Failed economic policies have created the reality described below.
Continuing to support those policies will merely worsen it.
Banana Republic here we come!
Inequality And Poverty America
style
By Graham Peebles
08 December, 2012
Countercurrents.org
In richness and in health
Irrespective of ones circumstances or stage of life, illness is
never welcome, in America if your poor it can prove to be a total catastrophe,
ending often in personal bankruptcy. “According to a report published in The
American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60%
of the personal bankruptcies in the United States“. Health care insurance an
unaffordable luxury, for the 15% or 50 million people now living in ‘official’
poverty in America, anxiously relying on good luck and a poor diet to keep
sickness at a bay.
Average individual health care insurance costs around $200 per
month, unbelievable as it may sound to the unfamiliar, this does not
automatically cover prescription charges. Having paid around $12,000 into
insurance company coffers and made no claim in five years, a friend recently
needed hospital care; no charge, antibiotics however, prescribed and dispensed
$50 - ‘have a nice day’. My daughter living in New York with family health
insurance, was charged $100, yes $100, for an ameliorative wonder cream earlier
in the year, one can only imagine it was infused with miracle oil and laced with
melted gold. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) in a recent
documentary,state the US healthcare industry is the largest in the world, with
“$300 billion a year spent on prescription drugs alone”, a figure that is rising
in tandem with the pharmaceutical companies colossal profits, the top three
according to Fortune Magazine making $27,000 millions in 2010. Surprisingly or
perhaps not given US politicians relationship with corporate leaders, Noam
Chomsky states, the prices set by these companies are protected in law.
Unsurprisingly and in keeping with commonsense and codes of social fairness, 80%
of the population would support lower rates.
The American health care system is a moneymaking machine for the
Insurance giants and their pharmaceutical bedfellows and a major cause of poverty
and hardship in the country. It is inefficient and at approximately twice the
cost per capita of comparable countries, extremely expensive, Cuba e.g. Noam
Chomsky says “achieves the same outcomes at 5% the cost.“ The fact that the
worlds only so called ‘super-power’ does not offer a health care system to all
311 million or so of its citizens, based on need and “free at the point of
delivery”, reflects the driving political/economic ideological doctrine that
underpins all areas of life in America; Capitalism, with its single motive;
profit. It is a system that is fuelling economic and social inequalities that
are trapping increasing numbers of people into a life of poverty devoid of
hope.
Disadvantaged and living in poverty
More people are living in poverty in America now, than at any
time since 1959 when data was first collected, with around 43 millions (August
2012 figures) a 70% increase in five years, relying on the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program - Food Stamps for their meals. The 15% figure may
be an understatement as the income level used by the government to define
poverty increases based on the rate of inflation.The threshold established for a
family of four in 2011 was $23,021 per annum, extreme poverty where 21 million
Americans live - $11,000. However, if as The Economic Collapse, report on Poverty
in America state “inflation was still calculated the way that it was 30 or 40
years ago, the poverty line would be much, much higher and millions more
Americans would be considered to be living in poverty”. Wealth and poverty
predictably falls along lines demarcated by race as well as social
backgrounds, 27% of Hispanics and Blacks and 31% of single mothers, compared with
13% of adults generally and 11% of families are living under the demoralizing,
de humanising shadow of poverty.
Since the late 1970’s poverty rates and levels of economic
equality have been dramatically increasing. Under the presidency of Ronald
Reagan and the days of unbridled competition and market forces that his
administration, and across the sea The Iron Lady championed, poverty numbers
leapt to a tat below the present figure. Reagan famously admitted to having
“fought a war on poverty and poverty won.” Those under fire were poorly armed
and inadequately prepared, the battle rages today and more furiously, with
inequities and social disadvantages acute.
Lack of opportunities and a plethora of social difficulties,
many of which, including overcrowding in housing and at school, poor nutrition
and health care, contravene the spirit at least of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, which states, in Article 25/1, “Everyone has the right to a
standard of living adequate for the health and well- being of himself and of his
family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social
services.” Living in unsafe communities, with perhaps little or no parental
support destroys hope and makes people more susceptible to emotional problems
and psychological issues, with low self-esteem, depression, anxiety and
substance/alcohol addiction potential consequences. Those coming from poor
backgrounds living disadvantaged lives in difficult circumstances, outgunned and
outmanoeuvred, are being slaughteredon the economic battleground.
Unemployment or poorly paid work is regarded by World Hunger as
the primary causes of poverty in America, but Frances Stewart, Professor
emeritus at Oxford Department of international Development takes a different,
more just view. She believes that the equitable distribution of resources, “from
the privileged to the deprived, would be enough to eliminate poverty in high and
middle income countries”.Not simply the redistribution of wealth but resources
more broadly, to, as she puts it, “improve the health, the education, the assets
and the productivity of the poor so that the improving of their lives can become
self sustaining.” The fair and equitable sharing of resources to meet the needs
of everyone in society is an economic model rooted in compassion and justice.
Beyond ideological constraints of the various political isms of old, sharing as
a rational economic principle, is an idea whose time has perhaps arrived. It is
of course, foreign to capitalist principles that believe in the wisdom of the
market, to house, educate heal and clothe the peoples of the world. At least
this is the justifying jargon of the economic/political just as they promote an
unjust system that concentrates wealth and power so effectively in their
hands.
World Hunger’s position is that there are three factors causing
citizens in the most powerful nation on earth, as US politicians like to
exclaim, to be living in poverty and without decent education adequate housing
and or appropriate health care; “ 1. Poverty in the world. 2. The operation of
the political and economic system in the United States which has tended to keep
people from poor families poor and 3. Actual physical mental and behavioural
issues among some people who are poor All too often poor health-physiological and
psychological is a consequence of a system and not a major cause of poverty.
