Capitalism typically creates more lower-paying jobs when unemployment is high. That's because those who are unemployed are desperate and willing to fill those positions. Lower-wage occupations, with median hourly wages of $7.69 to $13.83, have accounted for 58 percent of all job growth. The occupations with the fastest growth were retail sales (at a median wage of $10.97 an hour) and food preparation workers ($9.04 an hour). Each category has grown by more than 300,000 workers since June 2009.
Poverty as an issue is nearly invisible in U.S. media coverage of the 2012 election, a new FAIR study has found. FAIR’s study found just 17 of the 10,489 campaign stories studied (0.2 percent) addressed poverty in a substantive way. Moreover, none of the eight outlets included a substantive discussion of poverty in as much as 1 percent of its campaign stories. Discussions of poverty in campaign coverage were so rare that PBS NewsHour had the highest percentage of its campaign stories addressing poverty-with a single story, 0.8 percent of its total. ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Newsweek ran no campaign stories substantively discussing poverty. The New York Times included substantive information about poverty in just 0.2 percent of its campaign stories and opinion pieces-placing it third out of the eight outlets, behind PBS and CBS. By contrast with other issues that have received wider attention in recent campaign coverage, “poverty” was mentioned at all, with or (most often) without substantive discussion, in just 3 percent of campaign stories (309 stories) in the eight outlets. This compares to “deficit” and “debt,” which were mentioned about six times as often, in 18 percent (1,848) of election stories. Even throwing a wider net, to include stories that mentioned “poverty,” “low income,” “homeless,” “welfare” or “food stamps,” turned up just 945 pieces, 10 percent of total election stories-still well below the rate at which “debt” and “deficit” were mentioned. The term “middle class,” ever-present in major party candidates’ stump speeches, was far more likely to be mentioned in campaign reporting than was poverty, occurring in more than twice as many stories (681), or 7 percent of campaign stories.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011 report, poverty in 2010 was at a 19-year high. In regard to vice-president Joe Biden's remark at the Democratic convention that "America's best days are ahead of us " a 2011 Brookings Institution study predicted that as many as 10 million additional Americans will join the ranks of the poor by 2014. The Democrats and their Republican challengers hope to keep the electorate bedazzled with the fantasy of a return to the economic "glory days" of generations past.
In the up-coming presidential election casting no vote at all is better than an uninformed vote which provides the mandate for actions that run counter to your true interests. When a voter is armed with accurate information no amount of money or political advertising would make any difference. A candidate with millions of dollars would have no advantage over any other candidate, if voters were well informed. If there was a million dollar advertising campaign designed to sell toothpaste which was known to contain dangerously high levels of arsenic, would you still buy it?
Instead of the lesser of the evils, for a change, let's vote for what we really want. Obama is not the lesser of two evils. He is the more effective evil. Obama extended his hand of friendship to the nation's bankers back in 2009: "Help me help you," he implored. Does anyone seriously believe Obama has any desire (or chance) to go up against Big Business? It makes little difference whether Obama or Romney is elected. The powers that control our world have taken an increasingly ominous and threatening tone. Unapologetic in their contempt for rule of law or human rights, they are repeatedly sending messages that force and fear will replace the "friendly" face of social programs. The capitalists' wealth is based in our work. We need to understand that our wealth does not come from "them".
The environmental threat to the planet is rapidly approaching a nd the only hope for the planet and humanity is to bring down the whole charade of capitalism as soon as possible. The absence of organization and serious discussion about moving forward from the initiatives of the Occupy Wall Street protest is troubling. People need to decide exactly what it is they're working for and it cannot be simply another version of capitalism.
Use the write-in option on the ballot if available to declare for socialism. The time has come where we must take the initiative to move ourselves towards socialism. That's what true democracy is all about. Capitalism has had its day. It's usefulness has passed. It lasted longer than Marx imagined but now is the time to lay it to rest. People have always depended on each other. It has always been through the efforts of workers that produced all the goods and services you needed and enjoyed. We now need to develop ways and means to organize work to produce goods and services for each other, for our families, and for our communities, to meet human needs. It is time to end the absurdity of factories rusting while millions are jobless, while millions go without and millions are homeless while homes lie empty. We need to organize. If ever there was a time for us to think outside the box, it is now. One way to do this is for workers to organize industrial production and have decision making power over their own work and what it is to be used for, and with input from the community that truly democratizes the process. Industry that does not respond to the needs of the community is not worth anything to the community. Integration between producers and consumers (the community) is vital to the democratization of free access. To get there, to get to the place where we can take back control of our workplaces and our communities we must take control of the state. The vote is too vital to waste.
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