“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
—Aristotle
I’ve spent a lot of time in Latin America over the last 20 years, mostly as a musician recording or playing music around Brazil, but I’ve also traveled extensively through the Amazon Rainforest, the Peruvian Andes, and trips to Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Cuba. In every country I’ve visited, I’ve seen the huge disparities in wealth between the wealthy elites and the working poor. I’m not talking about the normal financial variances one sees in Europe or the United States—I’m talking about a radical shift in a nation’s wealth, which is being siphoned off by a tiny percentage of people.
Incredibly, this is starting to become a reality in the United States, where a relative handful of self-appointed oligarchs are now controlling most of the financial and production assets in the country, while the vast majority of the population is being squeezed ever and ever tighter with growing personal debt, enormous student loans, and a gnawing feeling that this is not going to get better and probably much worse. Already economists are predicting another Great Recession and possibly even a Great Depression because nothing has changed since the financial collapse of 2007. Bank regulations have been rolled back or eliminated entirely, and the financial indexes are far worse than they ever were in 2007. Our buffoonish politicians rave about low unemployment, but they never address the fact that most of these jobs pay little more than minimum wage, which is essentially the wage of the working poor. No one can live on $15.00 an hour and make anything of their lives, much less support a family, go to college, buy a house, or own a decent car—it’s all a farce. So here we are, in a country where the labor unions have little power, good health care is largely unaffordable, and what is considered to be a good wage is really indentured servitude equivalent to what I earned in high school in the 1980s.
The United States is approaching a 21st-century equivalent of the Robber Barons of the 1800s. Back then, the workers earned starvation wages, were always in debt to the company store, and generally worked until the day they died. On top of that, the fossil fuel industry has systematically siphoned off our natural resources, sold it back to us at inflated prices, polluted our public lands and waters in the process, all the while avoiding taxes every step of the way.
Add to this the corporate lobbying of our government, which has resulted in massive corporate tax cuts that have decimated the treasury, while simultaneously adding astronomical debt to the nation. All of what I’m saying has become historical fact, and this is exactly the same method that vulture capitalists use when they raid a company: They make its debt untenable, declare bankruptcy, and then they sell off the assets, the unemployed workers be damned. It is, very literally, a corporate dismantling of the republic of the United States of America. It’s already happened in Russia, where the oligarchs stole the money from the treasury, and the natural resources of the Russian state, making themselves billionaires overnight. Like Brazil, the United States, and other countries with large economies, the workers have less and less, but paradoxically more and more debt. How did this happen so quickly, and how did we not see this coming?
Have you not seen this for yourselves, where folks our grandparent’s age are forced out of retirement to work menial jobs at fast-food restaurants or late night shifts at the 24-hour grocery store? I’ve seen it in my own neighborhood and it breaks my heart. I’ve seen families with children living out of their cars and tents, the kids trying to attend school with some semblance of dignity. Can you imagine that kind of instability and anxiety if your children had to live like that? What kind of nation does this to its own people? We are supposedly the wealthiest nation in the world, yet we allow this to happen to our oldest and our youngest generations.
The dictator, the oligarch, and the extractive capitalist all use the same method to deflect attention away from themselves and onto other people, as they continue to steal the wealth of their nations. They’ll say that it’s about racism, and it is of course, but it’s really about economic inequality within all races. They’ll say we don’t follow the right religion, when in fact the country was founded on religious freedom, not religious oppression. They are dividing us up by social and economic categories to pit us against each another, rather than uniting us—against them. They know this, and they hope we don’t start to realize their strategy, but we are on to them, and here are some examples of the divisions.
When you go to the airport in your own city, you’ll start to see a kind of class/caste system at work in the terminals. For one thing, the average American airport is in a terrible state of decline and disrepair, the result of those tax cuts for the wealthy. It’s ironic how we criticize the rest of the world, but when you visit their airports (as I have frequently), they are strikingly newer, nicer, and more modern than most in the United States. Airports in London, Paris, Berlin, Bangkok, and Dubai for example, far exceed the dismal, grimy affairs we have in the US.
Homeland Security is in charge of airport security, but these folks are barely paid minimum wage themselves, yet they are given great power and authority over your personage and your belongings, which creates an unhealthy power dynamic. The whole idea of making people take off their shoes and clothes is itself a way to demean human beings and create a power dynamic over them. That’s what they do to prison inmates, and it’s what totalitarian regimes do to their citizens. None of this have I ever seen in a foreign airport, mind you.
In addition to this already oppressive situation, they have new levels of “financial clearance,” where a first class passenger, or a member of a high mileage program gets a special line, separate from the rest of the people. If you have enough money and your ticket is expensive enough, you don’t have to take off your shoes and jacket, and you can breeze through security with a smile. This essentially means that the wealthy and the corporate are given special treatment—just watch this for yourself the next time you take a flight. It is a financial caste system, applied to the people and their safety.