People are trapped into poverty World Hunger discovered, by an
unjust political/economic system, in which power rests with the wealthy. Those
born into poor circumstances face a mountain of disadvantages, and as BBC4’s
documentary Why Poverty, found “they almost never escape”. In a society that
champions material success and individual achievement above all else, when all
time and energy is given over to addressing the fundamental requirements of
living, life becomes arduous and demoralizing. Tedium by design orchestrated by
the ‘Masters of Mankind’ as Adam Smith famously called the rich and powerful,
who like nothing more than an exhausted, depressed populace, purged of the
necessary energy to revolt, to protest, to demand justice and equality.
Unjust unrestrained inequality
If you are born into poverty in America, with all the inherent
disadvantages, the overwhelming tendency is to remain there. Social mobility is
almost unheard of, the Economic Mobility Project found, Huffington Post report,
that “the United States has lower, not higher, mobility than other wealthy
countries… very depressing for those who subscribe to the notion that America is
a meritocracy and a "land of opportunity." Economic inequality is a worldwide
social poison not just in the US, who lays claim to an often cited, Hollywood
fashioned, rarely achieved ‘American dream’ of opportunity and material success,
whilst simultaneously following political/economic and social ideologies that
strengthen inequality and encourage division.
In fact, as Why Poverty show, the 400 richest people in America
“control more wealth than the bottom households combined, that’s 150 million
people” A staggering shameful statistic, in a country overflowing with resources
that espouses democratic principles of freedom, equality and justice to all and
sundry. A country with, according to Noam Chomsky 25% of the worlds wealth, down
from an unprecedented 50% in 1948, that, whilst 50 million of its citizens
languish in poverty and with a fiscal cliff looming, somehow manages to spend
and justify so doing, $1 trillion on it’s armed forces, more than the military
expenditure of the rest of the world combined. To one unfamiliar with the ways
of corporate political life and the complexities of democracy, this sounds like
collective, or State madness, does it not.
Since 2009, Bloomberg 2/10/12 report“the wealthiest one
per-cent, incomes rose 5.5 per-cent. For the 96 million households in the bottom
80 per-cent, average earnings fell 1.7 per-cent,“ strengthening the acute chasm
existing between the wealthy fraction and the rest, the 99% as the Occupy
Movement termed it. In fact the greatest concentrations of wealth reside with as
Noam Chomsky makes clear, “1% of the 1%”, making the ‘The Great Beast’, who must
be tamed at all costs, the remaining 99.9%. Economic and social inequality
reinforces inherent injustices, causes deep resentment, anger and despair. And
as has always been true, is the single greatest cause of poverty, which Frances
Stewart states “can be eliminated… what is needed is a significant reduction in
the quite obscene levels of inequality that prevail today”. The rich, it has
been said, must give up what they want, so that the poor may have what they
need; namely food, a home, access to decent education and health care and the
opportunity to live fulfilled, dignified lives.
Money power control, money power money and more money
In a world where ‘the market’ is believed to be infallible and
all knowing, wherethe golden egg and reason for doing, and one suspects for
living, is profit, at all costs profit, every aspect of existence in such a
socially divisive unjust system is seen as a commodity, fit to be traded; to be
bought at the lowest possible $ price and sold for the highest amount, no matter
the human cost and environmental impact; global climate change, deforestation,
water and air pollution and child labour in the Near-East springing readily to
mind.
Such a system, World Hunger state, will inevitably “create a
significant amount of poverty.“ and a “significant amount of unemployment.”
Surely then the model should be changed, this seems the obvious conclusion to
observations that perpetuate inequality and result in such hardship and
injustice, as Frances Stewart makes clear, “as a result of the way the global
economy is organised, inequality is not falling but rising in most countries
today”.
Increases in poverty and inequality are of little concern to
those pulling the American political/economic strings; the corporate leaders,
financial magnates and business tycoons, sitting pretty in the 1% club lounge,
with all benefits, from preferential tax arrangements, and access to
congressmen, senators, presidents and administration staff. Jeffrey Sachs,
Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, claims in Why Poverty
“there are many bought politicians in Washington”. Bought by the rich, the
present day merchants and traders; the hedge fund managers, brokers, CEO’s of
major corporations, such as David and Charles Koch. Estimated to be worth $62
billion, they have donated funds to over half the members of the Senate and the
House of Representatives, and ploughed millions of dollars into 230 university
colleges to promote courses, which support their ‘free’ market ideology. A
‘free’ market in name only, skewed from the off, over which they and their
cronies have overwhelming control.
And what do the wealthy expect in exchange for their millions
and billions of dollars ‘donated’ to politicians, these are not, after all
philanthropic acts from men of social conscience. Access to decision makers is
the primary aim, in order to exert influence and fashion policy, ensuring the
social order is maintained as the economic system remains constructed in such a
manner as to benefit them in the fullest possible way, so that the ultra, mega
rich and super stinking wealthy become richer and richer. Causing the economic
and social inequalities to become wider, the lives of the 99.9% increasingly
arduous and painful. More than enough, not enough to satiate the insatiable and
so the madness continues unrestrained. Until, and perhaps that day can be sensed
in the present fog of greed, uncertainty and injustice; commonsense prevails and
principles of goodness begin to govern, in which the needs of all, to live
secure, creative, happy lives are met, irrespective of social background or the
size of ones bank account.
Graham Peebles is Director of The Create Trust,
www.thecreatetrust.org A UK registered charity (1115157). Running education and
social development programmes, supporting fundamental Social change and the
human rights of individuals in acute need. Contact , E:
graham@thecreatetrust.org
