American's choice

In America, the working class is the unmentionable class, a class that doesn’t exist, just like the upper class doesn’t exist. Everyone is in the middle class, we were told. 

 Many promises and claims were made the Republican and Democratic Party conventions from the respective party podiums, but no real solutions were put forward. Despite the posturing between Obama and Romney, both stand by the capitalist commandment - make profit. Neither Romney or Obama are proposing an alternative, only variations of the same.

In its most recent report, the Census Bureau describes the reality many Americans are facing, including declining household earnings.

    46.2 million Americans are under the poverty line — that's 15.7 percent of the country
    1-in-15 American households earned less than $11,406, the second highest percentage since 1967
    Median household incomes fell 1.5 percent to $50,100
    48.6 million Americans did not have health insurance in 2011 (down from 2010)
    9.4 percent of children did not have health insurance
    The bottom 10 percent of earners made the same amount of money in 2011 as they did in 1994
    Women continued to earn 77 percent of what men earned
    27.6 percent of Black Americans were in poverty
    25.3 percent of Hispanic Americans were in poverty
    9.8 percent of White Americans were in poverty
    More than one-fifth of those under 18 were in poverty

 93% of the economic growth that has occurred since the economic crisis went into the pockets of the top 1%. Big business is sitting on $2 trillion in cash. Side by side with this enrichment, high unemployment and underemployment persist and 58 percent of new jobs pay under $13.83 per hour.  Today wealth is vastly more concentrated into fewer hands. The top richest 400 individuals have more net worth than the bottom 60 percent of all Americans. Six members of the Walton family behind Walmart have, by themselves, as much wealth as the bottom 150 million. This elite’s top goal is to generate as much short-term profit as possible for themselves. The long-term effects of how they do this are of no concern to them.

Wall Street interests would have us believe that the best way to deal with the plight of the poor is to bring up the bottom by growing the economy from the top down—the classic claim of trickle-down economics. When wealth and power are concentrated at the top, however, the result is not trickle down. It is a sucking up. Those on the top suck up the wealth. Wall Street generated eye-popping profits and bonuses through financial manipulation, deception, and extortion while producing nothing of real value. When access to the essentials of living—for example, food, water, shelter, education, and medical care—depends on our individual access to money, those who control the creation and allocation of money hold tremendous power.

There is no shortage of work that desperately needs to be done. Industries need to be re-tooled to reverse climate change. Our infrastructure needs to be maintained and, in many cases, rebuilt. Public education needs to be improved and expanded. Social services and health care need to be made available for everyone who needs them. Workers need to wrest control of the economy from the 1% by building a politically independent mass social movement to place our needs fore-most. Economic growth is not the solution to our problems. In fact, sheer economic growth drives the need to exploit ever more of Earth's resouces, creating an environmental deficit that compromises Earth’s living systems to feed an economic system that fails to meet our most basic needs because of an egregious misallocation of resources.The financial logic of profit maximization becomes the only logic. Concern for others and Earth’s living eco-systems is off the table. Our prime need as socialists is for a more intelligent production and distribution of the wealth we have and giving priority to social and environmental returns instead of financial returns.