Madison, Wisconsin has been the center of the battleground where working people are beginning to demand an end to the government assault on our standard of living. The issue in Madison is the right to collective bargaining. However, wages as well as access to health care have been steadily declining over the past thirty years. While the majority of the population has been experiencing these cutbacks, we are also exposed to the fact that the most affluent people in the world never have had it better.
I will begin to examine this issue by citing three front-page articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer. First, the Inquirer ran a series of stories about the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of people in the Delaware Valley who do not have enough food to eat. Then, there was an article exposing the fact that the Philadelphia School District might have its funding cut by as much as five hundred million dollars. Then, there was the article about the opening of the new $786 million taxpayer-funded convention center.
The Inquirer’s reporter, Inga Saffron, wrote the following description of the convention center. “Now the Broad Street facade puffs out its glass chest, as if to assert the center's belatedly recognized importance in the city's orbit.” According to Saffron's article, the new convention center will be closed and locked for most days of the year. In my opinion, politicians in Pennsylvania seem to be taking food out of the mouths of children, and cutting back on education, in order to fund a convention center that will be closed most of the year.
However, the problem with the issue of funding for the convention center is only the tip of an enormous iceberg. The government routinely dumps enormous amounts of money on some of the most affluent people in the world.
In the Philadelphia area, the government has dumped hundreds of millions of dollars on the affluent in the form of the construction of sports stadiums. Hundreds of millions more were dumped on the affluent in the form of tax abatements. These abatements enabled the affluent to avoid paying taxes for ten years in return for new construction in the city. Then, there is the interest payments on municipal bonds. The affluent have received hundreds of millions from the city government for merely moving their money from one place to another.
The federal government has dumped about two trillion dollars on the affluent in the form of the stimulus plan. All of this is happening while about 49.1 million people in this country do not have enough food to eat and unemployment is reaching its highest point since the great depression.
If you think that these are the only ways that money is wasted, think again. Banks, insurance companies, and advertising agencies add absolutely no value to the goods and services we all need and want, in my opinion. Yet these enterprises might be absorbing trillions of dollars every year.
When we think about these facts, it should come as no surprise that the most affluent one percent of the population owns about 42.7% of all financial wealth, while eighty percent of the population might own no more than seven percent. We also might consider that the most affluent 400 individuals in the United States own more than half of the population.
Many of us are fully aware of many of these facts. In quiet moments, most of us ask ourselves: Since the affluent possess so much money, why aren’t they satisfied with what they have?
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels answered this question in a pamphlet titled The Communist Manifesto written in 1848. They wrote about the cause of capitalist economic crisis. “In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of overproduction.”
In other words, when there are more commodities on the market than people are buying, at an enormous profit for the owners, then recessions and depressions happen. However, when Native Americans gathered more food than they needed, they celebrated and had a party. Today, when corporations have what they call “excess capacity” they eliminate jobs of productive workers and actually create conditions of scarcity.
In my opinion there is only one reason why poverty exists anywhere in the world. This is because the top priority of capitalist governments is to enrich the affluent, who presently have more money than they could possibly spend.
Another way of looking at this question is to imagine what the world might look like if we had a workers' government that used resources in a rational way. I believe we all need and want about eight different goods and services. These would include: food, clothing, housing, transportation, communication, health care, education, and exposure to cultural activities. These cultural activities would include: music, art, dance, and theatrical productions.
If the resources of the world were distributed in a rational way, everyone could be guaranteed all of these things, not as benefits, but as constitutional lifetime rights. Working people might not need to work for more than twenty hours per week, and certainly would be able to retire at the age of forty-five.
Many will look at these ideas in disbelief, arguing that this point of view is pie-in-the-sky and totally unreasonable. My argument is that democratic and republican politicians have a consistent record. Every time any of them holds office, I believe we have an ironclad guarantee that we will have poverty, war, unemployment, the destruction of the environment, as well as alienation.
Human history, in many ways is progressive. The United States was born as a result of a revolution. The Civil War was, in essence, another revolution to abolish slavery. Mass movements have erupted with respect to labor, civil rights, and against war. The recent uprisings around the world signify that working people have the potential to make this a profoundly better world.
Steven Halpern - I was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. As in all cities in this country, I was continually exposed to the gross disparity in living ...
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