The bankers and billionaires have given us the biggest economic crisis in decades. Now they want us to pay for it. They are cutting wages and benefits when not resorting to outright layoffs, robbing us of trillions of dollars in bailouts (tax dollars), while using their political clout to cut social services. On April 30, they pulled their political strings to defeat a Senate bill that supposedly would have prevented 1.69 million foreclosures. Even Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat, admitted that the banks “frankly own the place.”
In New York City, the city’s richest resident, Michael Bloomberg is also the mayor. He is the seventeenth richest person in the world, yet has the audacity to name himself the “people’s candidate.” Take a look at how Bloomberg did in 2008, a positively disastrous year for the working class. According to Forbes magazine, of the twenty richest people on the planet, Bloomberg was the only one whose net worth actually increased last year. He made $4.5 billion—that is over $12 million per day.
There are 793 billionaires on the planet. These 793 capitalists have the combined wealth of the world’s 3 billion people—about half the global population—who live (or die) on less than $2.50 per day.
In all, 80 percent of the world lives on less than $10 per day. Even workers in the United States, where the national minimum wage is $6.55 per hour, are part of this race to the bottom. There is not a state in the union where a worker can meet all the necessities of life with this kind of wage. Last year 1.7 million people in this country lost their homes and almost all of them were workers (even if they thought of themselves as “middle class”), and there were over 2 million layoffs. Another 2.1 million people are expected to lose their homes in 2009.
Where does all the billionaires’ wealth come from? Us. It is not a complicated calculation. The U.S. working class is twice as productive as it was in 1968. That is, each worker now produces twice as much value as she or he would have 40 years ago. But our wages have the same value—the same purchasing power—as they did 40 years ago. All that extra value has gone straight to Wall Street, to the already rich.
The minimum wage has actually been going down in the last forty years. The peak minimum wage of $1.60 an hour in 1968 would be worth $9.78 in 2009.
That is the situation we are facing. The billionaires, the kings of the capitalist system, call the shots that govern our lives. They decide who keeps their jobs, who loses their homes, how our communities are developed, what factories get shut down, who receives the funds to contend for political office and what bills pass Congress.
And they have never been elected. Almost all who own and control the economy today are the children and grandchildren of yesterday’s railroad barons, oil tycoons, mega-bankers and slaveholders. That is the foundation of their wealth.
There is nothing natural or permanent about 793 people—and the government that represents their corporate and banking interests—controlling society and sucking up all the wealth that we create. There is nothing natural about a system that has us producing more, but earning less.
Socialism is a simple concept—it means eliminating the political and economic control by a small class of people who keep the rest of us teetering on survival. It means returning that immense wealth back to the people, in the interests of the greater development of humanity.
Has it ever been more clear? Billionaires, your time is up. You, and your system, are the cause of deepening poverty and economic insecurity. We need socialism now.
