his living rooms. But, he says, lack of investment in public education, an increasingly regressive tax system and other challenges pushed him into the fray. “America has never had as greedy a top 1 percent as we have now. The inequality has reached dangerous proportions.”
“Unfortunately, Luckett is a rare exception in Mississippi politics. The state’s leadership is exemplified by ex-governor Haley Barbour and current governor Phil Bryant, who both won election by forging alliances between country club denizens and the culturally conservative white working class, which both preach the virtues of shrinking government, rolling back regulations and cutting social services. ‘When you get a white guy walking out of his rusty trailer into his pickup truck and he’s got a Vote Republican placard in his yard, then you’ve reached the height of stupidity,’ Luckett says.”
As Abramsky states, ror years, the story of poverty in America has been swept into the nether regions of our collective consciousness. And while a new opportunity has opened up to place poverty and inequality center-stage again, you just do not find anyone talking about the exponential decline in the necessity for labor worker jobs to produce our products and services. This is the result of ever-accelerating shift to non-human productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production.
Fifty years after Michael Harrington brought the “invisible poor” out of the shadows in his classic exposé The Other America, another generation is discovering that many parts of the country, and many demographic groups, are impoverished. And the issue is being reinjected into the national conversation with the Occupy movement—and with the presidential campaign shaping up as a contest pitting the interests of the 99 percent against those of the wealthiest 1 percent. Unfortunately, nothing concrete will occur until our leaders and the people movements recognize that productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth and, therefore, should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. If both labor and capital are interdependent factors of production, and if capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then equality of opportunity and economic justice demands that the right to property (and access to the means of acquiring and possessing property) must in justice be extended to all. This is the real crux of the problem and the challenge when formulating policies and programs to broaden private, individual ownership of new productive capital assets, which over time will eliminate poverty and provide every man, woman and child with a viable income-producing capital estate. Policies and programs need to be directed to enable every man, woman, and child to accumulate wealth and receive dividend incomes from newly issued shares in new and growing companies, and pay for their acquisition not out of past savings but out of future earnings (future savings) generated by the investments. This would additionally result in the creation of “real” jobs, at least in the short term. Such leadership will do far more than just give the poor a chance to have their issues aired once more.
“Although poverty is borne more heavily by minorities, that doesn’t mean that it is only, or even mainly, a “minority problem.” In fact, about 47 million Americans—of all colors, ethnicities and backgrounds—are living at or below the poverty line. (That figure is up from 37 million before the recent housing crisis.) Of these, more than 20 million are living in what’s called “deep poverty,” with incomes that put them and their families at below 50 percent of the poverty line. More than 16 million children in the United States, 22 percent of the country’s kids, live in poverty, the highest total since 1962 and the highest percentage since Bill Clinton took office in 1993.”
“Additional millions of men, women and children in America are living below what economists like Dean Baker, co-director of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, term a “living wage” threshold. Too affluent to qualify for most government assistance programs but too poor to make ends meet, they are working at jobs that provide few or no benefits and are thus perpetually at risk of falling into devastating debt.”
“Millions of workers and their families are similarly vulnerable to such mundane changes as a slight decline in the number of hours per workweek or an extra few cents per gallon in the cost of gasoline. Many are elderly, forced back to bottom-of-the-economy jobs because of the low dollar amount of their Social Security checks and/or the collapse in value of their investments following the events of 2008.”
While there are myriad signs that poverty and equity are starting to figure more prominently in national politics, still legislators’ willingness to confront the crisis and craft innovative solutions to it are hampered by venomous anti-tax, anti-government rhetoric from the right, and by conservative oratory that blames the poor, often in barely camouflaged racial terms, for their misery. Abramsky states that even as national unemployment and poverty figures reached alarming highs during the recession, Democrats shied away from tackling the issue.
While President Obama in his rhetoric repeatedly emphasizes his commitment to protecting the struggling middle class, he never offers a plan nor pushes Congress to come up with a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy.
