Dictatorship Now! » poverty

Rich Man’s Congress

Schalken — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:55:08 +0000

On Friday, Oregon senator Jeff Merkley begged Kentucky senator Jim Bunning to drop his one-man opposition to the extension of unemployment benefits for over a million Americans. Bunning’s response? Tough shit. He also complained that because the Senate would not agree to drop debating an extension and adjourn, I have missed the Kentucky-South Carolina game that started at 9:00.

You’d might think that this would be the most callous, out-of-touch comment ever uttered in Congress, but that’s not so. Probably not by a long shot. Consider this exchange between a factory worker and a Senator in the early 1880s, during a Senate investigation into the relations between labor and capital:

Senator Blair: Why do you not go West on a farm?
Thomas O’Donnell: How could I go, walk it?
Senator Blair: Well, I want to know why you do not go West on a $2,000 farm, or take up a homestead and break it and work it up, and then have it for yourself and your family?
Thomas O’Donnell: I can’t see how I could get out West. I have got nothing to go with.
Senator Blair: It would not cost you over $1,500.
Thomas O’Donnell: Well, I never saw over a $20 bill, and that is when I have been getting a month’s pay at once. If someone would give $1,500, I will go…

In his day, Blair was one of the senators most concerned with the welfare and conditions of American workers.

(Source: Garraty, John A. Editor. Labor and Capital in the Gilded Age. Boston: Little Brown And Company, 1968.)

Health care reform and the capitalist class.

Schalken — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 03:39:15 +0000

Foremost among the policy objectives of Obama and the Democratic Congress this year is the reform of the American health care system, which is inefficient and ineffective compared to health care in the rest of the West and even in parts of the third world (e.g, 45 countries have a higher life expectancy than the U.S.). The obstacles to passing any reforms meaningful even by bourgeois standards are numerous. For instance, it’s common knowledge that no fewer than five of Democratic Senator and chief of the Senate Finance Comittee Max Baucus’s former staffers — two of them his chiefs of staff — are now lobbyists for, among others, Wyeth, Merck, Amgen and AstraZeneca.¹ Pharmaceutical giants have generously contributed to Baucus’s election campaigns. For the faction of the capitalist class that is arrayed against health reform, Max Baucus is a powerful ally, but only one among many. A 2005 report found that pharmaceutical companies, to say nothing of insurers and the like, had spent 675 million dollars in the previous seven years on lobbying congress. Another 125 million dollars were donated to congressional campaigns.²

Even so, other factions of the American bourgeoisie are convinced that health care reform is a necessity to shore up sinking profits. Obama, chief spokesman of the American capitalist class, proclaimed in a major television address to the nation that health care reform would help combat the current economic crisis. Health care reform may constrain the profit-making ability of the health care and pharmaceutical sectors, it is only to the benefit of the remainder of the bourgeoisie, to prevent a particular group of private capitalists from holding the rest of the private capitalist class to ransom.³ This is something Obama made clear in his statement that health care reform is “about every small business that has been forced to lay off employees or cut back on their coverage, because it became too expensive.”⁴ But small businesses are not the only ones counting on the state to take on the costs of health care. Writing in Fortune in 2007, Matt Miller brazenly championed an overhaul of the health care system on the grounds that the costs could be shift from businesses exclusively to American taxpayers:

Start with the fact that business now spends a stunning $500 billion a year, or 4% of GDP, on health-care benefits. Let’s say we shifted that cost to government–that’s right, relieved business of it entirely–and, to make matters simple, combined it with other public funds to give citizens a voucher with which they could buy a private health plan. To pay for this without boosting the deficit, we’d raise taxes by an identical amount–not on business, of course, but on taxpayers broadly, via various gas or carbon taxes that would have the salutary side effect of helping cure our energy and environmental woes.