Now, you may say flying is a luxury so who really cares? Many people can’t afford to fly and most people don’t even venture outside the country. Perhaps the American airport is not the most obvious example of the social stratification that is taking place, but it’s a glaring one as I see it. Let’s look at three other things—education, food, and housing.
Being a former music professor at a small liberal arts college, I can tell you firsthand that the cost of a higher education is becoming astronomical, except at the community college level, which I totally support and believe in. This rising costs of a college education is not an accident, it is a capitalist technique designed to make education so expensive and untenable that only the children of the elites can afford to be educated, while the children of the diminishing middle class and the working poor have fewer and fewer educational opportunities (except for those community colleges). Again, this is not the result of natural economic inflation—this is being specifically orchestrated at the administrative level to keep the poor people poor, and the rich people rich, because the elites know that an educated population is dangerous to their position of power and authority. Nothing more needs to be said about this, it is self-evident at the most basic level.
With food, we see a radical separation between high quality, organic foods, and foods made at the lower quality, factory level. Companies like Whole Foods, Sprouts, and various high-end co-ops offer organic food for a premium price that only the financially stable can afford on a regular basis. If we go down the food chain to one of the towns where I lived in New Mexico, we find some of the lowest quality foods you’ll ever see in the developed world. Most of it is cheap factory food, highly refined and extremely unhealthy for the human body. This is where the working- class people in my neighborhood shopped, many of them immigrants or low-paid workers. It’s all they could afford, and barely that.
Here we see that food itself is being stratified into socio-economic categories, and we’re not talking about eating at a high-end New York restaurant versus a local diner; we’re talking about grocery store food that is deliberately manufactured for a financially struggling, lower economic class. It is totally deliberate.
When we look at housing, a good example is what we’re currently experiencing in Seattle, which is a housing crisis with rising homelessness. In fact, there is a housing crisis happening all over the country— apartments are either full or too expensive for people to afford, houses are difficult to rent and nearly impossible to buy, and when they do come up for sale, the bidding wars create false values that cause the entire regional market to become untenable for local residents.
If you read the news from different parts of the country, you’ll find that much of this unaffordable housing is the result of private equity groups who buy up entire blocks of houses and apartments, raising their rents as high as possible to get only the wealthiest people into their buildings. Where does that leave the folks who work hard, often for minimum wage (at the behest of those same wealthy landlords who want to drive down wages), and now can’t find housing? If it is like Seattle, they’ll end up in one of our many homeless tent communities, which have become our version of the favela.
A favela is a Latin American term, specifically Brazilian, where thousands of people live in a shantytown on the outskirts of a city. In these favelas, the electricity is tied in by hand (quite dangerously), the water is carried up in buckets, and the sewage runs down into the streets, rivers, lakes, and eventually the ocean. The residents are mostly hard-working folks, but the economic marginalization of society has pushed them to edge of theirs, which is also why violence is endemic and predators like drug dealers and human traffickers flourish within these places.
Latin America also has the remnants of the colonial empires, where long ago, the elites uncoupled themselves from the working class who supported their lavish lifestyles. This was the beginning of the massive disparity in wealth in those countries, which is the same dynamic happening in the US. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the favelas are growing ever and ever larger.
Historically, it used to be that the majority of North and South Americans lived in the countryside, working their farms and ranches and living in rural communities. That amounted to about 80% of the population. After World War II, and increasingly into the present, the demographic has totally reversed with about 80% of North and South Americans living in the cities, and only 20% living in the country.
In the United States, this is the new socio-economic reality. The tent cities started with a few dozen marginalized people, then it became a few hundred, and ultimately it will be thousands of homeless people in each city. Some are young and disenfranchised people with nowhere to go; others are young mothers with children who fled abusive relationships. The worst situation is the elderly folks who have simply grown old, run out of money, and have nowhere to go. Some economists have called it the “Brazilification” of the Americas, and I have already seen it happening down the American west coast. San Francisco even has the distinction of having a human poop problem on their streets because of a lack of sanitation for their growing homeless population. San Francisco, the golden city of technology, covered in human poop—how ironic.
If you think any of this is the normal outcome of capitalism, then you are correct—this is exactly what late-stage capitalism looks like: our environments become decimated, our air and water becomes polluted, people become sick from the low-quality foods they eat, the youth can’t get an education or a decent job and thus become addicted to recreational drugs, and the wealthy move into walled compounds with private security guards.
The rest of us live in the margins, between the collapsing infrastructure of false dreams, and the empty promises of an economic system that was a lie from the moment of its inception.