On December 24, 2019, Niles Niemuth writes on WSWS:
This Christmas approximately 568,000 people, a population equivalent to the state of Wyoming, will mark the holiday in homeless shelters, tent encampments or in the rough, all across the United States.
Some of the homeless will not make it to Christmas as the death toll continues to mount. In Los Angeles County, a focal point of the social crisis, one thousand of the estimated 44,000 unsheltered homeless population have died in both 2018 and 2019, nearly three lives per day, side by side with the glitter of Hollywood and the wealth and privilege of Beverly Hills.
A man walks past a mural of angel wings titled “Africa Wings” by artist Colette Miller in Los Angeles’ Skid Row area, home to the nation’s largest concentration of homeless people, Friday, Sept. 1, 2017. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
This year marked the third year in a row in which the Department of Housing and Urban development recorded an increase in the number of people living outdoors in its annual January point in time survey. This figure is likely a significant undercount as it is taken during the coldest time of the year and done by volunteers who are unable to canvass all the areas where people seek to survive without shelter.
How many will die from exposure and other causes on the holiday is unknown, but the reality is that thousands of unsheltered people are dying on the streets, encampments, abandoned homes and backlots of cities across the country every year. Tens of thousands will go to sleep Christmas Eve out on the streets of America and it is likely that dozens will not wake up in the morning.
Annual vigils and protest marches were held Thursday night in several hundred cities across the US to remember the homeless men and women who died this year. So far this year, in Washington, D.C., 117 homeless individuals have lost their lives in the nation’s capital, a huge jump over the 54 recorded in 2018. Santa Clara County, California, home to Silicon Valley, saw 161 homeless deaths. Riverside County, California, recorded 95 deaths; Portland, Oregon, marked 43 deaths, the most in that city since 2015; Salt Lake City, Utah, which recently cut the number of shelter beds by 400, saw 94 homeless deaths; Boulder, Colorado, marked 48 deaths, a doubling from 2018; and in Springfield, Illinois, that state’s capital, 13 homeless people died on the streets this year.
At a time when the ruling elite is celebrating the continued rise in the stock market and patting themselves on the back for historically low unemployment figures, the number of people who are being thrown out on the streets is on the rise. This is not a contradiction: the records set on Wall Street are based ultimately on increasing exploitation of workers through the deployment of new technologies and efforts to drive down wages, including by the creation of an increasingly desperate layer pushed to the absolute limit.
The grim figures on homelessness are a snapshot of just one part of the deepening social crisis which is gripping America as 2019 comes to an end. The opioid overdose crisis, gun violence and a rising suicide rate has driven down life expectancy, an event unprecedented among the world’s leading economies and in America’s own history.
The economic recovery since the 2008 recession has seen low-wage jobs proliferate as part of the “gig economy,” leaving millions on the verge of destitution in the event of an emergency or an accident. Workers now rely on apps like Uber and GrubHub for a tenuous employment at low wages, or turn to companies like Amazon where they can be worked to the point of exhaustion or death in a warehouse for $15 an hour.
The social and economic gap between the bottom 90 percent and the top 10 percent has never been wider. Two very different Americas exists within the geographic borders of the United States. Record corporate profits and stock buybacks continue to fill the pockets of the wealthy, while workers are forced to tighten their belts and work more for less.
A recent analysis of Census data by Pew Trusts found that the poverty rate increased in 30 percent of all US counties between 2016 and 2018, impacting working people of all kinds, black, white, Hispanic and Native American alike.
The richest one percent of Americans, with access to the best health care their money can buy, live more than a decade longer than the poorest one percent who are among those dying on the streets. And conditions of life for those at the top have never been better, with the three wealthiest families, the Waltons, the Kochs, and the Mars, controlling $349 billion, more than 4 million times the net worth of the median US family.
The 400 richest people in the US combined have more wealth than the bottom 64 percent. Under President Donald Trump, corporate and estate taxes have been slashed, ensuring that ever more wealth is funneled to the very top of society. Last year 91 of the largest corporations paid zero or negative federal income taxes and for the first time the richest individuals paid a lower tax rate than the poorest.
Despite the conventional presentation in the media and the claims of both parties that things have never been better, pointing to the mounting piles of wealth at the top, the reality for the majority of Americans is a deep social crisis.
It is notable that growing numbers of indices about the social crisis have not factored into the Democratic primaries nor have they sparked any sense of urgency from the mainstream media. While Trump promises to “Keep America Great” (for the super-rich), the Democrats simply ignore the desperate conditions confronting the working class in favor of appealing to those in the upper ten percent on the basis of identity politics.
At the Democratic presidential debate last week in Los Angeles, the epicenter of the national homelessness crisis, the subject was avoided by all the candidates on the stage. Not one referred to the fact that the death toll among homeless people in the Los Angeles area was approaching the one-thousand mark, including the self-styled “democratic socialist,” Bernie Sanders, whose politics are those of a moderate liberal of the 1960s.
Heading into the new year, the obliviousness and callousness of the American ruling class in relation to the real conditions of life for millions of workers make the French aristocrats before 1789 look like paragons of foresight and generosity.
The top one percent and the politicians in the Democratic and Republicans parties who represent them are sitting on a social powder keg. The last year was marked by a resurgence of the class struggle all over the world from France to Sudan, Algeria, Chile and Mexico, and to the United States itself where the number of strikes is on the rise.
