The transformation from a nation tightly controlled by a small
population of Land Holders, to a nation meeting the needs of a broad
population, has been side tracked many times by the privileged
descendants of those Revolutionaries. Sure, it is a broader base, but
the Ruling Class still maintains control. We will continue to gain
and lose and remain about where we are, as long as the Ruling Class
bases its control on the Corporate Capitalist System.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/22/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whatever the narrowness of the original plan for America, the constitution
was amended and the legal structure has since been interpreted. Only people
like Clarence Thomas, insist on the original intent. Supposedly, we've
gotten beyond that. We slowly were moving to a welfare state that took care
of all citizens and where all newcomers were welcome. That is what we were
told that America is. That is what people fought for in World War 2. That
image is what motivated Edward Snowden to tell us about NSA spying on us.
When the 9/11 attacks took place and people began flying the flag, it was
that image of America that they believed was attacked. If you talk to people
who came here from other countries, the real working people, those who are
uneducated and uninformed, those who haven't read Marxist theory or history
books or much of anything, they say things that are at odds with what you
and I believe. The older woman from Croatia who used to clean my apartment,
came from a country where, theoretically, there were government provided
medical services. Few existed. She had family members suffering health
crises with no available resources. The woman who had emigrated from Ireland
40 years ago and had family there, believed that our medical system was far
better than the one in Ireland, or the one in England, for that matter. The
young home health aide who assists me during the week, comes from Jamaica.
The country that she most resents is China because China seems to have a lot
of economic interests in Jamaica now. Jamaicans feel like China is taking
over their country. What everyone appears to agree about, is that none of
us have much power these days.
Miriam
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, July 22, 2018 10:44 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: National (In)Security in the United States of
Inequality
Almost too many statistics to follow, but the bottom line is that the Empire
is in serious trouble. And as the American Empire goes, so goes most of our
basic security. This government was established to care for its
people...the White, Male, Landholders 21 years of age and older. It has
done its job, but now is rushing to the brink of self destruction. It's
past time when the Working Class has a major voice in its own future.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/21/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
National (In)Security in the United States of Inequality
So effectively has the Beltway establishment captured the concept of
national security that, for most of us, it automatically conjures up
images of terrorist groups, cyber warriors, or "rogue states." To
ward off such foes, the United States maintains a historically
unprecedented constellation of military bases abroad and, since 9/11,
has waged wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere that
have gobbled up nearly $4.8 trillion.
The 2018 Pentagon budget already totals $647 billion - four times what
China, second in global military spending, shells out and more than
the next
12 countries combined, seven of them American allies. For good measure,
Donald Trump has added an additional $200 billion to projected defense
expenditures through 2019.
Yet to hear the hawks tell it, the United States has never been less
secure.
So much for bang for the buck.
For millions of Americans, however, the greatest threat to their
day-to-day security isn't terrorism or North Korea, Iran, Russia, or
China. It's internal - and economic. That's particularly true for
the 12.7% of Americans (43.1 million of them) classified as poor by
the government's
criteria: an income below $12,140 for a one-person household, $16,460
for a family of two, and so on. until you get to the princely sum of
$42,380 for a family of eight.
Savings aren't much help either: a third of Americans have no savings
at all and another third have less than $1,000 in the bank. Little
wonder that families struggling to cover the cost of food alone
increased from 11% (36
million) in 2007 to 14% (48 million) in 2014.
The Working Poor
Unemployment can certainly contribute to being poor, but millions of
Americans endure poverty when they have full-time jobs or even hold
down more than one job. The latest figures from the Bureau of Labor
Statistics show that there are 8.6 million "working poor," defined by
the government as people who live below the poverty line despite being
employed at least 27 weeks a year. Their economic insecurity doesn't
register in our society, partly because working and being poor don't
seem to go together in the minds of many Americans - and unemployment
has fallen reasonably steadily. After approaching 10% in 2009, it's
now at only 4%.
Help from the government? Bill Clinton's 1996 welfare "reform"
program, concocted in partnership with congressional Republicans,
imposed time limits on government assistance, while tightening
eligibility criteria for it. So, as Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer show
in their disturbing book, $2.00 a
Day:
Living on Almost Nothing in America, many who desperately need help
don't even bother to apply. And things will only get worse in the age of
Trump.
His 2019 budget includes deep cuts in a raft of anti-poverty programs.
Anyone seeking a visceral sense of the hardships such Americans endure
should read Barbara Ehrenreich's 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not)
Getting By in America. It's a gripping account of what she learned
when, posing as a "homemaker" with no special skills, she worked for
two years in various low-wage jobs, relying solely on her earnings to
support herself.
The book brims with stories about people who had jobs but, out of
necessity, slept in rent-by-the-week fleabag motels, flophouses, or
even in their cars, subsisting on vending machine snacks for lunch,
hot dogs and instant noodles for dinner, and forgoing basic dental
care or health checkups. Those who managed to get permanent housing
would choose poor, low-rent neighborhoods close to work because they
often couldn't afford a car. To maintain even such a barebones
lifestyle, many worked more than one job.
