March, 2007

Billions for Corporations, The Gutter for the Rest

The homeless in St. Petersburg, Fla. have recently erected tent cities to house themselves and focus attention on their plight. PHOTO/DON SCHIFFLER

Dumped in the street in downtown Los Angeles by a paramedic who could find no place willing to accept him, a paraplegic, homeless man, clad in a soiled and torn hospital gown, pulled himself through the gutter begging for help. That image now stands beside the frightful pictures of Abu Ghraib, America's torture prison in Iraq, as the defining measure of American morality in the minds of the peoples of the earth.

As children in elementary school we sang of an America "Whose alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears." What happened to our nation's morality that such a noble vision could be so completely and so rapidly replaced by "each man for himself and the devil take the hindermost?"

We do not confuse the morality of our government with that of the people. The people were shocked by this latest display of callousness. The government on that very day took steps to further cut social security and Medicare benefits. The reality is that year-by-year the increase in homelessness and poverty and the brutality of the invasion of Iraq has dulled the people's sense of social morality. They feel they can do nothing to change things, and overwhelmed by their own problems, they turn inward. The main task of revolutionaries is to awaken them and help them see that they cannot solve their individual problems without grappling with the general social destruction they face as a class.

What is the situation today? Overshadowing everything is the reality that not only is the gap widening between rich and poor -- the rich are becoming very rich and the poor are becoming destitute. It is difficult to imagine that by the end of 2005 some 16,000,000 Americans were living in what the government calls "severe poverty." That number has increased over the past year and a half. If you can imagine a family of four trying to live on $9,900 per year -- that is $2,475 per person -- you can imagine severe poverty. This severe poverty grew by 26 percent in five years--from 2000 to 2005. Today 43 percent of the country's 37 million poor are desperately, severely poor.

Statistics can be boring, but without facts we cannot understand the "big picture." What is behind all these statistics? The American worker is becoming more and more productive. By working with robots, fewer and fewer workers and more and more robots are putting out more and more goods. Consequently, a greater and greater percentage of the national income is going into corporate profits, and less and less is becoming wages and salaries. This trend is becoming more and more pronounced and is the reason for the increase in poverty. Can we reverse this trend? We cannot. In order to capture the shrinking world market, business has to produce more and more and more cheaply. That means more and more poverty as jobs disappear and more robots appear.

With the entire world facing this "race to the bottom" the corporations will not feed what they cannot use in the battle for production. To guarantee that nobody and nothing will get more than their market value, the corporations had to first take over the government. They have done that. Next, stage-by-stage they will impose their market economy on every thing and every body.

A homeless paraplegic man does not have much market value, so he is dumped in the gutter. Do you get the picture? Do you know who is next? It's time to think about how to take over these corporations before they complete taking over us.