That opposition by millions to increasingly unbearable conditions will erupt in mass struggles in the United States is inevitable but the great social problems, including homelessness and poverty, will only be resolved under the leadership of a working-class political party fighting consciously for socialism.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/24/pers-d24.html
Gary Reber Comments:
We as a nation are becoming callous and in denial as more and more Americans are struggling to survive to meet the cost of rising housing costs and inflation overall. The political pitch is to the middle class, which is struggling to keep from falling into poverty, while the controlling owners of the corporations grow their capital asset wealth. These same controlling owners are investing in global opportunities to establish capital asset wealth in foreign countries.
The constant is that capital asset wealth continues to be funneled to the 1 and .1 percent of the people who OWN America.
As the president, Senate and Congressional elections in the United States near next year’s Nov. 6 ballot date, it is evident that none of the candidates speak of a vision for a future system of economic democracy based on equality of opportunity for every person to become an owner of productive capital, the source of wealth. This is particularly of importance for the person elected to the presidency, as the President of the United States has the national stage at his or her disposal to espouse targeted leadership. As you read this article, the intent is to query “Who should own America?” going forward.
Why the focus on “productive capital?” Physical capital is non-human “things” owned by people used to produce products and services (productive land, resources, structures, infrastructure, tools, machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized processing and operations, etc. and certain intangibles that have the characteristics of property such as patents and trade names). Real physical capital isn’t money; it is measured in money (financial capital), but it is really producing power and earning power through ownership of the non-human factor of production. In the law, property is the bundle of rights that determines one’s relationship to things.
The reality, which is ignored in our political discussions and even by conventional economists and the media, is 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. The ownership of productive capital is the source of wealth and income for the richest Americans — not a job.
Businesses, whether small or large, or sole proprietors, partnerships, or business corporations are formed to provide products and services at a profit. Their success or failure is dependent on whether or not there are “customers with money.”
Unfortunately, politicians, economists and the media focus on job creation as the only way to create “customers with money” and provide a source of income for peoples’ livelihood. Yet the demand for people (labor workers who contribute manual, intellectual, creative and entrepreneurial work) is being made less necessary as productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth.
What should we conclude from this assessment of reality? Well, simply, that if both labor and productive 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.
The role of physical capital is to do ever more of the work, which produces income to the business owners. Full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum in order to maximize profit. Private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical capital’s ever increasing role.
The function of research and technology is to invent tools to reduce toil, enable otherwise impossible production, create new highly automated industries, and significantly change the way in which products and services are produced from labor intensive to capital intensive — the core function of technological innovation and invention. Technological change makes tools, machines, structures, and processes ever more productive while leaving human productiveness largely unchanged (our human abilities are limited by physical strength and brain power — and relatively constant).
It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption that is the problem in the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being.
What we really need in the 2020 presidential election year is a national discussion on the topic of the importance of productive capital ownership and how we can expand the base of private productive capital ownership simultaneously with the creation of new productive capital formation, with the aim of building long-term financial security for all Americans through accumulating a viable income-producing capital estate.
If we are to significantly expand the population of “customers with money” and significantly grow the economy, then the ownership of productive capital must be spread more broadly and simultaneously with the growth, without taking anything away from the 1 to 10 percent of the people who now own 50 to 90 percent of the wealth controlled by businesses. Thus, productive capital income would be distributed more broadly and the demand for products and services would be distributed more broadly from the earnings of capital and result in the sustentation of consumer demand, which will promote responsible economic growth. That also means that society can profitably employ unused productive capacity and invest in more productive capacity to service the demands of a environmentally-enhanced growth economy.
Unfortunately, ever since the 1946 passage of the Full Employment Act, economists and politicians formulating national economic policy have beguiled us into believing that economic power is democratically distributed if we have full employment — thus the political focus on job creation and redistribution of wealth rather than on full production and broader productive capital ownership accumulation resulting from ownership creation. This is manifested in the misguided belief that labor work is the only way to participate in production and earn income.
Thus, when politicians advocate taxpayer money spending to stimulate industry development, there needs to be a conscious policy to broaden private, individual ownership in the companies benefiting from the stimulus — not just argue the justification for taxation redistribution and further national debt based on how many jobs would result. We also need to incentivize business corporations to pay out all their profits as taxable personal incomes to avoid paying corporate income taxes and to finance their growth by issuing new full-dividend payout shares to create broad-based citizen ownership.
To accomplish this we must ensure that future economic growth be financed to create new owners of expanding established and future viable businesses to ensure that the consumer populous is able to get the money to buy the products and services produced as a result of substituting “machines” for people.
But how can we accomplish this goal of creating new owners of future productive capital investment simultaneously with the growth of the economy?
The solution requires that the Federal Reserve stop monetizing unproductive debt and begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every child, woman and man to establish a Capital Homestead Account or “CHA” (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to acquire a growing dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income. Policies need to insert American citizens into the low or no-interest investment money loop to enable non- and under-capitalized Americans, including the working class and poor, to build wealth and become “customers with money.” That’s what the Capital Homestead Act addresses.
The “Capital Homesteading” concept is the direction America needs to take to build an OWNERSHIP CULTURE and ensure a balance between production and consumption.
For specifics please visit the Capital Homestead Act.
Own the Future or Be Owned!