Though politicians prattle on about how times have changed for the
better, Ehrenreich's book still provides a remarkably accurate picture
of America's working poor. Over the past decade the proportion of
people who exhausted their monthly paychecks just to pay for life's
essentials actually increased from 31% to 38%. In 2013, 71% of the
families that had children and used food pantries run by Feeding
America, the largest private organization helping the hungry, included
at least one person who had worked during the previous year. And in
America's big cities, chiefly because of a widening gap between rent
and wages, thousands of working poor remain homeless, sleeping in
shelters, on the streets, or in their vehicles, sometimes along with
their families. In New York City, no outlier when it comes to
homelessness among the working poor, in a third of the families with
children that use homeless shelters at least one adult held a job.
The Wages of Poverty
The working poor cluster in certain occupations. They are salespeople
in retail stores, servers or preparers of fast food, custodial staff,
hotel workers, and caregivers for children or the elderly. Many make
less than
$10 an hour and lack any leverage, union or otherwise, to press for
raises.
In fact, the percentage of unionized workers in such jobs remains in
the single digits - and in retail and food preparation, it's under 4.5%.
That's
hardly surprising, given that private sector union membership has
fallen by 50% since 1983 to only 6.7% of the workforce.
Low-wage employers like it that way and - Walmart being the poster
child for this - work diligently to make it ever harder for employees
to join unions.
As a result, they rarely find themselves under any real pressure to
increase wages, which, adjusted for inflation, have stood still or
even decreased since the late 1970s. When employment is "at-will,"
workers may be fired or the terms of their work amended on the whim of
a company and without the slightest explanation. Walmart announced
this year that it would hike its hourly wage to $11 and that's welcome
news. But this had nothing to do with collective bargaining; it was a
response to the drop in the unemployment rate, cash flows from the
Trump tax cut for corporations (which saved Walmart as much as $2
billion), an increase in minimum wages in a number of states, and pay
increases by an arch competitor, Target. It was also accompanied by
the shutdown of 63 of Walmart's Sam's Club stores, which meant layoffs
for 10,000 workers. In short, the balance of power almost always
favors the employer, seldom the employee.
As a result, though the United States has a per-capita income of
$59,500 and is among the wealthiest countries in the world, 12.7% of
Americans (that's
43.1 million people), officially are impoverished. And that'sgenerally
considered a significant undercount. The Census Bureau establishes
the poverty rate by figuring out an annual no-frills family food
budget, multiplying it by three, adjusting it for household size, and
pegging it to the Consumer Price Index. That, many economists
believe, is a woefully inadequate way of estimating poverty. Food
prices haven't risen dramatically over the past 20 years, but the cost
of other necessities like medical care (especially if you lack
insurance) and housing have: 10.5% and 11.8% respectively between 2013
and 2017 compared to an only 5.5% increase for food.
Include housing and medical expenses in the equation and you get the
Supplementary Poverty Measure (SPM), published by the Census Bureau
since 2011. It reveals that a larger number of Americans are poor:
14% or 45 million in 2016.
Dismal Data
For a fuller picture of American (in)security, however, it's necessary
todelve deeper into the relevant data, starting with hourly wages,
which are the way more than 58% of adult workers are paid. The good
news: only 1.8 million, or 2.3% of them, subsist at or below minimum
wage. The not-so-good
news: one-third of all workers earn less than $12 an hour and 42%earn
less than $15. That's $24,960 and $31,200 a year. Imagine raising a
family on such incomes, figuring in the cost of food, rent, childcare,
car payments (since a car is often a necessity simply to get to a job
in a country with inadequate public transportation), and medical costs.
The problem facing the working poor isn't just low wages, but the
widening gap between wages and rising prices. The government has
increased the hourly federal minimum wage more than 20 times since it
was set at 25 cents under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Between
2007 and 2009 it rose to $7.25, but over the past decade that sum lost
nearly 10% of its purchasing power to inflation, which means that, in
2018, someone would have to work 41 additional days to make the
equivalent of the 2009 minimum wage.
Workers in the lowest 20% have lost the most ground, their
inflation-adjusted wages falling by nearly 1% between 1979 and 2016,
compared to a 24.7% increase for the top 20%. This can't be explained
by lackluster productivity since, between 1985 and 2015, it
outstripped pay raises, often substantially, in every economic sector
except mining.
Yes, states can mandate higher minimum wages and 29 have, but 21 have
not, leaving many low-wage workers struggling to cover the costs of
two essentials in particular: health care and housing.
Even when it comes to jobs that offer health insurance, employers have
been shifting ever more of its cost onto their workers through higher
deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses, as well as by requiring them
to cover more of the premiums. The percentage of workers who paid at
least 10% of their earnings to cover such costs - not counting
premiums - doubled between 2003 and 2014.
This helps explain why, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
only 11% of workers in the bottom 10% of wage earners even enrolled in
workplace healthcare plans in 2016 (compared to 72% in the top 10%).
As a restaurant server who makes $2.13 an hour before tips - and whose
husband earns $9 an hour at Walmart - put it, after paying the rent,
"it's either put food in the house or buy insurance."
