Working In These Times

dhfabian 3 Nov 2009
1:07 pm

Sorry, but it’s not possible to do more than very marginally, temporarily,  improve economic conditions as long as we refuse to have a legitimate/non-punitive welfare system. This is something the more economically successful countries have figured out.  When a you fall without a safety net, you crash to the ground.  With each economic downturn, more fall into poverty; when conditions sort-of improve, fewer are able to climb back out, so the number of very poor keeps growing. The abundance of mandatory workfare labor, paid minimum wage or less,  has served as a “captive” temp help workforce, saving our corporations billions of dollars while suppressing wages, crushing unionizing efforts and significantly increasing layoffs.

We have an entire chunk of our population living (and dying) under Third World conditions, but that’s OK, as long as it helps maximize corporate profits.

Today, we would rather hang ourselves than to help our poor, and it increasingly appears that this is exactly what we’re doping—hanging ourselves.