The touchstone of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and her stated reason for the presidential run is the fiscal regeneration of the American peole.
So what else is new? Every politician and his brother is currently making the same statement. At least half of them are lying, but there just may be an outside chance that Hillary, means it, and unlike Bernie Sanders, could get it done. So what will it take and what assumptions and understandings must be made to achieve it?
For at least the last fifty years the incomes of the workers of this country have not increased, nearly enough to meet the increased cost of living. During that time the incomes of the top 1% have increased astronomically, creating more millionaires and many more billionaires than would normally have been thought to be possible. Why is such an increase in wealth considered to be a bad thing? Is there a correlation between that increase in individual wealth and the loss of wealth in the middle and poorer classes?
The answer to the first question is that it shouldn’t be, at least not if that increase is accompanied by a sense of social responsibility among those who have benefited by this system. The answer to the second question is that there is a correlation between the two and it is due, to a great extent, to a lack of any sense of the above mentioned social responsibility. The concept of noblesse oblige has disappeared almost completely from the wealthy echelons of American life.
But before we can begin to explore solutions to the problems of the poor and the middle class we must establish that there are two areas that differ but share some solutions. The one that has garnered the most ink is the middle class and working poor, mainly because they have access to the most media and they make more noise, but there is also the problem of the desperately poor and the minorities, and that is always the harder problem to solve.
There has been so much written in the last couple of years about how to solve the problems of the working poor and the shrinking middle class, that I am going to attack the problem of the desperately poor first. In order to do that I must eliminate a distinction, and that distinction has to do with minorities because for the most part, minorities are the poor. This has been an existing situation in this country since it began and circumstances have not changed it one bit since.
I’m not going to go into a long history of poverty and migration in this country; it’s all there in the history books for those that choose to read it. I’m just going to make the statement that slaves and felons were our first non-voluntary immigrants and our first poor. We have maintained the status quo ever since. Right now our poor population is made up of a few whites and many African Americans who are native born, along with large numbers of immigrant Latinos, Africans, Asians and other groups. Other than being poor they have almost no common traits. Some will rise quickly out of poverty and some will remain exactly where they are, unless they receive the kind of hand up that only government can supply.
The first thing that we must accept, if we are going to solve the poverty problem is that race is only partly to blame for it. Sure, most of our poor are currently black, Latino or Asian but that is only a temporary situation. When I was born, a long time ago, most of the poor in this country were black, Irish, Italian and Polish. Why? Because the last three were the latest immigrant classes. They climbed out of poverty very quickly, partly due to the fact that they were white and the prejudices that were leveled against them were not as severe as those experienced by the black population, but also because, as immigrants, they brought with them the kind of entrepreneurship that it took just to leave everything behind and get on a boat to who knows what.
It would be foolish to say that the latest riots in Baltimore and Ferguson have nothing to do with racial prejudice; they most certainly do but that prejudice is born in poverty and the forces that it creates, which pit us one against another in a fierce war to survive. If we can solve the problem of poverty in our sluyms, we will, go a long way to solving the problem of violent crime. Sure there will always be individuals who choose crime because it looks easy, or because it looks exciting, but the majority of violent criminal activity will lessen with access to financial stability.
Discussions of the criminal justice system and how we deploy our police are splattered all over the tube right now, with most of the people discussing Bill Clinton’s approach as opposed to how Hillary’s might differ. Of course the GOP voices are quick to point out a perceived lack of difference between Bill’s position and Hillary’s, but in doing so they just point out their inability to intelligently address a pretty simple situation. They just fail to understand or comment on the fact that the country is in a much different place now than it was when Bill was in office.
Those who are paying attention or those who are old enough to remember; will recall that the country was drowning in crime at the start of Bill Clinton’s administration. It was the number one concern of the citizenry. It’s much different now. Crime statistics are falling every year and as the world turns, so must we. Attention must be paid to many of the draconian parts of our criminal justice system that attack our black, Latino or just plain poor citizens in a wholly unfair balance with affluent whites.
