US workers face more poverty, social crisis as capitalist offensive continues

source: CNN

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

According to the most recent US Census Bureau's report released September 17th., as US GDP has tripled, American men working full time are earning less in real terms than we were in 1973. The huge gains in this period "....have gone mostly to the people at the top" Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports in this weeks issue. I think we all agree that "real terms" are the only terms that matter don't we?

"We've had 40 years of stagnation." says Sheldon Danziger who heads the Russell Sage Foundation that funds research about living standards. The poverty rate has also jumped almost three percent since 2007 and as should be expected, the young are the hardest hit.  Close to 22% of children live in poverty in the United States compared to 15% nationally the Census report adds. The situation can only get worse as the war against workers and the poor continues.  The effects are clear, monthly food-stamp use has risen 18% over the past four years according to Bloomberg Business Week and as the Republicans in Congress are pushing to cut spending on nutrition programs by a further $40 billion things will only get worse; "If the full-time, full-year male workers aren't benefiting from economic growth, why should we expect the poor to be." says Danziger.

Robert Gordon, an economics professor at Northwestern University tells BW that the US is "in for a long period of stagnation.". Michael Feroli of JPMorgan Chase points out that the capitalists are simply not investing in what he calls the "..innovation needed to boost efficiency." We have pointed out many times that workers, the poor and the middle class must cast aside this propaganda nonsense that there is no money in US society.  The corporations are sitting on trillions of dollars that they refuse to invest in the economy or in social infrastructure.  Let's not allow the propaganda to unduly influence what we know in our gut--- that the money is there.  I will continue to remind readers again and again, that by their own estimates, sections of the capitalist class have stashed away as much as $32 trillion dollars in offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes, this is equal to the GDP of both Japan and the US combined.  Then there is the trillions wasted on predatory wars fought on behalf of the 1% and their corporations.

Furthermore, as I stated in a previous commentary, Just 20Americans made as much from their 2012 investments as the entire SNAP budget for 47 million people. SNAP is the acronym for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program that provides food and assistance to the millions of people, and soon to be millions more as the 1% forces the US working class on rations in order to make us more competitive with our brothers and sisters throughout the world and to pay for their economic crisis.  Politicians in Congress yesterday were boasting about how they will occupy the legislature floor until they could no longer stand in order to defeat Obamacare (this is not to defend Obamacare) but three trillion on the Iraq war is OK and the poor and low waged need a $40 billion trim, about half of what one human being, Bill Gates is worth.

I have felt the effects of these attacks on workers in my own neighborhood where petty theft has been on the increase, car and house break ins are occurring more frequently. The local news reported last night that in the Rockridge area of Oakland, a fairly affluent middle class (Using the US definition by income) community, a group of commuters waiting in line for car pick ups were robbed at gunpoint.  People wait in these lines for other commuters to pick them up so they can use the commuter lanes.  People stand there with computers, I phones, belongings etc. 

The robbery has shocked the community as robberies have risen over 40% in the last year.  The perpetrators were black youth from what I could gather from reports this morning. We will read all the racist laced Internet chatter about the need to get tough on crime and how we all need to be armed etc.  When I ran for Oakland City Council in 1996 I had a public debate up in Rockridge and this was a problem then, people coming up from West Oakland and breaking in to care stealing radios, CD players and such.  One of my campaign issues was for a $10 an hour minimum wage and my answer to the concerns residents had was that they are not the 1%, they are mostly middle class professional types, not walled off from the rest of society and the best best way to eliminate the crime was to openly and organizationally support the demand for jobs and a $10 an hour minimum wage. In other words, to show solidarity with other humans, victims of market forces.

I am not advocating that those less fortunate and more desperate among us are right to rob people in bus lines or each other in our communities, but people get desperate.  You can spend a lot of time in prison for robbing someone at gunpoint and if things get crazy and someone gets shot you many never see life outside of prison walls again.  The US Gulag is a notorious hellhole and hundreds of thousands of young black men occupy it. People have to eat.  The US is the worst of the advanced capitalist economies to be poor in. If you have no money here, you're "on your own baby."; Vietnam Vet---too bad, get a job, the flag waving is only for when they want our youth to go fight their wars, when they return they're a burden on profit making.

