The Struggle is Now

 Poverty isn’t about how hard you work; it’s about how much money you make. Wealth inequality has long been part of life but now it is getting worse. 2.6 million children have sunk below the poverty line in the world’s most affluent countries since 2008, bringing the total number of children in the developed world living in poverty to an estimated 76.5 million.  In Ireland and Greece, countries with major austerity programs, child poverty has increased by more than 50 percent since 2008. In the U. S., child poverty increased in 34 states since the beginning of the crisis, where more than 24 million children live below the poverty line.

Fewer students from poorer backgrounds go to university (Schofield, 2006); that reading skills of children whose parents are jobless are less than average (Hill, 2005); that death rates among the poor are 3 times higher (Burke, Kenaghan, O’Donavan, & Quirke, 2004)? Or that increased poverty is directly related to increases in cancer and stroke, a correlation unchanged since the late 19th century (Dorling, Mitchell, Shaw, Orford, & Smith, 2000).

A fast-growing group of people in the United States, households with children, are living on $2.00 or less per person per day. In a study for the National Poverty Center, H. Luke Shaefer of the University of Michigan and Kathryn Edin of Harvard University applied the World Bank metric to the US for the first time to show that in mid-2011 and based on cash income, about 1.65 million households, with 3.5 million children, lived in extreme poverty. Since the official poverty level is considered to be $17.00 per person per day, this extent of extreme poverty implies that millions of Americans are subsisting on less than 12 percent of the poverty-line income.  Children have suffered most: between 1996 and 2011, their numbers in extreme poverty increased by 156 percent.  In 2013, only seven percent of the US wealth is left to the bottom 80 percent. The middle strata have become poor, and the poor are now destitute. Most American workers lack the bargaining power, which is at a historical low point, they need to press for wage gains is . With wages growing close to the rate of inflation — about 2 percent — since 2009, most workers have been stuck with stagnant real earnings. By contrast, corporate profits have risen sharply in the recovery, with the profit share of national income hitting the highest level in many decades and the stock market also has hit new highs. Meanwhile, real median household income is still down 3 percent since the current expansion began in the second half of 2009.

 It’s easy to cite numbers but just as easy to see the reason - capitalism. Economics drives politics. The pro-capitalist parties have been cooperating for years on maintaining the privileges of the rich and the corporations while at the same time punishing the poor, immigrants and minorities. Capitalism is like a tumor. It requires cut out.

More than 100,000 workers took to the streets in Brussels to protest austerity cuts and free-market reforms that are set to cut vital social services, freeze wages, and raise the retirement age.  Low-wage workers marched through Brussels to mark the start of an anticipated month-long campaign against the country's newly elected center-right government.

"They are hitting the workers, the unemployed. They are not looking for money where it is, I mean, people with a lot of money," one worker, Philippe Dubois, told the Associated Press.

"The signal is clear," ACV union chief Marc Leemans told Reuters UK. "People are angry, livid."

We will continue to lose the class war unless we band together, across borders, and fight as one united class.  A real social democracy is worth fighting for. There is an alternative other than the market but it will only come about as the result of coordinated struggles waged by mass movements using a diversity of tactics.  Our challenge is to provide that alternative vision that can convince people that such struggles need to begin right now.