The Affordable Care Act, or ACA (aka Obamacare), provided subsidies to
help people with low incomes cover the cost of insurance premiums, but
workers with employer-supplied healthcare, no matter how low their
wages, weren't covered by it. Now, of course, President Trump,
congressional Republicans, and a Supreme Court in which right-wing
justices are going to be even more influential will be intent on poleaxing
the ACA.
It's housing, though, that takes the biggest bite out of the paychecks
of low-wage workers. The majority of them are renters. Ownership
remains for many a pipe dream. According to a Harvard study, between
2001 and 2016, renters who made $30,000-$50,000 a year and paid more
than a third of their earnings to landlords (the threshold for
qualifying as "rent burdened") increased from 37% to 50%. For those
making only $15,000, that figure rose to 83%.
In other words, in an ever more unequal America, the number of
low-income workers struggling to pay their rent has surged. As the
Harvard analysis shows, this is, in part, because the number of
affluent renters (with incomes of $100,000 or more) has leaped and, in
city after city, they're driving the demand for, and building of, new
rental units. As a result, the high-end share of new rental
construction soared from a third to nearly two-thirds of all units
between 2001 and 2016. Not surprisingly, new low-income rental units
dropped from two-fifths to one-fifth of the total and, as the pressure
on renters rose, so did rents for even those modest dwellings. On top
of that, in places like New York City, where demand from the wealthy
shapes the housing market, landlords have found ways - some within the
law, others not - to get rid of low-income tenants.
Public housing and housing vouchers are supposed to make housing
affordable to low-income households, but the supply of public housing
hasn't remotely matched demand. Consequently, waiting lists are long
and people in need languish for years before getting a shot - if they
ever do. Only a quarter of those who qualify for such assistance
receives it. As for those vouchers, getting them is hard to begin
with because of the massive mismatch between available funding for the
program and the demand for the help it provides. And then come the
other challenges: finding landlords willing to accept vouchers or
rentals that are reasonably close to work and not in neighborhoods
euphemistically labeled "distressed."
The bottom line: more than 75% of "at-risk" renters (those for whom
the cost of rent exceeds 30% or more of their earnings) do not receive
assistance from the government. The real "risk" for them is becoming
homeless, which means relying on shelters or family and friends
willing to take them in.
President Trump's proposed budget cuts will make life even harder for
low-income workers seeking affordable housing. His 2019 budget
proposal slashes $6.8 billion (14.2%) from the resources of the
Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) by, among other
things, scrapping housing vouchers and assistance to low-income
families struggling to pay heating bills. The president also seeks to
slash funds for the upkeep of public housing by nearly 50%. In
addition, the deficits that his rich-come-first tax "reform" bill is
virtually guaranteed to produce will undoubtedly set the stage for yet
more cuts in the future. In other words, in what's becoming the
United States of Inequality, the very phrases "low-income workers" and
"affordable housing" have ceased to go together.
None of this seems to have troubled HUD Secretary Ben Carson who
happily ordered a $31,000 dining room set for his office suite at the
taxpayers'
expense, even as he visited new public housing units to make sure that
they weren't too comfortable (lest the poor settle in for long stays).
Carson has declared that it's time to stop believing the problems of
this society can be fixed merely by having the government throw extra
money at them - unless, apparently, the dining room accouterments of
superbureaucrats aren't up to snuff.
Money Talks
The levels of poverty and economic inequality that prevail in America
are not intrinsic to either capitalism or globalization. Most other
wealthy market economies in the 36-nation Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) have done far better than the
United States in reducing them without sacrificing innovation or creating
government-run economies.
Take the poverty gap, which the OECD defines as the difference between
a country's official poverty line and the average income of those who
fall below it. The United States has the second largest poverty gap
among wealthy countries; only Italy does worse.
Child poverty? In the World Economic Forum's ranking of 41 countries
- from best to worst - the U.S. placed 35th. Child poverty has
declined in the United States since 2010, but a Columbia University
report estimates that 19% of American kids (13.7 million) nevertheless
lived in families with incomes below the official poverty line in
2016. If you add in the number of kids in low-income households, that
number increases to 41%.
As for infant mortality, according to the government's own Centers for
Disease Control, the U.S., with 6.1 deaths per 1,000 live births, has
the absolute worst record among wealthy countries. (Finland and Japan
do best with 2.3.)
And when it comes to the distribution of wealth, among the OECD
countries only Turkey, Chile, and Mexico do worse than the U.S.
It's time to rethink the American national security state with its
annual trillion-dollar budget. For tens of millions of Americans, the
source of deep workaday insecurity isn't the standard roster of
foreign enemies, but an ever-more entrenched system of inequality,
still growing, that stacks the political deck against the least
well-off Americans. They lack the bucks to hire big-time lobbyists.
They can't write lavish checks to candidates running for public office
or fund PACs. They have no way of manipulating the myriad
influence-generating networks that the elite uses to shape taxation
and spending policies. They are up against a system in which money
truly does talk - and that's the voice they don't have. Welcome to
the United States of Inequality.
Rajan Menon / TomDispatch