What would business think of such an idea? Policy suggestions like this would ordinarily be dead on arrival, decried as a record $500 billion tax hike sure to sink the economy. But what if the business community rose as one to force politicians to get past such rhetoric–and publicly trumpeted the need for the new taxes? It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Look what we’d be doing: We’d free business from the burden of financing health care.⁵

Likewise, the CEO of Kelly Services, a Fortune 500 company that employs 750,000 persons annually, stated with a great deal of frankness that there are employers that don’t want the responsibility [of providing health care], and we are in that category. My health-care costs total more than my profits. Transferring that responsibility to the government and taxpayers as a whole makes financial sense for such companies. Benjamin Sasse, an Assistant Secretary of Health & Human Services under President George W. Bush and currently an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, claims that large enterprises do not want to be seen as more willing to dump [benefits] than their competitors are. Sasse claims that many employers would even be willing to pay higher taxes to avoid the costs of providing health care themselves. And Len Nicholas, health policy director of the corporate-backed and sponsored New America Foundation think tank, suggests that opposition to health care reform from companies outside of the health care sector has been limited because these companies know high health-care costs put U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage.⁶

Moreover, streamlining the health care system promises to free up dollars for consumer spending, the hitherto unattained objective of so many of the measures passed in the last year intended to combat the crisis. In Obama’s aforementioned television address, he provided the example of a woman who spends 700 dollars a month for her medicines. In fact, in America 15% of the GDP is spent on health care, a figure higher than that of any other developed nation. Rescuing Americans from this crushing expense isn’t merely an act of charity. Health care reform would have the effect of transferring consumer spending from the highly profitable health care sector to the sectors of the economy that are in dire need of “effective demand.” It should be no surprise that such measures would be undertaken by the state, which after all represents and defends the interests of the collective capitalist class even when this means curtailing the interests of particular capitalists. After all, the modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital, as Engels wrote.⁷

Thus even this brief examination of the motives behind Obama and the Democratic Congress’s current drive for health care reform belies any notion that they are acting solely in the interest of the American people, as if they were standing up to “corporate power” for the “little guys,” to use the populist language the bourgeoisie uses to obscure the fact that society is divided into definite classes. What’s more, we can say that whatever comes of health care reform this time, whatever success it achieves, health itself is an impossibility under capitalism. Consider that…

3% of deaths in the U.S. are caused by air pollution.⁸ Worldwide, about 40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution.⁹
A study in the journal Pediatrics indicates that a pregnant mother’s exposure to certain pollutants (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) may lower the future intelligence of her unborn child.¹⁰
5,488 American workers died on the job in 2007. This number is an historic low, though still far higher than the average number of American GIs killed per year in the Vietnam war.¹¹ Another four million workplace injuries and illnesses were reported.¹²
An Associated Press investigation uncovered that that a vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans.¹³ A follow up investigation by the IP revealed that U.S. manufacturers, including major drugmakers, have legally released at least 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water.¹⁴
The incidence of cancer has increased dramatically in recent years. Childhood leukemia increased 1.4% yearly between 1970-1999.¹⁵ In Sweden, mortality due to prostate, bladder, colon and lung cancer, as well as melanoma has increased significantly over the course of the 20th century.¹⁶
In the industrialized countries, a person consumes an average of almost 15 pounds of food additives each year.¹⁷
In the United States in 2007, over 36 million people were “food insecure,” meaning that they are either starving or are forced to curtail the amount or quality of food they eat.¹⁸ Food insecurity can lead to serious health and behavioral problems, especially in children.¹⁹
In the United States, 66% of adults are overweight or obese.²⁰ Far from providing evidence of the affluence of American society, obesity strongly correlates with poverty.²¹
The 2009 swine flu outbreak and recent outbreaks of avian flu have been tied to the inhumane practice of factory farming.²² Factory farming threatens to create more virulent strains of viruses that could lead to deadly pandemics.
There are 50,000 tanning salons in U.S.²³ Tanning beds have been classified by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer as carcinogenic to humans.²⁴

