Class warfare: The poor lost

Wish the poor
Would go away;
They’re not pretty,
Anyway.

Well, the Great Recession has at least brought us one piece of good news — we don’t need immigrants anymore. The press now reports that native-born Americans have finally become so financially desperate that they are accepting those famous jobs that were previously too dangerous, filthy, exhausting, underpaid, poisonous and demeaning for civilized people to agree to. Hunger will do that to you.

This level of destitution was widely visible and understood during the Depression but today is generally considered a bit too unpleasant for the media to dwell on. It’s much tidier to describe the economy in terms of housing starts, GDP, stock market fluctuations and auto sales. Unemployment news is grudgingly reported, too, but rarely the fact that our U.S. definition of it is designed to make it still look as rosy as possible.

Relegated to even greater obscurity is the shredding of the social safety net, begun under President Ronald Reagan and refined under both George Bushes and Bill Clinton. This purposeful abandonment of the poor has left them constantly in conditions closer to the 1930s than the 1960s.

Other players also loom large in their lives. Our food industry, for example, has discovered that while the cheapest ingredients may be the most fattening, they do make the most profit. Thus, corn syrup, sugar and grease make up a heavy share of the poverty diet. Obesity and diabetes then follow as night the day.

With good food being unaffordable and good health care being unavailable, sickness and death are afflicting today’s slums.

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Additional avaricious industries, both in manufacturing and the service sector, have similarly long relished the malevolent job-destroying charms of “free trade.� And why not? Sending jobs abroad generates major profits. Consequently prestigious think tanks, distinguished editors and leading business schools all do their level best to make free trade axiomatic with the welfare of the nation. Having graduated from one of those schools, I remember well the emphasis on cutting labor costs. Today that emphasis is touted as a national good.

And so it goes the world over. The race to the top for the wealthy has unleashed a race to the bottom for the poor. In this country the partial removal of the safety net has caused lives at the lower end of the scale to become mean, brutal and short.

These lower classes no longer have a serious production function in society and are useful mainly as consumers. We can even get along without them entirely if they become too expensive to maintain. Their menial tasks are better performed by immigrants anyway, who are generally more afraid to complain.

Most of this news slips beneath the radar of the press. Yes, they occasionally admit it is sad that so many citizens go hungry, have to skip their meds, live off extended family, and lose their possessions in eviction. Unfortunately though, advertisers don’t care.  They need readers who can spend. Thus the news focuses on folks in the upper two-thirds of the wealth scale. Those are the ones who can often afford homes and new cars, even if maybe not right now.

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Nor is this descent into economic wretchedness just a result of the recession. That unpleasantness only speeds it along. The growing disparity between rich and poor, along with the shrinkage of the middle class, has been gnawing at our society for decades.

We are returning now to the economic framework of the 1920s, while many of FDR’s works have been repealed. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama seems less of a Roosevelt than a Clinton, which may just permanently solidify the rock-bottom role of our nation’s underclass.

Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.

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