So I appeal especially to working class (wage earners) readers of this blog, those of us who have had more fortunate circumstances liking keeping our homes and jobs over the past period not to fall in to the trap set for us of blaming the victims, of blaming our class brothers and sisters for circumstances they find themselves in that are overwhelmingly not of their own creation.  Poverty, racism, homelessness, petty crime, these are all market driven.   It is the same with small business, and by that I mean community mom and pops who live in a community, are part of it and contribute to it. Rather than oppose a $20 an hour minimum wage you too should support it openly.  Most workers recognize that under the present circumstances a small store owner, the local plumber or coffeehouse owner can't pay that; they can often rarely contribute to benefits as big absentee landlords jack up rents.  But by openly declaring support for such a minimum wage ($15 is gaining some momentum here at the moment) community business owners can build solidarity and links with the workers' movement and as this movement gains strength and momentum including standing it's own candidates for political office independent of the two Wall Street parties, a united movement of workers, the dispossessed, the poor and the undocumented who are among the most exploited of us, can in turn help free these small proprietors from the clutches of the corporations, insurance companies and other forces that bleed them dry. It is ridiculous for example that a community business is expected to pay for its one, two or three employees' health care.

For the workers movement it is important while we fight for the interests of workers, to appeal to this layer of community businesses between these two great classes in society and win them to our side.  If we do not, the 1% will win them to theirs.  We cannot drive back the capitalist offensive, let alone rid ourselves of it without a united working class movement and we can't build a united working class movement without fighting racism, sexism, and all forms of discrimination that they use to divide us.

The heads of organized Labor are also criminally negligent in that they have the resources and ability to turn this situation around but have completely capitulated to the capitalist offensive and regurgitate their ideological justification for it.  We will see some turmoil in these organizations as well at some point.

In my previous commentary I included a quote from the head of AIG who compared the anger Americans displayed at AIG corporate types getting bonuses after they ran the company to the ground and the taxpayer bailed them out, to white supremacists lynching blacks in the South. Give that a thought for a moment.  Yes, these people are human beings and in the new society they have the right to a job and a secure future, something they deny us. But as it stands they are not people who can be appealed to on a moral basis. The capitalist class has historically waged the most violent war against humanity and the natural world in their quest for profits, from the peasant wars of Europe, the war against women and their equal rights, the wars of conquest throughout the colonial world from Ireland to Peru.  They will not simply become nice because it's the right thing to do.  Believe me, the folks in the Pentagon would drop nuclear weapons on their own cities to save their privilege.

Like the feudal aristocracy though, some of them will break ranks but only when they see the united power of working people throughout the world and that there is no winning this war. The workers of Bangladesh, the Arab world millions of them women outside of US borders, are leading the struggle against the capitalist offensive.  It's high time we joined them.

US inequality gap hits record high

 by Richard Mellor
Afscme local 444, retired

The inequality gap in the US reached a record high in 2012 according to a recent BBC report.

According to the report, the top 1% of US earners received 19.3% of household income surpassing the previous record set in 1927.  Overall, the pre tax incomes of the top 1% rose 19.3% in 2012 compared to a 1% increase for the rest of us, with the top 10% of all households taking almost half of the national income.

USA Today reported yesterday that according to an AP study, four out of five US adults, “..struggle with joblessness, near poverty, or reliance on welfare for at least part of their lives…”  The situation among white workers is deteriorating as well as they face increased economic insecurity, and pessimism among this group is at its highest in 25 years with 63% of whites regarding the economic situation as “poor”. More than 19 million whites fall below the US poverty line of $23,021 the report claims, that’s 41% of the country’s poor.  This is double the number of blacks for obvious reasons as there are more of them. 

Percentage wise the poverty rate among blacks is much higher: “By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent.”, the report states,  “But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76% enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.”

"Poverty is no longer an issue of 'them', it's an issue of 'us'," says Mark Rank, one of the authors of the study. This is of great concern to the ruling class as we outnumber them and it is their ability to provide a significant portion of the population with higher living standards (whites) and opportunity that helps them maintain dominance of economic and political life.  Nationalism, racism, sexism (women still earn 77 cents to a man’s dollar) and other divide and rule tactics are less effective the more people fall by the wayside as capitalism sinks deeper in to crisis.

This is far from the optimistic, I’ll say Jubilant, tone after the collapse of the evil Soviet empire in 1989 when the Wall Street Journal announced that “We Won” and that finally history had come to understand how the world really works. Full Spectrum Dominance was the mantra as US capital was now free to travel the globe, to go where it wanted and when, unhindered by unions, nation states or resistance movements, protected as it is by US military might.

But 95% of all income gains in the last three years have gone to the richest 1% of Americans the BBC report states and this also contributes to the anger and hatred of the rich that exists beneath the surface of US society. The predatory wars on behalf of US corporations have to be financed and the unelected rulers of society ensure that it is workers and the middle class that pay, which is why we see the declining living standards described here.

