Them and Us - Short notes on the class struggle

 

US

After recently reading “Poverty, By America” (Matthew Desmond), I ran across the following from the Poor Peoples’ Campaign. To put it bluntly, poverty kills and it is the direct result of public policy! I quote

“Last year, we released A Poor People’s Pandemic Report: Mapping the Intersections of Race, Poverty, and COVID-19, which collected data on poverty, income, and occupation as they relate to the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that poor and low-income communities experienced higher death rates and infections of COVID-19 as a result of public policy failure to protect and support those experiencing interlocking injustices stemming from … public policy. 

“And just a few weeks ago, researchers at the University of California, Riverside identified poverty as the fourth-greatest cause of death in the United States. That means in 2019, poverty silently killed 10 times as many people as homicides. Poverty is lethal. ‘Poverty kills as much as dementia, accidents, stroke, Alzheimer's, and diabetes,’ said David Brady, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside of the study.”  - Bishop William J. Barber, II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis

To add to the misery, we are seeing a surge in illegal child labor. Since 2015, child labor violations have risen nearly 300%. And those are just the violations government investigators have managed to uncover and document. Companies like General Mills, Walmart and Ford have been implicated. Many of these children being exploited are undocumented immigrants and their families can’t risk speaking out. They need the money, which makes them easily exploited.

In response to this, some Republican controlled state governments are working to lower the legal age to work, even in dangerous jobs. After all, too much government regulation hurts the economy and the bottom line. As far as business is concerned, the problem is solved.

At the same time funds for public education are being slashed. Poor children, particularly Brown and Black children, obviously don’t need an education to work in the jobs waiting for them. Charles Dickens & Jacob Riis, where are you when we need you, again?

 

THEM

BlackRock Investment Management & Financial Services is the planet’s biggest investor, with $9 trillion in assets under management and an army of tech-savvy analysts trained on the scent of easy money. The corporation is second only to the U.S. and China in terms of the financial power it wields.

In search of that easy money, BlackRock is a (the?) major investor in ITA (iShares U.S. Aerospace & Defense ETF). Among the dozens of companies represented in ITA are Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing—companies that profit directly from huge Pentagon spending. Lockheed Martin developed the bombs Saudi Arabia used on a Yemeni school bus full of children in 2018, and Raytheon is the contractor behind the expansion of the U.S.’ nuclear arsenal. Reason enough to divest in these “masters of war”, but moral calculation isn’t what BlackRock is about. Note: ITA shares have seen a more that 500% increase in price since 2012.

BlackRock is also the planet’s second-biggest funder of fossil fuels. The significant climate impact of these companies often goes unmentioned. By providing ballistic missiles and aerospace tech to the Pentagon, these companies fuel the latter’s carbon emissions—making the U.S. military the planet’s largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gasses, and thus a leading cause of our present climate crisis. While BlackRock’s continues to pay lip service to the severity of the climate crisis its actions are at serious odds with its “concern given the investment platforms it sells. 

In the Gilded Age of US history, when the Robber Barons ruled the economy, Populist leaders used to say that the people needed to own the banks or the banks would own the people. In today’s economy, it’s private equity (in combination with the rest of the financial sector) that is well on its way to fulfilling the later. We need to revive the call for the people to take control, since “regulation” seems to have accomplished little over the past 100+ years.