One could provide many more examples, especially in the realm of mental health, but by now the point should be clear: rather than participating in this bourgeois policy debate, the task of politically conscious workers is to point out that health care reform isn’t an act of altruism on the part of “our” representatives, but rather a necessity for the profitability of the American capitalist class and that even if Congress can pass an extensive health care reform bill, profit and health will remain mutually exclusive, since the drive for profit requires capital to cast aside any and all considerations (such as health, the environment and even life itself) that stand in the way of achieving those profits.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106655060
http://projects.publicintegrity.org/rx/report.aspx?aid=723
Page 24 of Adam Buick and John Crump’s State capitalism: the wages system under new management. Buick and Crump were describing the British state’s 1868 decision to nationalize the telegraph and postal systems.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/us/politics/22obama.transcript.html?_r=3
Miller, Matt. “Opening the Capitalist Mind.” Fortune; 4/2/2007, Vol. 155 Issue 6, p38-38.
Arnst, Catherine. “A Secret Wish for Health Reform.” Business Week. New York: May 18, 2009. , Iss. 4131; pg. 23.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-7659925.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070813162438.htm
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1912197,00.html
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nr0.htm
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/osh.nr0.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-03-09-water_N.htm
http://www.usnews.com/articles/science/2009/04/19/tons-of-released-drugs-taint-us-water.html
http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v97/n7/full/6603946a.html
http://www.iddd.de/umtsno/cancertrends.pdf
50 Facts that Should Change the World, 2.0, Jessica Williams. Pages 75-79. Disinformation, 2007.
http://www.frac.org/html/hunger_in_the_us/hunger_index.html
http://www.lsuagcenter.com/en/family_home/family/childcare/Children_Childcare/Malnutrition+Impairs+US+Childrens+Health+Behavior+Says+LSU+AgCenter+Food+and+Nutrition+Expert.htm
http://www.win.niddk.nih.gov/STATISTICS/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14684391
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/fresh-greens/2009/04/27/swine-flu-and-factory-farming.html , http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36651
http://dermatology.jwatch.org/cgi/content/full/2002/731/1
http://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/news/20090728/who-tanning-beds-cause-cancer

Poverty affects mental development

Schalken — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 04:17:34 +0000

The Wired Science blog reports on a new study that links childhood poverty with impaired cognitive development. Bad news for the 1.4 billion people worldwide who live on less than $1.25 a day (according to the World Bank), not to mention the hundreds of millions of proletarians in the west who struggle to survive despite a much higher income. These lives are stunted even more so, one would suspect, by the total lack of leisure time, an education whose only aim is to make them complacent sellers of labor-power, and their inability to afford the fruits of a culture that has been totally commodified. Kropotkin captured this predicament brilliantly in his “Appeal to the Young“:

Do you remember the time, when still a mere lad, you went down one winter’s day to play in your dark court? The cold nipped your shoulders through your thin clothes, and the mud worked into your worn-out shoes. Even then when you saw chubby children richly clad pass in the distance, looking at you with an air of contempt, you knew right well that these imps, dressed up to the nines, were not the equals of yourself and your comrades, either in intelligence, common sense, or energy. But, later, when you were forced to shut yourself up in a filthy factory from five or six o’clock in the morning, to remain twelve hours on end close to a whirling machine, and, a machine yourself, were forced to follow, day after day, for whole years in succession, its movement with relentless throbbing – during all this time they, the others, were going quietly to be taught at fine schools, at academies, at the universities. And now these same children, less intelligent, but better taught than you, have become your masters, are enjoying all the pleasures of life and all the advantages of civilization. And you? What sort of lot awaits you?

You return to little, dark, damp lodgings where five or six human beings pig together within a few square feet; where your mother, sick of life, aged by care rather than years, offers you dry bread and potatoes as your only food, washed down by blackish fluid called, in irony, tea; and to distract your thoughts, you have ever the same never-ending question, “How shall I be able to pay the baker tomorrow, and the landlord the day after?”

What! Must you drag on the same weary existence as your father and mother for thirty and forty years? Must you toil your life long to procure for others all the pleasures of well-being, of knowledge, of art, and keep for yourself only the eternal anxiety as to whether you can get a bit of bread? Will you wear yourself out with toil and have in return only trouble, if not misery, when hard times – the fearful hard times – come upon you? Is this what you long for in life?

If the poor are no longer as wretched as they were when Kropotkin wrote, the rich are infinitely richer. As Marx observed, poverty is relative:

A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it shrinks from a little house to a hut. The little house shows now that its owner has only slight or no demands to make, and however high it may shoot in the course of civilization, if the neighbouring palace grows to an equal or even greater extent, the occupant of the the relatively small house will feel more and more uncomfortable, dissatisfied and cramped within its four walls.

One only has to look at the educational experiences of workers’ children relative to the education of the children of the rich to see that enormous disparities remain. A man like Bill Gates become the world’s richest man only because his wealthy parents can afford to send him to a school with the latest technology, where he learned computers; whither the children of the working class, some of whom study in schools so dilapidated that rain clouds form inside of them (according to Jonathan Kozol, at least)?

All that said, as individuals, the rich are often even more stunted than the poor. They are often vicious, selfish, cynical, and paranoid — and with their privileges to guard, how could they develop otherwise? Only in a communist society, which Marx and Engels described as “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” can the potential of all humanity be fully realized.