Lack
of access to education, medical care, good wages and healthy food isn't
just leaving the worst-off Americans behind. It's killing them.
November 4, 2013
|
During a discussion at the University of Michigan in 2010, the billionaire vice-chairman of
Warren Buffett's
Berkshire Hathaway firm, Charles Munger, was asked whether the
government should have bailed out homeowners rather than banks.
"You've got it exactly wrong," he said."There's
danger in just shovelling out money to people who say, 'My life is a
little harder than it used to be.' At a certain place you've got to say
to the people, 'Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.'"
But
banks, he insisted, need our help. It turns out that moral hazard – the
notion that those who know the costs of their failure will be borne by
others will become increasingly reckless – only really applies to the
working poor.
"You should thank God" for bank bailouts, Munger
told his audience. "Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else,
there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all
the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies."
In
the five years since the financial crisis took hold, people have been
sucking it in by the lungful and discovering how pitiful a coping
strategy that is.
In Michigan, the state where Munger spoke, black male life expectancy is lower than male life expectancy in
Uzbekistan; in Detroit, the closest big city,
black infant mortality is on a par with
Syria (before the war).
As
such, the crisis accelerated an already heinous trend of growing
inequalities. Over a period of 18 years, America's white working class –
particularly women –
have started dying younger. "Absent a war, genocide, pandemic, or massive governmental collapse, drops in life expectancy are rare,"
wrote Monica Potts in the American Prospect last
month. But this was a war on the poor. "Lack of access to education,
medical care, good wages and healthy food isn't just leaving
the worst-off Americans behind. It's killing them."
This
particular crisis, however, has also accentuated the contradictions
between the claims long made for neoliberalism and the system's ability
to deliver on them. The "culture" of capitalism, to which Munger
referred, did not die but thrived precisely because it was not forced to
adapt, while working people – who kept it afloat through their taxes
and now through cuts in public spending – struggle to survive. Given the
broad framing of economic struggles in the west exacerbated by the
crisis, this reality is neither new nor specific to the US. "Over the
past 30 years the workers' take from the pie has shrunk across the
globe," explains
an editorial in the latest Economist.
"The scale and breadth of this squeeze are striking … When growth is
sluggish … workers are getting a smaller morsel of a smaller slice of a
slow-growing pie."
A few days before the bailout was passed,
I quoted Lenin in these pages.
He once argued: "The capitalists can always buy themselves out of any
crises, as long as they make the workers pay." What has been striking,
particularly recently, has been the brazen and callous nature in which
these payments have been extorted.
Last Friday, 47 million Americans had their
food stamp benefits cut.
These provide assistance to those who lack sufficient money to feed
themselves and their families. Individuals lose $11 (£7) a month while a
family of four will lose $36. That will save the public purse precious
little – bombing Syria would have been far more costly – but will mean a
great deal to those affected. "Before the cut, it was kind of an
assumption you were going to the food bank anyway," Lance Worth, of
Washington state,
told the Bellingham Herald. "I guess I'm just going to go $20 hungrier – aren't I?"
The
cut marks the lapse in stimulus package ushered in four years ago. But
while the recession is officially over, the poverty it engendered
remains. Government figures show
one in seven Americans is food insecure. According to Gallup, in August, one in five said they have, at times during the last year, lacked
money to buy food that they or their families needed. Both figures are roughly the same as when Obama was elected. This negligence will now be compounded by mendacity.
Republicans propose further swingeing cuts to
the food-stamp programme; Democrats suggest smaller cuts. The question
is not whether the vulnerable will be hammered, but by how much.
The impetus behind these cuts are not fiscal but ideological. Republicans, in particular, claim
the poor have it too easy. "We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency,"
claimed former Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan. "That drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives."
The
notion that food "drains the will" while hunger motivates the ambitious
would have more currency – not much, but more – if the right wasn't
simultaneously doing its utmost to drive down wages to a level where
work provides no guarantee against hunger. In last week's
paper for the Economic Policy Institute,
Gordon Lafer, an associate professor at the University of Oregon,
revealed the degree to which conservatives have been driving down wages,
benefits and protections at a local level after their victory at the
2010 midterms.
He writes: "Four states passed laws restricting the
minimum wage, four lifted restrictions on child labour, and 16 imposed
new limits on benefits for the unemployed. With the support of the
corporate lobbies, states also passed laws stripping workers of overtime
rights, repealing or restricting rights to sick leave, and making it
harder to sue one's employer for race or sex discrimination."
That's why 40% of households on food stamps have at least
one person working.
And the states most aggressive in pursuing these policies, Lafer points
out, had some of the smallest budget deficits in the country.
Immediately
after Obama's election in 2008, his chief of staff to be, Rahm
Emmanuel, said: "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I
mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not
do before." The crisis didn't go to waste. But it is the right that has
seized the opportunity. Not content with
balancing the budget on the bellies of the hungry, it is also fattening the coffers of the wealthy on the backs of the poor.
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