More important, we must address the other imbalances in our society forced on poverty stricken neighborhoods. Let’s face it; crime is, more often than not, a result of the perpetrator’s inability to earn an honest living. Thirty percent of black males in Baltimore are unemployed. That’s worse than Calcutta and it causes anger and resentments that explode more easily when jogged by almost any provocation, but most assuredly by racial injustice, which, if we noticed, has been the spark of many confrontations across the country.
But before we can make any progress we must change the perceptions of the American people. Below is a current poll that gives us a good idea of what America wants from its leaders.
What the voter thinks is important:
Democratic:
Job creation and economic growth
Healthcare
Climate change
Republican:
National security-Terrorism
Deficit & Govt. Spending
Job creation and economic growth
The one item that appears on both the Democratic and Republican sides of the ledger is Job Creation and Economic Growth. Since the billionaires only make up less than 1% of the populace I don’t think those polled are talking about corporate bonuses.
Taxes Paid:
Poor 17%
Middle Class 25%
Rich 17%
Does anything about the above figures strike you as morally repugnant? What they say is, those who benefit most from the use of our taxes pay the least percentage of their income to those taxes. Yeah, I’m talking about the super rich. Let me give you an example. The infrastructure of this country, except for the railroads, was built between 1929 and WWII through the auspices of the CCCP and the WPA, two government organizations that were created to put people to work. They were successful beyond creator Franklin Roosevelt’s wildest dreams. Our national highway system, built during the Eisenhower era was the last act of the WPA. After it was disbanded we had a nation of bridges, highways, dams, airports, waterways, ports, an electric grid and much, much more. All this infrastructure contributed tremendously to our industrial growth, the growth that happened after WWII, the growth that we all aspire to again today. This excellence of infrastructure is one of the main reasons that our economy, despite Donald Trump’s denials, is the greatest in the world. The lack of it is why the communist experiment in Europe collapsed. It had nothing to do with Reagan and everything to do with the fact that nothing in the communist world worked and the people who lived there were finally, through television, exposed to the differences between how they lived, how the people of the west lived and how their system was completely non-functional.
If we ever hope to reinvigorate our industrial success we must have an infrastructure that will support it. We don’t have that now.
What’s both interesting and appalling is that those who are seemingly opposed to the administration’s plans to regenerate the infrastructure are the same ones that need it to grow their investments. Industry needs easy access and that means roads, bridges, etc. It needs communications, which means, the Internet and the rest of our communications systems. It needs ports, airports and trucking terminals, all of which make the production and delivery of goods and services easier or indeed possible. So why don’t the affluent Republicans see that? Maybe it’s because they want nothing to do with industry any more. Maybe it’s because they see Wall Street as an easier avenue of profit. Maybe it’s why the super rich don’t invest in business anymore and therefore don’t help the economy. It’s why trickle down economics is a joke.
Wall Street creates nothing but money, it doesn’t create jobs, it turns out no product and right now, it finances no new industry. It is simply a way for the super rich to gamble and increase the numbers on their account sheets to no universal end.
The super rich, whose investment money feeds Wall Street, have no interest in creating a country where the poor have the opportunity to advance their position. To be fair, they more often than not don’t do anything to keep this from happening, but their inactivity is just as bad as opposition.
Left to their own devices, the rich will allow the poor to remain poor, the middle class to disappear and the American Dream to evaporate into some third world cataclysm that will turn our nation back to the middle ages.
But there are solutions to this, and both Hillary and Bernie have them., Yes, they are slightly different but the goals are the same. The difference? Hillary’s may seem less intense but her approach will certainly be more realistic. Maybe then they will wake up. Maybe they won’t and it will just steamroll over them.
The way Trump is rolling along it will probably take both Hillary and Bernie working in tandem rather than at odds to put him away. Hillary must continue to bring out specifics on how she will accomplish her goals, thereby appealing to those voters who actually think.
Bernie must find a way to reign in his emotional followers and point them in the right direction. Either one of them is a superior choice to the alternative. It would be a tragedy if they let minor differences pull them so far apart that the orangutan of the tube actually won.