Early this year Hillary Clinton made headlines when, in
response to a question about her personal fortune, she claimed her family was
“dead broke” when they left the White House. That statement followed New York
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top aide casting those making $500,000 a year as merely
upper middle class. More recently Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s reckoned being
a millionaire does not constitute living high above the ranks of ordinary
people. The data suggest otherwise. Lew was usually paid between $700,000 and
$800,000 a year as New York University’s vice president, while also receiving a
$440,000 mortgage subsidy. Lew also earned $300,000 a year from Citigroup, with
a “guaranteed incentive and retention award of not less than $1 million.” Lew
was given a $940,000 bonus from Citigroup in the same week the bank received a
$300 billion bailout from the federal government.
According to IRS data, 99 percent of American households
make less than $388,000 a year, and 95 percent make less than $167,000 a year.
The true middle in terms of income—that is, the cutoff to be in the top 50
percent of earners—is roughly $35,000 a year.
Of course, there remains a bit of a debate about what
constitutes “rich” in America. A recent New York Times poll showed 27 percent
of Americans believe a family of four can be considered “rich” if its annual
income is between $100,000 and $200,000, while another 20 percent say “rich” is
defined as making between $200,000 and $300,000 a year. Two-thirds of the
country told the pollsters that making more than $300,000 means a household is
wealthy.
A recent study found Americans grossly underestimate the divide
between CEO and average worker pay. Such misperseptions were recently spotlighted by comedian
Chris Rock in an interview with New York magazine. Of inequality, he said: “People
don’t even know. If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be
riots in the streets.”
Everyone knows about wealth inequality. Everyone knows about
poverty. To end global poverty, we have to end global capitalism. There are a
host of people’s movements across the world who are trying to battle poverty.
But with little success. The Arab Spring was a vast anti-poverty protest – a
revolution for “Bread, Freedom, and Social Justice” (aish, hurriya, adala
igtimaiyya) as the slogan went.. Bread or ‘aish, in the Arabic of Egypt, refers
to life. The call for bread is a call for life. What produces poverty? Not the
lack of property titles, or the lack of high growth rates or the lack of
twenty-first century infrastructure. What produces poverty is a system of
social production for private gain — in other words, capitalism.
In capitalism not only accounting but the actual impetus of
markets favors accumulation and profit making. Not only pharmaceutical
companies but even hospitals are generally seeking market share and profit.
Those without money get short shift. Those with money, should be separated from
them, if possible. Those who own, whether the pharmaceutical companies or the
hospitals or medical practices, should benefit. Profit above all sounds like
rhetorical excess but in fact it is only a little wrong. Profit always
operates, always pressures, and what is gained that isn’t actually profitable
is gained only by virtue of fighting hard against profit making pressures.
Ironically, everyone knows this.
Capitalist contradictions - crises emerge - and then get
sorted out before the next crisis comes. These crises do not bring capitalism
to its knees, do not inaugurate a new order. The agent for the transformation,
even in the twenty-first century, remains the working class. This is the class
that has no capital. It is more realistic to believe that a socialist
alternative, rather than charity or World Bank policies, will make poverty
history.
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