<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" http-equiv=Content-Type>
<META name=GENERATOR content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.23520">
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>
<H2 class=date-header><SPAN>
<H1 class=title><A href="http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/">Facts For Working
People</A></H1>Wednesday, September 25, 2013</SPAN></H2>
<DIV class=date-posts>
<DIV class=post-outer>
<DIV class="post hentry" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting"
itemscope="itemscope" itemprop="blogPost"><A name=532496605435241398></A>
<H3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name">US workers face more poverty,
social crisis as capitalist offensive continues </H3>
<DIV class=post-header>
<DIV class=post-header-line-1></DIV></DIV>
<DIV id=post-body-532496605435241398 class="post-body entry-content"
itemprop="description articleBody">
<TABLE style="TEXT-ALIGN: left; FLOAT: left; MARGIN-RIGHT: 1em"
class=tr-caption-container cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0>
<TBODY>
<TR>
<TD style="TEXT-ALIGN: center"><A
style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 1em; MARGIN-LEFT: auto; CLEAR: left; MARGIN-RIGHT: auto"
href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9IAwRHiviSE/UkMS19dcMmI/AAAAAAAAIRo/kfTOk7u1tPQ/s1600/130917102922-us-poverty-rate-091713-620xa.png"
imageanchor="1"><IMG border=0
src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9IAwRHiviSE/UkMS19dcMmI/AAAAAAAAIRo/kfTOk7u1tPQ/s400/130917102922-us-poverty-rate-091713-620xa.png"
width=400 height=227></A></TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD style="TEXT-ALIGN: center" class=tr-caption><A
href="http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/17/news/economy/poverty-income/index.html">source:
CNN</A></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>by Richard Mellor<BR>Afscme Local 444,
retired<BR><BR>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
<I>"....have gone mostly to the people at the top"</I> Bloomberg BusinessWeek
reports in this weeks issue. I think we all agree that <I>"real terms"</I> are
the only terms that matter don't we?<BR><BR><I>"We've had 40 years of
stagnation."</I> 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; <I>"If the full-time, full-year male workers aren't benefiting from
economic growth, why should we expect the poor to be."</I> says
Danziger.<BR><BR>Robert Gordon, an economics professor at Northwestern
University tells BW that the US is <I>"in for a long period of stagnation."</I>.
Michael Feroli of JPMorgan Chase points out that the capitalists are simply not
investing in what he calls the <I>"..innovation needed to boost efficiency."</I>
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 <A
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/super-rich-offshore-havens_n_1692608.html">$32
trillion dollars in offshore accounts</A> 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.<BR><BR>Furthermore, as I stated in a previous commentary, <SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: small">Just <A
href="http://www.usagainstgreed.org/Forbes400_2011-12.xls">20</A> Americans 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.</SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: small">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. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: small">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 cars
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.</SPAN><BR><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: small"><BR></SPAN><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: small">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 <I>"on your own
baby</I>."; 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.</SPAN><BR><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: small"><BR></SPAN><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: small">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.</SPAN><BR><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: small"><BR></SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: small">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.</SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: small">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. </SPAN><BR><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: small"><BR></SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: small">In my
previous commentary I included a quote from the head of AIG who compared the
anger Americans displayed at AIG corporate types </SPAN><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: small"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: small"><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: small">getting bonuses </SPAN>after they ran the company to
the ground and the taxpayer bailed them out</SPAN>, 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.</SPAN><BR><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: small"><BR></SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: small">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.</SPAN></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>