adminduplicity reflects much worse ahead.
Wealth, power and privilege are prioritised over basic human needs. Extreme deprivation follows. Families struggle to get by. Annually the battle gets harder.
Many can’t cope and suffer. Some give up entirely. Poverty, unemployment, underemployment, homelessness, hunger and despair affect them. The world’s richest country doesn’t care. Imperial priorities take precedence. So does redistributing wealth to bankers, other corporate favourites, and super-rich elites. It’s the American way. It was never beautiful and isn’t now.
A three-part Reuters report discussed it. It’s titled “The Unequal State of America.” It covers the plight of America’s “undeserving poor.” They struggle out of sight and mind. Growing hardships harm them.
In the 1970s, about one in 50 Americans were on food stamps. Today, it’s one in 6,5. At year-end 2008, 31,6 million Americans were on food stamps. Today it’s around 48 million and rising. Over half the population needs some form of federal aid. Bipartisan complicity plans on cutting it en route to eliminating it altogether.
A decade or two from now, it may be gone. At the same time, median household income is declining. Unemployment approaches 23 percent.
Around 100 million working age Americans are jobless. Most others are underemployed. Conditions are getting worse, not better. Middle America is disappearing. Most children live in households considered low income or impoverished. Over 75 percent of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck.
During Obama’s first term, labour force totals declined nearly 8,5 million. At around 9 percent based on 1980s calculations, inflation is multiple times higher than official numbers. America’s 1 percent has more wealth than the bottom 95 percent. The 400 richest families have as much as the bottom 50 percent. In 1965, one in 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today it’s one in six.
At the same time, benefit cuts are planned. Social Security and Medicare recipients are affected. So are poor households. America’s social contract is eroding. Plans are to eliminate it altogether.
America spends hundreds of billions of dollars annually on welfare. Increasingly there’s not enough to go around. Growing numbers get squeezed.
It’s happening “in virtually every corner of the world’s richest country.” Since 1989, inequality grew in 49 of 50 states. Everywhere the top quintile benefited most. Other developed countries spend more on social programs. In 2009, Germany spent 27,8 percent of GDP. America spent 19,2 percent.
Nations with more progressive tax and transfer systems have less income inequality. Germany cut inequality more than average. America ranks near most unequal. Attitudes toward poor people matter. A 2008 OECD study found Americans and Koreans more likely to call them lazy compared to Nordic and continental European respondents.
A US canard suggests that anyone working hard enough can get rich. John Steinbeck (1902-1968) once wrote that at least some poor Americans saw themselves “not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
In his 1925 short story titled “Rich Boy,” F Scott Fitzgerald said:
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early . . . They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we . . . Even when they enter deep into our world . . . they still think that that they are better than we are. They are different.”
In his article, titled “The Truth About ‘Class War’ in America,” economist Richard Wolff said: “The last 50 years have indeed seen continuous class warfare in and over federal economic policies.” Wages haven’t kept up with inflation. Benefits as a percent of income declined.
“Free markets” work best for those who control them. Others lose out. Growing numbers do entirely.
Technology driven productivity pressures workers to toil longer for less pay and fewer benefits. Marx was right. He called capitalism anarchic and ungovernable.
Force-fed neo-liberalism created today’s monster. Americans feel it acutely. Class warfare isn’t new. Today it rages. It pits private wealth against populist interests.
Corporate giants and America’s super-rich wage war against working Americans. They’re winning. Notably since the 1970s, “business and its allies shifted most of its federal tax burden onto individuals.”
At the same time, benefits are eroding as inflation adjusted incomes decline. Low income and poor Americans suffer most. Increasingly they’re getting disproportionately less. Institutionalised inequality victimises them. Until the mid-1970s, younger generations outdid older ones financially.
Wages rose in real terms. They no longer keep up with inflation.
High-paying jobs disappeared. They shifted offshore. Low-paying/poor benefit ones replaced them.
Many are temp or part-time. Technology driven productivity pressures workers inordinately. They push harder and longer for less.
Residents in America’s capital face appalling social inequality conditions. In the shadow of the White House and Capitol Hill, human need grows out of sight and mind.
Lyndon Johnson waged war on poverty. It was little more than a skirmish Poor residents now are poorer. Rich ones are richer. — Mathaba News.
Online Reporter