"By identifying poverty with people of color, the powerful manipulate those poor whites who are either outright racists or who unconsciously fear identification with the stereotyped character of non-whites. Though aimed at people of color, the thinking that suggests the poor lack respectable work ethic and virtuous moral character becomes a conceptual lever that functions to induce shame that makes the poor easier to manipulate. (This manipulative ideological control is what the Italian Marxist social philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, meant by the term 'social hegemony.') This is why dominant culture works so hard to identify scapegoats (black people, undocumented workers, feminists, LGBTQ folks) to channel anger and self-hatred [from the real cause of the problems onto the scapegoats]."
4. The Poor Refuse to Work: The founding idea of the right-wing reactionary mythos is that the poor won't take responsibility for their lives and get to work! This belief was implied by Mitt Romney's infamous remark about the Obama-47 percent. Mark Karlin noted, in his 19 September, 2012 Truthout article, "Five Lies in Romney's War on the '47 Percent," that in 2008 one-quarter of low-income earners voted for the Republicans ticket: 25-percent of the voters earning under $15,000 a year, and 37-percent of those earning between $15,000-30,000. Add to this that many older Americans who are reliant on government programs support the Romney [as well as] previous Republican tickets. Karlin points to an article by CNN contending that fewer than 7% of the 47% not paying income taxes are working age and poor. Most of those not paying income taxes are seniors, on-duty military, and others who pay 7.6% to cover Social Security and Medicare.
Romney and other plutocrat's comments concerning poverty and food assistance speaks to a woeful ignorance about the identities of the primary recipients of federal food aid: children, elderly, and/or disabled Americans. According to the Department of Agriculture, 'In fiscal year 2010, 76 percent of all SNAP [Food Stamps--RJG] households included a child, an elderly person, or a disabled [non-elderly] person. These households received 84 percent of all SNAP benefits' (USDA, op cit., p. 16).
The Department of Agriculture report states that 46.6 percent of food-stamp recipients are children, and another 7.9 percent are elderly (USDA op cit. p.23). That means that for more than fifty-four percent of all federal food aid recipients, getting a job is not an option. And that number does not include those individuals who are disabled and unable to work. In fact, those who are able to work, but are receiving food assistance, account for less than twenty percent of al recipients.
Only the most egregious sort of classist thinking would confidently assume that such persons are simply lazy, happily poor freeloaders. If it is true that few are truly satisfied with the powerlessness and marginalization that comes with poverty, one could hardly assume that the poor, able-to-work, and unemployed do not want to work. With the 2012 (when Professor Nall's article was written) unemployment rate at about 10%, and more than twice that in the black community, it seems naïve to assume getting a job is as simple as demanding 'a paycheck,' as Gingrich put it. Even today, with unemployment officially at 6.7%, there are millions of Americans who have simply quit looking because the job market is so poor. Being jobless is a source of great shame in our society, so if someone has quit looking, it is because the jobs available are of the sort that many Americans are over-qualified for, and they have no chance of getting: low-paying, entry-level positions intended for the millions of younger Americans simply trying to find a job. This is particularly true for men, where dominant masculine norms require 'authentic' men to be bread winners. Psychiatrist James Gilligan contends that the shame of economic failure is so great that it stimulates violence. (James Gilligan; Preventing Violence. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001; p. 43.)
5. Education Necessarily Remedies Poverty: The plutocracy's greatest myth suggests that it is a lack of education that is the root of poverty, and that education alone is the answer to poor people's plight.
This way of thinking legitimizes the plight of the poor, by blaming victims of exploitation: blaming low-income workers' conditions on their failure to possess a real job, which means a job that requires a degree. The greatest secret of the early twenty-first century is that even an advanced degree is no longer a guarantee of a decent paying job.
Professor Nall points out that rather than addressing the unethical business practices of extracting wealth from workers' labor with less than subsistence-level wages, the 'get an education' mantra tells the poor that they should only expect to be treated with dignity once they have earned a college degree. This myth both ignores the working poor, and assumes that the solution to the working poor and their being mired in poverty is education. This piece of propaganda serves the function of making disappear from America's collective conscious the routine, systematic exploitation of the poor for the benefit of CEOs and investors.
The reality is that we see an increasing number of impoverished graduate-degree holders, whose very existence demonstrates that the education-is-the-solution-to-all-poverty mantra is a reality-distorting oversimplification of the world we live in. ABC News reported in May 2012 (Suanna Kim, May 9, 2012,"The Number of PhD's on Public Aid Triples in U.S.," ABC News), that the number of people with a PhD who received some form of public assistance had more than tripled between 2007 and 2010, and that nearly the same numbers applied to those with master's degrees. (From 9,776 to 33,655 for PhD's, and 101,682 to 293,029 for those with a Masters degree; Kim, ibid, May 9, 2012, ABC News.)
In a cruel twist of fate, many of these impoverished graduate-degree holders are engaged in full-time work at part-time pay in the institutions of higher education that are said to be the remedy to the problem of poverty. Professor Nall again:
"The exponential rise of poor graduate-level educated people is driven by the fact that non-tenured, part-time instructors - adjuncts - comprise nearly 70 percent of college and university faculties. (Adjuncts teaching at the community college and state college level in a state like Florida, for instance, make under $2,000 per class. This means that teaching 8 classes a year yields about $16,000 annually). In June 2012, the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW) released a report (see 'Dismantling the Professoriate,' On Campus, September-October 2012) finding that the median adjuncts were paid for a standard college course was $2,700 in fall 2010, $2,235 at two-year colleges, and $3,400 at four-year doctoral or research universities."
The plutocrats are destroying the middle class here in the United States, as well as undermining a future middle class's educational opportunities. This is being done in the name of the plutocrats establishing a permanent oligarchic hegemony over our nation. The other Western democracies seem to be following our self-destructive path. This is the why the European and other banks are insisting on "austerity measures"--especially in a nation's social safety nets--rather than attempting to tackle the real problem in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, and the other European nations that are teetering on the edge of an economic abyss. The real problem in those countries that are teetering at the edge of insolvency is that they have been following America's bad example of reducing taxes on the richest individuals and corporations over the last fifteen years, trusting that the economic "good times" would go on forever. Together with a nearly universal epidemic of tax evasion throughout much of Western Europe--where it is everyone's second favorite indoor sport--government revenues have eroded in virtually every European Union nation, and placed tremendous, unwanted pressure on the once-vaunted "Euro."
Once we are given the truth, the real facts rather than the plutocrats' lies, we are left with a single choice: whether or not to overthrow the plutocrats power. If we do not, then we deserve the state of serfdom that we are agreeing to by not ridding ourselves of the oligarchic yoke.
(In Part Two, I will discuss the failure of the oligarch-controlled Mainstream Media to report the continuing opposition to the plutocrats attempted takeover of the United States; a short history of rights and privileges under both English common and American law; when I believe a human need evolves from being a right to being a privilege; the growing enslavement of the American mind, and with it, the attempt to make serfs of 99 percent of the population; and finally the names--with links to some of their pertinent articles--of those individuals who, like myself, have been voices crying in the wilderness, calling for us to oppose the plutocratic oligarchs before it is too late.)
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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