We’ve reached the year milestone for the coronavirus pandemic. President Joe Biden remarked, “As a nation, we can’t accept such a cruel fate. While we have been fighting this pandemic for so long, we have to resist becoming numb to the sorrow.” We’ll see how he puts these words into practice.
The essential workers, families, and friends of those who have died or become very ill, millions who are still jobless, hungry, and homeless are far from numb. Their lives are permanently changed.
Texas suffered through record freezing temperatures leaving four million customers without electricity and nearly half the state’s 29 million people under boil water advisories. Over one million had no access to drinking water on February 24, and the death toll is still being assessed. Households are being billed tens of thousands of dollars for services they are not getting.
Underlying the crises we face is a problem that seems insurmountable. As a thoroughly capitalist country, all services and production of housing, food, and clothing in the U.S. are controlled by corporations that exist to make profit for themselves. It is a system based on private property — property that is socially necessary but privately owned. As production is increasingly accomplished without human labor, we see an increasing divide in the world. “According to the latest Fed data, the top one percent of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion (or 30.4 percent of all household wealth in the U.S.),” Forbes reported, “while the bottom 50 percent of the population holds just $2.1 trillion combined (or 1.9 percent of all wealth).”
Much of the increase in wealth is the result of money made off the pandemic. Pfizer reported it expects to sell about $15 billion in coronavirus vaccine doses this year and net a profit in the high 20% range of revenue for the inoculations. Other corporations are making money from distributing vaccines.
Inequality is inherent in the distribution of the vaccine. Access to the vaccine in poor communities of all colors is markedly lower than those well-off. “Any gap in vaccinating rich versus poor inevitably exacerbates racial divides,” stated Statenews.com. “Black and Latino people are far more likely to live in poverty than white people, and despite having died at higher rates throughout the pandemic, they are receiving fewer vaccines than white people.”
The U.S. government is failing to take responsibility for our well-being and our children’s future. Corporate income taxes make up only about seven percent of federal revenue, while 50 percent comes from individual income taxes and 36 percent from payroll taxes. So, the measly $1,400 stimulus, child tax credits, and supplemental unemployment come from our pockets. Most of us would expect more and would argue that no one should face the prospect of homelessness and hunger as millions already are.
It is becoming impossible to reconcile the wealth piling up on one end and the poverty and need piling up on the other. The increasing polarization of wealth and poverty is an expression of the division in society between a propertied ruling class and a propertyless working class.
A well-founded distrust of this system is growing. Millions of Americans are joining and founding organizations, protesting and marching to guarantee that people have at least the means to survive. A sense of unity among workers is budding that transcends the divisions imposed on them by the ruling class — across all boundaries of color or ethnicity, in every city, suburb, and rural area in the country, in every age group and gender.
Each of us can play a role in developing this unity, and join it with a consciousness that the interests of the vast majority of people are completely different from those we are ruled by.
Published: March 24, 2021
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