The US bosses are well aware of the dangers that increased poverty across broader sections of the US population brings.  They are very concerned about social unrest which has led to increased domestic repression and the beefing up of state security forces as I pointed out in an earlier piece.  The situation will worsen and the years ahead will see some serious and protracted battles domestically as Americans are forced to fight back.  A cursory glance at US history and our labor history will remind us of the violent nature of the US state apparatus and the 1% will reveal just how ruthless they are as the working class offensive takes shape.

Despite the shifting of the industrial working class from the US and Europe to Asia and the huge movements against global capitalism that have arisen in Latin America, global capitalism cannot be cast in to the history books without the US working class settling accounts with the US ruling class, the most powerful and heavily armed of the global bourgeois.

The power of the US mass media is a force to be reckoned with as it penetrates every aspect of our lives.  It’s aim is to confuse, to lie to present the world not as it really is but as they would like it.  They sow division in order to weaken and prevent the unity of the working class.  The use of mindless media and sports without end is aimed to numb the mind, “I wish my co-workers could get as fired up about what’s happening at work as they do about sports.”, a young worker said to me recently.  There are a lot of sideshows, but in the last analysis, consciousness has a material base, objective reality reigns, and the traditions of the American working class will emerge with force as workers see no alternative but to fight.  Workers know it means a fight and we always seek the line of least resistance but the bosses won’t let up. 

On a final note, Peter Phillips and Brady Osborne, two Sonoma State University professors, have an interesting piece about the global capitalist class and its composition, the Transnational Capitalist Class. They point out that a “group of 161 individuals represents the financial core of the world’s transnational capitalist class. They collectively manage $23.91 trillion in funds and operate in nearly every country in the world.”

It is worth a read and is at Michel Chossudovsky’s site the Centre for Research on Globalization

Capitalism: Destroyer of beauty and love.

This beautiful photo shows the love between a mother and her child. We must use our imagination and envisage what this mother wishes for her child. But tragically we must use our imagination in another way also. That is what capitalism offers to this mother and her child. Hundreds of millions of adults and children starve to death or die of preventable disease in Africa every year. Tens of millions more dies in vicious wars where military forces representing major corporations and their stooges murder and rape their way to control. Capitalism is horror without end. Capitalism is a nightmare for the majority of the population of the world. Capitalism is destroying life on the planet as we know it. Capitalism had forfeited the right to exist.

For the international socialist revolution, for an international socialist world.

Starvation, poverty and disease are market driven.

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

What a tragedy. A beautiful little boy who should be experiencing all the pleasures that a healthy and well fed young life can offer. I can barely look at it without wanting to take him in my arms and caress the little man; hold him like I have my own little ones, or the way we hold our pets.  A mother or father whose kisses and hugs bring such joy to the recipient and the giver is waiting for that moment when starvation and lack of water, ensures he breathes his last breath. It's not a nice death is it?  Look at the body and the physical pain it brings to the child and the emotional pain to the adult, herself, not far from death's door. 

The scene in the picture is indeed horrific. It is heart wrenching, sad, makes us angry and makes us want to cry at the same time.  But let's get something clear in our heads. What we see in the picture, a starving boy being given water by his equally deprived mother, or female guardian, is not something that occurs because of a lack of resources or money.  The condition prevails not because people in that particular part of the world are lazy or stupid or can't govern themselves.  It is not as some might argue, god's wrath, or the devil's work or the work of any supernatural beings or ghostly demons. It is not because of overpopulation or that there's too many people on the planet.

This young boy will die of starvation amid plenty.   He will die of diseases that were cured long ago.  The cause of these events is political and economic.  Society has infrastructure and that infrastructure is put in place by directing capital and labor power to do so.  The trillion or two the US has spent in Iraq would solve world hunger, would eliminate what we see here forever.

The infant mortality, disease and starvation that engulf millions of people in this world is a product of the market, of capitalism.  The communities in which these people live have little public infrastructure, no water system, no sewage system and instead unsafe water and sewage flows openly in the streets if at all. There is no medical and health care system in place. Diet is poor and shelter is inadequate. The money is there to remedy this.  But the owners of capital, capitalists as the Wall Street Journal calls them as opposed to many anti-capitalists who choose words like corpocracy, plutocracy, meritocracy, oligarchy and other terms to avoid calling them what they are, will not allocate capital to buy labor power and the necessary materials necessary to end this savagery.