Keynesian conventional economist, as well as the Progressive Caucus who attempted to buck this trend last year when it introduced a People’s Budget, emphasize infrastructure investments (temporary job creation) over tax cuts for the wealthy. President Obama launched his re-election campaign with a series of speeches decrying the country’s growing inequalities and increasingly regressive tax codes. In Osawatomie, Kansas, the president declared that the growing chasm between rich and poor was “the defining issue of our time. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class,” he said, “and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. Because what’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement.” Since that speech, Obama has repeatedly struck a more radical economic note than he did in the first three years of his presidency. BUT, what is not discussed is the reality that as long as working people are limited by earning income solely through their labor worker wages, they will be left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1 percent of the people that the system is rigged to benefit through ever-narrowing concentrated ownership of productive capital. Working people and the middle class will continue to stagnate, resulting in a stagnated consumer economy. More troubling is that this continued stagnation will further dim the economic hopes of America’s youth, no matter what their education level. The result will have profound long-term consequences for the nation’s economic health and further limit equal earning opportunity and spread income inequality. As the need for labor decreases and the power and leverage of productive capital increases, the gap between the middle class, labor workers and the poor and capital owners will increase, which will result in far more upheaval than perceived with the Occupy movement.
While there is a growing sentiment among Democrats and Republicans, sensing that their constituents are drawing connections between their financial struggles and an economy apparently rigged to favor the wealthy, our political leaders have not offered up any policies and programs that address America’s growing income divisions. They have failed miserably––even denying an open national debate on this imperative issue.
As Abramsky notes, it was in this context that Mitt Romney’s presidential primary opponents attacked him for his role in taking over underperforming companies and throwing workers out of their jobs. The spectacle of Republicans ganging up on Romney for being a “vulture capitalist” was surreal; those same politicians spent much of the primary season in a competition for least compassionate conservative.
“Early on, Romney—who has repeatedly touted his extraordinary wealth as testimony to his dynamic personality—stumbled into an admission that he’s ‘not concerned about the very poor’ and then offered an equally out-of-touch clarification that he really meant that poor Americans have a strong safety net to fall back on. Newt Gingrich decried a culture that gives people food stamps instead of enforcing a ‘work ethic,’ and lowered the racebaiting bar by labeling Obama the ‘food stamp president’—code that Gingrich’s overwhelmingly white Southern supporters understood all too well. His equally unempathic rival Rick Santorum notoriously promised a crowd in Iowa that under his presidency hard-working (presumably white) taxpayers wouldn’t have to pay for nutritional assistance for do-nothing blacks. Come the general election, the GOP’s inability to understand the struggles of millions of ordinary Americans could well come back to haunt the party.”
“The disenfranchisement and pervasive sense of loneliness among the poor is, of course, well-known. Fifty years ago, Harrington wrote eloquently about the extreme isolation of America’s “invisible land”; and nearly forty years before that, Bessie Smith famously sang, “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.” Today, whether the poverty is total or relative, whether it is in a desperate inner city or a depressed suburb, many of the psychological costs are the same. A poor person in America is deeply, profoundly alone.”
Abramsky argues that the Occupy movement has been far more effective than Washington at highlighting the extent of poverty and plutocracy in America. But Occupy, too, has struggled to connect with the people it claims to speak for. And Occupy has yet to organize as a political force and run candidates on an advocacy platform that addresses the ever present danger of continued concentrated ownership of the productive capital assets of the American economy.
The lack of attention to this issue with solutions based on the economics of reality has resulted in a growth in inequality not experienced in this country since the 1920s. And while it appears that significant movements are growing up to highlight these problems and to challenge the notion that such divisions are somehow an inevitable byproduct of modernity, the obvious solutions evade the movements. As Abramsky notes, the movements are young and somewhat inchoate; they are, however, vital. America’s democratic culture cannot be restored to health unless we acknowledge the scale of poverty and start developing big-picture strategies to tackle the epidemic.
http://www.thenation.com/article/167564/other-america-2012-confronting-poverty-epidemic