According to Global Issues:
10.6 million children died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (same as children population in France, Germany, Greece and Italy

1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation

The money is there to change this:
A conservative estimate for 2010 finds that at least a third of all private financial wealth, and nearly half of all offshore wealth, is now owned by world’s richest 91,000 people – just 0.001% of the world’s population.

The world’s billionaires — just 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) — were worth $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP).

The world spent close to $2 trillion on military hardware in 2012 with the bulk of that coming from the US, the worlds largest arms dealer by far. Corporations are hoarding trillions, private capitalists have stashed away some $26 trillion or more in offshore tax havens. Poverty and most disease can be eliminated, but capitalism cannot do it; it is the cause of it.

The US president Obama, Hilary Clinton and all the other representatives of wall Street and the system that perpetuates the misery we see in the graphic, are prepared to bomb Syria because of the deaths of less than 2000 people.  But the policies that these people institute and defend to the teeth kill millions of children and adults yearly; their deaths are not accidents, they are the product of conscious decisions by human beings.

These conditions and the endless wars that we currently see begun by primarily by the US government  cannot be eradicated under the present economic system we know as capitalism.  It is not simply that they cannot be eradicated in what is often called the developing world, they are on the increase in the advanced capitalist countries also. As an earlier blog pointed out, the cost of making the world safe for US corporations is not only causing untold environmental damage and misery for the world's populations, it is also driving US workers further in to poverty and debt.  Even the US troops are facing cuts to necessary services.  This will hasten the crisis in the US military much like the crisis that occurred during the imperialist war against Vietnam.

It is pointless feeling guilty about having a better life than the woman and her child in the picture.  We are not individually responsible for it and guilt is a pointless emotion that accomplishes little.  We can collectively end it though.   I was talking to a group of young men the other night, they were all well educated and relatively financially secure. They had good jobs but when it came to understanding the forces at play in society and what was going on in the world around them, especially US capitalism's role in it, they were clueless and actually accepted that they were oblivious to much of what is going on.  This is nothing to be proud of even though, the forces against us in the US are considerable as we are faced day in day out with an ideological  offensive from the 1% about the merits of their system and how there's opportunity for all if we take the bull by the horns.

Throughout the world,  workers are fighting back against the capitalist offensive.  Working class women that fill the factories of Bangladesh have waged street battles against factory owners and their hired thugs.  Chinese workers have struck foreign multinationals for higher wages and better conditions and won raises of as much as $20% and this is without independent unions.
Indigenous people throughout Latin America, India, Indonesia and the entire world are leading the struggle against the environmental devastation caused by the energy giants and mining companies.

Greek workers, Portuguese workers, women and gays in Russia, are all refusing to be cowed by the worshipers of the market. And we saw the rise of the Occupy Movement in the US that challenged the repressive laws of the 1% and battled the new beefed up security apparatus built in anticipation of the resistance that will occur to the increased offensive of capital.

And here in the US, we should not underestimate the developments that have occurred around Obama's eagerness to bomb Syria.  The outpouring of opposition has been intense and this has caused the 1%'s representatives in Congress to push back against Obama's war drive.  In a twist of irony, it looks like old Putin might have thrown Obama a lifeline brokering a deal with Syria's Assad to have the UN take charge of that country's chemical weapons stash.

This development is very positive and when we consider the ongoing global resistance to the capitalist offensive we should be inspired and optimistic about it.  But we must take the bull by the horns, we must accept firstly in our own consciousness that the present state of affairs will eventually lead to the end of life as we know it, market driven wars and environmental catastrophe all in the pursuit of profits will ensure it. We must recognize that the most destabilizing force in society today and the reason for much of world poverty is US capitalism.  American's cannot find a solution to our problems within the borders of our own nation state.  The solution to the starvation we see in the graphic, the endless wars and driving back our own 1%'s austerity agenda lies in the building of a global movement.  Capitalism is global and the fight against it's destructive effects must be global.

Replacing an economic system of production where a tiny minority of individuals own the means by which we produce the necessities of life and who set these forces in motion only for personal gain, is our goal.  Capitalism is an anarchistic unplanned system of production, it cannot advance humanity.  It is, as we say here, past its expiration date.  Only a democratic socialist economy and political system can solve the crises that capitalism creates.

A couple of things to remember:
The Soviet union was not a socialist or communist society.
Socialism is not a utopian idea it's just a different way of constructing human society
Sweden, Finland or a national health service is not socialism or communism
Obama is not a socialist (for my American brothers and sisters only)
Capitalism overthrew feudalism and socialized production
Socialism will take it one step further and socialize ownership of the process of production, distribution and exchange. It brings economic democracy.